Soldier Girls (23 page)

Debbie asked Jeff to send more booze, and he mailed her a care package full of small airline-size bottles of liqueur. A colleague suggested they start pouring shots of Baileys into their morning cups of coffee, and Debbie figured why not start the day with a pick-me-up? In the evenings, she fell into the habit of taking a long walk with Will after dinner—they would go around the post's outdoor track for two miles or more—and then going to visit Gary Jernigan in supply. His office was tucked away in a remote part of the post, and it was deserted down there in the evenings; they could drink without fear of observation. Gary was happy to share his booze, and when they scored some alcohol they shared with Gary. After Ellen Ann sent a care package that included a large bottle of Early Times whiskey, Debbie wrote: “My box came today! What a mess. EA forgot to reseal the coffee container with tape, and the Rice Krispies and the popcorn were full of coffee. . . . But at least the goodies came. I've probably drank all the ET already but I shared with Will and Gary.”

At work, however, Debbie maintained her enthusiastic disposition, and the people who worked alongside her had little idea of this other side of her life. Debbie was meticulously punctual and unflaggingly cheerful, and whatever insecurities she battled remained invisible to others. In some ways, the diary read like the inverse of her public persona, for in its pages she stored all the worry she never allowed herself to express out loud. With every passing week, Michelle relied on the older woman more and more for daily inspiration. Sergeant Miller tore her down and Debbie Helton built her back up. “I was always kind of a shit—like, I was never in a good mood,” Michelle would say later. “And Debbie's really gregarious, and everybody's mom. Everybody loves Debbie. She's always happy, she's always in a good mood. And I'm always fighting with Patrick.”

To learn how to work on AK-47s, the armament team apprenticed themselves to the Romanians, the most knowledgeable soldiers at Camp Phoenix about Soviet-style weaponry. Michelle discovered she was good at disassembling and reassembling AK-47s, and she took a certain amount of satisfaction in doing her work flawlessly, but she paid a heavy price for working with the Romanians. When it came to harassing women, they were the worst on the post, in her opinion. Some of the things that one particular Romanian officer said to Michelle were so vile she could not bring herself to repeat his comments even years later; anytime the officer got her alone, he told her disgusting things he longed to do in graphic, obscene detail. “The biggest pervert in the entire world,” Michelle would say afterward. “I never heard anything like the stuff that came out of that guy's mouth. He was just a nasty, nasty, nasty dude.”

Thankfully, the apprenticeship was brief. At the beginning of September, the armament team started a new routine. They met at 7:30 a.m., jumped into Humvees or Mahindra Boleros (a sports utility vehicle manufactured in India), and drove through the gates of Camp Phoenix, waving to Rambo on their way out. Rambo's real name was Jamal Undin. He had lost his wife and one of his children when a rocket hit his home in the 1990s, and he held the Taliban responsible for their deaths. He stationed himself at the front gate of Phoenix, wearing cast-off uniforms donated by American soldiers and wielding a lead pipe covered in red electrical tape. He used the pipe to smash the windshields of oncoming
cars when the drivers approached the gate too quickly, or to beat locals if he thought they might be bearing explosives. It was handy to have somebody like him manning the gate—somebody fearless, somebody who could read the environment, somebody who spoke the local languages. Michelle counted on seeing him, even though he was not paid. “He would salute me every day when I left to go to work, and he would salute me every evening when I came home from work, and he stood there with his lead pipe and made me feel safer than all of the infantry boys at the gate combined,” she would say later.

Michelle loved that moment when they drove through the gate, leaving behind the monochromatic world of the military post and entering the jumbled colors of the Afghan streetscapes, where they were surrounded by jingle trucks and three-wheeled taxis and horses with bright wool bridles. During the first week of the new routine, they passed by a funeral at a cemetery on the side of a hill. It was a sea of blue burkas: dozens of faceless women covered from head to toe in the same shade of evening-sky blue, with only a mesh window where their eyes should be. The strangeness of the hooded women—somebody hidden inside, looking out from that fabric prison—struck Michelle as barbaric. “Here the women aren't even allowed to show their faces in public,” she wrote to her father. “They have to wear these blue gowns called birkas [sic]. . . . It's really sad and I am really glad that I'm from a country that allows me to be free. I couldn't imagine living that way.”

Of course, they had their own strictures. The entire team was required to put on body armor before they left Camp Phoenix, just like everybody else who traveled outside the wire. The vests weighed enough to cause long-term physical issues for those who wore them daily. They were also hot, irritated the skin, and made the soldiers look lumpy and misshapen. But few of their colleagues got to pass through the post's gate as regularly, and the armament team treasured the privilege. While their colleagues remained stuck inside at Phoenix, coordinating the flow of vehicles or ordering supplies from identical prefabricated buildings, the armament team frequently worked outdoors, which made them much more aware of the weather. “We are outside this whole time I got some sun today,” wrote Debbie in her diary. “We experienced the first real sandstorm. What a mess. The wind is still pitching a fit.” They loved the
constant sunshine, but after a while they all started to miss rain. Debbie wished for wet weather in her diary.

At first the armament team worked at Pol-i-charkhi, but Miller soon found them a better location over at the main storage and distribution center used by the Afghan National Army, in a nearby part of Kabul. At the ANA depot, Miller secured for them one corner of a cavernous warehouse. It was a cinder-block cathedral with a metal roof held up by steel girders. Skylights let in vast shafts of sunlight, and they entered the building through giant metal sliding doors that took two people to open. The warehouse was being used to store boxes of military goods, and they could work there largely undisturbed. With Miller urging them to work faster all the time, they started flying through boxes of AK-47s, turning broken weapons into functional weapons at a roaring rate. “We put three boxes up today,” Debbie wrote proudly after one particularly busy day. Each box held about one hundred AKs. “Hey there big Daddy,” Michelle wrote to her father. “I hope this letter finds you well. I am doing pretty good over here. I actually have a lot of work now; I've been working my ass off. I learned how to work on AK-47s. So we've got about 2500 of them to fix. Got about 500 done so far.”

Michelle maintained that upbeat tone in all the letters she sent to her parents. In truth, however, she was grappling with conflicting emotions around the armament team's new project. The American-style semiautomatic assault rifle she carried had better aim, but the Soviet-style weapons she was fixing were cheaper and functioned better in adverse climates, such as the sandy places of the world, where weapons tended to jam. It had become the weapon of choice for poor people across the globe. The bullets fired by her M4 were lighter, and flew with higher velocity toward their targets, but the heavier rounds fired by the AK-47s penetrated farther into anything they hit—they did more damage. Were things as simple as their first sergeant had declared? Would the guns be used only to help spread democracy? Michelle could not take apart and put back together an AK-47 without worrying how the weapon might someday be employed. It was hard to accept that the guns she was repairing would be used only for purposes that could be called noble. Guns had a way of changing hands. As she replaced the sights on a broken AK-47, Michelle asked herself who had used the assault rifle before
and who would fire it next. Who would be hit by the large rounds? With her hands occupied, listening to music on her MP3 player (anything but the Dave Matthews Band, that was too close to home; she would never be able to listen to the Dave Matthews Band again), Michelle felt productive; at the same time, a black thread of worry pulled through her contentment. As satisfying as it was to make a broken weapon function, she had a lot of unanswered questions about the work she was doing.

While Debbie soothed her disquiet with a cocktail or two, Michelle developed other coping mechanisms. In a letter she mailed to Pete, Michelle assured her boyfriend that she felt no regrets about their relationship and apologized for being out of touch and said she had just gotten a new phone card and would call him that very night but in truth she had begun spending a lot of time with Ben Sawyer. There were many reasons, among them that having him close kept other men at bay. While the young women who lived in Michelle's tent complained of feeling unfeminine, wearing their butch uniforms, they had nonetheless become sought-after commodities. The 113th Support Battalion included almost eighty female soldiers, out of a total of about two hundred and seventy personnel. But now they lived beside the all-male regiments that also belonged to the 76th Infantry Brigade—the very men their support battalion was intended to support—which rendered the ratio of men to women on the post even more highly skewed. Plus, most of the regular army and foreign NATO soldiers were men, too.

The male soldiers competed to see who could lift more weights, who could drink more beer, who could sleep with more women. Any attractive young woman living on the post drew intense scrutiny. The attention was fierce, omnipresent, palpable. The men on the post had left behind their girlfriends and wives and had taped pictures of barely clad women in their tents, and to these men Michelle did not look like a fellow human being so much as an opportunity for a kind of relief they were determined to find. Within weeks, male soldiers she did not know were greeting Michelle by name everywhere she went on post. She could not sit down in the dining hall without attracting a bevy of interested dining partners. Ben Sawyer assuaged her loneliness and also offered protection—he warded off other suitors. She started eating dinner with him almost every evening. Sawyer had never gone to college, he had bad
teeth, and he was married. There was a tattoo of Jesus on his calf, a tattoo of Death on his shoulder, and on his arms he had inked the names of his son and his daughter. Michelle did not believe in Jesus, Death, tattoos, or infidelity, nor did she believe Sawyer was the right man for her, but he was a solid six feet three inches of warm muscle, and he was by her side. At home in Indiana, she had recognized Sawyer as being white trash, just like her half brothers, but after they got to Afghanistan, he made her feel safe. And so Michelle slept with him again.

It was Desma Brooks who came up with a system for when they could have sex. Debbie Helton's tent was close by, and she happened to witness the inception of Desma's system, because from where she put her chair in the evenings she could see the tent where Michelle and Desma lived. “The girls were funny last night,” wrote Debbie. “They decided to hang out a white sock if someone was getting lucky. Desma did it for a joke at first and [then] everyone paid attention. Ziggy and her boyfriend took full advantage and went for it—they were allowed 30 minutes. These young girls have no shame. But they crack me up I could see me there about 10 years ago.” Many of them used the white sock after that—Michelle for a tryst with Ben Sawyer, Desma for a tryst with the superior officer she'd been sleeping with since Atterbury, Mary during a brief fling with an infantryman who quickly moved along to other prospects.

After Michelle slept with Sawyer a few more times, she could no longer convince herself that it would not happen again. In her next letter to Pete, she struck a different tone. “I want you to live while I am gone,” she told him. “You are not stagnant. Every day is yours and you should make the most of it. We will go on when I get home, so keep your life moving forward. I know wherever you go in this year I am much faster than you so I'll catch up!!” She could not bring herself to say in writing that she was not faithful, but she wanted to acknowledge the many kinds of distance that now divided them. Perhaps the letter was also an attempt to find a sense of coherence: she was still in love with Pete, and by sleeping with another man, she had split herself in two; Michelle was tortured by her deceit. She could neither stay away from Sawyer nor could she forgive herself for being so weak. But in truth without Sawyer at her side in the dining hall every evening, her time at Camp Phoenix would have been intolerable.

Early in September, a car bomb exploded outside Camp Phoenix. Perhaps as many as ten people were killed, including some children. Medics from Debbie's tent ran out to care for the wounded. The car bomb threw Michelle sideways, emotionally. “I hate days like this, when there is no mistaking that I am in hell,” she wrote to Pete. “What really freaks me out is that I couldn't cry for them. I don't know why but I got so angry with myself because I don't want to be one of these mindless desensitized fucks that I am surrounded by. I don't know what's happening to me.” It was still toward Pete that Michelle bared her soul, even though she was no longer calling as often. “I miss you a lot,” she told him in the same letter. “I know I haven't called lately, and I'm sorry. They're supposed to be putting more phones in soon. I love you more than words can say.” The car bomb seemed to trip something inside of Michelle, and she found herself filled with a wistful nostalgia for the life she was no longer leading—the life in which Pete was her partner, and there were no car bombs, and they could go eat at their favorite dive anytime they wanted. “Let's just walk down to Big Top for some onion rings and tea,” she told Pete. “Before long it will be too cold to do it for a while.”