Soldier Girls (25 page)

In all kinds of ways, Michelle depended on Desma to make their drab lives more colorful. After they had been living in Afghanistan for about a month, Desma had announced that it was depressing to live in a green tent amid an ocean of identical green tents, and therefore she went online and ordered fifty hot pink plastic flamingos, as well as a sign that said
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
. Desma stuck the sign in a sandbag right outside their tent. Then she arranged the flock of flamingos around the tent's walls, sticking their wire legs between the sandbags. In that dreary place, the pink birds stood out, a shocking herd of whimsy. Michelle loved those crazy birds. The flamingos declared they would not conform—they were stuck here but they had not surrendered. Other soldiers seemed captivated by the sight, because one by one soldiers
borrowed the birds. Desma saw one of them out on the highway, duct-taped to the front of a Humvee. She liked the idea of her flamingo traveling the length of Afghanistan.

When they got bored with filling out dirty versions of Mad Libs, they watched Disney cartoons together on their laptop computers, or swapped DVDs. Michelle watched every single episode in her collection of
Sex and the City
shows, and then loaned the DVDs out, exchanging them for other movies. Even Nose Hairs borrowed her
Sex and the City
DVDs. Then Michelle spent hours combing through the hadji movies at the bazaar, looking for entertainment. She found a hadji collection of Johnny Depp movies, as well as a copy of her beloved
Return to Oz
. The bootleg copies of Hollywood movies were sold at the bazaar for $2 apiece. The word “hadji” bothered Michelle, but everybody used it. Technically speaking, the word meant a person who had made the trip to Mecca—literally, a pilgrim—but Michelle noticed how the American soldiers used the word to separate themselves from Afghans, to keep their distance. Hadji movies meant blurry, cheap, bootleg movies; hadji workers did menial jobs. They had been instructed to use the term “local national workers” instead, but everybody still said hadji. Many of the American soldiers had had little exposure to foreign cultures and viewed the people they called hadjis with fear and contempt.

Debbie was a rare exception. She befriended local nationals just like everyone else, and was regularly chatting with the Afghans who worked at the dining facility. One Afghan man apparently believed they might be falling in love.

“Do you think it will rain?” Debbie asked him one evening.

“Rain?” he said. “Tomorrow!”

“It will rain tomorrow?”

He pointed to his finger. “Yes! Yes!” he said. “Gold ring! Tomorrow!”

“No, no, no!” Debbie laughed, backpedaling.

Camp Phoenix was bustling with activity involving local national workers, as the leadership at the post had ordered a variety of construction projects. Local workers were building a new dining facility, a new post office, a new laundry area, a library, a study room for soldiers who were taking continuing education classes, a television room with theater seating, an Internet café, and a food court with three new restaurants.
Local workers were also building structures called B-Huts (short for Barracks Huts) that the soldiers were supposed to move into that winter, as well as more latrines and more showers. The wars were not going to end soon, the construction suggested—the soldiers were going to be here for a while. All of the construction posed an increased security risk, however, and soldiers in the 113th pulled hadji duty more and more frequently as the construction projects mounted. Being assigned to guard Afghan workers was considered an onerous task, but Debbie found it fascinating; she longed to understand more about the country around her, and she spent the time talking animatedly with the workers. “Well I did hadji watch not too bad . . . ,” she wrote in her diary. “They make $6 a day which is a lot for them. They don't wear socks. Some young boys around ten, eleven. I gave one a pop tart he liked it. Was a cutie I could of adopted him.” One day the local workers she was guarding started a cook fire and made tea and flat bread. The Afghans offered to share their food, and Debbie fell in love with flat bread. The more she talked to the locals, the more her admiration grew. “One of the workers rides his bike one hour just to get here,” she wrote. “No kid at home would do that for $6 a day!”

Debbie had also started visiting Michelle and Desma's tent regularly to cut hair, wax legs, and wax eyebrows. She told the other women that she would not take money; these services were what she had to offer to make them feel more at home. If they insisted on making some type of payment, they could pick up a scarf for her at the bazaar. Debbie had started off just cutting hair in her own tent, but soon she was getting requests from soldiers across the post; she spent more time doing beauty work inside Michelle and Desma's tent than any other. The younger women tended to be more concerned about their appearances. And Debbie could tell when a young woman started seeing another soldier, because that's when she would get a request for a bikini wax. Soon Debbie felt even more at home inside Michelle and Desma's tent than she did in her own. She spent hours listening to the young women chatter about their romances. Their tent had an intimate, lively atmosphere; it could also be wearying, as the young women indulged in a lot of drama. Debbie no longer wanted to take so many risks, nor suffer such large consequences.

The young women wanted so badly to feel more feminine. Because the soldiers were flush with cash and stuck at Camp Phoenix, Internet shopping became an obsession, and in Michelle and Desma's tent, the hot commodity became fancy underwear. Michelle and Mary started the trend, and then the other women followed suit. Within a short time, Michelle had matching lacy bra and panty sets in black, green, and gold. She hated wearing the male-looking uniform every single day, and liked the idea of Ben Sawyer finding the colorful underwear beneath her camouflage. Then she found a nail salon at Bagram where she could get a pedicure. Anytime Desma had to go get parts, Michelle tagged along and got her toenails painted. It struck even her as frivolous, but that was sort of the point. She wanted to hang on to the sense of being a woman, and that was hard to do as a soldier.

As the weeks passed the weather began to turn, and at night the lows started dropping down into the thirties. Ben Sawyer began staying overnight in Michelle's tent. All of the women had hung blankets around their sleeping areas, suspended from the top bunks, to create some privacy. For a time, the ten women had stuck to the rule that banned male visitors from spending the night, but at one point Michelle had innocently lifted up the blanket around another soldier's bed to ask a question, and to her shock had been confronted by the sight of that woman having sex with a male colleague. After that, the goings-on inside of the tent had become more of a free-for-all. Generally, the male visitors tried to tiptoe out of the tent by 4:00 a.m. It was widely understood that several of the battalion's senior leaders were having affairs with young subordinates, but it was also understood that nobody was supposed to get caught.

The battalion's soldiers split in their response to witnessing the affairs. Many soldiers were religious and attended a weekly prayer group, and some of the devout soldiers condemned the behavior as immoral and hurtful. Other soldiers shrugged it off as simply a by-product of having been sent to war. The Judge Advocate General's Corps lawyers who served as legal advisers to the battalion's command were perplexed about what to do, given that many of the relationships were clearly illegal. In previous wars, soldiers had found physical comfort outside their
own barracks, with nurses or with local women. The current trend was a marked departure from past history and signified the first time that interactions between soldiers had become widely sexualized inside the barracks. What did it mean for the overall concept of military discipline when soldiers began picking and choosing which part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice they would heed? At one point Desma accidentally knocked over a folder in her company commander's work area and saw a memo from the JAG lawyers on the subject. Inappropriate relationships will not be tolerated, the memo declared. The commanders should crack down on the illicit affairs, and perpetrators should suffer punishment. Ha! Desma thought. That is not likely to happen, when half of the commanders are guilty themselves!

With a series of cool remarks, Michelle's tentmate Jaime Toppe communicated that she viewed Michelle's and Desma's habit of sleeping with married men as a sacrilege. Her own husband had deployed along with her, however—she was married to Jeremy Toppe, the soldier who had nicknamed Michelle “Poison Butterfly”—and she could sleep with him anytime she wanted. So Michelle shrugged off Jaime's scorn, concluding that with her own husband present, it was pretty easy for Jaime to resist other temptations. Who was she to judge?

As the days went by, Michelle grew accustomed to wrapping herself around Ben Sawyer's long body on her small twin mattress. In the dark she could not see his tattoos, and she used his chiseled proximity to tell herself that it was safe to fall asleep. She had no doubt that she still loved Pete, but he had vanished from view, and it was upon Ben that she began to depend for small daily assurances. It was Sawyer's arms that provided heart-pumped heat in the chilly tent as the nighttime temperatures began to drop, and it was Sawyer's long legs that reached down into the bottom of her sleeping bag and reduced her fear of the invisible camel spiders that still crawled across her skin.

As the temperature dropped, it also started to rain frequently; the seven-year drought had broken. They even got some hail. The Afghan man at the dining hall whom Debbie had befriended congratulated her on changing their weather. “Thank you for bringing the rain,” he told her, as if she had actually brought the rain along in her duffel bag, all the
way from verdant Indiana. “Honey, we didn't have a thing to do with it,” Debbie replied. But he just said, “Thank you, thank you.” And as it began to rain, they began to toughen up.

One day, the armament team took a break from working on AK-47s and fixed some broken rocket-propelled grenade launchers instead—the very weapons that were most often trained against them. While working on one of the grenade launchers, Michelle came to understand how crude the weapon was: most of the RPGs she saw had no sights at all. It was a crapshoot, in other words, where the explosive device landed. That insight liberated Michelle from the fear of being hit by a grenade, which had dogged her since she had first arrived. There was no way to aim an RPG properly, she now saw; if she was hit, it would be an act of providence. The next time the blaring alarm siren sounded at the post, Michelle shrugged her shoulders at Desma, and they went on doing Mad Libs and eating Tostitos they had found at the PX. They put on their body armor and their helmets—“dressed for getting bombed,” as Michelle liked to say—because otherwise they would get written up, but they did not worry about whether a rocket was going to obliterate their tent. It was too exhausting to keep worrying about that.

Later, during another air raid, Desma stuck her head outside and saw that nobody was around. “Hey, Michelle, let's go have a smoke,” she said. They were supposed to hunker down below the sandbags, or else seek shelter in a bunker, but who cared anymore? They were outside smoking when a group of gung ho soldiers from Alpha Company ran by on their way to the bunkers with all of their battle rattle on over their pajamas. Desma gave them a round of applause and kept on smoking.

Over the course of that fall, Michelle decided to stop allowing Patrick Miller to make her cry, and turned off the tears with stony determination. He continued to berate her, but when his rages no longer had any visible effect, he erupted less frequently. Maybe Miller could also see that he had to change his behavior. Accepting that Michelle would never show up on time, he assigned her the task of picking up their radios from the motor pool. This meant she had an extra half hour before she had to meet the rest of the team. And when Miller did yell, Michelle found ways to insulate herself. She brought her MP3 player to work every day, along with a pair of ear buds. The rest of the team would ask who she
was listening to. If she answered Madonna, she was having a good day; if she said Nine Inch Nails, she wasn't. Often, if Miller was yelling at her, Michelle acted as though she could not hear what he was saying. “You could just tell, you know, that look on the face—she can hear Patrick yelling, but she's not going to answer him,” Debbie would say later. “We were just dying laughing, because we knew what she was doing. She was just shutting Patrick out.”

Michelle also learned to use the fact that she was female to throw Miller off. When he had served in the marines, he had had no women reporting to him, and he was still getting used to the idea. One day Miller gave the armament team a pep talk. He told everybody that part of his job was to make sure his soldiers were taken care of, and asked if there was anything they needed. “Birth control,” Michelle said drily. It pleased her to see him blanch. (Much later, after she and Miller had grown close, Miller would reveal to Michelle that he had gone to her tent one day to give her a package from the post office, and had seen her lacy underwear strewn across the floor. He had never imagined
that
under a uniform—but once he had seen the garments, he could not get them out of his mind.) Michelle sensed that she had the power to make him uncomfortable and liked that it gave her the upper hand.

At the same time, she made herself useful. She saw that Miller could not function without his car keys and the small dark green field notebook in which he kept detailed notes about their progress. He kept misplacing both items. Michelle made it her business to know at all times the location of his keys and his notebook, and he began to rely upon her to tell him where they were. Also, Michelle and Debbie worked out a methodical system for documenting the stream of AK-47s that were passing through their hands. Miller drummed into his soldiers that they needed to be able to account for every single AK-47, but the AKs were sometimes hard to identify. Michelle and Debbie took over the task of deciphering the frequently eroded serial numbers on the sides of the weapons, and recording the identity of each gun they repaired. If the team got a difficult box, they all concentrated on disassembling and reassembling the broken weapons, and Debbie and Michelle documented the weapons after the repairs had been completed. If they got a box that was easier, however, then Will and Patrick focused on repairing the broken
AKs, while Debbie and Michelle wrote down every symbol they could find.