Soldier Girls (28 page)

Bush had been reelected while Desma and Mary were in Cancún. When the soldiers at Phoenix heard the news that Bush had won,
Michelle received a stream of visitors to her tent (“people came in droves to, like, rub it in my face”). Michelle felt mystified by the support that Bush still held among her colleagues. “I was like, what is your problem?” she would say later. “Are you guys idiots? Like, do you want to stay here forever?” Knowing that she would be depressed by the election results, Pete mailed her a copy of
The Activist's Handbook
, by Randy Shaw—a guide to bringing about social change—which she devoured. Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that he was resigning, saying it had always been his intention to hold the job for only one term. Bush announced that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would stay in his post. They kept hearing disturbing bulletins from Iraq, where thousands of marines were engaged in the Second Battle of Fallujah, a city held by the insurgents. Supposedly it was some of the ugliest urban combat since Vietnam.

The soldiers did what they could to distract themselves. Debbie stayed up late to catch live football games, which aired between midnight and dawn. Desma and her lover, Mark Northrup, became lethal at euchre, and were awash in pogs, the small cardboard counters that vendors used instead of coins to make change. Morale, Welfare, and Recreation showed
The Manchurian Candidate
, among other movies, and started a karaoke night. Desma got up and sang “I Got You Babe” with the new first sergeant. He had just taken over for Dean Kimball, who had been sent home because of a personal emergency. In an unrelated incident, the medics had discovered they were missing a significant quantity of morphine. Debbie's tent was searched twice, because of the number of medics who lived there, but nobody ever found the missing drugs.

Patrick Miller's wife sent a Christmas tree that arrived in the middle of November. It was plastic, dark green, and about three feet tall. The armament team set it up on a table at the ANA depot. Miller was battling increased guilt over his absence, because his wife had been caring for the baby by herself, and he felt terrible that he had done no parenting. “I don't feel like a father,” he told the
Wrench Daily News
. “I miss what I'm missing. I miss her terribly. I feel sorry for her that I have to put her through this, that she's doing this by herself.” When Toppe asked what
was helping him get through the deployment, he answered, “My soldiers. People that look up to me, that respect me, that I respect. They're my family now.”

The artificial tree bemused Akbar Khan.

“Why do you have a tree?” he asked.

“Oh, you know, we like to have a tree, we like to have lights,” Debbie told him. “It's pretty. And we put presents underneath.”

“But why a tree?” Akbar asked.

The soldiers were perplexed. Akbar had given them lessons in the history of Islam, he had told them all about Ramadan, but nobody could answer his one simple question.

“We have no idea,” Michelle admitted.

Thanksgiving fell on November 25, 2004. Morale, Welfare, and Recreation organized a scavenger hunt, a flag football game, a volleyball tournament, and a horseshoe toss. The dining facility served corn on the cob, seasoned green beans, peas, broccoli with cheese, mashed potatoes, corn bread dressing, glazed sweet potatoes, four kinds of gravy, smoked turkey, roast turkey, turkey breast, glazed Cornish hens, baked ham, grilled steaks, steamed crab legs, and buttered lobster tail. The commander of the post invited Rambo to join them. He had never entered the dining room before and looked visibly uncomfortable. Then soldiers started waving and calling out thanks. “Thanksgiving! The DFAC personnel put on a very lavish spread it was really nice,” wrote Debbie. “Even had an ice sculpture.”

The following day, however, an Afghan man opened fire on a convoy as it was leaving the post. A French soldier shot and killed the man. The stark juxtaposition of the fatal shooting, coming so soon after the holiday meal, jerked everybody back to reality. The cooks had done a magnificent job of transporting them to some other place, but in fact they were still living in a war zone. To lift her own flagging spirits, Debbie was now hiding a puppy in her tent. Shortly before Thanksgiving, the armament team had been working at the ANA depot when they had heard shouting. Outside the depot, a group of children had been trying to sell some soldiers a puppy for $2, but the soldiers had refused to buy the dog, and the children had begun abusing the puppy. Debbie wrote:

They were throwing her in the dirt and against the wall. She doesn't seem to be hurt but was very traumatized + shook all night. . . . She is probably only 3 weeks old. No teeth yet + her eyes barely open. So I've been feeding her with syringes + a formula they made up. She's up about every 2 hours. But she is so much better she has a lot more energy + her eyes are starting to shine so I hope she will make it. . . . Her back legs are weak so we hope there was no nerve damage.

They named the dog Diamond. A woman in Finance cared for Diamond during the day, and Debbie cared for the puppy at night. Every morning, before she met the rest of the armament team, Debbie secreted Diamond in a box and carried her over to Finance. Every afternoon, as soon as Debbie finished her shift, she returned to pick up Diamond. The puppy required constant attention and could not be left alone. She also offered Debbie unconditional love. Debbie no longer went down to supply to drink, and no longer wrote about booze in her diary. She only wrote about Diamond.

Well the baby is doing quite well I'm still Auntie Debbie the night nanny. Her back legs are moving great she has some sparkle in her eyes + is cutting some teeth. It's been tiring but worth it. I get up every 2–3 hours to feed her. . . . It's so nice to have her close by. I miss my Maxx a lot.

A few days later, Debbie's tent was ransacked again by staff sergeants who were continuing to search for the missing morphine, but Debbie got a heads-up and hid Diamond in another tent. The puppy required regular exercise, and it was hard to walk a dog and keep the animal hush-hush, so Debbie started getting up at four in the morning to walk Diamond around the post—an hour at which the only other people she encountered were the married soldiers who were sneaking out of tents in which they did not belong. None of them was likely to turn her in. Michelle found it hilarious that she was hiding Ben Sawyer, and Desma was hiding Mark Northrup, and Debbie was hiding Diamond. (“Her illicit relationship was with a dog,” said Michelle drily.) “Baby girl got her
first bath today,” wrote Debbie in her diary shortly after Thanksgiving. “They are supposed to do a bed check tonight around 1:30 to make sure no one is practicing intercourse not sure what to do with Baby girl!”

It got cold and then it got colder. By the middle of December it was often dipping down into the twenties at night, and sometimes only climbed up into the thirties during the day. “Our heat acts like it's going out,” wrote Debbie. “And no heat still at work.” Patrick Miller complained that his people needed heat, and was told that a heater would be forthcoming, but weeks slipped by and it did not materialize. The armament team began burning old butt stocks inside the warehouse to keep warm. They mailed care packages back home and they also sent money. “Here is the money you needed,” Michelle wrote to her father. “I hope it helps.” Desma had been sending home child support to the people who were caring for her children every month, and now she mailed gift cards as well. Debbie sent money to her daughter, her brother, and her parents after they ran into various financial difficulties. “Jeff's worried I'm going to give all my money away before I get home,” she wrote in her diary. “But it's my family + hard to say no. I really just want all my bills except mortgage to be paid off then I can concentrate on the next few years + try to retire early to enjoy. I don't need much just no bills . . . + Jeff if he decide[s] to stay.”

The new post office opened in time to handle the holiday mail traffic. Every day for several weeks, trucks full of packages arrived, and the post office had to round up volunteers to unload all the boxes. The soldiers also flocked to the new PX, which carried a greater selection of magazines, food, DVDs, CDs, television sets, microwaves, refrigerators, Xbox consoles, PlayStation 2 consoles, and video games. Hamid Karzai was inaugurated as president of Afghanistan on December 7, 2004, and both Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld arrived for the ceremony. Usually fighting ceased during the country's harsh winters, but US military leaders announced that because the Taliban was planning to disrupt the upcoming parliamentary elections, they were sending special forces out on raids throughout the winter. The midwinter push was being called Operation Lightning Freedom.

Ten days before Christmas, the Taliban retaliated with a series of attacks across Afghanistan. Mortar rounds rained down on a US base
in Paktika Province; a rocket blast wounded other soldiers in Kandahar; inside the jail at Pol-i-charkhi, prisoners waged a ten-hour uprising during which inmates seized an AK-47 and killed four Afghan National Army soldiers. The next time the armament team went there, they were told they were not allowed to bring Akbar Khan inside the dining hall. Miller surprised the rest of the team by announcing that if Akbar couldn't eat in the dining hall, then none of them would. They ate lunch together out in their vehicles. It astonished Michelle; she had not expected Miller to evolve. But the daily contact with Akbar was having an effect on all of them—constant proximity to an Afghan who possessed so much dignity had changed the way they perceived Afghans in general. Even Miller did not make the same kinds of jokes about hadjis anymore. Akbar had brightened their days and they could no longer imagine their time in Afghanistan without him. Gift-giving was a significant part of Afghan culture, Akbar told them, and if they exchanged presents at Christmas then he wanted to give them something, too. But he puzzled over what would be appropriate. Were feminine things like earrings okay to give to a female soldier? Or should he get them knives?

Soldiers left Camp Phoenix to bring food, clothing, and medical supplies to families living in Kabul's crowded refugee camps. Michelle visited a local orphanage, and painted desks inside a school. She also started volunteering with a medical team that was providing health care to women living in local villages and refugee camps. Michelle played with their children while the mothers saw the medics. It was a small thing, perhaps, but later she would recall those moments as among the most rewarding of her life, and would search for a kind of work that would give her the same feeling of fulfillment. Soldiers who belonged to a different unit in the brigade got caught up in the story of a sixteen-month-old Afghan boy who needed heart surgery, and raised thousands of dollars to fly the boy back to Indianapolis to have a potentially lifesaving operation. Many people in Indiana attached great importance to the soldiers' effort, but Afghanistan was a place of harsh realities, and the boy died two days after returning home. The soldiers wanted to do good but it was not always easy to know how best to realize their intentions.

The air over Kabul grew acrid from smoke, because people were
burning trash to stay warm. To cheer up the homesick soldiers, Morale, Welfare, and Recreation announced it was conducting a competition to see which tent could mount the best holiday decorations. It appalled Michelle to see generators being used to power Christmas lights when all around Kabul children were literally freezing to death. How could her colleagues happily fill the generators with fuel to light trees and displays and to pump air into blow-up Santa dolls? Michelle went on a tirade about it one day at work. “For some people, that's a morale lifter,” Debbie tried to tell her. But Michelle would not listen. “It's so wasteful!” she cried.

Homesick, Michelle signed up for a video conference with Pete, Veronica, and Colleen. On the morning of the call, she woke early, and got dressed for work as usual—desert camo, ballistic vest, bulky Kevlar helmet, M4 assault rifle—then walked across the post to an office for the videoconference. There they were, waving at her, Pete and her two best friends, wearing homemade knit caps and stoner outfits. They had never seen Michelle in all of her gear. They had seen her in uniform, but they had never seen her carry a weapon. They should not have been taken aback, yet they were—the sight of her with the big gun, it was shocking. Plus, there was a glitchy time delay, and they kept interrupting one another. They tried for holiday spirit—“Merry Christmas!” Pete called out—but the call was an abject failure. They had hoped it might stitch them back together again but instead it left them feeling ripped apart.

The
Indianapolis Star
asked enlisted men and women to describe what they missed about home. One soldier said he missed being able to drive a car by himself. Another missed his La-Z-Boy recliner. The soldiers missed being able to watch football games at a normal time of day, missed arguing with their children, wearing civilian clothes, and ice cubes. They missed their own bathrooms. They missed Little League games and shopping on Black Friday. They missed fixing breakfast for their families on Sundays, and catching the holiday performances at their kids' schools. They missed spending hours finding the right Christmas tree and wrestling the tree into place and hanging ornaments on its branches. They missed shoveling their driveways.

One soldier from Camp Phoenix told the newspaper that the soldiers who were stationed there could look back over the months they
had spent in Afghanistan and feel a sense of accomplishment. They had helped ensure the safety of the presidential elections, and they were training soldiers for the Afghan National Army. In their spare time, they had also tended to the sick, built schools, and brought clothes to refugee camps and orphanages. They believed they were making Afghanistan a better place. That month, residents of Indiana had sent tons (literally) of toys, clothes, coats, and blankets that the soldiers had distributed. “I realize that this may be the best example of the spirit of the season on Earth,” wrote one soldier in a letter to the
Indy Star
.