Soldier Girls (32 page)

T.J. told Debbie that she was mailing her something really sexy that she could do all by herself for Valentine's Day—it turned out to be a blowup guy, and he got passed around Debbie's hut—but Jeff forgot about the holiday entirely. When he realized that he had neglected to send a card or a gift, he wrote Debbie a heartfelt email saying “it's your dead beat honey” and promised he was going to show her such a good time when
she got home that “you might want to wear your body armor when you get back just to be safe.” As it happened, the power had gone out that day and most of the meat he had stored in the freezer had thawed. “Maxx will eat good for a couple of days, I'm telling you,” he said. “Maxx is okay he will love my pork chops the big butt head.” Debbie told her daughter to make sure to take Jeff to Pizza Hut for Valentine's Day so that he wouldn't spend the holiday alone. Debbie was a little envious of all the action the younger women were getting. “Terry told me to write something juicy about her but we all laughed none of our immediate group are getting any juiciness of any kind. In our dreams.” But she also felt grateful that her life was not so tumultuous.

Later that month, the armament team drove to a new location: a facility known as the Kabul Military Training Center, where a
kandak
was about to be deployed to another province.
Kandak
meant brigade. One of the principal training sites for Afghan soldiers, the KMTC sat in rolling foothills on the outskirts of Kabul. There were no trees; the landscape was an undulating expanse of tan-colored sand and gravel, interrupted by hardy brown grass and occasional shrubs. Soon it would be fighting season, and the newly trained soldiers needed weapons. Michelle, Debbie, Will, and Patrick worked in an unadorned cinder-block room painted white, where they sat on red plastic chairs and used overturned metal drums as tables. Hundreds of AK-47s had to be repaired in a hurry. Their job remained similar—they sorted through the reclaimed guns, fixed the ones that were broken, and documented everything—but these AKs were in much better shape than the others they had been repairing. Debbie, Will, and Patrick flew through the boxes while Michelle sat to one side, furiously writing down serial numbers. Afghan soldiers watched them intently, including a bearded man of high rank. The Afghan men seemed taken aback to be interacting with female soldiers. “The young recruits were very curious about Michelle + me,” wrote Debbie afterward. “I think [they were] fascinated they stare continuously.” Michelle retreated to their Humvee to eat her lunch, unable to tolerate the degree of attention she attracted.

For the rest of the deployment, the armament team alternately fixed broken AK-47s at the ANA depot and at KMTC, and eventually they
also started giving classes on how to maintain and repair AK-47s to the deploying Afghan soldiers. As they spent more and more time over at KMTC, the Afghans showed them greater hospitality. “They served us chai + a really great cake taste a lot like our pound cake,” wrote Debbie. “Then they fed us lunch ‘Afghani style.' Rice, beef, cauliflower. [It] was really good! Michelle + I love those cakes.” Finally they got heat at the ANA depot; mechanics arrived and installed a generator outside the building, then ran a metal tube in through a window. If the armament team stood directly underneath the tube, they could feel a river of warm air. It did not really heat the warehouse, but you could stand under the tube and take a heat shower. Miller kept driving them furiously. At the end of February they learned that their superiors considered their productivity so prodigious that they were being given a special commendation. “DDR received medals for our work apparently very prestigious awards not usually given out they were signed by a two-star general!” wrote Debbie. “Not many of these will be given out pretty cool.”

Sometimes Patrick Miller lost control of his temper when he could not get the Afghans to do his bidding. At one point after they had returned to the ANA depot, he jumped up on the back of a truck and started yelling and waving a knife around when he could not get a group of Afghan soldiers to clean their AK-47s to his liking. He said the Afghans should clean the AKs immediately, or else he would cut their balls off. Michelle and Debbie could tell that Akbar fudged the translation. (“I just said he is requesting with great vehemence that you do this task,” Akbar would say later, confirming their sense.) The armament team figured Akbar had saved their lives. “Miller acts like a beheaded chicken,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “He drives us crazy at times.”

The harsh winter was followed quickly by an unusually mild spring. On March 13—the most unusually warm day of the entire year, in terms of the relative increase over previous years—the temperature rose to seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, twelve degrees warmer than the previous average. But the skies did not clear. It rained more in March than it did during any other month that year. The soldiers reveled in the warmer temperatures. Even Patrick Miller softened with the change of weather. Since the work of his team had been formally recognized, he visibly
relaxed, and let them goof off. In the middle of the warm spell, he let the whole team stop work to watch Akbar Khan fly kites.

Both Debbie and Michelle had read
The Kite Runner
, which had led them to ply Akbar with questions about the Afghan tradition of kite fighting. Young men battled with kites that had sharp pieces of glass fused into the string, making their kites dive to cut each other's lines. Akbar told them it wasn't kite season—kite fighting tournaments were held in the dead of winter, when children stopped going to school because of the cold—but the soldiers begged him to show them how kite fighting was done anyway. He brought two kites to work; one was lime-green and aqua-blue, with long streamers, while the other was purple, fuchsia, and yellow. Akbar launched one of the kites. He stood in place, and tossed his kite in the air, flicked his wrists, and suddenly the kite was airborne—a bright flower of color leaping above the drab brown conexes. “We had a great day at the depot,” Debbie wrote that evening. “Akbar brought 2 kites. We watched him fly it was really something. . . . One of the other boys said he knew how to fly so he + Akbar had a kite fight. They use glass string and he cut the other kite's string so quick we missed it. They don't run [but] stay still + use a lot of hand movements. We are going to have a Kite Day + learn how to fly it right maybe I can teach Jaylen!”

While explaining his country, Akbar had also taught them a lot about themselves, about what it meant to be Americans who traveled in foreign places. They could no longer bear the idea of leaving him behind. “He told Q. that he really loved his mother but I was like his mom here because I mother him I guess,” wrote Debbie. “He's such a great person. We all want him to come to America! So innocent. So smart.” They had asked to meet some of his relatives, but had been told by their superiors that it was not permissible. The following week, however, as they were driving back to Camp Phoenix, Akbar pointed out some men who were working in the fields. He said one of those men was his uncle, he was planting wheat. It was unusually early, but the weather had warmed so quickly that his uncle had decided to put seeds into the ground now, while the dirt was soft and wet. Stop the truck, said Patrick. Let's say a quick hello. They were violating all kinds of prohibitions. If anything had gone wrong, it would have been the end of Miller's career. But nothing went wrong. It was just Akbar's uncle, a man with a weathered face,
one piercing brown eye, one eye that looked dead, and a long gray beard, who wore a set of cotton trousers with a long, dress-like top made from matching fabric. He was delighted to meet the Americans his nephew had told him about—why didn't they come over for tea. They doubted if they would be allowed to accept but told him they would love to have tea someday. “We had to stop + pull security,” Debbie wrote later. “But I didn't feel scared it was like a natural thing to do. We can't go to Akbar's so I'm not sure what we will do about tea but it would be nice to have conversation. Akbar told him I was his American mama!”

The following week, Akbar wanted to feed the team a proper Afghan meal. Miller gave him the equivalent of twenty dollars and Akbar left to pick up the food at a restaurant in downtown Kabul. Hours passed and Akbar did not return. They trusted the young man completely, but wondered if something dire had happened. When he finally returned that afternoon he explained that his cab had gotten a flat tire, and he had helped the cabbie change the tire. He had brought kabob (lamb, in this case),
kafta
(ground meat mixed with parsley and onions), and
kabuli
(rice cooked with carrots, raisins, cabbage, and beef). The following day was Gary Jernigan's birthday, and because Debbie and Will knew that Gary had fallen in love with the colorful, noisy jingle trucks, they had asked Akbar to help them secure a special birthday gift: a set of jingle chains that Gary could affix to his own truck when he got back to Indiana. “I want some for the dogmobile,” wrote Debbie enviously.

Akbar had a way of knowing what would touch another human being, and by this point he had touched them all. Even Miller. One day that spring, when they radioed to Camp Phoenix that they were on their way back to the post, they learned that there had been trouble on the road. Miller warned everyone to be ready. He pointed to the 9mm that he carried, in addition to his M4 assault rifle.

“If we have any trouble, I want you to take this gun,” he told Akbar.

“Oh, no, Mr. Patrick,” Akbar said. “I'm not allowed to do that. I can't touch a weapon.”

“You will take the gun,” Miller told him. “If it means you can save someone's life, you will take that gun.”

Later on, Michelle and Debbie marveled at the exchange. It meant that Miller's trust in Akbar had become complete.

As the air grew warm, the soldiers at Camp Phoenix found their thoughts turning toward home. “Miller heard we will be home by July 4 they want to have a celebration at the Hoosier Dome or somewhere,” wrote Debbie. “That's good!” Michelle wondered what going home would mean for her and Pete, for her and Ben. What was she going home to? Other soldiers had already disclosed their infidelities, and so many relationships—even some marriages—had broken apart that Debbie had come to believe she should not expect Jeff to remain faithful. She had written a letter telling Jeff he was free to do as he pleased. What she was trying to say was that she loved him, but did not expect him to remain celibate for an entire year. When Jeff got the letter, however, he read her words to mean that
she
no longer wished to remain faithful. He decided the honorable thing to do would be to move out of her house. Debbie heard from Ellen Ann that Jeff was packing his belongings because she had a new boyfriend. Debbie immediately phoned Jeff to set things straight and they talked for more than an hour. Jeff sent Debbie a pungent follow-up email in which he reminded her that he had served in the military, too:

your my honey get out of the sun its frying your brain our something, it will be the same when you get home you forget i know where your comming from i did my time 20 years back maybe thats why we get along so good and every body else is just fuck in the head . . . im proud of you honey your the best so keep your little ass safe till you get back, maxx said hi and he cannt wait till you get home dads no fun . . . just one more thing if you talk to me reel nice when you get back i may let you suck my dick on the way home ha ha ha

love you honey kiss kiss kiss

Jeff had proved himself to be constant. In some unexpected way, it felt as though the deployment had actually strengthened their relationship. Debbie mulled over the idea of a deeper commitment—but would a second yearlong deployment pull them apart? “I'm so thankful for my Honey . . . ,” she wrote. “Too many people here are having trouble back home. I am thinking about kidnapping him + maybe even getting married
yea don't faint. But . . . there's the Iraq thing before I can retire.” Meanwhile, Diamond or Maxx—Debbie longed for the company of a dog. In one of their phone calls, Jeff told her that he started her car, to make sure it was running fine, and gave Maxx the false impression that Debbie was home. “Jeff said Maxx went crazy in the house scratching the doors,” she wrote in her diary. “When he let him out he ran around the car + looked in the windows for me. . . . He is getting old for his breed I hope he lasts a lot longer I sure miss him a bunch!”

On Friday, March 18, 2005, a huge hailstorm pounded the region. Black clouds obscured the sky, and lightning forked down. It rained again on Sunday. On Monday, it started raining so hard that Patrick decided it wasn't safe to make the drive to the depot. They waited out the torrential downpour inside the motor pool, listening to the rain make a drumroll on the metal roof. “Rained so hard we left hour later [than usual],” wrote Debbie. “It was really pouring sounded great!” Michelle was in a good mood, because she was about to go on vacation in a week's time—she and Ben Sawyer had decided to sneak away for a quick break in Florida before they both returned to visit their respective families. The armament team worked hard that day, and Miller let them leave work ahead of schedule. “Came back early we had pizza, me, Akbar, Miller, Kellogg, Michelle,” wrote Debbie afterward. “It was fun. . . . Went to help Gary in supply for a little while + had happy hour. Well, it's almost Easter hard to believe another holiday down.”

On Friday, March 25, 2005, two days before Easter, Michelle Fischer and Ben Sawyer left in a convoy for Bagram, hoping to catch a flight out the following day. On Saturday, March 26, another convoy left Camp Phoenix, headed in a different direction. A group of soldiers from the 151st Infantry Regiment—another part of the 76th Infantry Brigade—left to scout out a new location for a shooting range for the Afghan soldiers they were training. They were about thirty miles south of Kabul when one of the vehicles exploded. It was a road the soldiers had traveled over and over again—a road they thought safe. The Taliban claimed credit, saying they had placed a bomb by the road, but military investigators determined instead that the foul weather had caused significant erosion, probably unearthing a piece of Afghanistan's lethal past—a long-buried Russian land mine. With brutal efficiency, the device had
killed all four of the truck's passengers: Todd Fiscus, thirty-six years old; Brett Hershey, age twenty-three; Michael Hiester, thirty-three; and Kyle Snyder, twenty-one. Debbie wrote: