Soldier Girls (34 page)

Strangely, the person she found it easiest to be around was her father. He took her to PJs and got her drunk and then they spent a day drinking together in his party trailer with relatives on his side of the family. Her father had parked a second trailer beside the trailer in which he lived, and they used it for any kind of celebration. For once there was no conflict, and it was easy. Her father and her uncle and her other half sister Cindy all seemed to look at her differently—with a rosy glow of appreciation. It had never been like that with her father before. He had always taken her for granted, but somehow she had become special.

Michelle saw Ben Sawyer again back at the airport in Louisville. He said his wife was down to ninety pounds, and his kids had wandered into and out of the house essentially uncared for while she lay sprawled across the sofa. The house had smelled bad, and there had been dirty clothes mounded in the bathtub. They got stuck in Kuwait for several days, and arrived back at Bagram almost three weeks after they had left, in the middle of April. Fighting season was in full swing and they spent the night in Bagram's transient housing area, lying side by side on cots in a cavernous, domed tent, filled with an ocean of cots occupied by innumerable other soldiers, all wearing Kevlar helmets and ballistic vests, listening to RPGs explode around them. Michelle listened to the big booms, crying as quietly as she knew how. She was afraid for her life, and she had forgotten what that felt like—it was as though she had never before been to a war zone. During those nights when she had done Mad Libs with Desma, she had grown numb to the idea that an RPG might snuff her out, but the women who shared her tent were not with her, and Michelle felt alone in the sea of strangers. She had never been through an RPG attack without Desma before.

Only after they returned to Camp Phoenix did Michelle finally realize
the enormity of what she had missed: the four deaths had fundamentally altered the atmosphere at the post. There was a shared sadness in the air and she was out of place, out of step with everyone else. While they had been grieving, she had been at Sea World; in retrospect, the vacation that she and Ben had stolen seemed selfish, wrong. Michelle felt like a stranger in her own tent.

While Michelle had been gone, Debbie had been forced to confront her own mortality. Shortly after Michelle and Ben had left, Debbie had gotten a cold, which had turned into a sinus infection. She had gone to see a medic, who did a routine examination and discovered that Debbie's blood pressure had jumped to 155/99. The last time the medics had taken a reading, her blood pressure had been 110/80, in the normal range. She had a mild case of hypertension. The medics conferred among themselves and decided to monitor Debbie's blood pressure daily. “I've never had any problems so I'm supposed to go back the next 3 days around the same time,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “Didn't go anywhere just laid around don't really feel like too much.” In the days that followed, however, Debbie's blood pressure went up, not down. She scrawled with frustration: “Went to get it checked around 3:30 it was higher today 158/102 what's up he said if it's still high tomorrow medicine I guess my 50s are not going to be nice to me.”

Debbie spent hours crocheting, hoping the soothing activity would lower her blood pressure. It was almost time for the baby's birth. “I talked to mom EA is one and half cent dilated but could stay that way for a while,” Debbie wrote. “She's two weeks away.” She finished Jaylen's blanket. “It doesn't look too bad now to mail it off.” She was hoping the blood pressure issue would resolve of its own accord but when she saw the medics again she learned otherwise. “Didn't have as much headache so I thought maybe it would be better but it was worse I don't get it. It was 158/110 today.” The medics started Debbie on blood pressure medication. Afterward, Debbie cheered herself up by going down to Morale, Welfare, and Recreation with Gretchen and some other friends. They ordered a pizza at Ciano's and then went to the new Dairy Queen that had just opened up on the post. It was comforting to linger over a beverage that reminded her of home. “Orange Julius was great haven't had one since they left the mall,” Debbie wrote.

The group gossiped about the fact that two women in the battalion had learned they were pregnant. Living in such close quarters, they had few secrets, and many people knew that a married woman from Charlie Company had conceived a child with her husband while she was home on leave, and an unmarried woman from Bravo Company had conceived a child with someone else on post. Ten days later, the young woman from Bravo Company left for Germany, supposedly to seek treatment for bowel trouble. “Heard [name deleted] was sent to Bagram for bowel trouble but not!” When the young woman returned, looking wan and strained, she turned to Debbie for consolation; it was always Debbie, she mothered them all. The young woman confessed that she had found reentry into the gossipy world of Camp Phoenix excruciating. Debbie confided something she rarely discussed: she had once gotten an abortion herself, more than twenty years earlier.

She got back today she feels strange like everyone is judging her I told her it was her business anyway no one else's. Her dad went to Germany to be with her for a while it was a wise decision she just doesn't know it yet! It was hard for me + I still have hard feelings every once in a while but it was the right one!

Encircled by younger women, on the verge of becoming a grandmother, and feeling powerless as she watched her blood pressure rise, Debbie faced the unavoidable truth that she was aging. So were her parents; that month, her father turned seventy-nine. She called him on his birthday; they had always been close. She wrote wistfully in her diary that at least she would be home the following year, when he turned eighty. Becoming older herself confounded Debbie. She still found herself attracted to men who were half her age. (“Some people were visiting from Kabul University boy was there a cutie I've been here too long he looked a lot like Keanu Reeves . . . he was gorgeous.”) Yet her body was betraying her in a fashion as elemental as the way her blood ran through her veins. She wondered about the possible reasons for her hypertension: Was it age? Could it be the altitude? The stress of the deployment?

Her blood pressure varied but stubbornly remained higher than normal, despite the medication. During her daily visits to the medical area, Debbie grew attached to one doctor in particular, a tall, blue-eyed, sandy-haired medic who had an attentive bedside manner. During one of their consultations, the doctor noticed Debbie's tall and slender build and asked about her diet. Was she eating enough food? Debbie said she was. Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol can raise blood pressure to unhealthy levels, but when the doctor asked, “You haven't been drinking while you're here, have you?” Debbie said, “No, sir.” The doctor changed her medication. The following day, Debbie felt worse, not better. “Well I go back today to check the BP I think it's still up I have a constant headache + I felt like I was in a fog last night + this morning,” she wrote. Indeed, her blood pressure had climbed even higher, to 162/99. Several days later, however, her blood pressure dropped to 138/100. The medics continued to monitor her closely, but they were encouraged—the new medication seemed to be working.

Shortly after starting the second medication, Debbie went down to supply for an impromptu party after being tipped off that other soldiers had made a run to Supreme Foods. The store was part of a chain founded by a former army food service worker; it sold liquor as well as groceries, and had outlets near American bases in the Balkans, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Soldiers from Camp Phoenix had discovered a branch in Kabul. The armament team had begun radioing in false departure times from the ANA depot or the KMTC so they could stop there to stock up on liquor. “The boys got to make a Supreme Run for the First Sergeant,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “Me + Terry went down around 3:00 started having fun early too early skipped dinner don't remember coming home. Got sick felt like shit most all the day not like my normal hangovers.” The following day she went back and allowed herself only one alcoholic beverage, but soon she was drinking at her usual rate. She shrugged off her brush with ill health. “Okay my BP 130/78 so I think that's fine,” she wrote. “I think it was a fluke with the sinus + throat thing. I'll finish this med + then have it checked + see about going off of it in case I don't need it!”

When Michelle Fischer returned that week, Debbie greeted the
young woman with her usual stream of chatty affirmation, wanting to know how everything had gone, buoying Michelle up by saying she had done the right thing, telling Pete in person. Debbie mentioned dealing with some issues related to blood pressure but quickly changed the subject. Only in the pages of her diary did Debbie reveal worry, fear, anxiety, or dependence; otherwise she concealed her vulnerabilities. Debbie had missed Michelle while she was gone. She enjoyed the girl's liveliness, her daily dramas, and her compelling way of putting it all into words, entertaining everyone in the process. Although Debbie thought it was her job to take care of Michelle, who struck her as too young to be in Afghanistan, oddly she found herself less anxious when she heard the girl's bell-like laugh peal out again as they fixed another batch of AK-47s. Patrick Miller had gone home on leave to visit his wife and baby, who was now six months old, and had left Will Hargreaves in charge of the armament team. Will was not a hard-driving taskmaster, and Debbie and Michelle enjoyed his more relaxed style. The air grew mild, and wildflowers carpeted the hills around them. “The weather has been beautiful I'm getting spoiled working outside every day!” Debbie wrote. She picked some of the wildflowers and stuck them into the pages of her diary. Meanwhile Michelle and Desma bought some hash and got stoned in the tent, hiding under their bedclothes, blowing the smoke into dryer sheets in an attempt to hide the smell. They thought they were very clever, but Caroline Hill came in and said, “You know I can smell that, right?”

When Patrick Miller returned he got them all working double time again. He kept meticulous notes about their progress, including a precise count of the number of assault rifles they had fixed—he proudly told the armament crew that by his tally, they had overhauled almost twenty thousand AK-47s so far, and he thought they could do twenty-two thousand before their deployment was over. They could feel their time together drawing to a close. At the end of April, Miller told them that some of them would start going home in June and the rest would follow in July. At the same time, Miller cautioned the soldiers to remain vigilant. They all took a mandatory class on improvised explosive devices, because of the frequency with which they were now being used across Afghanistan.

The soldiers were exhausted and raw, and the final months of the deployment unfolded messily. In quick succession, the post endured two
scandals. A woman from Charlie Company had been having an affair with a lieutenant; unwisely, they had made a sex video, which showed her performing fellatio. The video passed from tent to tent via jump drives, and everyone watched the spectacle. Only days after word of the video spread across the post, an Alpha girl from Evansville accused a soldier from Bravo Company of rape. “[Name deleted] supposedly was raped by [name deleted] at a b-day party at one of the connexes,” wrote Debbie. “She woke up + he was on top of her.” The young woman was viewed as unreliable by her peers, however, whereas the man she accused was well liked. The rape charge ignited a stormy controversy, with most of the troops lining up behind the accused man. There was little support for the young woman's position, partly because she had been drunk. Desma Brooks told others that the male soldier who was involved in the incident had once made a pass at her, and had been pretty pushy, but after she firmly told him no, he respected her wishes. She speculated that maybe the young woman had been too drunk to say no.

While all of the female soldiers in the battalion were aware there was a risk of getting raped while living on the post, the soldiers did not yet fully appreciate the extent to which sexual assault had become epidemic across the two war theaters. Like the use of improvised explosive devices, “military sexual trauma” was on the rise—eventually as many as one-third of the women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan would report having been subjected to a sexual assault of some kind during their deployments. Statistically, in other words, it was unlikely that the 113th Support Battalion could have been in Afghanistan for a full year without a serious assault. However, Desma and Michelle both felt greater fear of the male soldiers outside of their mixed-gender battalion than those in it. They maintained they received much worse harassment from regular army soldiers, or from Guard soldiers who served in all-male units, compared with soldiers who were used to having a significant number of female colleagues. The soldier accused of rape was ultimately convicted of adultery, according to people who knew him in Bravo Company. The other soldiers treated the young woman who had lodged the accusation as a turncoat; the idea was that a loyal soldier would not do that to another member of the same battalion. Her commander assigned her to the third shift of local national watch for the rest of the deployment.
Nobody else who had been caught drinking had been made to work nights for such a long time. Michelle wondered, what exactly was the woman being punished for?

Even while the rest of the battalion was struggling to understand what had taken place between the Alpha girl and the man she had accused of rape, Debbie became preoccupied with the fact that Ellen Ann was about to give birth. Doctors had begun monitoring Ellen Ann closely, because her blood pressure had started to climb, indicating the possibility of preeclampsia. As the baby's arrival drew near, Debbie found her thoughts always turning to her daughter. “I may try tonight to reach her,” she wrote in her diary. “Hope everything is okay!” Four days later, Ellen Ann was still at only one and a half centimeters. Debbie wrote, “She is a week out so could happen any time.”