Soldier Girls (49 page)

“You're looking pissy,” said the first sergeant.

“The chow hall doesn't open for an hour, and I need coffee,” snapped Desma.

“I have an extra cup in my office,” he said. “Let's go have a talk.”

The first sergeant had an office they called the Crow's Nest because it sat on top of the building. He liked to invite soldiers to join him for coffee so that he could find out what was going on. Desma felt at liberty to be frank, and her supervisor was grateful to get some straight answers.

A couple of days later, when Desma returned to the motor pool, the first sergeant said, “Would you like to have coffee in the morning?”

“Sure, I'll be there,” Desma said.

Mike Quigley belonged to another platoon in the same company. “Wow, openly fucking the first sergeant,” he volunteered.

Desma swung the Kevlar helmet she was holding as hard as she could and hit Mike Quigley on the side of his face. The helmet thwacked against his skull and Quigley went down. Desma stood over him and asked, “Should I do it again? Do you want to keep running your mouth?”

“You!” the first sergeant bellowed, pointing at Desma. “Anger management! Now!”

Anger is an emotion, said the therapist who worked in anger management. People can't make you angry. Situations don't make you angry. Your inability to control your emotions makes you angry.

“If Mike Quigley wasn't an asshole, I wouldn't have hit him in the face with my Kevlar,” Desma said.

The therapist told her to watch a PowerPoint presentation about controlling her emotions. Afterward Desma was waiting at a bus stop to catch a ride back to her CHU when an active duty kid told her he wanted to lick her all over like a lollipop. She told him to shut up. Then he said he would like to drag her behind some Dumpsters and got a little graphic. “I just left anger management because I smashed a guy in the face with my Kevlar for doing this very same thing—being an ass,” Desma told the
kid. She wanted to hit him, too, but instead she restrained herself and responded by reporting the verbal harassment. Then she wound up in the equal opportunity office with her first sergeant and his first sergeant and a lot of people asking if she wanted to file a formal complaint. Desma said she did not want to file a complaint, she just wanted someone to teach the kid how not to be a complete turd. The kid's first sergeant made him write Desma a two-page letter of apology including how he should treat women in the future.

A week later, Desma loaned her truck to another member of her platoon. That soldier tore up the tires driving on a bad road, and her truck wound up in the shop. As a result, Desma had to borrow a different truck that belonged to somebody else. Drivers were responsible for their own vehicles, and his was full of trash. Desma told the other soldier to get his Honey Bun wrappers and Rip It energy drink cans out of the truck. He refused and started to walk away. “Worthless motherfucker!” Desma said, and hurled her Kevlar helmet at the guy. Back to anger management again; different therapist, same PowerPoint.

“Would you like to come back again next week?” the therapist offered.

“I got a job to do, I'm not here to go to anger management,” Desma said.

The following day, while Desma was out on a mission in the borrowed truck, a discarded lithium ion battery that had been pulled off a radio started rolling around on the floor. Desma could hear something thunking around but didn't know what it was. When she went around a ninety-degree curve, the battery got caught in her steering linkage and locked her steering wheel in the turn position. Desma found herself about to roll the truck into a ditch. She couldn't get the wheel straight, couldn't get the wheel straight, couldn't get the wheel straight, and finally yanked the wheel as hard as she could and the battery popped in half. She found it down there, still intertwined in the linkage, after the mission was over. If the soldier who had left that in his truck had been standing in front of her she would have done more than just throw her Kevlar at him.

About one week later, Desma and Charity had left the coffee shop at Q-West and were walking over to pick up their laundry when they heard
one single shot. It sounded close; the range was more than a mile away. It was a guy from another unit alone in his hooch. His girlfriend had taken his kid and his money, and had begun sleeping with somebody else—too many deployments, too much time apart. Two other soldiers found him and tried to stop the bleeding but his chest was a wide-open cavity and his heart was in smithereens.

Desma realized that her daughters had moved in with their father when she started having to call the girls at Dennis's house. They just migrated there, as best she could figure out. She knew right then she was going to have trouble when she got home, because Dennis did not know how to discipline the children properly, in her opinion. They just ran wild, according to Desma. (Dennis said he thought Desma was too harsh with the girls.) Her ex-husband was doing his best, however, and she heard from him regularly. Knowing that she missed her children terribly, Dennis emailed Desma a photograph of Paige looking a lot like her mother, hugging a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl Desma had never seen. Dennis wrote:

THIS IS PAIGE'S FRIEND CHRISTIAN, THEY HANG OUT A LOT TOGETHER.

BE CAREFUL AND TAKE CARE, GIRLS SAID HI AND THEY LOVE YOU, THEY COULD NOT THINK OF ANYTHING TO WRITE.

Alexis turned nine years old that September. Desma sent Dennis $100 and asked him to take the girls to see
High School Musical 3
. Dennis emailed short updates about the girls' lives, and allowed the girls to keep in touch with their mother using his email account. On September 12, 2008, they wrote: “hey it's paige if you have internet get on
poptropica.com
and you can use my password. . . . I love you very much!” “Hi, it's Burgerbutt. I only had 1 F in grammar but that's because I didn't study. Are spelling words are e-a-s-y. LOVE, ALEXIS.” Dennis wrote again to clarify that actually Alexis was earning good grades; her report card had been all As and Bs, and the F she had mentioned was for one paper, not her overall grade. Paige was not doing quite as well. Dennis wrote:

Paige has 3 d's 3c's and 2 b's and 1 F. . . . The papers she brings home all have 95%–100% on them so I don't know why her midterms are the way they are.

By the end of September, the girls were counting down the days until Christmas, because that was when their mother was supposed to be home. Alexis and Paige sent Desma their Christmas lists on September 27, 2008.

Hi, mommy! I have got As and bs on my medterm's, but two people in my class has a F in behavior and their names are Aniyah and Alex. Do you want are chrismas list if you do heare it is.

1. Hanna Monntana best of both worlds

2. you

3. the movie High School Musical 3 movies

4. you

5. to go back to Rockport

6. you

Love,

bugerbutt/lexi

hey its me i have my list

1 that seventys show season 1

2 dell cool bean

ok luv ya

   paige

Desma was already thinking about Christmas, too. In the small green notebook that she carried on her missions—it was filled with notes about the briefings from their convoy commander—Desma had jotted down thoughts about the gifts she wanted to order for her children. She was planning to buy Alexis pajamas, a video game, and a Build-A-Bear. She was planning to buy Paige pajamas, an MP3 player, and a Build-A-Bear. And for Josh, five T-shirts and a video camera.

On October 19, 2008, Desma and Charity left Q-West on another mission to Tikrit. It was daytime and they were running ass, right after Stoney and his crew. Brandon Hall was their gunner that day, which was a relief; Desma was glad to have gotten rid of Peaches. They joked around with BB the whole way. It was as good a day as they got in Iraq, Desma thought. When they reached the Baiji bypass, at about 10:00 a.m., they saw oil everywhere, however, black liquid sinking into the white sand. The pipeline had been sabotaged again, it seemed. They still had radio communication with the rest of the convoy, but they could no longer see the trucks behind them. Stoney saw a box by the side of the four-lane highway. Part of the box was covered in bright silver tape, the same kind that they used on their own post—it glinted in the searing sun. Some asshole dropped a box, thought Desma. Another convoy in front of them had reported sighting the box but had decided not to check it out. She had heard someone else say, “Leave it, it's nothing.” Stoney wanted to make sure. “Hold up,” he said. “We need to look at this box.”

His truck slowed down and Stoney leaned way out of the turret.

“Mama, I can't see in that box,” Stoney said over the radio. “Can you get closer?”

“I got this,” Charity told him.

Desma slowed to a crawl and turned the wheel of the ASV so that the right front tire lipped the shoulder. The box was maybe four feet away, but BB still could not see inside. Charity told her they needed to get a better angle. Desma inched forward. Then the truck thrust heavenward and Desma saw blue sky for a moment and abruptly everything went black. She could hear an awful high-pitched squeal. Ages passed. It dawned on Desma that the noise was the sound of a radio that had been disconnected. When she reached up to turn off her headphones, she found that somebody had shoved her helmet down over her eyes, which was why she could not see. She took her helmet off. The vehicle was filled with smoke.

“Are you okay?” Charity was saying.

Charity was lying on the floor of the vehicle, over on the passenger side.

“What the fuck just happened?” Desma said.

“Are you okay?” Charity repeated.

Desma looked out of the front windows and saw Angry Beaver standing on the hood of her truck. He looked more furious than she had ever seen him.

“Get out of the truck!” he was screaming. “Get out of the fucking truck!”

“Okay, okay. Hold on a minute,” Desma said. “I can't get my seat belt off.”

Desma was stuck between the steering wheel and her seat, which she had elevated so that she could see out of the windows. Somehow her angel wings had gotten caught in her seat belt—and she could not reach the lever to lower her seat back down. Charity undid Desma's seat belt. They were both covered in hydraulic fluid. BB was sprawled out in the back of the truck, trying to sit up. Charity told BB to stay put, they would get him out in a second. Then she climbed out of the hatch. Desma followed, but the drop was not right. She hit the ground too soon, which was how she realized that the truck was damaged. The last thing Desma had seen before everything went black was Stoney, peering out of the top of the lead scout truck, watching her get close. Was he dead? No, there he was, picking pieces of her tire assembly out of his gun turret. They opened the back hatch and got BB out. He started wandering around with his flight suit halfway off, no bulletproof vest, no helmet. “You got to put your vest on,” Desma told him. “You can't walk around like that.” BB had a big welt on his forehead. He had taken his helmet off because his scalp had been itching and he had thought maybe he could see better without the helmet. Then they had gone up in the sky and he had bounced his head off the .50-caliber. He seemed dazed and not himself.

The medic put his hands all over Desma's body, way up under her vest, while staring into her eyes at the same time. Was it sexual? She wanted him to stop touching her. “I'm fine,” Desma told the medic. “Make sure BB's okay.” He ignored her. He said he had to give her a MACE test—it stood for Military Acute Concussion Evaluation. “Elbow, apple, carpet, saddle, bubble,” said the medic. “Repeat those words back to me.” Desma could not get past apple. They tried again. She could not get past carpet. Charity was directing traffic into the other lane, but the drivers must have feared getting shot, because instead they started heading off into
the desert. Then a big tour bus came along. Desma could see women and children looking out of the windows. The driver looked fearful; Charity had her finger on the trigger of her M-4. Just then another military truck from their convoy pulled up between Charity and the bus. Desma looked up at the gunner, a guy named Talbot. “Get that bus out of here before she hurts somebody,” Desma told him. “Rog-er,” drawled Talbot.

Desma walked over to look at her truck. It listed by the side of the road, one wheel missing entirely, the rest of the tires blown flat. Hatches and headlights lay strewn across the highway. Mechanics had recently added an extra layer of metal to the truck's armor, and that outer hull was scoured by deep grooves. Desma put her thumb into one of them. It fit inside the groove all the way up to the meaty part of the joint. What had made that mark—ball bearings? Big ones. Without the extra layer of armor, who knows what would have happened. She walked around, found fragments of wires, a cell phone battery, and pieces of a tap light that had scorch marks. A homemade pressure plate.

The translator who had been riding in Stoney's truck was freaking out.

“I just got hit by a bomb!” he told Desma. “They tried to kill me!”

“Tag, you're it,” Desma said in a weary voice. “Do you need a water?”

Then the wrecker showed up.

“We're going to change the back tires and drag it,” the driver told Desma. “I need you to climb in there and turn off all the electronics.”

“You want me to go back in there?” Desma said.

“Yep. Turn that shit off.”

Inside the truck, everything was a little bit wrong. It smelled like dirt and hydraulic fluid and she could hear the radio still squealing. Weirdly, Desma could not recall the proper steps to power down the Blue Force Tracking device. She used to teach other people how to use the complicated military GPS system, but all that information had been erased from her mind. She just turned it off without following the prescribed procedure. When she reached up to turn off the radio, something popped when she lifted her arm, and a jolt of pain shot through her shoulder. She climbed out of that vehicle and got into the lead scout truck with Stoney and his crew. The medic came over.