Soldier Girls (54 page)

“That's awesome,” said Desma. “Can we just get this done?”

“Are you irritated?” the doctor wanted to know.

“I'm extremely irritated,” said Desma. “I just want to go home.”

“Do you want to hurt yourself or anyone else?”

“I have no desire whatsoever to hurt myself, but there are a couple of people I could hold underwater until they quit kicking,” Desma said.

You should not carry a weapon, nor live in an austere environment, Desma was instructed. Soldiers who had their weapons taken away did not usually advance in their careers—they had been given a “profile,” in military lingo, and were labeled as damaged goods. Desma believed she would have said something similar at any point in her life if faced with someone as self-satisfied as the doctor, when a series of other people had already vexed her. But once you got a profile it was hard to undo. She had hit an IED, and then she had made a stupid remark to the wrong person; now she had become one of those scary veterans, a possible shooter. After the evaluation, Desma was given a 30 percent disability rating—10 percent for the continuing headache, 10 percent for her shoulder injury, and 10 percent for stress fractures in her legs. She was told she had a 0 rating for post-traumatic stress disorder. As a result of her partial disability rating, Desma was given an extra $315 per month as compensation.

Initially, having her weapon taken away did not affect Desma professionally, because she was still attached to the 139th. The guys she had served with in Iraq considered her someone they trusted, no matter
what her profile. Desma was promoted that same month, making her an E5. The specialists had to call her Sergeant Brooks. The main issue she ran into at her job was that she could not get her brain to work properly. Once she had been able to master any software or technical device, and she still had an aptitude for that kind of work, but when her boss gave her a list and explained what the items meant, five minutes later she could not recall what he had said. She would look at the piece of paper and not be able to decipher its meaning.

Shortly after Desma began working at Camp Atterbury, she started seeing a medical doctor at the VA named Douglas Mottley. He suspected that she had traumatic brain injury, although she had not been given that diagnosis and was not being compensated for that disability. He also believed that she had PTSD, according to his notes in her VA file, even though she was not being compensated for that, either. In an extensive evaluation that he conducted, Dr. Mottley noted that Desma had constant headaches, moderately slowed thinking, episodes of vertigo, severe sensitivity to noise, severe concentration issues, severe forgetfulness, severe difficulty making decisions, and very severe irritability. “Since restarting work, she has had difficulty remembering instructions that she has been told, difficulty with organization, difficulty remembering appointments, days of the week, forgetting where she places her keys,” noted Dr. Mottley. He concluded that these findings were consistent with a diagnosis of traumatic brain injury—the signature injury of the current wars. Pentagon officials estimated that more than three hundred thousand soldiers had come back from Afghanistan and Iraq with invisible head wounds due to the tremendous explosions that had been detonating in both theaters. The armor on their bodies and their vehicles had kept them alive, but the blasts had sometimes caused winds in excess of three hundred miles per hour, and many of the soldiers had been knocked around so badly that their brains had sheared inside their skulls.

Dr. Mottley recommended that Desma see speech pathologists for help with memory and organization and that she see doctors in neurology about her headaches. He also ordered an MRI. Over the next six months, Dr. Mottley and the neurologists prescribed various medications, but nothing blocked Desma's headache. “Will also put her on a
gradual Neurontin taper to see if it decreases the headache intensity,” wrote Dr. Mottley at the end of April. Desma took the medicine for three days and could not function. Finally, in September 2009, the doctors in neurology decided to try Topamax, an anticonvulsant more often used to treat epilepsy. After Desma started taking the Topamax, her headache became bearable; the medicine reduced the pain to an almost imperceptible level. When she failed to take the pills, however, the headache came roaring back. She took the Topamax daily.

After the doctors looked at the MRI, they determined that she did have TBI—they deemed it a mild case of the disorder, which did not mean the symptoms were easy to live with but only that they had seen worse—and Desma also began to receive compensation for that condition. “America's grateful to you for your service,” said the letter she received about her latest disability rating. “Please safeguard this important document.”

Over the same period of time, Desma saw several different speech pathologists who taught her coping strategies they had developed for veterans with cognitive problems. “She reported that her main concern was her difficulty remembering how to do her job, which required several steps to be able to complete,” wrote Kathleen Krueger in a summary of the consultation she did in April 2009. “Her supervisor has done things to assist her like writing down steps of tasks, but she reports he sometimes gets agitated.” Desma was having similar problems at home, too. “She reported, ‘My kids think I'm crazy because I can't remember what I told them,' ” wrote Krueger. “She reported that she failed to take them on some trips that she promised to because she forgot. She also loses cash.”

The speech pathologists taught Desma to use email and Post-it notes and calendar entries to remind herself of critical matters that she had once kept in her head. She could no longer form reliable short-term memories, so she had to provide herself with prompts. If she needed to remember something, she sent herself an email or stuck a note on the refrigerator. Desma created an elaborate color-coded system of sticky notes at work. Yellow was for everyday stuff, because that was the color of normal sticky notes; blue meant something she had to pay attention to personally; red indicated something she had to bring to the attention of someone else. For the most part the system worked, although
sometimes it caused Desma frustration, because she would look at a note she had written and she would not have any idea what it meant. It made her furious, being so disabled. “She has used many organization strategies that work but gets mad that she has to use them,” observed Susan McGarvey Toler, another speech pathologist who worked with Desma.

The speech pathology staff at the VA wanted to give Desma a BlackBerry or an iPhone or an iPad. They had all this free technology, but they were not offering to pay the monthly bills on the devices. Desma already had a phone, and it had a much cheaper service plan. She declined. McGarvey Toler wanted Desma to relax; she coached Desma to add daily reminders on her phone's calendar, telling herself to breathe. The only problem was that when Desma got home and looked at the phone's calendar, she saw that every single day that month had turned red. Usually she only entered one or two things per week, and the only days that lit up red were birthdays or days when she had an appointment at the VA. Desma could not stand looking at the all-red calendar and took out the breathing reminders.

The speech pathologists also suggested that Desma might want to take medicine for attention deficit disorder. She said she didn't think she needed another prescription. She already had a shoebox full of pills, and it contained so many bottles that she joked about lining them up “in formation.” The list of medicines that Desma had been prescribed included Topamax for her headache, as well as both Trazodone and Ambien for sleep, and the anti-inflammatory drugs Naproxen and Diclofenac for the pain in her shoulder. Then she had Metoclopramide for nausea, Zomig for migraines (which she took on days when the Topamax was not enough), a variety of muscle relaxers to reduce the tension in her body that contributed to the severity of her headaches, and Wellbutrin to combat anxiety.

One of the main things making her anxious was her love life. Over the previous six months, Desma's relationship with Charity had been slowly deteriorating. Charity was going to school to become a paramedic, and had returned to her job as an emergency medical technician. Maybe Charity wanted to return to other aspects of her former life, too. In the spring of 2009, Desma had found a letter that Charity was in the middle of writing to her ex-girlfriend, in which Charity said she wished
she could have the other woman back in her life. As a friend? A lover? The letter did not specify. Desma worried that maybe Charity had only agreed to live together so that Desma could help pay the bills. Charity did not offer much affection; she had grown distant. Desma moved into a separate bedroom to sort out her feelings. In one of her therapy sessions, Desma told Delia McGlocklin that she was still in love, but she believed that her partner no longer reciprocated her feelings.

At the beginning of June 2009, right before Desma's daughters were supposed to come live with them, Charity told Desma she was not happy and did not want to do this anymore. Desma tried to look for a new place to live but could not find a decent home in a good school district that she could afford. She called her therapist in a state of near hysteria. “Patient reported that she had a full panic attack,” Delia McGlocklin wrote in her notes. “Patient reported that last week her partner stated she wanted to end the relationship, and patient reports she is in pain with the loss. She also reported that her children are due to move in with her in the next two and a half weeks.” Desma felt overwhelmed at the idea of becoming a full-time mom again. “She reported at times she finds it easier not to have to worry about mom duties,” wrote McGlocklin.

Paige and Alexis were supposed to resume living with Desma at the beginning of July 2009, but did not actually move in until that August. Josh had stuck to his plan and was continuing to live with his surrogate father. Charity told Desma that she and the girls could stay at her place until Desma got on her feet. It was important to Desma that the children not have to change schools twice; she wanted to get the girls settled, and then look for a new place within the same school district.

It was after the children moved back in to live with Desma that things started to fray. When they had come for the weekend, they had been happy to see her, but now they said appalling things. The girls had been eight and ten when she left; now they were nine and eleven. Nine and eleven and sullen, obstinate, rude. “Why don't you just go back to Iraq?” Alexis said at one point. “That's where Dad says you prefer to be.” Desma blamed Dennis for the change in their behavior. “It's come around that he told the kids that I left because I would rather go overseas than be with my children,” she would say later. “There was a lot of disrespect
when I come home. They weren't made to pick up after themselves while I was gone. He didn't take care of them the way I did. He didn't discipline them the way I did. And when I come home, they hated me.” Once again, Dennis remembered things differently—he said that when Desma came home from Iraq, she argued with everyone constantly and was impossible to get along with.

Desma did not feel as though she deserved ungrateful children. Sometimes she forgot to show them love. Her kids told Desma she was the one who had changed—and the person who had come home from Iraq was not even the same person as the one who had come back from Afghanistan. “It's different every time you come home,” Alexis told her. Living with Charity became more fraught after the girls moved in, and although Desma looked, she could not find alternative housing. She told Delia McGlocklin that she was contemplating living out of her car.

Desma went into a tailspin. The therapist tried reminding Desma of her many attributes. Earlier, McGlocklin had written up an evaluation of her client's strengths and weaknesses. In the plus column she noted that Desma had “hope, resiliency, positive attitude, expressing desire for change, motivation for change, adequate housing, has a job, transportation.” On the negative side, however, McGlocklin observed that Desma had “limited social supports.” She had few family members to rely upon—only her cousin and her sister. Otherwise she was trying to rely on Charity, who did not want to be relied on anymore. The therapist reminded Desma that she had other friends: Mary, Stacy, Michelle, Debbie.

That fall, Desma began calling Michelle regularly. The phone calls were agonizing from Michelle's perspective—she was listening to Desma hang on to a deployment relationship long after the deployment had ended. Michelle answered the phone every time, however; she could not imagine having endured Camp Phoenix without the pink flamingos and the vibrators and Desma's colorful insouciance. Anytime Desma wanted to talk, that was fine with Michelle. Their friendship deepened.

On October 19, 2009, Desma went to the VA hospital for a follow-up appointment with Dr. Mottley. She told him, “Happy Bomb Day.”

He asked what she meant by the comment.

“She says that today is the one-year anniversary of the IED blast,” wrote Dr. Mottley in his notes. “So she feels a little more anxious than usual.”

At the same time, Desma reported with relief that ever since she had started taking Topamax, her headache had remained under control.

That November, Desma received another promotion and her annual pay increased by $10,000. Around the same time, Dennis also began paying Desma child support of $44 a week, after their arrangement changed and she took sole custody of their children. Because of the raise, the child support payments, and the additional money that came about as a result of her increased disability rating, Desma was able to afford to move out of Charity's house. She found a trailer half a mile away, which she rented for $550 per month. The girls would not have to change schools. Desma hoped to move in December 1, but her landlord had a hard time evicting the prior tenant, and she did not get the keys until Christmas.