Soldier Girls (57 page)

Michelle turned thirty years old in September 2012. After seven years together, she and Billy had recently ended their relationship. In the weeks that had followed, Michelle had turned fragile and weepy, and one night she drank too much and got a DUI. Now she was driving around Colorado with a Breathalyzer attached to her steering wheel. It seemed important to move on, however; Michelle was not getting any younger. That fall, she was out on a date with a man she had met recently when Akbar called her cell phone. She did not answer. He sent a text message. She did not write back. He sent another text demanding that she call. Then Desma sent a text saying Akbar was trying to reach her. Michelle wrote back: I'm having a sleepover tonight and he needs to back off. Desma replied: Got it!

When Michelle finally returned Akbar's calls, she learned that he had been trying to reach her because he had been shattered by witnessing a horrific attack. He had been at Bagram, standing with a group of colleagues, when an RPG had blown up several of the soldiers. Akbar had been covered in blood and gore. He could not eat, he could not sleep, he could not keep track of his keys or his phone. Doctors had prescribed psychotropic medication and he had to take the pills to calm down. Meat reminded him of what he had just seen, and he could put only fruit or vegetables into his mouth. He tried to quit his job at the prison, but Mission Essential Personnel said he had to finish out the remainder of his contract. Meanwhile, Akbar's wife had been diagnosed with cancer, and shortly after the RPG attack Akbar learned that she might need to seek treatment in Dubai. It would be very expensive. He decided to keep working at the prison.

That same fall, when Desma went to one of her regular drill weekends,
she was instructed to participate in another mandatory health screening. Desma stood in line for hours, got fed up, and blew off the screening. She walked into a building and down a flight of stairs, and there he was, Josh Stonebraker. She had not seen Stoney since they had gone through demobilization. Four years had elapsed.

“Papa!” Desma cried.

Stoney said warmly, “Hey, Hooker!”

He wrapped her in a bear hug. They created their own little island, let other soldiers wash around them. Stoney wanted to know how she was doing. Desma told him they would not let her carry a weapon anymore, her career had stuttered to a halt, and she was seeking a medical retirement.

“I'm sorry,” Stoney said.

“For what?” Desma asked.

“I'm sorry I led you to it,” he said. “I was the one directing you in. I'm sorry.”

“I was just trying to get a little closer,” Desma said. “I wasn't trying to hit it.”

“You didn't hit the box,” said Stoney. “The box went PFFFFFFT, turned into confetti. I watched it vanish. You never hit the box.”

“I know I didn't hit the box,” said Desma.

“I gave you shit for it afterward,” said Stoney, rueful.

“Because that's what we do, man,” said Desma.

She went home thinking about that little scrap of conversation. Hearing that Stoney shared some piece of her yawning sense of being at fault—it meant that she was not alone. The conversation did not erase her sense of accountability, but it made her realize that she was not carrying that weight because she was female, or not as good as Stoney, or inadequate in some other fashion—all those things she had accused herself of when she had searched for the why of it. Why had she hit a bomb? Why had her truck gone nose up in the air? Why had she not been able to yell, “Missed me, motherfucker!”? She kept telling herself it was her fault. But if Stoney carried the same burden, then maybe they had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the two years since Desma and her daughters had moved to Hagerstown, the problems Desma had been having with Paige had escalated.
One day, Paige had called 911 while Desma was out shopping. Paige said afterward that she had called the ambulance because her mouth had gone dry and her heart had started racing and she had felt dizzy. Desma had little sympathy, however, because she got a bill for $3,000. Why hadn't her daughter just picked up the phone and called her? Paige maintained that after she left school she went straight to the Boys' and Girls' Club and stayed there all afternoon, but the staff told Desma that her daughter vanished for long stretches. Paige also created an alter ego for herself on Facebook, a supposed friend named “Haiydan.” On more than one occasion, “Haiydan” wrote emails to Desma asking if Paige could spend the weekend down in Spurgeon. Alexis stayed on the honor roll, but Paige was put on academic probation. Her seventh-grade report cards were littered with Ds and her eighth-grade report cards were not much better. Paige swung around like a weather vane that did not know which way to point; half of her still longed for the comfort of childish things, while the other half of her spun toward grown-up declarations of pain. At one point, she taped a sign to her bedroom door. It was a list of things she wanted to get:

1. Gauged ears

2. Lip piercing

3. Good grades

4. Abs!

5. Orbies!

6. Ceiling stars

7. Neon colored eyeliner

When Desma determined that Paige had been lying about remaining at the Boys' and Girls' Club, she took away her daughter's electronic devices. In response, Paige said that she found living with Desma to be intolerable, and demanded to live with her father. With a mixture of sadness and relief, Desma let her go—although a few months later, Paige asked to return to Hagerstown. Desma welcomed her back, but the trouble continued. They tried counseling, to no avail. “Those little people have been really hard to live with these past six months,” Desma told Michelle in one of their phone calls.

In the end, though, it was Josh who broke her heart. He had graduated from high school at age eighteen in the spring of 2011. The following summer he had gotten arrested for possession of alcohol as a minor and spent one night in jail. That fall, Josh had asked if he could move in with Desma and Roy, saying he needed a new start. Desma had fixed up a bedroom for him and bought him a black 1998 Neon and gotten him a job working part-time at UPS. Josh had failed to show up regularly, however, and after a while he had been fired. Then Josh had moved back in with his surrogate father and started working at a plastics factory, but he lost that job after fighting with a colleague. Afterward he was arrested for possession of marijuana. He moved back in with Desma and Roy again. Desma never expected her son to be lazy, but Josh seemed to have a sense of entitlement, an idea that good things should simply come his way. He spoke of enrolling in community college but never filled out the forms. He spoke of finding another job but never did that, either. At night he had insomnia and during the day he seemed only half awake.

One day Roy came home to find his stereo missing and his tools gone. There was no sign of forced entry, and he suspected it was Josh. Desma did not want to believe that her son would steal from Roy, but she feared that maybe he had. Those tools meant the world to Roy and he was so angry that he asked Desma to give him back the key to his house. In the evening, she had to wait in the driveway until he got home before she could enter. Josh went to live with his surrogate father again, and Desma told him to straighten out or else he was going to wind up in jail. But Josh had acquired the wrong kind of friends and the wrong kind of habits. In February 2013, Josh was arrested for breaking and entering a home in Richmond, Indiana. The police said Josh had beaten up an elderly man and stolen prescription medication, cash, and credit cards. According to court documents, Josh faced charges of burglary, burglary resulting in bodily injury, armed robbery, battery, battery resulting in bodily injury, theft, and resisting law enforcement. He was put in jail to await trial. Desma went to see him but it was awful: they had to talk on a phone, separated by glass, and she was asked to leave after only fifteen minutes. His lawyer told Desma to expect the worst, and so she was not entirely surprised when Josh was sentenced to twenty years. Maybe he could get out in eight, for good behavior, the lawyer said.

Desma asked herself: Would this have happened anyway? Would Josh have turned to crime if she had stayed home? Or was he in jail because she had gone to Afghanistan and Iraq? Should she have skipped one of the deployments? Both? Then in the late spring of 2013, Desma learned that Paige had failed eighth grade. “Over the last five years since I have been home, I have tried very hard to show my kids how much they mean to me,” Desma wrote shortly afterward in an email. “I just can't seem to help Paige with whatever she is going through.” Repeating eighth grade would put Paige two years behind her peers, in the same classes as her younger sister, Alexis. Desma did not think she could handle Paige anymore. She considered sending Paige to a therapy-driven boarding school, but ultimately decided to allow Paige to live with her cousin Lesley instead. Desma recognized that she was prone to fly off the handle and that she and Paige had developed a conflict-ridden dynamic; she hoped that her cousin could do a better job parenting her daughter than she could herself. “I really wish raising kids was easier,” Desma wrote wearily. Again, she asked herself: Would this have occurred if she had stayed home? Was Paige in trouble because of the two deployments?

At the point when Desma learned that Paige would not move on to high school with her peers, it had been almost five years since Desma had hit the IED. She had recently started seeing a new therapist, a psychologist named Dr. Heidi Knock. The psychologist did not believe it was important for Desma to recount painful memories of her own middle school years, and what had happened right before she was placed into foster care. She focused instead on modifying Desma's present-day behavior in small, concrete ways. Dr. Knock asked Desma to go to a movie and sit in the middle of the theater. “I wouldn't sit in the middle of the room before the Batman shooting, there's no way I want to sit there now,” Desma objected. “There's no way to get out, in case of a fire, if you do that.” Dr. Knock pointed out that this was an example of hypervigilance. Desma argued this was common sense. Dr. Knock gave her a different assignment. She told Desma to go to a restaurant and sit with her back to the door. Desma went to an IHOP and tried to do as instructed, but the sound of unseen people coming up behind her made her half crazed. Dr. Knock asked her to keep practicing until she could sit through the experience without discomfort. She also asked Desma
not to switch lanes so often on the highway, and to adjust her speed to the flow of traffic. If she felt impatient, she was supposed to breathe deeply and try to relax.

In the summer of 2013, after they had been working together for several months, Dr. Knock asked Desma to make a series of voice recordings in which Desma would describe the explosion in detail. She was then supposed to listen to the recordings daily, and discuss them with the therapist every week. Rather than avoid her frightening memories, the psychologist wanted Desma to wring them dry of emotion. The bomb blast was accidentally stuck in the present moment, the therapist observed; every time Desma thought about it, it was as though the incident were happening all over again. Dr. Knock wanted to help her get it safely into the photo album of history, where it would carry less valence.

In the first recording, Desma recounted everything she could recall about that day. She was inside the truck, and had just taken off her helmet. She could see Jeff Stacey standing on the hood of the vehicle, yelling to get the fuck out. But she could not reach her angel wings.

“And what's going on with you, Desma?” asked Dr. Knock.

“I can't hardly move,” Desma said.

“So you feel stuck in there?”

“Yeah, I'm stuck,” Desma said, and laughed her belly laugh.

“Why do you laugh?”

“Because it's funny.”

Desma listed the reasons she could not get out of the truck.

“And what's going on with you emotionally?”

“Nothing. Just do what you gotta do. Get out of the truck.”

Desma described how Charity undid her constraints. She described climbing up out of the truck's hatch, watching Charity pull security, and seeing the huge tour bus come barreling toward them.

“What's it like, standing outside your vehicle after just getting hit, with all these people passing by you?” asked Dr. Knock.

“It's another day in Iraq,” Desma said.

The therapist told her to continue. Desma described walking over to the bomb-battered armored security vehicle she had been driving and inspecting the destruction.

“What's it like to see the vehicle so damaged, and know you were in it?”

“Awe-inspiring. Holy shit, check this shit out!” Desma said. “It works, the V bottom. It deflected the blast.”

She described the deep grooves in the side of the metal-plated truck. Without the extra armor, she said, they might have all been killed.

“What's that like, when you realize that?” asked Dr. Knock.

“Makes me hate people,” Desma said. “Who sets bombs by the side of the road to get a random person?”

And that was the only emotion that Desma could name, at any point in the fifty minutes they spent discussing the incident: anger.

“You have a hard time identifying your emotions,” Dr. Knock pointed out. “You're so numb, Desma. But your face is red, and your breathing is elevated.”

Desma said once she saw a picture of a marine giving the finger to a map of Iraq. She said that was exactly how she felt. Fuck them all.

“Anger is part of it,” the psychologist acknowledged. “I'm not asking you not to be angry. But what drives your anger? How about the fear of knowing that you almost died?”

Desma said the idea that she might have died that day had not occurred to her until later.

The therapist reminded Desma to listen to the recording every day. After a few weeks, they made a second recording. This time Desma's voice grew fragile. At a certain point she stopped, saying she could go no farther, and began crying silently, with her knees up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, curled into a ball. She still could not name her emotions, but the therapist had brought her to a far more vulnerable place. Desma said she felt nauseated. She objected that what they were doing was bringing back her former difficulties—once again she found herself tailgating, speeding, and overreacting to trash. The psychologist assured her this was normal. Her symptoms would spike temporarily, but if they continued with the work, they might be able to liberate her from the incident forever. They pressed on. Dr. Knock asked Desma over and over again to say what she might have done differently, if she could rewind time and live that day over again, knowing only what she knew at the time. Desma said maybe she could have driven
past the box. When Knock asked what would have happened in that case, Desma conceded that most likely other people would have gotten killed—someone else would have triggered the blast, and they might not have been protected by an uparmored ASV. And hadn't Desma been ordered to get closer? Yes, Desma acknowledged. She had been told to get closer.