Soldier Girls (58 page)

“Who's really to blame?” the psychologist asked.

“The bastard who put it there,” Desma said.

But her voice lacked conviction. She wanted to assign the blame to the bomber, but in her heart she still blamed herself. She had torn up an $800,000 truck, she had almost gotten everyone inside of it killed. That was where the bomb had thrown her, and where she still remained.

At the same time, the therapy had some mysterious effect. Alexis and Paige both started eighth grade in the fall of 2013—Alexis living in Hagerstown, and Paige back in Petersburg. Meanwhile, Desma let her hair grow long and put on a few extra pounds. One day in the kitchen, she announced in front of Roy that being in a relationship had made her fat, and he rolled his eyes, as if to say, And this is
my
fault? Desma encouraged Alexis to join the band even though it cost a lot of money and then she went to every one of Alexis's performances. To make a few extra bucks, Desma started selling sex toys at house parties and at bars.
ASK ME ABOUT A QUICKIE!
said the button she put on before she set out her wares.

In October 2013, Republican legislators shut down the federal government, trying to defund Obamacare, putting Desma out of work. Desma borrowed Roy's chain saw and started cutting up dead trees on the property to keep herself busy. She amassed a pile of logs as tall as her chin; she called it “chain saw therapy.” One day that month, when the sun was shining and the leaves had turned burnt orange and the air was crisp enough to make her face glow, she was out there with the saw buzzing, cutting a huge tree limb into pieces, chips of wood flying everywhere, when her cell phone vibrated. She took it out and saw she had a text message from Charity. “Happy Bomb Day,” Charity wrote. The date was October 19, 2013—it was the five-year anniversary of the silver box. She stood there, startled, holding the chain saw in her hand,
with the smell of freshly cut wood in the air, looking at the words on her phone. Every other year, she had counted down the days anxiously, getting more tense as the date had approached. How weird, how wonderful to have forgotten to notice!

When Desma thought about that explosion, what it had done to her personally, and what the two yearlong deployments had done to Josh and to Paige and Alexis, she realized they would all be counting, possibly for the rest of their lives, what the last decade had cost. What it had cost the people who had gone away and the people they had left behind. Sometimes, when Debbie and Desma and Michelle got together, they tried to reckon the final tab. Economists were saying that the wars were going to cost upward of $3 trillion, when all was said and done, and more than six thousand service members had been killed during the two conflicts. Returning soldiers were also reporting record rates of alcoholism and depression, especially those who had endured multiple deployments. And soldiers who had served in the two wars had been committing suicide at the rate of roughly one per day.

Or sometimes they hurt other people. Michelle could hardly believe it when she heard that Aaron Schaffer had shot and killed a man during an argument. Schaff had a bunch of children, one of them was just a baby. She had such fond memories of him. He was the soldier to whom she had once passed along a bottle of Southern Comfort, after Pete had mailed it to her for Valentine's Day, back when they were in Afghanistan. When he confessed to the homicide, Schaffer told police that he had shot the man in the way he had been trained by the military; after the man had threatened to shoot him (although he would turn out to have been unarmed), Schaffer had simply emptied his gun, firing until he had no bullets left. That's what you were supposed to do, he said, to make sure you didn't get killed. He also told police that he had shot an unarmed civilian while he was deployed—most likely in Iraq, Michelle figured. Schaffer said he had thought the civilian was reaching for a weapon, only to learn afterward that the man had been reaching for a piece of paper on which someone had written the words “Thank you.” Had that been chewing him up? Was that what had made him unravel? She wondered if he would spend the rest of his life in jail.
And she had liked him so much, back when he had joined the armament team every once in a while to work alongside her and Debbie, fixing those broken AK-47s. She could have sworn he was one of the good guys.

What had been accomplished? What had been lost, and what had they gained? They asked themselves these things, Debbie racked with guilt because she had not hit a bomb, Desma because she had, and Michelle because she had had it easier than both of her friends. Even Debbie sometimes questioned what purpose the two wars had achieved, although she deliberately turned her thoughts to positive accomplishments. One night, while hanging out with Michelle, Debbie pointed out that when they had first arrived in Afghanistan, the hillsides around them had been dark, but by the time they were packing up to go, they had been able to see lights go on in the evening, little pinpricks of electricity, spread out like the stars above. That was something tangible, that was a real improvement. And Desma still wanted to believe that they had changed the situation of women in Afghanistan for the better.

Michelle, who felt quite certain that the entire decade had been one long, terrible mistake, simultaneously thought with gratitude of all she had learned and what abiding friends she had made. If given the choice, she would not take back the year she had spent in Afghanistan. When she filled out her applications for graduate school, she wrote that she wanted to become an occupational therapist because of the moment in an Afghan village when she had held a nine-month-old child in her arms as medics had treated the child's mother. That was when she had first glimpsed what she now understood to be her life's calling: to help fix what was broken in the world, to alleviate suffering. As long as she could be guaranteed the exact same deployment—one in which she never fired her weapon, never took a bullet, got to see Akbar Khan fly that kite, and got to comfort that child—she would do it all over again. Life would unfold this way sometimes, she came to understand, a curse and a blessing, both at once. It had been wrong, the war in which she had served, of that she had no doubt, but it had been a thing of immense proportions and she had been part of it and it had been hugely consequential to her personally. As wrong as they were, those days of sand and sun and bleached friendships and whistling rockets, they were sacred to her.

Even Desma could not bring herself to say that she wished she had never gone to Iraq. Because it had gotten under her skin, once she had been sent to a war zone, the desire to prove her worth in that arena. The desire to match someone like Stoney, to be just as capable, just as nonchalant. What Desma said, when she looked backward, was that she just wished she had gotten the same training as everybody else. She wished she had gotten to run lanes, she wished she had been taught to identify roadside bombs. When Michelle considered the tally of what Desma had paid, however, and added onto that what the two deployments had cost Desma's children, the total seemed simply too high. Earlier that year Obama's secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, had announced that the military was going to lift its ban on women serving in combat positions. The three women had divided in their response to the news. Debbie felt a pang of regret, for she had missed her chance—secretly, she had always wanted to be a sniper. Michelle opposed the change. “Women have more important things to do,” she said. “They're mothers. Society should prioritize mothers over soldiers.” Desma shrugged at the announcement. “Women are already in combat,” she said. As far as she was concerned this was making official something that was already a reality. Maybe now, she thought, they'll train women right.

Yet they only made such reckonings every once in a while. Mostly, when they got together or they talked on the phone, they spoke of their hopes for the future. Michelle wanted a healthy relationship. In the years since Afghanistan, she had put on some weight, and after she and Billy split up, she started exercising more, then went on date after date, slogging through a series of prospects she found online. One day she told Debbie and Desma about a labor organizer who was smart and funny and believed all the same things she did. He owned a copy of
The Activist's Handbook
, too. He might be the one, she said. Debbie let her thick, dark hair grow long, which made her look younger, even as white strands started appearing in the midst of her brown curls. Her father's health began to fail, and she helped him move into a nursing home. Then Debbie started volunteering at the VFW as a bartender. She worked a double shift once a week, drinking alongside the World War II vets and the Vietnam vets, making their dark evenings brighter with her constant affirmation. Desma visited Josh in jail regularly and welcomed
Paige back home again after Lesley said Paige was more than she could handle.

In the ten years that they had known one another, they had survived two wars, two deployments, two homecomings, a dozen men, one lesbian affair, a lot of heartache, and many questions about the well-being of the three children who had gotten caught up in the evolving question of what role women should play in war. Ten years of comings and goings, ten years of upheaval and disruption and having to start over. And through it all ran the constant guideline of their friendships, their attempts to love one another enough, the way life kept taking each of them apart and the way they kept turning toward one another to make themselves whole again. What Debbie would say, when she tried to describe what they had experienced, was that after so many years, she and Michelle and Desma had become so interlaced, they were even more like a family than their “real” families. What they shared was not war, exactly, it was their cumulative responses to the events of the past decade—the opposite of war, in a sense. That was what they had in common, what they shared, and what they valued. The ways in which they had stood through it all together.

I
AM TREMENDOUSLY
grateful to the MacDowell Colony for the chance to have several glorious, rainy weeks of uninterrupted work time in June 2013, when I was struggling to finish this book. I loved writing the end of this story in Kirby studio, to the sound of rain on the roof, with my manuscript spread out across the top of a grand piano, and everything I had left to do mapped out on a memory board. I did about three months' worth of work in three weeks' time and it was an extraordinary experience.

The three women featured in this book patiently sat through multiple years of lengthy interviews, showed me around Indiana, answered endless follow-up questions, and turned over personal correspondence, email, diaries, photographs, military records, medical records, and therapists' notes. Their primary motivation has always been to help other people understand what veterans live through, and to help other veterans know they are not alone in their struggle to put their lives back together after a deployment. A story like this can only be told when people are so brave and honest.

All gratitude to my agent, Denise Shannon, for believing in this idea at the outset. Thanks also to Denise for introducing me to Colin Harrison, the editor at Scribner with whom I have been so lucky to work with for the past ten years. Colin, thank you for encouraging me to pursue this idea, for talking to me about my progress every single month, for reading every chapter as the words were being written, and for telling me to keep going even though the early pages you saw were a mess.
From start to finish, I felt I had a friend and guide who believed in this book even more than I did.

At the beginning of this project, I was inspired to talk with veterans about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan after hearing a speech given by Steve Price, a social worker with the Veterans Administration in Fort Collins, Colorado. Joe Rice, a former state legislator and an Iraq War veteran, spent many lunch hours discussing this subject with me, as did Pam Staves from the Veterans Administration. Linda Lidov introduced me to one of the three women who became the subjects of this book. Veterans Jordan Schupbach, Izzy Abbass, Eryth Zecher, Krystal Florquist, Jaclyn Scott, Jason Crow, and Garett Reppenhagen all took time out of their busy lives to help me understand this subject better. Later I had the great joy of getting to know the wonderful Ed Wood, a fellow writer and a veteran of World War II, who read this manuscript in draft form and provided terrific feedback. Nate Matlock at Regis University's Center for the Study of War Experience generously advised me, read an early draft, and provided interns who helped with research. Interns Michael DeGregori, Stephanie Farnsworth-Edwards, Patrick Ross, and Steven Ferrel from Regis transcribed interviews, researched the history of the National Guard, summarized the history of women in the military, and compiled a timeline of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am deeply grateful to all of these individuals for their time, generosity, and patience.

While trying to comprehend the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I found the following books invaluable:
The Forever War,
by Dexter Filkins;
Yellow Birds,
by Kevin Powers;
Love My Rifle More than You,
by Kayla Williams;
Redeployment,
by Phil Klay;
You Know When the Men Are Gone,
by Siobhan Fallon;
In the Graveyard of Empires,
by Seth G. Jones;
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,
by Thomas E. Ricks;
Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq,
by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor;
The Gun,
by C. J. Chivers; and
The Good Soldiers
and
Thank You for Your Service,
both by David Finkel. Many thanks also to David Finkel for his words of encouragement and his generous advice.

John Hickenlooper and I separated during the writing of this book but helped each other through that transition in all kinds of ways. John,
thank you for believing in this project, for supporting me while I wrote this book, and for the way we have remained a family. Teddy Hickenlooper: Remember when our plane got stuck in New York and the iPad broke and we ran out of books to read and I told you this entire story from start to finish? You said, Mom, it's cool the way the stories you write are about really hard things but they still have happy endings. You are the greatest joy of my life, a wonderful travel companion, and a keen observer.