Soldier Girls

Epigraph

Author's Note

I. Indiana, 2001–2003

1. Hooah!

2. Don't Worry About Being a Female

3. Drill

4. Three Months of Hell

5. High Altitude

6. The Tiki Lounge

II. Afghanistan, 2004–2005

1. Off Safety

2. Codependent

3. Rain

4. Translation

5. Easter

6. Sea World

III. Indiana, 2005–2007

1. Welcome Home, Dad

2. Out of Uniform

3. Answered Prayers

IV. Iraq, 2008

1. Look, Fuckers

2. Hooker

3. Anger Management

V. Colorado and Indiana, 2009–2013

1. Huge Billy Clubs

2. Happy Bomb Day

3. Numb

Acknowledgments

About Helen Thorpe

for John
with thanks

The Army National Guard, which has fallen short of recruiting goals during the prolonged fighting in Iraq, is trying new marketing beyond the traditional enticement of college tuition aid. New ploys include free hunting and fishing licenses, passes to state parks, more chances to get signing bonuses, and pink T-shirts bearing the words “Soldier Girl.”

—from a compilation of news headlines published in the
Wrench Daily News
, a newsletter serving the 113th Support Battalion, 76th Infantry Brigade

T
HIS BOOK
is a work of nonfiction. To report it, I spent four years interviewing the three main characters, as well as many other individuals. I supplemented those interviews with information from emails, letters, diaries, Facebook posts, Facebook messages, notebooks that the soldiers kept with notes about their missions, yearbooks that the soldiers brought home from their deployments, photographs, newspaper articles, court documents, medical records, therapists' notes, and a newsletter distributed to soldiers who belonged to the Indiana Army National Guard's Bravo Company, 113th Support Battalion, 76th Infantry Brigade.

Two of the main characters wished to use their real names in this book, and one did not. I refer to her by a pseudonym throughout the work, and also changed the names of her family members and friends. Other soldiers and family members whom I was fortunate enough to have a chance to speak with were offered the choice of whether to use real names or pseudonyms. When I did not have the chance to interview a particular soldier, I generally chose to use a pseudonym. The translator the soldiers worked with in Afghanistan, who presently works at a prison where many members of the Taliban are incarcerated, was afraid that using his real name would bring danger, and I have used a pseudonym for him as well.

Much of the dialogue is reconstructed, which is to say that it is accurate as far as the people who said those words or heard those words could recall when they spoke to me. Otherwise, all details are factual to the best of my knowledge.

M
ICHELLE FISCHER HAD
not yet reached twenty but she already knew how to find the National Guard Armory, a low-slung, modern-looking building made of red bricks with a green metal roof. It commanded a prominent seat beside the Lloyd Expressway, the main east–west thoroughfare that split the heart of Evansville, Indiana. People used the building as a landmark when they gave directions—other places along the Lloyd Expressway could be described as east of the armory or west of the armory. The recruiters who worked there had established many ways of meeting young people, and Michelle had swayed to pop music inside the vast blue gymnasium there at both her junior and her senior prom. She did not have the nerve to return and talk to the recruiters on her own, however, which was why she had badgered her boyfriend of six months into accompanying her. It was March 2001, and Michelle was eighteen years old. From her vantage point, the Indiana Army National Guard looked like the answer to a dilemma, which was that she found her circumstances dreary.

Michelle had thrust through a childhood full of neglect, making her both headstrong and vulnerable, and it was no accident that she had dreamed up the idea to enlist but required Noah Jarvis's steadying company to execute it. That was Michelle—audacious, needy, a little bit self-absorbed. Michelle was quite certain she knew what the Guard would ask of them in return: one weekend a month, two weeks every summer. Maybe they would also be asked to hem a swollen river with sandbags,
or gather up the pieces of a town shattered by a tornado. She thought that was a price she might be willing to pay, in exchange for the prospect of leaving home.

Michelle did not look like a soldier. On the short side, buxom, a face framed by masses of long, curly, blond hair, with big brown eyes and a button nose, she brimmed with cherubic innocence, which made her mischievousness a constant surprise. She looked angelic but through her sluiced a prodigious appetite for naughty things such as boys and pot and punk rock music. Life rendered itself to her in contradictory ways, brackish and clear, bitter and honeyed; she had formed the habit of looking for what was funny in sad moments, and she had a laugh like a bell, loud and clear and ringing.

Michelle had spent her entire childhood in southern Indiana, mostly in and around Evansville, an industrial city tucked into a bend in the Ohio River. The rest of the Midwest had forgotten about Evansville so long ago it might as well have been southern, and the pace of life was slow. Vast barges heaped with black coal sank low onto the river, crawling past casino boats where people went to hazard their earnings. Michelle's father lived on the opposite shore, buried deep in the woods of Kentucky, in an air-conditioned trailer where he hoarded mementos and told unlikely stories. Everybody Michelle knew seemed bled of hope. She had grown up watching businesses shutter and jobs disappear and her mother slip into poverty and her siblings enthrall themselves with drugs. Ten months earlier, in the spring of 2000, when she had graduated from Evansville's Central High School, the theme of her commencement had been “Oh, the Places You'll Go!” So far, however, she had gone nowhere, and the year since she had finished high school had been dispiriting.

Thanks to her extraordinary intelligence, Michelle had excelled at school. In the mandatory journal that she kept for her psychology class, she had written that she had set her sights on going to Indiana University, one of the most prestigious colleges in the state. It had a beautiful tree-lined campus up in Bloomington, and demanding professors who had gotten their degrees from the Ivy League. For a while it had looked as though she might achieve that dream, for she had earned the right marks, and when she had taken the ACT she had scored 34 out of 36,
which put her in the 98th percentile. Nobody else in her family had ever been to college, however, and Michelle did not know how to find the path that led to a fancy campus. Her mother lost factory jobs as often as she found them, and her father alternately drove a truck or got himself locked up in jail, and neither of her parents had set aside any money for college.

In the fall of 2000, Michelle had enrolled instead at the University of Southern Indiana, a commuter college that squatted beside another part of the Lloyd Expressway, to the west of the armory. She had borrowed the maximum possible amount in student loans, as she was paying her entire tuition bill by herself. As she began her college career, Michelle was sharing a one-bedroom apartment with her mother, working as a waitress at a steakhouse called the Golden Corral, and driving back and forth to classes in the Tank. That's what she named her 1994 silver Ford Tempo. It had been a gift from her father. A burly wreck of a man, he loved Michelle dearly, but he had never stuck with any of his four wives, nor had he safeguarded the economic well-being of his children. He had bought the car used for $2,000, and had given it to Michelle in lieu of paying the $40,000 in child support that he owed to her mother. Michelle's mother eked out a thin existence with occasional welfare checks, irregular jobs, regular packs of Marlboro Lights 100s, and a steady supply of Double Cola. After he bought the car for Michelle, her father had made her mother sign a letter saying she wouldn't sue him for the money that he owed, and then he had handed Michelle the keys. She liked to joke that she drove a $40,000 beater. The joke encapsulated everything about her childhood—what she had been given, what her parents had failed to provide, and the spark that let her laugh about it all, especially the parts that were not really funny.

Michelle had spent the winter of 2000 in the Tank, driving to and from her classes, her job at the chain restaurant, college parties, and the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her mom. Michelle smoked too much pot, went to too many keg parties, started dropping acid. In the spring of 2001, she learned that her standing in the University of Southern Indiana honors program had been thrown into jeopardy because she had been failing to show up for an algebra class that was held at nine o'clock in the morning. Somehow, she had taken a wrong turn.
She knew where this road led, because she had watched various older siblings take it: you started off drinking too much and then you wound up battling a lifetime of addiction. Michelle wanted to leave all this behind. She wanted to stride across a pretty campus, she wanted to be assigned a room in a dormitory, and she wanted to take classes that were challenging. Yet she could not calculate out how to pay for her aspirations until she remembered the military recruiters who had visited the economics class she had taken during her senior year at Central High. They had handed out fake dog tags and spoken of true heroism. One recruiter had said the National Guard would send students to
any college in the state, free of charge
. With more than sixty armories, Indiana had one of the most robust National Guards in the country, and many of Michelle's fellow students had accepted the offer, which struck them as low risk. The country had been at peace for more than a decade, and the only serious conflict that had occurred in their lifetimes was the Persian Gulf War, which had been wrapped up in months. Plus, everybody in southern Indiana knew that the Guard did not go to war—if you wanted to see combat, you joined the regular army.

Michelle had not pursued the matter because she did not see herself as the military type. She thought of herself as a music-loving, pot-smoking, left-leaning hippie—not a soldier. By the spring of 2001, however, after almost a full school year of driving the Tank back and forth to the bleak campus of her commuter college, she found herself recalling the pitch made by the recruiters. She told her boyfriend Noah that she was thinking about signing up for the Guard and hinted that he should enlist, too. Noah was older than Michelle, albeit more adrift. After dropping out of college, he had slouched through a series of dead-end jobs—for a while he had driven an ice cream truck, and at another point he had sold doughnuts. Often he drank so much that when he woke up he could not remember what had happened the night before. Noah had gotten stuck in a side eddy, and the main current of life was passing him by. When Michelle suggested that he join the Guard, however, Noah confessed that he found the idea intimidating—he wasn't in very good shape, he said, and he wasn't sure if he would measure up as a soldier. But Noah was besotted with Michelle, and thought it would not be chivalrous to send his girlfriend off to talk to the recruiters alone.