Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe

persuaded Michelle and another female soldier to climb up the fire escape to the male-only part of the barracks to meet him and a friend for a double siege. The two couples stole inside two unoccupied rooms, with a lookout posted nearby, the surreptitious intimacy twice as exciting thanks to the fear that a drill sergeant might discover them in a state of undress. “You’re adorable,” Cooper told Michelle, then retreated into his self-sufficient solitude.
    Even as he remained elusive, Cooper kept Michelle’s anxieties at bay. She was a creature of thought, but he was a person of action—he did not ruminate the way she did. He made her laugh, made her lighten. It helped, even though they did not join up well philosophically. Cooper hewed to black-and-white beliefs, and he was gung ho about the possibility of war. When Congress passed the Patriot Act, greatly expanding the power of the federal government to gather intelligence, oversee financial transactions, and detain individuals suspected of terrorism, Michelle found the very name of the act frightening, yet she said nothing about her dismay to Cooper because she feared he would turn away.It chilled Michelle to watch her country surrender its liberties so easily, but nobody else she knew of at Aberdeen seemed worried.
    In the classroom, Michelle continued to excel. She proved handy with mechanical tasks, and the art of repairing weapons came easily. Toward the end of her stay at Aberdeen, after eleven weeks of studying the same weapons, the marines broke off to study their own sniper rifle, while the army and the Army National Guard soldiers worked on howitzers. The big gun was massive—the breech weighed more than Michelle—although everybody considered them obsolete. Michelle wasn’t sure exactly what kind of war Bush had in mind, but she doubted the soldiers were going to be using howitzers. “I mean, what kind of a situation would I be in where I would have to fix a broken howitzer?” she would ask. She did not believe that the members of Al-Qaeda were going to dig trenches and line up to be shelled.
    And then she was finished. James Cooper had gone already; he had finished his welding courses before her and gone home to New York. When Michelle graduated from Aberdeen toward the end of November, nobody came to celebrate. Michelle packed up her things shortly before Thanksgiving. At the Baltimore airport, she ran into the newly heightened security measures involving airline travel for the first time. At the ticket counter, an airline staff person told Michelle she could not board the airplane while wearing her uniform. If there was a terrorist incident, said the woman, Michelle’s uniform was likely to make her a target. She was told to go to the bathroom and change her clothes. The country was awash in fear, Michelle realized. She had stepped outside of the civilian world for just half a year, but in that time it had been transformed.
    Back in Evansville, Michelle found six people living in the one-bedroom apartment that she had been sharing with her mother. Her aunt had moved in after losing her job; her brother had moved in after finding a job at a nearby McDonald’s and stayed even after he got fired; her sister had moved in, along with her two children, after her husband had abandoned them. Nobody living in the apartment was working except for her mother. Michelle had given her mother access to her bank account while she was gone, and her mother had plundered it to pay for rent and groceries. Donovan had commandeered the Tank, and after somebody smashed one of the windows he had neglected to repair theglass. It had rained, and the car stank of mildew. Donovan had also run up a bill of more than $1,000 on her cell phone. Michelle had earned thousands of dollars in active duty pay during her six months away, and all of that money was gone. Once Michelle might have slumped into this, but she had been through basic