Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe Page A

training—she knew how to choke somebody until they passed out, she knew how to fire an M16. “I don’t have to take this shit anymore,” she told her family. Then she packed up her things and left.
    Michelle moved in with Veronica and Colleen. They were sharing a two-bedroom apartment, and Michelle slept on the couch. She had fallen out of step with her friends, however; Veronica and Colleen were now sophomores at the University of Southern Indiana, while Michelle had returned home in the middle of the fall semester and could not resume taking classes until the spring. She still hoped to apply to Indiana University, but she planned to take another year of courses at USI while she waited to hear if she was accepted. She found a job at Target, working third shift. Veronica and Colleen threw Michelle a welcome-back party, and Noah Jarvis brought his guitar and stood outside and played “Wish You Were Here,” which he had taught himself while Michelle had been gone. They started dating again, but Michelle did not feel the same way, and the relationship did not cohere. Moody, bored, she got into a fight with her roommates over their failure to clean the kitchen. Veronica and Colleen were slobs, she said. She got her mother to kick everybody else out and moved back home.
    Once a month, Michelle reported for drill at the armory on the Lloyd Expressway. She showed up wearing shiny boots and a pressed uniform, as she had been trained to do. The rest of her unit looked like slouches, dusty boots and wrinkled uniforms straight out of the dryer. Her colleagues had a hybrid ethos, a combination of the strict military culture she had encountered at Aberdeen and the more relaxed standards of everyday life in Evansville. “It’s a bunch of people who are [practically] back in civilian mode, which you will get to, but you have a hard time with that,” Michelle said. “It’s hard to go back and forth between the two modes. Guardsmen have a unique way of straddling both, in their own neglectful way.”
    At the armory, Michelle recognized half a dozen people. She knew Lucy Schneider and Agnes Harmon from middle school, for example, and she knew Angela Peterson and Bridget Palmer from high school. All of the women belonged to a small detachment of the 113th Support Battalion. The main part of the 113th drilled in Bedford, several hours away, but the detachment had been formed so that women could drill in Evansville, as the principal unit operating out of the armory at Evansville remained male-only, because it was field artillery. Michelle belonged to the 113th’s Bravo Company, primarily a maintenance unit. The women whom Michelle recognized from her school days were all 88Ms (“eighty-eight Mikes”), or truck drivers, and they belonged to the 113th’s Alpha Company, which drove the trucks that Bravo maintained. Sergeant Joe Haverty told Michelle that she was the first person they had gotten who was authorized to work on a howitzer—the archaic big guns still composed the bulk of the field artillery unit’s inventory, and at first Michelle thought her skills would make her important. But actually the howitzers were kept in storage, and Haverty assigned her to a maintenance team that worked on trucks.
    The rest of the maintenance team were 63Ws (“sixty-three Whiskeys”), or truck mechanics, and in the armory’s vast, chilly garage, which smelled of motor oil and solvents, they taught her how to work on vehicles. She changed tires, changed radiator fluid, and once even changed the head gasket on a five-ton truck. The team consisted of her superiors Sergeant Haverty and Corporal Ezra Schmidt, as well as a young woman named Amber Macdonald, who had spiky blond hair, large breasts, and a bubbly personality. Macdonald enjoyed flirting and giggled a lot. Macdonald was not Michelle’s intellectual equal, but she served as a reliable ally. One weekend, Macdonald called