Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe Page B

Michelle to warn her that everybody who showed up for drill was being subjected to drug testing, and Michelle, who had recently smoked pot, called in sick. Another weekend, Michelle showed up still drunk from the night before, and Macdonald walked her up and down the halls of the armory until she was sober enough to stand in formation. Their superior Corporal Schmidt hit on Michelle or Amber indiscriminately and often. After a while, Noah Jarvis joined the team, too. He had become a dieselmechanic (“sixty-three Bravo”), and Michelle started working alongside him on drill weekends, sometimes lying beneath trucks, sometimes bending under their hoods together.
    That winter, when Michelle watched the news on the small combination television set and DVD player that her mother owned, she found it hard to keep track of the cities in Afghanistan that the United States and its allies were capturing. It looked as though it would be a swift war; major parts of Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat had been hit with bombs and cruise missiles, and the United States and its allies had taken the Taliban-controlled districts of Zari, Keshendeh, and Aq-Kupruk. Then they captured the important city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital city of Kabul, and finally the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz. Michelle had never heard of these strange-sounding places; she did not know where to find the cities on a map. It was hard to follow the war’s narrative. She took away only the gist of the story: American generals said the war was going well. And indeed, the war in Afghanistan got off to the kind of start that military historians would later call spectacular. US special operations teams and CIA forces worked with Afghan fighters who were loyal to their cause to topple the Taliban regime in less than three months, with only a dozen US fatalities. Michelle assured her mother there was no way anybody would send her to Afghanistan, and as the military alliance announced its string of victories, she began to believe that might actually be true.
    Yet as the weeks slid by, the reports grew more confusing. Fighters aligned with the Taliban somehow smuggled weapons into a prison in Mazar-i-Sharif. Forty Northern Alliance fighters died, as well as an American CIA agent, Johnny Micheal Spann. Just before Christmas came dramatic news: supposedly bin Laden was holed up in an elaborate cave complex in the mountains on the country’s eastern border, close to the legendary Khyber Pass. News reports said the caves of Tora Bora might be bin Laden’s headquarters; it might be a vast hideout capable of sheltering more than a thousand people. Al-Qaeda might have stockpiled ammunition there, or maybe its fighters. All that could be said for certain was that the caves were in one of the least accessible areas in a country full of impassable mountains. For days, US and British special forces negotiated the brutally rugged terrain, first bombing the cavecomplex and eventually breaching the caves themselves (which turned out to be smaller and less impressive than suggested). They searched the redoubt, but like a specter bin Laden had vanished.
    In the months since they had trained together at Aberdeen Proving Ground, James Cooper had not reached out to Michelle, so that winter she got in touch with him. Michelle found his home number in the telephone directory and sweet-talked his parents into providing updated information. After she tracked Cooper down, they started talking on the phone. He was unmoored, and she felt the same way. In search of the assurance Cooper had provided, Michelle went to visit him for a week. He took her to Niagara Falls and kissed her while the water thundered around them, and she thought it was one of the most romantic moments of her life. With scant encouragement, she then moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, so they could be geographically closer. In the spring of 2002, instead of returning to the University of Southern Indiana, she enrolled at the