Soldier Girls The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War by Helen Thorpe

Author:Helen Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

As long as she remained in Afghanistan, she could sustain this state of irresolution, where she never had to confront the truth of what she was doing. She could see Ben in person and interact with Pete as an almost fictional being—but it was crazy, she knew. And it cost her emotionally in ways she had not even started to tabulate, trying to inhabit both worlds at once.

Desma cherished no illusions about her significance to Mark Northrup. She would have liked to hold on to a man of his caliber, but it was not going to happen, and she knew it. Sometimes he went out on the road with Voodoo Child—as his roving maintenance team liked to call themselves—to rescue other soldiers who had gotten stranded in bad situations. Then she might not see him for several weeks. When he was on the post, they slept together fairly regularly, usually about once a week. They had sex in her hut, his hut, Mueller’s office, an ambulance, the back of a van. Once Northrup asked her if she would have sex with him inside a Porta-John, but that was where Desma drew the line. “I think this affair is over if you think I am to the level where I will have sex with you in a Porta-John,” she told Northrup. “I am not that person, and you really do not need me to be that person.”

But he was not going to leave his wife, he was not going to marry her. Desma did not even dream that would happen. Nobody was supposed to find out about the affair, but it had become an open secret. At about this time, somebody posted a picture of Desma and a mechanic together on MySpace. Because of Desma’s reputation, the mechanic’s wife jumped to the wrong conclusion. “Apparently she totally flipped out, and thought we were sleeping together,” Desma said later. “And that was so not the case. Well, then, in his defense, bless his heart—I’m not mad at him, but he really shouldn’t have handled it the way he did—he told her, ‘No, I’m not sleeping with her, Northrup is.’ ” The photograph of Desma and the mechanic had been on MySpace for only twenty-four hours when Desma got a phone call from Stacy Glory, back at the armory in Bedford. Stacy called Desma at the motor pool (they were supposed to use the phone line only for military purposes, but sometimes they used it just to catch up) to warn her that the comment had made the rounds of the Family Readiness Group. The wives could be vicious. “Northrup’s wife pretty much put it out that I was sleeping with everybody,” Desma said. “I wasn’t.” After that, she and Northrup tried to be a little more discreet.

T.J. told Debbie that she was mailing her something really sexy that she could do all by herself for Valentine’s Day—it turned out to be a blowup guy, and he got passed around Debbie’s hut—but Jeff forgot about the holiday entirely.

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