Soldier Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

trigger, how loosely or firmly she held her weapon, if her body was relaxed or tense. She decided that shooting was all about breath, for her shots varied wildly until she began relaxing her body and squeezing the trigger gently at the very bottom of her exhale. Then she qualified as a marksman.
    Michelle learned how to operate a machine gun, how to dismantle a land mine, how to fire a grenade launcher, and how to throw a hand grenade. The real grenades felt unexpectedly heavy. Her drill sergeant told her she would blow herself up if she made a mistake, which made her clumsy with terror, but as she leaned against a wall clutching two grenades against her chest, a trainer standing beside her asked where she was from, and when she said Indiana, he brought up Bobby Knight. So then they chatted about college basketball while she pulled out the pins and threw the grenades over the wall, and she lobbed them far enough to survive. After that, the drill sergeants let the trainees have a rare day offreedom, when a band performed a rock concert. The afternoon ended badly when a soldier tossed a full plastic bottle in the air, causing a long silver arc of water to splash over the crowd. The drill sergeants made the entire crowd kneel down for the rest of the concert.
    One week later, it was time for the last phase of basic, the blue phase: night ops and MREs. In the second week of August, Michelle and the rest of her platoon began the final test, a seventy-two-hour war simulation exercise. They rucked out in all their gear, hiked six miles, then started digging foxholes. The temperature climbed to a high of 99 degrees, although with 97 percent humidity, the sweat-drenched soldiers experienced a heat index of 107 degrees. That night, while Michelle was helping to unload MREs off a truck, lightning flared, and she finished the job wrapped in sheets of rain. Michelle slept in a leaky tent, curled up in a cloth sleeping bag, lying in a puddle. Sometime after the rain ceased, drill sergeants threw tear gas into her tent, and then at dawn, they hustled everybody into the foxholes. They were supposed to watch for an attack, but instead Michelle rested the edge of her Kevlar helmet on a post, closed her eyes, and slid into a lucid dream in which a drill sergeant leaped into the foxhole to berate her.
    The following day, when the heat index hit 102 degrees, the merciless drill sergeants took them home by a more circuitous way, so that the foot march lasted nine miles instead of six. They finished by trudging through an enormous expanse of sand, where Michelle’s calves began to burn and her hip began to ache and she fell farther and farther behind. She had developed a stress fracture in her hip due to the training exercises, although she did not know this yet; all she knew was that she could not keep up. Her friends Davidson and McDonough dropped back to make sure she finished the exercise, and toward the end of the hike, the two young men took her by the elbows and half carried Michelle across the sand. When they neared the barracks, they heard Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” blaring over the intercom. “Had the guts, got the glory,” reverberated across the post. “Went the distance, now I’m not gonna stop.” Not her kind of music, but it meant the ordeal was over. As they lined up in formation, she saw that half of the newly minted soldiers around her were crying.
    On August 16, 2001, Michelle put on her dress greens and marchedto her graduation ceremony. She felt bold, able, ready for action. Her body had grown lean and she knew the name and function of every single part of her assault rifle. She had also proved to herself that she could survive nine weeks of separation from her mother, who drove all the way to Fort Jackson for Michelle’s graduation. In the years since she had lost her bookkeeping job, Irene had grown antisocial, to the point where she rarely left the house except to go to work. Yet