Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe Read Free Book Online

action. “Let’s join the marines,” Debbie heard one urge another. More settled members of the Guard worried about being sundered from spouses and children, while others expressed anxiety about the danger of a deployment. Debbie herself did not chafe. She thought she would find whatever sacrifices might lie ahead infinitely more satisfying than her job at the beauty salon.
    Debbie had acquired ideas about devotion and selflessness from her parents. She idolized her father, a warm and attentive man who worked construction and had allowed her to follow him around on job sites, making mortar, carrying hod, toting bricks. She always spoke kindly of her mother, but without the same degree of adoration, suggesting a hidden rift. Debbie’s mother battled anorexia and addiction to prescription pills, and Debbie found her father a more reliable source of emotional support. When she had declared that she wanted to learn how to shoot a gun, back when she was a teenager, he encouraged her to take a formal class at the rifle range at Indiana University, and then he gave her a .22. She spent most afternoons at the quarry, dropping plastic containers into the deep, cold water, and perforating them until they tilted from view. Most of her friends were boys, but she was the best shot of them all.
    Debbie graduated from high school in 1971, and one year later she married her high school sweetheart. Her husband persuaded Debbie they should have children, then started an affair while Debbie was pregnant, according to Debbie. After Debbie gave birth to their daughter, Ellen Ann, she and her husband divorced. He married the other woman, had another daughter, and got another divorce. Debbie would shoulder the cost of rearing their child alone. In 1975, when Ellen Ann was one, Debbie looked up the nearest military recruiting station in the phone book, imagined offering herself to the army. She was twenty-three. The recruiter, a uniformed soldier in his forties, rejected her as soon as he heard about Ellen Ann. Really and truly, he said, the military does not recruit single parents. Debbie had imagined that the military would receive her gladly, and left staggered.
    A practical person, Debbie scouted for another way to support herself and her child. Growing up, Debbie had cut hair for all the boys in the neighborhood—it had started when her best friend, Jim, came to her and said he wanted to keep the money that his father had given him to pay for a haircut. Debbie’s grandmother worked as a cosmetologist at Redken Laboratories, making color mixes for hair dye. She suggested that studying electrolysis would provide a guaranteed income, and it would take only one year. “That sounds like fun,” Debbie responded. “I like working with my hands, I like working with people.” Good-humored, stoic, practical—that was Debbie. If she experienced anguish at being asked to trim her dreams, that was never articulated.
    Debbie finished her cosmetology degree in 1976. She found a job working for a woman who ran an electrolysis business, then started her own. She lived frugally. Debbie and her daughter shared a two-bedroom efficiency apartment, and Debbie got around town by walking or by bus. She supplemented her income by waitressing at a local bar called Time Out. A coworker recruited her to join a local softball team, and the two of them played together in the outfield. One evening, her coach’s brother dropped by to watch the game. How cute is that guy, Debbie thought. To her surprise, Tony sought her out after the game. He was suave and good-looking—“kind of like a Greek god,” Debbie told friends—and mentioned that he was serving in the army. Later he stopped by the bar where she worked a few times, and flirted with her some more. Tony’s charm bamboozled Debbie, leaving her starstruck. One evening, Tony seemed loath to part from such a rapt audience.
    â€œAre you going my way?”