Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe

football jerseys and blue jeans, and while she had a gorgeous smile she also smoked cigarettes until theygave her voice a raspy edge. With friends, she was capable of extraordinary loyalty, but she had a hard time with authority figures. She had a lengthy belly laugh that chugged upward through a variety of registers, starting down low and ending up high, and it was infectious. The fact that Desma had enlisted was an accident, as far as she was concerned—something that was true of most pivotal events in her life. Agency she ascribed to others.
    Desma had grown up in Spurgeon, Indiana, a town buried deep in the southern part of the state and small enough for her to ride her bike from one end to the other. She had grasped early that her mother could not function. “I call her a manic-depressive, because she never came out of her bedroom,” Desma would say later. “But I don’t know. Let’s just say my mom was crazy. I love her, but she was crazy.” Most nights, Desma made dinner and brought food to her mother; her mother drove them both to the grocery store, but Desma did the shopping. Her three older siblings had married and left home before she was born, and by the time she came along her mother had stopped trying. Desma was on her own from a young age.
    Desma was extraordinarily bright, and before she finished elementary school, she devoured The Secret Garden and Little Women . Later she raced through Oliver Twist and The Raven . The books spirited her away from her surroundings and shielded her from her mother’s rage. Her mother vacillated between catatonia and violence, according to Desma; when displeased, she might beat a child, but if Desma was reading, her mother left her alone, Desma said. In seventh grade, both Desma and her younger brother, the last of the five children in their family, were placed into foster care. The notes that would eventually come to be contained in Desma’s Veterans Administration file alluded to some kind of abuse, but she did not want to discuss the incident, even years later with her VA therapist. “It’s not who I am,” Desma said. “It has nothing to do with how I handle my day-to-day. It has nothing to do with how I raise my children. I raise my children in a better atmosphere than I grew up in, that’s the only way that affected [me].”
    Caseworkers assigned Desma to a foster home in the same county where her mother lived, and she kept attending the same middle school, although she took a different bus. The couple that had agreed to fosterher had previously adopted two children and were also fostering two more, making Desma the fifth child they were sheltering in their two-bedroom house. Initially, Desma expected to stay for only a short period, but then her mother was injured in a car wreck, and the weeks stretched into months. Desma began fighting with her foster parents’ adopted daughter. Her foster father worked for Whirlpool and had an even temperament, but her foster mother was an evangelical Christian with a fragile personality. Eventually the placement ended after the foster parents said they could not handle Desma. “I know in their hearts they were trying to be good people,” Desma said later. “And, you know, he was. She should never have been a mother, but, whatever—that’s not my call. Not a very good parent, the house got filled, she got stressed, and I left.”
    The move occurred abruptly. One day, after Desma had finished school, a caseworker picked her up, suggested that they take a ride in her car, and then dropped Desma off at a group home. Residents were supposed to graduate after five weeks, provided they completed the program. Desma progressed rapidly at first, but then balked after she was ordered to clean an oven in which someone else had exploded a green bean casserole; she thought the person who had made the mess should clean it up, and refused to touch the burned splatter.