The War Within: two months after president obama announced the end of combat operations in iraq, the battle goes on in the minds of those who fought.
Story by Justin Franz, Published in the Montana Kaimin, November 10, 2010
ON A CLEAR and crisp fall day, Kelley Ziegler sits in the grass against a tree and studies. Flipping pages from right to left — how Arabic is read — she thinks about how she will do on her test in a half-hour.
But that is not the only stress on her mind.
As students rush to and from class this Thursday afternoon, Ziegler keeps a close eye on everyone that passes. One student comes from behind and she knows, hearing his footsteps crunch on fallen leaves. Her long red hair flies in the wind as she turns back to see who approaches and judges the threat.
Ziegler, 32, is a student, mother and veteran who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, diagnosed shortly after her first tour in Iraq.
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, PTSD occurs in 11 to 20 percent of veterans who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan and usually stems from the trials and terror of war.
Justin Raap, Veterans Affairs coordinator at The University of Montana, says PTSD is one of the most common things they see in their office, although there are no hard numbers on how many military personnel suffer from it. Part of this comes from the fact that many don't want to admit that they have a problem.
"It's a proud group of people, and they don't like to ask for help or seem weak," Raap said.
But even if some don't accept their diagnoses, Raap says his department does as much as it can to help the estimated 1,500 student veterans at UM, who served in conflicts ranging from the Vietnam War to those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The best thing we have with this office is we're veterans helping veterans. We offer a place for them to talk," he said.
One of them is Ziegler, who was born in Billings and now lives in Hamilton. She enlisted in the National Guard in 1998 as a way to pay for college, but also because she admired the teamwork and camaraderie that it encouraged.
"I saw these people who watched out for each other and I wanted to be a part of that," she said, adding that it was a culture she was familiar with, with members of her family, including her husband at the time, in the service.
Leaving her husband and young son at home, she went through basic training and then was shipped to South Korea for six months in the summer of 1999, serving as a military police officer.
The distance destroyed her marriage, and they were divorced soon after her return. A few months later, her youngest daughter was born, and she left active duty.
But she didn't stay away for long. In 2002, she again enlisted with the Montana National Guard, in which she could serve in the military but stay stateside. She only had to dedicate one weekend a month, two weeks a year, and could raise her young children while attending the College of Technology in Missoula.
It was there on March 24, 2003, four days after the United States invaded Iraq, while smoking a cigarette, that she received a call from her commander. Recognizing the number, she picked up.
"You need to report to the armory at seven Friday night. We're deploying," the commander said.
"What?" she replied.
"Just be there at seven," the commander said.
Ziegler realized that she had four days to drop her classes, find a way to take care of her kids and say goodbye to her family.
Another person smoking nearby noticed.
"You look like you just got bad news," he said.
"Yeah, I think I did," she said, as she turned towards her car, got in and started driving home.
IN THE WEEK following the call from her commander, she packed up her life, moved her kids in with her mother and drove to South Dakota to tell her father that she was deploying. A few days later she was in Bozeman in a huge hanger full of people waiting to find out where they'd be going, although they all knew the answer.
The 143rd Military Police Detachment Law and Order was going to Iraq.
With the invasion in its early stages, military police were needed immediately and Ziegler and the 44 others in her unit only spent a few more days in Montana before heading south to Fort Benton, Ga. for training and preparation. What resulted were two long, hard months.
"They were just slamming us through it. I mean, we were going from four in the morning until 11 at night," she said, talking of the various training, cultural classes and medical appointments they had to go through prior to deployment.
A few weeks later they were in Kuwait at a place called Camp Victory, where all troops heading for Iraq were being stationed. Due to a lack of gear and equipment, they sat on base until June when the unit was flown into Baghdad. But Ziegler and five others stayed behind and a few days later were heading north by road, taking what equipment and gear they had with them in a convoy.
As they darted across the desert in the unrelenting heat of Kuwait, Ziegler couldn't help but think of home.
"This is just like eastern Montana," she said. "Flatland and tumbleweeds."
As they inched closer and closer to the border, more signs appeared telling soldiers to gear up and be alert.
It's advice she's never forgotten.
SEVEN YEARS LATER, she's sitting under a tree near the Oval, cramming in the final minutes before her test. Before taking this class she knew little Arabic, only what she learned while overseas, which mostly consisting of phrases like "stop, or I'll shoot" or profanities.
Today's text is much more friendly, listing various greetings and pleasantries.
She's stressed, having just gotten off the phone with Veterans Affairs trying to figure out how she'll pay for this semester's classes and rent. But she can only think about these problems so long before gathering her books, lighting another Camel Blue and walking to her next class.Even as she walks into the Liberal Arts Building, Ziegler is alert. She constantly keeps an eye on everything or anyone that moves. Going down the hallway she talks with a fellow classmate, and as they approach the room — which has two doors, one on each end — she parts ways with the young man, who goes into the first. She goes the extra 20 feet to the second door that has a better view of the whole room.
As students try to remember phrases and terms in the final moments before the test, Ziegler walks across the front of the room and heads to the last row, on the far side. Picking a perfect vantage point, she sits with her back to the wall and a view of the two doors from the hallway and one door that goes into an adjoining classroom.
A few moments later, a short Middle-Eastern man walks into the room, and on cue, the class welcomes him in Arabic. Only being a few weeks into learning the language, the welcome is littered with mistakes, but unlike seven years ago when Ziegler was crossing the border under a scorching desert sun, she understands every word.
WHAT GREETED ZIEGLER at the border was a massive berm that blocked views of what awaited on the other side. And while the scenery didn't change, the people did, as villagers, mostly young children, swarmed the trucks, begging for anything.
"Give me chocolate, give me money, give me water," they yelled, as they beat on the side of vehicles and grabbed at the people within.
"It was a little nerve-wracking," she said later. "You were like ‘what are these people saying? What are they doing? What are they grabbing for?'"
It was an eye-opener for her and the others as they saw the living conditions of these forgotten people, most of whom only had homes constructed of dirt and mud.
"I'd be fucking pissed off if I was living in a mud hut, too," Ziegler said to the driver.
Yet, no matter how badly the soldiers felt for them, there wasn't anything they could do but push the people away from the convoy.
Afterward, the silence of their trip resumed. They took secondary routes in order to avoid attacks. Like Kuwait — and eastern Montana — the deserts of southern Iraq were open and lifeless, as the sights before their windshield remained unchanged.
As they approached the city two days later, traffic and vegetation began to appear and soon they were at their destination — Baghdad International Airport. Here, they were given a few moments to take a break before the few trucks of her division continued to the west side of the city. But before they returned to their trucks, they were given a warning.
They were about to drive through one of the most dangerous sections of the city called ‘sniper alley.'
With two, two-lane overpasses, surrounded by tall buildings, which were occasionally sprinkled with sharpshooters, the area was a perfect ambush site, with only one way to escape — keep moving forward.
They proceeded with speed and caution, but what greeted them wasn't the barrel of a gun from a shadowy window, but rather traffic like any other city.
For the girl from Montana, it was overwhelming, having only been to Seattle and Calgary before. But the traffic of those areas was nothing compared to what they drove into, as two lanes of traffic became four, and taxis and cars swerved in and out of the way of the small convoy. Ziegler remembers drives like that in which fender benders were common.
"They get in our way, we hit them," she said.
A half-hour later Ziegler and the five others were reunited with their unit, and it couldn't have come sooner.
"I wanted to go to the bathroom, go to the shower and get out of the goddamn truck," she said.
But there was one order of business that had to be taken care of first as members of her unit swarmed the trucks in similar fashion to the kids a few days earlier. Inside those trucks were 45 black boxes, filled to the brim with personal items that each soldier had brought from home, containing everything from clean bed sheets to PlayStations.
"It was like Christmas all over again."
NOW, SITTING IN a barren classroom on the third-floor of the Liberal Arts Building, Ziegler's professor has a different gift for her. Going from row to row, he counts the number of students before him and flips through the same number of tests to hand down to the students. When he gets to Ziegler's row he only flips one.
"When you are hasty, you'll regret it. When you're slow, you'll be fine," he reminds the class, as Ziegler attacks the first page with a sharpened No. 2 pencil.
The first page is vocabulary and Ziegler slowly and meticulously goes down the page answering each question. Other students do the same as the professor walks the rows. Hearing the light whispers from behind, Ziegler quickly turns back to assess the situation before again hunching over the test before her.
Finishing the first page, she goes over each answer again, slowly swinging the No. 2 along every mark. Just like the first few months in Baghdad, it's thorough and monotonous.
WHILE THE COUNTRY had been invaded and its government overthrown — there was still the issue of re-establishing law and order. On the west side of Baghdad, that duty fell to the 143rd as they spent countless days setting up police stations, organizing new local officers and getting them paid. Along with setting up a police force, they were busy being a police force, undertaking investigations of those who had made threats to coalition forces, which resulted in more than a few kicked-in doors. For much of the time, this was their nine-to-five life.
While preparing for another day of this monotony a few months into the tour, a message came over the radio — two trucks from their division had been hit by a roadside bomb.
Standing near a commander when the message came over the airwaves, Ziegler asked if she should go find the others who were busy preparing things for the day to come. The commander signaled for her to pause, while he listened for more information on how bad the explosion had been.
Suddenly, he turned to her and said "Go."
She was out the door in a moment's notice and ran a block to where the other troops were waiting. She burst through the door, out of breath.
"They got hit, they got hit, lets gear up and get the fuck out of here," she screamed, as she attempted to catch her breath.
The unit mobilized and headed for the trucks, still yelling, "they got hit, they got hit, we've got to roll."
And roll they did as Ziegler continued to earn her nickname "the lead foot of Baghdad," as she swerved in and out of traffic, heading toward the underpass and traffic circle known as Tayaran Square.
What they found was chaos.
A huge crowd had gathered around the underpass as a dozen soldiers lay in the wreckage, some with glass and shrapnel deep in their faces and bodies. It was the first attack that had directly affected the 143rd.
While medical personnel tended to the injured, Ziegler, and the rest of those who responded, worked to push people away, at times physically shoving them back and threatening them with their weapons.
It wouldn't be the last time her unit would brush death.
A few weeks later, on August 19, Ziegler was standing guard outside the Canal Hotel where the United Nations was based.
Now almost five months into its deployment, the unit was starting to feel the wear and tear of war, and as she stood half asleep, she was startled by a voice.
Blue eyes, get out of here.
Shaking her head with confusion, she laughed off the voice which sounded like that of her grandfather, who had passed away years earlier. Turning to a friend she joked about what she heard.
"You're fucking crazy," she responded.
"No, I just heard it clear as day..."
Blue eyes, get out of here!
Suddenly Ziegler's expression changed.
"You don't look right, you need to drink some water," the fellow solider suggested.
"I just heard it again," she said.
Now, more confused then ever, her friend reiterated what she had said moments earlier.
"You're fucking crazy. You need to go to the pool and destress. You're losing your mind."
"Maybe I am," Ziegler said, trying to laugh the whole thing off.
Damn it blue eyes, get the fuck out of here!
This time Ziegler took full notice of the voice, remembering that her grandfather never swore.
"We gotta go," she yelled as she ran inside to grab a friend who was working on some paperwork and at first was unconcerned with what she had to say.
"I don't care," she screamed at him. "You either get your ass in the fucking truck or it'll leave without you."
Seeing how concerned she was, he decided to oblige, gathering his paperwork and heading for the truck.
Now behind the wheel, the lead foot of Baghdad quickly drove away from the complex, passing through the maze of walls and jersey barriers that protected it. Moments later, with the building out of view behind a wall, a large flatbed truck exploded, killing 22 people, including famous UN diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello.
After that, no one questioned Ziegler's judgment.
"If your grandfather ever talks to you again, I better be the first fucking person to know," someone later said to her.
SEVEN YEARS LATER, the memory of that afternoon is still as vivid as the day it happened. Just as vivid as the Arabic Ziegler was studying an hour earlier, or so she hopes, as she finishes her test and turns it over.
As each student finishes, the professor carries on with the planned lesson as he looks across the room and speaks unfamiliar phrases for the students to repeat.
Even in the disorganized responses, the beauty of the language emerges, with dialects that can be as wild as rapids and as soothing as still water. But as the clock ticks towards 4 p.m. each student displays the unrest of day's end. The same goes for Ziegler who will return home to Hamilton and see her two children.
It's the same unrest that she felt in February 2004, when a commander walked into the room and told her to call home.
"YOUR DAUGHTER IS in the hospital," the commander said.
She frantically looked for the satellite phone held by her unit and in Montana a phone rang in the darkness.
Her mom, who already knew what had happened, picked up on the other end and tried to calm her daughter, slowly explaining that Ziegler's youngest was in a hospital in Allentown, Pa., where her father was taking care of her.
"She's got diabetes."
Hours later she was on a plane headed for Germany and finally Baltimore, where she would make the connection to Allentown. Or so she thought, as she pleaded with the gate agent to get a seat on an overbooked flight.
"I need on this plane, I need on this plane," she cried. "You don't understand. My daughter is in the hospital."
"I'm sorry. We can get you another flight in the morning," the agent responded.
"You don't understand," she said, before finally giving up.
Moments later, an airline employee walked up to the shaken mother and asked how he could help. Ziegler told him the whole story: the war, the call and the daughter in a hospital bed. It was more than enough for him to turn to the desk and grab the pa system microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I know you've heard it more than once and you're probably tired of hearing it, but we have an American soldier who needs to get to Allentown because her daughter is in the ICU. Will anyone please give up their seat," he announced.Seven people stood up.
By the time she got to the hospital, her daughter had been released from the ICU and was sleeping in a bed. After taking a quick shower and washing off the grime of war and travel, she got in bed and held her daughter for the first time in months. She quickly joined her in sleep.
In the morning, the young girl awoke and got out of bed to walk over to her father. She only wanted one thing — her mother.
"Your mommy is in bed," her dad said.
"No, she's not," the girl said.
"Well you better go back and look again, crazy girl."
Ziegler suddenly awoke to screams.
"Mommy, mommy!!!"
ZIEGLER WOULDN'T RETURN to Iraq. With only 90-days left in her unit's tour, she was allowed to stay stateside.
In the months and years that followed, "life happened." She returned home to Montana with her children and went to work. She was also diagnosed with PTSD.
It was another wrench in a confusing life that lacked the order and stability of the military, and in 2007, when her unit was looking for volunteers to go back over, she signed up. It was a decision that her family didn't take well, and she spent weeks thinking about how she would break it to them — especially her father.
"He supports me unfalteringly, but I'm his baby girl and I shouldn't go to war," she said.
But she did, and a few days after Christmas 2008, she was back in Baghdad, serving as a military police officer again. Confined to the area of Baghdad International Airport, her second tour was much safer, but it didn't come without its trials. As one of the few women left in the unit, she was often the victim of inappropriate remarks. In her second year overseas, she spent much of her time trying to avoid the people who treated her wrong.
"They say women in the military have to fight twice as hard," she said. "That's very true."
On October 31, 2009, her unit flew into Bozeman, concluding her second, and what will likely be her final tour in Iraq.
But for her, the war will never end. Everyday she must deal with the effects of her time in Iraq and PTSD.
"I had major mood swings; I had a violent temper ... I couldn't drive under the Orange Street underpass," she said, because of the memories of that summer morning at Tayaran Square.
But with psychiatric help, life has gotten better.
"[My doctor] taught me some ways that I can overcome some things," she said, "and some of them I will just always have for the rest of my life."
She's dealt with it better than some, remembering an uncle who had fought in Vietnam, who, following her first tour, became a confidant, shortly before he died.
"I was having huge troubles just functioning as a civilian and I'd drive to Townsend and find him in a bar, because he was a Vietnam-era veteran and they had (PTSD), but they didn't know how to deal with it," she said.
"He was the one person who I could talk to that wasn't like ‘Oh, you should go see a doctor' or ‘You need to get on pills for that' or ‘you need to get over it, it's in the past,'" she said. "He's the only person I've ever told everything, and he's probably the only person I will tell everything to... because, for a lack of a better term, he's been there, done that."
But unlike her uncle, she now tries to live the life he never could. Now enrolled at UM, she hopes to become a photographer in the future and jokes that the classes she takes merely lead to a four-year degree in understanding her Nikon digital camera.
But she often feels out of place in a classroom.
"I'm very unsocial in most of my classes, because I can't deal with the 18-19-year-old drama. I really can't. I've seen dead bodies, I've seen blown up bodies and I couldn't really give two shits less that Johnny broke up with you at the homecoming dance," she said.
This is the stuff she hears in classrooms like the one on the third-floor of the Liberal Arts Building, where she now grabs her books and slides them into her bag. Handing her exam to a teacher's assistant, she turns to the door and waits, watching her classmates file out of the room.
She is one of the last to leave.
ON A CLEAR and crisp fall day, Kelley Ziegler sits in the grass against a tree and studies. Flipping pages from right to left — how Arabic is read — she thinks about how she will do on her test in a half-hour.
But that is not the only stress on her mind.
As students rush to and from class this Thursday afternoon, Ziegler keeps a close eye on everyone that passes. One student comes from behind and she knows, hearing his footsteps crunch on fallen leaves. Her long red hair flies in the wind as she turns back to see who approaches and judges the threat.
Ziegler, 32, is a student, mother and veteran who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, diagnosed shortly after her first tour in Iraq.
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, PTSD occurs in 11 to 20 percent of veterans who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan and usually stems from the trials and terror of war.
Justin Raap, Veterans Affairs coordinator at The University of Montana, says PTSD is one of the most common things they see in their office, although there are no hard numbers on how many military personnel suffer from it. Part of this comes from the fact that many don't want to admit that they have a problem.
"It's a proud group of people, and they don't like to ask for help or seem weak," Raap said.
But even if some don't accept their diagnoses, Raap says his department does as much as it can to help the estimated 1,500 student veterans at UM, who served in conflicts ranging from the Vietnam War to those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The best thing we have with this office is we're veterans helping veterans. We offer a place for them to talk," he said.
One of them is Ziegler, who was born in Billings and now lives in Hamilton. She enlisted in the National Guard in 1998 as a way to pay for college, but also because she admired the teamwork and camaraderie that it encouraged.
"I saw these people who watched out for each other and I wanted to be a part of that," she said, adding that it was a culture she was familiar with, with members of her family, including her husband at the time, in the service.
Leaving her husband and young son at home, she went through basic training and then was shipped to South Korea for six months in the summer of 1999, serving as a military police officer.
The distance destroyed her marriage, and they were divorced soon after her return. A few months later, her youngest daughter was born, and she left active duty.
But she didn't stay away for long. In 2002, she again enlisted with the Montana National Guard, in which she could serve in the military but stay stateside. She only had to dedicate one weekend a month, two weeks a year, and could raise her young children while attending the College of Technology in Missoula.
It was there on March 24, 2003, four days after the United States invaded Iraq, while smoking a cigarette, that she received a call from her commander. Recognizing the number, she picked up.
"You need to report to the armory at seven Friday night. We're deploying," the commander said.
"What?" she replied.
"Just be there at seven," the commander said.
Ziegler realized that she had four days to drop her classes, find a way to take care of her kids and say goodbye to her family.
Another person smoking nearby noticed.
"You look like you just got bad news," he said.
"Yeah, I think I did," she said, as she turned towards her car, got in and started driving home.
IN THE WEEK following the call from her commander, she packed up her life, moved her kids in with her mother and drove to South Dakota to tell her father that she was deploying. A few days later she was in Bozeman in a huge hanger full of people waiting to find out where they'd be going, although they all knew the answer.
The 143rd Military Police Detachment Law and Order was going to Iraq.
With the invasion in its early stages, military police were needed immediately and Ziegler and the 44 others in her unit only spent a few more days in Montana before heading south to Fort Benton, Ga. for training and preparation. What resulted were two long, hard months.
"They were just slamming us through it. I mean, we were going from four in the morning until 11 at night," she said, talking of the various training, cultural classes and medical appointments they had to go through prior to deployment.
A few weeks later they were in Kuwait at a place called Camp Victory, where all troops heading for Iraq were being stationed. Due to a lack of gear and equipment, they sat on base until June when the unit was flown into Baghdad. But Ziegler and five others stayed behind and a few days later were heading north by road, taking what equipment and gear they had with them in a convoy.
As they darted across the desert in the unrelenting heat of Kuwait, Ziegler couldn't help but think of home.
"This is just like eastern Montana," she said. "Flatland and tumbleweeds."
As they inched closer and closer to the border, more signs appeared telling soldiers to gear up and be alert.
It's advice she's never forgotten.
SEVEN YEARS LATER, she's sitting under a tree near the Oval, cramming in the final minutes before her test. Before taking this class she knew little Arabic, only what she learned while overseas, which mostly consisting of phrases like "stop, or I'll shoot" or profanities.
Today's text is much more friendly, listing various greetings and pleasantries.
She's stressed, having just gotten off the phone with Veterans Affairs trying to figure out how she'll pay for this semester's classes and rent. But she can only think about these problems so long before gathering her books, lighting another Camel Blue and walking to her next class.Even as she walks into the Liberal Arts Building, Ziegler is alert. She constantly keeps an eye on everything or anyone that moves. Going down the hallway she talks with a fellow classmate, and as they approach the room — which has two doors, one on each end — she parts ways with the young man, who goes into the first. She goes the extra 20 feet to the second door that has a better view of the whole room.
As students try to remember phrases and terms in the final moments before the test, Ziegler walks across the front of the room and heads to the last row, on the far side. Picking a perfect vantage point, she sits with her back to the wall and a view of the two doors from the hallway and one door that goes into an adjoining classroom.
A few moments later, a short Middle-Eastern man walks into the room, and on cue, the class welcomes him in Arabic. Only being a few weeks into learning the language, the welcome is littered with mistakes, but unlike seven years ago when Ziegler was crossing the border under a scorching desert sun, she understands every word.
WHAT GREETED ZIEGLER at the border was a massive berm that blocked views of what awaited on the other side. And while the scenery didn't change, the people did, as villagers, mostly young children, swarmed the trucks, begging for anything.
"Give me chocolate, give me money, give me water," they yelled, as they beat on the side of vehicles and grabbed at the people within.
"It was a little nerve-wracking," she said later. "You were like ‘what are these people saying? What are they doing? What are they grabbing for?'"
It was an eye-opener for her and the others as they saw the living conditions of these forgotten people, most of whom only had homes constructed of dirt and mud.
"I'd be fucking pissed off if I was living in a mud hut, too," Ziegler said to the driver.
Yet, no matter how badly the soldiers felt for them, there wasn't anything they could do but push the people away from the convoy.
Afterward, the silence of their trip resumed. They took secondary routes in order to avoid attacks. Like Kuwait — and eastern Montana — the deserts of southern Iraq were open and lifeless, as the sights before their windshield remained unchanged.
As they approached the city two days later, traffic and vegetation began to appear and soon they were at their destination — Baghdad International Airport. Here, they were given a few moments to take a break before the few trucks of her division continued to the west side of the city. But before they returned to their trucks, they were given a warning.
They were about to drive through one of the most dangerous sections of the city called ‘sniper alley.'
With two, two-lane overpasses, surrounded by tall buildings, which were occasionally sprinkled with sharpshooters, the area was a perfect ambush site, with only one way to escape — keep moving forward.
They proceeded with speed and caution, but what greeted them wasn't the barrel of a gun from a shadowy window, but rather traffic like any other city.
For the girl from Montana, it was overwhelming, having only been to Seattle and Calgary before. But the traffic of those areas was nothing compared to what they drove into, as two lanes of traffic became four, and taxis and cars swerved in and out of the way of the small convoy. Ziegler remembers drives like that in which fender benders were common.
"They get in our way, we hit them," she said.
A half-hour later Ziegler and the five others were reunited with their unit, and it couldn't have come sooner.
"I wanted to go to the bathroom, go to the shower and get out of the goddamn truck," she said.
But there was one order of business that had to be taken care of first as members of her unit swarmed the trucks in similar fashion to the kids a few days earlier. Inside those trucks were 45 black boxes, filled to the brim with personal items that each soldier had brought from home, containing everything from clean bed sheets to PlayStations.
"It was like Christmas all over again."
NOW, SITTING IN a barren classroom on the third-floor of the Liberal Arts Building, Ziegler's professor has a different gift for her. Going from row to row, he counts the number of students before him and flips through the same number of tests to hand down to the students. When he gets to Ziegler's row he only flips one.
"When you are hasty, you'll regret it. When you're slow, you'll be fine," he reminds the class, as Ziegler attacks the first page with a sharpened No. 2 pencil.
The first page is vocabulary and Ziegler slowly and meticulously goes down the page answering each question. Other students do the same as the professor walks the rows. Hearing the light whispers from behind, Ziegler quickly turns back to assess the situation before again hunching over the test before her.
Finishing the first page, she goes over each answer again, slowly swinging the No. 2 along every mark. Just like the first few months in Baghdad, it's thorough and monotonous.
WHILE THE COUNTRY had been invaded and its government overthrown — there was still the issue of re-establishing law and order. On the west side of Baghdad, that duty fell to the 143rd as they spent countless days setting up police stations, organizing new local officers and getting them paid. Along with setting up a police force, they were busy being a police force, undertaking investigations of those who had made threats to coalition forces, which resulted in more than a few kicked-in doors. For much of the time, this was their nine-to-five life.
While preparing for another day of this monotony a few months into the tour, a message came over the radio — two trucks from their division had been hit by a roadside bomb.
Standing near a commander when the message came over the airwaves, Ziegler asked if she should go find the others who were busy preparing things for the day to come. The commander signaled for her to pause, while he listened for more information on how bad the explosion had been.
Suddenly, he turned to her and said "Go."
She was out the door in a moment's notice and ran a block to where the other troops were waiting. She burst through the door, out of breath.
"They got hit, they got hit, lets gear up and get the fuck out of here," she screamed, as she attempted to catch her breath.
The unit mobilized and headed for the trucks, still yelling, "they got hit, they got hit, we've got to roll."
And roll they did as Ziegler continued to earn her nickname "the lead foot of Baghdad," as she swerved in and out of traffic, heading toward the underpass and traffic circle known as Tayaran Square.
What they found was chaos.
A huge crowd had gathered around the underpass as a dozen soldiers lay in the wreckage, some with glass and shrapnel deep in their faces and bodies. It was the first attack that had directly affected the 143rd.
While medical personnel tended to the injured, Ziegler, and the rest of those who responded, worked to push people away, at times physically shoving them back and threatening them with their weapons.
It wouldn't be the last time her unit would brush death.
A few weeks later, on August 19, Ziegler was standing guard outside the Canal Hotel where the United Nations was based.
Now almost five months into its deployment, the unit was starting to feel the wear and tear of war, and as she stood half asleep, she was startled by a voice.
Blue eyes, get out of here.
Shaking her head with confusion, she laughed off the voice which sounded like that of her grandfather, who had passed away years earlier. Turning to a friend she joked about what she heard.
"You're fucking crazy," she responded.
"No, I just heard it clear as day..."
Blue eyes, get out of here!
Suddenly Ziegler's expression changed.
"You don't look right, you need to drink some water," the fellow solider suggested.
"I just heard it again," she said.
Now, more confused then ever, her friend reiterated what she had said moments earlier.
"You're fucking crazy. You need to go to the pool and destress. You're losing your mind."
"Maybe I am," Ziegler said, trying to laugh the whole thing off.
Damn it blue eyes, get the fuck out of here!
This time Ziegler took full notice of the voice, remembering that her grandfather never swore.
"We gotta go," she yelled as she ran inside to grab a friend who was working on some paperwork and at first was unconcerned with what she had to say.
"I don't care," she screamed at him. "You either get your ass in the fucking truck or it'll leave without you."
Seeing how concerned she was, he decided to oblige, gathering his paperwork and heading for the truck.
Now behind the wheel, the lead foot of Baghdad quickly drove away from the complex, passing through the maze of walls and jersey barriers that protected it. Moments later, with the building out of view behind a wall, a large flatbed truck exploded, killing 22 people, including famous UN diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello.
After that, no one questioned Ziegler's judgment.
"If your grandfather ever talks to you again, I better be the first fucking person to know," someone later said to her.
SEVEN YEARS LATER, the memory of that afternoon is still as vivid as the day it happened. Just as vivid as the Arabic Ziegler was studying an hour earlier, or so she hopes, as she finishes her test and turns it over.
As each student finishes, the professor carries on with the planned lesson as he looks across the room and speaks unfamiliar phrases for the students to repeat.
Even in the disorganized responses, the beauty of the language emerges, with dialects that can be as wild as rapids and as soothing as still water. But as the clock ticks towards 4 p.m. each student displays the unrest of day's end. The same goes for Ziegler who will return home to Hamilton and see her two children.
It's the same unrest that she felt in February 2004, when a commander walked into the room and told her to call home.
"YOUR DAUGHTER IS in the hospital," the commander said.
She frantically looked for the satellite phone held by her unit and in Montana a phone rang in the darkness.
Her mom, who already knew what had happened, picked up on the other end and tried to calm her daughter, slowly explaining that Ziegler's youngest was in a hospital in Allentown, Pa., where her father was taking care of her.
"She's got diabetes."
Hours later she was on a plane headed for Germany and finally Baltimore, where she would make the connection to Allentown. Or so she thought, as she pleaded with the gate agent to get a seat on an overbooked flight.
"I need on this plane, I need on this plane," she cried. "You don't understand. My daughter is in the hospital."
"I'm sorry. We can get you another flight in the morning," the agent responded.
"You don't understand," she said, before finally giving up.
Moments later, an airline employee walked up to the shaken mother and asked how he could help. Ziegler told him the whole story: the war, the call and the daughter in a hospital bed. It was more than enough for him to turn to the desk and grab the pa system microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I know you've heard it more than once and you're probably tired of hearing it, but we have an American soldier who needs to get to Allentown because her daughter is in the ICU. Will anyone please give up their seat," he announced.Seven people stood up.
By the time she got to the hospital, her daughter had been released from the ICU and was sleeping in a bed. After taking a quick shower and washing off the grime of war and travel, she got in bed and held her daughter for the first time in months. She quickly joined her in sleep.
In the morning, the young girl awoke and got out of bed to walk over to her father. She only wanted one thing — her mother.
"Your mommy is in bed," her dad said.
"No, she's not," the girl said.
"Well you better go back and look again, crazy girl."
Ziegler suddenly awoke to screams.
"Mommy, mommy!!!"
ZIEGLER WOULDN'T RETURN to Iraq. With only 90-days left in her unit's tour, she was allowed to stay stateside.
In the months and years that followed, "life happened." She returned home to Montana with her children and went to work. She was also diagnosed with PTSD.
It was another wrench in a confusing life that lacked the order and stability of the military, and in 2007, when her unit was looking for volunteers to go back over, she signed up. It was a decision that her family didn't take well, and she spent weeks thinking about how she would break it to them — especially her father.
"He supports me unfalteringly, but I'm his baby girl and I shouldn't go to war," she said.
But she did, and a few days after Christmas 2008, she was back in Baghdad, serving as a military police officer again. Confined to the area of Baghdad International Airport, her second tour was much safer, but it didn't come without its trials. As one of the few women left in the unit, she was often the victim of inappropriate remarks. In her second year overseas, she spent much of her time trying to avoid the people who treated her wrong.
"They say women in the military have to fight twice as hard," she said. "That's very true."
On October 31, 2009, her unit flew into Bozeman, concluding her second, and what will likely be her final tour in Iraq.
But for her, the war will never end. Everyday she must deal with the effects of her time in Iraq and PTSD.
"I had major mood swings; I had a violent temper ... I couldn't drive under the Orange Street underpass," she said, because of the memories of that summer morning at Tayaran Square.
But with psychiatric help, life has gotten better.
"[My doctor] taught me some ways that I can overcome some things," she said, "and some of them I will just always have for the rest of my life."
She's dealt with it better than some, remembering an uncle who had fought in Vietnam, who, following her first tour, became a confidant, shortly before he died.
"I was having huge troubles just functioning as a civilian and I'd drive to Townsend and find him in a bar, because he was a Vietnam-era veteran and they had (PTSD), but they didn't know how to deal with it," she said.
"He was the one person who I could talk to that wasn't like ‘Oh, you should go see a doctor' or ‘You need to get on pills for that' or ‘you need to get over it, it's in the past,'" she said. "He's the only person I've ever told everything, and he's probably the only person I will tell everything to... because, for a lack of a better term, he's been there, done that."
But unlike her uncle, she now tries to live the life he never could. Now enrolled at UM, she hopes to become a photographer in the future and jokes that the classes she takes merely lead to a four-year degree in understanding her Nikon digital camera.
But she often feels out of place in a classroom.
"I'm very unsocial in most of my classes, because I can't deal with the 18-19-year-old drama. I really can't. I've seen dead bodies, I've seen blown up bodies and I couldn't really give two shits less that Johnny broke up with you at the homecoming dance," she said.
This is the stuff she hears in classrooms like the one on the third-floor of the Liberal Arts Building, where she now grabs her books and slides them into her bag. Handing her exam to a teacher's assistant, she turns to the door and waits, watching her classmates file out of the room.
She is one of the last to leave.