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Charlie”), fire control. Debbie could make the big guns on a tank shoot straight. She could also make grown men shrink with her smuttiness, and she had no problem drinking beer in the morning. She had been one of the pioneers who had integrated the unit, back when women were first allowed to join, and she had always gotten along seamlessly with the men who surrounded her—she was not the type to mutter if a guy started talking about anatomy.
    Over the years, Debbie came to play a maternal figure to most of the men in the unit, and to the growing number of women who served alongside them. Debbie was benevolent, chatty, kind. She had ivory skin covered in faint freckles; prominent cheekbones set high in a square face; short, curly dark brown hair that she often pinned back with barrettes; and a tall, spare frame. People called her Olive Oyl. She was a softball fanatic, a perennial volunteer, cheerful, buoyant. She took care of everybody else. Debbie liked to talk, though she rarely said anything personally revealing, perhaps because she did not consider her interior world important, and she had a way of constantly bestowing affirmationon others. She called other people “honey” or “dear” or “sweet pea.” If the 113th Support Battalion had a den mother, it was Debbie Helton. And being in the National Guard gave Debbie what some people found at church—a community, a way to connect to a larger circle, a means of submerging herself in a group that she held in high esteem.
    That was Debbie on drill weekends. In her civilian life, she managed a beauty salon inside a department store at one end of a shopping mall. The department store was called L. S. Ayres. Debbie lived in Bloomington, Indiana, where she had grown up and was now raising her daughter. In addition to managing the salon, she also saw clients for waxing or electrolysis. Once a month, she drove up to Indianapolis to confer with her boss, who lived and worked out of Fort Wayne, Indiana—they would each drive to the L. S. Ayres store in Indy, meeting halfway.
    On the morning of September 11, 2001, Debbie left her house around nine, as the drive to Indy took roughly an hour. At about 9:15 a.m. she was heading northeast on Highway 37 in the gold 1990 Cavalier she had bought used after she had enlisted in the Guard, and could finally afford a vehicle, listening to the Bob & Tom Show . A person had to have a sick sense of humor to enjoy the syndicated comedy show, but it was Debbie’s main source of news. That morning the hosts ripped into the idiot who had accidentally flown his plane into an iconic part of the New York City skyline. The hosts were still apologizing for their misreading of the terrorist attack when she got to Indy. Her boss asked if she needed to leave. “No, I didn’t get a phone call,” Debbie replied. “I have a feeling we will have some type of involvement going forward, but I don’t know what or when.”
    Debbie was mesmerized by the idea of firefighters running up all those stairs. She also wore a uniform, she also strove to rescue. She wondered if she would find a call from the Guard on her home answering machine, but when she got back to Bloomington, no call had come. That was disappointing to her—she would have liked to be needed. Her regular monthly drill weekend fell four days later. When she arrived at the armory in Bedford, she found the 113th Support Battalion’s Bravo Company in a tumult. People were milling around, tasks abandoned. She heard a fellow Guardsman say that maybe the active duty troops would go, maybe the Guard would assume responsibility for securityin the United States. They talked about the fact that Bill Clinton had just finished closing bases. If there was a war, the regular army would be stretched thin. The uncertainty assailed the unit in disparate ways—emotionally, they were splintering. Some of the younger guys feared being left out of the