Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles

by Anthony Swofford

  We stop the field-fuck and rip our gas masks from our faces and throw them in the air, as football players might do with their helmets after an especially grueling victory. We’re bent over at the waist, hands on knees, breathing hard, breathing free. We pile our charcoal-lined MOPP suits in the straddle trench. We’re standing around the trench either naked or in skivvy bottoms. We look like burn victims. The fires, the smoke and mirrors of history have been transposed to our skin.

  The colonel and his driver jog at double time toward the Land Rover, the woman from the Boston Globe in tow. The Times reporter will stay on a few days.

  Kuehn douses the suits with fuel and strikes a match. He says, “May God please save us, because these MOPP suits won’t,” and he drops the match, sending the pile into raging flames that burn black and sooty, choking the blue sky gray.

  A few guys stand in line in front of a Humvee while Vegh pours water over them in a useless attempt at replicating a shower. Nothing other than an honest, power-driven shower will clean this muck from our bodies. I rub water over my face, and as the water runs down my forearms and mixes with the charcoal MOPP protectant, I recognize an odd formation on my skin, like a tattoo of fish scales. My thoughts return to my childhood in Japan. The world expands and contracts. My temples begin to throb and my ears ring a piercing rhythm through my brain. It’s the heat, or breathing through the gas mask for an hour, or desert exhaustion, but I must sit down, and as I do, I stare at my forearms as though they are a map.

  One day, as a child in Tachikawa, Japan, I sneaked off the air force base where my family lived and entered the city, hoping to find a nearby candy store. I was nervous. When shopping with my mother, Japanese women constantly stopped us on the street to look into my blue eyes, and the attention confused and aroused me and I often pissed my pants while a Japanese lady giggled and tickled my stomach or stroked my hair. But my younger sister’s birthday was soon, and I wanted to surprise her with a long necklace of whistle gum, her favorite novelty from our preferred candy store. I’d never been off base alone, and I quickly lost my way. I knew the store was in an alley, and so I wandered from alley to alley, as they all looked alike with noodle houses and teahouses and sake bars and fish shops and electronics stores and candy stores that weren’t the one I wanted. I ended up in a tattoo shop.

  Two artists were busy on skin, one needling a man, his partner needling a woman. The artists were smoking and talking and hard at work, so they didn’t notice me enter their shop. The clients looked at me and the woman smiled. They were naked above the waist, and their bodies were covered with ink, dragons and fish and ancient, wicked shogunal faces. Their tattoos were identical. I didn’t even notice the woman’s breasts. At the navel they each had a tattoo of a mushroom cloud. As the artists worked, in the middle of the man’s chest an image of the woman’s face began to appear, and in the middle of the woman’s chest an image of the man’s face began to appear. The man was ugly, with the face of a kicked dog, but the woman was beautiful and I thought him lucky to have her face painted on his chest, though I didn’t understand the permanence of the shared act.

  The artists still hadn’t noticed me, and I continued to stare. I stood watching for an hour at least, as the faces were finished and the artists moved to their clients’ forearms. They painted fish scales, and the electric needles continued to hum in the air like mad flies. The couple stared at one another and the woman occasionally smiled at me. The artists worked and smoked and talked back and forth in quiet, harsh whispers, aware only of the skin canvases in front of them. The woman’s work was completed first, and when her tattooist noticed me, he hissed and threw his cigarette at me. The burning cigarette missed and I picked it up and threw it back at him, then I ran from the shop. The woman screamed. I didn’t stop running until I made it home.

  I awake hours later on a cot under the infrared net, with an IV in my arm. I passed out, as did a few of my platoon mates. We’ll be sick for five days with dysentery. Yesterday, Fowler had gone to the rear on a fuel run and stole a vat of food from the chow hall, hoping it was hot food—lasagna or beans and rice or beef stew or any of the slop they make in those hideous chrome kitchens, but it was a plain green-leaf salad with no dressing. Only those of us desperate enough to eat the salad are down with the sickness. The lettuce came from Jordanian fields where they use human feces as fertilizer. So here we are, defending a country none of us gives a shit about, eating its neighbors’ shit, and burying ours in the sand.

  Prior to leaving the platoon, the Times reporter asks us what we want from the States, and we give him a list: European or Asian porn mags of any size, shape, content, and function; Oreo cookies; canned tuna; saltine crackers; Gatorade; Truth; a rotate-to-the-states date; ham; turkey; salami; a month of the New York Times; condoms just in case; canned soups; letter-writing gear; batteries; powdered chocolate; actual coffee, not crystals; candy bars; pop; beef jerky; whiskey; mouthwash; rubber bands; duct tape; corned beef hash; Sterno; Jolly Ranchers; the names and addresses of women incarcerated at federal correctional facilities; mail-order Filipino-bride catalog; cigars; baby-name book; marijuana; methamphetamines; cocaine; LSD; penis enlarger; pocket-pussy; blowup doll; butt beads; Vaseline; baby powder; shaving cream; boot laces; toothpaste; shower soap; needles and thread.

  We don’t believe he’ll come through, but a month after his visit, a cardboard box the size of two footlockers arrives, full of some of the items on our list and others we didn’t request. We’re surprised, and a few of us walk around the box and choose not to remove anything, having forgotten what we’d requested and feeling that if we reach into the box, we’ll spoil the magic.

  Kuehn thumbs through a smut mag and says, “He’s an all right motherfucker. I didn’t believe him for a second. He’s all right for a reporter.”

  On the second day of boot camp I was selected for the platoon scribe position. My job would be to assist the drill instructors in administrative duties such as completing sick-call chits, training schedules, and travel manifests. My first task required me to draw on the barracks chalkboard the proper layout of our footlockers. Drill Instructor Burke handed me a photocopy of the footlocker display and ordered me to create a masterpiece.

  Burke, like most DIs, didn’t speak as much as growl. His chest was as thick as a butcher block. His eyes looked dead, as though he’d lost them for a few years and found them washed up on the beach. When he yelled, every vein in his body jumped. He wore, I would learn, the Charlie Uniform: olive-drab wool trousers and short-sleeve beige shirt with ribbons and badges. Expert badges for rifle and pistol were pinned to his left pocket flap. Above the badges he wore ribbons from Beirut. Later that night he’d tell us “Beirut bedtime stories” about digging dead buddies from the rubble.

  I suppose there was confusion over what capabilities a scribe should possess, and drawing had never been my strong suit. I struggled through a poor representation of the schematic I held in my hand. I attempted to concentrate on the task while Burke ran up and down the squad bay, agitating and insulting my fellow recruits, making accusations about bestiality and other dark secrets the recruits were hiding. I took some pleasure in that scribe duty might keep me out of the line of verbal fire.

  He yelled to a recruit, “I can’t believe my fucking eyes! Did you piss your trousers, boy? Did you piss your trousers like a little girl?”

  “Sir, no, sir!”

  “You had an orgasm, is that it? You think I’m so sexy you jizzed in your trousers? Where are you from, boy?”

  “Sir, Olympia, Washington, sir.”

  “Fuck me standing! My mother lives in Olympia. She don’t piss her pants. Where’d you learn to piss your pants, boy? From your mama?”

  “Sir, the recruit’s mother is dead, sir.”

  “One less bitch I got to worry about her calling her senator because her cunt son can’t handle my Marine Corps!”

  “Sir, my mother was not a bitch, sir. Sir, I am not a cunt and I can handle your Marine Corps
, sir.”

  Burke punched the recruit square on the forehead. He swayed but his knees did not give. The recruit had made the mistake of using personal pronouns, which the recruit is not allowed to use when referring to the drill instructor or himself. The recruit is the recruit. The drill instructor is the drill instructor or sir.

  Burke surveyed the platoon, hands clasped behind his back.

  He yelled, addressing us all, “I am your mommy and your daddy! I am your nightmare and your wet dream! I am your morning and your night! I will tell you when to piss and when to shit and how much food to eat and when! I will teach you how to kill and how to stay alive! I will forge you into part of the iron fist with which our great United States fights oppression and injustice! Do you understand me, recruits?”

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “If your daddy is a doctor or if you come from the projects in East St. Louis or a reservation in Arizona, it no longer matters. Black. White. Mexican. Vietnamese. Navajo. The Marine Corps does not care! Your drill instructors do not care! You are now green! You are light green or dark green. You are not black or white or brown or yellow or red. Do you understand me, recruits?”

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  Burke approached me and the chalkboard. “What in the fuck is that, scribe?”

  “Sir, it’s the recruit’s drawing of the footlocker, sir,” I said.

  “Jesus, Joseph, and doggy-style Mary, that looks like a pile of dogshit! My three-month-old daughter can draw better than that.”

  “Sir, the recruit has never been good at drawing, sir.”

  “Why the fuck are you my scribe? Isn’t my scribe supposed to know how to draw?”

  “Sir, the recruit doesn’t know. The recruit thought the scribe was supposed to write, sir.”

  “Of course the recruit doesn’t know! The recruit doesn’t know because I haven’t told him! And don’t fucking tell me what my shithead scribe is supposed to do. You are my shithead scribe because someone fucked up! You should be in the retard platoon, learning how to draw with crayons and throwing your shit on the bulkheads!”

  While he spoke, he spit in my face, and he bashed the brim of his Smokey Bear cover into my nose and pressed his index finger into my chest. He asked me to read what I’d written and point out exactly where the skivvies and running shoes were supposed to go. I couldn’t decipher my chalk drawing. He slapped me on the back of the head a few times, as though slowly contemplating some further violence, winding me up, and then he shoved my head into the chalkboard. The board was affixed to the cinder-block barracks wall, so that after my head broke through the chalkboard, it stopped at the cinder block. I did not really feel the assault. It’s possible it was minor enough, and that’s why I didn’t feel it, or I was in shock. The large bump on my head would fade away by the end of the week.

  Burke leaned in close to my face and I could feel his moist, cruel breath in my ear, and he said, “Boy, you just entered my killing zone.”

  He continued berating me, and he complained that I’d ruined his goddamn perfectly good chalkboard, which was, according to Marine Corps Logic 101, absolutely true. He ordered me to prepare my own footlocker as a model for the rest of the platoon. While I labored over this task, he allowed my platoon mates to write letters home.

  Eventually I finished, and did not a bad job, for the first time in my life attempting to fold skivvies into four-by-six-inch squares, for the first time in my life actually referring to underwear as skivvies, pants as trousers, a hat as a cover. Now, hands were dickskinners, the mouth was a cum receptacle, running shoes were go-fasters, a flashlight was a moonbeam, a pen was an ink stick, a bed was a rack, a wall was a bulkhead, a bathroom was a head, a shirt was a blouse, a tie was still a tie, and a belt a belt, but many other things would never be the same.

  Burke didn’t touch me again, but he beat on other recruits. I’m sure he had only the best intentions, and now when I consider him and his acts of violence, they seem petty, not severe enough. I wish that that night at the chalkboard, after he’d shoved my head into the wall, he’d have put me to the floor with a swift knee to the stomach, followed by a boot to the face, and another boot, and that he’d have continued beating me, while the other recruits watched, horrified, observing their future. Perhaps this is only the luxury of distance and time and the reemergence of the blind stupidity and dumb loyalty that first led me into the Corps and helped carry me out alive. But a further beating wouldn’t have damaged me, a further beating wouldn’t have caused me to run.

  One morning during a heavy rain, we shoved our racks to the bulkheads and turned our barracks into a mini-drill-field and practiced close order drill. We’d been issued our weapons the day before, and even for a farm boy raised with a rifle in his lap, the particulars of COD are difficult. You don’t throw the weapon over your shoulder and a piece of straw into your mouth, like you used to do before diddying down to the local hot spot for squirrels.

  We dropped our rifles, confused port arms with shoulder arms, and along the way Burke became angrier and angrier, until he grabbed a recruit’s rifle and rifle-butted him in the chest. The recruit fell backward a few ranks, and Burke threw the recruit’s weapon at him and stormed out of the barracks. Unfortunately for Burke, the company commander stood at the back stairwell and had watched him train us and eventually lose his temper.

  A few hours later, a command lieutenant spoke to our platoon and ordered anyone who’d been physically assaulted by Burke to come forward. Along with others, I chose to speak, and I wrote a report of what had occurred the first night of training when Burke had introduced me to the chalkboard. Partly I did this because I believed that no one had a right to put his hands on me. I briefly fantasized that the Marine Corps would apologize to me and buy me a ticket home, no questions asked. But mostly I hoped that reporting Burke’s brutality might somehow put me in danger, increase the odds against my survival, that his fellow DIs would fuck me further and longer than anyone else, and I welcomed this imagined challenge. I’d increased the likelihood of my failure.

  Burke was transferred to another platoon in our training company, and we rarely saw him. The matter didn’t surface again, and I left boot camp and never spoke about the event. Sometimes I’d think that my reporting Burke would surface and reflect poorly on me. I had daydreams of running into Burke in a bar on Okinawa, where I’d apologize to him for being so weak, ask his forgiveness, and let him beat on me more, as I assumed he’d have liked to that second night at boot camp.

  Like most good and great marines, I hated the Corps. I hated being a marine because more than all of the things in the world I wanted to be—smart, famous, sexy, oversexed, drunk, fucked, high, alone, famous, smart, known, understood, loved, forgiven, oversexed, drunk, high, smart, sexy—more than all of those things, I was a marine. A jarhead. A grunt.

  I hated the Marines and I hated being a marine. I wore earrings while on leave and liberty, grew sideburns, hung out with gay navy guys who knew the best straight clubs anywhere—San Diego, L.A., Olongapo, Angeles City, Barrio, Kinville, Naha, Pusan, Seoul—jarhead-free clubs where I’d lie to pretty local girls and say I was a college student visiting my parents.

  When I partied in enlisted clubs, things went poorly. I remember one night in particular—an enormous fight between jarheads and airmen at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa; we tore the place apart, tables and chairs and people airborne, broken bodies, broken bottles, broken skulls; one jarhead was punched for good reason and we all poured ourselves into the dumb, brutal stew. I made it out the back and missed the MPs.

  I ducked into a sex show downtown, where a beautiful, young Filipino girl assaulted bananas and stacks of yen with her crotch. Bored and saddened by the show, I ventured into the warm night, steering clear of the Japanese police, the JPs, masters of the baton.

  I found a jarhead-free restaurant and bar I’d eaten at before, and I drank Asahi and sake and ate broiled mackerel with the owner’s daughter, whose name was Yumiko. Her hair was dyed
wine-red. When she laughed, three small wrinkles appeared on the bridge of her nose. She wore deep red lipstick and her lips were like waves and I imagined them crashing against my thin lips, crushing me. Her chin was rather sharp, and I would come to enjoy lightly kissing it while she slept.

  I’d retained spotty Japanese from living in Tachikawa from age four to seven, and Yumiko had rough English from the Tokyo business school she’d dropped out of. I told her I went to college in America but I was taking a semester off, visiting my parents up north. We carried a big bottle of nigori sake upstairs to her convenience apartment, and we drank the sweet, cloudy liquor and listened to Japanese pop for hours before helping each other out of our clothes.

  In the morning, in the kitchen downstairs, she made omelette-rice and miso and more mackerel. We sat on the spotless floor and ate from dark lacquerware. She called me Prince An-tony, the name of a popular Japanese cartoon character. Later, we drank beers on Red Beach between snorkeling missions, the ocean blue like a welder’s flame, the tide soft against the white sand. We’d driven to the beach in her father’s three-cylinder Suzuki van, and we had sex in the van, to the smell of burnt engine oil and seaweed, and to the slow slap of the ocean on dark volcanic rocks. We snorkeled again. I forget the names of the fish we saw, though I remember the fresh urchin bleeding through Yumiko’s fingers as she opened them for me on the beach, and I remember the taste of the urchin and her skin.