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

by Anthony Swofford

  I asked her, “Have you ever climbed Fuji-san?”

  She laughed. “No Fuji on Okinawa, dumb-dumb. Fuji-san means, what you say, vacation? No vacation for my family. Work and work and don’t stop to work more. Vacation is time to work. If restaurant is slow, I go work in uncle’s butcher. If butcher is slow, I go work in uncle’s laundry. If laundry is slow, I go back to restaurant, fold napkins, fold gyoza, sweep.”

  I could tell she didn’t want to talk about Fuji. The Japanese I’d known either loved to talk about Fuji or refused, and either way, they were talking about Fuji. The mountain is blight or jewel. The topic of Mount Fuji is like the topic of war.

  But I told Yumiko the story of my family climbing Mount Fuji on July 4, 1976, and the confusion this caused for me, as the two hundredth anniversary of my nation, a nation I wasn’t currently living in, had been celebrated by my family with a rigorous two-day hike up the side of a treacherous (to my five-year-old eyes) foreign mountain. My father explained to me the history of the American Revolution, and that because of wars that had been fought, and mostly won, America was everywhere, that the base we lived on, in Japan, was a piece of America, and that similar little Americas thrived all over the world.

  I stayed with Yumiko on weekends, taking a $30 cab from the north to Naha on Friday evening and returning to base late Sunday night. She told me about her boyfriend, who was still enrolled at business school in Tokyo. We stayed out of the fashionable bars because he was known around Naha. Mostly we drank sake in her apartment and beers on the beaches. When not drinking, we were snorkeling or making love. I’d wake early in the morning, at four-thirty or five, and go on a city run. The streets of Naha were wet at this hour, the sweepers having just rumbled through; shopkeepers, grocers, and fish merchants were opening their chained storefronts. I never saw another white person this early, and I would catch the shopkeepers’ eyes as I pounded through the streets and alleys.

  After a few months, Yumiko’s boyfriend returned from Tokyo. We bought each other drinks. His name was Saturo, and we became friends. I never asked Yumiko what, if anything, she’d told him about me. It wasn’t important. I told them I was not a dependent but an active-duty marine. Yumiko said, “No shit, Tony-san. I knew that from the get and go. Let’s still be friends, no?”

  I continued to leave base on the weekends. The three of us would go to clubs and drink immense amounts of alcohol. It would have been easy for me to leave a club with a woman, but I always kept the integrity of our triumvirate intact. We’d return to Yumiko’s parents’ restaurant early in the morning and eat breakfast together, and often I’d stay awake all day, playing poker with the cook while Yumiko and Saturo slept through the afternoon. The cook taught me how to cheat at cards, and also how to drink sake without your boss knowing you’re drunk. His family had relocated to Okinawa after the bombs, and he showed me pictures of the devastation in his old neighborhood in Hiroshima. He would say, “Fucking Americans. You okay, Tony-san. Fucking Americans.” And he’d tend to his curry or yakisoba or other coarse country meals.

  That May I rotated back to the States. The night before my battalion left, Yumiko took a cab to Camp Hansen and slept in the barracks with me. She brought a pear that I sliced and fed her, and we made love all night in silence. When not caressing or kissing, we stared at our bodies, entwined like the histories of our nations. Her hands, as she loved me, felt like rose petals against my skin. On my tiny government-issue rack, in a concrete barracks built just after World War II, I experienced more passion than I had ever before in my life. We raced against the sunrise, the sure death of our affair, and every second that I was inside her, we both burned. I sucked her breath from her mouth and she bit my tongue until it bled. As the sun broke into the barracks, we wept, and she kissed my chest softly.

  I walked her to the taxi stand, and Saturo was there, waiting in Yumiko’s father’s van, along with the cook. The cook exited the van and walked toward me, and he handed me a bag of dried shiitake mushrooms and a bottle of nigori sake and we bowed toward one another. Yumiko jumped into the van, Saturo cursed at her and shook his head, and they drove away.

  I felt bad that Saturo had discovered us, but I also assumed that he’d known, and that when he’d gone to Yumiko’s apartment the prior night and she wasn’t there, the cook had told him what he hadn’t wanted to hear.

  * * *

  I wrote Yumiko a few letters from Saudi Arabia; she was in Japan and Japan was everything Saudi Arabia could never be. I was in the Desert, sending out messages worldwide, clamoring for love with my pen. And with each letter I wrote and sealed, parts of me escaped the Kingdom of Saud. At times I thought I might write myself away, fit my entire body and mind into a few thick envelopes, and that way, as a stowaway, escape the ghastly end that awaited me.

  My father served in the jungles of Vietnam from February of 1969 to February of 1970. He was twenty-eight and had been in the air force since the age of seventeen, so to him Vietnam mostly meant packing another seabag, Indochina being another duty station, like Travis or Seville or Moses Lake. But this time, a chance to break away from the wife and kids.

  My father’s age and the family back home and his proclivities toward Scotch and beer placed him in the population rarely depicted in the literature and films of the Vietnam War. He was not a crazed, fucked-in-the-head grunt, stoned on uppers or nodding on H, not a stealthy Special Forces guru, nineteen or twenty, the perfect age to die; he was a father and a lifer, and while he wasn’t necessarily a patriot, he wouldn’t be fragging anyone over orders he didn’t groove on or dig—he’d build the fucking landing strip in the middle of the gookthick jungle and at the end of the day hope for Chivas and Budweiser, write a few letters home, maybe screw a whore in the ville. (What happens overseas stays overseas, until someone writes about it. I don’t know what my father did in the villes of that bombed-out, fucked-out country, but I’ll assume.)

  One night between the thirteenth and twentieth of November 1969, I was conceived at the Honolulu Hilton. My father had received a surprise week of R&R. He called my mother from Saigon and told her to be in Honolulu in ten hours, and she called my aunt and asked her to watch my brother and sister. Not expecting my father home until February, she’d been off the pill. I am that old practical joke, the mistake. No one saw me coming.

  The hotel room: orange shag carpet, one king bed, ocean view. Wet bar (my father empties the Scotch each night). The painting above the bed is of sailboats or sea horses. Snorkel equipment still wet, hanging from the balcony rail. Two 35mm cameras, four spent rolls of film, seventeen shots left on one camera, five on the other. On the dresser, a framed picture my mother brought from California—my soon-to-be father, mother, brother, and sister on the street in Seville, Spain, a donkey and a pretty Spanish girl behind them. In my mother’s basket: grapes, red peppers, meat, wine. My brother and sister are dressed like a flamenco couple. My father is wearing jeans and a black, button-up shirt and black, dusty brogans; my mother wears a pretty yellow sundress.

  In the bed, in Hawaii, my parents are fornicating. I cannot watch, and neither can you.

  My father could’ve flown to Vietnam the next day and been shot dead, on the street or in the jungle. But he wasn’t shot: the bullets and shrapnel missed him, and he arrived home three months later, a few more ribbons and medals on his chest, a pregnant wife sitting on the porch, nervously smoking.

  My father returned from Vietnam only partially disturbed. For many years he suffered migraines, and at social events he wandered away from the crowds to pace. In Japan, in 1975, I played Pee-Wee football on base. My father filmed our games with Super 8. But at some point in the action he’d stop the camera, break down his tripod, pack his gear, and pace behind the bleachers during the remaining quarters, smoking, my handsome father. Years later my mother insisted that the possibility of me breaking a bone was too much for him, weak-stomached man, afraid of his own blood, vomiting over nosebleeds. I’m sure my mother was wrong, that her hypothesi
s was a product of the divorcée’s caustic revisionist history. I think my father couldn’t stand still in one place for too long because if you do, a bomb lands there. And then you are dead.

  In 1981, when his migraines tapered off, his hands locked in fists. At this time, I delivered a paper route. I’d wake at five-thirty, before anyone else in the house. I’d have about half of my papers folded, and my father would emerge from my parents’ bedroom. He’d find me in the garage and sit next to me on the cold concrete floor, fisted hands on his knees.

  He’d say, “Sorry, Tone, wish I could help.”

  Some mornings he’d be fine, and he’d help me fold and load my papers onto my bike, and I’d return from delivering my ninety papers and he’d be dressed in uniform, but usually when I returned, he was still sitting on the floor of the garage, reading, turning the pages of the paper with his fists. I suppose my mother helped him dress on these mornings.

  After breakfast, I’d walk with him to his Jaguar and jump in the passenger seat, and I’d work his right fist over the clutch ball and his left fist over the steering wheel, and I’d start the car and in winter turn the headlights on.

  His doctors weren’t able to explain these ailments, or at least that’s the story I received. Agent Orange, maybe? Plain and simple madness? My father once told me that after Vietnam he’d been ordered numerous times to visit the base psychiatrist, something he never did. I suppose he had enough rank to cover his insubordination. Of course he needed help. Not only because of Vietnam, but because his mother had died when he was three months old and his closest half brother died while a marine on embassy duty in 1967. My father was thirty-nine years old and the world seemed a dead, cold place, void of promise. The problems of his psyche had become manifest in his hands. With his fists he beat at the thick chest of the world, but the world ignored him. Of course the world ignored him.

  Not long after being birthed through the bloody canal of boot camp, my mind still cluttered with the junk of my military incarnation—Ribbons and Medals, Rifle Badges, Nomenclature, Marine Corps History, Policies and Procedures, Laws of War—this knowledge and these dangling accessories wrapped around my neck like a yolk stalk, I realized that joining the marines had been a poor decision. I had, not unlike Céline’s Bardamu, stood from my seat at the café—where with a friend I’d been busy smoking, drinking, and looking at the ladies—and joined the colonel’s march, his insane parade through the brick streets. I waved and said good-bye to my friend, but for the sounds of bugles and tank tracks, he did not hear my farewell.

  While at Barracks Duty School I further decided my enlistment was a poor decision. I performed morning calisthenics, cleaned my weapons, shot my rifle, shotgun, and pistol expertly, and then, during the sixth week of barracks-duty training, the captain called me to his office.

  There’d been a budget cut, and the school had to rid itself of three trainees and send them to the infantry, the Fleet Marine Force, the ready combat force of the Marine Corps. Now, rather than standing guard duty in my handsome uniform, in front of a navy nuclear or missile facility, I’d be doing what I was supposedly made for—humping up steep mountains or through thick jungles with a hundred pounds on my back, sweating and cussing in my wrinkled fatigues, with a large target on my chest: USMC GRUNT.

  I was number three. Number one had been Private So-and-So, who for weeks tried for a psych discharge and had in his latest act of defiance masturbated on the captain’s desk; number two was a young man, Private So-and-So, who tried for an admin homosexual discharge, making passes at the base MPs, wearing a pink bolo while on guard duty, but during the captain’s weeklong review of the paperwork, he discovered that the young marine had been screwing the captain’s daughter. So it goes when you screw the captain’s daughter. When you’re in, you’re in.

  And when you’re out, you’re out. The captain had found my drug waiver.

  At boot camp, during in-processing, I’d confessed to using drugs, something I hadn’t disclosed prior to signing my enlistment contract. Part of the reason I’d spoken up was that, on the third day of boot camp, I wanted, more than anything, not to be in boot camp. I’d slept six hours in two days; they’d shaved my head and insulted me with hundreds of spectacularly profane phrases and shoved my shaved head into the chalkboard. I wanted to go home and screw my girlfriend and paint houses for my father and drink beer with my buddies, who were screwing their girlfriends (and maybe mine) and painting houses for my father and drinking beer. I remember the room: gray industrial carpet, blue plastic seats, scarlet and gold paint, Marine Corps and U.S. flags. Ten or fifteen of us were in this last phase of being administratively harassed, the Final Flushing Out. All day recruits had been standing up and admitting things they hadn’t told their recruiters: gay, asthmatic, sleepwalker, illegal alien, felon, fraudulent high school diploma, bed wetter.

  Drill Instructor Burke exercised us to keep us alert. He barked the orders and paced in front of us.

  “I know you cum receptacles have something to tell me. I know you’ve lied to my Marine Corps. If it’s drugs, we’ll find it. If you’re a puffer, we’ll catch you ass-dorking in the shower or we’ll find the cock magazine under your rack. Ya’ll ain’t faggots, are you? Your faggot bus to Hollywood left ten minutes ago. Let me guess. You keep exercising, ladies, and I’ll figure you out. Don’t do me any favors. Don’t help me out here.

  “You, California boy. Swofford. You sure are pretty. Them’s pretty blue eyes you got. You sure you ain’t a homo? I know you lied about something. Every one of you lied. It’s my job to find it out of you. Push-ups!

  “Honestly, fellows, what I’m doing here is a favor to you. I’m giving you an option. You tell me now, we write it down in our book, and if it’s nothing major, we forget about it. Once you’re in the Fleet Marine Force and they find out you lied on your contract, they’ll put you in the brig. Do you want to go to the brig someday, Swofford?”

  “Sir, the recruit will admit something, sir.”

  “Don’t lie to me, you worthless cum receptacle.”

  I admitted to formerly using cocaine (four times), methamphetamines (twice), LSD (twice), and marijuana (once).

  I closed my eyes and pissed my pants as Drill Instructor Burke screamed in my ear the words faggot, addict, cumsucker, bitchmaster, dickskinner, dickfuck, fuckforbrains, nopecker, and lilywhitebitch.

  I spoke to the colonel about my drug revelation. I hoped he’d send me home. But he ordered me to perform one hundred push-ups and said it was embarrassing for everyone that I’d pissed my pants and to save pissing my pants for combat. He said he thought I’d be a good marine someday, and he’d try to keep my barracks-duty contract for me.

  But after fourteen weeks of boot camp and six weeks of barracks-duty training, the captain sent me to the infantry. This was unfortunate for many reasons. From the roll call of local Vallejo women, I’d recently found a girlfriend, a Vietnamese woman new to the country by a few years. She worked at the club on base, and after serving me drinks for a few weeks, she asked me out on a date. I told her I had a girlfriend, but she said that didn’t matter, and I couldn’t argue with her. She was poor and honest about her desire to acquire a husband from the Marines who’d take care of her while serving his country honorably and with valor and concurrently fathering numerous children. In the military, the more children, the bigger the check. At the same time that she cultivated dreams of pulling herself from the muck of immigrant poverty with the good love of a good man, my girlfriend understood I had no intention of fathering her plan. She only asked that I not marry my other girlfriend, down the road, Kristina in Sacramento.

  I enjoyed the sex we shared, and I looked forward to sleeping, on weekends, on the living room floor of her family’s house, a filthy ramshackle tumble of wood and stucco, home to three generations of Vietnamese. I loved her, more than I ever did Kristina, and for many months after my training and duty at Mare Island ended, I sent her money orders of $50 and sometimes $100 to help with gr
oceries or rent. So my forced departure from the posh, velvet-lined concertina wire of Barracks Duty School was not well received.

  I considered masturbating on the captain’s desk, but instead I called him a faggot addict cumsucker bitchmaster dickskinner dickfuck fuckforbrains nopecker lilywhitebitch. He laughed as he signed my orders to the Seventh Marines.

  During the long bus ride to Camp Pendleton, I confirmed for myself that joining the Marines had been a mistake. At a breakfast stop in Bakersfield, I considered fleeing, but decided this was my lot, to serve, and I would handle it like a man—I would do my duty wherever they might send me, accomplish all missions, honor my contractual obligation. And besides, Bakersfield looked like a place where people were dying slowly without knowing it—to the east, oil derricks and miles of flat, dead desert, and to the west, strip malls and designer suburban neighborhoods.

  I spent my first few days at Camp Pendleton in the base hospital, faking a stomach flu. I chewed Ex-Lax gum and this kept me shitting and dehydrated. A few times a day, I sneaked away to the hospital café and ate their good hamburgers and meat loaf; though I knew the food was not long for my body, I relished the almost civilian flavors.

  I pursued a sweet, young candy striper during my stay at the hospital, daughter of an artillery major. She was more than giving with the pinochle and poker cards and small boxes of hard candy, but she did not concede her body, not even a kiss. I felt like an old pervert, though I was merely eighteen and she sixteen, the age of consent in most sane countries. When I’d try to kiss the major’s daughter, she’d laugh at me and say, “You funny marine,” or, “Wait until I tell the major,” or, “My boyfriend is a linebacker for the Camp Pendleton High School Mustangs.” I missed her when I left and I knew she missed me. She knew I was not like her father.