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

by Anthony Swofford

  There are six of us, and together we carry five M16s, three M203 rifle/grenade launchers, two 9mm pistols, one M40A1 sniper rifle, and one .50-caliber sniper rifle, plus a few dozen frag grenades and smoke, and our platoon corpsman is attached, Doc John, who carries a 9mm he isn’t supposed to use. We’re being possum-fucked—not only has the command denied support, but their denial of the support is a vote of no confidence in our ability to properly and lawfully engage the enemy. Twice fucked. We’re bait, and for the first time since joining the Marine Corps and for the first time since my arrival in-country, I feel completely dispensable. Countless other times I have felt worthless and unimportant, but never completely dispensable. If we get carved to oblivion out there, it doesn’t matter, as long as we don’t massacre surrendering Iraqis, and the current mission is to convince the Iraqis to surrender. Somewhere, at regiment or division, or even higher, a major and a light colonel are busy crunching the numbers, and a six-man scout team or a two-man sniper team from a marine infantry battalion have been deemed worth losing.

  We exit the battalion perimeter through Golf Company, Third Platoon, lines, my old platoon, but I know no one. The grunts are polite; they’ve heard that the CP perimeter took rounds earlier and also that we are being sent out with no support. One of their sergeants tells us that if we get caught in a firefight, dial him up and if he’s able, he’ll send a squad for us. The sergeant’s generous offer is not smart but noble and even admirable, and, if only for a moment, he makes us feel better, or at least loved, loved in the way men love one another when they enter combat—loved as brothers love brothers and fathers love sons and sons love fathers—because they are men and they might soon die in one another’s arms.

  What we are about to accomplish, our first combat patrol, will void every training cycle we’ve participated in, every round we’ve fired at a paper or twisted-metal target, every grenade thrown at iron dummies. When you take the initial steps of your first combat patrol, you are again newborn—no, you are unborn—and every boot step you take is one step closer to or further from the region of the living, and the worst part is you never know which way you’re walking until you’re there.

  Martinez takes point, Kuehn falls in behind him, Johnny mans the compass and map behind Kuehn, Dettmann with the worthless heavy radio on his back follows Johnny, Meyers and Doc John are in line between Dettmann and me. I like taking the rear, looking behind me every ten or so steps, visually controlling the entire field of battle. I don’t count steps, though. The good rear man never counts steps but rather turns around when he feels he should, when the time that has lapsed since his last look is time enough for some small storm to have formed on his heels—then he turns, two, three backward steps now though his overall motion is still forward, with the movement of the unit, now a swift turn on the right foot and forward facing again, and checking both flanks, nodding toward Johnny that all is clear. The patrol must maintain 360-degree control—357 degrees leaves three slivers of time and space open, and this is where the enemy enters and now you are dead.

  Hand signals are the preferred mode of communication during patrol. The team leader uses hand signals to slow or increase the speed of the patrol, to call team attention to a particular area in the patrol zone, to call certain members forward for conference, to initiate a firefight and to cease fire, among other actions. A hand signal is as authoritative as a verbal order. Sometimes, because of battlefield stressors such as exploding enemy ordnance, marines forget what the hand signals mean, and the situation becomes loud and confusing and marines begin yelling rather than using their hands.

  The hide Johnny and I are supposed to man for forty-eight hours has to be built because there is no natural cover where we’re going. We’ll dig ourselves into the soft slope of a gentle rise. From the map, our intended position looks to offer a premium view of an area of the obstacle belt and minefield. We figure it will take five hours to dig and camouflage the hide and redistribute the sand. We’ve brought along an extra ruck, and we’ll take turns digging and shoveling the sand into the ruck and carrying the sand-filled ruck two hundred yards behind our position and dumping the sand so that it looks natural, not as if it has just been extracted from the side of a nearby rise so that two marines can hide in the earth and with any luck watch Iraqis cross the minefield and obstacle belt.

  We’ll blame Dettmann, poor Ellie Bows, for what happens next. He stays on the radio too long, we’ll later decide, longer than three seconds, so that the enemy triangulates us—radio geometry whereby the enemy uses two known, fixed positions to locate the position of your signal. We’ll never know for sure. Possibly, we were moving too quickly, excited in the midst of our first combat patrol, not paying attention to our pace, so that the sounds from our gear, the natural movement, the tension between body and uniform and flak jacket and war belt and rucksack, times seven, became a chorus, and we were not patrolling tactically as we might each have thought, but rather as a seven-member chorus of idiots announcing their position. Maybe, when Johnny stopped the patrol and called Dettmann forward and spoke to Dettmann after exhaling, telling Dettmann to call in Check Point Two, Johnny hadn’t exhaled fully, so that his whisper exited his body as a scream. Or maybe we were so goddamn quiet, so fucking perfectly tactical, the night so silent around us, that the enemy assumed a patrol must be in the area.

  Somehow they know we are here, and that’s why they’re shooting rockets at us, MLRs, multiple-launch rockets, many rockets launching, landing, near us, exploding like fierce blazing fists, so that the command and control Johnny might want in such a situation are now overruled by our collective fear and terror, and the now of these moments is a blur, a hall mirror shattering, a shiver of bodies. I see all of our broken faces, caught in this eternal moment, and no one can find the way out. Kuehn now yelling, Fuck this goddamn shit—oh, fuck God, I love my wife, and Doc John laughing, saying, Jesus Christ, are those rockets? and Dettmann screaming, I didn’t do it, and me yelling, Rockets, rockets, and forgetting, absolutely forgetting, everything I’ve been taught about evasive action for rockets and only knowing the word rockets. I stand in place and piss my pants, this time not just a trickle but piss all over and running into my boots, clear piss I know because of hydration, no underwear and piss everywhere, thighs both, knees both, ankles both, bottom of my soft wet feet both, clear piss and no underwear because otherwise chafed rotten crotch and balls from humping because Vaseline only works to mile ten and all wars and battles occur farther than ten miles from all safe points, and bloodrottenballs if you don’t remove your underwear at mile ten, and rockets landing red glare and more rockets, hitting everywhere around us, but they haven’t hit us, so far they have only caused great amounts of terror and forgetting.

  No one is hit. We stare at the smoky depressions left in the earth and no one has been hit. The sand, where the rockets have impacted—smoke-shrapnel burnt into the desert—looks like an abstract charcoal portrait, broad strokes beginning and ending nowhere.

  Then we hear the voices of the Iraqi soldiers, and the idling diesel engines of their vehicles. Johnny and I low-crawl to the top of the rise while the rest of the team prepares to cover our right flank. This is not communicated verbally or with hand signals but simply through knowing. I’m crawling slowly, my belly as close to the earth as I can force it, sand filling my trousers. We still hear their voices, their deep throaty drawl, and the engine idling and I think, What are they waiting for, do they even know we’re here? Based on what I recall from Soviet armor, I know there might be up to eleven of them, and I know they will be armed with AK-47s and RPGs, rocket-propelled grenades, and possibly a light machine gun. I imagine we are better trained, but it is of course possible that these men have fought before, against the Iranians or Iraqi Kurds or as part of the initial invasion of Kuwait, though I’m quite sure little fighting occurred in early August.

  We crawl. I’ve always admired Johnny, and watching him lead us, lead me, up this rise and into a firefight, I ad
mire him even more, I love him for his expertise and his care and his professionalism and his fear. And then we hear the engine of their troop carrier move from idle to acceleration, and the slow, deep throaty drawl of the men’s voices is gone, and we know that we’ve been just missed again. Johnny stops crawling and buries his head in his arms, and I roll over and look at the sky, the smoky dark sky without the stars I normally see, and the rest of the team walks upright toward us and gathers in a circle and sits and no one speaks, for many minutes no one speaks, for hours maybe, or seconds, no one speaks, until Doc John asks if we are all right and Kuehn says, “Yes, Doc, we’re all right, look at us, but we could’ve not been, we could’ve not been, and that’s all that matters.”

  The rest of the team returns to battalion and Johnny and I patrol the final klick alone, and Johnny uses the GPS to confirm we are where we need to be, and we start to dig. Dig, motherfucker, dig your grave, I think, dig with these hands. It does take five hours to dig the hide and distribute the sand elsewhere. We cover the opening of our hide with IR netting and settle in. I draw a sketch of the area, an absurd sketch because in addition to my being a poor artist, the only thing in front of us is desert. After the mission I will turn the sketch in to battalion, and rather than sketch the rises and draws and soft slopes, I want to write in bold print, THERE IS A FUCKING DESERT HERE AND NOTHING ELSE. Johnny asks me please not to, even as a joke.

  We both remain awake at night, and during the day we assume four-hour shifts. We wait and watch and we see nothing of importance for two days. Occasionally an enemy troop carrier will approach the minefield, but they do not cross through the safe avenues that we know exist, and it’s of course too dangerous to guess. We hear Coalition bombs landing nearby or far away, watch psy-ops pamphlets blowing across the minefield, listen to more bombs, but the Iraqis never cross their obstacles.

  Shoved into this hole in the middle of the middle of nowhere, I consider the fire we’ve taken. The ground war has not officially begun, but we’ve been fired at, within close range, twice. I will never know why those men didn’t attack us over the rise. Perhaps we shared an aura of mutual assured existence, allowing us to slowly approach one another and prepare to engage, but finally when the numbers were crunched, the numbers were bad for both sides, and the engagement thus sensibly aborted. If wars were fought only by the men on the ground, the men facing one another in real battle, most wars would end quickly and sensibly. Men are smart and men are animals, in that they don’t want to die so simply for so little.

  Because we’ve reported nothing with intelligence value, we’re pulled out of our hide. This order arrives in the middle of the afternoon on our second day. Johnny communicates that we’d prefer to move under the cover of darkness, but we’re nonetheless ordered to return immediately, so that we patrol, or rather walk, toward battalion lines in the middle of the afternoon, as though no ground war is about to begin, as though we’re amateur naturalists out on a stroll.

  At battalion we learn that the final-final deadlines for complete withdrawal from Kuwait are being issued to Saddam Hussein, and that the real battle, the mother of the mothers, is about to begin, within hours or the day. The battalion moves directly on top of the Berm, we actually dig our positions into the Berm. Psy-ops helicopters fly overhead all day, playing tapes of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, and I’m not sure that we aren’t as unnerved by the music as our enemies might be. Iraqi troops have lit fire to hundreds of oil wells in southern Kuwait, and we’re told that they’re also spilling crude onto the desert floor. The oil fires burn in the distance, the sky a smoke-filled landscape, a new dimension really, thick and billowing. A burning, fiery oil hell awaits us.

  In the late afternoon the wind shifts and oil from the fires begins to fall in small droplets on our gear and our bodies. Crouching into the Berm, with my poncho draped over my body, I write a few letters. In a recent letter my brother informed me he has requested transfer from Germany to the Storm, and when his transfer arrives, I should be able to go home because of DOD rules that allow families to deploy only one progenitor of the family line to a war zone. I write my brother, telling him he is late. I also tell him that I think he’s shamelessly lying, that his hero pose sounds good on paper and probably over the phone to our mother and sisters, but what the fuck is he talking about, he’s living in Munich, on the economy, driving a BMW and drinking good German beer and God knows what else and he has a wife and a daughter and don’t they plan for more and if he’s smart, he should be happy with the out. I love my brother dearly, but he has always been rather impressed with himself, and because of the events of the last few days, the incoming rounds, and the events that await me, more incoming rounds, I turn against my brother, and I insult the U.S. Army and any pigfuck who would join such a shitpoor organization, and I tell him what I’ve thought of being his little brother for so many years and, as far as I can tell, the rest of my life. I tell him that it’s an okay gig, really, that I love and like and respect him, but when he pulls bullshit like telling me he’s going to come to my rescue and fight for me, take my place in the ranks, I can’t help but be angry and recall that in the family he has a reputation for largesse and falsity. I tell him I know the truth, that he’s goddamn happy over there in Germany, drinking the beer and what have you, and that he’s really goddamn stupid or even crazy if he thinks he’ll prefer combat action to drinking good German beer, fucking his wife, playing patty-cake with his daughter, and going about the normal wasteful business of the garrison military.

  But then, my brother has always fabricated facets of his life. I first realized this when I was eleven, and he told me he was a star on the local college football team. He had been a minor football star in high school, but not star enough to be a star at college, even at a small state college with a generally unimpressive football program. He told me of his star status and at first I believed him, and possibly other members of the family believed him as well. But when my father and I went to the games, Jeff sat on the sidelines and only played after the outcome had been decided. I was embarrassed for my brother. Even though my father and I had been in the stands on Friday evening, my brother would still tell us that he was a football star—he’d recount his latest impressive performance while the family shared Sunday brunch after Mass. My brother’s behavior confused me, but I never talked to anyone about it.

  This was about the time that I began to lie as well, to construct my fantasy world. I lied about my brother to my friends, telling them he was a local football star even though I knew the truth. I suppose I thought that continuing my brother’s lie would bring me closer to him or that my lie would obliterate his. Once, a few years later, I even lied about him to him, insisting that on the wall in the weight room of our high school his name was stenciled next to a record for the bench press. He knew I was lying, and that at that moment I could bench-press more than he ever had and still it wasn’t enough for a high school weight room record, but because he wanted to believe my lie, he didn’t challenge me. He lied with his silence. By this time he’d joined the army after dropping out of college, and the army allowed him an entirely new world to mold around his own personality.

  Growing up on air force bases, my brother had hated the military, and in moments of whispered sibling conference, he’d disparage the gypsy lifestyle forced on us by our father’s career. Perhaps because my brother was the firstborn son of the firstborn son of a firstborn son, he fell automatically to the role of spoiler, agitator, and rebel, as my father had before him. My father left his family and the South with nothing to prove, but my brother needed to shout his worth, his excellence, to those he’d left behind.

  In the letter, I tell Jeff how I’d followed his example as a teenager and told countless lies about myself and my accomplishments—but shortly after joining the Marine Corps, I’d stopped lying because I realized that both lying and religion wouldn’t matter when the bombs arrived.

  I ask him to please stop lying about trying to take my
place in the war. I tell him that his lie is embarrassing and offensive, and that if he does somehow become stationed in the Desert, I won’t leave.

  My brother never responded to my letter, and anyway, I assume that by the time he received the letter in Munich, probably by the time the letter left Saudi Arabia, the war had ended.

  We cannot plan how we will die—unless we decide to kill ourselves—but Jeff might as well have come over to the Desert and got his ass shot to death, died a hero, because as it was, he simply prolonged the lie of his living years, and shortly after separating from the army, under questionable terms, he died slowly, over a year, from a cancer. So now the advancement of my Swofford line, the Georgia Swoffords, the Douglasville Swoffords, the John Columbus Swoffords, the John Howard Swoffords, is my responsibility, resting firmly in my shorts. The pressure is immense, and I blame my brother for dying and filling my balls with so much false history and hope for the future.

  I believed I’d enlisted in the Marine Corps in order to claim my place in the military history of my family, the history that included my father’s service in Vietnam, his brother dying in the peacetime Marine Corps, and my grandfather serving in the army air force from December 10, 1941, through the end of World War II.

  This initial impulse had nothing to do with a desire for combat, for killing, or for a heroic death, but rather was based on my intense need for acceptance into the family clan of manhood. By joining the Marine Corps and excelling within the severely disciplined enlisted ranks, I would prove both my manhood and the masculinity of the line. Also, by enlisting as an infantry grunt I was outdoing my brother, who’d spent his first few years in the army learning a practical vocation, teeth cleaning. Even before I hit puberty, Jeff and I had been in competition for the dominant male role just junior to our father’s.