The treasures in the bunkers—correspondence, a bayonet, a beret, a helmet, homemade Iraqi dog tags with the information scrawled by hand with an awl—the worthless treasures call. The platoon continues collecting relics for the same reasons Crocket puts the damage to the corpses—in order to own a part of the Desert, to further scar this landscape already littered with despair and death, and to claim and define themselves, define their histories, to confirm that they are marines, combatants, jarheads, to infuse the last seven months of their young lives with value, and to steal history from the dead Iraqi soldiers who now have nothing to remember.
For this complete absence of memory the dead men are envied their deaths, that perpetual state where they are required only to go on being dead. No other consequences exist for the corpse. The corpse suffers violence and contempt, the corpse is shot and knifed and cursed and burned, but the corpse will not suffer loneliness and despair and rage.
The captain from S-3 suggests STA get together with him and the few enlisted marines from his shop and that we all fire the weapons that STA has gathered from the enemy positions. This means the AK-47s and RPGs. We accept the captain’s offer because without his support we won’t be allowed to fire the weapons in the psychotic and frenzied fashion the situation requires.
Our cache holds four to five hundred AKs and three dozen RPGs. Our targets, the disabled Iraqi weapons and vehicles, are plentiful. The captain even attempts to get one of the Iraqi tanks running so we can fire it. He spends an hour poking in and around the T-62, but he has neither the knowledge nor the tools to enable the weapon.
The Iraqi soldiers took poor care of their rifles. We’ve pried the weapons from the hands of dead men who hadn’t performed rifle maintenance for days or weeks, but the pitiful state of the weapons—the rust, the filthy barrels, and sand-filled trigger mechanisms—encourages us to curse the men and their poor discipline. Such sloppy soldiering further decreases their stature as our former enemies.
Kuehn says, “These bastards would’ve gotten about two magazines off before their weapons failed. Jesus, this wasn’t an army, it was a pack of assholes with some rifles.”
“I haven’t seen one set of cleaning gear,” Martinez says. “I bet they weren’t issued cleaning gear. They probably had to supply their own. This is crazy. Frontline troops with dirty weapons.”
I say, “It’s as though they wanted their weapons to fail.”
“Their weapons didn’t fail,” Johnny says. “They failed their weapons.”
We throw the AKs into a pile, a metal confusion of barrels and stocks and bolts. The RPGs we handle more delicately, placing them in an orderly line. The captain doesn’t want us to waste our time attempting to clear failed weapons or changing magazines, and he suggests that when a weapon malfunctions or runs out of ammunition, we throw it in a discard pile. The fire will be a free-for-all; as long as you’re safe and remain behind the firing line, you may shoot at anything on the other side of the firing line.
I’ve studied the AK for years, know its capabilities by heart, and had often assumed that the weapon would kill me in battle. But the battle is over. Now the dirty AKs look like children’s toys, and I feel as though I’ve been fooled again, by myself and propaganda. Also, I feel like a bit of a traitor, holding the enemy’s weapon, now firing the enemy’s weapon, the snap snap snap of the firing pin piercing the shell, the projectiles screaming downrange. I don’t care what I hit, in front of me there is desert, and tanks and bunkers and troop carriers and still in some of the carriers, corpses, but I fire, as next to me my platoon mates fire, from the hip, with no precision, as though we are famous and immortal and it doesn’t matter that we’ll likely hit nothing firing from such an absurd and unstable position, but we burn through the magazines, and when the dead click sounds, meaning the magazine has ended, or a mangle of metal occurs—bolt action stuck in the chamber, like a key stuck in a lock—because the weapon has failed, we throw the rifles aside, watching them leave our hands and land in a tumble, as though throwing aside a disturbing memory that will someday resurface. The RPGs explode with a pop. No one hits a target with an RPG, rather the rounds bounce and flail, exploding finally for nothing. We fire and fire the AKs, a factory of firepower, the fierce scream of metal downrange and discharged cartridges and sand flying everywhere, now all of us shooting in the air, shooting straight up and dancing in circles, dancing on one foot, with the mad, desperate hope that the rounds will never descend, screaming, screaming at ourselves and each other and the dead Iraqis surrounding us, screaming at ourselves and the dead world surrounding us, screaming at ourselves, at the corpses surrounding us and the dead world.
I throw my rifle onto the discard pile and run toward the Humvee, and I dive under the vehicle as the fire line continues to send a wall of metal into the air, and I weep, and I hear my screaming friends, those men I love, and I know we’ll soon carry that mad scream home with us, but that no one will listen because they’ll want to hear the crowd-roar of victory.
To be a marine, a true marine, you must kill. With all of your training, all of your expertise, if you don’t kill, you’re not a combatant, even if you’ve been fired at, and so you are not yet a marine: receiving fire is easy—you’ve either made a mistake or the enemy is better than you, and now you are either lucky or dead but not a combatant. You will receive a Combat Action Ribbon, and if unlucky enough to have been hit but not fatally, a Purple Heart, or if you’re hit fatally, your mother will receive your Purple Heart, but whether you are dead or not, you haven’t, with your own hands, killed a hostile enemy soldier. This means everything.
Sometimes you wish you’d killed an Iraqi soldier. Or many Iraqi soldiers, in a series of fierce firefights while on patrol, with dozens of well-placed shots from your M40A1, through countless calls for fire. During the darkest nights you’d even offer your life to go back in time, back to the Desert for the chance to kill. You consider yourself less of a marine and even less of a man for not having killed while at combat. There is a wreck in your head, part of the aftermath, and you must dismantle the wreck.
But after many years you discover that you cannot dismantle the wreck, so you move it around and bury it.
It took years for you to understand that the most complex and dangerous conflicts, the most harrowing operations, and the most deadly wars, occur in the head.
You are certain you’d be no better or worse a man if you’d killed one or all of the men you sometimes fantasize about killing. Probably, you are incorrect, and you would be insane or dead by your own hand if you’d killed one or all of those men. You would’ve been a great killer. You would’ve been a terrible killer.
If you’d killed those men, you would’ve told your mother, “No, I never killed anyone,” and even though you have indeed killed no one and have told your mother this, still she has said, numerous times, while weeping, “I lost my baby boy when you went to war. You were once so sweet and gentle and now you are an angry and unhappy man.”
After clearing the bunkers, we lived in a tent city near Riyadh, where we were allowed to take cold showers each morning and required to shave our faces and polish our boots. The war ended much faster than it had begun, and while the Pentagon spent six months building the force of five hundred thousand fighting men and women, it would disperse the majority of that same force in less than six weeks, because the host country was now safe, and the need for the protective force had ended, and now we were no longer protectors but intruders.
We spent most of our time in the rear-rear worrying about when we’d be sent home and trying to make sure we didn’t get screwed, as we were sure that the first guys in should be the first guys out.
We finally got our plane. We first stopped in Athens, but they didn’t let us off, and this was pure torture, looking from inside the stuffy plane at the green hills of Athens, looking at what might have been ancient ruins or contemporary housing, we couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter, only that we wanted to be there. Certai
nly some of us would’ve stayed in Athens, never to be heard from again, a fact the command must have considered.
Next we stopped in Dublin, and this time they allowed us to debark, probably because armed men patrolled the tarmac. The colonel spoke over the intercom and ordered us not to drink at the bar. This is when the gunny jumped out of his seat and yelled, “With all respect, sir, fuck you, sir.” I was third or fourth behind the gunny at the bar. I ordered a Guinness and I drank it like water. I wandered the duty-free shop, picking through liquors and candies and expensive leather goods but buying nothing. An older Irish couple rushed up to me and the woman hugged me while her husband shook my hand and thanked me heartily and offered me whiskey from his silver flask. I was shocked by the display and at first confused as to the motivation for their generosity and praise, and then I remembered what I’d been a part of. I thanked them for I didn’t know what and returned to the plane early.
We arrived in California, and the bus trip from San Bernardino to Twentynine Palms took many hours because along the desert roads thousands of citizens had gathered to welcome home the heroes. I recalled pictures from World War II victory parades in New York City, and our twenty yellow buses rambling through the high desert were a letdown in comparison.
People threw cases of cheap beer and bottles of cheap booze and plastic yellow ribbons and flags into the buses, and occasionally a marine lifted a willing woman into our bus. The woman would smile and congratulate us on our hero status. Sometimes the woman would kiss a few marines on the cheek and accept the gift of a marine’s clip-on chevrons, and she’d good-naturedly slap away the tawdry and somewhat violent sexual calls and advances. But other times the well-intentioned and even patriotic and proud woman would realize what she’d been pulled into, and she’d scream, until a jarhead ushered her politely out of the slow-moving bus and back into the safe world of citizens. This continued for many hours, and I became bored with the routine and frustrated with the identity, the identity of the hero, being forced upon me.
As we neared Twentynine Palms, Crocket pulled a Vietnam vet onto the bus, a hard Vietnam vet, a man obviously on and off the streets for many years, in and out of VA hospitals. The man had no shoes on his dirty feet and wore tattered jeans and a faded camouflage blouse of indeterminate origin. Tears fell from the man’s eyes and rolled down his deeply wrinkled and hurt face, the surface of his face not unlike the topography of the Desert. The man was somewhat drunk, but obviously less drunk than he was used to being. He steadied himself by gripping Crocket’s shoulder, and he opened his dry mouth but no words issued forth. The bus quieted. He closed his mouth and licked his cracked lips and yelled to the bus, “Thank you, thank you, jarheads, for making them see we are not bad animals.”
Crocket helped the man reenter the crowd. I hoped that even though the spectacle of the excited citizens was worth nothing to me, it might help the Vietnam vet heal his wounds.
Throughout the long drive to base I grasped the dog tags around my neck—not mine, but those that I’d ripped from the necks of three dead Iraqi soldiers. Those dog tags remain in my ruck, in my basement, with my uniforms and medals and badges and ribbons and maps.
Stealing the tags was a crime. I sometimes wonder if the families of the dead men were notified of the deaths, or if the men are listed as missing in action on a stone wall in Baghdad. Probably the corpses were identified with dental records, and probably an Iraqi captain spent a few weeks after the war informing families of their loss, but maybe I am responsible for three Iraqi families living the horror of not knowing what happened to their sons and fathers. Now when I think of these men, I remember their dead faces, and I imagine them wearing their dead faces on a picnic with their families. I am sorry if the families don’t know the men are dead, while I know for sure they are dead though not their names. Yes, I’m sorry the men are dead, for many reasons I am sorry, and chief among my reasons is that the men who go to war and live are spared for the single purpose of spreading bad news when they return, the bad news about the way war is fought and why, and by whom for whom, and the more men who survive the war, the higher the number of men who might speak.
Unfortunately, many of the men who live through the war don’t understand why they were spared. They think they are still alive in order to return home and make money and fuck their wife and get drunk and wave the flag.
These men spread what they call good news, the good news about war and warriors. Some of the men who spread good news have never fought—so what could they have to say about the purity of war and warriors? These men are liars and cheats and they gamble with your freedom and your life and the lives of your sons and daughters and the reputation of your country.
I have gone to war and now I can issue my complaint. I can sit on my porch and complain all day. And you must listen. Some of you will say to me: You signed the contract, you crying bitch, and you fought in a war because of your signature, no one held a gun to your head. This is true, but because I signed the contract and fulfilled my obligation to fight one of America’s wars, I am entitled to speak, to say, I belonged to a fucked situation.
I am entitled to despair over the likelihood of further atrocities. Indolence and cowardice do not drive me—despair drives me. I remade my war one word at a time, a foolish, desperate act. When I despair, I am alone, and I am often alone. In crowded rooms and walking the streets of our cities, I am alone and full of despair, and while sitting and writing, I am alone and full of despair—the same despair that impelled me to write this book, a quiet scream from within a buried coffin. Dead, dead, my scream.
What did I hope to gain? More bombs are coming. Dig your holes with the hands God gave you.
Some wars are unavoidable and need well be fought, but this doesn’t erase warfare’s waste. Sorry, we must say to the mothers whose sons will die horribly. This will never end. Sorry.
Now I often think of the first time I received artillery fire, and the subsequent obliteration of the enemy observation post. I’ll never know how many men manned the OP, but in memory I fix the number at two, and though at the time I was angry that the pompous captain took the handset from me and stole my kills, I have lately been thankful that he insisted on calling the fire mission, and sometimes when I am feeling hopeful or even religious, I think that by taking my two kills the pompous captain handed me life, some extra moments of living for myself or that I can offer others, though I have no idea how to use or disburse these extra moments, or if I’ve wasted them already.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
This book describes a number of people reacting to the difficulties of life, war, and service in the U.S. Marines. I’m grateful to these individuals for sharing their lives with me. I’ve changed certain names and biographical details.
Deepest thanks: first, to my editor, Colin Harrison, who worked with me page by page in exactly the way I’d been told Manhattan book editors no longer do and so proved wrong those who insisted that the editor is extinct; also at Scribner—Nan Graham, Sarah Knight, Laura Wise, Steve Boldt, and Veronica Jordan; my agent, Amy Williams at ICM, friend, counselor, and wise reader; also, Melissa Flashman at ICM; my teachers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
I am indebted to Harold Schneider, Jack Hicks, Katherine Vaz, John Callahan; William Wann, Clifton Hall, Douglas Ahim-Bisibwe, D. Foy O’Brien, Sachiko Tamura; Les and Susan Freeman, and especially my parents and sisters. And Sarah Elisabeth Freeman.
I thank the Corporation of Yaddo and Caldera for time and space.
I wish to express my gratitude to James Michener and the Copernicus Society for their generous support of my work.
For Gulf War theater–wide chronology, order of battle, U.S. and Iraqi weapons nomenclature, and an understanding of the support and dissent of the U.S. citizenry and media, I consulted the following works: Order of Battle: Allied Ground Forces of Operation Desert Storm, Thomas D. Dinackus (Hellgate Press, 2000); Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: The War Between America’s Ai
ling Veterans and Their Government, Seymour M. Hersh (Random House, 1998); Gulf War: The Complete History, Thomas Houlahan (Schrenker Military Publishing, 1999); The March to War, edited by James Ridgeway (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991); The Gulf War Reader, edited by Micah Sifry and Christopher Cerf (Times Books, 1991). The definition of the word sand (a1 and a2) is from Webster’s Third International Dictionary. The epigraph is taken from The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions, 1998).
Anthony Swofford served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper Platoon during the Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Men’s Journal, The Iowa Review, NOON, and other publications. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he lives in Portland, Oregon. He is at work on a novel.
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