Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  Knowing the reporters will arrive soon, we shave for the first time in a week, pull new cammies from the bottoms of our rucks, and helmet-wash our pits and crotches and cocks. Vann’s wife recently sent him a bottle of cologne, and we each dab a bit on our neck and our chest.

  Sergeant Dunn gathers the platoon in a school circle under the plastic infrared (IR) cover. It’s before zero nine and already one hundred degrees. Our platoon commands three Humvees, and the vehicles are under IR cover. Ideally, weapons, vehicles, and personnel shielded under the netting will avoid detection by enemy infrared devices. We’re not convinced. Why believe in the effectiveness of IR netting when the drink tube on your gas mask breaks every time you don-and-clear during a training nerve-gas raid? When the best method of maintenance for the PRC-77 radio, the Prick, is the Five-Foot Drop?

  We’ve known about the press visit for a few days, and Sergeant Dunn has already recited a list of unacceptable topics. We’re prohibited from divulging data concerning the capabilities of our sniper rifles or optics and the length and intensity of our training. He’s ordered us to act like top marines, patriots, shit-hot hard dicks, the best of the battalion. As the scout/snipers, we’ve been handpicked by the executive officer and the S-2 officer to serve as the eyes and ears of the battalion commander.

  “Listen up,” Dunn says. “I’ve gone over this already. But the captain wants you to hear it again. Basically, don’t get specific. Say you can shoot from far away. Say you are highly trained, that there are no better shooters in the world than marine snipers. Say you’re excited to be here and you believe in the mission and that we’ll annihilate the Iraqis. Take off your shirts and show your muscles. We’re gonna run through some calisthenics for them. Doc John, give us a SEAL workout. Keep it simple, snipers.”

  Kuehn says, “It ain’t simple. This is censorship. You’re telling me what I can and can’t say to the press. This is un-American.”

  As we begin arguing about the gag order, Staff Sergeant Siek arrives. He says, “You do as you’re told. You signed the contract. You have no rights, you can’t speak out against your country. We call that treason. You can be shot for it. Goddamnit, we’re not playing around. Training is over. I’m sick of hearing your complaints. Tell your complaints to Saddam Hussein. See if he cares.”

  I want to come to the defense of free speech, but I know it will be useless. We possess no such thing. The language we own is not ours, it is not a private language, but derived from Marine Corps history and lore and tactics. Marine Corps birthday? 10 November 1775, the Marine Corps is older than the United States of America. Birthplace? Tun Tavern, Philadelphia, a gang of drunks with long rifles and big balls. Tarawa? Bloodiest battle of World War II. Dan Daly? He killed thirty-seven Chinese by hand during the Boxer Rebellion. Deadliest weapon on earth? The marine and his rifle. You want to win your war? Tell it to the marines! When you are part of that thing, you speak like it. Reporters are arriving to ask me what I think about sitting in a desert, waiting for war. I’ll answer that I like it; I’m prepared for anything that might come my way; I have supreme confidence in all of my leaders, from my team leader to the president.

  The reporters are due at our position at 0900.

  Staff Sergeant Siek says, “You are marines. There is no such thing as speech that is free. You must pay for everything you say. Especially the unauthorized crap.”

  I leave the free speech argument and walk to our straddle trench. I enjoy shitting in the desert. There’s no seat in a straddle trench, but I’ve been punished many times, for hours on end, in the squat position, so I could sleep while straddling the trench. Also, it reminds me of Korea, where we spent a month of our last deployment. Most public rest rooms in Korea had straddle holes, and I enjoyed shitting there as well, often drunk, often having just walked away from a bar booth where I’d been buying a prostitute five-dollar Lady Drinks.

  I look at the sky, blue like no blue I’ve known before, and at the desert that will not stop. This is the pain of the landscape, worse than the heat, worse than the flies—there is no getting out of the land. No stopping. After only six weeks of deployment, the desert is in us, one particle at a time—our boots and belts and trousers and gas masks and weapons are covered and filled with sand. Sand has invaded my body: ears and eyes and nose and mouth, ass crack and piss hole. The desert is everywhere. The mirage is everywhere. Awake, asleep, high heat of the afternoon or the few soft, sunless hours of early morning, I am still in the desert.

  The Desert will become the popular moniker of Operation Desert Shield and the forthcoming Desert Storm, the Gulf War, the Operation to Free Kuwait—whatever else the war, the mass staging and movement of personnel and weapons of destruction might be called, it is the Desert. Were you in the Desert? Who were you with in the Desert? They kicked ass in the Desert. Those jarheads didn’t do shit in the Desert but sit on their asses and chow down on pogey bait.

  I wipe myself and turn to kick sand over the waste. A Land Rover crests the rise, an enlisted man in the driver’s seat, a marine colonel next to him, and two reporters in the back.

  The press-pool colonel and his driver wait in the Land Rover, the air-conditioning blowing the colonel’s hair into fine white wisps of artillery smoke.

  We gather under the IR netting and the reporters introduce themselves. The man is from the New York Times and the woman from the Boston Globe. They shake our hands and urge us to speak freely, but they know we’ve been scripted; they know our answers to their questions have already been written on our faces, though maybe not in our hearts. The Boston Globe woman looks bored, or at least not very interested in what we might tell her. She just heard the same stories a few miles away.

  “Yes, ma’am, I believe in our mission. I believe we will quickly win this war and send the enemy crawling home.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m proud to be here serving my country. I’m proud of our president standing up to the evil. Them ragheads is gonna go down.”

  “I’m from Texas, ma’am. I joined when I was eighteen rather than go to jail for a few years. Petty stuff. I finds out later my dad talked to the judge the night before and set the whole thing up. How ’bout that shit? But I’m proud of what the Corps has made me.”

  “This is about freedom, not about oil. This is about standing up to aggression, like the president says. Nobody wants to go to war. We just got to be ready. We can shoot out someone’s eyeball from a klick away. Ain’t no better shot in the world.”

  “I’m proud to serve my country. This is what I signed for. I’m gonna make my pop and mom and my girl proud. I come from a little town in Missouri. They’re gonna make a parade for me, they got the ribbons up already. My mama says the whole town is behind us.”

  “My uncle, he was in the Vietnam and he don’t feel good about me being over here, but still he writes me letters about watching my ass and don’t try being a hero and watch out for your buddies.”

  “I think the mission is valid and we have all the right in the world to be here and the president has all the right to deploy us and we are well trained and prepared to fight any menace in the world. They can bomb us and gas us and shoot and we’ll keep at them. Many of us have been preparing for this since birth.”

  The Times reporter has brought a football. Kuehn and I toss the ball back and forth and speak with the reporter. He stands between us and his eyes follow the ball. He looks like an anthropologist, an expert in primate behavior. He’s a kind man, soft-spoken, eager to hear from us what we really think about the operation, to see how we live through a single day. He wants a look at the psyche of the frontline infantryman, and I can only offer him processed responses. I’ve been ordered to give him SPAM. I wish to speak with him honestly and say: I am a grunt, dressed up in fancy scout/sniper clothes; I am a grunt with limited vision. I don’t care about a New World Order. I don’t care about human rights violations in Kuwait City. Amnesty International, my ass. Rape them all, kill them all, sell their oil, pillage their gold, sell th
eir children into prostitution. I don’t care about the Flag and God and Country and Corps. I don’t give a fuck about oil and revenue and million barrels per day and U.S. jobs. I have a job. I’ll walk the rest of my life. I’m a grunt. I’m supposed to walk and love it. I’m twenty years old and I was dumb enough to sign a contract and here I sit, miserable, oh misery oh stinking hell of all miseries, here I sit in the hairy armpit, swinging in the ball sack, slopping through the straddle trench of the world, and I can hear their bombs already, Mr. Times, I can hear their bombs and I am afraid.

  I go out for a long pass, over the straddle trench, and I catch the ball with one hand, a diving catch with one hand, and I slam my left shoulder and my face against the desert. I am proud of my difficult catch. Kuehn yells, “Touchdown!” Sand is in my mouth, it feels gritty against my teeth and gums, and I run my tongue over my teeth, clearing the sand, and as if the particles of sand were particles of luck, I swallow them. As I jog the ball in, I hear bitching and moaning.

  Vann yells, “Swoff, quick, throw the ball in the shitter!”

  The colonel, on seeing the football, has exited his vehicle and instructed Staff Sergeant Siek that better than a workout of calisthenics, we should play football for the reporters, wearing full MOPP (Mission Oriented Protective Posture) gear and gas masks.

  We were issued the MOPP suits at 29 Palms and have been humping them in our rucks ever since. They weigh ten pounds and were once hermetically sealed, but after six weeks of being beaten around in our rucks, most of the suits aren’t even in their original packaging but bound together with duct tape and nylon rip cord. The MOPP is supposed to protect us from skin contamination during a chemical attack. We’re happy to use the suits for this foolish game, because now they’ll really be useless; we’ll burn them in the straddle trench and it will take Supply months to issue replacements.

  Grunt mathematics: ruck minus ten pounds equals happy grunt. What else can I burn?

  Doc John Duncan, our navy corpsman, reports that the temperature has reached 112 degrees.

  In combat, we’d wear our cammies under the suit, but we’ll cut down the heat by wearing only skivvies, and those of us, like me, who wear none will go naked beneath. Siek assures us that the colonel has guaranteed him that the next day the shower trucks will visit our position. The next day.

  With just the bottoms on, I begin to roast; I feel as though I’ve stepped into an oven. Dunn orders us into formation, and before we don our masks, we each drink a canteen of water. We put our masks on and tie the hoods.

  We’re all in great shape. Stateside, we’d run two or three 10Ks a week, swim three thousand yards four days a week, and spend at least a few hours a day in the weight room. In the desert, we’ve been performing Doc John’s SEAL workouts every morning and running three or four miles a night, not to mention the battalion humps of seven or fifteen or twenty miles.

  The MOPP suits are in jungle camouflage, so we look like a movable forest, something from a Monty Python skit. We break up, scout teams one and three versus teams two and four. We use five-gallon water jugs to mark the goals. This football game will kick our asses, but it might be better than standard-issue boredom.

  I drop a touchdown pass. Dickerson and Fowler argue back and forth across the line of scrimmage and throw sand at one another and insult each other’s mother. Hut, hut, hike. My team makes ten yards, good enough for a first down. Combs and Johnny Rotten get into a pushing match, and a few of us pull them apart. The drama of the scene is catching, our audience is entranced. The reporters are taking notes and Siek looks happy with our performance. We’ve been forced into this inhumane game and we’re going to play. We have no lines. MOPP improv. The heat is intense: 125, 130, 140 degrees inside our suits.

  Combs intercepts a pass and runs it in for a touchdown. We’re all bent over at the knees, trying to catch our breath, and Siek shouts at us to continue the game. The Pentagon insists that warriors can fight at 100 percent in full MOPP and gas mask for eight hours. Siek wants us to play ball for an hour.

  After a few more changes of possession and no change in score, Siek calls halftime. To demonstrate to the reporters the usefulness and practicality of the drinking tube, he orders that with our gas masks on we drink from our canteens, as if to say, Aren’t we smart, we’ve thought of everything.

  The gas mask and hood cause your hearing to lengthen and stretch, so that words enter your brain in slow motion, and it takes a moment to formulate just what it is you’re hearing. I hear Siek telling the reporters that our gas masks are high-tech pieces of equipment, that combined with the MOPP suits we are virtually an unstoppable fighting force, that the only chance the Iraqis have is to drop an A-bomb on us. We retrieve our canteens from inside the IR net, and a few of us break the seals on our masks to catch fresh air. The air tastes sweet. It swirls around my face and cools my lungs and I think of fighting with this gear on and I hope, more than anything, that if we are going to war, and they are going to kick our asses, that they’ll do it with an A-bomb, scatter us dead with the flames and fierce winds of a Little Boy or a Fat Man. And soon.

  We stand in line and Siek issues instruction on using the drink tubes. Of course, we know the directions, but this is part of his show. The problem is, even if your drink tube is intact, the device on your canteen cap designed to interact with the drink tube will probably be broken. The atmosphere is one of glee.

  When talking with a gas mask on, it sounds like you have a styrofoam cup over your mouth.

  Kuehn yells, “I’m fucking dead already. The cap is broken on my canteen. If I drink this, I’m gonna drink some fuckin’ mustard gas. I been saying for three months I needed a new canteen cap.”

  Vegh says, “My drinking tube is broken. I’m not going to break the seal on my mask, because that would kill me. I’ll die of dehydration. Sir, thank you, sir.”

  “Staff Sergeant,” I say. “I requested a new gas mask four months ago. My drinking tube fell off in the gas chamber at the Palms and Kuehn stepped on it. And we have unserviceable filters in our masks. We’re all dead. We are the ghosts of STA 2/7.”

  Fowler has been wrestling with his drink tube and canteen, and finally he rips his mask off his face and punts it down the field. We’re breaking up with laughter, but Siek is not happy. He tells us to take our masks off and drink from our canteens, and that he’ll talk to Supply about replacement parts. He whistles like a referee and we resume the game.

  Vann returns the kickoff. Kuehn decides to switch from touch to tackle, and he takes Vann down hard. Vann punches Kuehn in the side of the head, Combs kicks Kuehn in the ass, and we all jump on the pile, punching each other, and it doesn’t matter whom you punch, because you’re not punching hard, you’re not punching to hurt, but only to punch. The half-speed fight degenerates into a laughter-filled dog-pile, with guys fighting their way from the bottom to climb back to the top, king of the pile, king of the Desert. We’re sweating and shouting and shrieking through our masks. This is fun, plain mindless fun, the kind grunts are best at. Siek doesn’t like our grab-ass, and he yells at us to resume the game, but we do not listen. He must know what terrible treat will soon be played out for the colonel and the reporters.

  Field-fuck: an act wherein marines violate one member of the unit, typically someone who has recently been a jerk or abused rank or acted antisocial, ignoring the unspoken contracts of brotherhood and camaraderie and esprit de corps and the combat family. The victim is held fast in the doggie position and his fellow marines take turns from behind.

  Combs pulls Kuehn from the bottom of the pile and yells, “Field-fuck!” Fowler starts the fun, thrusting his hips against Kuehn’s ass, slapping the back of his head; when you aren’t field-fucking, you’re shouting support and encouragement or helping secure Kuehn.

  Dickerson yells, “Get that virgin Texas ass! It’s free!”

  “I want some of that. I ain’t seen boy ass this pretty since Korea.”

  “Semper fi! Scout-sniper!”

/>   “Somebody get a picture for his wife. Poor woman.”

  Kuehn yells, “I’m the prettiest girl any of you has ever had! I’ve seen the whores you’ve bought, you sick bastards!”

  “Scout-sniper! STA 2/7!”

  We continue to scream, in joy, in revelry, still wearing full MOPP and gas mask, and we look like wild, hungry, bug-eyed animals swarming around disabled prey, and we sound thousands of miles away from ourselves.

  The reporters have stopped taking notes. Siek runs toward us, yelling, “Stop! Stop, you assholes!”

  I stand back from a turn with Kuehn. I feel frightened and exhilarated by the scene. The exhilaration isn’t sexual, it’s communal—a pure surge of passion and violence and shared anger, a pure distillation of our confusion and hope and shared fear. We aren’t field-fucking Kuehn: we’re fucking the press-pool colonel, and the sorry, worthless MOPP suits, and the goddamn gas masks and canteens with defective parts, and President Bush and Dick Cheney and the generals, and Saddam Hussein, and the PRC-77 radio and the goddamn heavy E-tools that can’t help us dig deep enough holes; we’re fucking the world’s televisions, and CNN; we’re fucking the sand and the loneliness and the boredom and the potentially unfaithful wives and girlfriends and the parents and siblings who don’t write and the bad food and the fuckhead peaceniks back home, the skate punks and labor unionists and teachers and grandmothers and socialists and Stalinists and Communists and the hungover hippies grasping their fraudulent sixties idealism; we’re fucking our confusion and fear and boredom; we’re fucking ourselves for signing the contract, for listening to the soothing lies of the recruiters, for letting them call us buddy and pal and dude, luring us into this life of loneliness and boredom and fear; we’re fucking all of the hometown girls we’ve wanted but never had; we’re angry and afraid and acting the way we’ve been trained to kill, violently and with no remorse. We take turns, and we go through the line a few times and Kuehn takes it all, like the thick, rough Texan he is, our emissary to the gallows, to the chambers, to death do us part.