Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  The marines fighting at Belleau Wood in 1918—where the Germans bestowed upon the Corps the infamous moniker Teufel-Hunden (devil dogs)—used sharpshooters to eradicate the deeply and lethally entrenched German machine gunners.

  During World War II, marine snipers used a 1903A4 Springfield with a German scope, the 12x Unertl, for the first time. The Marines also introduced night-vision devices into the sniper’s trade, and during one battle on Okinawa 30 percent of the casualties were due to this capability.

  The Marines used many different weapons for sniping during Vietnam, and more than a few of the guns hit out to one thousand yards. Despite the distance efficiency, the first-shot kill—the sniper’s goal—was not a constant in the jungle until the introduction of the M40 weapons system, a commercial Remington M700 with a heavy barrel equipped with a Redfield 3x9 scope. Marine snipers started working in highly successful and cost-effective two-man teams. It is said that for every fifteen thousand rounds fired by an infantryman, the United States scored one fatality; for every 1.2 rounds fired by a sniper team, the United States scored one fatality. Still, marine snipers emerged from the jungle as beaten as the rest of the U.S. military, and the command knew that many of their snipers were cowboys who simply loved to shoot, which didn’t necessarily mean they were skilled technicians.

  The most often repeated sniper stories came from Vietnam. A couple of my favorites, which may or may not be true, though whatever the facts, they are true in nature and design: The sniper who was in a duel with a VC sniper that ended when the marine sniper caught the reflection of the enemy sniper’s scope and delivered a round that penetrated the enemy’s scope and then his eyeball and skull, thus killing him. The sniper who saved a young Vietnamese boy’s life by shooting out the front tire of the boy’s bike seconds before a five-ton truck would have rumbled over him.

  After Vietnam, the Marine Corps realized they needed a new weapon for sniping, and comprehensive training for the contemporary scout/sniper. The new weapon, the M40A1, was concocted in the bowels of the Marine Corps Marksmanship Training Unit at Quantico, Virginia. Now the best shooters in the world fired the best rifle in the world, one-shot/one-kill out to one thousand meters. Point of aim, point of impact.

  Too much time and energy are expended during boot camp and subsequent rifle-training sessions convincing the marine that he must covet his weapons system just as he does his girl back home, his girl back home a beautiful and noble creature, and so too his weapons system a beautiful and noble creature, capable of both saving the marine’s life and jeopardizing the marine’s life, causing him either joy or grief. The paradoxes of love are the paradoxes of war, the lesson goes, the thing you love most deeply might someday fail you. But when men are at war, the weapons system is simply a system, and those who understand and maintain the system understand and maintain order, and they are more likely to survive, and those who fail to understand the system, they might die faster. This has nothing to do with naming your weapon after your girl or your wife, or likening the deadly system to the tight insides of the girl or the wife. Most weapons systems are made of steel and hard plastic, material nothing like the soft great insides of the woman the marine loves. Systems management. We might just as well call marksmanship training by this name. Anyone can be taught a system. And anyone can wreck a system.

  The M40A1 (steel and hard plastic) was the result of all of the work done in the fields of sniping and rifle manufacturing since the invention of the reticle scope. When the sniper looks through his ten-power Unertl, he’s looking through the history of the sniper, the history of the art. The reticle is his window onto sniper history, and if he’s lucky, the picture of his future, and in that picture will emerge the figure of the enemy—the quartered head, the medulla shot, the pink mist, the confirmation that the sniper’s training and history and tactics are not all for naught.

  In all of the literature I read, certain words reappeared: uncompromising, highly trained, elite, cruel, shrewd, calculating, hard-nosed, sacrificial, light. But there was constant debate within the Marine Corps regarding the effectiveness of the STA Platoon and scout/snipers. Leaders who adhered to the idea that mechanization was the future of the Corps discounted the scouts and snipers, while others cried that the art of scouting and sniping helped sustain the Corps and its mythos. The STA Platoons were filled with men who worked in highly disciplined pairs, who gladly took on poor odds and likely death to fulfill thankless missions. I wanted a thankless mission; I wanted poor odds and likely death; I wanted to give myself over to beliefs that were more complex than the base beliefs of the infantry grunt. The grunt dies for nothing, for fifteen thousand poorly placed rounds; the sniper dies for that one perfect shot.

  Flyers announcing the indoc appeared around the battalion in early December:

  STA INDOC

  ONE SHOT ONE KILL

  LEAVE YOUR MOTHER IN KINVILLE

  19–23 DEC, 1989

  MUSTER AT O-COURSE, 0300 ON 19 DEC

  GEAR LIST FROM S-2

  No one else from my platoon showed any interest in taking the indoc. Graycochea tried to put me in contact with guys he knew who’d tried out in the past, but anyone who’d failed a STA indoc didn’t want to talk about it. The common response to my inquiry was “Fuck STA Platoon, they’re hard-assed pricks. And fuck you for wanting to be part of them.” I signed up at S-2 (the intelligence shop, the entity that commanded STA) and requested leave from my platoon sergeant.

  The indoc was run by enlisted STA marines. They were all talented men who assumed we had nothing to offer their platoon, and their first priority was ensuring the continued honor and high standards of STA. Their preference was that none of us pass: our failure would confirm the elite status of the unit.

  Twenty-three grunts showed up for the indoc. It was the rainy season in Okinawa. I slept one hour each night on the floor of the wet jungle. I ate crackers and nothing else. The lesson was, if you’re going to be in STA, you must want it, you must travel light and sleep little and eat only what you can carry in your cargo pockets. We spent most of five days on a forced march through hundreds of miles of trails in the Northern Training Area, where some of the most vicious battles of World War II had occurred. They teargassed us and stripped us and starved us. During moments of high delirium, I thought I heard screaming from the jungle, the voices of Japanese and American dead.

  When the march ended, we were given classes on stalking and camouflage and observation, the scout/sniper’s trade secrets. The fundamental work of a sniper is rather simple: Go to this spot, shoot these personnel, extract yourself. We weren’t allowed to touch the sniper rifles, but we had our own M16s with us, and we stalked with those far less tactical weapons. In the ideal situation, the sniper will be inserted one thousand meters away from the shooting position. The low crawl is the sniper’s chief mode of movement, elbows and knees and belly.

  We low-crawled across a thousand-meter-long wet field, trying to move undetected while STA personnel attempted to locate us using binoculars and scopes. The rain came on hard, and then harder, which was good for tactical movement, but I was miserable and cold and sleepy and at times I wanted to stand up and scream—I turn myself in, take me back to camp for a shower, I’ll be in Kinville tonight drinking jungle juice at Eddy’s Sound Pub with a bar girl on my lap. But I kept on.

  I’d been raised by a highly disciplinarian father. I understood unattainable expectations and failure and subsequent punishment. When I’d stood on those yellow footprints the first day at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, I was fully equipped and wired for life as a marine. The Marine Corps environment is one of cause and effect, the first pragmatic principle we learn as children. When red, the stove is hot. When you fail, you disgrace yourself and others. When you succeed, be proud and others will be proud for you.

  After six hours, I reached my objective. I aimed at one of the STA spotters sitting on the tailgate of a Humvee, and I shot a blank from my M16; I’d passed the stalking tes
t. Four others completed the stalk with me: Collier, Vann, Vegh, and Kuehn.

  At the conclusion of the indoc, after the oral and written exams and ten more times through the obstacle course, the only thing that mattered was having completed the stalk. The life of a STA marine is facedown in the dirt and the muck and the waste. The five grunts accepted for STA Platoon 2/7 were Collier, Vann, Vegh, Kuehn, and Swofford. We’d stay assigned to our line platoons during the next two months in Korea and the Philippines, and when back in Okinawa for the final month of the deployment, we’d join STA and begin our scout/sniper training.

  It didn’t matter that I was a line grunt for sixty more days, I thought of myself differently already, and so did my line platoon peers. Soon my training would exceed theirs, and I would learn how to kill better, and faster, with more precision, and if a war started, being a STA marine would increase the danger of my missions.

  In May of 1990, when 2/7 returned to the States from the West-Pac, hundreds of our jarheads separated from the Marine Corps. Bottoms and Frontier asked for and received their discharges three months early so they could matriculate at Saddleback Community College for summer school, and Graycochea went to Hawaii and skipped the next eighteen months of his contract. Perhaps these three knew what was coming at the beginning of August; perhaps the salts’ constant sense of impending doom had rung loudly enough that they listened.

  The old salts—twenty-one or twenty-two years old—had seen it all: they’d been twice through Hondo and Fuji and the Northern Training Area, Pusan, Green Beach, Wake Island, Guam, Magsaysay Street in the PI; they’d spent years of their meager salary on sex and maybe drugs and certainly alcohol; in Hondo they’d traded the chocolate from their MRE for ten blow jobs and a boot shine from the prostitute’s little brother; in the PI they’d pounded fifteen Red Horse in fifteen minutes and received sample blow jobs from forty bar girls in one night, gone home with three bar girls for $20, caught fifteen cases of the clap, had their watch stolen off their wrist in the massage parlor/barbershop, been fired at by Muslim rebels. They’d floated on ships and ridden tired and exhausted through jungle and desert in hot, baking troop carriers, fired millions of rounds through the M16, the M60 machine gun, the M203 grenade launcher, detonated hundreds of Claymore mines, and thrown enough center-of-the-plate grenades to win ten Cy Young Awards, and they’d humped thousands of miles at a tactical pace, looking for nothing but other dumb jarheads in training. The salts were tired and mean and the last thing they needed was a war.

  During our second trip from the Triangle to the rear-rear, in the middle of October, I become rather sick over the realization that the base we’ve been ordered to enjoy—showers, private toilets perfect for soothing masturbation, two bunks and an air conditioner per room, sidewalks, televisions, VCRs, chow hall, pogey-shack—is probably not, as we’ve been told, an abandoned oil company camp, but actually a military base that had sat vacant for years, waiting for the American protectors to arrive in the event of a regional conflict, protectors who’d be tolerated until they obliterated the threat and returned the region’s massive oil reserves to their proper owners. We are soldiers for the vast fortunes of others. I realize this while sitting on a shitter and reading the English-language Arab Times. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney is quoted as saying no limits exist for the number of U.S. forces deployable to the Gulf, and heavy mechanized units from eastern Europe have begun transport to the desert. Foot and mechanized infantry units, artillery battalions, and planes are integral to a defensive posture, but hundreds and even thousands of tanks mean an offensive operation is imminent. The paper reports on Palestinian-Israeli violence, and if I were apocalyptically inclined, I might well think that the end is nigh.

  The intended effect of the barracks is to convince us that despite the hundreds of thousands of acres of desert that surround us, we are civilized men preparing to fight for the freedom of a civilized people. We are being cared for, the story goes. The Saudis are happy to host us in their country, we’re told; in fact they’re so happy, they’ve postponed certain drilling activities and removed their workers from the compound so that we may cool our sweat-soaked balls and brains.

  So, as much as I should, I don’t enjoy the rear. One STA team is still in the Triangle, and I ask Sergeant Dunn if I can arrange a ride to join them, because I’m tired of the air-conditioning and the $2 candy bars the Egyptians hawk in their pogey-shack. Dunn tells me no, that I have orders to enjoy myself, and he wonders aloud what my problem is:

  “What the fuck problem do you have with air-conditioning?”

  “I just don’t like this place,” I tell him. “It’s spooky. Preordained. In the desert at least it doesn’t look like they were waiting for us with a prefab red-carpet barracks.”

  “Stop thinking so hard. Jerk off and take a shower and sleep in the AC. Fucking relax, man. Who knows the next time you’re gonna get a hot shower and a rack.”

  For most jarheads, such propaganda works. Any grunt in his right mind will do anything for a hot shower and a rack. The grunt is an addict; the rear-rear is his fix. You’ve been in the desert for six weeks. The colonel lied about the hot showers your platoon would receive after the MOPP-suit football game. You heard rumors that field units would receive ten pounds of ice per platoon per day. You’ve seen no ice. One day, because someone stole a case off a mail truck, you drank a warm soda. In the rear you may drink ten or twenty or thirty cold sodas in a day. And the word is that they’re showing war movies in the rear-rear, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Boys from Company B, Full Metal Jacket, Sands of Iwo Jima. And the pleasure of the violent films is like the pleasure of cocaine or a good rough fuck.

  I don’t leave my small room for five days. I eat MREs and canned tuna and whatever else I scrounge from my platoon mates’ care packages. Troy Collier is my roommate, and his mother has sent him ten pounds of caramel, and I eat half of it. My platoon mates urge me to please shut up about the place being rigged, about the Saudis wanting us to die for their oil. Everyone in STA but me enjoys the rear. Ten phones have been installed, and what the fuck is my problem, why don’t I get on the phone to my girlfriend even if she is cheating on me, or my mom, who will love me no matter what. Make the best of the situation. Stop bringing everyone down with your negativity. Watch a couple of war movies and get pumped. Prepare yourself for killing.

  One night I’m alone in the barracks, cleaning my M16, while the rest of the platoon watches movies at the Fox Company barracks. They’re hoping for a replay of last night’s showing. A Fox Company grunt’s wife had sent him a video with his last care package. A homemade porn film had been spliced into a Vietnam flick. The barracks full of unsuspecting marines cheered a screen full of jungle carnage as the on-screen marines charged a VC bunker, then in midcinematic combat frenzy the barracks went silent when the screen turned from overwhelming firepower to the sleek power of sex. After a few seconds, the room erupted. The marines were elated that the amateur smut had made it past the censors, it was another coup! But the excitement only lasted until the marine whose wife had sent him the movie noticed something about the hooded woman, and what he noticed could have been a mole on her ass or the way she moaned or how she threw her head back as she came, but that coming woman was his wife, and the man was his neighbor, and he began to scream, “That’s my wife! That’s my wife fucking the neighbor, a goddamn squid!” At first the jarheads laughed, because they thought he was joking, but when he continued to scream and then began weeping, they knew that it really was his wife, and someone had the decency to turn the video off. But tonight they want a replay, because why not, the damage is done and when is the next time you’ll be able to witness infidelity? And fuck that poor jarhead anyway. He’s down at sick call on suicide watch, and as soon as the docs okay him, he’ll be on an emergency-leave flight to the States, he’ll be the fuck out of the desert.

  I remove my firing pin from the bolt carrier and place it in my mouth like a toothpick, and with my tongue I dance the tip of
the pin across my teeth. The sound is like a soft tapping against a fragile pane of glass.

  The term suicide watch always makes me think of my older sister. I didn’t know what suicide was until she tried to kill herself a few times. I was between the ages of twelve and fourteen at the time of her first attempts, and after a few sessions of family counseling and her extended stay in an institution (the place was called Serendipity, so it took me some time to realize that it was an institution), she was back living at home and the family situation, as the counselors say, was progressing normally. But, of course, my sister was not normal, and she’d spend the next many years trying to kill herself, and still now occasionally finds herself in the corner, with pills usually—so statistically we are supposed to understand she is not serious about ending her life but is only in the throes of a cry for help because she is a woman and she is in the corner trying pills, yet again—and then she stays at an institution with a dreamy, druggy name, such as Serendipity.

  I liked visiting my sister in her institutions. Often they were in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, slow-rolling foothills thick with trees and the various bent forks of snow-fed rivers. My mother and I would drive up the Sacramento Valley and exit the smoggy freeway for a slow and winding country route, where thick shadows cooled the asphalt and most sharp turns in the road yielded a stunning and steep view of one of the chilly rivers. By the time we arrived at the hospital, I’d have forgotten our destination.

  We’d wait first in one waiting room and then in a more interior waiting room and finally an even more interior visiting room, and soon my sister would appear, in what I considered a robe, though the hospital I’m sure had a more appropriate name for the garment, and the three of us would visit. My brother would not visit because he was stationed somewhere with the army, and my parents didn’t allow my younger sister to visit, fearing that the institution would frighten her, and my father didn’t visit because he and my sister didn’t get along, and often she blamed him for her mental condition, though as much as he was sometimes unfair to her, we all now know that it was the chemicals in my sister’s brain and not her sometimes harsh father that caused her to open the bottle and swallow one hundred or however many pills. Incidentally, my father was never a bastard to me, and there are different theories as to why this is. I am a spitting image of my father, and I think that he wasn’t a bastard to me because it would have been like being a bastard to himself, and he’d had enough of people being bastards to him while growing up.