Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  The visits with my sister saddened me, but nonetheless they were comforting. My mother and I would offer my sister encouraging words and we’d all hold hands and cry, and also smile and occasionally laugh. We’d give my sister the family update so that she wouldn’t feel so isolated, even though she was isolated. Sometimes her brain had recently been fried, as in electroshock therapy, though I believe they call it some other, better name these days, a name that sounds not unlike serendipity. If brain work had recently occurred, we’d barely talk, because my sister was incapable of responding other than with an occasional grunt or a flutter of her eyelids. We’d sit there, the three of us, holding hands and crying, and nearby usually another patient or two was busy visiting with family members.

  Watching the other visitors react to the sickness in front of them, the related sickness, fascinated me. It is difficult for most people to face related sickness. I know this because through the many years of visiting my sick sister in institutions, I witnessed people related to sickness react poorly to the sick person and the sickness. I watched fathers berate daughters for hurting their mothers and brothers berate brothers for driving their parents mad, when everyone should’ve known the poor crazy person in lockdown couldn’t help himself or herself. No matter the group counseling or the pills or the months or years of confinement, the crazy person nearly always returns to the island of their grief or madness. If you are on the outside, no matter how sick you might consider yourself, you are on the outside and cannot claim the lunacy or the malaise.

  Throughout the years of visiting my sister in mental institutions, I also watched my mother react to my sister. My mother’s reaction was a many-years-long sigh. As much as my mother loved her daughter, it was difficult for her to understand this related sickness, hard for her to comprehend that while she’d raised the daughter she loved, she was at the same time raising a sickness inside of the daughter, breast-feeding the sickness, driving the sickness to ballet lessons and clarinet lessons and softball practice, throwing birthday parties for the sickness, purchasing back-to-school clothes and new grade-appropriate dictionaries for the sickness.

  The sigh is my mother’s default setting for dealing with grief. While in Saudi Arabia, about to go to war, in the few letters my mother writes to me, I recognize the sigh blowing through her perfect script, and I feel as if I’m again in a visiting room with my mother, but this time I’m the patient, and the institution is not named Serendipity, the institution is named War.

  I reassemble my weapon. I’ve been in the Marine Corps for less than two years, and I’ve probably performed this one act, assembling the M16, more than ten thousand times. I break it down again. I wonder if mothers worry because their marine sons live with high-powered rifles always within arm’s reach.

  Sometimes marines kill themselves when they’ve received bad news from home, from the woman they love, a wife or a girlfriend. This bad news often involves the genitals of the involved parties—in graphic detail the woman describes the other man’s skills in bed, and particular acts the marine would never perform, such as with the mouth or the ass or even with innocent toys or easily acquired cooking oils. Even if not specified, these acts are always imagined by the marine.

  Kristina, the woman I’m currently supposed to love, the woman who is supposed to love me, is having sex with someone else, a guy who works at a hotel with her, one of the clerks. Even though she has not described their sex in her letters, I know the sex is occurring because she has called him a good friend and a great listener. Also, a coworker and friend of hers, Katherine, who writes me honest letters, has referred to Kristina’s “new friend.” But I have a sense of humor. I recall Drill Instructor Sergeant Seats saying, “If I ever find out one of you goes and kills yourself over pussy, I’ll chase you down into hell and kill your ignorant ass a second time.”

  When, a few weeks into this deployment, Kristina told me she’d found a job at a hotel, I imagined that soon she’d be sleeping with one of the clerks—during their breaks they’d use vacant rooms, the same vacant rooms that all of the other employees use, not even changing sheets between fornicators. My platoon mates talked me out of this scenario, insisting that I’d probably seen something similar on TV or in a movie, but that the likelihood of such a crime being perpetrated in real life was slim. I did not believe my mates, nor could they have believed themselves, but I appreciated their good-hearted attempts at soothing me.

  I close my eyes and reassemble my weapon in seven seconds. I stand. I toss my rifle from hand to hand, marking a sharp cadence with the slap of my palms against the hard plastic hand guards.

  Kristina’s absurd insistence that we stay together in the midst of her infidelity is a result of her desire to be connected to the military, specifically the Marine Corps, and now, while I’m in a combat zone, receiving combat pay, she considers herself connected to combat. (During and after my various infidelities I never insisted we remain boyfriend and girlfriend, but somehow we would always be classified as such.) Combat must seem sexy to Kristina. I treat her military fetish with disdain because I know that the power of the fetish will not usurp the power of her simple desire to feel flesh, even the flesh of the lonely hotel clerk. I know that she takes pleasure in telling people that her boyfriend is a combat marine. I imagine her smiling as she tells the poor hotel clerk that the man whose girlfriend he’s fucking is a marine. And I’m sure the hotel clerk likes telling his friends that the new girl he’s stiffing is a dumb jarhead’s girlfriend. Everyone loves to get over on the jarhead. Especially other jarheads.

  I know that while I was in boot camp, Kristina slept with a marine recruiter. Some people might insist that this replacement lover signified her love for me, that by fornicating with the marine recruiter she included me in her infidelity, bringing herself closer to me because she could not touch me during the tortuous thirteen weeks of boot camp. In this version she’d shown me respect by choosing a marine rather than a civilian, and the recruiter was doing me a favor because while he fucked Kristina, he prepared her for the rough-and-tumble life of loving a jarhead.

  But Kristina’s various infidelities are not the reasons I’m standing in the middle of my small barracks room, placing the muzzle of my M16 in my mouth and tasting the cold rifle metal and the smoky residue of gunpowder. The reasons are hard to name. The history of my family and the species? The reports that the enemy to the north are elite fighters who learned how to throw grenades when I was barely off the tit? To move closer toward my sister? Cowardice? Fatigue? Boredom? Curiosity? It’s not the suicide’s job to know, only to do.

  I have ammunition everywhere: hanging from my body, stored in metal boxes and wooden crates under my rack, packed thirty deep into magazines. It is hard to know why I’ve selected the M16 over the sniper rifle, the weapon with the larger caliber. The round the sniper rifle fires is much more advanced than the basic M16 projectile, precision versus ball. But the weapon I’ve locked and loaded is my M16. Though less powerful than the .308 round the sniper rifle fires, the 5.56mm M16 round has a lot of bounce and turn, and one hears countless stories concerning an M16 round entering a guy’s neck and exiting through the tip of his left big toe, or going in the toe and exiting through the left eye socket. In the event of a proper head shot, the result is what we call pink mist. I’ve spent many hours of my life imagining what my bullets will do to the enemy.

  The medulla oblongata shot is the most coveted shot, the epic shot. Entry through the mouth or the eyeball is also acceptable. The marine does not shoot to injure but only to kill. Sometimes my imagined enemy has been a Russian, sometimes a Chinese, sometimes an Arab, depending on world events and what version of those events I’m receiving or currently involved in.

  I bend at the waist and place the buttstock of my rifle against the deck. My thumb rests on the trigger. I bite into the steel muzzle and feel my teeth reversing into my gums. With my tongue running between the slits of the flash suppressor, I imagine the trip my bullet will take, its
movement through cerebrum, cerebellum, corpus callosum, pineal body, medulla oblongata. I think of a bullet traveling around my head and exiting through an eye socket or never exiting but rather spinning and spinning and ripping my brain to shreds until the momentum of ballistics is overpowered by fleshly resistance. Stop. Dead.

  When you have the muzzle of a high-powered rifle in your mouth, there are many things to consider other than your despair.

  Troy walks into our room and sees me. He stops. My trigger selector is on burst, so that rather than one bullet rounding my skull, there will be three, and this must have been the reason I chose the M16 over the sniper rifle. Burst.

  Troy says, “What the fuck?”

  And I might be only a half a second or many seconds, or even many years, from pulling the trigger, because who knows how many tries one is allowed until one gets it right, but Troy slaps me hard across the back of my head, and the muzzle plays around in my mouth, and I chip a tooth.

  I look at him and say, “I was fucking around, I knew you were walking in the door.”

  He unloads my weapon, calls me various names, and throws my rifle on the rack with his.

  He says, “They played it! That poor jarhead. Half the battalion plus assorted tanker assholes have watched his wife getting fucked, really getting fucked, by the neighbor. But I’d watch it again tomorrow. And you want to kill yourself? I need to go for a run. You coming?”

  I put my boots on and we fill our two-quart canteens and strap them to our backs. Our side of the barracks, what looks like an extended double-wide trailer, is filling up with our platoon mates, and the story of the video is on all of their tongues. Kuehn asks us why the hell we’re going for a run, and Fowler calls us suck-asses. Troy insults them both with numerous imaginative profanities involving farm animals and their mothers, and the two of us head into the hot night. We stretch outside of the barracks, and the whir of the hundreds of window-unit air conditioners sounds like one large motor idling at the start line, a motor without a body and without a driver, just pure power and fuel.

  We run the perimeter of the base. It’s absurd to be in the desert and at the same time confined. Marine MPs in Humvees are stationed every few hundred yards. I wonder if they know what they’re looking for. If we scream, they might shoot us.

  Troy says, “I really don’t know what you were doing back there. If this is over Kristina, you need to pull yourself together. She ain’t suicide-pretty.”

  “It’s not about her. It’s about the desert.”

  “The desert my ass! Motherfucker, I picked out and bought for you your first hooker in the PI. Don’t try to jack me off! I don’t give a fuck what it is, just don’t pull the goddamn trigger!”

  Troy had indeed bought me my first prostitute in the Philippines, and he considered that a blood bond. A year before our West-Pac he was stationed in the PI, and he knew the islands and the bars as though he’d been born in Manila rather than Greenville, Michigan. But on barracks duty in the PI he got busted from corporal to private for failing the marijuana portion of a piss test. He’d blown a choice assignment and been sent to the Fleet Marine Force, so he was particularly belligerent and disrespectful and thus great for morale. He was a terrible crying drunk, constantly moaning about a girl at home named Lisa who’d refused his advances since grade school.

  Even before we both passed the STA indoc, Troy and I often drank together in Okinawa, and after taking in a few porn films and a $2 plate of yakisoba, we’d end up in my barracks, yelling profanities and asking for free beer. On Okinawa, it was easy to bum free beer. The Michelob semitruck pulled onto base every Wednesday at noon and sold cases of bottles for $5. There weren’t enough refrigerators on the entire base to hold the beer all of those jarheads bought. After drinking a case of $5 Michelob, yelling at people for no apparent reason was rather common. It wasn’t just drunkenness, it was stupidity and youth and forgetfulness. You must forget who you were before the Marine Corps. You must also forget the person you might be in the future, after leaving the Marine Corps, because when war comes, you might die and then all of your fantasies and predictions for the future will have become lies.

  We run in silence. Troy is smaller and faster than me, but I can outdistance him. He tries to tire me out quickly, and I attempt to finish him off slowly. We run and run and the hours pass, and even though we’re going in circles, I’m running away from whatever I left back in the barracks. I’m swirling around the thing until it becomes part of the swirl, and the swirl becomes part of me, and I’m still a part of that small sickness, and that sickness is still a small part of me, but it no longer has me bent over at the waist, chewing on the muzzle of my rifle. Maybe someday in the future I will revisit the sickness, but for now I’m done with it.

  Troy snaps his fingers as he runs, a trick his high school track coach taught him to keep on pace. Our boots slap the sand with the sound of a theater curtain falling. And we are actors running around the stage. We are delivering our lines as we run. We are proving to the great theater director of All Time that we are ready for war or whatever. We can run all night, and we will run all night, through the sand, in circles around our fake encampment. The wagons are circling. We are the wagons. We have no reason to challenge one another this way, to prove anything to one another, there is nothing to prove, there is no challenge. We are the same body. We are nearly the same brain. We are running ourselves into the earth, literally; we run a path around the fence, like wild animals circling prey they don’t yet know how to eat.

  My shoulders hurt and my stomach aches and we have been running so long that even my fingertips hurt, but we continue. My crotch is raw, and Troy’s is too, because he says to me, “I wish I had rubbed some petrol jelly in my crotch,” and I affirm this desire. But we will not stop. The sun rises. Reveille plays over the same speakers that call the Egyptians to prayer. We continue to run.

  Perhaps I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger. My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness. Maybe Troy’s good timing saved me. I think about my sister, this very minute living in an institution in California, and I consider myself a poor impostor, an actor speaking the wrong lines. I don’t know what I want, but obviously I don’t want badly enough to be dead. I think about Hemingway. What a shot. What despair. What courage. Some insist that the suicide is both a coward and a cheat, but I think the suicide is rather courageous. To look at one’s life and decide that it’s not worth living, then to go through with the horrible act. Millions of people live lives that aren’t worth living. Many fewer people end their worthless lives. To look down the barrel of the gun or over the lip of the pill bottle and say, “That is what I want, that is the world that needs me, better than breath, better than banging my bones through the remainder of these sorry days”—there is the courageous man and woman, the suicide. But I don’t own the courage to kill myself. I must return to the thing I know best, possibly the only thing I truly know: being a jarhead.

  The mirage interferes, even long after the Gulf War. A few years later, after Troy might have saved me from killing myself, he is killed—now a civilian driving to work in Michigan one morning, at least hungover and possibly drunk, hitting a patch of black ice and then a tree and now he is dead.

  Six of us traveled to Greenville, Michigan, for the funeral. Me, Atticus Larson, Roger Wagner, Sandor Vegh, Doc John Duncan, and Doug Welty. When we arrived at the Detroit airport, the five of them had been drinking for thirty-six hours and I’d been drinking for thirty (because I was late back to base after liberty and so found out about Troy’s death six hours and five cases of beer after them), and since I was the closest to sober, I rented the car. The Michigan winter was brutal, and we’d left the high desert in a rush, bringing only our dress uniforms and one spare set of civilian clothes, and not one of us had brought a jacket, not even Atticus, a native of Wisconsin, who should’ve known better. It was 3 A.M. and we drove around Detroit for an hour before finding our way out.

  We each had a bottle of
liquor with us, and we passed the whiskey and schnapps and brandy and Scotch around, and this way we stayed warm and were able to continue a buzz, and I drove as the snow began to fall, and we didn’t speak, other than the occasional Fuck or What a motherfucking shitload of luck or Goddamn, goddamn. We were all hurt badly, and ready to die, to join our friend. We wanted the pain to end and certainly the alcohol didn’t help, and our good friend was dead, and we didn’t give fuck-all about anything else.

  The girl named Lisa, whom Troy had loved from afar for many years, had given us directions to the funeral home. Lisa and her parents were there and also Troy’s fiancée, a girl he’d started writing to from the Desert when Lisa had finally made Troy understand she wanted only his friendship. Somehow Troy had convinced his future fiancée to join the Marines, and she’d done so while we were at war, and she had subsequently told Troy that the engagement wouldn’t work, with him in Michigan now and her on the West Coast, but they should just wait and see. She was a nice woman, and smart and tough, and being grunts, we’d spent minimal time around women marines, and at first we weren’t sure how to treat her, but eventually we treated her as a peer and the former fiancée of our dead friend.