Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  Our captain assures us that our current guard duty isn’t a training cycle—it’s highly probable that Iraq has operatives in Saudi Arabia who want nothing better than to take out a marine general and a handful of staff officers in the midst of planning the Coalition ground offensive.

  But we don’t believe this threat. For one thing, there isn’t another building (a possible hide for enemy snipers) within two thousand yards of the command post, and the perimeter is so heavily armed, with both an infantry and a weapons company, that the sorry bastards who try to make it through would be shredded to nothing by the time a sniper gets a shot off—we’d be shooting at piles of human hamburger.

  I assume that if an attack is committed, it’ll be Lebanon-style, a five-ton truck loaded with enough explosives to blow the entire building to ash. We’re ordered to shoot to kill any intruder, and if they’re barreling toward us in an explosives-heavy vehicle, we’ll try like hell to hit the driver.

  * * *

  A week into the guard-duty rotation we’re fortunate enough to receive a .50-caliber sniper rifle and the training to go with it. The Marksmanship Training Unit, at Quantico, Virginia, has been working on retrofitting a civilian .50-caliber semiautomatic rifle into a combat weapon. They’ve been at it for a few years, and the rumors were it would be a few more before they’d roll it out. But the Desert accelerated their schedule. Twenty Barrett .50-calibers have been shipped for ALLMAR disbursal. In the middle of the desert, on a range out to two thousand yards, one hundred or so of the best shooters in the world will test a new weapons system.

  The captain calls four sniper teams to the guard shack. He gives us map coordinates, tells us to bring enough chow and water for a week, and to go get our present. Me, Johnny, Troy, Dickerson, Fountain, Combs, Dunn, and Kuehn jump in a Humvee and head toward the middle of the Triangle.

  We arrive at the coordinates and the area looks like a Gypsy camp. Forty or so Humvees are haphazardly parked with IR netting covering some of them, blue tarps over others, some fully exposed, and a few hosting what look like tailgate parties, as snipers from all over the Marine Corps are meeting up for some serious rifle time. We attempt to locate other snipers from our regiment, with no luck, so we park near the Battalion Recon team we trained with in November on the coast.

  One of the great things about the Marine Corps is the lack of regalia that you’re required to attach to your uniform. You can look at an army guy, for instance, even in the field, and read his life story on his sleeves and chest. And in the Marine Corps everyone wears the same cover, no silly berets or baseball caps. So this gaggle of marines, this clutter of snipers and recon gurus, all look the same. We’re wearing desert cammies with boonie covers and nothing else. The only variation occurs with boots, and even there, little variation is visible because we all buy our boots from the same high-speed mail-order catalog.

  Guys wander from unit to unit and reunions are occurring here and there as snipers share stories from the different schools they’ve attended: Scuba, Jump, Sniper. I’m not division-level school-trained, so in the eyes and hearts of the division-schooled snipers, I’ll always be a lesser shooter, a Pig. This doesn’t bother me because I know the job, Pig or not—I know I hit the same targets at the same distances, handle the compass and map with the same expertise, call in bombs and artillery just as swiftly, crawl on my belly for thousands of yards in awful terrain and weather, wait and wait and wait, and I know I’m as ready as the Hogs for combat.

  My STA mates have fanned out to find friends and talk trash, but I sit in the back of our Humvee and read The Iliad. I rarely socialize with other units, and sometimes this causes me trouble, because people assume I’m either a sniper elitist or simply an asshole, but around other snipers and recon marines social disorder and dysfunction are expected, and I can sit in the back of our vehicle and read all day without offending anyone or inciting a fight.

  A recon sergeant has started a wrestling tournament, and in the middle of the bivouac site, sand rises into a storm as snipers from all over the Corps wrestle and cheer their fellows. All around me jarheads fight and wrestle and swear and trade war stories, and I read my book.

  Two jarheads who have lost their first wrestling matches are consoling and coaching one another when one of them notices me. He approaches my vehicle and says, “What the fuck are you reading?”

  “The Iliad.”

  He reaches toward me and I hand him the book and he examines the back cover. He says, “That’s some heavy dope, sniper. Cool.” And he returns to grappling with his partner.

  For the sniper, dope is anything that helps him acquire a target.

  In the middle of the afternoon the Quantico instructors call the crowd to order and commence classes on the .50-caliber. They’ve aligned the weapons on sheets of plywood, an impressive and deadly display. One of the instructors breaks down a weapon and explains the nomenclature and capabilities. The rifle is matte black and a few inches longer than the M40A1. It has a pistol grip, a comfortable-looking stock, and an octagonal barrel and triangular flash suppressor that resemble a whale harpoon. The weapon looks truly devastating, as though you might create casualties simply by flashing it on the battlefield. Yes, the motherfucker looks so deadly it makes me giggle and blush.

  (I don’t know this in January of 1991, but the Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle will become a controversial weapon in America. After the Gulf War, the militia movement and white separatists will latch on to the Barrett as a standard for the individual’s potential power against the tyrannical state. The Barrett will make junkyard relics of “bulletproof” limousines and the safety glass that surrounds public podiums. Presidential candidates will never stump the same way again when the shooter has an effective range of a mile and a half. The militia will adopt coveted scout/sniper sayings—One Shot/One Kill and Death from Afar—and print them on their T-shirts. After the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, reports will emerge that the truck-bomber, Timothy McVeigh, owned a Barrett. The Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, will force the ATF and FBI to use military troop carriers as cover against their .50-caliber sniper capability. And in Phoenix a man will make half a million dollars a year selling untraceable “build your own fifty” kits through the mail. Representative Henry Waxman of California will become a major opponent of the idea that your neighbor might own a gun that can fire rounds through your living room and on through the living rooms of the next ten houses down your block.)

  The Marksmanship Training Unit has affixed the same scope that we use on the M40A1 to the Barrett, the ten-power Unertl. This is controversial because the Barrett needs a scope manufactured to match the trajectory of the .50-caliber round. The Unertl ten had specifically been manufactured for the M40A1. The point target maximum effective range for the Barrett is advertised at two thousand yards, but the ten-power Unertl cuts that down to sixteen hundred. The Barrett has more problems than just the scope. The five-round magazines we’ve been issued are cheap and thin, made from subpar sheet metal by slave laborers in China, maybe sufficient for the civilian shooting in pleasant weather, wearing a fancy shooting glove and jacket, but they’re not well built enough for extended use during combat. The rounds catch in the magazine, interrupting the feed, interrupting the supposedly sustained and oppressive pinpoint fire. We’re forced to use a metal file to customize each magazine to each weapon, and this is a pain in the ass and absurd. The weapons must have cost over $5,000 apiece and Quantico went out and bought magazines for a nickel per, from the Communists. But when we complain, the instructors tell us to shut our holes, that we’re damn lucky to receive the rifles, that they’ve been working their asses off since early August trying to deliver the weapon to us, and that we’re making marksmanship history, integrating a .50-caliber sniper rifle into the armament. They tell us we’ll really make marksmanship history when we tear the asses out of the Iraqi armored brigades from sixteen hundred yards.

  But do I really care about tearing the asses out of the I
raqis? This is what I ask myself as I fire my one hundred rounds for the afternoon. From sixteen hundred yards away I’m achieving tight groups and punching armor-piercing projectiles through hardened steel. This is marksmanship magic. But also, this is death—the war moving closer, encroaching upon me. How long before I’m really pulling the trigger? Who is that man quartered in my crosshairs? Who will sight in on me?

  After the shoot, the instructors treat us to a hot meal. Some of us haven’t eaten hot chow in weeks or even months. We’re being pampered for some reason, as pampered as one might get in the Triangle. Not only have they trucked in hot chow, but there’s a whole Humvee full of pogey bait, and it’s free.

  The head instructor says, “Take what you want, it’s on the commandant. He’s excited about this weapon.”

  They pull out cases of iced Pepsi, and two of the instructors build a bonfire, because the sun has gone down and it’s January and even in the desert it gets cold at night in January.

  We break into four groups and we’re supposed to sit around the comfy fire and have a little talk-talk about the Barretts, but the session quickly widens to include anything on anyone’s mind that’s worth some wrath.

  One of the recon marines I know becomes especially animated, jumping to his feet, throwing his boonie cover at the instructors for our group, and yelling, “I want that goddamn four hundred yards. If I fucking die because you make me crawl four hundred lousy fucking yards closer to a goddamn raghead armored brigade, well, fuck; well, fuck me, I’m not crawling four hundred yards closer, you are going to shit me a scope that hits at two grand.”

  Kuehn says, “The motherfucker weighs enough. Plus the ammunition. We’ve been so happy pissing all over ourselves we haven’t talked about deployment. Are we going to carry a forty and a fifty in each sniper team, plus an M203, an M16, a pistol, and a freaking radio? Jesus, two men with enough firepower to take out a rifle company, but they won’t be able to fucking walk because the shit’s so heavy. We’ll be dead in the sand.”

  Dickerson says, “I’m turning my M16 in at the armory. And my pistol. And the radios don’t work anyway. When’s the last time anyone had a Prick work for more than a day without having to take it to the comm shop? The army is using satellite systems and we’re carrying fifteen pounds of dead radio. I’m gonna use smoke signals.”

  “We can do like the Saudis and hire some Flips to do the hard work,” a recon sergeant says. “We trained some fucking Saudis last week, we worked all day digging a defensive position, while the fuckers watched, then we told them to do the same overnight. Come back in the morning, and the bastards had driven to town and hired ten Flips and a couple Koreans to dig their fucking holes! Can you believe that shit? They said, ‘We don’t dig holes.’ I told them to fuck off and we left ’em there. All I got to say is expect an opening bigger than the parting of the Red motherfucking Sea when the war starts. Every A-rab in-country is gonna step aside for the U.S. of fucking A. to go get chewed up. That’s us, you dumb bastards.”

  The instructor breaks in. “Hey, gents, can we talk about the rifles? It’s not news that this war is gonna be all-American. I’m here to teach you how to kill people and disable vehicles with your new toy. By the way, you all know you can’t hit a human target with a fifty-caliber weapon, right? It’s in the Geneva Convention. So you hit the gas tank on their vehicle, and they get blown the hell up, but you can’t target some lonely guard or a couple of towlies in an OP calling in bombs. You’ll have to get closer with the forty or call in your own bombs.”

  “We can’t shoot people with this thing? Fuck the Geneva Convention,” a sniper from the Fifth Marines says.

  Dickerson says, “You fuck the Geneva Convention and I’ll see you in Leavenworth. That’s like shooting a nun or a doctor. Where’d we find this retard?”

  The recon sergeant says, “The Fifth Marines. They collected every jackass in the Corps and shipped them all to the Fifth Regiment. All the inbreeds and degenerates. They came from the same mama somewhere in the woods of North Carolina. A big old green, wart-covered jarhead-mama. She shits MREs and pisses diesel fuel!”

  The instructor interrupts again. “What I want to talk about is the Barrett! How did you feel behind the weapon?”

  “It’s an amazing weapon,” I say. “The recoil is nothing. It feels like an air rifle, with that ten-foot spring in it. I don’t like the scope. I love that scope on my forty, I just don’t like it on this weapon. It doesn’t feel right. And I’d like my four hundred yards back, just like Lips over there.”

  “Yeah. If the commandant loves me so damn much, where’s my four hundred?” the recon marine asks.

  “I don’t care about the four hundred. I don’t think we’ll need it in this war. Hell, I don’t know if we’ll be needed. The war’s going to be moving too fast. Sixteen hundred yards is nothing. Sixteen hundred yards was two weeks of fighting in Vietnam and a whole goddamn year in World War One. It’ll last about five minutes out here, if you ask me.”

  This is Johnny, a guy who everyone listens to. Strangers watch Johnny for about two minutes and they know his dope is dialed tight. He doesn’t look at anyone when he speaks, he half looks at the sky and half turns his eyes back on himself. When he’s done talking, he looks down at his hands, and the entire conversation stops, because he’s brought up what everyone else was talking around—the possibility of our obsolescence. The Barrett has been introduced to bring the sniper up to desert speed, but Johnny has stopped us.

  The instructor says, “Listen, snipers. You’re always needed. You all know this. I won’t lie, the war is going to be high fucking speed, but that doesn’t mean the colonels don’t need snipers. You snipers have a good night. I’ve got you for four more days and about forty thousand rounds. And I’m trucking in hot chow every night. So let’s tear it up, all right, snipers? Remember, you are the most effective psychological weapon on the battlefield.”

  I say, “The most effective psychological weapon on the battlefield is the nuclear bomb. And then gas, and the bastards have gas and we don’t. Or we won’t use it. Tell us, Quantico, are you taking these goddamn pills three times a day?” I pull the foil-wrapped pills out of my cargo pocket. “Fuck no, you aren’t. In six days you’ll be on Virginia Beach drinking rum runners and fucking your wife. They haven’t even told us what’s in these pills. They tried it on rats, and they say it might be an antidote to nerve gas! Fuck yes, I’ll take the pills. But in a year my asshole will turn inside out and start talking to me!”

  Johnny pulls me aside as though I’m a drunk relative at the family reunion. “Hey, Swoffie, cool down. We can’t control anything but our crosshairs.”

  Over the next four days we fire hundreds of rounds through the Barrett. Due to some strange interchange between the scope, Johnny’s thick eyeglasses, and his weird eyesight, Johnny hits consistently at eighteen hundred yards, farther than anyone else on the firing line. Because of this, and other reasons one can never know, STA 2/7’s Barrett is assigned to me and Johnny, which means, among other things, we now carry more weight on our backs. But we also own the best gun in the desert.

  We arrive back at First Marine Division Headquarters, where the other sniper teams have spent the week bored to death on the roof. The only excitement occurred when a boot lieutenant accidentally discharged his pistol inside the building. No one was injured, but the sergeant of the guard went “about ape shit,” as Dettmann put it, trying to find the culprit. Accidental discharges are always a concern when two-thirds of the Marine Corps have live ammunition hanging from their bodies.

  There are also the accidental on purpose discharges, when the marine decides it’s about time he fires his rifle or blows something to hell because there he sits with all this firepower and who knows when he’ll be allowed to use it. The AOPDs usually occur when two marines have been sitting together on an observation post for days or weeks, looking for what they’re not sure, and they’ve talked themselves nearly to death, they know more about each other’
s sex life than they ever wanted to know, they know every childhood victory and failure, every love lost and love gained and love just barely missed, the dreams and sick fantasies that fuel each other, and finally, more than anything, they know that when they get out of the Marine Corps, they never want to see another jarhead for as long as they live because jarheads are sick and fucked-up, and if jarheads are sick and fucked-up, that means they are too.

  And after the long silence that follows this troubling recognition, one of the jarheads says, “Let’s shoot something or blow some shit up. Isn’t there a Claymore around here somewhere?”

  This must have been how it occurred with Fowler. Though he might’ve been alone. No one really knew. Often, the stories jarheads tell are impossible to confirm.

  On OP one night Fowler says to me, “You should see what the forty does to the head of a fucking camel!”

  I ask, “What does it do?”

  “It turns it inside out into about three fucking knots. The goddamn slow things are an easy target too. Headshots like a motherfucker.”

  I don’t believe or trust or like Fowler, but I assume his story is true because of my recent interaction with the Bedouins, and my knowledge of his act is potentially harmful to my rank, my paycheck, and my freedom, so I ask him no further questions. This is one way stories become clouded and imprecise, because often the storyteller is a jarhead no one cares much for—a loudmouth or a shitbag or the guy who has seen it all and is here to tell you about it, and once he begins speaking, other jarheads do anything in their power to shut him up, or they walk away, because he’s either lying or he’s telling the truth after committing a heinous act.