Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  The fighting man receives tokens—medals, ribbons, badges, promotions, combat pay, abrogation of taxes, a billet to Airborne School—worthless bits of nothing, as valuable as smoke.

  Johnny and I listen to the war drone on until all of our batteries die.

  The next morning we are supposed to be extracted by Humvee, but the vehicle never shows, and at 0700 we begin patrolling on foot toward what should be the new battalion CP coordinates. We are concerned over the absence of our extraction team, and then, as though to confirm that a slaughter of our battalion has occurred, a squad of enemy tanks moves across the horizon. We kneel in the sand as the tanks head slowly north, and there is nothing for us to do but watch.

  I imagine a possible horror—as we took turns sleeping and watching the empty desert, our unit was slaughtered by a renegade enemy force, and Johnny and I will arrive to a mass of fatalities, the only two marines living from a battalion of a thousand men. Who will carry the standard now? Johnny looks afraid, as he did just a few nights prior, as we crawled the rise, ready to engage the enemy who’d shot at us with rockets.

  He says, “Swoffie, I don’t like this. I’ve never not had a pickup. Dunn wouldn’t allow it. He’d run out here and carry us back on his skinny fucking shoulders.”

  “Maybe they gave Cortes the map and compass.”

  “Even Cortes would find us. It’s nearly a straight shot. Lock and load. Let’s go find out what the fuck.”

  Johnny assembles his M203 and me my M16 and we fasten our sniper rifles to our bodies with slings.

  We patrol tactically the entire route to the assumed battalion coordinates. We speak only in hand signals—Halt, Eyes Right, Decrease Speed, Increase Speed, Shift Right, Shift Left, I Do Not Understand. We are once again undergunned and out of support, two flabby, worthless tits left to jiggle in the wind, most alone in this widest and darkest of lands. I imagine the scene back at battalion, all of my mates dead and dying. I imagine the dubious fame that will come to Johnny and me, the last bearers of the standard: 2/7 is dead. Tell it to the commandant. After such atrocities units are disbanded and marines are banned from mentioning the ghost battalions.

  It takes us about three hours to move within two hundred meters of the draw where the battalion should be bivouacked. By 1000 they’re supposed to be en route to the next fight or at least packed and ready to roll. But we don’t encounter them during the patrol, we don’t come upon anyone. We dump our packs and sniper rifles at the bottom of the rise and low-crawl up it. All I can see ahead of me is sand and sky, still some smoke from the oil fires, but more blue than I’ve seen in weeks. The sand is warm against my body. Johnny pauses and loads a grenade into his breech. I’ve been on burst the entire patrol, and my finger is still on the trigger, sweating against the trigger.

  Nearer the top of the rise we hear music and screaming, and Johnny thinks it must be a trick, a ploy, and we continue slowly, prepared for the worst, prepared for an assault or to witness the results of a great atrocity. We crawl to the top of the rise, and on the other side we see Headquarters & Support Company 2/7 behaving as if they’re on liberty. Men are lying naked on sleeping pads, soaking up the sun that bursts between the gray smoke clouds. Weapons and rucks and uniforms are strewn about the camp. Two men throw a football back and forth. A poker game is full of players, and a crowd of bettors surrounds the makeshift card table, the losers arguing as each hand ends. Two gas masks, impaled upon metal fence posts, face us—oh, dreadful but magical skulls!

  Johnny and I sit and watch the company live what two days ago, two hours ago, two minutes ago, would’ve been our wild and dangerous fantasy. We’re unable to move, our legs stuck beneath us as under a great weight. We must continue our last bit of war—we know what the commotion means, why First Sergeant Martinez is handing out cigars and dancing shirtless and playing a kazoo when he isn’t smoking his cigar, and we know why he’s allowing Jimi Hendrix to pipe through the comm towers. But Johnny and I stay on the rise, we sit for an hour or ten minutes or half an hour or all day, watching men we know and love celebrate the end of our little war.

  Eventually, I put my rifle on safe, and Johnny removes the grenade from his weapon—he shuts the breech and the sound is like an iron door closing on history. We descend the rise, and the first sergeant is the first to greet us, smiling broadly, and in his face I see his family and the happiness of a family man, this from a marine I’ve never seen happy except while insulting or degrading a subordinate, and he says to us, “Oh, fuck, you guys got stuck out there, didn’t you? I had Siek drive the colonel up north for a look-see. Sorry, guys, you crazy snipers, you crazy bastards, but the war is over, the motherfucker is over.” And he slaps us both upon the back and shoves cigars in our faces.

  We make our way to the STA area, where everyone apologizes for leaving us out there, but they really did run short of vehicles because of the mad rush of staff officers up to Kuwait City to view the victory. And they are so happy on peace that Johnny and I don’t care, we call them bastards and sons of bitches for making us run a tactical patrol for eight klicks without communication while the goddamn war was over, but we really don’t care.

  The music plays throughout the day, Hendrix, the Stones, the Who, music from a different war. Ours is barely over but we begin to tell stories already. Remember that time. Remember when. Can you believe?

  I wonder if we’re being fooled. I want to read the news in a newspaper, or hear it on the radio. So much information is bad information.

  But by nightfall, after I’ve heard Siek tell us about the happy civilians he saw on the outskirts of Kuwait City, I begin to believe. Siek has acquired a stack of wooden pallets from an ammunition dump. We douse the pallets with diesel and light a fire, and we gather in a circle around the flames. We have nothing special to cook and only water to drink, but we have our stories, and these go on for some time. The stories will never end.

  Because we don’t have liquor, my platoon mates celebrate by chewing tobacco, perhaps the only marine vice I haven’t acquired. Atticus swears to me I’ll get a buzz, and I realize that I want a buzz, or anything to fill the onset of a nameless emptiness. I try a mouthful of the dark, musty leaves. I chew and suck on the leaves, forming them into a tight ball. My lips and gums go numb. I spit into the fire a few times, just as my mates, and I do feel a good buzz. I swallow some of my spit. I close my eyes, the world spins, and I fall slowly backward off my ammunition box, onto my back. I roll over onto my hands and knees. No one notices me. Their war stories march through my brain like a parade of epileptics. My stomach turns. I vomit. It feels as though I’m regurgitating the last seven months of my life. This is how I welcome the peace.

  We spend a few weeks in Kuwait, clearing bunkers, and this is where I will become intimate with the detritus and almost kill myself.

  STA 2/7 is ordered to clear three large enemy positions, one artillery and two entrenched infantry. Our mission is to empty the bunkers and trenches of weapons and equipment and especially to look for chemical weapons and any intelligence that might be considered relevant to the debriefing. We know that the only things relevant to the debriefing are the corpses.

  The count of the dead: many of them, many fewer of us. This is a good count, these are good numbers. Let’s go home.

  The cleanup mission is a freelance operation. We gear up in our three Humvees and head out each morning from the battalion bivouac, and the captain only wants to hear from us if something goes wrong, if we engage a sleepy enemy platoon, a group of men who missed the great assault, or if a munitions cache explodes or someone steps on a mine.

  We gleefully run through the enemy positions, noting the hundreds of different ways a man might die when five-hundred-pound bombs are dropped on his weakly fortified position or when his tank or troop carrier is blown nearly inside out. Some of the corpses in the bunkers are hunched over, hands covering their ears, as though they’d been patiently waiting. Maggots and whatever other insects enjoy a corpse are busy with th
e decaying remains. Near some positions shallow graves have been dug. I hope that at the end of the day the casualties were gathered and buried with honor or at least respect. In some positions corpses are stacked on one another, and bottom to top one can tell the stage of decay, a reeking calendar of death. In one bunker I see three different stages of decay on three different corpses, which leads me to believe that the men died at different times, and that the last man alive in the bunker spent a few or many days waiting to die near his two death-bloated friends. I can’t understand why he didn’t bury the men or at least move them from his bunker, but maybe they were a comfort, a cold comfort—helping him to know his end so intimately, sleeping next to it and smelling it and waiting. Many of the men in the bunkers seem to have died not from shrapnel but concussion, and dried, discolored blood gathers around their eyes and ears and nose and mouth, no obvious trauma to their bodies. A few weeks into the air campaign the United States began employing the daisy-cutter bomb, a weapon originally used in Vietnam to clear helicopter landing zones. Three feet above the ground the daisy cutter detonates its 12,600-pound charge of aluminum-powder blasting slurry. If you were within two acres of the explosion and above ground or even in a barricaded bunker, you were sure to die. The infantry positions look like daisy-cutter test areas. The mouths of the dead men remain open in agony, a death scream halted. Can you hear?

  I enjoy sitting in the bunkers and sifting through the dead men’s effects. The Iraqis had been in these positions for months, and they made the bunkers comfortable if not formidable, with colorful blankets on the decks and nailed to the plywood roofs, pictures of family propped in shelves dug from the sand. I thumb through their letters, in Arabic, so I can’t read them, but I don’t need to read the script to know what it says: Please come home alive. We love you. The cause is just.

  Near our bivouac, Crocket has found a corpse he particularly disagrees with. He says the look on the dead man’s face, his mocking gesture, is insulting, and that the man deserved to die and now that he’s dead the man’s corpse deserves to be fucked with. And Crocket goes to the corpse again and again, day after day, and with his E-tool he punctures the skull and with his fixed bayonet he hacks into the torso. And he takes pictures. Johnny Rotten orders Crocket to stay away from the corpse, but he doesn’t, Crocket is being driven mad by that corpse. I understand what drives Crocket to desecrate the dead soldier—fear, anger, a sense of entitlement, cowardice, stupidity, ignorance. The months of training and deployment, the loneliness, the boredom, the fatigue, the rounds fired at fake, static targets, the nights of firewatch, and finally the letdown, the easy victory that just scraped the surface of a war—all of these are frustrating and nearly unendurable facets of our war, our conflict. Did we fight? Was that combat? When compared to what we’ve heard from fathers and uncles and brothers about Vietnam, our entire ground war lasted as long as a long-range jungle patrol, and we’ve lost as many men, theater-wide, as you might need to fill two companies of grunts. Crocket—hacking at the dead Iraqi soldier and taking pictures of the waste—is fighting against our lack of satisfaction.

  One morning before Crocket starts his work on the corpse—the body by now a hacked-up, rotting pile of flesh—I bury it. I use my E-tool to cover the dead man with sand. I start at his feet and build a mound that rises six or so inches above his body, and I finish at his mutilated face, the thing no longer a face, his body no longer a corpse but a monument to infinite kinds of loss.

  Crocket discovers that I’ve buried his man, and he calls me a coward and a bitch and an Iraqi-lover. I tell him I’ve done everyone a favor by burying the corpse, even him, and that someday he’ll be grateful I’ve stopped him.

  He says, “Look around, the dead motherfuckers are everywhere. I’ll find another one.” And maybe he does.

  Crocket isn’t the only marine desecrating corpses, though. At company formation First Sergeant Martinez says, “Because we are U.S. marines, and honorable, we do not shoot dead men, we do not carve their skulls open with our E-tools, we do not throw grenades into a pit of corpses, and after we don’t do these things, we don’t take pictures of the resultant damage. If we do take pictures, and the pictures are discovered, we will be punished under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And if we steal weapons or articles of identification or other battlefield trophies from the corpses, we will also be punished under the UCMJ. Carry on.”

  One morning we receive a call over the radio that our battalion is in queue for the victory lap through Kuwait City, and that if we want to join the convoy, we should meet the five-tons at such and such coordinates at 1100.

  Our convoy rambles through the outskirts of the city, through the poor neighborhoods, where olive-skinned and overweight mothers clutch babies to their large breasts and with one hand wave Kuwaiti and American flags. Their homes are made of stone and held together, it seems, through the creative manipulation of plywood and nails. The only Kuwaitis we see are these women and young children. They chant, “USA, USA,” and we wave, and occasionally a jarhead jumps from his truck and hugs a woman or a child while one of his buddies snaps a picture. These must also have been the neighborhoods of the expatriate workers, the workers from the PI and Malaysia and India and Egypt working for cheap with limited human rights, the people whose population, before the invasion, had nearly matched that of the nationals. These Kuwaiti women with their children aren’t the ones we fought for: we fought for the oil-landed families living in the palaces deep with gold, shaded by tall and courtly palm trees. These flag-waving women are just like us, these women are our mothers, and those children dirty at the mouth with skinned and bloody knees, they are us and our sisters and our neighborhood friends.

  Our convoy is not allowed to drive farther than this ghetto. We’re turned around by MPs, stationed at checkpoints preventing us from entering the actual city, from driving through the neighborhoods where in the homes, the palaces, I imagine women and men are busy making lists of the assets and property stolen or vandalized during the Iraqi occupation, while they lived in five-star hotels in Cairo and London and Riyadh.

  We turn around and pass the same women and children from earlier, and I assume they’ve been placed there by the Kuwaiti and U.S. governments, handed the flags, and told to stand in their gravel yards at certain hours while the U.S. troops pass, and smile and wave your flags and act happy for your freedom. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe during the occupation they stowed the U.S. flags in their kitchen cupboards, waiting for this glorious day.

  One of the hero medals we’ll rate will be the Kuwaiti Liberation Medal, a handsome gold medal with what looks to be palm fronds jutting from it. While most medals arrive wrapped in cardboard and plastic, the KLM will be presented in its own collectible box with hinges and a clasp. The rumors will say that the Kuwaiti government offered to pay each American service member who’d served in the region ten thousand American dollars, but the U.S. government refused, claiming the troops weren’t for sale. Other rumors will surround the medal: if you pay your way to Kuwait and present your medal upon landing at the airport, untold pleasures await you, pleasures of the flesh delivered by Kuwaiti women—grapes from the vine, wine spit into your mouth from her mouth, her sisters and friends, entering all of the holes like the ancients talked about, the whole sexy deal. Also, the medal is said to be made from pure gold, with a market value of $1,000. None or all of this will be true but I will never know and never care.

  After the victory lap we return to the artillery position. I’ve become comfortable darting in and out of the enemy bunkers, the absent presence of the enemy surrounding me—their colorful blankets and weapons and the Swedish and Russian rations they left behind, the Russian and British munitions, and the pictures of their families and their letters—I’ve even become comfortable with their corpses bloodied and decayed.

  I enter a command position at the southern edge of the perimeter, and as I duck into the bunker, staring at the gun plan affixed to a piece of plywood—the plan draw
n on green construction paper with a red felt pen so that it resembles the dark fantasy of a five-year-old boy—I feel a faint tug at my ankle, and my first thought is that someone in his final moments of death, here all these days and finally dying, has reached for me, but I realize that it is a booby trap installed by retreating soldiers. If I continue my forward motion I will trip the trap and die horribly. I realize all of this not in the length of that sentence, but in the length of my life, my life strung out thin along the wire. I stop, back away, and I stare at the goddamn trap and my stupidity and carelessness that hang from the trip wire like a bag of cheap bones. The fragmentation grenade I would’ve detonated is at head level, tucked into a sand pocket the size of a ripe pear. I can see in the damp sand the finger marks of the man who dug the pocket and carefully rigged the grenade. Of course, I’m familiar with grenades—intimate, even, as I have a few of my own hanging from my body—but this is the first grenade I’ve heard before it explodes, as though it beats like a heart. I loosely fasten a length of nylon rip cord around the trip wire. I remove the gun plan from the plywood and shove it into my cargo pocket. I back up forty feet from the embrasure, kneel in the sand, as in supplication, and yank the cord as though I’m extracting a life from out of the hole, and the bunker blows, and I own my life again.

  I don’t enter another bunker, and I tell the rest of the platoon they’re insane if they continue the mission, that we’ve all been insane for ten straight days, and lucky. They seem to think it’s natural that I nearly killed myself on a booby trap, but that I detected it and am now safe. No one even asks me, “Are you all right?”

  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.