Suck and Blow

by John Popper

  And the moral of that story is the abortion issue is a hot-button issue. Or that it’s just not as funny a joke as I think it is.

  However, I couldn’t stop with the Twitter jokes: “But they’re so delicious. I could eat them up, especially when their fontanel hasn’t hardened. I just pop a straw right in and drink it like a kiwi.” I said I would remain “soylent” on the issue.

  And I know it’s a stupid little joke. But that is what Twitter is for. People who go on Twitter to express true ideas are morons because you’ve got 140 characters, and what do you hope to express in 140 characters? Is this the new game that the only true thoughts are in haiku? Is that really how we’re going to express things to each other?

  “You suck balls.” “No, you suck balls.” I am the guy who will sit there and debate who’s actually sucking balls. I think it’s important for people to know that they, in fact, actually suck balls. And I’m willing to sit there like their bartender or their therapist and prove conclusively through patience that they do indeed suck balls. I will stick with them and hear all of it until something good is on television.

  The only thing that bothers me is when really nice people from really nice places just want to say, “Hey, I really liked that song,” and then they have to see, “No, you suck balls.”

  I won’t shy away from a good troll battle, but I don’t want to subject the nontrolls to the ball-sucking declarations.

  Ultimately, though, we all kind of suck balls for being on Twitter.

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  SAFETY PATROL

  I feel that going on a USO Tour is like getting a free ride to the moon without being qualified to fly a spaceship. You’re watching all these young kids deal with stuff that didn’t even occur to you to deal with when you were their age—honor and saving each others’ lives and facing death willingly, not to mention a host of technological processes. These guys are the only people I know on the road more than we are, and they really don’t know when—or if—they’ll go home.

  Every single one of them I met who was wounded was pissed off because their friends, their brothers, were at the front and they couldn’t be with them. They didn’t care about politics or who the president was; they were upset because “my friends are back there and I’m here.”

  I went to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and listened to a lot of the wounded, and some were mad because their corporal died and they didn’t and where was the fairness in that? These are things way beyond my experience, and I’m watching people process this. All I could do was listen.

  The third year I finally burst out crying. I was at Landsthul Regional Medical Center, where they fly the wounded directly from the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq. This guy had one arm left—their tank had blown up and a gun turret flipped on top of him—and he couldn’t reconcile how the guy inside, who he considered a better man, didn’t walk away while he did. I was trying to engage him and just started sobbing. He had to crawl out of his bed with one arm to hug me, and that made me feel worse.

  They told me it’s a normal thing, but that was the last time they had me back. I think they decided that after three years I couldn’t take it anymore.

  Whenever I’ve been overseas, the troops just wanted to know that somebody back home cared. I could have been the Crazy Eddie spokesman.

  Our first USO tour was Korea and Japan in 1998. I just wanted to do my part if I could help in some way. It’s something I’m really proud of, and I recommend it.

  In 2002 we went to Landsthul. They explained that the average turn-around is forty-five minutes, so sometimes people were there only forty-five minutes and sometimes they came straight from the battlefield before heading out to Walter Reed stateside or wherever they needed to go.

  Then they told us that some Green Berets who had been in a fire-fight had just arrived, so we ran down the hall to see them before they left. We had no idea what we might see, how horrible it might be but we raced to it. I remember thinking, Why am I running to see this? It turned out that they were all right, though, they were just covered in dirt, but I can’t imagine what that’s like for them: one minute you’re engaging the Taliban, and then there’s Blues Traveler—how surreal is that? They still had shit on them from the battle and looked dazed.

  I’m not sure whether they were necessarily fans—I think they were—but they were happy to have anyone come see them and know what they were doing and be proud of them. I really got that feeling whenever I would go overseas. They want you to know that this is the best helicopter in the Army because it’s their helicopter and that it runs right. Every time we visited a vehicle, we received a little speech about how it worked.

  When you’re visiting the wounded, they just want to know they’re not alone and are appreciated. They just wanted to see a civilian of note—or any civilian, really. If everyone received the same tour I did, they would appreciate what’s done on their behalf. You really do see some of the best people ever. I’ve never approached being honorable the way they do, and their whole day is built around that.

  I talked to one woman who was a helicopter pilot and asked her what it was like when people were shooting at her. She said it’s all routine; you’re doing your job and then they shoot at you, and suddenly you take it really personally—“You’re not going to keep me from seeing my kids again.” Think of that. It’s easy as an anecdote to go, Wow, but when you’re living that way, seeing your kids is now a fight between you and someone you’ve never met before who is trying to kill you and now you’re trying to kill them. It’s unreal.

  In Afghanistan I was in a MASH hospital, and there were these mountains over my head. Every once in a while somebody would say, “shush” and then “all right.” People had their guns on. I walked into the hospital, and a local guy had stepped on an IED and gotten some glass in his brain. So the doctors invited me to put a mask on and come in. The thing I’ll never forget was his friend in the waiting room, this really old man with a turban. He looked like Osama bin Laden’s grandfather. He saw people come up to me for autographs, so he knew I was somebody, and I could tell he was scared of me. That’s how I was meeting people from Afghanistan—they were in a state of abject terror. And I was terrified of him as well. There we were, afraid of each other. To me that’s how it was being over there in terms of the local people, mutual fear.

  When we first went to Bosnia in 2002, the guy who took us on that tour with the USO was Captain David Mills. He was going in for SEAL training, and he was a badass. We didn’t see or hear from him for years, and it got to the point where we were afraid to ask what had become of him. Then in 2006 I went to Saddam’s palace and he walked up to me.

  I believe that if you’re a VIP, you’re not in any real danger. I’ve been technically shot at, but what that means is that miles away someone was trying to hit us with something. When the plane lifted off, we took some small arms fire, but it was so far away that it just bounced off the side like a BB gun. We could hear the dings; they sounded like pebbles. We took off in a corkscrew motion so they couldn’t really get a good shot at us, but when that happens you are aware that people are trying to kill you, which is a strange feeling because that doesn’t happen in my daily civilian life.

  Another time, at Camp Victory in Iraq, we were on stage practicing, and someone tried to hit the stage with a mortar. I guess they saw something shiny. In a weird way we were bait, because after that, I heard the .50 cals being shot from a helicopter, and then I didn’t hear the mortars anymore. Somebody flew out to kill the people who were firing the mortars, and we got to hear that. We were listening to sounds of war while we were getting ready for the show.

  The closest was when I was in Saddam’s palace and an IED went off. It was all serene, there’s the Tigris River, and suddenly I heard a Boom! maybe fifty yards away over in a city block. It sounded like three m80s combined. My first instinct—this is me in combat—is that someone was practicing. No, it was a real IED, but I wasn’t in the perimeter, although I was in
earshot and it was enough to make me jump.

  Another time somebody was shelling the base, and I came out of the PX with some Lucky Charms. Everyone said, “shhhh,” and I stood there for a bit, and then we were good. I felt safe because I was in the center of the military, being very protected.

  If you think about it, had the Blues Traveler guy or the six New England Patriots cheerleaders been blown up or hurt in any way, policy would have changed. So there was a real interest and effort to protect us and make us feel protected. Incidentally, if you ever do go into combat, try to bring six cheerleaders. It lends a surreal aspect to the whole affair, and there’s nothing like going into any place with six cheerleaders in uniform. The seas part, people get out of your way, and I can’t attest to this, but I have a feeling the enemy never hit us for a reason.

  We got to ride around in Stryker vehicles through downtown Bagdad and sit up top. People were waving, and even there I felt safe.

  Later on I ran into these big SEAL-looking guys, and they said, “If you want, we’ll take you on a run with us.” But that got stopped.

  In Afghanistan the impression I got was that you never know where it’s coming from. We were at the base of the mountains in this MASH unit we were in. So when soldiers had their guns on, you had the feeling it was because they really needed them.

  In Iraq the captain said to me that they had a good idea where they were going to be attacked. They set up IEDs on roadsides and intersections and learned how to anticipate that and up-armor their vehicles to have an acceptable amount of damage. In Afghanistan that never happened because there no infrastructure to guard; it was just little village after little village.

  I learned all this information about IEDs, and then Stars and Stripes sat me down for a television interview to demonstrate how informed people are who come to visit. I gave this incredible, erudite twenty-minute lecture on what I had learned. I was knowledgeable because I’m a weapons guy, so I could explain it properly; the problem was that every time I should have said IED, I said IUD. The guy filming tried to stop me, but I was just on a roll. It was my best most informed self, I was speaking to Stars and Stripes broadcasting, and explaining, “Yes, an IUD could go off at any point and if you’re driving by, a handkerchief or a can could be a sign of an IUD.” They just couldn’t use it because IUDs are dangerous if they do go off, but in a completely different way.

  In Bosnia I learned a couple of things about my crew, in particular that they could find weed anywhere. I came into the barracks where we staying and could smell it and told them that they could get arrested for stuff like that—“This is the military; it’s not the same thing.” Alcohol wasn’t really allowed on the base, and with the smell, it was ridiculous.

  One year the Air Force got worried that we were too drunk and rowdy, so they assigned us a chaperone. In the playfulness of having a chaperone, we said, “Oh, so you think you can keep up with us, huh?” He responded, “Oh I intend to.” But what he wasn’t counting on was hanging with Chan. I think we were in the Azores and the Pittsburgh Steelers were playing, and it was two in the morning and Chan was really counting on the Steelers to win, and we’d all had a lot to drink. And this chaperone started showing me death moves like how to slit a man’s throat and was playing with this knife I had, and this was clearly bothering Chan a bit because he can tell the guy’s intoxicated. We have wheels up in three or four hours, so we knew we were not going to get any sleep, everyone’s going to congregate at the plane, and we’re really good at going without sleep and meeting at the plane because it’s like bus call.

  This guy had a lot to drink, and we clearly drank him under the table because he was nearby but unconscious while Chan was getting so upset that the Steelers had lost that he started throwing glass bottles around his room. I was walking to my room, and just as I turned to go in, I could see MPs coming up the hallway. I said, “Okay, good night,” shut the door, and got ready for bag drag—you have to have your bag ready and put it outside your door so they can bring it to the plane.

  We all made it perfectly fine, except the chaperone couldn’t find any of us because we all beat the guy there—he was twenty minutes late. And he looked like an old undershirt that somebody had ripped off in a hurry. The man looked like used laundry. He didn’t last long; he was replaced pretty quickly.

  Another time we were on the tarmac of some place we had flown to, and Fisher, from our crew, rest his soul, started snapping pictures. The next thing we know the crew was surrounded by MPs. I’m not sure whether they told us, but it’s common knowledge that you don’t take a picture on a military runway because that gives potential terrorists information they can use about where things are that they might want to blow up. So we could not leave with that film. Fisher was arguing, “That’s my camera—I have pictures on here.” And the MP said, “I know.” Fisher became so upset that the band had to go over and talk to the MPs. The master sergeant recognized me and was a harmonica player, so the way to get Fisher and essentially all of us out of jail was that he came and sat in with us that night.

  In Qatar (we were never allowed to refer to Qatar as Qatar—it was always “Location Three”—something to do with international diplomacy), I got to go out on a mission, but there was nothing in Qatar. It was technically a forward area, but that’s where the brass were, so nothing was going to come and get them. Later I saw some pictures and realized I had been wearing my reflective belt that you need to wear in the camp so that you don’t get hit by a car. Apparently no one told me to remove my safety patrol belt. And I was safety patrol in the sixth grade so I knew how to wear the belt. Standard issue. All you see in the picture is my belt, but I did get to wear a uniform and hold a gun.

  When I was there I was too shy to take a dump in the regular bathroom with the stalls. The brass got wind of this (excuse the pun) and gave me one of the two private toilets in the entire theater. A general somewhere had one and I had one. It makes you feel special and also like the biggest pussy ever. That’s me in combat.

  There has been discussion of us going to Guantanamo Bay. Some might say that we shouldn’t play this place because it goes against the ideology of what American stands for. I understand that point of view, but I feel like it’s a shitty posting for solders who are trying to do their job wherever they’re sent on behalf of us, so I would go and play for them. Also if my government’s doing something horrible, I would want to see what conditions are like. It’s a crazy time we live in, and I want to be present when stuff goes down. Not seeking trouble but not running from it either.

  In 2004 I met the New England Patriots cheerleaders during our first day in the Azores. There’s something in common between a hot chick and a fat guy—we’re both judged on our appearances. I would see the shit they would get—soldiers would look at them and see the cheerleader in their high school—“You’re probably a bitch, aren’t you?” And they’d just be trying to be nice to a bunch of soldiers. The cheerleaders would listen, and it would make them cry.

  I realized that as a fat guy where I’d be judged on my appearance, I had developed a thicker skin than them. They weren’t used to it, but they should have been; they’d get it all the time. It was a weird bonding thing.

  There was a band bus and a cheerleader bus, and I told the guys, “Screw the band bus—I’m going with the cheerleaders.” I was like their goofy older brother but with pervy designs. Maybe I went too far, though, because after begging and begging, on the final night I was able to satisfy some meager fantasy of mine and get two of them to kiss. The downside, though, was that the next morning my camera “went missing,” and it had some really cool images of myself in a war zone (including some with my security guy, Oscar, who’d been my security when I was on tour—he got to come along as well, and it was really a high point for the both of us). Still, both an infatuation and an actual relationship came out of my USO experience with the Patriots cheerleaders. It’s like a Danielle Steel novel if you have a tryst with a cheerleader in a war si
tuation. Everyone’s dressed like Wonder Woman, and there’s explosions and romance and all of that stuff.

  Another memorable moment took place when I was in Iceland at a high school class at a Navy base. That’s when I first heard, “You might not know who this is, but your parents . . .” It was early in the morning, and I was not in top condition. I hadn’t wanted to do this class, and that was God’s little kick in the ass: “Oh you’re feeling bad, so try this on.” And it snapped me out of it.

  The thing that struck me, though, was that when I told them the most basic thing about improvised music—just play the thoughts in you head, play anything you imagine—they were so blown away, like I had once been. And I remembered how valuable it had been when Roy Eldridge, one of the greatest trumpet players of the twentieth century, came to the New School and said, “You know, we’d just get high and play.” I was like, “Holy shit! That’s what I do!”

  I just told them every platitude I could: Close cover before striking. . . . Do not remove tag under fear of prosecution. . . . Cross on green, not in between . . . . Always check your references . . .

  I began to wonder: At what point do kids not know who the hell you are because, at the time they know who the hell you are you’re almost a kid yourself, so you don’t feel like anybody knows who the hell you are anyway.

  By 2005 they were thinking, That’s the guy who lost all that weight or That’s the guy who was in that bowling movie, which as I mentioned earlier is what I tell people who don’t know who I am. I’ll say, “You know that movie about those Amish guys bowling? There was that band at the end and that was me.”

  Then they’ll ask, “What was with the sideburns—was that a costume?”

  I’ll tell them, “No, that really was me.”

  This was in Keflavik, Iceland, just outside of Reykjavik, in December 2005, the second coldest place I’ve ever been. The coldest was Green Bay, Wisconsin. I bought some Taco Bell a block away from my hotel, and by the time I got back, it was frozen solid. I have not experienced cold like Green Bay, not even in Iceland.