Marine at War

by Merrell Michael

  “Trying to see if Ive got any hot spots yet. I don’t want my feet all fucked up after tonights hump.’

  “That was some pretty intense shit.” I say.

  ‘Tell me about it.”

  “Do you think we ever will?” I ask.

  “Will what?”

  ‘Tell anyone about it.”

  He shakes his head. “No. Not today. Today was too fucked up. Im taking that shit to my grave. I’ll tell different kinds of stories, down at the VFW, when I’m old.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Boot camp stories. That’s the entire point, of being a Marine. To tell boot camp stories.”

  “You don’t tell boot camp stories now.”

  “Because its not cool now. Because everyone here has a boot camp story. But after I get out? Oh, hellz yeah. Boot camp stories. Boot camp stories and USMC t-shirts. Fuck, dude.” Bill yawns. “I’m tired.”

  I stand the first hour of watch, and then take off my helmet and body armor. I unroll my sleeping bag from my pack, but lie on top of it. There is a smell to this country that fills my nostrils. It is the smell of body odor and fecal matter. I try to think about all that has come here before, the Russians. The Greeks. Everyone who has invaded this country and been broken by it. My poncho liner is warm and soft. Without wishing for it, blackness envelopes me.

  The first time I met my wife, she was naked.

  The club was called Harlem Nights, in Houston. My wife was dancing on stage. She was long and slender. Her skin was a dark chocolate mocha. Her lips and nipples were the same shade of tender brown. Later I learned that she used the same lipstick for both. Her hair was long and straight, and she had C- cup breasts and a large ass. The first time she gave me a lap dance, I had an orgasm. After that, we learned to talk. And talk. The talking led to her breaking the rules, and dating me. The dating led to groping, and fucking. The fucking led to my daughter, Selah.

  I had always preferred black woman. When I joined the Corps, somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought of myself as fighting for that right. Here now, in the desert, near the backs of murdered men. Here now, all my thoughts turn to you. You will keep me safe and whole, and when I return to you I will be the better for it. I will fight Bush’s war, I will fight Obama’s war. I will keep my rifle clean and ready. Here. Now. At the end of all things. Let me see our house in North Carolina, Let me feel the red brick and green grass. It needs mowing, I hope you are able to do it. Let me see our daughter learning to walk, her bright green eyes and dark tan skin, her endless ringlets of curls. I can feel it slipping from me. Let me breath softly into your cheek and feel the warmth of your skin. Quickly, before all this fades. Before all is taken from me.

  Schueher wakes me up by nudging me with his boot. I spring awake. In the next two minutes all my gear is packed and I am ready to move. The sky overhead is the dark blue not black of predawn, before anything truly starts to rise. We move into staggered formation. I test the sand beneath my feet.

  A hump is a forced march, or a hike. A walk with packs and weapons. Humping in the Marine Corps has completely ruined my desire to ever go backpacking, one day. It is a test of endurance, of legs and back. The march is done leaning forward slightly, to keep pace. We step out. I keep in sight the man ahead of me, and to my left. No one speaks. Into the hump, my breath grows ragged and I can feel my heart beating. I sip water from the water bladder. I see fonseca ahead, staggering on short legs, trying to keep up. The air is surprisingly cold. I remember that its December. Time passes. The terrain remains the same. After an hour we pass an abandoned shell of a car, gutted and nearly unrecognizable. We pass and keep moving. All I think about is the pain in my feet. Left foot, then right foot. Always leading with the left. This is the true meaning of infantry, to walk to battle using your feet.The drill instructor called them two black cadillacs. But my desert boots are made from brown suede. An anachronism. We move. I cradle my M16 in my arms. The Marines chose the M16A4 over the army’s M4. Said it was better. Spent money on it. Everything is money. Left foot, right foot. Endlessly. I try to remain alert, and fail. All I can do is move. It is three hours until I can see the airport.

  The airport is recognizably an airport, with a distinct air traffic control center and runway. It appears to be set in the midst of nowhere, for the use of no one. Reilly calls a halt and collapses the platoon into a three-sixty, rifles pointed out and ready to kill. I wait and wait. I wait for the order. Eventually, Scheuher comes beside me.

  “You awake, Mikey?” He asks. I nod. “Good to do.” His voice is an unnessacary rasping whisper. “Drop you pack here. Were going to be the assault element, as usual. The objective is the airport. Weve got support from weapons company with mortars, and they’re going to take out some entrenched guns. When I say double time, you run like your ass is on fire. Got it?”

  “Yes, Corporal.” I respond.

  “After all this is over, theyre going to bring in the rest of the battalion. For now, its only us.”

  “How big is the objective, Corporal?” I ask.

  “Shit, Mikey. It’s a fucking airport. Use your goddamn head.” Schueher leaves. We break off with first squad. My rifle is up and alert. I hear the whistling sound of mortars, and see the THUD THUD of the impacts. Shattering glass and screams. The sound of an AK. Schueher pumps his fist in the air, signaling double-time. We are facing the Airport, and we run like hell.

  Four

  The building we are heading to is colored a sickly yellow. There is Arabic graphitti on the wall that I am focusing on. The air port is made of joined arches, architecture that someone must have been proud of, once upon a time. Under my feet is the crunch of broken glass. We stack on the wall, and then break to clear it.

  Everything in the Marines is an acronym, and the acronym we are using is called MOUT. Military operations in urban Terrain. Tactics developed in Hue City. Used to clear buildings everywhere It looks like what you see Swat doing in the movies. Clearing rooms. Checking corners. In the first room I turn to, there is a sound of life. My finger is on the trigger. A rat runs out, with large, sleek black fur. Outside I hear the familiar braaap of a three round 16 burst. I run out. Someone is running away, and Bill is firing. The whole squad is suddenly firing. They continue to run, then jerk up and down. They stop. The man had a brownish red cap, and a sort of brown robe. Just then, at that moment in time, I wish to myself that I knew the words for the clothes these people wear.

  After that we continue to clear the rooms. After a while we give up on the mout tactics and start to walk. Everything looks dead, long abandoned. There is plenty of rubble. I look at the Air Traffic Control tower. Painted on the side, in blue, it says TEXAS 17.

  “We got some bad intel, along the line.” Rielly points to the tower. “That’s special forces. They must have already cleared this. All we got left are the stragglers.”

  “Sargeant.” Jonesy the radio operator comes up. “Lieutenant’s trying to reach you on the radio.”

  Sargeant Rielly talks in low tones into the transmitter. When he gets up, he shakes his head. “Okay, first. Get outside. Weve got to police call.”

  “We have to clean?” Bill asks.

  “We have to walk the runway and police call. So they can land the planes in. Lets go. Hunter, Colon, hold position in here, in case they show up.”

  The runway is nearly two hundred yards long. We walk across it on line, picking up tiny pieces of rock. First Platoon is cheerfully bitching the entire time. A smattering of fuck this shit, a little cant wait till I get out. Like all good and great Marines, most of us hate the Corps and the military. This is the secret tradition. At Iwo Jima, the Marines raised the flag because some colonel wanted a larger one. The fighting was not over. There is so much senseless activity here. So we pick up rocks. We kick rocks off the runway.

  “hey, sir.” Hunter asks the lieutenant. ‘Whats with this shit?”

  The lieutenant looks baffled at the question. At the idea of the question. “The sma
ll pieces of rock can tear up the aircraft engines.” He says. “The pilots call it foreign object damage.” Then, as if he should lead by example, he bends down and picks up a small piece of rock, and throws it aside. Lieutenant Easter is twenty-two. He has a smooth face and a tiny chip in his front tooth that makes him look perpetually frightened by the idea of all that he is doing. At the barracks, we found a small journal he was keeping in it, he wrote over and over I should have been a pilot/ I should have flown/I should have been a pilot I should have flown…..

  After every other rock, I look up and see the big picture of what we are doing. Where we are. The scenery has changed. There are trees, here. Pine trees. The ground is rocky and hard, not the smooth silt of sand. Beyond the large blue letters across the arch that read KHANDAHAR INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT I can see mountains. They are veiled in mist, tips stained white, and remind me of parts of Colorado. All of this reminds me of the American southwest, Flagstaff, Arizona maybe. I wonder of the latitude. Arizona by way of Mars.

  Back inside what must have been the terminal building I dig voraciously into an MRE. I eat it cold and fast. I have to drink from my canteen, as my water bladder is empty. I sit on my helmet. I am feeling the drain from the day, from the rush leaving my system. All of us eat as fast as we can. When we are done, someone starts to smoke and the idea catches hold. The water hits my kidneys. My bladder strains with the need to urinate.

  “Hey, Sergeant.” I ask. “Where can I go take a piss?”

  Rielly waves his hand. “go out near those bushes. “ He says. “Take a buddy. And put your helmet back on.”

  There are many bushes near the surprisingly green airport. I pick one near a small shack. I feel exposed and naked, walking across the airport grounds without holding my rifle out. Bill stands behind me and smokes. The piss is golden yellow. There are small joys in life that mean everything when you focus on them. The joy of pissing, when you’ve been holding your urine unintentionally all day, is one of them.

  As Im buttoning up my fly, I hear a groan from inside the shack. The stream suddenly dries up, and my pecker seems to zip itself closed. A few drops hit the leg of my pant. One darkens the toe of my boot, large and pregnant with its secret origin.

  “Did you hear that?” I ask. Bill nods. His hand is on his rifle.

  The shack appears to be made of thin plywood and several sheets of corrugated tin. The door juts part open and Bill slowly pushes it. The sliver of light is thin, and we walk through. It shows the boy, propped up in the corner. He says something at us in his language. His skin is light amber, and grey dirt stains the bottom of his feet. His right hand is pressed to his belly, from behind it is dark red. He is breathing heavily. He looks no older than twelve.

  “Mesha.” He says. “Ahhlah allluha.”

  In the corner of the shack is a rifle, proppled up near the broken glass of the window. Bill and I see it at the same time and nod. The boy speaks to us in his language.

  “What are we going to do?” I ask.

  “Nothing to do.” Bill says. “He’s going to bleed out. Leave him here.”

  I point at the rifle. “What about that?” I say. “That’s what he’ll get a hold of if he gets up.”

  Bill scratches his head. “I don’t want to make a lot of noise.” He says. “If we make a lot of noise, were going to have to clear everything all over again. Were probably not going to get to chill, and I want to chill, before what ever the fuck happens next happens.”

  I look at the face of the boy. There is an animal under there. Underneath the rapid breathing. I can smell it, smell the unwashed smell of flesh. With terrible deliberation, I reach for my knife. I unbuckle it from the front of my flak jacket. The blade of the Ka-bar is black and shark. Slowly, I bring it out. The boy sees what I am doing, and lifts a hand out to force me to stop. It is small to me, and delicately featured. He starts to crawl away against the tin shack, shuffling back and forth. He stops and lies there, his chest rising and falling underneath a thin robe. I turn the knife so the blade faces down in my hand. I thrust quickly, slamming into his back. He rocks from the impact. When I pull it out there is a wet popping noise, and the blood is much brighter than I had imagined I aim for his neck, and slam again. He is writhing and my blade half misses. The red is everywhere, all over my hands and sopping at the bottom of my boots. Bill has attached his bayonet, and is sticking the boy in the side. I think of Christ on the cross as he thrusts. Could this one be the harbinger of some unknown origin? Unlikely. Any God of hope died in the last century. His is the new god, the god of blood and martyrdom seventy-two virgins or endless darkness. There is very little light in the room. I look up, out the doorway, and a cloud has passed across the face of the sun.

  Five

  “What took you so long?” Schueher asks. “Did you hold it for each other?”

  I grunt uncommittedly. Rielly stares at us for a moment. His eyes are green and piercing. “You’ve got blood on your boots, Mikey.” He says.

  “There was a dead animal out there.” I tell him. “A goat or something.”

  “Is that what was in the shack?”

  “Yes, sergeant.”

  “Wipe yourself off with a wetnap. You’ve got some of that shit on your flak jacket.”

  “Yes sergeant.”

  “While you were busy, the platoon was briefed on our new mission. Were setting up a perimeter and digging in. Second Platoon will be here tomorrow. The whole company will be here in less than a week. Get your shit on, and lets go.”

  We ruck up and start to move out of the terminal. In front of the building the landscaping is surprisingly nice. Flowers bloom amid bushes. Evidence of a vacant civilization, the red blossoms. Beyond it all the ground is dusty rock, facing the mountains. Rielly places us all two at a time, out on a perimeter. There is a road in front of us, almost two hundred yards that I can make out. It curves to the right and runs into the airport. This would be a likely angle of attack.

  The Entrenching tool, like so much else in the Marines, was perfected in Vietnam. It is a black metal shovel that folds in on itself in three places. Unlike a regular shovel, it comes to a sharp point, with serrated edges. These can be used for cutting, or as weapon. Its use as a weapon in Nam is well documented. I bring it down sharply, and it meets the earth with a chink chink. The ground is hard and packed. I hack into it over and over. Striking again and again. Bill stands point, sighted in with his weapon, watching down the road. This will be our hole. This will be our home. The hole gradually widens to a shallow trench, after several hours. I take a break, and let Bill take over. He works as hard as I do. I wonder if all this could count as some sort of penance. All down the line the sound of Marines at work, digging a hole to live in, sounds off. Each of us taking small breaks, to spit tobacco or wipe of sweat. By nightfall, the hard earth is deep enough for us to squat in. During twilight we wait for an eventual attack, weapons at the ready. Here in the hole, everything smells like dirt and dirt is my friend. I think back to my childhood. Reading Batman comics, and wishing that I was underground, that I had a cave. But the dirt here is not the brown loam of home. It is rock and dust. The colors change overhead, and the cooling in the air is instant and harsh. From deep red to blue.

  “How are we sleeping tonight?” I ask Bill. He spits.

  “Rielly said fifty percent. One of us up and one of us down.”

  “What kind of shifts should we do?”

  “I say three hours. Two isn’t enough to sleep on, and four is too long to stay awake. Three on, three off.”

  There are times afterward, when I wished that I had thought more carefully about decisions that I made in the blink of an eye. Sleep is important. You cannot function without it. The rest of my life, on a three hour sleep pattern. But there was no rest of my life then. There is only the now, and so I agree and Bill curls up in his sleeping bag. I take another dip of Schueher’s snuff, and think. And stare, from behind my M16. The green LCD of my atomic solar watch counts down until I crash, I wa
ke and crash, And there is no time to dream.

  The next day is a repeat of the first day. We wake up and eat MRE’s, then start to dig. The deeper we get in the soil, the more often my E-tool hits large rocks and sparks fly. I am starting to enjoy the work, the rhythm of the thing. Strike, and draw back. Strike, and draw back. When the hole is filled with loose dirt, start to shovel. This is an act of creation. I am creating a space with absence.

  “Mikey.” Schueher appears. “Get your shit and head over to the mortars. Your on a working party to dig them a hole. Bill too.”

  I wipe my face with my uniform top and grab my weapon and e-tool. Bill saunters next to me, hands in his pockets. “I will be glad.” He says “When that piece of shit leaves next year.”

  “I think he’s going to re-enlist.” I say.

  “So what? He’ll get another job. Some kind of good job, that we wont even think about. The command loves him. The point is, he’ll be gone, and we’ll probably both be Corporals, and we’ll probably have some other dumb boot to do these working parties.”