by Matt Young
And you, motherfuckers.
Yes, Corporal, we sound off in unison.
What are we going to do with you?
Sing us a lullaby, calls Vick Miner, one of our sergeants. He walks into the wedge of light, boots crunching along the dried bed of primordial ocean.
We stand, silent, at the position of attention. One of us begins “Rock-a-bye Baby.”
Shut the fuck up, shit stain. Sergeant Miner’s snaggled lakeweed teeth slur his words.
The crackle of cigarettes, the nocturnal desert things slithering and scampering along the hardpan, our hearts firing pins against primers.
Sing me “The Marines’ Hymn,” says Sergeant Miner. He holds his arms like a conductor.
Sergeant Miner’s arms drop and we launch the song from our guts, mortar rounds bursting past blast attenuators, pushing air from our diaphragms, our shoulders back, chins up, eyes level. Our voices make the six feet three inches of Sergeant Miner look childish, and for the three minutes it takes to sing “The Marines’ Hymn” we are a choir of angels in the darkness, spotlighted by holy Humvee high beams.
Old Amboy shrinks from our fervor as we recount the Battle of Chapultepec and the many deaths of the Barbary pirates. We’ve killed more than you ever will, we tell Old Amboy.
And then we are done and the stakes are found and we are in our sleeping bags, shielded by bivvy sacks against the chilly desert night, trying to imagine what war will be like. Somewhere under the starlight our voices are still zooming through the thin desert air, moving along the cooling sand and yuccas, flowing over the Mojave mountains, beyond the sadistic reach of our senior Marines, past the sacrifices at Old Amboy.
We drift into sleep waiting for the splash.
Love Story
Christmas. 2005.
I love you, says the boy.
I love you, too, says the girl.
Will you marry me? asks the boy.
Yes, says the girl.
This is not her first mistake.
When should we get married? asks the girl.
Why don’t you come back to California with me and we’ll drive to Las Vegas, says the boy. One day when we have children we’ll tell them our story. We’ll say, When we were young your father was shipping off to war and we were in love and so we drove to Las Vegas and got married.
The girl thinks that the boy’s impulsivity is romantic. It makes her feel wanted.
Do you think there will ever be other women? asks the girl.
Of course not, says the boy. I mean, unless maybe something horrible happens, like, what if you get sick? Or die. Or, I mean, sometimes marriage just doesn’t work out.
That would be a story to tell our children, says the girl.
The girl wonders if there have been other women already. The boy is handsome and he is broken by his parents’ dissolved marriage and his skewed sense of manhood. It’s a formula to attract naïve girls. It attracted her. It is blood in the water—sensitive and damaged but strong and protective.
Have there been other women? asks the girl.
What do you mean? asks the boy. Like, before you?
No, says the girl.
You mean since you, then? asks the boy.
Yes, says the girl.
Of course not, says the boy. I mean, there were women before you, but I’m with you now. I don’t think about them.
You still talk to your ex, says the girl. You almost followed another ex to Arizona when she moved there for college, says the girl. When the boy flushes and turns his head she knows she stepped over one of his lines. The lines are fluid and twisty so usually she is over one before she knows it.
The boy does not respond.
The boy can be mean when he puts his mind to it. He burns bridges with people at the drop of a hat. Sometimes if the girl says or does something he does not like he will not speak to her, refuses to acknowledge her existence until the girl apologizes for, what seems to her, being alive.
I’m sorry, says the girl. It’s just that I love you.
I love you, too, says the boy. I don’t know why we can’t forget that happened.
It was only a year ago, says the girl.
It was a year ago, says the boy.
Can you promise me there won’t be another woman? asks the girl.
I think I want to promise that, says the boy. But don’t promises just seem like if you make them, they get broken?
I promise you there won’t be other men, says the girl.
But you don’t need to, says the boy. Because we’re in love, and love is kind of a promise, isn’t it?
You just said promises are made to be broken, says the girl.
Well, says the boy. Yes. But spoken promises. Just because you say I love you doesn’t mean you’re making a promise. Love is more like a feeling. Like, you know I love you even if I don’t talk to you for a few days, or we don’t have foreplay and go to sleep right after sex, or I don’t like your parents, or think your opinions are wrong. You know I love you even when I don’t tell you.
The girl knows this is not a two-way street. This is how the boy is allowed to express himself. This is how he’s allowed to treat her. She must be dutiful, and loving, and doting, and understanding. She must not criticize him because he is already broken from being adopted and his adoptive parents’ divorce and his father’s callousness and his mother’s victimhood—her criticism would not be fair because of that fact. But the boy says he loves her, and he makes her laugh sometimes, and they spend time together, and she’s broken herself from her own parents’ nuclear explosion of a marriage and her mother’s remarrying to a suicidal Gulf War veteran and her father’s remarrying to a Southern belle beauty queen who thinks the girl’s curly hair makes her look poor and dirty.
Marriage is a promise, says the girl.
You’re going to look beautiful in a wedding dress, says the boy. Will you send me pictures when I’m gone?
The boy asks for pictures often. Sometimes he wants pictures of the girl doing things she feels humiliated by, but still she takes them and sends them and listens to the boy talk about her body and how she should position it the next time he asks for pictures.
If you promise not to show anyone, says the girl.
Other guys show me pictures of their girlfriends, says the boy. They all think you’re gorgeous. What’s wrong with bragging?
I would never show pictures of you to someone else, says the girl.
I might die, says the boy. What if I died?
I don’t want to talk about it, says the girl.
It always comes to death with the boy; there is no equality next to the possibility of death. The girl is not going to war. The girl is finishing high school and the girl is going to college and the girl is going to major in biology and maybe go to medical school. She feels safe most of the time, as safe as a girl can feel. She feels guilty for this, then wonders what’s wrong with feeling safe. She wonders if her safety entitles the boy. She wonders if she does love the boy or if maybe it is all just guilt.
I love you, says the boy.
Deserter
In January 2006 I’m asleep in my barracks room at Camp San Mateo on the larger Camp Pendleton and almost miss my bus to war. A Marine I won’t remember the name of in ten years finds me and we sprint the half mile from the barracks to the parade deck. The Marine sucks in hard and breathes out, Fuck man. Fuck. For the entire three minutes.
I think because of this, my seniors will call me a coward and a deserter and they will throw me from the charter bus as it speeds down a Southern California highway. They will stick me on point and give me the radio and send me to clear houses as first man in the stack with a squad automatic weapon, which will inevitably jam and I’ll be mowed down by muj.
I wish the Marine wouldn’t have found me. I wish I could’ve stayed asleep for the next three years only to wake for my end of active service and reenter the civilian world without the scars and trauma my seniors seem so willing to pass down.
I sit next to Keene Sherburne who says, Nice going.
I am about to tell him to fuck off when Corporal MacReady leans forward and whispers in my ear, Mother. Fucker. You trying to desert?
No, Corporal, I whisper back.
Don’t whisper to me, boot. I look like your fucking Susie?
No, Corporal.
This ain’t a way to start a deployment, Young. This is some bad juju. Shit goes south, it’s on you.
Corporal MacReady leans back and closes his eyes. He’s snoring before our buses rumble off the parade deck.
From March Air Force Base we fly to Bangor, Maine. On the Jetway I’m greeted by hunched and knotty but grinning veterans sporting mesh-backed, foam-front caps stamped with geometric military unit insignia. One hands me a Nokia cellular phone. Call your family, he says. Good luck, he says. God bless, he says. Semper fi, he says. I nod and say, Thank you, sir.
I pace the terminal. Families approach other Marines and ask questions. The Marines smile and stoop down to talk to the families’ children. The families say they’ll pray for us, and even if the Marines are not religious they say, Thank you. No one talks about weapons of mass destruction or oil or justification. I call home, let my family know where I am, ask my fiancée to send or e-mail pictures just so I won’t have to talk about war.
I smoke outside the terminal and shiver in the stinging January wind, huddling together with other Marines for warmth.
Charlie drawls, It ain’t gay if it’s for body heat.
We laugh, press in closer.
I think about what Corporal MacReady said and then think about walking off into the snow. Disappearing into the Great White North.
On the cars idling in front of the airport are yellow ribbon stickers reading SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. I think, I am a troop. Support me. Smuggle me out of this nightmare. I don’t want to die for this bullshit. Take me home.
Families reunite, luggage is loaded, gearshifts grind, and I’m left out in the cold.
From Bangor, Maine, we fly to Frankfurt, Germany. The airport in Frankfurt provides an entire wing for us. Our new company first sergeant, a lanky black man whose head bobs like a chicken when he walks, stands watch in the gift shop, ensuring we don’t purchase alcohol. Some Marines buy cheap airport trinkets. We’re all thinking of our families, and trying not to think about what we think we know about war.
I try to sleep across empty airport chairs, but end up wondering instead if I remember enough high school French to get lost in Europe.
The smoking area outside is fenced in with chain-link and topped with concertina wire. Beyond there are people—airport personnel—driving TUGs, hauling luggage, stopping to maybe invite one another to dinner.
Inside I use a phone card to call my family one last time. I have nothing much left to say and so I mostly listen to them breathe one at a time, and even though we’ve still got thirty minutes before we have to be back on the airplane I say, They’re calling us. Got to go.
I cry in a bathroom stall until it’s time to board.
From Frankfurt, Germany, we fly to Kuwait International Airport. We rally with our squads and then we are sent on a working party to unload the plane’s belly of our operational gear in order to reload the gear on a semitruck. We return from the working party. Sergeant Mars calls out the names of our six-man squad to rally us for a sight count of weapons and gear. Corporal MacReady does the same for his squad, as do others.
I am trying not to acknowledge that some of the men whose names were called might die and that it might be my fault.
From Kuwait International Airport we board buses to Ali Al Salem Air Base, Kuwait. Our bus passes through a military gate and then minutes later our bus stages behind others in front of a sea of Quonset huts. We file from the bus one row at a time; we rally; we are sent on a working party; we find and stage packs and gear; we reconvene; we count heads, weapons, gear; we count again, and then we are assigned a Quonset hut.
For the next few days I attend formation diurnally to count gear. I clean my weapon, smoke cigarettes, talk about the nude pictures my fiancée promised she’d send as long as I didn’t show anyone. I promise to show everyone. I go to the chow hall where they serve sirloin steak and rubbery lobster tail and to-order omelets for breakfast. I jerk off in port-a-shitters and scrawl obscenities with pens or carve them with knives. I count more. I am told to stand by.
I have nothing but time to think about war—about all the people who ever went to war and all the people who never came back. I wish I would’ve walked away in Maine or jumped the fence in Germany. I feel like an animal in a trap waiting for some hunter to come put a slug between its eyes. I think of wolves gnawing through their flesh and sinew and tendon and bone to stay alive.
Before we left, a Marine I knew shot himself in the foot in a port-a-shitter in Twentynine Palms. He told everyone it was a negligent discharge, that he was holding the rifle muzzle on his boot while taking a shit. We all knew better and we laughed and made fun, but I’m thinking about him now—thinking about the fact that he will get to live and I might have to die. I run my thumb along the butt of my rifle.
From Ali Al Salem Air Base we load a C-130 to Al Taqaddum Air Base. The inside of the plane is a gutted whale belly full of cargo nets and canvas seats stretched across aluminum bars and lit red. We are instructed to wear our daypacks on our chests over our flak jackets. The sweatband of my helmet saturates immediately in the C-130. My shoulders touch the Marines to my right and left, my knees touch the Marine’s across from me, and if I lean my head back, my helmet collides with the Marine’s behind me.
The air is rough; we climb and drop, climb and drop. A few Marines vomit. The stench of fuel and oil and human insides sticks to me, slides down my face with my sweat.
We’ve been told the muj have the TQ landing strip dialed in, that once we land we should exit tactically—that is, as fast as we fucking can—toward concrete bunkers.
When we land there is no mortar fire, but we still run. There is a part of me that is disappointed, but I am officially in a war and I am smiling by the time we reach the bunker.
From TQ we board seven-tons that will take us from Main Supply Route Boston to Route Fran through Al Fallujah to Highway 1 to a small base just outside Camp Fallujah called Camp Mercury.
We leave around 0300 in full gear, our night vision mounted, weapons in condition one. Even with us packed in the seven-tons it is freezing and the convoy crawls for fear of IEDs. The twenty klicks to Fallujah from TQ takes three hours. There are security halts—trash in the road, maybe an animal carcass. Explosive ordnance disposal teams are called. We can do nothing but wait.
Our convoy enters the city and our seniors tell us to stay low, keep our silhouettes out of the slatted windows. The city is dark. There are no streetlights. Cold sewage and bread and tire fires rub against our noses. I can make out the crumbling facades of buildings pockmarked with bullet holes.
One of our seniors says, Shit, wasn’t that the building we took down with the MK19?
Heads swivel to get a look; a celebrity sighting. Most of us have seen our salts’ home movies from 2004—mortar and machine gun destruction, a corpsman explaining the different bodily fluids seeping from an Iraqi corpse. I am in that world now.
Our berth at Camp Mercury is a massive heavy vinyl tent filled with chintzy metal bunks—our home for the next two weeks until the relief in place is completed. Benito Ramirez, whom everyone calls Cheeks, is one of our seniors. He used to be in our company but was made lead gunner for our battalion commander’s convoy and deployed two weeks before us. We see him in the turret of a Humvee as the BC’s patrol is about to roll out. He smiles big and strikes a pose, like we should admire muscles he doesn’t have, and tosses us cigarettes. We watch the convoy fade outside the wire.
During the days I am busy brushing up on heavy weapons systems knowledge and stan
dard operating procedures and the nine-line medical evacuation procedure and Humvee rollover scenarios.
At night there is nothing but time to think. I think about Indiana and my fiancée. I think about my father, who canceled dinner plans with me before my deployment to attend a work meeting. I think about the letters I used to write my mother in basic training. I think about what life could’ve been like in Canada or France or how bad shooting myself in the foot might hurt. I think about Corporal MacReady’s words. I would rather die than feel the shame of those words. I feel guilty that I don’t want to be here, but I feel more guilt about how good it felt running from the C-130 to the bunker. I feel more guilt about how my body buzzed in anticipation when we arrived at Camp Mercury and a Marine told us to be aware of indirect fire and snipers. I feel more guilt when a Marine, enlisted with the battalion we are currently in the process of replacing, is shot through the neck while on patrol and all I can think of is revenge.
I feel guilty because the longer I am here the less I think about my family and fiancée and what life might’ve been like in those other places, and the more I think about my new family and my loyalty to them and the fear that strikes my heart when Marines are traded between platoons. I do not want that to happen to our platoon, my new family—even though it is inevitable. I feel guilty because I think about laying waste to buildings and entire towns with the MK19 and clearing houses by fire and using my newfound knowledge of the nine-line medical evacuation procedure. I feel guilty because I am not counting down the days until I get home, but the days until we leave the wire and all those gruesome and grisly possibilities move that much closer. I feel guilty because no matter what I feel, I feel like I’m running—leaving something behind.
Turned On by the Fertile Crescent
Masturbation is a means of survival. Jerking off has saved countless lives throughout countless wars. Probably all the way back to the Norman invasion of England there were peasant soldiers manning the ramparts whacking away trying to stay awake during the night watch. Probably before that. The reason the Trojan Horse worked at all was because some asshole sergeant in Troy’s army probably put a eunuch on the wall to keep guard who fell asleep because he couldn’t flog the dolphin and, boom, Troy’s burned to the fucking ground.
