by Matt Young
We invoke the Mortar God. We bellow, beat our chests, strain our vocal cords.
Later, in the desert dusk, we tell stories of his appearance, cloaked in white phosphorus, armored in high explosives, fingers thick as mortar tubes.
It is the Mortar God who bids us, Seek out the second of two strip clubs in Yuma—the one that does not card for identification. Go forth, he tells us. And in my honor defile yourselves. Drink until you’ve forgotten all fathers before me; drink until you are gone and I am all that remains; drink until you drown.
And we abide because the Mortar God would have it so.
The temple of the Mortar God is named Toppers. Inside it is dark. Hips gyrate and watery, red-rimmed eyes stalk exposed, undulating stretch marks and caesarean scars. Under the strip club black lights our teeth glow like demons and we become a spectacle. Onstage, an exotic dancer fastens a belt around one of our necks for a harness and rides and parades us for the pleasure of the Mortar God. We sweat our drunkenness between the dancer’s thighs and breathe in the stink of talcum and body glitter. We dry the taps and empty the bottles and leave in our wake a wasteland of dust and broken glass and bloody knuckles and vomit.
When the lights come on and the place clears out, we’re left in the cold desert night beneath the clear Yuma sky and our eyes see twice the number of stars. Double the dead light and double the time. And then we piss in the alley on a trash can while three coyotes watch, heads cocked and ears perked, and we think there might be something to that.
We announce that the Mortar God says, Maybe get a taxi.
In the taxi others ask what we really saw up on that mountain in the middle of the desert looking into Mexico. But we don’t answer and feign sleep, because the thing we saw on top of that mountain was far worse than how we’d imagined the Mortar God, and we can’t quite find a way to admit that what we saw looked a lot like us.
Future Perfect
If I decide not to go home and instead turn around and head back to the bar, I will have to retrace my drunken steps the three or so blocks I’ve already stumbled. But I won’t walk, I’ll run because I am drunk and because there was a mildly attractive woman—a friend of my platoon mate’s wife—hitting on me. She touched my arm and traced my tattoos with a manicured nail, sending shivers into my armpit down my ribs to my ball sack, constricting the flesh and flushing my face. So I’ll run. Which means I’ll show back up at the bar sweaty from the Southern California aridity, ready for another drink. Those of my companions who never left will cheer momentarily for my return and then resume their conversations or heavy petting or beer chugging.
If I don’t order another drink, I will ignore the tacky saliva collected at the corners of my mouth and the tumescence of my tongue and instead walk up the stairs to the outdoor porch seating where the woman is tossing her hair and settling into conversation with my platoon mate’s wife. I’ll lay my hand on the soft exposed flesh of her upper arm. Startled, she will turn her head, and I’ll lean over her face and kiss her. She’ll kiss back and I’ll grow hard and her saliva will wet my mouth and I’ll forget about my thirst and all about my fiancée.
If I go home with the woman, because it’s Southern California it will take us an hour to get back to her apartment, which is only twenty-five miles away. It will give me time to sober up. I’ll grow tired and groggy and my head will bob and the woman will reach over and unzip my pants and grab hold of me and squeeze and rub and stroke and she’ll say things like, Stay with me, and, Make this worth my time, and, Just want to see what I’m working with. She’ll follow up with coquettish smirks while keeping her eyes on the road.
If I mention my fiancée, the woman will withdraw her hand and say something like, I’m not into regrets. This will translate to, Shut the fuck up about your fiancée. And so I will, and after a few moments of tense silence and shitty, dated alternative-rock radio I’ll move my hand high to the inside of her leg, hitching her skirt in order to feel the humidity between her legs. I’ll work my fingers against her panties and feel the stubble at the convergence of thigh and trunk.
If I follow the woman to her bedroom, I will try to psych myself up, to think of witty and sensual things to whisper or growl—the best I’ll manage will be, Your hair is pretty. The woman will be all business. When I botch the bra removal she’ll say, Stop—it was expensive, I don’t want you fucking it up. She’ll remove the garment herself; take time to place it in a dresser drawer; leave me sucking in my gut, erection bobbing and wagging, awkward in the dimness. I’ll fumble her onto the oversized bed attempting a good mix of assertive and gentle, which will come across as indecisive, noncommittal, and inexperienced. The pressure in my bladder will begin to mount as I slide myself into her, we’ll breathe each other’s stale breath, and I’ll try to angle my head away, suffocating myself in her pillow. My thrusting will be off-kilter and irregular and the woman’s hips will buck trying to get control. She’ll start to press my left shoulder, a signal I should turn on my back, give her the right of way, and in that moment I’ll come without warning and collapse on top of her too ashamed to move.
If I wake up in the middle of the night, in the bathroom after I let loose my uncontrollable postcoital stream, I’ll stand in the mirror and antagonize myself like I used to do when I was a child and wanted to cry harder. I’ll be disgusted by the woman and myself. I’ll think of the stubble between the woman’s legs and the razor burn and the imperfections of her body. I’ll think about the sex smeared over me and the body smells and breath and sucking sounds conveniently left out of movies.
I’ll justify and make excuses and grow angry at my fiancée. I’ll tell myself lies: She’s probably at school back in Indiana cheating on you, too. It doesn’t matter. She has to expect this, she has to know, it was an unspoken agreement. When I end my service in 2009 I’ll have a clean slate. I’ll be better. I’ll quit drinking, smoking, screwing other women. I’ll make it up to her, I’ll get a job, we’ll move to the country—away from people—we’ll have each other.
I’ll shut off the bathroom light before I open the door so as not to wake the woman. She will be snoring—not lightly. I’ll lie on the bed as far away from her as I can and I’ll think about my perfect future.
Positive Identification
We call our identification dog tags because of their resemblance to the method of identification used for canines. There is no shyness in the metaphor.
Our dog tags are aluminum, rectangular in shape with convex ends. The five lines of embossed text read:
Last name
First name and middle initial, blood type
Serial number
Branch of service, gas mask size
Religious preference
We wear one tag around our necks on gutted paracord thongs. We wear another on the lower laces of our left boots.
This is the reason we wear the tags: If we are decapitated and our dog tag slides over our neck stumps, our bodies can still be identified. Or, if we’re dismembered, if we step on an IED, our legs will be in tatters but our heads and necks will still be attached to our torsos. Ideally.
Our tags are a foretelling of violent anonymous death. They presuppose that death makes us unrecognizable to the living and that while in the Marine Corps the only right way to die is in combat. Most times we choose not to wear the tags—like not wearing them might stop death.
We do not yet realize that nothing stops death—not body armor, or belief, or bravado.
Close to midnight on Tuesday, February 27, 2007, two of us, Baker and Fisher, are returning to Camp Pendleton from San Diego. Fisher isn’t the best Marine, he’s short with a potbelly, his skin is greasy and pale. Whoever issued his trousers gave him a size too big; they billow around his knees when he runs. Baker looks like maybe he’s wearing the utilities that should belong to Fisher. The buttons of Baker’s blouse are put to the test. The fabric on the insides of his thighs is pilled and faded. In any temperature sweat runs down his forehead from a fuzzy thatch
of mahogany hair.
They are driving from Fisher’s girlfriend’s apartment, where they had dinner, and where Fisher had a bit too much to drink. Baker is driving, but he doesn’t have a license. Baker is sober, but Fisher is asleep. The night is cool, but no matter what Baker does his eyelids cast anchor to his cheeks. The car veers off the interstate in La Jolla, crashes into a tree. Fisher dies instantly. Baker will come to wish he had.
We do not compute. Someone has died, but the person was not shot during combat. The person did not step on an IED. We are not deployed.
In country, 2006, Fisher’s vehicle hit IEDs and he lived. He received a Purple Heart, a combat action ribbon. He was no different from the rest of us, but now he is dead. We are still alive. Are we still alive? Are we deployed? Is stateside a dream? Are we still in the shit?
The ground under our feet is spongy, ready to swallow us. We think about dying in war often. We make peace with it. Some of us hope for and invite it. But the rules of death are not supposed to apply stateside. Our numbers aren’t supposed to be called unless we are in use like the guns we carry, and like the guns we carry we don’t come out until we are necessary, and in the interim it is like we don’t exist for the world—for fate, for death. We are well-oiled machines left in the dark, encased in our snug leather holsters, fire selectors on safe. We are not like people and so we do not understand these human moments of frailty.
Confronted by our mortality curling around us like kudzu choking some ancient, mystical tree because we do not know better, because we are like virgins, we let the moment in fully. We experience the loss as if it is the only loss the world has ever experienced.
We become what we are afraid of. We make copies of Fisher’s dog tag and wear them.
We hang the tags from the rearview mirrors of our cars. We slide the hanging tags between our thumbs and forefingers, the same way we might one day move our hands through our lovers’ hair—gentle and fluttering, a strange touch for men who are trained to take the lives of others.
We wonder if Fisher wore his tag the night he died. We wonder if his girlfriend removed it from his neck and hung it on the opaque conical shade of her small bedside lamp while they fucked behind a closed door as Baker watched television at a higher-than-normal volume in the living room. Maybe Fisher forgot to return the tag to his neck, maybe it’s still there hanging on the shade to this day, maybe his girlfriend slides the tag between her forefinger and thumb before she leaves the sleep stink of her mattress every morning.
Or maybe it was never there in the first place.
We have transformed the tags.
Now the tags are acceptance. They are finite life. The tags remind us that we didn’t die, but that there are those who did, and regardless of who they were as men they should be remembered. They remind us death shouldn’t be feared or welcomed, and that it should be treated with indifference like all inevitable things. The tags remind us it’s important to remember instead of trying to forget.
Domino’s Tolls the Bell
There are whorehouses in Thailand. There are women who are paid to massage and bring to climax and send on their happy newly tranquil ways the lonesome, the bored, the curious military boys who wander through the doors in packs like wild dogs begging to be tamed by the perky tits and airbrushed makeup of the civilized world. There are multiple and redundant alcohols one can imbibe if one so chooses, and these libations are served in innumerable bars and exotic dance clubs throughout the land.
And so, gather round and lean in close for there’s a story to be told of the days of old, before two wars took up the rotational deployment schedule of the lowly grunt, sentencing countless manboys to time served in the desert. Let’s all gather round that man there in the faded green camouflage utilities with the nicotine-stained lips and grim wrinkled face of a gent twice his age. Chances are, he’s been divorced, busted in rank, probably has a few kids in different states. The corpsmen at the aid station know him by first name and they keep a stock of penicillin and amoxicillin handy for his frequent visits. We’ll listen to his tales in a too-hot barracks room stinking of last night’s Yellow Bellies and vomit. It might start out like this: So there I was, hair on fire, balls flapping in the wind, or, You ain’t a real man until you get your bore punched. Enraptured, we gather around like children at story time and poke one another in the ribs while the grizzled old bear spits tobacco into a foam cup lined with a paper towel. This magical land he’s describing to us full of wanton sex and unmeasured freedom is our future. An all-expenses-paid well-earned anything-goes vacation courtesy of the United States government.
Sure, we might have to spend some days and nights in the jungle, and put up with the golden orb weavers and the snakes, but just think: There’s Japan and Thailand and Australia, countries where the mere mention of an American accent sets panties to dripping. No more explosions or deserts. No more jerking off. This is the show, the fuck we’ve been waiting for.
And then somehow in April 2007 we’re being force-fed Domino’s on a Southern California parade deck watching our future burst into bullshit. The command throws pizza parties to mask bad news. It’s a great opportunity, they tell us. They rattle off the battalion’s illustrious combat history. You’re warriors, they say between mouthfuls of sauce and cheese. Were we all to contract some mortal disease, they’d stuff our mouths with pizza and smile as we slipped toward the light.
Instead of Oki and Oz and Thailand, our battalion will deploy back to Iraq, back to the desert. Mobile Assault Platoons again. Back to patrolling the exact same fucking roads where we bought our tickets and rode the Gravitron and most of us survived to tell the tale, to the cities where kids tried to throw grenades into our Humvees, to where we piled on top of one another while RPK rounds zipped and pinged around us and we lost our minds with fear so that we could only laugh. We’ll go back there and we’ll try to do our jobs, but instead, because those things that happened before are no longer happening, because the war—what we think of as the real war—is over, we’ll grow complacent and buy sheep from farmers during patrols to fatten and eat, and smoke opium-laced tobacco with out-of-work villagers, and ghost ride our trucks through apartment high rises and post the videos to YouTube and get disbanded and busted in rank.
Then we’ll come home nastier and surlier and we’ll get drunker than we used to and we’ll exercise less and cheat on our wives and fiancées and girlfriends more and we’ll have a year left on our contracts. The higher-ups will tell us we’ll fail, that we can’t hack it as civilians, that we’re not civilized anymore, and some of us will give in and re-up. We’ll lament their loss, call them lifers, throw them going-away pizza parties, forget they ever existed.
The lifers will deploy with Marine Expeditionary Units and do all those things to the girls in Thailand and Australia we were supposed to do. They’ll travel on to their new duty stations and we’ll be stuck hanging around, of no use to anybody, short-timers. The command will stick us on the periphery, make us beautify the camp. We’ll spend our days Weedwacking and painting curbs red and gold and raking rocks and sweeping asphalt. We’ll think of how we used to carry guns and maps and the weight of the world. We’ll dream at night of Thai pussy and try to figure a way to get back to the war.
We find it, a call for volunteers. Short-timers wanted to provide security for the colonel of Fifth Marine Regiment in Iraq. Free pizza for anyone interested. So we drop our paintbrushes and Weedwackers and rakes, and we gorge ourselves, stuffing our faces until it’s gone. Every last bit.
War Movie
In the summer of 2007 we are broken once more into Mobile Assault Platoons. Junior Marines are sent to us from the line companies so we can meet our tables of organization. Chris, who came to the fleet with us and was a machine gunner with a line company and then a sniper, joins our platoon.
We train for war at a movie studio in San Diego. Sets built to resemble villages and homes are constructed to give the feel of authenticity. Guide wires strung from r
ooftops to the sandy ground carry mock-RPG explosives as they rocket toward our patrols. A loudspeaker atop a minaret at the fake village center plays the adhan—Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar—over and over, never the shahada. It is maddening. Women shuffle around in burkas; most have some kind of weapon under their shapeless garb. We are told to treat everyone with courtesy and respect but always have a plan to kill them. We are told the rules of engagement and reminded about escalation of force. We are told we are professionals and should conduct ourselves as such. We are told we are here to win hearts and minds. We are told we cannot search women, we are told we cannot make physical contact with the actors, and we are told the actors will follow the rules. It’s all just a cunt hair away from being real.
The studio has hired former Navy SEALs to help train us—to be our aggressors. They hire actors and stagehands and special effects gurus and advisors and coordinators and amputees. In a large room we sit with our left hands on our left knees and our right hands on our right knees. We act professional and serious—how we’ve been told men going to war should act. We fall into single-file lines and give mission briefs like robots. We rotate in and out of activities with other platoons, a round-robin of military operations.
There is a village, a school with movable walls, and there is a kill house—set up for cordon searches, cordon knocks, and raids. Inside, actors and former special forces operators crouch in wait with their weapons augmented to shoot 9mm paint rounds that sting like wasps. There is a woman who we call Lara Croft. She carries Desert Eagles akimbo and dives for cover across hallways, shooting at us with deadeye accuracy from behind her burka. We all die.
When RPGs in the village impact near an amputee someone behind the scenes presses a button and the woman’s leg explodes into spaghetti-like gore. When a sniper uses a second-floor window in a building facade to plink blank rounds in our direction a controller walks around in the room we are huddled in and douses some of us with fake blood and says, You’re dead. You’ve been hit in the femoral. You have a sucking chest wound. Our corpsman goes to work and the call to prayer blasts our eardrums to dust.
