by Matt Young
In the school with the movable walls we come to a T intersection in a hallway. One of us is shot, another is taken hostage. We spend the next fifteen minutes pinned down while an actor sprays us with paint rounds. Our command watches from catwalk vantage points, they make calls over the radio, deny casevac and QRF, they make it impossible for us to survive to see what we will do.
One of us has an idea to throw a blank grenade—a glorified blasting cap—calling, Flash bang out! We rush in to save our comrade and detain the actor.
During the debrief we are chastised. You can’t get pinned down like that in a house, they say. You should’ve thrown a grenade around the corner, they say. Your buddy would’ve been dead already anyhow, they say. Got to think quicker, they say. Sometimes you’ve got to make sacrifices. Train for the worst, they say.
We have been mortarmen too long. We have forgotten what it is like to be door-kickers. Chris, who was birthed a grunt, helps remind us.
Fuck this, he says.
Soon we are running behind sets and climbing catwalks and putting our knees into the actors’ throats and placing them in incapacitating holds, wrenching their arms and bending their knees and tackling them to the ground. We are hissing Hajji and Muj in their ears and putting the soles of our boots into their faces.
We are showing them what real is.
One junior Marine, whose Kevlar helmet is too big and whose belt is missing a loop, we call Lawrence. Lawrence is gentle. He leads detainees by their elbows.
Lawrence, you fucking boot, we say. You are in a world of shit. Watch us.
We shove our arms up under flex-cuffed wrists and grab the napes of necks, putting shoulders to the test. The actors grunt and cry out and some fight back and get into it and some say stop. It doesn’t make a difference.
Between stations we jerk off in overflowing port-a-shitters and draw giant veined cocks on the walls, proclaiming in graffiti, The Green Weenie Was Here and Chesty is Watching and BOHICA.
We want to burn the world down. We want to kill and die and make up for not killing or dying in 2006.
We are sick of acting.
Down the Rabbit Hole
You spend a month in June 2007 at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms outside Palm Springs, California, during Mojave Viper Combined Arms Exercise in one-hundred-plus-degree heat. You try to escape the heat to a port-a-shitter where you go to town on yourself, using your sweat as lubrication. It stinks of shit and desert and diesel and your pupils pin in the rose light sneaking through the blue plastic coffin air vents, turning the horror into a 1980s porno boudoir.
You are thinking of war death destruction bleeding bodies heroism medals fantasy blow jobs anal sex intimacy. Your brain flips pages, parts the reeds searching for what it needs. You are thinking of exes, one-night-stands, the female engagement team that’s currently training with your battalion—the existence of which Command has told you not to acknowledge. Abdominals strain, your body pushes forward through memory. A fly lands on your upper lip and you blow it away but now you’re thinking of shit. Shit everywhere, the fly covered in the insides of your platoon mates now all over your face, burning shit, black oily smoke in your nostrils and still somehow you’re hard and plugging away, drilling through gray matter to the archived log of sex acts notable enough to get you off all these years later.
Outside, voices drawl about pussy and beer and cigarettes and dip. There’s a group of who-knows-how-many singing an ’80s hair band ballad while you treat yourself like a lawnmower’s pull start. You wonder if there is something wrong with you—if there’s something in you that’s broken, a chewed gear or rusty bearing. That would make your actions easy to explain, some dark part of your past you’ve sequestered into the ADULTS ONLY section of your brain. It’s not that easy.
Focus, think of your fiancée, the pictures she sent, the sex you’ve had, the places you’ve had it, and you’re almost there, but she’s not with you, she’s hundreds and thousands of miles away, and her face twists, morphs into the girl who blew you in the alley behind the bar two weeks ago, now she’s a young female Marine from a month before who you fucked on your friend’s bed, now she’s the friend of your platoon mate’s wife, now she’s two college girls at a house party in San Diego, now she’s your ex-girlfriend, now she’s your ex-girlfriend’s friend, now you’re breaking into your fiancée’s ex’s house after he sent her an innocuous text message and beating him as he sleeps, now you’re going down on a girl who is not your fiancée in a bathroom, now you’re lying to your fiancée and telling her she can’t go to a party because it’s at a bar and she’s not twenty-one and it’s really not at a bar but your platoon mate’s wife’s friend is there and you’re thinking maybe you can talk her into a for-old-time’s-sake blow job. The lies are compoundable; they meld with the shit air of the hotbox, morphing into a physical presence. Bulbous and veiny through it all you’re cranking away, debriding a wound, cleaning the grit from avulsed flesh after the car wreck into which you’ve turned your life.
Humvee engines turn over, growling for your blood and you pump your arm through a spasming bicep chafing and grating. You hear your name riding Humvee exhaust to your ears. The sweat stings now and you know you’ve got to finish, that if you don’t you are wrong and you are bad and your scale is off balance and you are in the red—but if you finish you can still turn this all around, you can still make your relationship right, you can spend your married years making it all up, throw yourself at her feet, lick her boots clean, offer her your manhood.
Maybe that will be enough.
You explode into the blue hell below your knees, not your spunk, but you, shot from the tip of your own miserable prick, accelerating from zero to forty-five kilometers per hour, soaring past your lies and all those other women and affairs toward whatever kind of misery waits for you.
How to Ruin a Life
Step 1: Start out with something to prove. Join the United States Marine Corps, become senior enlisted Marine.
• These may seem like separate steps, though be assured they are one and the same; it’s merely what you’re setting out to accomplish that differs. For instance, you might have something to prove and in rebuttal to that feeling of inadequacy you might paint a masterpiece or get a PhD. However, you’d be doing the wrong thing if you wanted to ruin a life. You might be following the steps for “How to Get Revenge by Living Well” or “How to Become a Better Artist.”
Step 2: After a deployment to Iraq, develop a serious chip on your shoulder and an inability to compromise.
• You’ll be ambushed, you’ll be blown up, you’ll be afraid and tired and cold and hot and lonely and miserable.
• You’ll never see the war your salts tell you about.
• You’ll never get to kill another human.
○ You’ll feel cheated by this.
Step 3: Use rank and privilege to hold junior enlisted Marines to an unfair standard.
Step 4: Drink. A lot.
Step 5: Be as unsympathetic as possible—remember that chip.
Step 6: Target the most emotionally vulnerable and impressionable person you can find. Become his mentor. Become the person he should trust and turn to, the person who should have his back.
• This person will have:
○ Anxieties about transitioning into military life.
○ A tumultuous home life.
○ An unhappy spouse.
○ An eight-month-old baby.
○ Trouble getting to work on time.
○ Difficulty remembering Marine Corps customs and courtesies.
Step 7: Exploit everything wrong with this person instead of tapping into your ability for empathy.
• Feel free to point these faults out to others and encourage them to point out faults they find with this person as well.
• Refer to this person as Lawrence in reference to the ma
ssive fuckup from Full Metal Jacket, Private Leonard Lawrence.
Step 8: Drink some more.1
Step 9: Find a “last straw” with your charge.
• Should be something arbitrary:
○ A missed belt loop.
○ Sloppily rolled sleeves.
○ No fresh haircut.
Step 10: Blow this discrepancy out of proportion.
• Relate this thing to combat and his inability to complete simple tasks.
○ E.g. an improperly looped belt shows a lack of attention to detail, which will result in this person causing the deaths of Marines in combat.
Step 11: Proceed to physically intimidate.
• Interpretations will vary but may include:
○ Threatening language.
○ Physical contact with this person’s body.
○ Physical contact between this person’s body and an inanimate object.
• Encourage others of your same rank and privilege to join in.
Step 12: Act unsurprised when this person does not show up for work the next day.2
Step 13: Act even less surprised when Mexican authorities discover this person transporting illegal immigrants into Southern California.
Step 14: Be completely unaffected upon hearing that during his transportation back to Camp Pendleton on September 22, 2007, this person managed to slip the zip ties binding his wrists and open the sliding door of the van traveling at eighty miles per hour down the Five.
• Remain similarly unmoved on learning he jumped.
Step 15: Now live with it. Go on. Try to live with it.
1. Read: excessively.
2. Or for the rest of the month.
All of the Above
At three in the morning during the summer of 2007 you are on a drunk so heavy you’ll manage to erase the previous week of temporary assigned duty at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms. You’ll patchwork it all together later. You’re attending a course in electronic countermeasures—devices that interrupt signals from radio-controlled IEDs. It is the night before your final electronic countermeasures test and you and six of the ten Marines in the course are strewn about an apartment after a night of barhopping in Palm Springs, California.
The apartment belongs to a woman who was a bartender at a club you hopped named Zelda’s. She has invited some of her friends over. While you are running your hands over the body of a fit Hawaiian woman who is not your fiancée but is friends with the apartment’s renter, it hits you that:
A. You are about to deploy again to Iraq in less than two months.
B. You are an incompetent leader and a substandard Marine.
C. You are a cheater and liar and borderline alcoholic.
D. All of the above.
The Hawaiian sits on your lap and leans back against your chest. You are thinking of:
A. The way the thin cotton blend of her dress clings to her curves.
B. The feeling of the split of her ass against your crotch.
C. Your fiancée, who will come to visit you in a month to see you off to war again.
D. All of the above.
Over the Hawaiian’s shoulder you decide:
A. That the apartment lacks furniture but is clean.
B. That what the apartment lacks in seating it makes up for with walls bright with photos and art.
C. That imagining yourself in the photos of the women’s friends who are smiling and laughing on the beach, at bachelorette parties, and during movie nights makes you feel like you are home. Resolve never to leave.
D. All of the above.
In the living room there are three women and five men (including you) scattered across a couch and the floor. The men are your fellow NCOs. Three of them are drunk. One of them is a designated driver who has taken his job seriously. Where is the sixth?
A. Passing out in the twelve-passenger van you personally drove from Camp San Mateo to Twentynine Palms.
B. Vomiting in the twelve-passenger van you personally drove from Camp San Mateo to Twentynine Palms.
C. Pissing his pants in the twelve-passenger van you personally drove from Camp San Mateo to Twentynine Palms.
D. All of the above.
One of the women in the living room asks what you think of the war in Iraq. You act like you don’t hear the question and after some silence the conversation in the living room turns toward the “never have I ever” and “prove it” variety. Your mind wanders to the road trip from the fresh summer sting of the coast to the shit hole of Riverside then through Joshua Tree National Park just before hitting the interior Marine Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms. You begin to think about:
A. How you should think Joshua Tree is beautiful—most people find it beautiful. But all you can think of is your first deployment to Iraq when you were so tired you might’ve hallucinated a leg that might’ve been a Joshua tree that might’ve not been there at all in the first place but was probably a leg.
B. How Joshua trees apocryphally represent the gateways between Heaven and Hell, and if Iraq is Hell by proxy—because of course Iraq would be Hell—does that make Twentynine Palms Heaven? Or maybe that’s all wrong and California is the host of an interdimensional Hell portal. Maybe they both lead to Hell. Maybe that’s the joke of it all.
C. How you are about to deploy. Again. To Iraq. Again. How since your promotion to corporal and most of your seniors reaching their end of active service you and the boys you came to the fleet with—John, Chris, Charlie, Adam, others—have been expected to lead. How you’re one of the men your Marines look to. You repeat the phrase in your head: your Marines. You think about how you are a better follower. How you’ve always been a follower. How you should’ve remained a follower. How if something goes wrong now it’s all on you. How there is never any escaping that feeling.
D. All of the above.
The bartender from Zelda’s takes a Marine into her bedroom. The designated driver looks at his watch and furrows his brow, though he tries to laugh at the story that’s been told three times already: When hopping bars one of the sergeants you were with reached over the chained-off section of an open-air restaurant and interrupted a date by taking a handful of fries being shared by the couple, and then proceeded to enter into their conversation seamlessly. The couple thanked him for his service. The bartender and the Marine reemerge. Everyone makes jokes about hitting and quitting and two-pump dumping. The designated driver uses this as an excuse to corral you and your drunken comrades. The Hawaiian pushes her ass into your erection and asks you not to go. She says, Let’s just go to sleep. I’ll make you pancakes in the morning. What do you do?
A. Make a stand. Incite a riot. Curse and swear at the designated driver. Decide to go absent without leave if only for pancakes. Say, Fuck the Marine Corps. Say, I don’t want to go back to Iraq. (It will be the designated driver’s first deployment to Iraq. Before this he was a security guard at Guantanamo.) Call the designated driver a boot. Call him an inexperienced child. Tell him to go fuck himself. Tell him you’re staying. Tell him he can go on and die if he wants to.
B. Give in. Stand to say goodbye to the Hawaiian. Hug her and caress her perfect ass. Turn her around so that her back is to you; let her grind into your crotch again. Let her loll her head back under your chin and then stoop down to slobber her neck, take in her scent like the dog you are. Move your hands to her breasts. Don’t think about the other Marines or the women or your fiancée or your family. Think that you might die again. Think no one is lucky enough to escape a second time. Think of Cheeks. Think you want to feel life and fucking is a way to do that. Pull the hem of the woman’s skirt up to see she’s not wearing underwear and then hear her scream and feel her palm connect awkwardly high on your
cheekbone and smash the tip of your nose.
C. Remember you are a follower. A coward. Sulk to the van. Curse the designated driver. Pass out as soon as you hit the seat. Wake, still in the van, still drunk, to the smell of stale tobacco and vomit and cheap tequila with no memory of what happened. Take the trip to the classroom where your test will be. Take the electronic countermeasures Scantron test and pass. Take the electronic countermeasures practical application test and pass. Receive a certificate of completion. Think about what it means to pass a test drunk. Wonder if this is what college would’ve been like. Drink a gallon of water. Load the van. Travel the three hours back to Camp Pendleton. Stay awake until Joshua Tree National Park. Think about your first deployment. Imagine a forest full of exploded, charred limbs cracking and splitting in the sun. Feel nauseated. Think about Sherburne’s crunchy face and the way a man cries for his family when he is being tortured. Fall asleep and dream about the desert.
D. All of the above.
Packing Level: Expert
Equipment and Gear You’ll Actually Bring and Use:
1. Half Log Copenhagen Long Cut
• For:
i. Barter
ii. Late-night post
1. Cigarette cherries are good sniper aim points
2. Protein Powder
• For:
i. False sense of accomplishment
ii. Meal supplements
3. Lotion
• For:
i. Masturbation
ii. Dry desert skin
