by Matt Young
4. Sweatshirt/sweatpants
• For:
i. Warmth in winter months
1. No one ever talks about how cold the desert gets
5. PT Shorts
• For:
i. Running
ii. Quick-drying underwear
6. Civilian Clothes (T-shirt, basketball shorts)
• For:
i. Sleeping
ii. Attempting normalcy
7. Three Cartons of Marlboro Reds
• For:
i. Smoking
ii. Barter
8. Utilities, Desert
• For:
i. Clean clothes
ii. Because you’re not a complete shitbag and want to set a good example for junior Marines
9. Porno Mags
• For:
i. Masturbation
ii. Leisure reading
iii. Morale boosting
iv. Wall decor
10. Self-loathing
• For:
i. A reminder of your first deployment to Iraq
ii. Impeding work performance
iii. Increasing cynicism
iv. An excuse to drink
1. Alcohol ultimately makes things worse
11. Skivvy Eggs (socks, shirts, skivvies made into a ball)
• For:
i. Easy transport
ii. Self-containment
iii. Construction fun!
1. To make: Fold skivvies (undershirt, underpants) into small square, place feet of socks in center, roll up so cuff and leg are exposed, fold cuff and leg over rolled up shirt and underpants
12. Running Shoes
• For:
i. Running
ii. Other exercise
iii. Attempting to keep feet healthy
13. Thumb Drive, Loaded with Digital Porn (inside running shoes)
• For:
i. Masturbation
ii. Boredom
iii. Because you’ve got a problem
1. Add it to the list
14. Extra BCGs (inside running shoes)
• For:
i. Accidentally fell into your shoe, did not intend to pack
15. Shower Shoes
• For:
i. Comfort
ii. Avoiding stepping in semen in shower stalls
1. Because Marines jerk off in the shower (when there are showers) and no one wants to step in someone else’s spooge
16. Extra Boots
• For:
i. Avoiding ass chewing about how nasty your combat boots are on the flight back
1. This speaks to the fact that you believe you will indeed make it home
2. Your optimism isn’t dead yet
3. Congratulations
17. Dog Tags
• For:
i. Easy identification of body if maimed, killed, or incapacitated
1. Place on chain around neck
a. In case of dismemberment
2. Thread low on left bootlace
a. In case of decapitation
18. Vodka (in misleading water bottle)
• For:
i. Borderline alcoholism
19. Shoulder Chip
• For:
i. Feelings of inadequacy as a Marine and a man
1. You’ve never been in a firefight, never killed another human
2. Your seniors fought house to house in a city—what did you do?
20. Combination Lock
• For:
i. Avoiding the sticky fingers of other Marines
1. Gear adrift is a gift
Rabid
It’s important to remember that “dog” is a loose term. It’s important to remember that we can say they probably most likely without much of a doubt and with the utmost confidence all have rabies or worms or congenital diseases or are overpopulated or are suffering from canine depression or have bitten a village child or whatever. It’s important to remember our boredom and lack of sleep and anger and sadness and youth and misunderstanding and loneliness and hate. It’s important to remember that we don’t want to, not really, not deep down. It’s important to convince ourselves of this especially. It’s important to remember that we’re just following orders. It’s important to remember the Nazis and the Nuremburg Defense.
It’s important to remember that we’re stuck in the gray cracks between black and white where answers are like handholds in a wall of obsidian in the dead of night. So before we aim in we think again about rabies and overpopulation and safety issues for the denizens of whatever the fuck Iraqi village we’re driving past, but we can feel our pulses quicken and our skin tighten and we even feel our pupils slam to their outermost border, dilating, taking in the night.
It’s important to remember that we have a dog back home that sleeps in our bed and pees the floor it gets so excited to see us. It’s important to tell ourselves this. It’s important to say, We don’t hate dogs, and then remind ourselves that these aren’t really dogs. They’re not our dog.
It’s important to know the statistics of people who commit cruel acts in regard to animals and how those acts may correlate to sociopathy or to domestic abuse or to myriad other psychological disorders, which come with a loss or lack of empathy. It’s important to plan for the future. It’s important to not take pleasure in this.
It will be important to justify the choices we’re about to make. It will be important, when telling this story, of how we shot dogs in Iraq, while drunk in a bar years from now that we sufficiently lower our head and hunch our shoulders and talk in a low voice about how we never wanted to, that we didn’t have a choice.
It’s important to follow weapons-safety rules. It’s important to remember to never point our gun at anything we do not intend to shoot. It’s important to keep our weapon on safe until we’re ready to fire. It’s important to keep our finger straight and off the trigger until we intend to fire. It’s important to know our target and what lies beyond.
It’s important to understand bullets don’t stop just because they hit something.
It’s important to remember, now that we’ve moved our selector lever to fire and our finger begins the slow steady squeeze we’ve practiced to the point of permanent muscle memory, that when the bullet stops, it won’t really stop. The bullet will travel through the dog and maybe through whatever is beyond it, or maybe become lodged in large bone or lost in the thoracic cavity.
Whatever the bullet does, it will be important to know that once it leaves the chamber, its true path of trajectory will pass directly into us, where it will ricochet off our bones and rip through our insides and smash into our consciousness. We will not feel it in the moment, but it will be bouncing and tumbling and shredding for years.
It’s important to help the bullet exit so the wound doesn’t fester and swell and leak puss and poison our blood.
It will become important to support no-kill animal shelters in hopes of aiding the exit. It will be important to donate two dollars for every trip to the pet store. It will be important to purchase for our own dog a designer dog bed filled with memory foam, and all-natural dog food, and preventative joint damage medication, and enzyme toothpaste to ensure healthy gums and teeth, which ultimately helps to avoid h
eart disease. It will be important to upset our own life and not board our dog and write pages upon pages of instructions for those watching her when we absolutely cannot do so.
It’s important to remember that the exit will leave a secondary wound as exiting bullets do. It will be important one morning after waking from a nightmare in which we are being torn apart by snarling, rotting dogs to look into our dog’s sweet sad sleepy doe eyes and attempt an apology that’s meant not just for the dogs but for everything we did are doing and might someday do.
How to Build a Raft
Orientation: Camp Baharia, old Baathist resort town favored by ones Uday and Qusay Hussein, southeast of Fallujah, November 2007. Sixty days into deployment two.
• Lake may contain unexploded ordnance from U.S. bombing of area
• Local mythology: Uday, who had penchant for kidnapping young girls, preferred transport of victims to resort home on island in middle of lake
○ Girls raped, murdered, weighted, thrown off dock
• Local mythology: lake populated with freshwater eels that feed on corpses of said raped, murdered, weighted girls
○ Explains size of eels
Situation: Enemies, friendlies, attachments, detachments, neutrals
• Enemy forces/hazards:
○ Weapons Company Higher Command
■ Bivouacked at Weapons Company HQ
■ 250 meters east of current position
■ Ability to impose office hours for violation of lake prohibition
■ Ability to impose nonjudicial punishment for violation of lake prohibition
■ Ability to remove rank for violation of lake prohibition
○ Asshole corpsmen with bivouac site closer to phone center
■ 100 meters southwest of phone center
■ Ability to make higher command aware of illegal activity (e.g. entering lake)
■ Ability to remove comfort items: Motrin, Ativan, etc.
○ Army assholes have bivouac site closer
■ 350 to 400 meters northeast of phone center
■ Potential for friendly fire as per Army Guard incident in 2006
■ Quick to trigger
■ Best to avoid
○ Unexploded lake bombs
■ Still have explosive potential???
○ Lake
■ Could fall in
• Not sure how deep lake is
• Full of eels
○ Saw one breach other night. Thick as forearm. Might have been longer than I am tall
• Friendly forces:
○ Operators: Chris Smith, hereby referred to as Echo-3 Sierra, and Matt Young, hereby referred to as Echo-4 Yankee, Mobile Assault Platoon 3A
○ Remainder of Mobile Assault Platoon 3A
■ Currently at bivouac site 4 klicks from objective and enemy
■ Remain behind element unaware of operation
• Attachments:
○ None
• Detachments:
○ None
• Neutral forces:
○ All others in vicinity of bivouac site
■ MAP 1A
• No qualms
■ MAP 1B
• No qualms even though has most guys from Texas
■ MAP 2A
• Least trusted
• Reckless
■ MAP 2B
• Even less trusted
• Idiots
■ MAP 3B
• On good terms
○ Regardless of what Echo-4 Whiskey said other day … can go fuck self
○ Regardless of Echo-4 Delta’s posh British fucking accent and that he’s probably gay
■ Everyone’s gay in the field, anyway
Mission: To build raft out of found material and cross channel between our bivouac shore and phone center shore for easier more accessible route to phone center to call family, women, friends.
• Reason:
○ 4 klicks too far to walk in cold rain
○ 4 klicks too far to walk when dark
■ Time difference dictates must go at night
■ Operations dictate must go at night
○ Bored
■ So bored
• Threw rocks at hole in concrete today for three hours, made one rock, feel good about progress, should be improvement tomorrow
○ Side mission to find place to drink bottle of vodka sent from stateside
■ Would like to get drunk
• Safe???
Execution: The breakdown
• Summary of plan and concept
○ Will first have to gather supplies to make raft
■ Parts, tools, etc.
○ Will also have to find place to hide raft while not under construction
○ Once raft completed will tie paracord to date palm on our side of bank and then paddle to far bank
○ Unspool paracord during crossing
○ Once across will tie paracord to large boulder from wreckage of Uday mansion
• Breakdown of duties
○ Echo-3 Sierra
■ Design raft
■ Gather parts for raft
■ Construct raft
○ Echo-4 Yankee
■ Gather tools
• Hammer
• Nails
■ Supervise
■ Some construction
• Make paddles
■ Will mostly supervise
■ And bring vodka
Admin and Logistics: Supply, evac, transport, misc.
• Supply
○ Food
■ Chow hall
• 350 meters southeast of position
■ MREs
• Next to NCO hooch
○ Tools
■ Located in toolboxes in most trucks at our disposal
○ Weapons
■ Not required for mission
• Evacuation Plan
○ Should bodily injury occur BAS located 3.75 klicks from current position
• Transport
○ No insertions/extractions
○ Foot mobile
○ Raft
• Misc.
○ None
Command and Signal: Signal instructions, commander position
• Signal
○ None
• Commander position
○ As Marine with longer time in grade, Echo-4 Yankee will take form of commander
■ Let it be known, most work credits and creative license revert to Echo-3 Sierra
After Action: Debrief
• Problem: People don’t always answer the phone
• Solution: Get drunk
• Problem: Being drunk caused one of us, maybe Echo-3 Sierra (who Echo-4 Yankee thought had the line and whom Echo-4 Yankee asked, Hey do you have line, and thought Echo-3 Sierra answered, Yeah, I have the line) or maybe Echo-4 Yankee, to drop the line in water
• Solution: Use paddles to get back to shore
• Problem: One of us, maybe Echo-4 Yankee, maybe Echo-3 Sierra (whom Echo-4 Yankee is fairly sure he asked if paddles were accounted for) left paddles on phone center bank
• Solution: One
of us had to reach into the lake to find the line
• Problem: It was dark. Blacker than black. No moon, no stars. Echo-4 Yankee was not afraid to admit he is terrified of the dark. Kept thinking about stories of dead bodies in the lake. Thinking about large eels feasting on dead bodies. Thinking one of those eels might be big enough to pull him in so he might become a dead body
• Solution: Echo-3 Sierra stuck his hand in, found the line, pulled us back to our side of shore
• Problem: Can’t sleep thinking about dead bodies on bottom of lake being eaten by eels. Wondering why no one answered phone call. Thinking am alone. Thinking am sad and drunk and cold and lonely and want to go home and what it might be like to be a kidnapped dead girl on the bottom of a lake being eaten by eels
Junkie
Sometime in 2008 the corporal is lying in a dry canal, waiting for a controlled detonation to submerge his body in sand and overpressure. He can feel dust caking like paste in his eyes and needling into his pores, mixing with the excited sweat on his brow and upper lip. The scrub lining the ground of the wadi rakes and grabs at the corporal’s flak jacket, reverberating noise over his tympanum. It sounds like cannons in the paralysis of the moment.
The corporal wonders how he and the lance corporal might explain themselves if they are caught. They are not supposed to be here. They are supposed to be in their trucks. They had to low-crawl from the cordon of the Humvees to avoid detection. How might they explain why they decided to sneak close to the detonation site in order to feel some excitement? Whose idea was it to begin with? The corporal asks these questions, but the lance corporal only shrugs, and smiles, his half-Filipino mocha skin dimpling dark at the cheeks.
Before all the low-crawling and secret squirrel business, they’d kept themselves busy by convincing a private to try to ride a lone cow standing in the fallow field where their platoon had found an ancient cache of rusted mortars, artillery, and RPK rounds. When the private hopped on the bag of bones it bucked like Bodacious and smashed his face, launching him in the air. It must’ve killed thirty minutes.
In the wadi, the corporal tries recalling the explosive ordnance disposal sergeant’s burn scars, which are visible when the sergeant is in his shirtsleeves. The skin is drawn and shining like morning ice spreading on a pond. Sometimes the corporal wishes himself a grievous injury for no better reason than a break in routine.
