FUBAR: A Collection of War Stories

by Weston Ochse

  The second Sunday I draw KP duty. I’m in the kitchen cleaning pots and pans when I see a girl. Not an imaginary girl or a girl in a magazine, but a real live, freshly-minted Army girl, wearing clothes just like me and her hair too short to be pretty. Still, she has breasts. Normally my mind would be doing mental gymnastics as it devises contortions for her to fit into, but today all I can do is stare at her, wondering what to do, knowing that I should know what to do, and be willing to do anything, including sneaking a quickie in the mob closet. So instead of coming on, I merely wave, then return to washing.

  What’s wrong with me?

  Fucking Napolean saltpeter turned me into the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

  It’s Doctor Doom’s fault too. He’s desensitized us through song. I realize that. I can feel it happening. Sometimes we sing a cadence and I cringe a little but inside when I hear the words. I got a mom. I got a sister. I got a grandmother. Sure I have insane images of naked movie stars running through my mind and doing crazy things with my lean hard military body. But to scream some of the cadences we scream is like turning my brain inside out to show God, the Universe and everyone how fucked up I am on the inside and how fast they should lock me up.

  “Up jumped the monkey from the coconut grove.

  He was a mean mother fucker, you could tell by his clothes.

  He wore a two button ditty, and a three button stitch.

  He was a loud mouth-mother fuckin, son of a bitch!

  He lined a hundred women, up against the wall

  and bet anyone, he could fuck them all.

  He fucked 98 till his balls turn blue,

  then he backed off, jacked off, and fucked the other two!!!

  Even knowing how wrong it is I laugh. We run and Doctor Doom sings cadence. I sing back at the top of my lungs and realize that our multiple voices have become one. I can’t hear black, white, Hispanic or Asian. I can’t hear northern or southern or eastern seaboard. I can’t hear educated or uneducated. All I hear is the song that begins to cement us into a unit.

  And it’s not just sex.

  It’s violence.

  It’s Children of the Corn, Son of Sam and Lord of the Flies all baked into one fucked up camouflage pie.

  I have these images of napalm sticking to kids and it doesn’t make me sick. I think about hand grenade-exploded bodies and I ask to pass the saltpeter-infested-gravy. I dream about bullets stitching across the fronts of men like me in different colored uniforms as I dress myself every morning. We joke about dead gooks caught in the wire. We laugh about deader Ruskies pickled in homemade transmission hooch. We giggle about blood and guts like they’re animated characters in Saturday morning cartoons.

  What used to bother me no longer bothers me.

  “When I get to heaven

  Saint Peter’s gonna say

  How’d you earn your livin’?

  How’d you earn your pay?”

  I’ll reply with a whole lot of anger,

  I made my living as an Airborne Ranger!

  Blood, guts, sex and danger

  That’s the life of an Airborne Ranger!

  When I get to hell

  Satan’s gonna say

  How’d you earn your livin’ boy?

  How’d you earn your pay?

  I’ll reply with a boot to his face

  I made my living sending souls to this place!”

  We fight a lot.

  It’s easier now to solve problems through our fists than it is to talk about them.

  Alphabet likes to knee people in the nuts. Black Johnson tried to hit him once. The hard-headed Armenian took it, stepped inside the other’s guard and kneed Johnson’s nuts into the back of his throat. We all laughed. It is so damned funny, especially the way Black Johnson’s eyes bulged.

  White Johnson’s boots were scuffed by Shexnader when the big lug tripped over his inspection display. White Johnson wrapped those boots around Shexnader’s head so many times the boot black makes him look African and the blood oozed like cherry pie filling. We laughed about this for days.

  Manfredi Spaghetti was the shortest of us all and had a temper relative to his stature. He was acting platoon guide and was desperately trying to lead us in drill and ceremonies, but we were ready for him. Whenever he said right, we went left. Whenever he said left, we went right. He’s always turning opposite our direction. By the time we were finished, he was a sputtering and fuming mess. His eyes glowed the same color as the red that’s lassoed his neck. We don’t laugh out loud because we know Doctor Doom is watching, but our eyes sparkle with the hilarity. Finally, Taco Lopez can’t contain himself. Delivering a choking Spanish litany of Manfredi’s ancestors, Lopez bent over and hugged his cramping stomach. Manfredi became an Italian-made Spanish-seeking missile. He shot across the ten foot space, latched onto Lopez’s neck and began to choke the Mexican out. Not a single one of us broke rank and it’s with a proud twitch of the eyes that Doctor Doom range-walkedover and saved Lopez, noting ever so slightly that we elevated ourselves in his eyes through stalwart professionalism.

  If I should die in the low drop zone

  Box me up, and ship me home

  Pin those medals upon my chest

  Tell my mama that I done by best

  Goldstein’s going to take the worst of our wrath. I don’t know if it’s because he’s Jewish (which never bothered me but pisses some of the others off, especially White Johnson) or because we have no focus for our newly acquired advanced degrees in violence or because he caused us to lose our movie privilege by lousing up our Saturday night inspection, but even Spastic Sorenson is mad at him this night.

  We get him in the shower. We’re naked just like him. Our lean hard bodies glisten beneath the lights. He screams when he sees us and tries to cover the patch of red hair in his crotch. It looks oddly like blood on his otherwise hairless body. But he shouldn’t have worried about that. We might be naked, but this has nothing to do with sex. This is pure violence. We kick him down. His screams fall weakly, soon overpowered by the static hiss of the water coming from the showers. The water turns first pink, then yellow as we baptize with three dozen streams of indignation.

  He lays huddled amidst his blood and our urine for an hour before Doctor Doom comes and gets him. Goldstein spends the night in the troop medical clinic. He comes back the next morning. He looks normal, but something is broken on the inside, something in his brain. He begins talking to himself. He won’t look any of us in the eye. He sneers at the world where before he held it in awe. He laughs at things we don’t even dare to laugh at. The end comes when he giggles at Doctor Doom.

  Swift.

  Brutal.

  Final.

  And it happens like this. Doctor Doom instructs Vance and Schmitty on the correct way to dispose of the bodies of all the ants they destroyed while wrestling atop an anthill. Not that anyone knows how to bury an ant, especially while respecting the tiny hymenopterans’ religious beliefs. Using a box of kitchen matches, the two privates begin to create tiny graves, marking each with a cross, because these ants were Christian ants. We know this because Doctor Doom tells us so. And as he observes the services of the deceased, the first giggle escapes Goldstein’s lips.

  A stern gaze attempts to impale the impertinent Jewish private, but he somehow survives. The giggle evolves into a cackle, transforming Goldstein into a parody of Faustus, ignorant to the divine justice that is about to be levied on his hunched and weeping form. The universe comes to a screeching halt as Doctor Doom crashes through the hastily-erected hymenoptera graveyard. We never see Goldstein again but he remains with us forever.

  Life goes on.

  We run.

  We do more pushups.

  We’re becoming something new, something different.

  During visitation day we parade around.

  Our chests are
pumped.

  Our chins are out.

  Grim smiles cut our chiseled features.

  We feel like Gods of War.

  Everyone is all smiles. Our Parents. Our girls. Everyone is proud of us.

  Then we sing the vegetable song.

  My girl is a vegetable.

  She lives in a hospital

  And I would do anything.

  To keep her alive.

  She got no arms or legs.

  She gets by on hooks and pegs.

  And I would do anything,

  To keep her alive.

  It’s only out of the corner of my eye that I see the effect of our transition, sixteen verses later. We think nothing of it. We’ve sung it a thousand times. They’re just words that rhyme. They don’t really mean anything. But our parents don’t know that. Our girls don’t know that. They see us marching and singing about mutilated girls and they don’t understand it. I try and come up with an explanation for later, but I don’t understand it either. It’s now who we are.

  We do Hup Twos for a few yards before we break into one last cadence.

  “Momma momma can’t you see,

  What the Army’s done to me.

  They took away my faded jeans,

  And now I’m wearing army greens.

  They put me in a barber’s chair.

  I turned around and had no hair.

  I used to drive a Cadillac.

  Now I hump it on my back.

  I use to date a beauty queen,

  now I hug my M16.

  Momma momma can’t you see,

  what the Army’s done to me.”

  Then we pass and review.

  I’m a soldier now.

  I’m ready for anything.

  I am what you made me to be.

  I seethe with the need to prove it.

  Thank you Doctor Doom.

  Thank you so fucking much.

  Look out world, here I come.

  * * *

  Notes from the Author: I first created this as a performance piece. If you go to YouTube and search for it you can see me performing it along with the songs. I created it because people kept asking me what basic training was like. That’s like asking me how long a piece of string is. There is no real answer. You have to experience it to know. This is the closest I can come to allowing you to experience basic training as I had it. For those of you who went to basic training, you probably recognized the authenticity of much of what you’ve read and will eventually hear and see, with the video. It’s a little different for everyone. We all have our different experiences based on the differences with ourselves and our services. But since Christ was a corporal, the idea of shared misery, repetition, and molding hard-edged killing machines has been at the heart of what we refer fondly to as basic training.

  Finishing School

  EVER FEEL SO overwhelmed you can’t finish? I’m talking anything. Like running a 5K for instance. You look up and it seems so far away you just say forget it and quit. Or you have so many writing deadlines that you can’t concentrate. It’s just too damn much. This applies to school, to life, to anything. I know we’ve all been there. I know we’ve listened to the niggly voice whispering in our ear to quit. We ignore it at first, but then it changes tactics and makes us rationalize.

  It’s not so bad.

  A lot of people don’t finish.

  No one will know.

  How often do you listen to it?

  How often do you fall victim to it?

  There’s a TV show I found while cruising the Direct TV menu last year when I returned from Afghanistan. In fact, it’s how I discovered that one of my favorite magazines has a TV channel – Esquire. The show was titled Boundless and features two Canadians who travel the world doing ultra-marathons and insane bike races in places like Africa, South Asia, Austria, etc. Simon Donato and Paul “Turbo” Trebilcock are the two crazy guys. Turbo is about my age, while Simon is ten years younger. These aren’t young men. And they don’t finish in first place. But in most of these, they do finish, which is most important

  What I like most about this show is when they’re narrating their own success or failure and they talk about that voice in their head, the rationalization that creeps into their desire to finish, and how they react to it. I’ve seen Turbo fall victim to it and overcome it and it totally hits home.

  In some odd way, Turbo is me.

  A lot of years preceding my deployment to Afghanistan, I was a quitter. I quit exercising because it hurt. I gained 80 pounds. I rationalized like a grand master. Truly, I was a genius at it. I had an excuse for everything. Even as I plodded around as Mr. Fatty McFatty acting like I was the King of Awesome, I rationalized that I was old and a disabled vet. If anyone deserved to not exercise and to be a rotund person, it was me. After all, I was the normal and all of those healthy people were just weirdo leftie sprout-eaters.

  But as I prepared for my deployment, I decided that I wanted to change. I needed to change. The doctor who examined me during my predeployment physical told me I was in bad shape. He told me I was almost in too bad a shape to deploy.

  Where was that voice then?

  Little fucker had abandoned me.

  So I deployed and began to learn to finish.

  I saw men and women whom I was in awe of.

  I saw a soldier with a prosthetic leg who’d returned to war. If anyone had an excuse to quit, he did.

  I watched people’s eyes and I could tell which ones were rationalizers and which ones were finishers.

  I met a lot of operators who had that look in their eyes where one glance and you could tell that they would never quit.

  I coveted that look.

  I wanted that look.

  So I curated that look.

  Since June of 2013 while in Afghanistan, I’ve never not finished a distance run I’d set out to do. Often, if I feel like quitting, I’ll run farther. Just the other day, I felt like someone had rolled me up and put me away wet. My legs were thousand pound tree trunks. My body was ‘73 Ford LTD on blocks. I wanted to do nothing more than quit. But I had to exercise. So I decided to toss off a quick 3K. Halfway through that voice returned. It niggled in my ear like sweet little earwigs, telling me to quit, encouraging me to just stop for a moment, rationalizing with me like they had for so many years.

  The voice whispered.

  The voice cajoled.

  The voice pretended I hadn’t banished it.

  And it pissed me off.

  So I ran 5K instead.

  This newly found dedication and determination has bled into my writing. This spring I had a novel, 4 stories and a novella to finish. It seemed so overwhelming… almost impossible. But I did it. I finished all of my deadlines.

  How do you do it?

  How do you ignore that voice?

  How do you finish?

  My latest novel I wrote in Afghanistan

  Here’s the great secret. It’s a very complicated four step process handed down person-to-person from the original Grand Masonic Order of the Dali Lama Hula Hoop Combat Brigade. I’m probably going to get in trouble for sharing, but hell, if you’re reading this essay and reading my books then you probably deserve it for having to deal with my inventive grammar.

  So here it is.

  Ready?

  Step 1 – Want it.

  Step 2 – Ignore the f#cking voice.

  Step 3 – Do it.

  Step 4 – Rinse, repeat.

  Stephen and Turbo follow this process. They don’t always succeed, but damned if they don’t try. I only run a few kilometers and am able to ignore the voice. But they chew life in large chunks. They run a hundred kilometers at a time, which gives that voice a lot longer to whisper to them. It gets so hard. You feel for them watching the program. Don’t li
sten to the voice, you scream at the TV, but of course they can’t hear.

  That should be your mantra – Don’t listen to the voice.

  How much more success would you have if you ignored the voice, or if the voice was silent?

  I watch Boundless to see them succeed. I watch it to see them overcome the voice.

  The last episode was the first episode of Season Two. They’re in Austria competing in a mountain bike marathon in Europe: the 137-mile Salzkammergut race in Austria. I thought of my old friend La Kelly when I watched it. She’s a professional mountain biker. I wonder if she ever competed in the race. If she did, I guarantee she ignored the voice. She seems to have her own inner voice that drowns out the evil one. I think that her desire to get the most out of life is greater than the voice’s ability to stop her.

  This desire is something I’ve been trying to curate within myself. I’ve embraced nature. I’ve returned to fishing. I have a kayak now that I use to be one with the water. I can stare at the world and smile, picking the beauty from it wherever I am. This strategy silences that voice like none other.

  I’ll do almost anything to keep that voice silent.

  Turbo did too. In the last episode of Boundless, he almost fell victim to it. It almost convinced him to quit. But he overcame it. He ignored it, squashed it like the pathetic little imp it is, and finished the 137 mile race. He did it by not thinking about the distance, but thinking about the road in front of him. It’s like when you run. You don’t stare at the horizon. You stare at the ground in front of you. You concentrate on the next step, not the last step.