Spent Shell Casings

by David Rose

  11

  THE SNOW-BIRD

  WINTER 2006

  Ah, the summers and springs outside the back gate of Camp Lejeune. In the warmer half of the year, the world was no longer the “cold, wet, miserable” motto the Recon boys knew so well. Below Courthouse Bay, beaches, wadis, and hidden subdivisions inches away from the brackish water—these seaside hamlets were an aesthetic deviation from the Walmart-cultured nether realm that awaited any who departed the front gate. The place was great for lazy beach days, soaking up the sun and forgetting all the annoyances of belonging to an institution.

  The area’s beach-bum vibe was in stark contrast to a trinket of its history that always captured my interest. Blackbeard the pirate: the first rock star, the weaver of theatrics and violence, the first true prelude to a future nation’s utter obsession with the criminal and crime—he had sailed the area, and terrorized its shores. Rumor was he and his bevy would lurk in the intercoastal water, waiting to see the inbound topsails of merchant ships. Once spotted, they’d tear out of the mangroves and plunder their target. This is said to be how one of the hamlets earned its name: Topsail Island. Whether entirely accurate or not, it tickled me and a few others to be a part of an amphibious fighting force in a locale that held such an esteemed hum about that very thing.

  In the early spring of 2005, entire battalions were returning from their seven-month pump—cogs in the wheel of the slow and mighty, monotonous OIF46 rotations.

  Guys who did their pump, coming home together. Guys from the MEU47, at some point in their work-up, greeting these guys as all the busses rolled in to the barracks. Broke dicks, casevaced from Iraq early due to some IED, waiting to greet their old platoon with a case of beer.

  It was a great time; seeing all the old faces, trading war stories, speculating who would end up where. Would it be a MEU? Pick up team leader and punch out for one more, then contact CAG48? Jump from Force to Dive School in Panama City to pick up a B billet, or maybe just stay with the battalion rotation and strive to build the team of choice? Amidst all this is a detail which, once announced, will get the attention of an entire unit that is ready to cop off some lay.

  For whatever reason, women from the north and Midwest flocked to the numerous beach house bungalows, standing sturdy and ready for their occupancy. For almost a solid year, the target-rich environment had been thoroughly exploited by myself, men from my battalion, and men form other units who I’d seen in Iraq covered in the sand and dust—transformed back into their Jingos, Patriot jerseys, and cowboy hats.

  Come early 2006, 2D Recon Bn had departed once again. This time I had remained behind. It was a time of extremes. I dealt with some startling sensations of loneliness, questioned my decision not to extend, and found myself working sixty hours a week in the now extinct Recon Indoctrination Platoon, esoterically known as RIP—the first filter in the path of a Recon hopeful.

  Although this personal era had its fair share of stress and conflict, one undeniable perk was there was practically no competition in all the back-gate bars and beaches. And although there was never any real shortage, the coming of winter begat the coming of the snow birds; the densest concentration of vacationers, galvanized by that adventurous spirit we all feel when in a new place. All elements in harmony, I capitalized on this so much that when I finally left Camp Lejeune for good, I first got Blackbeard’s colors tattooed on my back, signifying how much time I spent on it in that oh so golden age.

  Some exploits, plunderings of the migratory libido—some were better than others.

  One afternoon, a buddy and I set out for a seafood dinner. He was one of guys who’d escaped the engulfed Humvee near the Euphrates and ran to the berm in sweat and bandages. Since then, he’d gotten a war scar to sport, and we’d gotten to know one another pretty good. We settled on a calm, two-story restaurant right on the beach. It was one of those rinky, wooden, seafarer grubberies; with drift wood decorations and old plastic crabs hung up in old netting on the walls. We sat on the balcony, overlooking the placid Atlantic. Past the sun-beaten wooden steps, leading downward, was a ribbon of pale white, where after a short time it meshed with rich brown sand, still moist from the outbound tide. Seagulls and sanderlings hovered and hopped about the furthest reach of the surf zone as the occasional beachgoer traversed the panorama.

  We had possibly the best calamari I’d ever had in my life, and talked about how his girlfriend’s pussy—while anatomically similar to girls he had had in the past, felt far better.

  “I mean, think about it.” He said. “‘Oh, she was such good pussy’, or it wasn’t. It’s really the same thing, it’s just how you feel about it.”

  “I guess you’re right.” I said, staring at a calamari ring. “Never really thought about it that way.”

  Our deep-digging into the ultimate realities about an act no more complex than the corking and uncorking of a bottle was cut short by a drunk old man. He was at the counter threatening to pulverize the hostess.

  “Dude if he hits her we are going to have to do something.” Said my friend, dipping his calamari in the white sauce. He got a bronze star, that bastard, I thought as I looked at the burn scar on his forearm.

  “He is drunk as shit.” I said. He wobbled in fury when the summoned manager couldn’t hide his smirk. Before long he left, though. My friend didn’t have to fight a senior citizen, and we decided it a much better plan to go to the place he’d likely tied his cantankerous knot.

  As the sun set, we made our way to a favorite bar of mine. About a block from the beach, this unassuming, one-story rectangle was a watering hole where I was batting 1.000.

  The air was thick with smoke—standing room only in most places—while an amalgamation of figures laughed, yelled, and humped the nearest leg to the latest, watered-down club music. Darts were thrown, glasses clanked against one another, and toasts were made as women from places like Madison and Omaha were undulating in what could only have been some Midwestern premating ritual, given its impetus by the temporary liberation from their workplace, the booze, and of course the hypnotic effect of the waves breaking only a few hundred feet away.

  Much of the first half of the night remains a myriad of jagged memories, not completely fitting the ends together in harmony but rather a type of jig saw puzzle missing a few key pieces. I saw a guy I went to MCIWS49 with. I will never forget his story about barging into a living room in Iraq.

  “So you know what happened next?” He asked with a gleam in his eyes.

  “Uh—no, not really?” I replied.

  “You know. The same thing we always did when you and your buddies see a bunch of Iraqis hanging out in a room—ya kill em’, of course!”

  There were two other guys from my battalion at the bar, MEU guys nowhere close to deploying. One I later heard went to Valhalla, Jimi Hendrix style, the other guy; possibly the only Marine allergic to beer. A solid operator, but three drinks was all it took for him to be falling over, laughing or crying, in your face or passed out by a car that vaguely resembled his own. His most recent episode at that time was he had punched out another unit’s duty. This flasco resulted in a rather hilarious formation where the beaten duty, escorted by a sergeant major who could barely pronounce his Rs, surgically scoured our ranks looking for the face of the perpetrator. Little did the duo realize that while the dipshit with the black eye had to walk around in front of an entire battalion with a big neon sign over his head, blinking “I’m a fucking pussy,” the guilty party was nestled safely in some clandestine place, awaiting word that the investigation had gone cold.

  Anyway, at some point, after we all had pounded enough beer to make an operation-risk-matrix card spontaneously combust, a couple of women approached us. Both blonde, well over forty, a bit burned from what was likely a solid week of laying on the beach hung over, and sporting that invitingly obvious “I’m a stark-mad horny tourist” smile. Showing the dental enhancements paid for via their most recent divorce, their grins wrinkled the crow’s feet to deep r
avines, amplified by the negation of full facial expression due to the steadfast and dutiful Botox.

  What is so beautiful about moments such as these was the role reversal. In most societies where a paragraph written or typed on some piece of paper dictates it illegal to club your mate of choice on the head like a baby seal (thus whisking them off to indulge in your flagrant delight), we are socially engineered to accept, execute, and predict the male as the initiator of the ultimately sex-driven conversation. With few exceptions, any encounter witnessed by a third party will observe the male armor his ego, think of something clever and hopefully not too cliché to say, and march steadily once more into the breach to test his attributes against the vetting system of the approached female.

  Anyone who has a pair of testicles and lived in a military town will uniformly confirm that this ritual is warped and magnified exponentially due to the abnormal ratio of poles to holes. In a place like Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, it was not uncommon to see a 200lbs woman being fought over by a gaggle of young Marines with six-pack abs. The repercussions of such a socio-psychological arrangement were extreme, and opening the door for some behemoth, who responded to your act with the same condescending one would expect from a blonde, coke head, Hollywood runway model—well, it got old.

  The seasonal crop of snow-birds was a breath of fresh air from the aforementioned social abnormality. We were a group of men who got up to run mile after mile before the rest of the civilized world had rolled out of their beds and cursed their alarm clocks. Considering the sheer amount of money spent on protein powder, coupled with the emphatic obsession with all forms of fitness, it was nice to feel that such hard work was recognized. So what if their skin was a bit leathery.

  What occurred next is still debated. I was told I was cock-blocking Mr. Duty-puncher, but I distinctly recall trying to set him up with a MILF in apex heat. Be that as it may, at some point the two women dragged me and the accuser of my alleged cock-block antics onto the dance floor.

  It was a slow song—a sensual, subtle tune to kick off the romantic acts that would ensue. She French kissed me between puffs of her Pall Mall. Grabbing my ass with one hand, high-fiving her friend with the other, my date and her friend celebrated their joint conquest of two males with no facial hair and hard bodies who would most certainly not need the blue pill. As their hands clapped in unified joy, their cigarettes sparkled and flamed—short-lived fireworks signifying, well, everything.

  By the fourth or fifth song I could barely stand. She had pumped so much booze in me that I was going nowhere but where she wanted. I must have looked like John Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula—deficient in gross motor movement while being sucked on by a being possessing a vagina. Instead of blood, vodka ran down my neck as her kisses became more slovenly and proprietary. The thing I remember most was at this point, as she slung me against her like someone moving a crash-test dummy from one car to the next, I locked eyes with a row of wallflowers. Cute girls, my age, with perky bee-stung lips, dressed to impress—and completely ignored by all the Marines in the bar. There were more over-forties in the place, and all meaning business. The snow-birds had swooped in and collected a Marine apiece and were not about to let go now.

  This was the beautiful thing about most Marines, and I’d learn later most door-kickers of the ground-combat world: You could shove your expectations right up your own ass. We would plow something tight and moist regardless, and any entitlement to some weak form of courtship was exactly where it needed to be—on the dance floor getting kicked to death by the feet of people about to fuck, and drowning in the sweat and spilled beer of the same.

  The lights turned on. The hour had apparently come.

  “Barrrrs closed!” yelled some girl with a thick southern accent.

  My date told me she had a place nearby and I was to accompany her. Indeed. It was when she had me get into an SUV with another couple that questions began to arise. No worry, she quickly explained, they were her sister and brother-in-law. Although I was spinning slightly, when focused on them strong enough, their inherent discomfort with the whole ordeal was chiseled into their faces. I got the impression they weren’t the least bit surprised I was in their backseat.

  Barely able to speak, I do remember them asking me how old I was. I was twenty-three. “I’m—twenty—twenty-six,” I cleverly replied. My date laughed and told me she was forty-six. She was twice my age. My mind tried to fixate on the weird math, but was soon distracted. She rewarded my answer with a huge open-mouthed face sucking, where this time I felt the faint cracks around her lips, resembling a flexible and articulate asshole, which of course were due to all the years of smoking.

  After a short drive we arrived at their beach cabin. She and I made our way to a screened-in porch. We smoked some. I unfortunately remember doing something involving her foot and my tongue. I’m positive she asked me some questions about being in the Marine Corps, warm with a spectator’s amazement that doesn’t exist in those within even remote proximity of a military base.

  The final Pall Mall snuffed out on the nearest board, she took to her feet. It was time. Now I’m not too sure about what their sleeping arrangements were prior to my stumbling arrival, but the woman escorted me into a small bedroom where a sleeping teenage girl lay on a twin bed. The moistened harpy demanded the mattress, and damn right. I locked eyes with this girl, her super-groggy and I ultra-lit. She was brunette, maybe eighteen, and her innocent, sleek look made me think of a figure skater. Her aunt told her to go sleep on the couch.

  It was chaos in the threshold of the doorway. The evicted teen tried to skirt past me, but my hyper-masculine proclivities fueled me to grab her by her arm and pull her back into the room. She fought her way to abstinent freedom, shrugging out of my grip and egressing with a rumpled PJ top. The last thing I recalled before the door shut was watching her walk into the living room, where a growing audible discomfort was rumbling from the other family members, too mortified to sleep.

  The door slammed shut, and my attention was ripped back into the room by the two brown hands pulling at my collar.

  The headboard would not stop banging. Even in my drunken state I still couldn’t help but feel the childhood-ending impose; imagining an entire family listening to that rhythmic and consistent, crisp smack. I was too drunk to finish, and finally laid on my edge of the confiscated cot to pass out.

  What felt like one minute later, I was awoken by pale morning blue that was penetrating the wooden mini blinds. The air had that morning beach smell and viscosity to it—almost extra saltier and somehow bled through the walls. Turning her onto her stomach, I jammed a finger in her ass, creating a moan that was half sexual and half from the supernal depths of infinite, spiritual agony. Going fifth gear doggy style, the headboard resumed its duty, much like a merry dog convinced of its job to bark when the doorbell rings. Needing to get back to base, I finished in record time, unloading into her and beginning the search for my jeans.

  For years I wondered what blonde mongoloid I produced via what was almost certainly one of the last of her eggs. I got a random email once from someone with the subject “I hope you like these.” In the body of the message were several pictures of a toe-head boy, strikingly similar to pictures of me at the Child Development Center in the mid-’80s. I quickly deleted the message, and remain confident with reasonable certainty I never gave her my email address.

  Tiptoeing out into the living room, I was met with the uncomfortable stare of the guy who’d driven the SUV. In the softness of morning I could see he was short and thin with a brown ’70s porn star mustache. He stood with the irked grimace of a man who spent the night prior listening to his sister-in-law get pounded while moaning like some oceanic mammal, yet in full realization that the unwanted pounder would likely feed him his teeth and then run a hand up his daughter’s back if he dared interfere. He had the task of now pouring breakfast cereal for the several children that had been in rooms unseen. Just poor the cereal. Don’t look him in the
eyes. Things are normal, kids, things are totally, totally fine. Aunt Carpe Noctem is on vacation too, and if we all pray together her new friend will be leaving soon.

  “There are just some things you don’t want to know,” sighed the teenage girl to her mom. At the tail of the sigh was a hard giggle.

  “Uhm—I don’t know where I am, and I, uhm—I need to get home.”

  Dad pointed toward the cardinal direction that housed the Marines, the leathernecks, a group I’m certain that family never looked at the same again. I quickly, without looking up, made my way to the front door and out of the house. Stepping out into the thick dew of morning, I breathed in the sea salt and gathered my bearings. As my eyes strained to make out the thin black asphalt that would take me northbound and home, I heard the porch door open.

  “Bye” sang the snow bird, out from her confines of the screen and wooden cage. I didn’t turn back.

  Soon on my trek home, a day-shift cop, fresh on the beat with his first cup of coffee in the console, stopped me. I saw his high and tight, with the side of his head so polished you could read a credit card number off the reflective surface.

  At the police station, I was harassed and harangued that a Recon Marine was “left behind” by his buddies—yet again somehow destroying the archaic and myopic slogans the Marine Corps is immortal for. I didn’t tell them I ditched my buddies to fill up a vacationer older than their field supervisor; instead, I shook my head, laughed, and had them call me a cab.

  12

  THE BRIDGE REP: A GOOD ARS STORY

  SPRING 2004

  Getting into the SOF50 community in general has always been, and likely always will be, a righteous kick in the dick. Arguments will always abound as to whether BUDS51 is harder than the PJ52 pipeline, or that Ranger school is harder than BUDS and/or ARS, or whose sniper school is harder (therefore qualitatively better), or of course is Marine Recon actually SOF, special operations, or just good dudes who went to the wrong recruiting office. I have come to bracket a lot of those esoteric arguments, and there are certainly a number of legitimate issues to support or damage a lot of the claims. One thing is for sure though, very few SOF operators have gone through more than one MOS producing school. The knowledge of one school is hard to compare with another, considering one was firsthand, leaving their sweat and name attached to that school forever, compared to the secondhand nature of learning the finer details of the other schools. With that in mind, and with years of post-military SOF friendship building, it seems the design on the hoodie eventually means less and less, and the gut check itself, in its roughest intrinsic form, produces men of a very similar mindset.