Spent Shell Casings

by David Rose

  My grandfathers: One died a feeble shell of his former self, too brain dead to even know it, and the other with a BAL of over .40. That grandson, however, the dragster who lived, will walk through life knowing that his grandfather was a breed not so normally found. Too alive to make it to the nursing home and too hard go out with a whimper.

  It is easy to imagine the moments leading up to it all. A young gun and his abnormally spry grandfather belted into their beasts. Eyes set straight ahead, revving their engines—and then they’re off. Tires squealing and thick, black smoke from the rubber and the demons exorcised from the rusty exhausts are the only things remaining from where they were just a moment before. First gear, second gear, third gear, and maybe fourth, the relatives fly down the tarmac, the old man’s black knuckles turned white on the steering wheel as the grandson yells, “I have the coolest granddad. . . ever!” Their vision needles to the space directly in front of the hood and they see the summit of the road just ahead. Then something goes awry. Grandpa’s arthritis and glaucoma pound his youthfulness back to harsh reality; his arms, once strong, can’t take the forceful vibrations of the bucking steering wheel. He loses control, and into a ditch the Buick plows. He could have become the pre-rigor mortis, risk-intolerant drone that many of his species opt for settling for, but no, not this dragster. Grandpa went out worshipping a different set of gods.

  That wreck was one of the few things I remember with any real clarity that involves the two and a half years in which I slogged through life as a police officer. I had receded into that uniform because at the time it seemed a logical progression. Carrying a gun was my marketable skill, the only one as far as I was concerned.

  It was in those days that I would spend an entire nightshift playing spider solitaire or talking to girls on the phone. Or maybe I would find myself in a store, where I had to explain to some fourteen year-old, just sprouting hair on his balls, that if he ever bumped against my gun side again (to impress some girl who looked like the result of Barbie getting pregnant by a crack pipe) that I would bounce his little forehead across every tile in the place.

  Or maybe deal with the derelict asking to be taken to the state-sanctioned facility used to house those who are going through withdrawal, contemplating suicide, or the like. Those street urchins usually wanted to be admitted for the free pills, and even cutely memorized verbatim the whole spiel about “without help I believe I am a threat to myself and others.” They were mildly entertaining at best, yet a bit caustic to a state budget.

  I offered one my gun once, to kill itself of course, and of course it did not. Committing the unrepentable sin of officer safety, I handed it my issued Glock-21. I could articulate later that it wrestled me to the ground and seized the weapon. It was short, bald, and troll-like, and under the awning of the gas station, the neon flickered in the sweat beading off its sooty skin. Its eyes rolled up to meet mine, its face showing curious disbelief.

  My lieutenant appeared out of nowhere. I snatched back my service weapon, as its momentary possessor also reacted with an abrupt start. We both looked like kids getting caught with a porno mag, looking at the approaching authority figure with that collective “Oh shit.” Ruining the moment, my superior told me what he wanted done. Alas, it was Baker Acted, and I was deprived a most coveted “stateside kill,” even if by proxy.

  Off the clock, in those days, the outlook was just as simmering and antisocial.

  How the people of my jurisdiction would have writhed in horror: The cop in long sleeves taking the crash report at 2 p.m.; at 2 a.m. . . . a rifle against the couch, Glock 19, and flashlight on the coffee table, maybe a beer too. The flashlight was for if they cut the power; the pistol in case the rifle had a squib load. Images from a DVD, playing once heralded works that had long settled into obscurity, flickered on the TV as a rogue leaning slowly seeped its way out of the public servant.

  In law enforcement, I was undeniably a black sheep. I was unmarried, had twenty-plus tattoos, had a tanning bed in my home (closet fag, as it was to be whispered), and worst of all I had come from the GWOT generation. This meant I had no way of kidding myself how utterly boring and pathetic ninety-nine percent of law enforcement was.

  When someone has watched a MK-19 decimate a house, or a fire team efficiently utilize some bounding overwatch to break contact, or to zero in on a crowd with an M4 and open it up, busting some scumbag for his ninety-second crack arrest just doesn’t get your dick hard. Maybe worst of all, the military mindset had been marketed to law enforcement, which resulted in countless cops referring to themselves as “Sheep dogs” and/or quoting that thing about “—rough men willing to,” totally omitting the fact that they were twenty pounds overweight, had never been shot at, and weren’t going to a GP70 tent later but a furnished home with air conditioning. Nevertheless, I was neck deep in; lesbians with a bizarre axe to grind, sheltered social rejects with a developed vendetta, the morbidly obese, and the thorn in my eye. . . the “warrior cop”. . . gear strapped to him like a GI Joe as he embarked on his crusade.

  The incessant comparisons of military to law enforcement (apparently because both involve guns) were almost too hard to take at times. Both were fighting wars, damn you! In the ultimate gesture of passive-aggressive Fuckyouism, I would always take a different stripper to their esoteric, frustrated, and married-too-long gatherings. Upon my approach once, a wife of a SWAT guy took her child by the hand and scurried away; the point was getting across. The high irony was that they were forever ignorant to the dark and rough appendages of the warrior culture. Squeaky clean and politically correct, obligatory trademarks of professional law enforcement, has no place in a fighting hole or bullet-riddled Humvee, yet the comparisons were made. But comparing law enforcement to the military is like comparing a trapeze artist to commercial fishermen because they both use nets.

  Warrior: semantics examined:

  The term warrior is thrown around as clumsily as love and hate. Warriors for: ending poverty, marijuana law reform, animal rights, gay and lesbian rights, equal pay in the workplace, equal time in the classroom, a tobacco-free state, selling beer on Sunday. . . warriors in business, education, and a plethora of others. The commonality, of course, is fighting for or against something. But a radical twist is thus; it’s been my experience that not even all soldiers are real warriors. Perhaps more interesting still, not all warriors are soldiers, as Soldier is commonly understood.

  “The army is still rotten with such as thee.

  With professionals such as thee.”

  —Ernest Hemingway (Gomez),

  For Whom the Bell Tolls

  “A warrior who does not conform to military discipline nor comply with social conventions is not a soldier . . . such an armed outlaw is either an adventurer or a psychopath.”

  —From an anonymous source, retrieved from “Verbal Shrapnel”

  The Soldier is in the vein of the Cop; uniformed executer of government directive. They are the white blood cells in an intricate immune system. Important, certainly, and a necessary evil at the very worst.

  The Warrior, by contrast, comes to the fight from an abstract point, from a place of identity that runs far deeper than a job title, a salary, and a simplistic war to wage. The Warrior is a blade, to be used to defend the helpless or to lop off their head. Most important of all, the Warrior is a warrior even without a war. Conflicts often change, DNA and/or the spirit rarely do.

  So where do these fundamental differences come from? Looking to the antiquated ways in which humanity placed cause and purpose seems to help.

  Insert the gods:

  The cop and the professional soldier, when viewed correctly as an occupation first, passion second, worship the civil-centric, municipal pantheon. These are a people who believe in a certain social structure and will do much to nobly defend it. From this perspective, gods have emerged in human history to reflect these ideas and interests. Gods of: harvest, fertility, wealth, commerce, and even law itself. The human animal has made certain
social arrangements work, certain contracts among and within the crowd. From these “working class” gods, sectarian traditions, priorities, and rituals emerged.

  The working man, from a working family, plowing the fields all day—fields protected by law from thieves and vandals—comes home on cobbled streets, funded by taxation. Local ordinance allows this man to travel safely and with good order to his home. His wife, done cooking the dinner for his large family, greets him. Some god of fertility blessed the family; there was not a sick child as they were fruitful in their multiplication. As the weekend beckons, they hop in the cart and make to the village square, where music and beer greet the denizens of this small, industrious, thriving, and totally boring place.

  Across a small sea, however, there dwell others. An island, large and jagged, was not placed in the correct location to develop farming the way the municipal-god-worshippers were able to. The flora here is scant—sporadic trees and shrubberies that all look ill. Geological factors also made vertical cliff walls in the dark, dank draws between the stony fingers of their Earth God—some sleeping ogre, perhaps. In conjunction with all that, the wind howls in its trapped spaces, as it tries in vain to return to the sea; the myth of trolls (howling) in these places is born.

  Farming will not work on this island, not at a rate to feed its populace, like the industrious peasant neighbors across the wild sea. However, the flora has created the perfect world for mega-fauna to develop. Bear and Hawk and Elk and Wolf reign supreme as the other forest critters scurry in the damp darkness and the sick shrubbery. The people of this island have their gods too, made from the same sociological necessity, rooted in geographical causation as the municipal-god-worshippers.

  Here on this island, however, predators, sharp falls, and the cold lick of sea wind make child bearing much different than is the case for the farmers. Only a few make it to five years old, thus emplacing an idealism in this community: the importance of physical strength. Defending their kin from hungry wolves and bears emplaces the idealism of combat efficiency. A wild love for drink and its very own god emblazon the attitude. They see the world as full of danger, and the gods they worship give them what they need (courage, weapons, levity) and are of course embodiments of such, as seen by their statues, in their bearskin-rug laden shrines.

  In time, a leader with his small horde of wild men hunts the bears almost to extinction. Same fate for the wolves. The trolls were bravely searched for, but never could be found. Order and tactics oil themselves into ritual and martial tradition. These island men begin to look to the sea they’d always fished. Voyage looms. The gods gave them the bravery to beat back the beasts and earn total dominion over their land. They, dressed in the regalia of bear claws, take to shipbuilding. There are just no more bears left to kill.

  One day farmers worshipping Harvest and Law looked up to see an approaching armada. Whatever defense they had, they hoped it would withstand those who worshipped the gods of war and wine.

  How is this relevant in present day?

  To make a long story very very, short, take the case above; strikingly similar to numerous cases throughout history. Max Weber (as well as many priests who gratefully sighed as raiding became viewed as a violation of God’s law) would agree; given enough time cultures merge, whether through cooperation or total or partial conquest. This means their gods merge too—which is theological talk for the merging of ideals. What we are left with is a synthesis. The values of both are alive in what is now normally a Nation.

  The USA holds such a synthesis. The value differences in people are stupendous. Next to a warrior soul in the checkout line stands a cog in the wheel, terrifled of life, helmet fastened farmer soul—the living antithesis of the people they’d consider, and rightfully so, to be reckless threat to their revered tranquility.

  But in the information age—typed to new heights by soft, fat fingers—the very dispositions so feared, so scoffed at, and given such a wide birth serve municipality in the moments it is most threatened. But it’s only for a limited time, then comes the reemergence of its mayhem. The jail cells swell as the peace horn sings.

  Farmers, and Warriors, Farmer Souls, and Warrior Souls71. The cop and the professional soldier, there to stop bullets and prevent the life they love from being altered to an unwashable ugliness. A different breed of citizen, from a different emotional place, however, emerges every time the drum is beat. Out of the city streets, the suburbs, the wooden hills, from churches, farms and bars and gyms, construction sites, plea deals, and offices. . . the Warriors do come. Much with the same intentions as the more timid souls who stand next to them in the ranks, but with one crucial additional ingredient: a desire to kill as palpable as blood itself.

  The moral question; is the Warrior. . . good?

  Generally speaking, literature, spanning across all cultures, from the days of painting in caves to blogs with hashtags, the human mind has loved to categorize and grandly distinguish what we refer to as Good and Evil. The Good Guy: some Roy Rogers-type sheriff on a white horse. The Bad Guy: the unsavory, unshaven man scurrying like the rat he is. The hero vs. the monster. The one-dimensional, moral monolith taking on the thing with the foul name and foul appearance. In the mythos of every culture, there seems to be some force of good, manifest in a human agent, doing battle with the embodiment of the pitfalls and calamities of the human experience.

  Considering rape, murder, drought, disease, flooding, food poisoning, fire, earthquakes, snakebites, betrayal, joy, love, friendship, fidelity, and pleasures of song, dance, and social cohesion, it’s not shocking to understand why the pragmatic human brain neatly categorizes such things, as well as assigns agency and causation to such. And what is important to realize is the aforementioned features are applicable to all in the human experience, no matter what pantheon they choose to abide by.

  However, that dog only hunts so well. It’s not a secret to many, but anyone ever called a “hero” for doing anything involving holding a weapon knows the hero is multi-dimensional, as is the hero’s thought process, intentions, and overall moral makeup.

  Not all who go to war for their society actually go to war for their society. There are those who put on a uniform to execute the urges that wail from inside that deepest of places. Whether to die or to facilitate death, the warrior is beyond the confines of the war effort itself.

  Cops, culture, and hodgepodge theology; checked off. Now the closer:

  Do they really think we gave a shit about the Iraqi people. . . or them? There is a truth out there, clawing just under the surface, that may cause a lot of startled citizens take down the yellow ribbons for good and hang a smaller American flag outside the front door. We—the reluctant heroes of the country songs and candlelit vigils—wanted to kick ass, and that is just shorthand for wanting to kill. To see it happen. To live through it. To answer our very own call of the wild. To know it could have been you but it was the other guy; likely on the same morbid quest.

  How does that sit in the stomachs of the churches who sent group prayers to their brave, presumably Christian, and of course. . . nationalistic soldiers? How does that sit to the news personalities who described the soldier as “scared to death” while standing some post for an obscure better tomorrow? How does that sit to the third grade teacher, married to the god-fearing plumber, who wrote to the deployed soldier “you’re a hero, making the sacrifices you are”?

  The news that surrounds war is categorically grim. Seeing young people ripped from their prime of life, just sprouting out from the adolescent soil. Some left a maimed relic of themselves. The image of selfless citizens dying is hard for many to swallow.

  I bring tidings that will either free them from that horror, or will plunge them down deeper into a realization even more unsettling: their heroic ranks are teeming with a breed they dare not imagine. Dare not imagine when putting that push in the diaphragm at the ballgame when the singer concludes, “Braaaaaave.” Dare not imagine when they stare at the family portrait of the inf
antryman who turned family man but still has that something behind his eyes.

  21

  BARROOM ENCOUNTERS

  SUMMER 2004

  An aged and learned perspective, I find clear, when listening to the eighteen-year-old at the bar ramble on in drunken celebratory vigor that he is joining the military. The usual bevy of impostors gloat of being “special forces.” The beer churns in my gut, and I think.

  Who are these young men who join? The excited proclaimer demands the visual of semi-directionless youth, riddled in testosterone and without family who own much land, public offices, or an Ivy League sweater. The lower rung of our socioeconomic hierarchy, ready to snap to-for God, for country, for meaning, for the girl who cheated and for the guy who bullied, and for the Montgomery GI Bill.

  Now how I see the obligatory praise the ruling class bestows upon us. The need to convince the prisoners of the West that we are the best and the brightest.

  But forget not and take the moment to recall the lordship forged within our own existence.

  The joke is not on the fighter, who becomes lord of this world with the fine motor skill of a single trigger squeeze.

  In 2004, I was set to embark for the retaking of Fallujah. Word had trickled down that our unit was to have a role in a battle that was sure to go down in history. Operators had been bouncing back and forward a healthy amount of speculation—who had heard what, when, and from whom. The mix of excitement, anticipation, and anxiety manifested itself in different ways, and the preparatory phase could be as unique as the individuals experiencing it. One of the rather more entertaining collective responses was the throwing out of porn, lest the following.

  “Dear Mrs. Johnson, your son’s possessions will be arriving via USPS on the 14th.”