Spent Shell Casings

by David Rose

  On the 14th, a bereaved mother, still smelling like the coach seat from the flight back from Arlington, opens a tightly sealed cardboard box, fully loaded with DOD stickers and maybe even a letter from his Command. Under a skim surface of T-shirts is the entire series collections of Cumback Pussy, Buttfaced, and Sugar Walls.

  It was an irksome, potential reality that crossed many minds, mine included. Legend has it that on the night of our departure, a particular Marine, not slotted for our deployment and known for his acquiring nature, spelunked the battalion Dumpster to wallow in the cornucopia that was his to claim.

  My reaction was probably the typical one. I realized I was very capable of dying and accepted it, accepted the fear, and went forward with it. I had a dream one night that I was being hunted by some primitive people in the darkness, and ended up getting caught then being burned alive. It was soon after this dream I got one of my largest tattoos: a ghastly scene, caught in its own happening, cleverly illustrating Death On The Brain: the proverb of that era. When not in the gym, or on the range, or getting drunk out of my mind, I focused on poetry. Evenly dispersed into two categories—the realization of my own looming death and the pure, bestial hope to kill others.

  Many are taken back by the mere thought of the latter. However, when someone volunteers for ground-combat units eleven months after 9/11, then claws and bites their way into schools to maximize their lethality, what could ultimately motivate such a person, if not to kill?

  To be clear, the complexity of killing as a motivation requires a sensitive approach. I personally never considered the act of killing to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Rather, I looked at it as an essential step toward the ultimate goal: to be tested, and the blighting out of another hostile life was the ultimate test and trophy. I had tested my mind and body already in what was arguably some of the most intense training available in the entirety of the Department of Defense. Prolific attrition rates didn’t lie. However, I had yet to see how I was to react to being under enemy fire. Would I duck quickly enough? Would I return fire soon enough? How would I react to being shot? Would I feel it? What would my reaction be to watching my buddy next to me get the back of his head cleaned out by a 7.62 round? These were things I desperately needed to know, and the annihilation of some mujahedeen was simply a means to an end.

  After our rather hilarious and, at times, confusing pre-deployment work-up, we were let loose on leave. I was back in Florida, and had found myself a bar with a mechanical bull. I insisted on wearing a Recon shirt. I wanted what many young gunslingers want(ed), women to ogle and men to fear you. Instead, however, my shirt resulted in free beers from patriotic onlookers as I rode the machine over and over.

  Finally tired of the bull and finding myself a bit thirsty, I wedged myself up against the bar. Later that same night, the people I went with would prove to be the greatest entertainment of all. One guy, a day out of shoulder surgery, had to defend his bewildered wife from a drunk New Yorker who was nearly seven feet tall. Another guy, who would have been useful during said defensive, decided instead to initiate a vicious and relentless attack on a young Puerto Rican couple. I remember the guy trying hard, and doing quite well, to act like he wasn’t terrifled.

  At the bar I caught some middle-aged man leering at me. I looked down at my own arm, seeing the USMC tattoo that was billboarded right at him. My eyes moved between us, hovering across the bar’s surface, and then crawled up to finally meet his stare. His sharp face was curiously set, his dark-pebble eyes squinting at me. Dressed in mostly black, with a goatee of successfully encroached gray, he took a drink “How long you been in?” he asked.

  “Two years,” I replied.

  “So what do you do?”

  At this point, the combination of free beer, bull riding, and the thawing-out erection from a groping MILF in cat glasses had me walking tall. Chest puffed out a bit, I kind of cocked my head to one side to respond “this,” simultaneously exposing the word “RECON” above the tattoo of a razor on my right wrist.

  He stared at it like he’d just watched the first few seconds of a cheesy rerun, then turned the channel.

  “Why the hell would you do that?” he snapped.

  I’d never received this type of reaction. Normally it was stuff like “Oh, Recon, yeah I played that game,” or “My brother is in the ROTC at our school and is slotted for Delta Force,” or “Is that like a Navy SEAL?” His reaction, however, was proprietary of some sort of experience, I could tell.

  He must have seen the look on my face.

  “I’m sorry, son. Didn’t mean it that way. It’s just why not get a skill you can actually use in the real world, like a rotary wing mechanic, something you can really use?” He pointed to my tattoo. “Besides be an assassin.”

  What transpired, my official rebuttal, was surely a drunken and wordy explanation, sunk in existentialism. We pulled our stools closer and he told me of his time in Vietnam, as a Marine grunt, and I recall him abruptly sounding like a gym coach. “Try not to get shot—it hurts.”

  The conversation came to its natural end, as those types of talks always seem to do.

  I had to try to find the blonde woman in glasses, but before departing he shook my hand and said, “Good luck overseas, son.”

  As the years have passed, I have assigned a lot of value to that night. In part due to his cold nature, that type of John Wayne stoic masculinity that still lingers in twenty-first century perceptions of manhood. However, I believe the reason that man is burned into my head is twofold: one, his ominous declaration regarding employability, and two, he is but one of two barroom encounters in all my life when the man behind the big stories and big ideas was actually what he claimed to be, determined by intense mutual vetting that is akin to dogs circling the other, butt-sniffing in full effect.

  22

  E & E

  WINTER 2003

  RIP (Recon Indoctrination Platoon), referred to sometimes as RTP (Recon Training Platoon), was an in-house school of sorts that has since gone the way of the wooly mammoth. The acronym is something, yet again, contested as swiped from the Army Rangers. Which in this case is a likelihood, considering we used Ranger Beads, Ranger Joe protractors, and so forth. But despite some bar-stool razzing, this is really a non-issue. One will notice that inane service rivalry dissipates quickly in the special operations community. Much like the willful stupidity surrounding rival high school football teams, hollow inner-service competition is for the very young (or new), the moronic, and the recruiters.

  RIP was unique in the Marine Corps. ARS made Recon Marines, but something was needed to make students ready for ARS. Having existed due to a need to provide ARS with men physically and mentally capable of graduating, RIP was a school before a school—an initial, preparatory step in a challenging two-step process. This made RIP a school hosted entirely by a unit, with unit staff and unit funding. 1st Recon Battalion would have their RIP, as would 2nd, as would the Force companies. Operators from the teams were the cadre, most without a day’s training in formal instructor techniques. When RIP existed, it was up to the Reconnaissance community to groom its own candidates, and do so in ways the community saw fit.

  One thing learned quickly in Recon (and I’m willing to wage the same is true in similar outfits): while certain traditions remain intact, most things, beckoning to the whims of whatever branch and the accordion effect of DOD, mutate sporadically. Recon Marines from 1986, 1996, and 2006 would/will tell very different stories regarding vetting, whereabouts of entire units, the nature of Recon as an MOS, and so forth. Specifically with regards to the turn-of-the-millennium era, RIP weeded out the weak and then prepped the worthy, as a means to have the highest number of ARS graduates possible. RIP consisted of rigorous physical training, both on land and in the water, enough so as to expose the deficiencies in any Rope who had any.

  RIP students were “Ropes.” One of the oldest, long-standing traditions and skillsets in Marine Recon is rope work. From paddle wrappi
ng to HRST72 to repelling, Recon Marines are technically proficient in knots. An iconic symbol is the twelve-foot rope, seen in black and white photos of the Vietnam era, and recruiting posters spanning decades. The RIP student wore this 3.7 meters of skilled heritage almost like suspenders, or diagonally on the torso the way a beauty pageant contestant wears her sash.

  In addition to the physical conditioning, advanced patrolling techniques and community familiarization made up the bulk of the training. There was one event that tied all these elements together: the escape and evasion run, or E&E.

  From the perspective of the outsider who unwittingly stumbled upon such a thing, it would look to them as if a disembodied remnant of a military formation was running with a lot of gear on. They wouldn’t be wrong. The idea is very simple: run an extremely long distance with your combat load, and run like your life depends on it. The reason such a training event exists is deeply rooted in both historical and theoretical contexts.

  Certain military occupations are known as high risk of capture. Any job involving being a pilot or crew in an aircraft, as well as any operator in the Spec Ops community, fills the vast majority of this category. The reasoning for the former is rather simple: getting shot down or crashing. For the latter, it is due to key features of the job, namely being behind enemy lines, covert in nature, and small in numbers with little support. Marine Recon was particularly subject to these potentialities because we were built from the ground up as an information-gathering entity. Direct Action (gunfights inside of buildings), infantry-based patrolling (gunfights outside of buildings), and a hodgepodge of other assets were all feats capably performed by the covert elements, even though the stated primary purpose of Marine Recon was to get in somewhere undetected, collect information undetected, and get the fuck out undetected. If they were compromised, as does happen, the extreme last resort was to run through the jungle. From the point of enemy contact to friendly lines, whether one mile or one hundred, the E&E was when the shit hit the tail rotor.

  The two most famous cases of E&Es being conducted are Jack Sillito, a British SAS73 trooper who covered around ninety miles in the Sahara Desert during WWII, and Chris Ryan, also SAS, who astonishingly outdid Jack by almost one hundred miles during the First Gulf War. These cases are rare, but uniformly intense. This act requires a gritty fortitude that cannot be assumed, only proven. Therefore, a monumental training event awaited anyone who wished to be one of these clandestine men of the shadows.

  Toward the end of RIP, the cadre would provide a week of back-to-back patrolling. This was to give Ropes a valuable experience. ARS contained that extensive and harshly graded patrol phase. If Ropes were going to go to ARS well prepared, then a simulation of graded events was crucial to overall success.

  The training areas of Camp Lejeune are some of the most heavily vegetated, bug and humidity infested, featureless terrain the military can provide within the United States. If you can land navigate successfully in Camp Lejeune and/or Stone Bay, you can land nav anywhere.

  In the cold of mid-December, teams of six to eight Ropes were assembled. Billets were assigned: the point man, team leader, radio operator, assistant radio operator, slack man, and assistant team leader. Add one or two RIP cadre, and the whole gang would insert into the bush. Thus began the RIP patrol week.

  What followed were several days of breaking horizontal canopy—walls of twigs and vines so thick an exhausted Rope could, and did, lay up against it, full body weight and laden ruck, and still appear to be standing. The patrols, all with various objectives, bled into the next; the only things changing were the billets within the team and the faces of the instructor. Sleep was sparse and mold in the mouth grew, as did the collective weariness. After a handful of missions, spills into ditches at 3 a.m., and exhilarating confirmations of pace counts, the final gathering coalesced sometime in the early night.

  My team was one of the last to arrive. At a large, cleared-out intersection of tank and Humvee trails, connecting willowy like an octopus, the other teams were sitting in quiet, single files. A mumble from a familiar voice breaking over the diesel putter of a lone Humvee, staged ominously like an olive drab hearse. Slight, jerky movement from guys in the files, adjusting the placement of a canteen against the hip bone or looking over a shoulder to try to make out what team was coming in. Everyone knew what was coming next. The pause prior to its commencement was recuperative and full of that nervous silence that occupies moments before jumping out of planes, watching the panties come down for the first time, or sizing up the other guys in the parking lot—knowing just one word from your group’s mouthpiece will start the spilling of the blood.

  “Everyone on your feet.” The command came from some distant instructor; down a sandy trail I knew we were about to tackle, and for a very long time. For some reason, as if a composer had waved his baton, a few animals starting yelling and chanting all kinds of shit. It was going to hurt, it was going to test, but that was why the morale was at a point of lunacy. Those who were there, in those files, were on some sort of drug.

  After years of working with such men, it was made clear beyond doubt that what makes a unit Spec Ops is not the gear, nor the titles, nor even its history. It wasn’t just the runs, or the vetting—it was everything. These men by most accounts were logical beings—staring more than once at me during some proclamation that buoyed me to the peculiar—yet these same men put themselves in extraordinary situations time and time again. Where the country thanked us for doing what so many couldn’t, we surmised it was that they wouldn’t, and we sat, ran, and eventually shot, grateful for a world so brutal. The point may be distilled most efficiently in the gunfight; the sheer terror, the heart-stopping fear of being burrowed through by the zings and cracks around you. . . yet also the strange inner peace, the calling answered, and answered well.

  The run began. For the next several hours a group of about thirty ran up and down every trail in an area covering a couple dozen grid squares. North, south, whatever. As the blood pumped, any recollection of direction was lost, replaced with the simplicity of a cattle drive.

  The purpose was to keep going until someone somewhere, way up ahead or in the trailing Humvee, said to stop. Beyond the obvious, there was an additional incentive: the rumored consequence of falling out, the most shameful reminder of one’s own weakness. The RIP corpsmen, a SARC74 who would later die in Afghanistan, wielded the Silver Bullet. If a Rope was left by the pack, it was articulable that he was a “heat case.” He would be pinned down and buggered by a robust, weapons-grade thermometer, it was rumored, and the event would go into one’s medical record, which only bolstered the dire need to avoid it.

  After hours and miles, exhaustion claimed me, as it did the drunk monkey running in front of me.

  Good old Chris—Bullet, who’d be my future Myrtle Beach, bouncer-fighting cohort, swooped in by my side; a psychotic athlete in my ear, envious of the drunk monkey.

  “I am so fuckin’ jealous of him right now, dude,” Chris said. “He’s in, like, another total fuckin’ mind state.”

  I struggled to just toss one leg in front of the other, barely on my feet and avoiding pot-holes; almost completely shrouded in the darkness of what had to be around 3am.

  “He’s having to dig deeper, bro,” Chris said in an envious chant. “He’s digging deeper than us. He is going allll the way—”

  I managed to swing my bone-weary face toward him, nearly toppling over in the process. Looking into those eyes I could see there was jet fuel pumping in his veins. Chris, looking into mine, saw I was going into whatever place the drunken monkey was already dwelling.

  Watching the back of Chris’s ruck dart ahead, my eyes rolled up to the sky. The stars swarmed and danced—white bugs on the surface of the black lake.

  “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

  —Carl Sagan

  “If we [humans] are the universe contemplating itself, then the universe may be one dumb motherfucker.”

  —R
econ Marine, sunk in cosmology

  And up into the black lake I fell.

  A sun explodes, the heavier elements form, inorganic matter turns to organic life, a smattering of a billion years or so of evolutionary biology, thousands of generations of hominids, then. . . me, born in 1983 to two peasants, one praying and the other likely drunk. Emerged from the stuff of stars, never having asked for any of this, yet this I was given. This short, fierce, beautiful time, in which I, as have others, decided to face the cosmos’ adversity, thus draped in the darker shades and often dwelling in the harshness of the human experience.

  Hydrogen, carbon, a bit of iron and some zinc, now running in mud-covered boots, breathing heavy. Other masses of the same clutter will their way to the finish line, our barracks pond—some living on the wind, others teeter-tottering on broken stumps.

  Coming back from the in and regrasping the out, voices of the RIP cadre on high, we were ordered to stand shoulder to shoulder on a long edge of the pond, frozen over in a thin film of dirty ice and slush. The pond, shaped like a maggot, had a Rope covering every foot of its Bayside. A senior instructor was speaking, but I couldn’t make out the words. I heard my heart beating, others panting, and the cracks and gurgles of the pond ice’s edge being broken by boots looking for a footing.

  For reasons unidentifiable, myself and Chris, who had found his way next to me, were violently jockeying for position. Shoves, pulls, and growls—so out of nowhere that a RIP cadre’s “you guys are fuckin’ crazy” resonated in our ears; letting each other go in a snarling impasse.

  It was about 4:30 a.m., an hour before most of the Marine Corps would be expected to awake, and about the time I would be going to bed every night a decade later.

  “What do you want to be, RIP?!” Cholo yelled from the second deck of the barracks.

  “Recon!” answered the mob.

  “What do you want to beeeeee, RIP?!”