Spent Shell Casings

by David Rose

Utilizing some makeshift bounding over watch, all boots on the ground made their way to their perspective vehicles. Some made it to their trucks sweating and smiling, while others were still coming off the realization that they were smack dab in the kill zone of a no-shit ambush.

  Our brother platoon made its way onto the road. I could see all their faces, flaks and Kevlars a-blazing. The bigwigs had a quick powwow, probably bragging about how four guys from Misfit 2 decimated the enemy at a four-to-one ratio. A little dick grabbing and maybe an “oorah” thrown out, then it was time to leave.

  I’ve always wished we would have hunted the three who made it to our side of the river. Chase either killed them or scared them so badly that they were laying low.

  Either way, a grenade would have sufficed.

  24

  LIFE OF PAIN

  “When you hurt the center of your body, you know the middle back, the lower back. . . there is what I like to call. . . a mental callous that you have to create.”

  —Phil Anselmo

  (a Converse x Decibel collaboration; interview at Phil’s house)

  SPRING 2011

  It’s a genetically endowed small frame, plain and simple. Tiny wrists and tiny ankles. A notorious ex-girlfriend once commented I looked better in her skirt than she did. Yeah, I put it on, more to make her laugh, damn sure not to make her jealous or feel “stout.” Recalling that event, I am forced to see a few haunting similarities to one of my family’s most intriguing secrets. Eventually uprooted as the awkward explosion of a repressed and tortured homosexuality, my maternal grandfather, passer-on of said birdy frame, used to periodically whirl about in dresses, drunk and with reckless abandon.

  But enough about that, for now.

  A disposition toward certain behavior makes pain inevitable. A track record of fights and daredevil stunts as a youngster later to morph into headfirst sprints into every dangerous occupation that grinned open its rust-covered and jagged entrance.

  Rolling over the hood of a car at fifteen, I picked up my bike and rode off as a mortified, full-faced woman got back in her town car. Soon after I blasted my soft tissue with the shock of jumping out of a tree into murky water that hid a shallow bottom. By sixteen I was a mess. I fought the pain, losing and violently thrashing my head about, making things worse, willingly, in a form of defeated frustration. Doctors couldn’t stop the pain, nor could my mother’s Jesus.

  Then. . . after eons. . . after hitting what drunks and druggies call “rock bottom,” a soul at zero, the great inversion occurred. Finally conceding the ever presence of pain, eyes opened for the first time. Pain became a virtue. Feeling such, being the captor of it, and defeating its tug and nag; the discomfort pulls a grin and the torture pulls you to greatness. This was found in its purest form inside a gym. Fighting fire with fire, the positive, all-nurturing, all-knowing pain swallowed whole the bad pain, which sat on a shoulder, anorexic and blackened with death.

  Given enough time with the weights, and countless hours of solitary refinement, muscle had no choice but to cling reluctantly to hollow bones. A doctor once commented how petite my skeletal system was for the physique I had developed. Pain had meshed with discipline, as torture had interwoven with regeneration.

  As much as it makes me laugh, there are some who would call me successful. My money is on it being attributed to not having shot myself or drowned in my own puke, in a dress maybe. Be that as it may, if success was ever true in my case, the origin is undisputedly traced back to a single realization. Despite all the hang-ups, maniacal confusion, and flaws, I was able to notice most people loved their comfort, almost over anything else. I also noticed how dismal and mediocre these people’s existence was. And this is not the judgment of someone on the mountain top—far from it. Rather it’s from someone in the trenches, listening to the regrets of the common, and of their own volition.

  And the cries came in: furthering education is too boring, too expensive, or too hard. Training the body is too painful, too repetitious, or it’s just too much for the fit and sexy people to see you in your weak awkwardness. Moving away from friends and family is too scary, too lonely. . .

  Well—the highbrow gadfly demands the floor—education begets both intellectual and financial wealth. The former a fixture, the latter not so fixed. The rigors of fitness improves quality of life: caliber of mate(s), longevity, and overall health of the mental, physical, and all the places they intersect. And striking out into the Uncomfortable is what got us out of the caves—expansion of perspective and networks enhances perceptions of life and the world as a whole. In short, the barnacle attachment to comfort neuters and dulls. It’s a fluffy cage, one a succumbed underachiever can mill about in, telling their progeny that they can do and be anything, all the while, unknowingly perhaps, confirming that some people cannot.

  I was fortunate enough to connect the two, the cause and effect that bogged down the faces and silhouettes of my upbringing. Without being aware of the finer mechanics, or even knowing what I was doing really, I plunged into one uncomfortable situation after the next, each time pushing the walls out just a little bit more.

  At some point, as one comes up for air in the austere environments that have become something like home, one finds themselves a forger, a pioneer. The frontiers may differ, but those who dare to cut a swath are virtually free in the niches they carved.

  Pushing beyond limits allowed a skinny, punk-rockish, millennial loner to keep up with some of the most incredible physical specimens to ever complement the ranks. Bound to pay for it later, but when you push it as far as some of us have, the pain is well worth the reward, and you don’t care about the scars you leave behind.

  Looking at the visible ones, most from experiences only indirectly connected to my seasons as a warrior, I do an inventory of all those on my dominant side. Inches away from the scar earned from breaking that car window and pulling out the old folks is a nasty little reminder of the night I literally single-handedly destroyed some frat boys’ apartment windows with a clenched fist. The drunken act amused my rather doper and clean-cut former team leader, who soon excitedly assumed the role of getaway driver, and it was when we arrived moments later at a nearby gas station to declare I had been wounded in a knife fight that he opened up in a bellow of mirth. The mortified attendant scrounged for the right box of Band-Aids while I stole the nearest beer. Moving down is a massive gash received from an odd and blurry night where I insisted on being blood brothers with a heavy-handed friend. Further down is a token to intoxicated and dark mania, and on the top of my foot is a nickel-sized scar from the ceremonious burning of the banner at the infamous Recon River Party, which to this day is one of the greatest weekends of my life.

  However, many can’t be seen, and living with all the wreckage, the spinal trauma, and so forth, when done for so long one will forget that it’s those very things that cause so much. A glutton for punishment, yes, referred to by a police sergeant as a “masochist,” that too; making the body pay, addicted. Even so, there is just no denying the uplifting elation that comes with pills and booze. Momentarily, there is a cease-fire, no need to get up and face the day. Guard down, I get to feel what others feel. I’m not constantly under the weight of living with injury, and get to experience life without the great and ever-present struggle.

  There is a terrifying feeling the moment one realizes. . . it’s never going to end. It’s only going to get worse, and it doesn’t care about how well you’ve managed so far. The truth is this is not limited to the physical nature of the body. The emotional ups and downs, often wrought from the damaged flesh, are no less real and far more potent.

  I wager the serious athlete and certain types of performer can sympathize, living roughly in the same dimension in one distinct way: the body taken to great heights brings potentially some monstrous lows, and this is equally applicable to the soul as it is to the joints.

  “If you intend to manipulate, to show, to impress, you may experience mild suffering and pleasant t
riumphs. If you intend to follow the truth you feel in yourself—to follow your common sense, and force your will to serve you in the quest for discipline and simplicity—you will subject yourself to profound despair, loneliness, and constant self-doubt. And if you preserve, the Theatre, which you are learning to serve, will grace you, now and then, with the greatest exhilaration it is possible to know.”

  —David Mamet, True and False

  Iliotibial band syndrome: feeling as if something bites the side of the knee. Daggers going straight down the spaces between the collar bones and the trap muscle: a type of stately execution in the ancient world. Nerves so shot in the shoulders that electric spiderwebs spindle down the arms, maybe ending between the knuckles with a burning throb. Flat feet that put a young man on his ass. Bad memories; boredom, shame, what could have been done better, those awful things they heard you say. . . leaving you in the barracks to your slow-spinning fan, punk rock, and your sweat, and wondering where it all went so wrong.

  I thought all the physical conditioning would somehow save me from the lying, the apathy, and the betrayals. I foolishly refined my physical nature to that of the warrior, all the while neglecting the soft things that make life truly worth living. I paid no heed to the need in me to connect with my fellow man; he was just an obstacle on the way to the gym, and later hogging the only incline bench. I was blind to the ossified state. I made myself a machine, meant to handle the USMC and combat, and boy did it. USMC and combat were the easy parts. It was when this “machine” returned home. . . A snow blower in the middle of the fucking desert. The reverse crash, the realization of Obsolete was enough to end a man, and something to that effect must have been going on with too many distant brothers-in-arms.

  Becoming so hard you callous yourself to a point of disadvantage, this is when the family really starts to worry. A caricature, a pleasant mask; bullets may bounce off, and that does a mighty service when Hell is at the front door, but it does no good when the same man later can’t feel the kisses going up his neck. The body armor grows tentacles, penetrating into the pink flesh underneath, imprisoning the wearer in a terrible insensitivity.

  Thirty-one years old, lying in a bed alone. A quiet, empty house, more a mother-in-law suite. The light from an adjoined laundry room peeking through the crack of a deliberately open door, a white trash night-light. Terrifled of the dark for some reason. Clutching a club from Africa. Waiting for something to burst through the bedroom door.

  Delirium of the wandering man. I wonder how many demons pace about my room as I sleep, and there is nobody dead whom I miss.

  On the coffee table lay a copy of Hunting the Jackal, as well as Green Eyes, Black Rifies. An M4 with EOTech, pop-up rear sights, Picatinny rail, and twenty-nine 5.56 rounds (acquired from the Marine Corps) in an inserted magazine rests nearby against the wall. Outside the window, the pitter-patter of a summer rainstorm pelts the glass. I’m surrounded by gear and literature, a member of a great culture, yet there is discord. The demon worm burrows deep and coils fiercely inside my skull. My skills, my fortitude, owed a piece of their existence to this intruder. So inseparable from its host, the doings of such were partial extensions of this terrible thing.

  I smell like the swamp, having recently returned from the rot and the fierce squirming of life underneath it. Standing against the window in a lean, forehead on my forearm, the rain burgeoning into an anticipated blanket of wetness.

  I wanted to be a tier one asset. Yeah, that was it. I wanted to be the absolute best. Devote myself to warriorhood as devout as those do to the clergy. I wanted to be battle-hardened and wise, oiled and elite, a true practitioner and one to be relied on in more hairy situations than can be counted.

  Feeling the mocking aches of pain in my neck, shoulder, and feet; the world granted me a different fate. I would fight battles, yes, but too often from within . . And unlike the almost immortal fighting reputation of the groups I would love to have been, I would not always win.

  25

  BELLEAU WOOD

  “We have Americans opposite us who are terribly reckless fellows.”

  —German private, referring to US Marines during WWI

  WINTER 2012

  I lied on my visa. The United Kingdom wanted to know if I had any court cases pending or any charges to my name that could be treated by the British with a prison sentence of one year or more. I lied. At the time my visa application was mailed to me, I was but a mere two weeks from needing to be in London for student registration, and only one week from a plea deal in a Florida courtroom. By some happenstance, likely some unknowable technicality, or a UK passport screener as lazy as American government desk workers, pending charges were not detected and I was cleared hot. Passing one another, narrowly, like two tumbling asteroids, my application was approved just four days before multiple felony convictions were hung on my shoulders. They weren’t important. I had already come to accept some colorful new titles associated with my name: armed burglar and a plethora of other nastiness that redefined the word draconian, along with the crusading legal practices that ensured such a black cloud. Sure, the sociological mechanism of people-titling was to arc weld a scarlet letter on me: I was never going to work for the government again, and a mere three-dollar records search would likely send a number of potential future girlfriends screaming for the hills. But I really didn’t care, as surprising as it may seem. I was soon to be undertaking one of the most highly regarded philosophy programs on the entire planet. I was unshackled, and on a transatlantic flight before the ink had dried on my administrative probation letter.

  Postgraduate study commenced and swallowed me whole. At the five-week mark, I was grateful that a Recon buddy had come to stay with me. Having planned this for some time, it was still hard to grasp the arrival. Standing in soggy clothing, dripping the London rain, and wielding a lone black suitcase, Derrick stood in the lobby of my student housing. The usual swarm of students broke around him the way a river current does around a protruding log. Iraq, Camp Lejeune, Miami. . . some time passes and then, lo and behold, we’re ready to kick it in London. Seeing one another, he smiled through the scruff, and I knew something big had just begun.

  For three weeks Derrick lived with me in Bankside House, a brown, eight-story rectangle just south of the Tate Modern. His stay, a smuggling of sorts, was a true feat considering the British love for fire drills and accountability checks—lingering, I presume, from procedures of the WWII days. In this student housing, a bottom-level cafeteria worker would demand to see student IDs. Students’ doors would fly open as elect wardens would make bloody sure no one was ignoring the fire alarms, ears shielded with headphones, studying merrily on their bed.

  For fire drills one of us would hide under the bed, the other in the shower. More than once the door swung open, and a childish sense of rebellion surged as the door soon closed, room empty and us unfound. During the days I would head off to the London School of Economics, I would give Derrick my room key, coordinating the evening linkup before leaving. Making good with one of the front door clerks served as a bypass for the overzealous security, a small group of African immigrants who were duped into thinking they were guarding the queen’s jewels.

  The system was probed for its gaps, the gaps were utilized, and we must have set some sort of Squatters record in that place. And as the Michaelmas term ended, we launched off the pad toward continental Europe.

  Fully equipped, we had train tickets, water-resistant clothing, multiple hard copies of hostel receipts, condoms, painkillers from Spain, one working cell phone, and a Marine “piss cutter”77 to place on random statues and monuments at opportune photo ops. We were to soak in the history, food, and architecture as if by osmosis. Not in the fashion typical of the American or Japanese tourist, floating from one attraction to the next, stopping for twenty seconds to take an iPad snapshot of Stonehenge, then spending twenty minutes glamming it up for Facebook and Instagram, happy only once the perfect hashtag is plugged in. #oldrocks_rock!


  Nay, we stalked and slithered every nook and addled cove. We walked until our feet reminded us of some late-night troop movement, and we ate and drank all that we could handle.

  We were also there for some sex tourism.

  From the American perspective, places like Eastern Europe are so rife with eager, unbridled Olgas and Natashas, Elenas and Paulinas, that any two young, red-blooded men worth their salt would have to go confirm or deny if the fantasy and reality actually intersect.

  Our first stop, of course, was Amsterdam. Our hostel was without question the cheapest and most seedy lodging in all of Christendom. My snoring irritated our squad bay full of Scottish ne’er-do-wells, Australian girls with inflamed cold sores, and a German dreadlock-adorned hippy who would get up at 3 a.m. every night to Dumpster dive. My phone was stolen the first night, my SureFire the second.

  It was a trip, no doubt, to stumble out of a bordello and see mounted police, give them a nod and then light up some hash, all the while technically on felony probation. After five days of coffee shops, museums, canal tours, window girls, window girls, coffee shops, and window girls, we said good-bye to the greatest city on earth, and its window girls.

  We went to Paris from Amsterdam, by train, with blisters on our feet from walking the brick alleys and canal frontage roads of the Red Light District.

  Coming out of a tube station and beholding the Eiffel Tower for the first time is no less awe-inspiring as it is made out to be. Sifting through the street peddlers, selling miniature statues of the most magnificent phallic monument in all human history, we made our way to the tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame de Paris, and the Louvre. It was right before Christmas and the city was draped with energy and decoration.

  While it is true that the Decadent movement swelled and proliferated in France, Paris is, by modern standards, not known for the same hedonistic provision that Amsterdam is. This, however, did not stop Derrick and me from sniffing out and uprooting what underworld the city had to offer.