Sunday, December 18, 2011

The War is Over

I returned home from a trip to Georgia just in time to watch the breaking news online as the last US troops left Iraq and closed the gate behind them. Closed that rust white symbol of the end of a war. It never made it to the top of the “news pulse” on CNN’s website, which seemed about right to me. My girlfriend is gone back to Mississippi for the holidays and I found myself alone in my apartment and jet lagged. I had a party with all of my dead friends last night, we drank and danced and they told me about what could have been, that they wished they could live my life, simple. I told them that I wished we could be together and they laughed and sang, “Only the good die young…you stupid sonovabitch.” When we had had too much to drink they began to lay into me for bitching about their sacrifice on a blog as the highlight of my day, that some things were not for me to say.

They closed that rusty gate and America keeps on trucking. My grandmother wrote on a link I had posted that we should have never been there in the first place. Usually such bland sentences make me want to choke a random person but I remember that it is the grandmothers of the fallen who have to continue on and that the way she feels is a sort of genetic transference from mothers and grandmothers that must date back to the beginning of time. “Why do these men go off to die when we spent so much time raising and loving them?” I hear her heart.

Alone in a cold apartment with imaginations of people who were once as real as me and they whisper at me to stay away. “Go to school!” they all yelled at me. And they are young forever but this war is over and I will not be for long. I found myself thinking, that at least there is still Afghanistan so that my service will have some sort of prolonged relevance to American society but I remember that it never did in the first place. I pick up the phone in 2003 and my dad is back from his reporting of the initial invasion of Iraq, and he will make my high school graduation. I think about all of the parents who went to their son's high school graduations to send them off soon to die and their story was always the same as mine. Some shrink will be forever questioning what I mean when I say that I don’t want to feel better about it, this is how I keep them with me, in a haunting feeling I let ferment, the feeling of the death of a good friend. “It meant something to me grandma!” I want to yell, but who is listening?

I will clock into work tonight and clock out when I am done. The dead dancers have left my building again with a message, “It is always like this, it was always like this. Now go home kid!” No words will fill in between the lines, no tears will resurrect anything other than a void and no news coverage means any more to a stranger than it does to me. I will wake in the morning cold to light a smoke and I will remember when you will not. The only thing that has changed is someone’s son does not have to die in Iraq tomorrow.

Cajones Part 2: Jose Moracruz

I had dreamed of putting a helmet on since I was young, only to find that when I finally did, the helmet was an uncomfortable hunk of shit that dug into my scalp so I would find any reason to take it off. We debarked a commercial airliner in Honolulu and were funneled into a white school bus in our dress green uniforms. Something about the island seemed surreal and almost spiritual, a strange sort of vibe that made me think about the many Marines who had gone through this process before me. The bus chugged along until we reached Marine Corps Base Hawaii. We got out of the buses and received our room assignments, my orders were to join four other new Marines assigned to Alpha Company third platoon and my roommate would be a fellow teenager I had never met before, Jose Moracruz. We had heard the horror stories and were clear that hazing would probably be in our near future.

I did not know if a crew of bloodthirsty seasoned senior Marines were waiting for us and my new roommate looked at me in horror as we stood on a freshly mowed lawn a little before midnight. “Hey, help me fix this.” Moracruz said to me, referring to his shooting badge on his uniform which had somehow broken a link and was hanging awkwardly. Such a thing seemed a good excuse for a senior Marine to catch and commence hazing. I struggled with the cheap piece of metal and was able to jerry-rig something that resembled normalcy. A black sergeant appeared in front of us and let us know that many of our senior Marines were participating in something called super-squad and would not be present to fuck us up for a couple of weeks. The others were asleep and would guide us to pick up our gear and fill out paperwork in the morning. I thought it was a trick, but we were set free to our rooms and told to set out alarms for five thirty in the morning. I feared the morning's alarm and when it sounded, I awoke to my first day as a real infantry Marine.

Routine becomes the life of a Marine and Moracruz and I were forced into the life and became good friends. In the early Hawaii days we would watch movies every night on a television I had purchased and a video game machine he had bought, we would fall asleep to them and I would wake early in the mornings to the looped sound of the DVD's menu screen. We would usually order a pizza and a two liter of soda, only to burn the calories off the next day or in the Hawaii jungle. When the senior Marines who had been gone finally showed up I begged them to haze me. I explained to them that I had made it through boot-camp and the school of infantry without having my ass kicked and felt that I had been cheated.

The senior Marines were surprised and the word spread quickly the first day, I told them to show up at eight p.m. and informed them that I would be ready. One of the senior Marines pulled me aside to inform me that they could not kick my ass until they trusted me, so I continued to taunt them. Moracruz was horrified and not happy with my request because as my roommate the chances were good that he would be hazed as well, but he stayed with me even though he did not have to. At seven thirty I told Moracruz that I would be dressing in my "war suit" for the upcoming battle. Moracruz shook his head and said, “You are fucking crazy Anderson.” I had it all planned out and dressed in my "war suit" which consisted of; a reflective yellow glow belt around my waist, my boots with olive drab socks, a gas mask, and nothing else. I was mostly nude and ready for anything. At the strike of eight there was a knock at my door. I threw it open and howled inside my gas mask, jumping out of the threshold and shaking my genitals at those senior Marines who had showed up. They all laughed and left Moracruz and I alone, we had earned some valuable cool points.

I was waiting to board a commercial airliner today from Atlanta back to my home in Portland. I listened to a couple of Army Privates in uniform who could not have been older than nineteen and they reminded me of myself and Moracruz eight years ago. The two Privates were fresh out of training and comparing stories about how difficult and fun it had been. They are always convinced that they will deploy soon and talk about it unrealistically, idealistic about an upcoming mission that they had not yet received orders for. It made me smile, they were still innocent and baby faced. When the plane landed the stewardess requested that uniformed members aboard the airliner be allowed to be the first off and the passengers applauded as I watched the Privates leave.

When we were young there were two Marines who made it their business to give Moracruz a hard time. One was Big Mississippi and the other Big Texas. They would predict him a coward and crack jokes at him because they could. On November 12, 2004 we were in the Battle of Fallujah and the squad I was traveling with found itself ambushed by thirty terrorists. I was in the house next door to the ambush house and Big Mississippi was one of the first people to fall back to my house. He had always worked out for fun and was a gigantic meathead, his complex was not complex and I remember him looking at me with wide eyes full of fear, he simply froze and did not prove combat effective. As soon as the ambush began Big Texas ran as fast as he could away from the enemy gunfire. He ended up shot and many speculated this was because he had run into a friendly machine gun position. When he was tackled down the street by one of our Navy medics he was said to have exclaimed, “They are all dead, drop a bomb on the house!” All of us were very alive. I remember watching Moracruz walk into the house and as he did so he dumped a couple hundred rounds out of his machine gun toward the enemy position. He was bleeding from the calves from where he had been shot, he only collapsed after his job was done.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Cajones Part 1: Tijuana Prelude

Cajones will be a four part story focusing on Mexican American Marines who guided my military experience.


In the winter of 2001 I took a trip with a friend to visit his father in San Diego with the intentions of slipping into Tijuana Mexico when I was sixteen. I made the trip with sixty dollars, twenty of which was lollipop money from a school fundraiser that I hid in the back of my wallet in case of an emergency. I owed the money to a teacher of mine that coming Monday. After spending a day meeting my friend’s father and his family, and after a paintball game with some friends who played with no protective masks, we took off to the Promised Land. His father dropped my buddy, his younger brother and I at the border and recommended against drinking the water. The last thing my father had told me before I had left for the trip was, “Don’t go to Mexico.” We walked through the state fair styled turning pole gate and found ourselves in a new and magical country.

The first thing a person may notice when crossing the border to Tijuana on foot is the smell of feces coming from a concrete irrigation channel holding shallow brown water that children play in and vagrants wander. Ahead waves an enormous Mexican flag in the air, surrounded by what appears to be dilapidated housing and make-shift shacks. Filthy and impoverished children run up to the new arrivals selling “Chiclet” gum and begging for money. If you have a heart it should be shattered within ten feet of clearing the pole gate. Welcome to Tijuana 2001.


My friends and I made it to the initial shops before we reached Revolution Street, which is the main hub of the city. We stopped at a bar and sat outside as the server brought my friend and I a couple of beers and I bought a pack of smokes in my new found “Donkey Island”. His younger brother abstained from the beer and nicotine, he was a nice curly haired kid who should have been entering his freshman year in high school but had skipped so many grades that he was preparing to graduate ahead of us, and needless to say he was a genius. We finished our beers and continued the quest. I didn’t have a lighter so I would light the cigarettes back to back chain-smoking. My Spanish was good enough to get around and I knew the culture of Tijuana well enough not to get in trouble, the lollipop money would be for police, if we ran into them. My friend and I were in search of a strip club and talking about it as we stood by a fountain that is a local landmark. Out of nowhere a shady looking Mexican guy interrupted our conversation and exclaimed, “Hey! Three amigo’s, did someone say strippers?” We nodded our heads and he said, “Follow me! I know a great place!” My friend and I were determined to be the first kids in our class to get a lap dance. Our new friend guided us passed Revolution Street and passed the never ending bars until we reached our destination. A large man sat on a stool and asked for our I.D.’s, my friend and I shook our heads and said that we did not have I.D.’s. Our new friend vouched for us and the younger brother told us that he was cool with his older brother going in but that he would wait for us outside. My friend and I entered the strip club.

Having knowledge about how such things operate and having made many trips to Tijuana after this trip, I have still never told my friend the secret to my hot stripper trick. As we entered the club a server approached us and offered us a seat by the stripper pole. I let my friend lead and I put a twenty dollar bill in the servers hand and told him in his ear that this was a tip and to make sure we had a good time. My buddy had never seen my move and we took a seat. The server brought us a complimentary aluminum bucket full of ice and beer, happy with his tip. The strip club was dark and empty except for the two under-aged gringos and smelled heavily of cheap perfume. American hip hop music began to bump in the club and the DJ announced the entrance of the first stripper with gusto.

She must have been in her fifties and was missing a front tooth. She mounted the pole and went to work; my friend and I loved it, I think because we both wanted to be writers and had read Hunter S. Thompson. As the song played and the old lady danced a hot stripper came and sat on my lap; my friend looked at me bewildered as to why me and not him? I put together that it was the tip I had dropped the server but said nothing. She flirted with me and asked if I wanted to go to the back room for a lap dance that would cost twenty dollars? I explained to her that I only had ten dollars and at first she refused but finally caved. I had seen that done in a favorite war movie about Vietnam. She led me to the back room and a four foot tall Mexican man held his hand out for advance payment. I put ten dollars of the lollipop money in his hand and he shook his head no and said, “Twenty amigo.” I put the last of my money in his hand and disappeared to the back room for three songs worth of a lap dance.

After the first song ended my friend entered the backroom with the elderly stripper who had been dancing on the pole. I raised my beer at him and he waved…I laughed the whole way through the next song because I had the savvy to win the hot stripper and he had no clue why. My dance ended after my third song and my friend had one more to go when the four foot tall bill collector came rushing into the back room and asked, “Do you have I.D. amigo?” I shrugged and explained that I had already told the door man I didn’t. He looked at me alarmed and said “Policia amigo, you need I.D.” My heart sank as I looked passed the bead curtain at Mexican police who were questioning some new arrivals. “You got a back door?” I asked in a panicked voice. “You got money?” He responded.

I had spent the last of my high school lollipop emergency funds on the Tijuana stripper but figured my friend had some money so I pointed at him and said, “No but he does.” The short man broke up my friends lap dance early and ushered him to where I was standing. My friend was confused and I explained the situation as our guide ushered us out the back door that led to a courtyard where a scrap metal fence with a rusty hinge stood between us and Mexican jail. We could not open the gate that had probably been closed since the Mexican Revolution so the three of us desperately put our backs into it until the gate was forced open. The short man made my friend tip him and he guided us back to the front door where my buddies little brother was having an intellectual conversation on the political impacts of 9-11 to the doorman who could not understand a word the curly haired gringo was saying.

When I got back home I told my step-brother who was the same age the greatest story he had ever heard about a city he had never seen; a land where a sixteen year old could drink beer, smoke cigarettes and pay for a lap dance. Next I told him that I was short the twenty dollars I would owe the next day. We laughed at the story. He thought I was pretty screwed as we walked down our suburban streets heading back to our house. I saw something on the black asphalt and picked it up. It was a twenty dollar bill.

Friday, December 2, 2011

For CEB and Most Protected People of our United States.

CEB wrote a response to a blog of mine. Below is the link and CEB's comments can be found under and surprisingly..."Comments".

http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/2011/11/thrill-kill-anderson.html#comments

Combat and war is a harsh reality and I wish it were different but I don’t wish everyone to go as most modern Americans would prove worthless in combat. I do not subscribe to utopia as I don’t believe every human and every leader of humans can remain tame for a lifetime. I can’t say that my wars were just or sensible from the political perspective but as a field Marine it was not my job or my wish to consider these things. I was sent where the voters sent me. When I was young I did not want war but I did want to serve my country and with a gun, regardless of political affiliation, service is a tradition that my family has been involved in since at least the civil war that I can trace but with an oral and probably accurate history dating back to the revolution from my grandmother’s maiden side of the family, the Doans. The Doans were of English puritan stock and were rumored to date back to Plymouth-Rock, which made my grandmother eligible for some creepy club of people who were not quite Native Americans but had been here since colonization.
I do not feel more “American” than anyone else and would not consider myself a conservative or a liberal; as the extremists in both of those parties equally make me want to puke. If CEB is concerned I vote for Ralph Nader every election, not particularly because I want to see him as the president, but as a protest to a two party system that represents minorities of logic in this country. I joined the Marines a few weeks after graduating high school and did not come from a poor or tragic background that most liberals would like to subscribe to. I was not a red blooded flag waving mindless patriot angered by racism against the “towel-heads” that had brought those towers down as some conservatives would subscribe to. I came from southern California middle class suburbia; I read books on my free time, liked punk rock music from the eighties and at one time sported a Mohawk. My parents divorced when I was young, which was common where I grew up but remained proactive in my up-bringing until I left for service. My father was a reporter and my mother worked in sales for most of my childhood. I frequented museums of art and science during odd weekends as a kid and went to the movies with my family on others. I wanted to be a writer and a film director for as long as I can remember…the same amount of time that I wanted to serve my country. I am a life-long atheist but respect the religious views of all cultures and always have.
I write this not because I am special but because CEB wants to counsel veterans and is currently a student. I fell in love with a girl when I was a kid and would write her when I was in Fallujah Iraq, waiting to die and fight but finding the romance in every sunrise of every day that I had survived…marveling at that ball of light and wondering if it would be the last time I would see it or feel the warmth of anything ever again. I would write her about my observations of a strange place where people were trying to kill me and with the expectation that we would be together when I got home. After that battle many of my friends had been killed, the girl had found another man and so is the ancient story of the warrior. I was not bitter, I had a nice vacation back home where there was another woman and some rest with my family. Then it was time to leave again and start the process all over but this time in Afghanistan and with new Marines who would see battle; that I was very concerned about the same way a friend of mine who was killed would have been concerned about me the year before.
I served four years and came back home to watch many of my friends struggle with their journey and I would think to myself how strange they were and wonder why they were having such a hard time. I would drink all day and stay up all night waiting for someone I did not know to kill me in southern California suburbia. Months after returning I began to smell dead bodies before I reached an REM sleep state and would find myself immediately very awake and very alert. I still can’t sit for too long in a crowded room without breaking for a cigarette. As for humanity, I never killed anyone and never wanted to. I spent my recovery from myself writing about my experiences in an attempt to explain what the world looked like to me as a Marine Infantryman teenager who did his job.
There are many CEB’s in this world who will question our humanity through ignorance and I laugh for joy at what a pleasure it must be to go to school instead and have such an easy life without ever having a legitimate question of mortality. Today the military is an all-volunteer force…no draftees because people like me keep it that way. I have no shame for the city we leveled to the ground or for the people we killed. I am very aware that when I talk to a civilian psychiatrist who has never been shot at, that I will be talking to CEB and hope that this letter clears the air a bit. In my world CEB is a waste of space, same as the war mongers and the liberals who campaign for tolerance for everything except those things they do not agree with. The same country I left to defend was the same country I returned home to.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Marley by Sue Bell

Today I lost my best friend of the last seven years, my beloved dog Marley. Marley was a true character with the ability to make me laugh until I cried. Today I just cry.

Our courtship began in 2004. My son was in the Marines and about to ship out to Iraq. I knew I was going to need something to distract and comfort me while he was gone. I could turn to drugs or alcohol for the first time in my life or run away to a faraway land. I decided on furry companionship instead. I wanted a rescue dog. I would rescue him and he would rescue me.

I found a place that had a website where they showed a picture of the dog and listed ALL of the dog’s traits, good and bad. I liked that because I had a long list of traits I did NOT want in a dog. I emailed them a letter including my list. The dog can’t bark all the time, he can’t be a runner if I open the front door, he can’t….. I ended the email with the promise that if they did not think ANY dog could meet my high demands, I would not get a dog.

Marley’s foster Mother responded with a message that she thought she had the perfect dog for me. A dog named Marley. She included a picture. It was not love at first sight. He had a face only a Mother could love. He had bug eyes that looked both right and left at the same time and an overbite on his bottom teeth. His tongue was long and curled in a coil when he was stressed or nervous.

My husband Rick and I were invited to meet him and a couple of other dogs that might work if we didn’t bond with Marley. We drove to his foster house in the San Fernando Valley and waited in the yard while the three dogs were gathered.

Out runs a cute white Llaso Apso and an eager Bassett Hound who immediately run over to me. Prancing to his own drum, Marley shows up and goes over to my husband first. I thought this was odd. Dogs ALWAYS come to me. It is like I am Mrs. Dr. Doolittle or something. This dog intrigued me. “Maybe this was a sign,” I thought.

Right after that thought the Bassett Hound headed toward my husband. 20 lb. Marley took out his fangs and growled like a rabid wolf. Oh Lord. My list included no mean dogs. The foster Mother quickly assured me that Marley would never bite the other dog, he was just claiming Rick for his own. My heart melted, but I was still a little scared that our relationship may end in unhappiness, but I decided to let Marley take me home.

Shortly after he arrived in our life, he swallowed a piece of rawhide whole and almost died. I nursed him back to health which bonded us deeply. I could finally see past the funny looking face and become the Mother that could love it.

Not long after, my son Garrett was fighting in the “Battle of Falluja.” The nights were especially hard. I sat awake most of the time, wishing I could fall asleep and forget. My husband went to bed at 10 and my daughter around midnight. After that it was just me and Marley. He was a very special dog. He and I had a communication. I understood him and he understood me. He knew I was in pain. He would just sit there with me and let me stroke his chest hair. My favorite part of him was that chest hair. It was like a thick patch of Italian Gigilo chest hair. I found comfort there. I credit Marley with getting me through that time.

What Marley lacked in looks, he made up for with personality. I could throw out every clock in the house and still tell time as long as he was around. He demanded his two meals, 45 snacks and one walk a day at specific times. The air would change as he stood on his hind legs and waved his front legs through the air. He put his front paws together like he was praying and swiped them through the air – and would continue to do that forever unless you got up and got him what he wanted. He has not had the energy to do that in at least a year. Last night I remembered that move and cried. It used to bug me sometimes when I was busy. I would tell him he should be a telemarketer or haunt houses. Now I wish he was haunting mine.

Marley had his dinner and then he shared mine. He told me when it was time to make my dinner also and then would “help” me in the kitchen. We moved around the kitchen together in a well-choreographed waltz. He anticipated where I would move next and never tripped me up until he got old and unable to keep up. He especially liked when I would make steak. I would let him lick the paper plate when we were done. He lived for that and let me know it with a howl.

At night he turned into a stalker. Opossums beware, Marley was on the prowl. When he was not chasing his nemesis, we had lots of talks together. I would ask him questions and he would bark an answer. What? I would say. Bark he would say. You want a booger I would say. Bark he would say. How about a hand full of sand. Bark he would say. Do you want a WALK? Bingo. He went crazy and barked in appreciation that I finally got what he was saying. He really, really tried to understand me at all times. You could see the wheels turning in his little head.

He loved his afternoon walks. He liked to pretend he ran this block. He threw the Rottweiler and Boxer down the street that “screw you chump” look as he peed in their yard. They barked a promise to kill him if they ever escaped that wall. When he got too old to make it around the block on his legs, my husband bought him an old wagon. He sat in that thing like he was king of the world and Rick pulled him like the servant he was to Marley. Rick loved Marley as much as I did. Like Marley helped me in the kitchen, he helped Rick wash the cars on a Sunday morning. Insisting he be in on the action.

When Marley was able to still jump up on the couch, he liked to have my husband on one side and me other the other. He would put his front paws on me and his back paws on Rick and “bridge” us. Rick would rub is back and me his Gigilo patch. He would get a big smile on his little face. That is how I will remember him. I know we gave him a good life and the love he gave us I will carry with me forever.

I love you Boo.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

November War

Neil Young sang to me a story from the early nineteen seventies during the battle of Fallujah in 2004, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away. My my hey hey.” The base store in Camp Fallujah sold music and many of the old artists had greatest hits compilations and digital remasters that had been recently released. I built my Vietnam soundtrack and would try to imagine what this music had meant to another generation of warriors. I would wonder what the last song I ever heard would be, like Russian roulette, if I left for the day’s work without hearing an absolutely favorite song I would feel manic. I waited to burn out and wondered if they would remember me in years to come. I was sure I was going to die and every now and again I would catch myself daydreaming about the future and force myself to shut it down and remind my subconscious that there would be no future. We slept in places that would remind a person something sinister was waiting, a creeping darkness during the daytime. We would stack furniture over the windows of the houses that we set up in for the night. An old refrigerator with the stench of rotting meat would be pushed by a couple of Marines to block a door that might be opened by a curious foe in the middle of the night, like a zombie movie.
A black Staff Sergeant shared a smoke with me one night and explained that he would not release the stress of war through masturbation like the rest of us because he didn’t want to leave his babies in an evil place. The sounds of war would echo through the city twenty four hours a day and I would imagine that in any given moment, somewhere out there groups of young men like me were fighting for their life and I would wonder if the distant clatter of gunfire meant another letter to loved ones back home. The Marines didn’t take long to look war worn, with dirty blackened hands and uniforms that were so full of old sweat they could almost cut a man. It was the better part of a month before we took our first shower. A piece in me loved it all, the way that I like a good horror movie. I didn’t want to look and I didn’t want to know but I always did look and I know now. Some sort of fucked up Halloween where they shot at us for asking for candy, and we would kill them. Enemy corpses twisted and disfigured some from our guns and others from earlier meetings with some other trick-or-treaters. A young dirty face might turn to you and emphatically point out that an enemy’s dick had been blown across the street and the rest would laugh while slipping in the dead stranger’s fat.
I ran to catch up to a concealed position once, I tripped, fell and knocked myself out with the impact of my own radio hitting the back of my head. I came to quickly next to a corpse and the other Marines thought that was the funniest thing they had ever seen, and so did I. “Tin Soldiers and Nixons coming, we're finally on our own…” A song which I could not relate to in the intentions of the lyrics, naïve to the outrage but willing to reassign modern meaning. Collectively the young men knew that there would never be anything like this again. A license to kill and a Grimm Fairy Tale that played like broken piano keys live and before our eyes, we were ready to fight and I was ready to die, but never did. That would be someone else’s story and I could not believe it on the ride back to our ships with far less trick-or-treaters than we had started with. I could not wrap my head around being alive and what that would mean. None of this fades with age and I wish as hard as I wished to live but told myself I wouldn’t, that I can go back for one minute. Smell those terrible smells and check up on some old dreams. Surreal like a Man Ray image this war plays in broken pieces and comes back to life in November.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Out of Iraq

Out of Iraq by the New Year. The sand will blow over the carcasses of our blown out vehicles like it does for the old Russian tanks in Afghanistan. I will live a life and so will all who survived the country and somewhere out there will be the metal and fabric skeletons that we used for our war. For the Veterans of this war, we will have to begin to make a shift in care as these wars come to an end. We will journey the transition from current news to a distant memory most likely similar to that of our Korean War. There was a war in Korea…I know! It ran from 1950 to 1953 and blew US Vietnam killed in action statistics out of the water in comparing these two wars for loss of life per day. The statistics of loss of life for the war on terror is infinitesimal compared to other American wars. The Korean War had been overshadowed by the hype of the end of the Second World War and minimized after no clear victory in that war had been achieved.

My hypothesis is that our connection to society as Veterans will be disconnected as soon as the war plug is pulled. Average Americans were not concerned about this war because it did not affect them, with no draft and no personal obligation to service for most Americans these wars were a television show that ran long in seasons and had been the same story since season four. This of course has happened before and to our brother and sister Veterans from Vietnam. Our problem is going to be in representation because it takes so few troops to conduct a war we are a true minority and will always have few numbers to voice our needs and concerns. A society will not suddenly care for a cause it had no previous interest in.

I hope that all of the Veterans of this war come together and organize to make sure that we continue to advance the level of care that we received because we earned it.
I hope our Vietnam Veterans who have been through this before guide us, and that America suddenly sees for the first time since WWII that Veterans are their friends and should be respected for risking their lives bravely for policies that they had no control over. I hope that when I fart it smells like fresh cut flowers. If we took one month out of what we had spent for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we could provide ample Veteran assistance for years to come, imagine if we took one year of that budget as a debt of gratitude from a nation to its Veterans as payment for a decade of service? Like we just pretended that the war was still going on for one more year, like the war Veterans who come home are faced to fight is really a war. I call this the one for ten for service plan.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Why Old People Should Go To War

I think we should send old people to war instead of the young. I think that if we threaten to send grandparents to war, that their children and grandchildren would never let it happen, so there would be no war. It does not work the other way around. Old people vote and old people make the wars. Reverse the process and there would be world peace. I want to see the enlistment age raised to eighty…..


Social Security will soon run out and with military service comes guaranteed housing, medical and financial security.

Old people tend to move slower than the younger population, which means there would
be more opportunity for negotiation while the troops are gathered.

Old people have already lived their lives, with this experience hopefully comes a better appreciation and value for a long lived life.

Old people get injured easily, which increases the likelihood of a broken bone that would remove them from the conflict.

Many old people cannot see well, this reduces the likelihood of an old person being able to shoot an opposing old person in given conflict.

Old people are too nice and trusting to engage each other in mortal combat.

Old people have had their children, so generations will not be lost with their loss.

Old people understand the value of a hard earned dollar…which would entitle them to equal pay to that of a sports star because old people would demand that if a guy who can run a ball makes a fortune, then naturally a person who gets shot at to protect the sports star's freedom should make a similar wage.

Old people can sustain the hours of boredom that combat requires.

Old people are very excitable; this will keep them sharp and ready for their enemy.

The fog of war is a natural state of mind for an old person.

Statues of brave old people would be a new medium for artists.

Old people are wise and thus too smart to go.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Boot Laces

I sometimes wonder if I ran away from home or if I was drawn to Portland Oregon to practice my art? Maybe I wanted to die and saw this city surrounded by evergreens as a last chance or an appropriate coffin? It rains here most of the year and that cabin fever becomes a good excuse to write as a refuge from the self-perpetuated insanity living too far inside your own mind can cause. I wander through the forest and can see between these trees the way that I like to read between the lines of a book, lost in intention that is only an interpretation of what I think something means.
The rich soil absorbs my step and I remember all of the places I have lived and environments I once called home. I grew up in a desert suburb of Los Angeles filled with sunshine and plastic people. The shitty thing about the sun shining all of the time is that when you are having a bad day the sun mocks you, makes a person feel like they should not feel the way that they do. I once lived on an island in Hawaii, where I was stationed as an infantryman. It was paradise on earth except that I spent most of my time preparing for war and something about preparing for war has a way of taking the magic out of paradise.
I have lived in two combat zones, and the good thing about these places was that I grew up in the desert and they reminded me of home. Life makes much more sense when a person spends the majority of their time trying to stay alive, there was a certain purpose to it and everything seemed so real. The corpses of our enemies were rotting in the sun and the smell would creep into my daydream to keep me grounded. I always loved Halloween and sometimes I would look into a set of rolled back eyes and contemplate the meaning of life. Then it would be time to have lunch and I would eat. I would tell jokes to pass the time but those corpses never laughed. I would tie up my boots and we would walk all day, until we wanted our eyes to roll back like our audience.
These trees are guard towers of judgment, they can see through me and I can only see in between them. I am lost and the dampness in the air turns into rain and I can feel my boots sinking deeper into the rich soil. The bark crackles and the trees bend over to keep me where I am. Sometimes when I walk through the forest I like to walk into the beams of sunlight that pass through the branches. Other times I want to see the forest cut down so I can climb up a hill and appreciate the sun breaking through the clouds casting its beams on thousands of tree stumps.

So It Goes 2001

I had a Mohawk when I dressed myself in a jean jacket with the sleeves cut off and my back read, “Stop: do not call 911, the man is out to get you.” My step brother did not know his father but we knew each other and he was the bass player in our punk rock band. He had a piece of cloth hanging from his ass that read, “Fuck racist cops!” We were walking back home to our suburban existence when we spotted a couple of cop cars parked in front of a gas station. We decided to enter and not buy anything. The cops looked like movie characters and noticed our strange wardrobe. As we left the double doors they followed and yelled to us. We acted surprised as we turned around and the policemen approached us. One had a mustache circa 1992 in the year 2001 and he said, “Fuck cops what’s that supposed to mean?” My step brother retorted that his message read, “Fuck racist cops,” and the officer repeated himself, “So fuck cops huh?”
This is funny to me now, considering my military background and work for, “The Man,” but I still relish my teenage rebellion. I think I wanted to be a well-rounded man and I must have made a deal with myself to explore all perspectives. The cop with the mustache told me to turn around so I did. He read my message out-loud and told me, “So when the brothers are kicking your ass around the corner you won’t want anyone to call us, right?” I replied, “The brothers sir? You mean black people?” They stumbled on their words and let us on our way. There was a general racism that was accepted in different realms during the days following September 11, 2001. I’m not sure why, I just remember that’s how it was. I remember a country that progressively lost its mind so I manned up and bared the burden. In the end it is people like me that will be blamed for it, but a wiser man than me once wrote, “So it goes.”

Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Suck

Dedicated to Mike Mooney-Semper Fi

My father told me not to tell his visiting Vietnam Veteran friend that I had an expressed interest in joining the Marine Corps when I was sixteen years old. The story went that while Mike was in Vietnam his younger brother and my dad’s best friend Mark would receive a copy of “Leatherneck” magazine in the mail, which he assumed was from his brother in Vietnam encouraging Mark to join. When Mike returned home during a vacation Mark told him that he was considering joining, so Marine Mike choked brother Mark in a heat of passion and convinced him to explore other career opportunities. It was mandated that you sign up for a subscription to the magazine as a recruit in boot-camp, Mike had forgotten about it and did not realize what had been done until the incident.

That day my father was going to ferry Mike and Mark to the “Moving Wall”, a mobile replica of the Vietnam memorial in Washington D.C. that has the names of the fifty eight thousand servicemen killed during the Vietnam War etched into black granite. When they arrived I sat nervously in the kitchen, fearing being choked out by Mike, but eager to learn something about his experiences because I felt that they could help me. At some point Mike asked me what I was going to do after high school and I blurted out, “I am going to join the Marines.” Mike looked baffled and sat a long pause in what seemed to be deep thought and then asked me, “Why in the hell would you want to do a thing like that?” Or something to this affect as he was known to be less elegant with the Queen’s English and more likely to speak Marine. I don’t remember what I told him, it was possible but unlikely that I gave him a patriotic bit about service to the country that had birthed me and knowing myself as a teenager I think I probably told him exactly what was on my mind. Mike sat with his cane propped on his chair and returned to an awkward pause and then he nodded and said, “You’re going to be alright. You will make a good Marine, I can tell.” I almost fainted and said no more about the service, instead we talked about life and then got into the car to visit the Vietnam memorial replica on display at the local park. Mike made his way to a dugout that faced the wall and took a seat. I sat with him and my father and Mark went to see the wall. “I don’t need to see that thing.” Mike said and we sat. When my father returned he asked if Mike wanted to take a look and the old Marine stood his ground and refused, so we sat together in silence as my dad returned to the wall. I looked at the replica from the dugout and could see that the white names seemed never ending.

As we sat there it was just a small wall on a baseball field but at the same time each name was a guy who had gone to high school and had wanted to live but died instead. Mike would have known names on the wall but would not confront them because they were not just etched markings in granite, they were his friends. Mike had carried a radio and fought in Hue City Vietnam, a famous Marine urban battle. In three years I would carry a radio and fight in Fallujah Iraq, which would be compared to the battle for Hue city. We sit in this dugout and I think about how Mike died about five years ago, and about how he would take a phone call from me late at night while I was stationed in Camp Hansen Okinawa, a base that he had also been stationed at. A few times I would receive packages from Mike with gifts inside, his lucky Marine Corps money clip and a book on jungle warfare dated 1968. In about thirty years when the next war kicks off and some punk kid tells me that he’s thinking about joining I won’t choke him out either, some people need to get what they ask for when they really think they mean it.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Help

Dear Mr. President,

We veterans are dying, eighteen a day after the war by our own hand. We come home but we never left the holes we fought so hard to defend, and the holes in our head are our dead and dying comrades beckoning us to join them because coming home has become a worse fate than the wars we fought. We signed up to serve our country and put our lives on delay for the mission with little to show for it upon our return. We could go to school with the GI Bill as long as we are sane and able to focus on schoolwork, but I can hardly focus on this letter I am writing and basic tasks become pointless.
Last year my unit dropped me off for a thirty-six hour mental health evaluation at the Portland VA. I was provided with pink pajamas and was evaluated in a setting that would make any suicidal human want to drown in their own vomit. Homeless veterans of different eras were mumbling to themselves, some wandering in endless circles. I was as a veteran humiliated by my own vulnerability and weakness and felt interrogated by civilians who could not possibly relate to my situation by having never served. A normal person would have assumed they were in prison, the food was terrible and we were not allowed outside for a walk or a smoke, which having picked up the habit in the service became too much for me to bear. I had the feeling that the civilians running the show knew that Vets smoke, and that Vets will check themselves out if smoking is prohibited. I was verbally disappointed in the program offered and upon my early release was told by a staff member, “If you don’t like it, talk to your congressman.” I was not within capable faculties to start a conversation with a congressman. I just wanted to be left alone.
I later spent three weeks at the Seattle VA for PTSD treatment and when I returned home nothing had changed. I don’t think there is a cure for wanting to put a bullet in your head after your life has been turned upside down by elements so far out of one’s control. What we need is an ease from the pressure. When we leave the service we need access and priority to jobs, good jobs that pay enough money to raise a family. We have spent an equivalent amount of time that one would for a college degree, tested in much more extreme forms and at the end of our career we have nothing to show for it.
My answer for this problem is that the VA mental health system needs to be reformed and can be by the very people it is supposed to support. I DO NOT TRUST CIVILIANS to handle my mental health counseling, they are too easily influenced without understanding the consequences of their incompetence. A program should be implemented to send interested veterans into the counseling field without having to spend four more years in training. This would open a gate that would provide jobs for Veterans that can help the Veterans of their conflict until the last of us leaves the earth. The only civilians in the VA should be doctors required for surgery and dispensing medication, all civilians should be overseen by veterans who would be working at appropriate GS levels.
The Vietnam Veterans need to be separated from the Iraq and Afghan Veterans as I found that our group sessions are prone to re-traumatize Vietnam Vets and that we have different issues as we come from different worlds. There should also be a program that can be ran by Veterans after discharge from active service in order to keep accountability of those they served with from their own unit to make sure that their comrades are not slipping through the cracks. We trust the people we served with. Claims should take one month, no longer. The mountain of paperwork and years it takes to file a claim is obviously put there as a roadblock to discourage veterans from following through. If our country cannot afford to pay for our services after our service they should have never sent us to war and the idea that eighteen veterans commit suicide every day is ample evidence that we have been failed. Our blood and our pain is in your hands, we gave so much for so little in return.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Church Bells Sing Suicide

The songbird singing on my windowsill will come and pass to be replaced by another and I will never notice. The old bird will come to rest in a shrub to be devoured by the cat, or maybe on a crowded sidewalk to be stepped over by the busy people of the day and I will have forgotten his song. Corporal Hunt killed himself two weeks ago in his Texas apartment. I didn’t know him but I could feel a lonely connection in deeper parts of my heart, and his story that made CNN headlines could not be shaken out of my head so I clocked out early today to write this blog.

Everything is so different out here and it has been years since my last deployment. After my first hospitalization for an attempted suicide I took a trip to Eastern France with my father to do some book research. We were on a Marine Corps battlefields of World War 1 tour hosted by former Commandant of The Marine Corps General Michael Hagee. Wandering through a well kept cemetery in the hamlet of Belleau France the General lit up and guided us to a tombstone. “Here it is!” He exclaimed. The General proceeded to tell us the story of Sergeant Streicher, who after his discharge in WW1 returned home to New York. He saved up enough money to take a trip to France and returned to the town of Belleau where he had fought. The former Sergeant asked the mayor if he would be allowed to live in Belleau to be close to his friends buried in a nearby military cemetery. The mayor granted his request, sometime later Sergeant Streicher wandered out to the wood line where he had fought and shot himself.

The Pentagon will not consider Corporal Hunt a war statistic, nor will they count the untold other number of post military service suicides. Sometimes I am walking through a parking lot checking the stubs to make sure that people paid for parking and I will think about all of these cars driven by all of these people and how they do not know that I served and that even if they did they would not care. I am a dead sparrow on the ground being stepped over and the weight of this thought is debilitating. I have sought help and sometimes I feel alright and other times I am walking through this never ending parking lot and it seems like I will never be able to leave. I always want everyone to know what my dead friends meant to me and what they should mean to their country but I don’t know how to say it.

Today I was walking through a cemetery in Eastern France. I was joined by Sergeant Streicher, Corporal Hunt and my dead great uncle Private Joesph Otto Turley who was killed on the last day of WW1, we were researching his story. Private Turley tugged my arm and walked me to the church where he had died. The French sky was grey and the old church was simple. Sergeant Streicher took hold of the rope of the bell and told me that when I didn’t know what to say it would be a good idea to ring the bell. The four of us took a hold of the rope and gave it a yank and it sang, “Another dead Marine!” The ringing thundered through the world, Corporal Hunt was smiling and we had known each other. We sang together, “Listen up you motherfuckers! Listen you passers by! Another dead Marine!” I shut my eyes and pulled the rope and when I awoke I was the only one ringing the bell.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/04/15/california.marine.suicide/index.html

Monday, April 11, 2011

Some Things I Learned in Combat

False motivation is still motivation!

If Gunny says, "Don't do it," someone will.

An empty house is a safe-house.

Never piss off your Corpsman.

Night-vision goggles require light to operate.

If you don't know where you are, the enemy does.

The extension will come as soon as you pack your gear.

"Help!" Is not a proper situation report.

Never trust a radio operator.

"Errr," is the proper response to everything.

Many dependent wives are not dependable.

The site count is never up.

Interpreters do not speak English.

Dear John letters are good for morale when read out-loud.

The MRE beef tastes like the MRE chicken, neither are beef or chicken.

If you follow the instructions you can heat an MRE by leaning the cardboard pouch on "A Rock or Something."

A rat-fuck is good if you’re pulling one; A goat-fuck is bad if you’re in one.

If it requires batteries to operate it’s already broken.

If you don’t know what it is, set it on fire.

Foreign troops will always pull the trigger to test the safety.

The only thing you weren't forced to do was sign the contract.

Combat is not a videogame!...

You cannot accurately hip-fire an M-203 grenade launcher.

There are no respawns in combat.

Auto aim is off.

Friendly fire is on.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Kat Dog

She made me smile and I wondered, “What’s wrong with that?” She is stunningly beautiful with a dog who stands on its head while chewing on its tail. We go on adventures together deep in the city of Portland. Sometimes you can find us in the back corner of a basement bar and other times we walk out of the city into the green, and we smile and laugh and during these moments I can forget the hard times.
Van Gough hangs on the walls of her apartment while I watch Craig Ferguson and she stands in the turn of the century doorway with the hand crafted molding, smiling at a dumb Neanderthal giggling at a Scotsman. I read, “The Catcher and the Rye” while she works at her computer and I enjoy the story but feel something deep for the protagonist who killed Lennon. If a person can hold out long enough after the world collapses it will put itself back together again. We can smile again and hope in ways that we did when we were young.
Life is as made up as a story book and I think about all of the time I spent not being alive before I was alive. The sound of rifle clatter comes as quick as it goes and for the rest of consciousness it will be there waiting, reminding us that we can always chase the dragon, or give it up and move along. Either way it will spin. And out of the nothingness comes a dog, walking on its head and biting at its tail and I laugh while she smiles because the dog is just like us.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The Night Before the Battle

I was tapping at the plastic keys of a guitar video game controller to “The Beatles” earlier tonight. I had a flashback and my hair stood on end but I kept pressing the keys in a zombie trance. The music was from another generation and I was nineteen and stretched out on an olive drab cot with my hands behind my head while I listened to a Beatles anthology. My rifle was loaded and propped on the cot near my head. My body armor with its hand grenades was draped over my helmet next to the rifle. The battle was less than twenty four hours away and I could feel a churning in my stomach and I understood that things were about to change, that my life would be different in twenty four hours. The volume was set at maximum, my only escape from the moment.
I escaped to a place that was my own; I ran through my mind at full speed and knew that the place I traveled to was different than where the other Marines lying on cots were going. The C.D. player had been a gift from my mother when I was in high school. I used to have to take the public bus home after school, but sometimes I would spend my bus money on french fries and walk the two miles back to my house. The C.D. player would sing my soundtrack and I would look at the orange groves and the light the sun was casting, silhouetting their perfect columns and files and I would inhale the southern California sea air. I knew I was young and was excited about growing up. My backpack was always weighed down with the books I never read and a folder with assignments I never completed. On the face of the C.D. player I had ripped up and rearranged a sticker that once read “Skate Street” and had changed it to “Eat Trees”.
The artillery pieces were positioned a few hundred feet from where I rested. They cracked off all night, killing people miles away, the room would shake and there was not enough volume in the world to drown out that racket. I listened to my Beatles C.D. and I could hear something that spoke to the core of my soul. It would be impossible to explain the feeling unless you have ever taken L.S.D. I could hear every note and the gravity of these notes would move me, and when I heard the lyrics I understood that what the Beatles had captured was youth, and my heart broke into a million pieces and would come back together and I wondered what was waiting on the other end of the barbed wire? The artillery pumped rounds into the city, killing people from miles away and I listened to the Beatles. That was the last night that every member of my platoon slept in the same area alive. I hoped to the music that we would be spared, that I would be spared.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

On Veterans

The raindrops bounce off of the bill of my hat and the slight breeze brings with it a slight chill. The clock has been punched, the ticket writing machine retired and there will be a dog to walk at home. The city of Portland Oregon is made up of old brick buildings from the Victorian era, mixed in between the climbing skyscrapers of various corporate eras. A gargoyle watches me cross the street and there is some sort of victory in my step. I read a letter from a Texas prisoner I served with in the Marine Corps, he had handwritten that he was where he belonged. I thought about his intensity in combat, he was just a little more violent than the rest of us and sometimes we all need a break. I remembered the smashing china and its startling crash on the concrete floor of some foreigner’s home.
The city was on fire, smoke signals rose from the burning tires set ablaze on a rooftop. I received a message from our old point man and noticed that he was cradling a new child on the profile picture of a social networking website. He wrote that he knew I saw the world in a different way. He lives in Mexico now and I remember what he had taught me about fighting and heart. After he was shot I picked his helmet up and found a card with a Spanish styled illustration of the Virgin Mary. I was an atheist, there was a full moon and I read the prayer on the back of the card in the moonlight and put the card inside my helmet for good luck. I read a message on a social networking site I frequent, it was from a friend. He wrote that he picks up cans during the day to pay for his drinking at night. I knew him in boot camp and he would call my father on Christmas to wish us well.
The raindrops cease when I unlock the community door to the apartment. There is a happy and anxious border collie, or springer spaniel terrier mix depending on who you ask, waiting for me. Tail wagging and clumsy tongue waiting to lick the hand that pets her. We will go for a walk, and I will return home to drink a beer and listen to the symphonic classical station on the internet.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Revolution

They are revolting in the streets and now what will we do? For the uninformed this means your gas prices will rise over the next month and possibly continue to climb. Which means the price of everything may continue to climb. Stand by to complain, to whine about the price of freedom for someone you have never met. We (The U.S.) had the chance to research alternative sources of vehicle momentum over the past thirty years, but instead chose to bask in the security of multi-billion dollar corporations that exist not for the good of human kind but for the acquisition of maximum wealth. To acquire maximum wealth requires a cost efficient business model which translates to being comfortable with dictatorships that are business friendly. These dictatorships have provided us with workers who will work twice as hard as us for half the price because their business model translates to survival. Unfortunately for us (The U.S.), people who have been oppressed tend to have an unstoppable work ethic; they want to see a better future, one that they have only viewed from afar on a Hollywood movie dream.
This country is weak in the ways of drive and education, it does not provide the opportunities for blue collar middle class work that once were because these jobs were outsourced a generation ago and our average American is unwilling to hop through the educational hurdles that will lead to a white collar lifestyle. In short the only thing that will be left of the American middle class will be overeducated underpaid teachers and the rest of the bare necessity of the public sector, i.e. cops and firefighters. What does this mean for an Arab on the brink of freedom through revolution? It means that the window is open if the Arab is willing to go the distance. If a leader is found he may find freedom in fair wages and no longer be exploited by the west’s search of maximum wealth. If this happens our average citizen might finally understand what cheap labor used to mean. Good luck Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, and any other exploited country and any exploited human who feels the burn that we once felt.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

War Poem

I am an American

Red like arterial spray

Washing worn out

Down mountaintops

Snaking through grassy plains

Passed the old gold claims

Fast like a miner’s cart

That has gone off track

And when they said

There is no going back

I breathe in

Like an inner city desperation

Like a hit of crack

We have friends too though

Spanning time like skipping records

On a hot summer day

When the wax is melting

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Jerkin It

It was a hundred and nineteen degrees in Kuwait, which made it closer to a hundred and thirty in the porta-potty. I was trying to focus and there was a rumor that a battle was coming our way, up north in Iraq. I was reading the blue plastic walls kindly delivered to us by a contractor that drew his paycheck from Dick Cheney stock. Black sharpie writing of naked women served for inspiration the way it might in prison. Some jarhead had written, “I should have swallowed the blue pill,” a Matrix reference. The smell of ammonia wafted over the piss that rested over the shit and we were baking together in the desert heat.
Earlier in the day our Company Gunnery Sergeant had held a formation and made us wait for his word in the middle of the desert. The sun was peaking over the bleached sand, we were burning and the grunts were getting angry the way the higher chain of command liked it. We were wondering if this was going to be the word that would send us to war. He was a short black man and had been to Kuwait a dozen years before, probably when he was nineteen like me. I was on fire inside and out, we had been standing in the same spot for twenty minutes, waiting, the way the higher chain of command liked it.
Before we could find a way to kill ourselves at the position of parade rest he came strutting out of his air conditioned circus tent. “You motherfuckers think you’re cute. Y’all like having a good time, fuckin’ around in the desert acting like gad damn children. Now I hear ya’ every now and again talkin’ about how you want to be treated like a man and I get it. But then I walk into the porta-shitter and I see nothing but graffiti. Let me tell you what Alpha Company, as soon as you start acting like men we’ll treat you like men. The next motherfucker I catch writing in the porta-jon is going to stand outside that motherfucker until the next guy writes in it, good to go?” The company responded with a low, “Errr.” The barely acceptable response only second to the “Yut,” which was our way of saying fuck off.
We were now sunburned because we had blown off steam on a plastic wall. After the formation I took off to the porta-head and found myself sweating through my cammies, my heart rate was reaching the red line and the adrenaline was coursing through my veins. I planted my seed in the urinal portion of the mobile toilet like hundreds before me, the goup was so thick it was no use peeing down the thing. I put my trousers on and pulled my sharpie out. I drew an arrow from the back blue plastic wall that pointed down to the poop chute. Above the arrow I wrote, “My Chain Of Command.”

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Short

I was nineteen years old on my fifth night in the battle of Fallujah. We would camp in one of the houses that we had broken into. The machine gunners would sleep on the rooftop and take post when it was their turn, the riflemen would sleep inside and rotate to the rooftop and take post next to the machine gunners. Third platoon’s navy medic had ripped some bedroom doors off of their hinges and offered me one to sleep on. I accepted and wrapped myself in the thin blotchy camouflaged liner I used as a blanket. The riflemen slept on the concrete floor around us talking in their sleep. I tucked myself in and placed the radio handset to my ear, a plastic phone that made a noise like television static. I fell asleep.
The cigarette cherry burned like hundreds before it. Sometimes I would put them out on my hand grenades. I would talk about the girls back home I wanted to sleep with. Women in their late teens danced like strippers in my day dreams. We would swap stories and ammunition when it was time. When it was cold we would cuddle, grown men dreaming of young women. She sent me pictures once, she posed in front of an apartment wall and I would pull them out of my radio pack and wish. I fell asleep.
Before the war, when I was young I would listen to music and write short fiction late at night. The computer screen would glow when the lights were off and I was alone; tapping away at a keyboard listening to the music of plastic on skin. Movie posters littered my walls and I would write to them. Girls would call so I would talk to them, and I wanted to be a man. In high school I was the lead singer in a punk band. A friend in our crew killed himself my junior year and I stayed up one night and wrote him down. I fell asleep.
A few days before I left for boot camp I went on a camping trip with my father and friends. From out of the grey Sierra Mountains flew two Marine helicopters. My father shouted at them, or at me, “Marines, Marines!” I felt an anxiety wash over me and I could hear the nearby rushing stream washing down from the mountains. The day before I left we went to breakfast and I could not eat. He dropped me at the recruiter’s office and we said goodbye.
He gave me his old radio pack and I took his old job. The staff sergeant spent months training me how to use that radio. Knobs stuck out of the olive drab brick and I learned the trade. One day in Iraq I slapped him on the back and we laughed about the radio. He told me he was glad he didn’t have to hump it around anymore. Down the road I heard the gunfire. They pulled him out of the house after tossing their hand grenades, he had fallen asleep.
A black man handed me blue pajamas. I put them on and he had noticed my tattoos. He asked if I was a Marine. I replied that I was and he noticed that I had noticed where I was so he told me I would be one of two coherent men in the mental hospital that night. I slept in a room with two beds, two government issued pillows and two blankets like boot camp. The schizophrenic in my room talked to himself and paced in the moonlight. I stayed awake, afraid that he might hurt me.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Free Tree

There is a hope I hope. I dream that 2004 will become a brick in the foundation that will support the man I want to become. The fallen brothers will cheer from the sidelines and help. We will run the marathon together and always think of each other, not in a way that takes but we shall give. My youth will never be restored but can be learned from. There will be another generation, one I help grow, little sapling that I can water in the ways of peace and knowledge. I want to see the sun rise over free soil, its rays nourishing a long lost dream of equality. The plants are not all the same size, but the taller fronds pass onto the lower fronds and that is how we will survive. A lake of history channels feed life and this time we will have understood what the dying were talking about, be they old and wise or young wounded and suddenly wise.
From a far away mountaintop a man shouts “The war is over,” and this time we understand. This man knows bloodshed, not detached but holds the key to empathy greater than he. No tears are shed and no people are weak, they understand that if we are to survive together a new world must be created. Religion is personal and not dictating, faith flowers in the soul and we will no longer have to prove this to the other. The children question you and you are proud of the individual, little sapling will grow. They will wonder why the old ones lived so strange and we will let them. Blue sky will speak to them the way it speaks to the passing and you hope to see one more second of it.
Little seed has grown and it listens to the ocean and is lost in the tone. The grain of sand will be all that remains of the old and insane. When we want to fight we will talk and when we want to die it will be the time that we watched tick on a clock. There was a dream that once flowed deeper than the deepest soul you have ever known. It watered the seeds and grew you and YOU must carry the pale to the shore. Garden the small things that could not survive without you, garden the small things that could not survive without you.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Sweger part 2

We sat in front of the armory cleaning weapons in Okinawa Japan. Fallujah was over; our days were easy as third platoon waited to finally go home. The base bugle sounded colors and we set our weapons down and snapped to the position of attention. The first song was the Japanese national anthem and base regulation mandated that we salute. I stood at attention with many others, refusing the salute. I felt guilty saluting a flag that had been captured by past and passed brothers and felt the conquered blacktop beneath my boots. When our national anthem played the rest of us saluted.
After colors I turned in my clean weapon and traded it for another. The armory custodian handed me the new gun, he had been a machine gunner replacement for a wounded squad in third platoon during Fallujah. We smiled and we had that brother understanding. I returned to my weapon cleaning, I broke the weapon down like I had been taught in bootcamp, I could have three rifles inspection ready in an hour. I moved from the rifle bore to the outer exterior, working my way down and never up, the dust and carbon flakes would fall to the ground. I picked up the stock and the catch was broken, I inspected inside beyond the plastic door that swung loosely. Inside the compartment were skull fragments and dry blood. I swore and tossed the stock to the ground. The blood ran from my face. I had heard a rumor that the armory custodian might have shot him on accident, that story made sense when the accused requested to clean the weapon of the dead awkward man surprised to death by a jack in the box. I asked the custodian to check the serial number of the rifles previous owner. He said his name and I handed him the weapon to finish cleaning.

Sweger

He was walking down a street in Fallujah Iraq. The power lines sagged and the light poles leaned at awkward angles. He was awkward, the catch for the door to the compartment on his rifle’s stock had broken and the piece of plastic jangled loosely in the chilly winter breeze. The city looked like suburban Southern California, stucco clad and uniform; every house had a gate, and most had rooftop access. The civilians had fled our sector but locked all of the doors behind them, which left empty houses that we spent the day breaking into. Every now and then a suicidal group of Jihadi’s would surprise the infantrymen like a jack in the box.
This had happened and third platoon was down a squad after a successful group of suicidal Jihadi’s popped out of houses and surprised the infantrymen like jack in the box’s. He had not been there but had come to third platoon to help replace the wounded squad. By trade he was a machine gunner. He had not had to clear many houses before, that was the rifleman’s job, and after the house was cleared the machine gun would be placed on the rooftop to cover the riflemen on the ground level. Now he was a rifleman and that was alright with him, everything was always alright with him. His haunting smile floats in dreams, a buddah, only speaking of his family and his girl back home, was always going to go back home.
The Captain had told the Lieutenant to tell the grunts that someone was going to die the next day. We sat next to each other on the tracked vehicle, which would vibrate violently for a few miles and come to an abrupt stop that would toss around the Marines on the benches. The back hatch would drop and the Marines would run out the hole, fresh into sunlight.
I would walk next to the Lieutenant and listen to my radio chatter. There was an argument between the leader of first platoon and my Lieutenant as to which platoon was going down which street. They switched streets and third platoon carried on down its new broken down blown out city route. I watched him as the Lieutenant and I followed another squad. The power lines were sagging behind the leaning light poles and I wondered why he didn’t fix that damn catch and close that plastic door jangling awkwardly from his stock. He didn’t care, not about that or anything, he was going home. The suicidal Jihadi’s surprised him to death and startled the other Marines when they popped out of a house like a jack in the box.