A Marine's Army Buddy (or the other way around)

Antonio and I cruise the desert of our childhood like time stopped a decade ago, with the windows rolled down. I would have been in my last year of high-school and when you are young the blinders are turned on hard, I never noticed so many people wandering the streets of my home-town before but I assured myself that they had always been there. Some of the strangest people in southern California reside in Palmdale, a refuge from the inner city of Los Angeles. It is always a mix where the flat middle class intersects with the poor and everyone of every background lives together in stucco houses mass produced between the middle 1980's and the late 1990's. When I was young I watched the city grow from a one stop-light desert community to the small metropolis it is today, Palmdale grew with me. The only notables that I ever knew crawled out from under those desert rocks were Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, both were young men influenced by European Avante Guard music and for some reason I can't get this useless fact out of my head because it makes the most sense of any analysis I have ever heard about this desert. Tumbleweeds blow, on the outskirts the farmers still work their alfalfa, the suburban police helicopter takes flight at night to find someone doing the same, a pool-hall is still a good place to get stabbed on a Friday but there is something I miss very much from this community I left to heal some time ago. People seem themselves in the desert, or they are more like me than where I reside in green Oregon.

Antonio and I are going to end our cruise in a trailer park to visit our friend Jerral. We had not seen Jerral since a fourth of July party my parents hosted before Antonio and I took off to film our documentary. If there is one place in America that is looked down on by even the most progressive; it is the trailer park. As we pull in the children are riding bikes, they look as innocent as any others so we take care not to run them over, like any others. We park and enter Jerral's home. He tells us it is good to see us, the fish tank humming in his living room; a beep from some other machine, the television is on and set to cartoons, Jerral's children will be home soon. Antonio and I take a seat so that we can begin shooting the shit. Jerral says, "Man, I haven't been out of here since the fourth of July." My heart sinks but it is now very important to listen to every word my friend tells me, because he has had all of this time to think, almost six months solitary. I ask him why he has not been able to leave the trailer? He explains that his van is still being worked on, something about the wiring. Jerral sits in his chair. Jerral and I returned to the same community, in the same year of 2007 after our war. I remember how slow everything seemed to me, so Antonio and I began a television commercial production business, but every week I would get the jack-rabbit in my blood and I needed to get out to see something big. We would usually go to Las Vegas, only a four hour drive. All I could think about was the war at the time and I was very curious to learn how to shake those feelings of darkness. I would try to drink them away, or get away, I would have crawled out of my skin if I could but the reasons are too deep to explain.

Jerral never had that option, no Vegas lights and no hopping in the car to make a bad decision. He had joined the Army and became a tanker. I was a Marine infantryman and our connection is made through my father who had also been an Army tanker. Jerral and his tank commander were happy to be at the front of their convoy, they had volunteered for the dangerous duty. The people who detonate a roadside bomb like to hit the first vehicle in a convoy because it traps the other vehicles in the kill-zone to an ambush. My fight had been in 2004 and house to house, I had always thought to myself how much I preferred that fighting to what later became a convoy war fought through roadside bombs. The waiting during a convoy was always the worst part; crammed into a small space with too much gear for hours on end, maybe your burning coffin, I could hear an explosion that had not caught up to me yet. On Jerral's 21st birthday his explosion caught up to him. The 21st birthday is what the young enlisted man lives for, the day he can finally have a legal drink, maybe to escape from the previous years and tax that being a warrior becomes, or maybe because young people like to drink. I remember that it was a constant fear of mine to be killed before my 21st birthday.

Jerral was stuck in or to the driver's seat, the tank's turret needed to be rotated 180 degrees before he could be removed and many had written the driver off as dead. Antonio and I sit and listen to Jerral recall it, a half hour spent cooking consciously until it all went black. His left arm was burned so bad that it required three amputations and a severed spine leaves him paralyzed with some basic function in his right arm. The scars cover the left side of his body and the tattoo's on his right side, one of a tank, another the crest of his unit the famous horse head of the 1st Cavalry Division (1st Cav). As if the story could not get harder, Jerral speaks of his wife who ran away with an Army ex-buddy of his, she left her children with Jerral, who manned up in a wheelchair and remains a proud pillar of father-ship. He explains that sometimes the young beautiful children don't listen to him and there is nothing he can do from the chair except wait for his mother to come home so that control can be maintained. I ask Jerral about the van, his only escape to the outside world and he explains that the guy working on it since shortly after the fourth of July stopped returning his phone calls a month ago. If Jerral is down at all it is hard to notice, there is an inner strength that glows, his eyes are steel and his position remains something not negative. As if to say, what can I do about it?

An anger washes over me and embarrassment; how could it possibly be that this man on a very short list of other paralyzed vets who gave just short of the ultimate sacrifice under service to the taxpayers of his homeland, taxpayers who sent Jerral across the world to get blown up, cannot leave his fucking trailer?! This is not a free pass request, his account has been paid in full by his body which has suffered the loss of function in youth during service. There should be a Lancaster City parade every day to Jerral's trailer, where a big van will roll up and take him out to lunch. His children should go to the finest private school in the valley, transportation included and free of cost. If some dickhead mechanic ducks his calls that man should be fired, and for damn sure no blown up vet should ever have to do hard time for a crime that he did not commit. When we went to visit Jerral a couple of days later he signed off by saying, "I'll be here man." When I left Jerral to return to Oregon I felt the ribbed plastic on the key between my fingers; and the desert air in my hair, I felt the fabric of the driver's chair and sat down. I pulled the switch on the shifter and moved it to reverse, gave it some gas and backed up, I moved the shifter to drive, gave it some gas and went home.

Happy Marines Come From Connecticut

Happy Marines could be found throughout the battle of Fallujah. They would usually start at it early in the morning when their dirty faces could get away with it, a smile and a laugh, usually at some other Marine’s expense, the energy was strong in the morning and everyone could only be happy before an operation. After that the smiles appeared only in brief short bursts, behind the gunfire and fire, the smoke that choked the young men with their black lungs. I met Paul Stewgots during his first day assigned to our Infantry unit; he had transferred over from security forces and the Marine Corps’ elite fleet anti-terrorism force (Fast Company). I was mopping the floor in the Alpha Company office.

I had been in the infantry a long three weeks and even to “the field”, our slang for the real infantry training I participated in the week before. I had been around the block and I wanted to make sure that Paul was on his game after he arrived. I introduced myself and told him that we would be in the same platoon; he was waiting in our reception room before being introduced to our Captain. Paul noticed that I was as new as his fresh socks but kindly humored my advice anyway. He asked me to program his watch to make up for his time change and once again I found myself frustrated that even the new guy was telling me what to do. I programmed the watch and babbled on all about the things necessary for “the field” which I had become an expert in and we would be leaving again for shortly.

Most transfers from security forces would have spent their previous two years guarding nukes, or the president, and others came from the historic drill team based in Washington D.C., therefore I assumed that Paul had either been standing in front of a missile or marching smartly. Our infantry unit was preparing for a deployment to the Philippines that we would never sail to aboard our Navy ships, which changed direction and headed for the middle-east. The only Marines in our unit that had been to Iraq were the older enlisted Marines, who deployed to Desert Storm thirteen years before. A strange thing had happened while my class was in the school of Infantry in January 2004, our instructors were replaced later in the cycle with instructors who had returned from recent deployments in Iraq, like a cheesy war movie the eighteen year old me was pretty sure the war in Iraq would be over with soon but in hindsight the instructor switch should have rang a loud bell.

Paul sat in his chair, a naturally quiet man. What he did not say was, “Shut your boot mouth kid, I just got back from Iraq.” He would be the only Marine in our platoon who had been to combat in less than a decade. Paul was a weapons expert and a professional Marine. I assured Paul the word that had been handed down to me, not to worry about that Iraq shit, Hawaii Marines go to the Philippines. When we made it to those ships that kept sailing everything changed as we crossed into waters known as the straits of Hormuz, off of the coast of Iran and the gateway into the middle-east. Our platoon was tasked to provide security along the perimeter of the ship; I stood next to Paul, loaded up with live rounds and curiosity. Small Iranian speed boats constantly flirted with our ship’s standoff distance; their small vessels would speed toward our ship and quickly break away before we started our two warnings and a sunken speedboat policy, nevertheless they were testing us and Paul stated that matter of fact when I asked him what the deal was with the speedboats? We stared at the boats and coast of Iran for hours, any time before I would have been water-skiing off of the back of a speedboat in air so hot, the water was emerald and would glow at night. Paul was preparing for round two.
   
 During the first full-fledged firefight I found myself involved in, a squad of Marines were caught in a gunfight with thirty enemy fighters in the house next-door to us. Nathan Douglass recalled from the perspective of our third squad, that Paul Stewgots sent a hail of grenade launcher fire down the street. The launcher requires the operator to load one round at a time, Paul was getting a hand cramp but Douglass explained it was a sight to behold, he just knew what to do, Paul Stewgots was a real life war machine. Some of this would have come from his advanced training in the elite FAST Company but most of it came from a warrior finding his place in the world. I was naturally clumsy, very young and my operating looked a world opposite of Paul’s.

Paul’s squad was blown up inside of a corner house later in the battle. Paul and his best friend Donnie were guarding a stairwell outside of the house when they heard the explosion followed by the moaning of wounded Marines. Today Donnie and Paul live close to each other in Connecticut; I went fishing with them this summer. Paul recalled that as he entered the house he asked his squad leader to help him pull bodies out of the house, his squad leader rasped “I’ve been shot,” and collapsed. Donnie and Pauley began dragging Marines out of the house that was also engulfed in flames. One Marine was lying on a stairwell and was too badly wounded to crawl out of the house. The smoke grew thicker by the moment and when Donnie and Paul found the injured Marine, they had a hard time moving him. Donnie recalled that they looked at each other and Donnie said, “We are going to die in here.” Paul recalled, “But it was like we were all going to leave this house or none of us were.”

Donnie and Paul were always a funny sight for tired eyes, they could make anything fun and the two were the heart of the platoon. They both received medals for valor that should have been higher. I talked to Paul about that last night. He had also been hit by shrapnel but never put in for a purple heart. I remember Paul and Donnie laughing in the desert, seared into my brain. Pauley Stewgots said to me last night that he recalled a flag waving on the back of a vehicle we exited to enter the battle, and how he thought that this was not the reason he was fighting, a piece of cloth. The Marine he pulled out of the burning house is breathing today.

Mexican Marine

Through heavily accented spanglish the first thing he ever said to me was, “I am your Corporal and I do not like the dick sucking.” I would come to later find that he had a robot black heart tattooed over his real heart. I was eighteen years old and standing at the position of attention. I replied, “I do like the dick sucking but to each his own Corporal.”  My roommate was also new to the unit and had Mexican heritage, he bit his lip in fear but I was confident that the Corporal would not comprehend my translation. The Corporal was a light skinned Mexican, he was built of lean muscle, he ran Iron Man competitions for fun and he was my first real squad leader. I was at home. Somewhere in the not too distant future both of the men standing with me in that room would be shot full of bullets in their legs, the squad leader’s leg almost blown in half and my roommate’s calf’s would look like a shark took a snack as he stumbled into our overpowered house with his finger laying down full automatic survival.
 
 Later the squad leader was moved to point-man, after the rest of the unit returned from advanced training. He loved the job and was good at it because he moved like a panther and was born lethal. I asked our point man “Bandito” how he came to America and he told me about walking through the border after several attempts as a teenager. His brother had taught him how to knife fight and he would teach me. He spoke of bandits in the streets of Mexico as a youth and how these bandits knew not to fuck with his knife fighting brother. During a training operation our unit participated in Okinawa the Bandito’s team was wiped out as he fought through the bottom story of a mock hotel with paint bullets. He called over the radio to inform us that he was carrying on. By himself the Bandito killed every member of the opposing force in the hotel working from the bottom floor to the rooftop. I was glad his service was in the US Marines.

I was his student. In Kuwait he introduced me to a Sergeant Peralta in 1st platoon. The Bandito explained to me and the Sergeant his outlook on the impending Battle of Fallujah in late 2004. He said, “I am here for the glory, nothing else. A million bullets can rain down and if Mary wants to take me it will be my time, if not it won’t.” I objected to this non-scientific approach and Sergeant Peralta laughed at my interpretation. Sergeant Peralta would later be nominated for a still pending medal of honor when after being terribly wounded he pulled an enemy hand grenade under his life-filled body, absorbing the lethal impact thus saving the lives of the Marines in the room with him. Regular guys who come from Mexico, the Mexican Marine Corps and an untold story of sacrifice by Mexican immigrants lives to this day in our military, which has always been filled with immigrants who yesteryear were white, giving generations of Americans a good excuse to avoid service.
 
This machinery is necessary to the American framework, it is not cruel, and tomorrow the Latino immigrants who served become politicians and can serve their non-serving white counterparts with a record that can’t be challenged.  This is the real America and a new wave of demographic will be our integrated future, like it or not. The truth is domesticated suburbanite teenagers like I was can’t be killing effective without the hard hand of the immigrant Corporal, who is hard through experience and a representative of every immigrant Corporal from every country to come to America, pick up a gun and fight in another foreign land.
 
After the wounded had been extracted, I picked up the Bandito’s helmet. I looked to a full moon and wondered if there was any significance in this? My hero had been killed and my teacher was off to the hospital. I reached in his helmet and picked out a Spanish prayer card he had tucked into the webbing. I stuck it into the webbing of my helmet and left the war an untouched atheist. I will visit the Bandito in Mexico next month for the first time since we were Marines, where he is fighting for his country in the drug war. He is my last interview for the film.

Between The Peak And Valley

Somewhere between the peak and the valley is the normal; where a human finds themselves most waking hours. I walked down the aisle on October 6, took the plunge, and pledged half of everything I do not yet own to my woman. As I walked along the smiling faces I thought of all of those marriage casualties who had come before me, crawling along the sidelines and tugging at the extra fabric on my tux. Of course two of them were my parents but blessed am I to have grown up with four of the greatest. Many people were married when I was in the service and today most of the couples have dissolved the ties that once bound them.

The rumor had spread to Fallujah Iraq in early 2005 that some of the wives of our unit had been caught running a brothel on our home base in Hawaii, as per many great substance lacking rumors this one came with the catch that the reason our chain of command had not informed anyone was because they didn’t want Marines in a combat theater going ape-shit with their loaded weapons while contemplating a different warriors welcome home than originally anticipated. When we finally came home it turned out the story was true, many of those wives had fled and spent the deployment money as well. I specifically remember standing in some line behind a Marine who said, “After all of that (war/battle/survival) I just want my truck, but she won’t give it back…. This is fucked up shit!”

These are scary stories colder than the poles but like combat either the fucked Marine carries on, or dies. Most carry on. Even given the crippling statistics a very few have been able to make it work. The reason strange and cruel divorce was such a happenstance in the Marines had to do with very young men marrying usually a high school sweetheart (first kiss), taking her far away from home and planting her in a house in Hawaii, where she finds herself alone for the first time in her life the duration of a year after the new husband deploys. Looking at this raw situation honestly sets a young woman up for a very lonely year of sacrifice, or the best year she has ever had with an endless surplus of tax free deployment money just a pin number away. I don’t judge because I have not been a nineteen year old woman married to a rich nineteen year old Marine, all of our money is expendable when the house and food are paid for by Uncle Sam, the drill instructors warned us about such women.
 
 I was married in Long Beach Mississippi, we had a real Southern wedding and to say it went perfect does not give it justice. My step-brother/brother Michael found it appropriate to mention that never in a million years could he picture my wedding being in the South, making reference to our upbringing in suburban Southern California and on how this was a true act of Southern hospitality that left men from our background awe stricken. I find it important as a combat veteran to associate everything with war so that I may appreciate a greater importance and assign meaning to this thing that I find so meaningless and time consuming, the character “Walter” in the 1997 film “The Big Lebowski” had a knack for doing the same thing. I think that civilians focus on such caricatures because like many stereotypes, this one has merit. Kin to the one of a grandfather barking at his kids, “You think this is bad? Let me tell you a little story called the battle of …” I am surprised to have found such a great match and to be so happy but being surprised at this surprised me so greatly that I felt like analyzing why. I am a child of divorce, which has a negative connotation I do not accept as mentioned above. Where I come from, it was strange not to have divorced parents. My parents remarried two beautiful people and I cannot imagine a happier childhood without them or the siblings I was raised with but I can imagine an unhappier childhood had they decided to continue fighting it out (risk/reward).
 
 My love Katharine married me and I had one of those tunnel vision moments where I felt time stop and the computer in my head registering something for a long “save as” (happiest moment) to replace the previous “save as” (surviving Iraq). Earlier in the morning I had my sun rise cigarette and found myself overwhelmed with emotion as I understood that this beautiful day would never be known by the young men who died single in Iraq 2004-05 (Walter Sobchak) Semper Fidelis, something known only to a warrior. It is this understanding and respect for death that I have found the most meaningful lesson learned from war in life. Death will eventually take us all as it has everyone before but we as living human beings, despite origin in culture and religion, always seem to find it important to celebrate certain living things universally. I could feel connected to early man walking down the aisle the way I could feel a certain transcendence walking into battle. We were lucky to have our loved ones, I am sure other weddings full of unstable in-laws could understandably go quite another way; in grace our new Anderson family is blessed.

This moment was an opportunity for reflection, there was a girl I would write letters to when I was in Iraq back when I really didn’t know shit. Now I know some shit and the shit that I do know is deep, if I had not done everything I did the way that I did I never would have met my Mississippi bride in Portland Oregon, she helps heal me and I now know what it means to be happy to be alive. Things get better and sometimes they go backward but to me it is all worth the dime I paid to ride this ride, I have had the experience and there is so much more to come, and when I reflect again somewhere in time’s never certain future I will know more than I do today just like they knew yesterday until there is no more day. My dead brothers will walk with me and all of the others who remember them, that is part of our service, in this our joy is shared and the important sting of their loss is a reminder to remember how different this gathering of family could be and how each one was a loss that eternally disrupts history. When I awoke the day after Corporal Michael Cohen was killed I had an epiphany that life would forever be this way, I knew he would be attached to me for every happy moment of my life, but he tells me it’s only because he wants to see too, so I let him.

To Whom It May Concern ...

       In my documentary “And Then They Came Home” I ask Marines that I had served with the same thirty questions so that I can gauge patterns in their response eight years after our shared point of trauma. One of my questions is, “Do you think a warrior ever comes home?” I am preparing to film my interview leaving only one Marine in Mexico to be filmed when I return from my wedding. I meditate on my own response. My life-long hometown friend Antonio has been sleeping on my couch for the past few weeks, stringing filmed pieces together so that editing will not be a hassle and we will be able to make our December deadline for the film. Does a warrior ever really come home? I couldn’t tell you because deep in my beat up wallet I bought after my deployment to Afghanistan in 2006 is a National Guard ID tucked behind my plastic cards and license. In April of 2010 I wrote my Guard unit a letter of resignation and have not had to put my uniform on since. I am contracted until December 2013.
 
I don’t know what it is like to come home, I haven’t been there since I watched my southern California suburbia youth haven disappear in the rearview mirror of my recruiter’s SUV bound for Los Angeles to catch a bus for San Diego three weeks after I had turned eighteen in August 2003. You are now leaving childhood, Palmdale California 1986-2003. I survived two combat deployments serving in the Marine Corps from August 2003 to August 2007 as an infantryman. A historian might note that those were the most violent years of the war. One day I found myself honorably discharged from the Marine Corps, I left my home base of Hawaii changed and bound for southern California. I spent a month at home, went to work for my Uncle for a month and caught a train to Portland Oregon to visit my best friend. Signs of trouble were seemingly slow to come, I was still drinking like a Marine which can be compared to twice that of a frat boy, one less than a vagrant and the nights had been bothering me for some time. There is still a hole in my best friend’s apartment from where I threw a hunting knife into his wall. In November I returned to California to start a business with my friend Antonio after coming into a family inheritance. We purchased film equipment and started to film television commercials and court depositions in California’s Antelope Valley. We were the youngest members of our Chamber of Commerce and I found that clients were receptive to a former Marine; my service would be brought up on the first interview and was absolutely an asset. I had no formal training in running a business but Antonio and I seemed to be doing alright during the days and at night I would return to my father’s house, drink like a Marine and watch endless videos of Fallujah on “Youtube”.

 I was in the second battle of Fallujah in 2004 and if you knew me in late 2007 you knew I fought there, it was all I ever wanted to talk about. I had felt zero emotional connection to friends and family since I had returned home and I wondered if I had ever felt anything in the first place, I was sure however that I had been doing a good job at faking it and I would think to myself that the connection would probably come naturally soon. Sleep was so infrequent that all I could remember about it was that I didn’t hold it as a priority at the time and could go for a couple of days on a few hours. I was standing on my porch smoking a cigarette drunk one night when I announced to my father that I was thinking about joining the National Guard unit that I had read in the local paper was getting ready to deploy to Iraq in 2008. My father had this way he would look at me every now and again back then, a sort of deep baffle with a nod of understanding.
In December 2007 I joined the National Guard, I signed a contract to become a tanker…a soldier who rides in a tank, my father had been the same thing when he was in the Army and after working with tanks in 2004 I was convinced that this would be the most enjoyable way to return to Iraq.

 I signed the contract and swore in over the phone on the same day. After I had sworn in it occurred in through the haze of the previous night’s hangover that I was not clear on an important part of the contract. I asked the recruiter how long the contract was that I had just signed? He looked embarrassed and quickly said, “You wanted the bonus right?” I replied yes and he told me, “It’s six years.” I was stunned but thought to myself I guess I’ll just keep doing this for the next six years; I had knocked out four in the Marines and I knew once I had sworn in there was not much that could be done to reverse it. When I got to my new unit I was informed that their status had changed from tankers into infantry because they didn’t need any more National Guard tanks in Iraq. I had joined to return to Iraq in an armored death chariot, I found myself back out in the open and on my feet, this made me uncomfortable. I liked the people in my National Guard unit and was able to make friends with my new platoon as I figured out how the National Guard was different from the Marines. I was surprised and excited by the professionalism of the unit; most of the soldiers had done prior active duty service like myself and joined the Guard after, there were even a handful of Marines in the unit. We would show up to train one weekend a month and the rest of the time we would work at our civilian day jobs.

 I prepared for Iraq and went back to cutting commercials and drinking at night, not sleeping and with a new weight on my shoulders, the next deployment. Some nights I would open my father’s bedroom door and babble drunkenly until he was awake and then shut his door. One night my father came over to the computer to tell me good night, I suddenly began to cry and I told him that I had been thinking of shooting myself with the shotgun upstairs. He was baffled again and I was sure I would have to answer for that slip after we came home from work the next day. The next day came and I did not go to work, I drank and told my friend Antonio that I wanted to go to open microphone stand- up comedy night at a club in Hollywood. By the time we got there I was tanked and quickly sank into an incoherent mess. I don’t remember my routine but I am sure it was nonsensical, after it was over we left the club and Antonio and a friend wanted to get something to eat. I told them to leave me in the SUV. They left and the rest I remember some of and the other parts Antonio filled in for me later. I was trying to kick out the back window of my vehicle when they found me, Antonio let me out of the vehicle, terribly confused and then I disappeared.

I left my friends and found myself drunk and walking through alleys and Hollywood streets, the writer’s strike was going on and screenwriters waved signs in front of one of the production studios. I checked myself into a hotel room and visited a liquor store to pick up a forty of fine malt liquor. I pounded the forty and sat in the hotel room. I didn’t want to go home because I didn’t want to face my father, and I didn’t want to return home to an empty house where I might shoot myself. In the drunkenness I remember that I tried to hang myself but the knot I had tied with the towel had come undone on the shower rod and I found myself on my ass wondering why that thing didn’t hold and then something hit me. I was trying to kill myself, I had been acting strangely and something I had been in denial about was very real, the things I had heard on the news and radio ads were true and something had happened to me in combat that was killing me back home.

 I called my mother who came to pick me up from the hotel and the next day I found myself a twenty two year old combat veteran in a mental hospital. Antonio had spent the night searching for me with my step brother and I was able to explain things when he came to visit me in the hospital. The initial intake and my first twenty four hours was spent being evaluated alongside people with severe mental issues, some criminals and this setting I found to be completely insane and counter-productive to my care. I spent the rest of March 2008 in the hospital. When I returned my unit had deployed to Iraq without me and I began going to Guard weekends as a member of the “rear detachment” comprised of soldiers who had medical conditions that did not allow them to deploy. I had left Antonio and our business behind and went to work for my mother while I attended aftercare in the hospital. The economy was tanking and I wanted to get on my feet a regular way so I moved into my sister’s apartment and found a job at an aerospace factory. I worked on the factory floor with Vietnamese immigrants, some of whom were Vietnam combat veterans, we would tell war stories and they would slap me on the back on the Fridays that I had to dress in my Army uniform to go to a Guard weekend.

After the first hospitalization I began to notice that I would become nauseous before reporting to my unit, a nervousness that would cause me to vomit. As the factory became a victim of the economy I had decided at the end of 2008 that I wanted to move to Portland Oregon, so I put in my two-week notice with my job and showed up to my last guard weekend in California. The acting unit commander wished me well and told me that this weekend he wanted me to watch over a soldier who had been experiencing similar issues. I agreed to watch the soldier, I knew him well and he had told me a bit about his issues. I started to worry about him during the previous Guard weekend; this soldier had been prior active duty Army and had returned from a deployment to Iraq.

I stepped outside with him and we stacked our gear next to each other. I informed the soldier I would be watching him during the weekend and he was alright with that. We lit up cigarettes and I asked him if he thought he would be alright to train over the Guard weekend? He said yes and I believed him. A moment later he was crying and told me, “I don’t know why I am crying Anderson.”  I understood why he was crying and told him that I thought he needed help. I told him it would be a better idea for him to return home. He told me he started a post-traumatic stress disorder program later in the week and when I told the acting commander that the soldier was having problems, he agreed and sent the soldier home. My friend called me to let me know he made it home and I have not seen or talked to him since.

I drove up to Portland Oregon and got a job writing parking tickets for a private company. It took me a few months to check into my new Guard unit because there were no tank units nearby Portland, so in the end I was sent to an infantry unit. I had told the guy placing me that I had been rated non-deployable and asked him not to send me to a deploying unit. My infantry unit had deployed to Afghanistan when I got to it so I once again found myself in the rear detachment. I had saved up a little bit and moved from my friend’s loft into an apartment and found myself truly alone for the first time in my life. At first I thought that being alone is what I had always wanted but the nights got longer again and the same weight had been with me, I felt less than cured and was not sure if there was a cure for how life felt. In January 2010 I once again found myself in a hospital after strong suicidal ideation.

 I got out and this time it did not take long for me to realize that things were still not fixed. I could feel myself running out of patience with myself and one day in April 2010 I was walking in Portland, fearing the next Guard weekend when I realized that the source for most of the anxiety in my life was being a member of the National Guard. I was not a bad soldier and that was part of the problem, it looked like I was fine so why would anyone think I wasn’t? Even with two hospitalizations I was seen as fit for duty though I felt completely unfit for duty and the pressure was building. It agitated my symptoms and I felt like someone was going to deploy me even if they were not and the fear of deployment agitated these things that literally drove me insane. I decided that if I valued my life I would write the National Guard unit a letter of resignation and face the consequences or carry on because I knew I would not survive much longer under the status quo, certainly not to December 2013. In April of 2010 I wrote something that changed my life, a letter of resignation…

With proper military respect and to whom it may concern,

I joined the United States Marine Corps in August of 2003, shortly
after graduating high school. After completing the Marine Corps School of
Infantry in February of 2004 I was stationed in Kaneohe Bay Hawaii where I
trained for a deployment to the Philippines specializing in jungle warfare.
When training was completed we set sail from Okinawa and continued on to
Kuwait. In a few months my infantry battalion suffered the loss of fifty-one
brothers, many of whom I had crossed paths with during my then short stint.
Afterward I participated in a combat deployment to northeastern Afghanistan
where my battalion suffered four KIA. Since the loss of so many close friends
I have never been able to reconcile my belief in service with my belief in
life.
     I no longer cherish the ability to be combat effective, lost in the
most evil haze of hell that a war can produce. I miss my friends and am often
confused as to why I am alive and they are not, I cannot imagine what it is
like to draw the short straw. This thought consumes me, I find myself unable
to comprehend any sort of meaning in this life, and I miss my friends.
     Since my discharge from the Marine Corps I have spent time in two
different mental hospitals, one for an attempted suicide and the other two
years later after the symptoms of a beast of an affliction returned to kill
me again. Being a dumb grunt I do not know much other than that I am still
alive and that I do not have the ability to hurt another human being.
      I will not lace up my boots again, and I am aware that there are
consequences for this action. I write this letter as a resignation and not a
declaration of insubordination, I beg for mercy and for benefits that I
earned walking between steel raindrops twice. I hope that I can someday make
peace with the violence that has consumed my twenties, I pray that this
affliction does not consume my thirties on into the rest of my life. I hope
the reader of this letter a successful and safe career, I hope the reader of
this letter finds what they are looking for in life, I thank God for the
United States Military, full of brave souls and too full of sacrifice for me,
if this is delayed cowardice than a coward is what I now am. I will not be
returning phone calls or allowing visitors into my home without a warrant,
this is not personal, it is simply my own paranoia of a large world that I
have seen destroy good men.
       Lastly I would like to thank ***** for doing everything
in their power to help a Soldier when he was down.

                                    Fair winds and good luck,

                                       Garrett Phillip Anderson

I expected my cell phone to be assaulted by incoming phone calls that morning, but nothing came. I felt a wave of fear sweep over me; I knew military police would probably be at my apartment, maybe after work. I went home from lunch. I was astonished to find an email from our training sergeant that explained I would not have to put on my uniform again and that the unit wanted to help me through this process of discharge but I had to contact them. I did and the process began. Since then I have not had to attend a Guard weekend, I have written for therapy and that has led to this film I am working on. I am getting married soon and live with my fiancé, created a more stable support network. Nothing is fixed but the pressure that has been taken off of me has allowed me to live a more real and fulfilling life. I was told that I would go to two review boards for discharge, the first would be a mental health screening and the next if I was found not fit for duty at the mental health screening would be my actual discharge board. I went to the first board in Madigan connected to Fort Lewis in Washington State in January of 2011. Madigan would later be found to have been lowering PTSD ratings for soldiers to save money at the same time I was seen there. All I can conclude from that is that my story was so fucked up even those dirty shrinks said I was not fit for duty.

 I waited for my discharge board and it never came. In July 2011 I was called by my unit and told to report for two weeks of annual training. I explained that I was still waiting for my discharge board and he explained that my not fit for duty status expired after one hundred eighty days. I called my father and we got in contact with a congressional representative who was able to delay my annual training and start the process again. In November of 2011 I flew to Georgia for another fit for duty board and was again found not. I had a second phone interview after the Madigan story broke and I think that one went well. I am not clear if I will ever be discharged from the National Guard, I wish I knew what it felt like to be truly free again. I also wonder how many more soldiers like me are out there in this limbo? The unit when informed went out of its way to help while following the rules of the system, so if there is blame to be put on delay it is on whatever is happening above. I recently received a letter from the VA apologizing for the delay in my case review but assuring me that they will get back to me when the process is finished.

Combat operations in Afghanistan are slated to end by 2014; luckily my contract ends December 2013. In a decade of service my time will not have known peace. The unit knows I am not fit to serve, the shrinks have found me unfit to serve, I know I am not fit to serve and for two and a half years I have been waiting for the paperwork to be filed. The only reason I am better today than I used to be is because I found another way. I have pages of paperwork from mental hospitals and a film I am editing to verify how it could have been that combat affected a young life so deeply. I urge those in similar situations to seek help, because they will wait for you to die before offering help if you don’t do anything for yourself. I proudly served my country and fought through two combat deployments, I am not ashamed of having been so affected but I am ashamed in how the system treats warriors who have put their lives on the line to protect it, this makes me nauseous and I don’t know what to do with any of this information.

...Because I said so

 I dug a hole with a Marine whose last name was so long that I will refer to him as Alphabet. Alphabet and I were training to be infantry Marines in February 2004. I liked Alphabet because the instructors had instructed us not to sleep but Alphabet slept anyway. Alphabet descended from Persia and was quick to let you know. He was supposed to be awake and providing conscious security behind his weapon as I dug a hole to prepare a defensive position for simulated enemy invasion. We had spent the day climbing up a mountain and I couldn’t blame Alphabet because there were no real enemy coming to storm the mountain so as I listened to his heavy breathing and watched his shoulders rise and sag I reminded myself that I was tired too so maybe if I let him get away with it, he might return the favor. The last time I saw Alphabet was on the last day I spent in Camp Fallujah, Iraq. Just like a war movie; he told me he could not wait to get out of this place. I concurred, that night he boarded a helicopter and Alphabet has been dead ever since.
   
 I remember a Marine who had been shot in the head. I looked down even though I told myself not to, his eyes were rolled back and the sun broke through the hole in his empty skull, the sunlight making the thinner parts around the open wound glow orange, the first time sunlight had ever shone in his head. I remember a Marine about my age, he was overweight and one time walked himself to death on a forced march in Okinawa during a black flag day. A black flag is flown on base to let other Marines know that it is too hot to conduct strenuous training on account that walking in the heat with a combat load on has been known to raise a Marine’s core temperature which might have nowhere to go other than total meltdown on a day so hot. One of the Marines in my unit replied after hearing the news, “Fuck ‘em he should have hydrated.” March or die!

One night the squad leader of 1st squad asked if anyone wanted to go back to base to make a phone call for the first time in three weeks during a battle my unit had been told we would only spend four days in. Each Marine declined so the squad leader volunteered himself and a close friend. The next morning an order came down that we would not be allowed to throw hand grenades as we entered each house that was to be cleared during the day’s operation. This was a deviation of our standard operating procedure. Later that day the replacement for the squad leader that returned to base was killed and six of our Marines were wounded, at the end of the night that city block was destroyed by a massive airstrike, which packs more punch than a hand grenade but was only used after all enemy contact had ceased.

The first time I came across an enemy dead body was after I shot him to be funny. We could smell his potent stench from houses away but earlier in the day had been given the order to shoot all dead bodies so when I did to lighten the mood, my Lieutenant looked at me in disbelief and said, “Good Anderson, you want to be a smart ass and shoot very dead bodies? You can check it for intelligence.” I asked my old roommate for some gloves and he handed me a pair as I approached what used to be a very tall Arab man’s corpse lying in the doorway that led to a kitchen. At the time all I could see were his two legs sticking out from under a blanket that had been draped over him, covering above his knee caps. The blanket was soiled and stained black. It smelled like someone had left a refrigerator full of meat open in the hundred degree heat and I pulled the blanket back. It appeared that the intelligence the Lieutenant was searching for had flown out of the front of the large man’s face after he had been executed as I noticed that his hands were bound. There was not much of a face left; I remember sticky stinky black goop, scattered teeth and being amazed at the sight of a real life dead man, which would cease to amaze me later on as there were to be many more corpses to see. Down the street were thirty-one Syrian foreign fighters that would all be dead in a few hours, I think those Syrians killed the tall guy during a Fallujah house-jacking so we killed the Syrians and now they kill each other.
   
 When I got out of the Marine Corps I would think about these things and how I wished I could see them again just to check on them and make sure they were real. Human misery was not something I had been exposed to growing up in suburban Southern California and part of it fascinated me and the other part horrified me the way a pre-adolescent poking a dead animal with a stick on a hot afternoon might feel after dinner with the folks. The army suicide statistics doubled within a month recently. I hate when people ask me why we are there because to tell the truth, I don’t care. It is not the trigger pullers job to care about why they are there, their job is to carry out the bidding of superiors who are trusted and act as the omnipotent sword of         American policy. American civilians are the reason we are there, they are represented by elected representatives of their constituency. If the constituency puts enough pressure on their politician, policy sways with the majority demand. Why are we there? We are there because you don’t care, because our society is too lazy and detached to do anything about this problem which may be a dinner party conversation to many people I know but was and is a very real reality to me and those like me. Sometimes I wonder if the people of Afghanistan don't want the Taliban in charge, why we don't let their constituency throw the Taliban out and if Al Qaeda comes out from their crab shells in Yemen then why can’t we do what we have been doing in Yemen and kill those nasties from the sky? In the end this is what is going to happen anyway.
     
Sun goes down and up goes the statistics of some more suicides of honorable people offering sacrifice to a complacent society that can’t afford a warrior’s understanding much less a war. Up goes the statistics of active duty service dead, gunned down by people we are supposed to be training, but fuck you troop, you signed the contract. March or Die! Why? Don’t ask a vet, ask your congressman and tell he or she why you think war in Afghanistan is or is not the bees knees... because I would not hesitate to invade any country for any reason as long as it was alongside people I cared for, which is what my primary motivation to succeed in battle was, not to think about lazy people whose concept of foreign diplomacy is the television until the next commercial. Unless you record your television in which case you may fast forward through the content which does not interest you... in which case you stopped reading my writing paragraphs ago.

Sailor Vic

I was sailing through the hot summer’s air and I could smell the chlorine in the water shortly before we became one. I had gone in with my clothes on, I pushed myself up for air and the smell had turned sour, full of diesel exhaust and cordite. The brown river water was warm, one of the sailors on a riverboat gave me a hand, he looked twelve years old with a twisted smile and crazy in his eyes, the way that youth do when they have been in combat for too long or have taken a street drug that has taken them. Thick black smoke reached for an electric blue sky that hung over the river and shone through the canopy. “Welcome aboard my boat!” He exclaimed shaking my hand wildly, “This motherfucker is going all the way, gonna’ take it to Thailand and open a bar, you know what I mean man?” I didn’t know what he meant. Another sailor manning the fifty caliber machine gun was pumping away but the gun made no sound, all I could hear was his breathing and the brass casings bouncing off the deck. I gaped at my wet clothes and was in awe that I found myself in desert digital camouflage, a familiar sight seemed distant. The sailors were dressed in olive drab with black boots. “Fuck this Perfume River shit! All they give us is dead Marines coming out of Hue! Fucked up man, I don’t want to be hauling these poor dead bastards!” Tracer fire erupted from the tree line and the air lit up like Christmas but none of the gunfire made any noise. I looked at the nametape of the wild eyed sailor and it all made sense, it read Czito.
   
“Well what the fuck are you doing here Anderson, you wanna come on my boat and not be conversational?” He twisted himself with intensity. “What can a young man learn without war?” I ask. The Czito scratched at his chin. His smile faded, “Don’t you come on my boat and ask me a question like that! This is where I live man, same with the dead boys on the deck! Don’t be shitting where we live!” A dead Marine sat upright and looked me in the eye, “Listen to the old man.” “Just shut the fuck up Anderson and I will show you.” I pushed myself up for air and the chlorine smelled pleasant on a hot day in Los Angeles. Victor Czito an ancient friend of my father and Navy Vietnam Veteran had pushed me into a pool not realizing that these days pushing people in pools usually involves electronics. We drank fine tequila and he told me his story of the Perfume River. In the year 2012 nobody hates war more than the Czito because somewhere on a riverboat is a kid scared shitless as I was in Fallujah. The young man continues endlessly rocking away at his fifty caliber and the young intense sailor screams over the noise of the gunfire loud as an exploding sun, “Anything he fucking wants!”

A Younger Cousin

Time is becoming more relevant to me as a younger aging man. I think I am moving in the direction of better understanding the inevitable cruelness of mortality as I am shifting from the invincible mirage of youth to the realistic tangibility that is a fragile life. I received a post card today inviting me to attend my cousin’s high school graduation and for a moment the world went still in the way it does when the hairs on the back of my neck raise and I am left to think about a decade before. I was seventeen years old when I touched the turf of school for the last time in the month of June and on Friday the 13th with six hundred and sixty six fellow graduates from Palmdale High School; we started the class with closer to nine hundred I am sure.

 My father had been an embedded reporter serving in Iraq since March of 2003 and was able to make it home in time for me to graduate. That night my family and I went to dinner on the nice end of town and as a high school gift I was given new swim trunks. A few weeks later I took a Greyhound bus north to where my Uncle lived so that I could pump propane for him during the summer and before I left for boot-camp. The war in Iraq seemed impermanent listening to the radio news as I traveled from grocery store to grocery store replenishing waning supplies of propane for the store’s floor buffers that would keep shiny tile for happy suburbanites. We rode in the cab of a Ford pick-up truck with a 200 gallon propane tank in the covered bed of the truck that fueled our trip and my Uncle Chuck’s livelihood. He raced cars for fun and during his free time would travel the indy “sprint-car” racing circuit from California to Colorado. A sprint car is a homemade land rocket that must follow specific standards to race, with a fuselage constructed of panels of carbon fiber in the shape of a bullet attached to an oversized engine that requires a land pilot to navigate a field of speeding death asphalt, these drivers race for nothing more than the rush of speed. That year Uncle Chuck informed me that this would be the hardest work I would have ever completed in my life and that when it was done I would be ready to be a Marine.

That year he did not hire that standard pit crew that came as a natural fixture to the other sprint cars on the circuit. Nor did he hire an extra spotter whose job would normally be to watch the racing car with a pair of binoculars and call over a radio connected to the driver, the positions of his enemies on the track. In the summer of 2003 Uncle Chuck let me know that I would be performing all of these jobs, pit crew, spotter and I would push start his car onto the track driving a four wheeler. With this development and since he unlike the other drivers owned his own car this would be a way to save a pile of money, it was a brilliant plan. Most sprint car drivers had sponsors who owned their car but Uncle Chuck had built his own and that season it was finishing top three.

 I had heart, but zero mechanical talent; I had been raised by a newspaper man whose father had nailed his garage door shut after it stopped working properly. My dad could change a tire and that’s about where my expertise ended. Shortly before a race Uncle Chuck let me know that if he blew a tire I would have to help him change it on the track. The process worked like this; after we did a onceover of the car, checked the fluids, tire pressure and fixtures I would hop on a four wheeler and push the race car onto the track full of other race cars speeding well over a hundred miles an hour, after I did that without killing myself I would ride the four wheeler to the spotting stands where the other more mature spotters would laugh as I came running up the bleachers. My Uncle would race the first and last lap blind and at the end of the race I would get on the four wheeler and he would tell me whether or not he needed to be pushed into the pits, which were made up of large trailers full of tool boxes that the cars could be transported in when they were not racing. Chuck had an old horse trailer he had rigged into a race-car trailer, he lived "Do it yourself".Sometimes the car could make it to his trailer with the momentum of the last lap but the engine would die below an idle because it operated only at a high rate of RPM. .

His kids were with him, my cousin’s C.J. and Jessica. They would watch the race while dad and I worked. One time the announcer happily explained to the audience that a new driver who had turned 18 years old was participating in her first race. I got to the spotting stands and the thunder sound of the cars on the track was rumbling as I sighted in on Uncle Chuck, the insiders new him as “Mad Dog”,a play on his last name Maddox, but he earned the name for being an asshole on the track. The girl’s car got to close to the Mad Dog and he turned into her, both cars went up on two wheels and she had become too shaken to race up at the front with the pack. Chuck was laughing on the microphone and I could hear her spotters swearing as they began to give me the stink eye and curse my Uncle. One of the spotters told me to tell my Uncle to, “Watch his ass in the pits.” I radioed the message to my Uncle and he laughed and told me everyone could hear us on the net and that he would see me in the pits.

 I ran down the aluminum bleachers and mounted my four wheeled steed, I cruised through the mud and back to the trailer where Chuck’s car would soon roll up to, but there was a crowd, the girl’s sponsor and pit crew were waiting for him. They were swearing as soon as I got there so I picked up a tire iron because I had heard about pit fights and these people seemed pissed. Chuck’s never ending classic country music was playing from his jerry-rigged tool box when his car came in neutral to the trailer. The girl’s sponsor was a fat guy and he started screaming at Chuck that he would kill him if he ever touched his car again. From under his helmet Chuck sarcastically responded with, “Fuuuck you”. The sponsor had not heard him so my Uncle repeated himself after taking his helmet off with a smile, “Fuuuck you.” I gripped the tire iron and there was no fight, my Uncle was too slick for a fight, he got his mission done and moved along to the sound of a party, to this day he lives an eternal weekend earned through hard work. My cousin who was a boy of eight at the time became my hero when I was in Fallujah and his mother wrote me about C.J. building a shrine with my pictures and candles, praying to it.

That last night in Colorado was July 4th and my Uncle wanted to know if it was alright with me if we left before the fireworks, I couldn’t see why not because we had more work to do and more summer to live but that night we drove through the empty desert of Wyoming and the black night was illuminated with fireworks far off in the distance for hours. That night we all slept in the same room together and Uncle Chuck told C.J. and Jessica, “Your cousin is going off to serve our country and we should be very proud of him.” They agreed and we slept, at some point I woke up in war and the day after I received a letter that my cousin is graduating High School. I will be there, and this summer he will work for me as I film a documentary capturing my life since I turned eighteen. A year after I worked his father’s car I had left for war, my praying cousin will hear the story but live at peace, when I am done with him he will understand something, he will never have worked this hard in his whole life. I remember how fresh the world seemed and how dark it became, what can a young man learn without war?

War Phone Home

The Early morning hours were passing in the ghostly low lit glow of my computer clock, the dog was reclined on our sofa and resting her head on her paws; gazing through my soul or looking for a date, I can never tell. A friend was calling and the phone was ringing. I hate the phone; anyone who knows me knows this. It is a strange irrationality of mine but my level of discomfort turns to panic as I let each ring pass. Sometimes I flip a switch inside and pick it up, other times I watch it play through to the end and take a moment to get over it.

My theory is that I hate the phone because I was a platoon radio operator during the battle of Fallujah when I was nineteen and every time somebody called me out there, it was an emergency. I had to monitor the net for unit reports on friendly movement so that my platoon did not walk into another’s gun fire. One time I had told a tank that it would be clear to fire on a building, shortly after I watched a dozen Marines from another platoon take cover behind the same building, out of sight of the tank. The tank’s turret shifted and pointed toward the building. When there are too many people talking on a radio channel, the net gets tied up and I have to wait for a person to stop talking before I can talk to them. I frantically held down the button to my handset repeating over and over, more panicked and more panicked, “Cease fire, cease fire, cease fire!” When I let go of the button I could hear the tank power down with a sound like a vacuum cleaner and my handset answered back, “Roger, cease fire.”

Other times I would need the radio to call for a medical evacuation of friends who had been shot or killed or hit by explosives. Most days my ear was stuck to my handset for eighteen hours and nothing special but during the times that nothing happened a person could not help but to wonder what the next horrible phone call might be. I turn my knob to our battalion channel and sometimes the breaking news of the day is a friend from another company has just been killed or I am sleepy on hour seventeen but keep nodding to the sound of empty radio static that makes a noise like television snow filled with a cold panic that if I succumbed to the sleep, my friends would die because of me. Sometimes Nate Douglass would call my apartment late at night and I would not pick up. I would want to cry for fear but did not feel well enough to help someone who needed real help. I would take a moment to recover and carry on with the endless web surfing. He just wanted to talk, so did I but war is a bitch and we both know it.

One time I picked up the phone for a number I did not recognize and it was Luis Munoz, our old point man. He had moved back to Mexico after the service and was calling to tell me about the violence he was witnessing, he said it was worse than Fallujah and he had a child to raise. He had been shot through the leg in Fallujah so bad that he was told he would never walk again. When we reunited Luis was in physical therapy walking with a cane in his early twenties, by the time he was discharged from the Marines as a wounded warrior he was jogging. Rich Casares had been hit by an enemy hand grenade in Fallujah which had damaged one of his eyes. The doctors put an air bubble behind it; I had to write him because he was in a Texas Prison, when he wrote me he would ask for a picture of Fallujah that looked really good so he could have it tattooed across his back. Paul Johnson has a kid and soon will Donald Blais, they live in Connecticut today and during the battle rushed into a burning house to ferry the bodies of their wounded friends, without being ordered to.

One early morning in my dark apartment I picked up the phone for Nate Douglass who had also been hit by an enemy hand grenade. We had been best friends in Fallujah. We talked about our struggles coming home and then we talked about the day that he had been hit by the hand grenade. He would reference the morning and I would retort with my perspective of the same thing. When we got to the operation he would talk about what he saw inside a house while I would tell him what I saw outside of that house, I realized that the story flowed naturally and that if I had the other members of our platoon who were there that day I was sure that they could reconstruct the story with even more depth. I told Douglass that night that I had an idea for a documentary that would tell a story of real life heroism and struggle that might answer questions for outsiders and those just returning from their story.

(Link to the Documentary)
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andthentheycamehome/and-then-they-came-home

1/26/05

These people fell out of the sky on Jauary 26, 2005. I knew some and others names I learned that I had known but would never know. The night was cold, I remember waiting for what seemed like an eternity for a helicopter to descend from the night and ferry us to a last mission after completing what was the hardest challenge any of those men who had survived the battle would ever face. We waited in lines known as (chalks) of about thirty men to a bird. My chalk was one of the last to load and looking back I must have seen the doomed flight take off. We all held the fear that leaving the city of Fallujah was too good to be true and thought that the last flight seemed an appropriate trap for irony; I remember that many of us had talked about it.

Earlier in the day I talked to a friend that would fall out of the sky with the rest. Jafarkhahnitorshizi had the longest last name I had ever seen, and communicated to me how he could not wait to leave the fucking city. About a year before the crash and during our infantry training “Cheesy” and I had dug a hole and spent a cold night together in the frozen hills of San Diego California’s San Onofre within the confines of Camp Pendleton. Being inexperienced we had been taught how to ask a challenge password to every person who passed our defensive position. We waited in holes that we had dug and stood atop our cultivated dirt for approval, with our faces covered in camouflaged paint like the real infantry Marines we hoped to become.

Word had spread that our commanding officer was coming up the line and I told Cheesy that I would challenge our Captain. Cheesy tried to plead sense to me, explaining that such a thing could turn into an awkward situation but when the Captain came up the trail I asked, “How are those Lakers?” Stunned the Captain looked bewildered at the question as I shot him with a blank round. The Captain inquired as to why I would think it appropriate to shoot my commanding officer and informed me that if he had been a foot closer he would have shoved my rifle up my ass. I told the Captain that he did not say the password and that during the battle of the Bulge of World War II German Soldiers penetrated allied lines by speaking English and dressing like American soldiers. The Captain looked at me curiously and reminded me that shooting the commanding officer was generally not an accepted form of testing the challenge and pass situation. Cheesy and I survived and we laughed and retold the story to our infantry instructors as they had to know after hearing about a rogue fighting hole.

I think about Cheesy and my other friends who were cheated by fate like they were still here today. So many Americans never have to feel this dark feeling because we volunteered and they did not. I hear a landing helicopter but I do not remember the confusion. When we had completed our ten day mission in another Iraqi city I finally read the killed in action list of those who had perished in the crash. Friend after friend passed by my eyes and I died again inside. My family thought I was dead, but I had lived and another family would bear the true burden of war while the others carry on. So is America.

Devil In Your War

He speaks to a young man washed in his friend’s blood, “Revenge.” The young man kills his friend’s killer and is left with the corpse of a stranger. Never having had the chance to explain to his friend’s killer what great damage this enemy corpse had done to his outlook on humanity and life, the young Marine pulls his dick out of his pants and pisses on the corpse of his friend's killer. This is a piece of war, not all of it but at the same time it is a microcosm of what war is; human beings pissing away existence.

Protected people will protest the horror of it and this is the great gift of protection and detachment from the human condition. A warrior’s ethos revolves around the death of his friends until it becomes him. Pissing on the enemy corpse is his way of telling his friends that they mattered. Something dark lurking in the shadows of mud huts and blowing sand sticks and though a human being might have mistaken themself for something omnipotent, the reality sets in and their reaction is a result of electrical impulses that are completely rational. Irrational are the people who believe that killing can be clean and acceptable. Irrational are people who carry on with their lives and cling to slogans like, “Kill them all!” Irrational is war.

It is all nonsensical and do not be too quick to judge a person that you have no connection with and a person who shares the same qualities and possibilities that you would if you found yourself under such circumstances. I feel a great sadness for the Marines who pissed on their dead enemies because they will be tried under law to make a point when what they require is understanding and therapy. It is my belief that their action was rational and that it is war that is irrational.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/12/us/video-marines-urinating/index.html