Sunday, September 15, 2013

Reflections On Paradise Lost

He said he read my writing so I’ll write another. My wife and I were driving our wedding gift car from the gulf coast of Mississippi, northwest on a heading for our home in Portland, Oregon when we stopped in South Dakota to visit Deadwood on our pseudo-honeymoon in October of 2012. I still owe her a real one. We stayed in the “Ma Barker Suite” at “Cadillac Jack’s Casino” hoping that we would have another $500.00 night like we did in East St. Louis. We had visited Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse memorial which my grandparents had recommended earlier during a buffet dinner in Kentucky. My friend Paul Erfman contacted me on social media and let me know he was in the area. We set up a meeting in the Casino and had a chance to catch up for the first time since I had left Hawaii after my last duty as a military policeman in 2007.


I had been an infantryman for almost three years when I was sent to the military police to wait out the remainder of my four year contract on base instead of deploying once more to Iraq with my unit. These fifty grunts/infantrymen had all deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Gunnery Sergeant who read our names off of the list during morning formation on the deep green grass with that Hawaiian ocean sky and that perfect weather sarcastically offered us the chance to stay with our unit and deploy again . I had seen the TV show "COPS" a million times and I knew that I would never again have this opportunity to live a life long dream so I courageously raised my hand and fucked off another deployment to grow a mustache and buy a pair of ridiculously over-sized aviator sunglasses, there would be rules to enforce and I would remain on the Hawaiian island of Oahu for the next nine months.


Those months remain some of my favorite on the planet even though they were veiled with the early signs of disease that came with my war. After a three week course on how to write tickets and put on handcuffs, and after the final exam where we were pepper sprayed, the infantrymen of First Battalion Third Marines had been officially recognized as Marine Corps Base Hawaii military police officers and we received our gun and badge. We were like TEMPS in a factory, this was not our primary occupation and we were not expected to do much more than man the front and back gate of the base to free up the contracted military police who had actually trained for the job and would patrol the base in police cars.
   
The grunts had been there a few weeks when the military police received a dump of fresh new Marines straight out of military police school. Looking at this scientifically it is my hypothesis that it may not have been the best idea to mix a group of seasoned hard core combat veterans with the new military police fresh faced Marines that were sent under the care of the grunts to learn their job on the gate. The reason for this is because the infantrymen, though very young, were hard to life and insane may be a harsh word but violence was accepted and so was hard drinking, we were the age of frat boys but many of us had killed people and lost many friends to war. This was not a shared experience with the new military police Marines who were sent to the gate with us and many were still teenagers.


One of these new Marines became my co-pilot, I would stand the front gate with Rodney Wheeler and at first I would make him work the whole shift, seven hours with bathroom breaks, because I had been to combat I felt it fair that the boot stood the watch while I read my books and listened to my “Coast to Coast” on the night shift.
    
When we were off shift I would drink an ocean and one morning early into Rodney’s career I woke him up at sunrise after drinking all night and informed him that we were going out. He had purchased a Cadillac which was a contradiction to his stature of five-foot-eight but seemed to fit with his southern twang and would have been much more effective with bull horns on the hood. He beamed and agreed to go on an adventure so we were off to live one of my daydreams, first we would visit the North Shore of Oahu. The warm water of November was welcoming but the waves crashed down with a thunder and the local girls were laughing at the white boys trying to make it past the surf. After we were ordered out of the water by a concerned lifeguard Wheeler drove us to Waikiki where we ate eighty dollar steak.


Back on the front gate I would become bored and Wheeler would watch me draft civilians that made a wrong turn onto our base. Our base was at the end of a freeway and especially during the weekend, inevitably some father would have the kids in the back of the rental and would be frantically explaining to me that he was trying to reach Waikiki but must have made a wrong turn. At some point I started retorting to this man and his clones that due to the new statue of the patriot act, thirty-eight-tac-bravo it was my duty to intern anybody attempting to trespass on our base for up to two weeks to pick up trash. I would further elaborate that they were not heading to Iraq or Afghanistan but because we were shorthanded on Marine Corps Base Hawaii due to ongoing combat operations, they would fulfill their new obligation of collecting the trash for two weeks and then could do their u-turn. I would then order them to pull over to the side of the road so that a recruiter could size and fit them for their uniforms. I would watch the color drain out of the father’s face and then I would tell him that I was kidding and proceed to give him the wrong directions to wherever he was heading.


I still don’t know why I found satisfaction in this act but it made sense at the time. If Wheeler was on patrol in the car I would stand the post with Vasquez another new join and these new Marines would stand their seven hour post waving the base traffic passed the gate while I babbled on about my deployment to Fallujah, I was stuck on repeat like a computer glitch and I could not stop talking about it, when I was drunk, when I was hungover, when I was hungover. If I ever heard the new joins complain about anything I would glare at them and bark, “You think that’s bad, let me tell you a little story called the battle of Fallujah!” I had once pictured myself as an old man and came up with that line as I imagined a future me geriatric and interacting with grandchildren.


After our first adventure Wheeler would beat on my door early in the mornings that we were off of work and drag me out of the hangover cave that I preferred and he would say, “Hey Andy, we're going on an adventure!” Off we would go throughout the island in the oversized cadillac with my throbbing head in my hands talking about Fallujah. It was on the last adventure as my contract ran out that we went for one final joy ride to the North Shore for a day of swimming in the ocean and an eighty dollar steak or seafood dinner. Those adventures were the best days of my life after enduring some terrible trauma. The young military policemen welcomed me into their lives and I was able to see how unaffected youth dealt with reality and it gave me hope for my future to be in their present. On that last day we were taking pictures on a jetty when my aviator sunglasses I had bought specifically for my duty in the military police fell into the water between some rocks. Our section sergeant would complain that he knew aviator sunglasses and trimmed mustaches were in Marine Corps regulation but when the whole company dawns these two items it becomes a bit ridiculous, however the sergeant had a sense of humor so for a few months some caricature of a policeman from the seventies would be waving the confused people through the gate.


After I heard that sound of a marble dropped into water I said to hell with the glasses it was meant to be that they vanish on this last day. But Vasquez and Efman would not let them go, they fought dark water and between rocks, I felt funny for standing there but I was positive they were gone, I just wanted to go eat. Somehow Vasquez found the glasses and handed them back to me. The young Marines did not give up so easily and I wore those sunglasses until they finally broke in the Summer of 2011. That night we ate a deliciously overpriced dinner and enjoyed being together and ridiculous. Some of those new Marine military fresh faced policemen would later deploy to Afghanistan, and that made me sad because I was always happy for them to be just the way they were. Wheeler stayed in the states and is as chipper as ever.


Last October Paul Erfman found me in the South Dakota Casino and my new wife and I joined him for a smoke and a little catching up. He seemed grown and he was talking in loop about his deployment and my deployment and then he looked at me and said, “Say it Andy.” My wife was confused and I looked at Erfman and said, “Let me tell you a little story called the battle of Fallujah!” He laughed and so did I, Paul said he was going to tell our mutual friend Carver that he got me to say it. There was something different in him and looking back at it I guess he might have reminded me of myself in those hangover Hawaiian mornings, I now see that we were all drinking so much because many of us were emotionally disturbed by our combat experience and had not been taught or properly encouraged to deal with that load in a more healthy manner than pausing the drinking only to puke and make room for more drinking.


Paul Efman had grown up since the last time I had seen him, he was a combat veteran which can peel the joke out of life until it is not funny anymore. We wished each other well and I will never see him again on this terrestrial plane. Carver wrote me to ask if I had heard about Paul yesterday and then I did and as I absorbed this information I found myself drifting back to that last adventure, jumping off of rocks and swimming in the warm ocean, everyone laughing and happy. Paul always looked happy.


Life can be captured in the regular things, I went back through my messages to see our last correspondence and it was as I will remember Paul Erfman who became one of the twenty two veterans who commit suicide a day and I hate it, as cliche as I can be I would love to sit down again with Paul and babble about the war, and about getting help. I wish I had the chance to talk more about how good life can be and to not let the life triggers suck you down too fast and too quick. “Let me tell you a little story about the battle of Fallujah,” supposes that someone who has been to the battle of Fallujah has endured the most pain any human being can endure and it is not true. I would daydream about what I would do when I got home and when those puzzle pieces were not fitting together as I had hoped it became devastating. The memory of pain is hidden in normalcy that looks like our final  correspondence;  


Hey I see ya gonna be in the hills tonight
October 12, 2012 6:31 pm


Hey dude what's up
hey actually honeymoonin  in Deadwood


I seen that.... I'm literally like 13 miles from ya in spearfish
cool man, I think we are going to hit the slots in an hour and a half, Im staying at cadillac Jacks
feel free to stop by for a beer


Right on well would ya like to grab a beer while ya in the area?
ya but we are drinking and Im staying static Ill be in the casino at 9 and we could catch up if you can make it


What's static? Lol oh I can make it I'm sure
coo


Id Text ya when I got there but don't have ya number so I'll just look for ya I suppose
661 400 ****
sounds good see you then


Alright


If you are a veteran in crisis call 1-800-273-8255. There is help out there for you for real.

Friday, May 10, 2013

Grunt Circles


(Read at The Headstrong Project's fundraising event Words of War at IAC HQ in NYC)


When that airplane hit the tarmac
I hit the ground running;
the confusion
of
a
wild
pack
biting at my heels
chasing me in circles,
on
    that
           tarmac.

Electric death clouds
chase me too
rain blood
and that flight crew
waive neon sticks
guiding me the wrong way,
again.

She was a favorite holiday
all of those beautiful bursting explosions
a smell of sulfur hung in my sniffer,

you are not beautiful anymore

the wild pack is exhausting
lost in these endless circles
and I keep saying,

ONE OF THESE DAYS WE’LL GET IT!

when I am weighed down
with a double combat load
and no soul to share the weight

Crooked liberals and crooked conservatives
throw me up on a flag
and
     tell me
what you were,

when I was
the only soul to see,

Liberty can find me in a dive bar;
on a trashy street corner,
maybe in politics or on a dance floor,
down seven sheets again.

Let me tell you
a
little
story
called
the Battle of Fallujah!

the war was easy like birthday gifts
you just show up
and unwrap your surprise.

you can find me
in
your
dreams,

I am your brother

Screaming is the quietest thing children
have
    ever
seen

I am your father.

but the surprise about that tarmac
that has me running in circles;

this place is not in a combat zone,
this is
what I call
                              coming
           home.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

My Little War Turned 10 Today


A decade ago I would have never imagined what ten years later would look like transmitted back to me with all of the hindsight that the future brings. I was seventeen-years-old and my  newspaper editor dad’s ride up the southern California coast to Camp Roberts, a base that time forgot built of white washed 1950’s vintage wooden paneled barracks. I would be dropping him off to invade Iraq with a local transportation company of the California National Guard; the unit's ranks made up of business owners, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, working class Joes, piles of soldiers with prior active service and just a few young ones still wet under the ears.
    
We were cruising in my newly licensed used compact that I had purchased from one of my father’s old reporter friends Jeff Wong. While my recently turned fifty-year-old father rode passenger through Santa Barbara in 2003, Jeff Wong was on a ship bound for the invasion as a Marine Corps infantry platoon commander, he had ditched the journalism for an adventure at twenty-seven-years-old; my current age, shortly before the towers fell in 2001. I can’t really recall much of seeing my father off to war, I think my high-school buddy Mike Vang and I helped him drop his gear off in one of those old buildings and that was it, no tears or fireworks.
    
I was glued to the television for a couple of complex reasons. In 1990-91 I had watched more of the gulf war on television than maybe any other six-year-old in America. The minute Saddam invaded Kuwait I called my dad’s office in Los Angeles to let him know what was going on, I can still recall the phone number by heart because I would hear the tones of the numerical buttons in my head like a favorite song. The next reason was I knew many people preparing to invade that country to include my father; my friend Mike who rode with us to Camp Roberts brother Jerry Vang was an Army combat engineer, and our high school buddy Joe Robbins had enlisted in the Marine Corps, the Marine recruiter who signed Joe up was a friend of our family and would be killed in Iraq with just over a year left on life’s clock. I had entered the delayed entry program which meant that I signed the contract to leave for Marine Corps boot-camp after I graduated high-school. After school I would spend time in the recruiter’s office to prepare for my adventure with heavy thoughts of my father and friends helping me find motivation to lose some weight off of my softness, physically and spiritually. My father would be content to die in a combat zone, he would avoid it if he could but I knew that if it happened I could find peace in my old man’s story because he lived his life like no other, and we had talked about it before he left.
    
While my father was in Iraq I was doing what needed to be done to graduate and nothing more. I was a television reporter for my high school t.v. show and had covered a war protest in Hollywood. Our show played on local cable access and after the story ran so many of the ten old people that followed our show called in to complain that they took the program off of the air forever. I remember thinking to myself, “Hey assholes, my dad's in Iraq!” I have found in this culture that no matter what my life experience, I will never be able to attain more free speech points in the land of free speech. Which leads me to today’s reflection. I can orbit the major media websites and view wise finally accepted truths that everyone knows because it has been ten years so it is time to have a sit down and learn from these mistakes. For every story about the war being for oil I want to see a story about the veteran suicide epidemic, ten stories about bad ass veterans who succeed in transition every day and will continue to build this country that misunderstands them because of the media, and a story about the never ending backlog that I believe kills service people in higher numbers than the war. Some of what I learned from the war validated what I already knew, this country is a sensationalist country, it likes drama and whether it will admit it or not, most of it regardless of political affiliation, loves war. War gives both sides something to attack and defend, it gives the people something to protest and something to fight for, and validates the perspectives of every side.

Every time something dramatic happens the news is all over it. I read articles about many sources complaining that the media dropped the ball on Iraq, I laugh out loud, as if there were anything else to do than to cover the orgasmic explosions of “Shock and Awe,” to feed the people’s eyes that are so hungry for legitimate drama. I say the media did a fantastic job covering the war. It’s not the media that’s fucked up here, it is the people who will it. If people want to watch something in America someone will figure out a way to show them, the more watching people the happier the business that provides this service. I saw plenty of critique from the media regarding weapons of mass destruction even before the invasion, the war protests were covered and when we went into Iraq so was something so unique to history that in March of 2003 a war was covered more extensively and brought to the viewers live for almost nine seasons. You can’t make the people pay attention to what bores them. War is not boring.

    
 I could have told you at seventeen that I anticipated any longer involvement in Iraq post-invasion would mean something serious to me, not like it would for the disconnected viewer. I figured that if the people loved this war so much, they would send me there to fulfill my destiny. I hate when our society refuses to accept that it is the people of a democracy that run this country and if it is not that way it is only because the people of this country are too lazy to make it some other way. If you ever wonder what mystical forces compel the strings of media, look no farther than what normal American people want to see, violence first and then sex. I can’t wait for a university in a hundred years to sit its students down and dissect this great gift of anthropology the media will have left behind regarding the war in Iraq. When I see the media apologize for itself I understand it is only doing what the people will it to, if they didn’t buy it, no one would sell it. The media gave all of the information to a people who willed war.

     
My father returned from reporting on the invasion on Friday June 13, 2003 which was the same day I graduated high school. I saw him for the first time in my first moments of my transformation from a school-boy to a young-man. I knew more people in the invasion than my father had known who served in Vietnam, I was influenced and proud of my peers who seemed to be the only people willing to put skin on the line for what their country wills. I went to this presentation about the Iraq war in Portland a couple of months ago. The only veterans in the crowd of a dozen or so was myself and a representative from Team Rubicon.

     
The presentation was designed to be a discussion about the war and as I discussed my feelings about the war and inquired to a beatnik lady of correct vintage how she felt about the troops she responded, “I bleed empathy for everyone on this planet but it is like, they are over there oppressing people you know?” The majority of the crowd agreed with her and I really didn’t know what she was talking about though I want to hear more people say what they really think.

When I shipped out to boot-camp my dad dropped me at the recruiter's office behind my old high-school in Jeff Wong’s former car, there was a hug and no tears and I was off to where the people willed me. When there is a VA backlog and a veteran suicide epedemic it is because the people of this country will it, if they cared enough they would not let the government get away with saving money on suicide. Every vet that kills themself saves the taxpayers of their country a lifetime of care. I don’t blame the media for the war; the troops sent to it, big oil profiting from it, or the government facilitating it, I put the blame where it belongs, on this country’s decadent majority fueled by its fascination with violence.




(Hello viewers of this blog. I wanted to inform you that Iraq/Afghanistan and More will close shop the day the war ends in Afghanistan. Thank you for reading and please stay tuned for the final installments.)

Friday, January 4, 2013

Somewhere in Mexico

The ball dropped in New York as I sat on a sofa with my new wife and strapped in for a new year. 60,000 Syrians are in the ground; cars changed, sports teams changed, some more celebrities died and I watched it all happen un-filtered through my box plugged into the wall. I remember my father bringing a computer home in 1994, it was to replace the old one with the green screen from the 1980's. We marveled as a family after we plugged the plant in to watch it grow. The new desktop had internet and my life would become digital, a father's hope that his family would see the next big thing. Every morning I power on my "super-computer", while the wife struggles to make it to work on time and the dog is whining for need of relief, I click and the whole world comes screaming at me in high definition. I would have had to own a subscription to multiple newspapers and magazines to capture a small percentage of the information available to me today within in a few seconds. I can watch the babies blown up in Syria and mourn to myself in this detached country, or the babies die in Newtown and hear the cries of change echo in my connected country. If I am an asshole I can validate any crackpot theory that swims around in my empty skull, or if I am poor I can find knowledge not available to the richest men a short time ago. I listened my whole life to adults explaining that this box in the wall would be the future and looking back I understand it, the difference between life before the airplane, or indoor plumbing.
   
The year passed has provided me with hope for a future that a couple of years before I did not believe in, something rewarding. My business partner Antonio and I were able to raise the funding for our documentary, and then we filmed it. My wildest dreams came true, infused to the story of my brother's who I fought alongside and finally got to see again. A month ago I was in Mexico for our last interview, the box in the wall had shit me airline tickets and correspondence with a man who in any other time would have been lost to me forever after discharge, the type of person who literally disappears. The concept of going to Mexico during this time in history made me queezy. I thought about recently having been married to my wife and day-dreamed that I might really understand what I had to lose right before some cartel guy lights the diesel and tells me to climb into the barrel. When the wheels touched down in Mexico I was alone with my camera equipment hidden in my backpacks. My tall friend and some guy I didn't know were there to pick me up. It was moving to see my friend "The Bandito" again. He had been our point-man during the second battle of Fallujah and terribly wounded by a gunshot to the femur. The last time I had seen him was 2005 and he hobbled around base with a very noticeable limp. As we left the airport I noticed that there were no signs of a limp and The Bandito's English was mucho improved.

We put my bags into the back of a late model Ford Mustang which had body damage similar to the other cars parked around it. The Bandito pulled his seat up and let me in, I fell back into my bucket seat and grabbed for the seat-belt to protect me from the bumper-cars, but the seat-belt did not exist. We drove from the airport toward the barrio where my friend lives, I played with my beard and felt the adrenaline course through my veins again. Traffic in this part of Mexico seemed unregulated and completely nonsensical, however I was sure the chaos made sense to the locals and forced myself to trust in that. The end would begin if the car was forced to stop by someone my friend did not know. If there was one thing I remembered about The Bandito it was that his values for things like safety always seemed much different than people hold in my country, which is what made him such an effective point man eight years before. 

The Bandito and I set my gear down and the driver left but promised to be back later. During the car ride The Bandito had explained that his life might be in danger, we drank beer and talked about it. Inside his barrio house the walls were bright white with immaculate white tiles on the floor, the living room seemed to glow. A card table set up with empty bottles of beer and paperwork reminded me of my dead Uncle's old apartment, the outside noises sounded similar to my outside noises back home but I noticed that every time a shadow crept across the curtains to his window, The Bandito became alert. I asked him to tell me about why he had decided to return to Mexico after gaining citizenship in the U.S.? He explained that he lived in Texas for a few months after he had left our base in Hawaii. He said that the walls felt like they were getting tighter and it was hard for him to watch the "zombie people" walking around him. The Bandito sipped his beer and turned up the music on his radio, I can hear the DJ banter because of his similar timing to any other DJ back home, but I can't understand what the DJ says. The old point-man continued to explain that life in the U.S. seemed very predictable and that he felt out of place, he had joined The Marines in search of an adventure, but life after the adventure is always back to the same-old. So my friend bought a motorcycle and drove it down to the other country on his citizenship Rolodex, the more exciting one.

He says he has always loved Mexico and that he missed the language the most. We go for a stroll in the barrio, street vendors are selling produce and meat, we are heading for a strange beer. The Bandito points excitedly, "You see this, this is what I mean. Here people talk to each other." I look around and see that he is correct. In the U.S. people seem to go out of their way to keep to themselves, but in this Mexican ghetto, children kick soccer balls, music plays outside and people talk to each other, it looks like the wild west. I prefer security to conversation but I can understand why this place appeals to my friend. We walk into a shack with two young Mexican men who serve beer with gobs of hot sauce added to Clamato poured into a Styrofoam cup with shrimp set atop the lid. We purchase the strange brew and I pray that these shrimp don't poison me, I used to frequent Tijuana when I was a teenager, my family has traveled deep into Mexico on a regular basis since my grandparents first went down in the 1950's. That was long before the massive drug-war and I can hear my father, "Don't drink the water boy or you'll wish you didn't." I am not sure how much water is in this strange drink but I know if I don't drink it The Bandito will laugh at me so like the old days I trust my friend and risk the parasite. The beer is good. That night I film the Bandito's interview in Spanish because I know it will piss-off an ignorant guy who wrote a comment on my story "Mexican Marine" when it appeared in "The Doonesbury". 

This year Antonio and I will spend countless hours editing the documentary on our computers until the film is finished and then we will tour it utilizing the box in the wall to assist throughout the whole process. Our southern neighbor will remain a non-issue for the most part again, I always marvel at how much closer Afghanistan seems to United States consciousnesses than Mexico. The Bandito will use his computer to find more dangerous work, as he walks his barrio streets, somewhere where the people communicate in their beautiful language and the shadows are something to be scared of. He wants very deeply to help rebuild his land but the street dogs will tell you that is a hard thing to do when there is so much corruption. Mexico used to be so different, I thought to myself as we flew along holding onto the rail inside a rural Mexican bus with no shocks. The people were all looking at me with these lines in their faces and an expression that I could not relate to. They all sat and stared at me until I felt out of place, but I remembered that I was with The Bandito and it was just like the old days.