Jerkin It

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