November War

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