The Suck

Dedicated to Mike Mooney-Semper Fi

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

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

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

Help

Dear Mr. President,

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

Church Bells Sing Suicide

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

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

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

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

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

Some Things I Learned in Combat

False motivation is still motivation!

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

An empty house is a safe-house.

Never piss off your Corpsman.

Night-vision goggles require light to operate.

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

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

"Help!" Is not a proper situation report.

Never trust a radio operator.

"Errr," is the proper response to everything.

Many dependent wives are not dependable.

The site count is never up.

Interpreters do not speak English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Combat is not a videogame!...

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

There are no respawns in combat.

Auto aim is off.

Friendly fire is on.

Kat Dog

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

The Night Before the Battle

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

On Veterans

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

Talk of the Nation 2-28

Revolution

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

War Poem

I am an American

Red like arterial spray

Washing worn out

Down mountaintops

Snaking through grassy plains

Passed the old gold claims

Fast like a miner’s cart

That has gone off track

And when they said

There is no going back

I breathe in

Like an inner city desperation

Like a hit of crack

We have friends too though

Spanning time like skipping records

On a hot summer day

When the wax is melting

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.”

Short

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

Free Tree

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

Sweger part 2

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

Sweger

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

Generation Y-Babies

We were missing the boat again. Another generation X but much more stimulated. Our music faded into corporate tone, it started in 1998. Television had captured it all, everything. Reality TV hit it big in 2000 and all of the naked women in the world drifted from playboy to a computer screen, our pornography Mecca. We don’t protest the war because we don’t care, turn the channel and let them deal with it, but oh the war ratings of Iraq the reality show circa 2003, have blown away with the sand and we turned this hourglass over and called it the new Afghanistan. I remember when my battalion heard the first rumors of Fallujah and laughed, they wouldn’t do that to us, somebody else and that troop transport nosed down and dropped us off at home, welcome to Camp Fallujah the sign read.
I listen to the radio and some old lady is an expert on Gen-Y, she can’t quite place the time-frame but these poor youngsters are going through a quarter life crisis and I laugh. Twenty somethings call and cry about the dormant college degree because they thought the world owed them something, maybe a tour in the sandbox where children don’t play would help them along with it, the kids were dying when I learned the world is not fair, and your jobs were outsourced over thirty years, don’t call the radio call your congressman and what the fuck is a congressman? We don’t care change this channel.
Can someone find my attention span, quote the boy I’m special again. Who are you to write me a parking ticket? I reply I am because you let me. Played this video game since there was memory but I lost the reset button or maybe it got stuck. You sneezed and ignited a hurricane I watch that corporal in half a uniform staring at his little American flag, watching it shred in the wind with the eyes of a hungry wolf, his buddies died in a helicopter crash and there becomes his quarter life crisis. And for those who wake up tomorrow becomes the same, mine and someone still owes me. Someone forgot to teach you about soul, there was an old way of living it gave meaning and it has gone before and will come back again, like all things. Time is yours dock this boat and tie it off, when you called it a day it was your choice and that is why you are not special, quote the man.

The Jihadi Who Tried to Blow Up Christmas

Shouting the famed “God is great”, the nineteen year old American kicked at FBI agents as they apprehended him in Portland Oregon’s Union Station. He was pressing a cell-phone key, maybe you can hear it in your head, pick a number one through five. The teenager is the same age I was in the second Battle for Fallujah Iraq. Reporters question his neighbors, lurking for the tell tale signs of a terrorist and there were none. The neighbors claim him to have come from a good family and seemed shocked but not quick to condemn. This is Portland Oregon USA, a bastion liberal thought and liberal arts, it is difficult for people in this land to hate anyone, even one intending to detonate an explosive device as the Christmas tree is lit in front of thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children who, when questioned by undercover FBI agents, the nineteen year old now very screwed Mohammad claimed to care less about.
I have heard nineteen year old American servicemen, including myself; express the same nonchalance toward dead foreign civilians. The story is almost always the same, “Fuck ‘em they shouldn’t have been there.” When these words escape the mouth of a young man he is saying, “You before me,” a policy I still subscribe to. For the young Mohammad there is no coming back, I would not want his poisoned brain near me or mine. If cruel and unusual punishment was the law of our land we would throw the kid in a cell with any of my brothers from the Battle of Fallujah and the work would be quick. My heart breaks at the thought of this darkness that has become us, and warms when I hear his neighbors waiting for the verdict. We are trapped in a box when the answers are so black and white. My brain says a bullet in his brain and my heart asks if this could have turned out different?
A strange thing about the strange city of Portland is that we remain the only major city in America that is not a member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The FBI intercepted emails from the accused to Pakistan that Mohammad had sent expressing a yearning for Jihad. The FBI played a game with Mohammad, gave him the outlet he was searching for and watched him run with it. A mosque Mohammad had frequented was burned down after his story broke on the news, because someone is very scared of Muslims. Now many Muslims are very scared of Portland and this circle of fear must have been anticipated by FBI officials. I wonder if there could have been a different approach to dealing with a young man searching for the radical, if instead of playing games, what affect could have been produced by confronting him after intercepting the emails and trying to flip him back into the world of sense. Instead of talking to undercover pretend Jihadis, could he have seen the light by being set up with an influential Imam who might have brought him back to the path of virtue? Who knows?
Now everyone is scared and as far as Mohammad goes, the way that I know him now instead of how it could have been…”Fuck him, he shouldn’t have been there.” If we are going to keep playing these games of fear, where will this get us other than where we have already been? The key to the case of Mohammad for me is the first interview that the FBI claims was recorded but that the recording had been too damaged to replay. All of the other recordings will be available for review. The scary part about that is when the nineteen year old is approached by people he thought were legitimate Jihadis, we don’t know if they told him once he began this there would be no turning back. But fuck him he shouldn’t have been there, I hear us talking about dead civilians, people who had real lives ahead of them, just like the Christmas tree people. Maybe someday there will be another way.

Rambo and Me got PTSD

I was making fun of him, a fellow Marine I had fought with in Fallujah. I called him a “pussy”. I told the younger Marines to disregard him, my brother. When he left I became the only Marine in third platoon who had served in Fallujah with 3rd, “the dirty third”, or the “third herd”. I knew I could take it, if everyone was gone than I had become god, the only untouched. No Marine could tell me what to do regardless of rank because I had been there; Fallujah Iraq, biggest battle of the war, survived, and came back for seconds. My mind slipped in seconds after we landed in Afghanistan, I had made a MISTAKE, I should have declared myself for mental illness but the illness makes you want to die, to stand on the line, maybe kill the wrong person to show them what they had done. And if this reads like too much to handle, it is. The smart Marines raise their hands and tap out before more permanent damage is done. He was a good man, he was my brother and I cursed him when I should have hugged him.
I was ready for Afghanistan, ready to thrive in my old madness to give it another go and hope for the worst, corpses littering the street and the sun blacked out in the thick smoke we made like Vikings, when the bad guys know we mean business. I went and Rambo stayed and my paranoia ate at my brain…I had been too lucky to live through Fallujah, better men than me had died before me and I was not going to see my twenty first birthday. After I survived Afghanistan I went to war with my mind. My last year in the Marine Corps is a drunken haze of anger and confusion, and then I went home. There was no purpose at home even though I was productive. My discharge was honorable but I felt like a bad person and I waited to be recalled by the Marines. At some point I decided to join the National Guard, not because of patriotism or because I didn’t have a job, but because I was scared of getting recalled by the Marines and I had read that a local Guard unit was deploying back to Iraq. After I joined the National Guard in December 2007, the stress of the impending Iraq deployment sent me back to 19 when I had swore to myself that I would not go back to Iraq, that I had survived, that I would survive, my most recent memory of hope.
Somewhere back there was Rambo, early in the battle of Fallujah, casings falling from his automatic machine gun, he loaded another belt, he killed bad guys, helped me survive. He was never a pussy and I might have said such harsh words in his moments of glory and would have wished I didn’t like I do today. My brother a hug for you. Later on we caught a virus, it made us hate us and life. Happiness is a glass house when you have seen the world for what it is. I go up for a medical discharge on Monday and for the first time I get to tell a story that has been bothering me for too many years.

AFGHAN "THRILL KILL"

Where do the wild things go? After childhood and the boy has made his decision to attempt to be a man, toys stored in the attic, ray guns traded for real ones and when he came home his mother said, “This is not my son.” Five U.S. soldiers based out of Fort Lewis Washington are back from Afghanistan, suspected in the premeditated homicides of at least three Afghan civilians. I watch a few of the soldiers confess their take on these “thrill kills” taking place during the early part of 2010. I was in Afghanistan in May 2006 serving as a Marine Infantryman on my second tour of duty when an Army CH-47 helicopter crashed leaving a joint operation that we had participated in. The word spread across Jalalabad Airfield and my platoon was ordered to gear up and wait for a helicopter that would take us to the crash site that we were to help recover and secure. Our helicopters arrived early the next morning and we loaded as we had practiced. I sat down and put on my seat belt. My stomach drifted like a rollercoaster ride as our CH-47 climbed into the chilly clear blue skies over farmlands and into the mountains that lead to the Kunar Province. The door gunner let off a burst into the emptiness making a chop-chop-chop noise as he tested his weapon. The enormous flying banana would dip seemingly out of nowhere, and I would think about how not special I really was. It had happened to many before. A violent vibration would creep under our seats and spread through the cockpit, that nineteen year old door gunner would shake his head at me, eyes hidden behind his tinted black goggles, signaling to me our hopeless situation and then what? Hopefully you’re unconscious when you burn to death, hopefully they can find your remains and this horrible nightmare will end. There is darkness in a combat zone; the worst part of a human becomes the part that wills his survival. I had lost some friends on a helicopter that had crashed leaving Fallujah on my first tour, I remember hearing the news ten days after the fact, and how secretly happy I was that it had not been me, and how ashamed I always feel for being grateful to have survived.
Our helicopter landed, I adjusted my goggles and ran off of the back ramp of the bird into a blinding cloud of fine glittering dust. I took a knee and began to conduct a radio check. The helicopter lifted off as the sweeping rotor wind finally died down and the dust settled I was surprised to see that we had landed in an opium poppy field. I had trained up another radio operator to replace me, and he was better, I was already tired at the ripe old age of twenty summers, but once again I found myself hauling the communications equipment that had become my specialty after a couple of years. We were supposed to have been done with our Afghanistan deployment and had been prepared to leave but the Army helicopter crashed and fucked up our schedule. I had a problem with being tasked out to recover an Army helicopter crash when I was a Marine and was outnumbered easily three to one, Army to Marine back at the airfield. I hated to be forced to risk my life off schedule; it wasn’t good luck and good for the paranoia. I needed to come home, I would walk five feet and scan and look at the good places to take cover if we were suddenly attacked. I needed to come home, this had not been like my first deployment where I was convinced that I would die, by the end of Afghanistan I was determined not to let a stupid mistake fuck up my chance at a legal drink. The Marines snaked along a goat trail worn into the side of an Afghan mountain.
We would pass through a village, and the elders would stand outside, stroking their beards covering the deep set lines their hard life has rewarded them for thirty years of fighting. He was not happy to see me. I could see the smoke coming from where the helicopter had crashed. I wondered if the elder would plan an attack while we were occupied with searching for the dead bodies? After a sharp left turn I began to see electronics hanging in the bushes, and pieces of scrap metal, some fabric, it smelled like a fried motherboard. I gave an extra pack of cigarettes to a soldier that had been from the same unit as the guys on the helicopter, he told me that he had watched the CH-47 roll down the mountain on fire. A couple of Air Force operators specialized in crash recovery were attached to us, and began their descent into the scene of the flaming wreckage. They took some Marines with them and rigged up a pulley system. At the foot of the mountain they would secure a body-bag to a skid and we would pull on a rope like a bunch of pirates on a ship until the corpse reached our lip of the mountain. It would take the better part of an hour to get one up the hill. By nightfall we had located all but two dead soldiers. I slept near the row of body-bags. In the morning the missing soldiers were located and we assembled teams to carry the bodies to the landing zone that we had arrived in. The work was challenging, the bodies were heavy and as ribs cracked through the bags I began to vomit at the smell that reminded me of how the city of Fallujah Iraq had smelled a little over a year before. I thought about the mission we were doing, and I came to peace with the Army/Marine thing, it didn’t matter, all that mattered was that we got the bodies of the dead American’s back to America.
As we passed through the village I saw the elder again. He began to smile. He was happy to see me, vomit in the corners of my mouth and maybe a little pain in my American eyes. I wanted to shoot him, to raise my weapon and rip the smile off of that cheap fuckers face. Leave him there for his son to find after he was done with his bomb planting for the day.
Let America ask why I would have wasted him, it was because he smiled and these bodies were in his ugly ass country for reasons I could care less about. But I didn’t kill him; I went home and had my legal drink to forget the bullshit. Now I am a human again and I watch the robots talk about how they lined up an Afghan man on a wall and murdered him, and I thought about it, what a long war it has been, about how the worst parts of combat were not the dangerous ones, but the times where we were doing nothing. How it felt when a buddy died and how bad I wanted to make someone feel that way. And I wonder why this is such a long war? The leader of these five “thrill kill” soldiers is my age, 25 and a Staff Sergeant, which means he probably joined the Army the same time I joined the Marines.
I can’t imagine how I would see the world if that desert deployment just became another part of life every other year another year in the desert. The 25 year old sounds like a psychopath, because sometimes people go to war and like it, they get promoted because they are good at it, and now they have influence over the junior men who want to be cool like the 25 year old Staff Sergeant with combat experience, the man who will give them what they always wanted, show them how to get away with it, to just kill people because, fuck it this has been a very long war, and not too much to say.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-soldier-describes-thrill-kill-innocent-civilians-afghanistan/story?id=11732681

Tail of an AfGhaN DOnKEy

And you can see his sickness

Hovering there

A cloud over this room

Like the whimpering and pathetic

Cry of a child

The faces are old

And new

Different at other tables

The beer is the regulator

His protector, fortress and shield.

Let me tell you a story you won’t understand

The faces now quiet

Eyes like stricken children

He has pounded his fist again,

And all of that excitement

All of that excitement

May he never forget

Those things that never happened

The day he didn’t

Fight like a brave.

Punk Rock War Child

I was in a Southern California music store and fourteen years old in 1999 when I picked up the Dead Kennedy’s album, “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.” In the year before Napster’s big boom, the only way for a young suburban adolescent on a search for a new music genera to buy an album was to present it to the father faculty and hope for acceptance. I was among the last of the paying for music world. My father looked at the CD, the cover was a black and white frame of cars on fire. I must have had the puppy dog eyes on because he looked at me and knew this was important, he bought the album that changed my perspective on life. We took the back road home, through the Angeles Forest Highway, a long and winding road that is the spine of Los Angeles County to the rolling desert of Palmdale, my home. I looked at the cover, wrapped in cellophane, and could not wait to return to my home, I had a feeling something I was looking for was locked inside the disc on the floor.
At the time the music was twenty years old, I heard it and a shockwave ripped my soul and spoke to my adolescent need for subversion and growth. I started going to punk shows, and bought every album I could beg my parents for. In school I met a friend whose uncle had been in the LA punk scene in the eighties. His uncle supplied my friend with an endless collection of punk, and my friend and I embarked on a new way of thought.
I loved the way people fought fair in the punk mosh pits of my youth. We were moved by the music, so we moved, and kicked the shit out of each other but if somebody fell down we picked them up and none of the violence of my scene was in hate. The music of twenty years before was political and complained of the arrogance of modern American society and many times prophesized a fall from grace through our own arrogance. The music of the proceeding generation echoed the same themes but seemed lost in recognition from a commercial market, which is what kept the music pure. Many of us throughout my city started punk bands and continued the tradition, mine was Out Of Ammo.
I would go to school with my “Dickies” pants, different colored “Chuck Taylor” high tops and the most offensive shirt I could find. My usual was from my favorite punk band “Bad Religion”, a white shirt with a red and black depiction of two nuns kissing. The most appealing part of the scene was the never ending narration of the disillusioned American, that this country had not lived up to its expectations, and I listened and heard it but felt compelled to put this hypothesis to the test.
I fell in love with a punk rock girl, we shared the same ideals until I joined the Military. And I left and went away to war. I listened to my music and met a friend in The Marines who shared the same music and values. I asked him in Kuwait what he thought about maybe going to Iraq and he said that he hoped we would not go. We both loved the punk scene before we joined the service. My last show was shortly before I graduated in 2003. My friend and I joined his Uncle in Hollywood for a “Circle Jerks” show. We drove up after school, ate junk food and when the LA skyline appeared I knew I was at home, with the people; the people who questioned authority and were smarter than the morons.
Soon after I signed my Marine Corps contract and met my friend who was my leader, he was killed and the music sings the pain. We tested a system and both got bit by the thing we never believed in. That is the shame, we always knew better but had the guts to go and see if we were right. Pat Tillman did the same. I stayed in my dead friend’s room after the war. A “Black Flag” poster still hung on his door and I remembered a man with a better hope for the future. I slept in the room and recalled a trip I took with my Father and Sister to John Steinbeck country in Monterey California. The year was 2000 and my sister and I explored Monterey by ourselves. I read John Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and then my little sister and I hit the music shops. We walked into my future as I picked up a “NOFX” album and Bad Religion’s “New America” and I knew that I knew it all. Me and my sister walked into the dawn of a new country, and I paid the price when I knew better. This is the shame and the message that needs to be sent to my future children in a new America.

For C.J. and Michael Cohen

The Pullout Method

Dear soul, you were sacrificed… for what? And same for the natural sense of security and of purity, this all happened and it was not a dream, and in the end it meant nothing. A government dismantled and reconstructed far too incomplete and we leave a people to find their own way, no weapons of mass destruction anywhere, wasted days and wasted day. We sat on a hill concealed in tall grass, playing war games in Hawaii, months before we had any clue we were going to Iraq. The platoon commander, a twenty seven year old Staff Sergeant looked at me, face covered in green and black, “Do you think we are going Anderson?” He asked, he knew I was a news junkie. “Yes Staff Sergeant.” I answered. “I think so too.” We sat in the tall grass and waited for a storm gathering not so far off of the island. The rain would come and turn the red clay to mud and we would be born amphibious again.
The body armor is very good now; we can take refuge in this technological advance. We can surely construct better bases faster, equipped with fast food favorites in days now and not months. Johnny got gun will not go longer suffer the losses of thousands on a beachhead because war has become friendlier and much less conventional. From now on the third world can clearly understand that opposition to U.S. policy or control over natural resource may subject you to a regime change similar to Iraq, when we are done with you the government will begin again at less than zero. We will be sure to fly no mission accomplished signs because there never was a mission. When I was nineteen, near the end of the battle of Fallujah, I shared a cigarette with an Iraqi National Guard Soldier who spoke descent English. I asked him if he was happy about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and he explained that he was, because the country was going to have a chance after Saddam. I asked him what would happen if we pulled out and left? The soldier smiled at me as if I was foolish and he said, America would not do that. I didn’t reply, amazed at the optimistic outlook of the Iraqi Soldier. Now we will leave and never before, this is what we tell the parents of war. I say good luck to Iraqi’s, I wish the people of Iraq much love, and luck…on repeat until I am ashamed again.

Semper Fi Mom

Even drill instructors have mothers. Mine are better than yours, that’s right I have two, my biological Mother Susan and my stepmom Marie AKA, “The Other Mom”. This article will primarily feature my biological mother, as she gave me the inspiration for this piece. I had originally embarked on my take of the Bradley Manning situation, but while interviewing family members it occurred to me that I have never attempted to tackle a subject in writing that I had always thought about while in combat.

My mother birthed me when she was twenty one, my understanding of her youth at that time had not hit me until I recently turned twenty five and happily childless. Despite the horror of it all I believe motherhood is more difficult than combat. We were a team early on; my first memories are of us playing the original “Mario Brothers” at home in 1989. I remember her cooking from when I was very young, the smell of it, something I hung onto in war. I remember blasting ducks with a plastic orange gun in 1989. Bang bang went the piece, a 2 bit duck would fall from a 2 bit sky, my gun 2 centimeters from the television screen, and I would ask my mom to look at it, what I had done, my victory.

As I grew up, she constantly reminded me that she did not want me to join the military. I joined anyway, and sacrificed the world of women for four years as a U.S. Marine Infantryman. We had a final dinner the night before I took off for boot camp and I could feel that it was over, the childhood, the girlfriend, the old life that I had known so well, but didn’t know how good it was until it was gone. This becomes the common cry of the suburban teenage Marine Corps recruit. In boot camp we would all scream, “Kill!”, whenever the group or an individual succeeded at a task. If recruit so and so did twenty pull-ups the drill instructor would declare, “Give him one!” The platoon would in turn ecstatically and simultaneously shout, “Kill!” It was at this point of my “enhanced training” that I realized I would never be able to explain any of this to my mother in a way that would make sense to her.

The same idea became a theme in combat. I lied to my mother after we had moved into Fallujah Iraq, a very hostile zone, and continued to tell her that I was in Kuwait, a safe zone. The Infantry Marines had no mother’s to cry to, only each other to lean on, and a mother needed to be as far away from that death trap as possible, even thinking of your mother in that place felt like a sin. My girlfriend was long gone and for many of those unfortunates that were married, so were their wives.

From the moment the combat began November, 2004 until the last one on October 31, 2006, friends around my young age began dying in what seemed a nonstop cycle. It was an old story, sparkly eyed young men who were as funny as you began to disappear. I would see them one day and we would share a smoke and a story, a week later I would bump into a friend of his who would tell me the gory details of how the guy I used to know died. Trapped in a house and shot to death, friendly fire, vehicle accident, explosions or coming home and making a bad drunken decision that could not be taken back. While many of my friends in “the world” were in college or getting knocked up, The Marines were stuck in a corner of hell that would not translate to mothers.

My experience was not foreign to the eternal mothers of the planet, who have dealt with the blood of their children spilt since the first war. Other than the pain of it, the only thing I feared of death was the devastation it would have brought on my family. I felt that my mother would never understand why I threw my life away, and that my father would rationalize it. With their ancient divorce there would have been no forgiveness as my mother considered my father’s Army hitch and pride of service in peacetime as the primary motivator for my service during war. When I came home after my Marine hitch from the ages of eighteen to twenty two, I cannot imagine what I must have seemed like to my own mother? There were dozens of dead friends stuck on rewind in my recent memory and a youth’s lust for alcohol as she chanted the mother’s mantra, “What have they done with my child?”

I had recently turned nineteen in Okinawa, Japan when the first Marine that I had been friendly with died. He marched to death on a company hike, walked until his brain was overwhelmed by heat, his core was too hot to process normal function, which leads to the organ failure and I heard that he had tried to quit the hike but was encouraged to continue by his brother Marines, who had no idea that their peer was dying. It was a shame, and I wondered what a person would tell their mother before they died if given the chance? When we landed in Iraq I was sure of my death. I remember thinking to myself that it was important not to consider living, as it would be a real bummer to expect to go home when you were bleeding to death and full of holes that could not be repaired.

I was twenty two and near the end of my contract when I learned that a good friend of mine had been accidently killed in Recon tryouts when someone from the opposing force of a training exercise accidently loaded live rounds into his gun instead of blanks. The Marine had always been one of my favorites; he had the physique of an asshole, a million mile smile and the heart of a monk. A Marine told me my friend had been shot in the head that his mother had given birth to. These were stories I did not keep my mom up to date with, how would you? We were trained to abandon the nurturing side of life, this training was necessary for all who survived and added time to the ones who did not. War is a sick and ancient dance but the fundamentals of the mental preparation for it have remained the same since its inception.

For those who have not experienced it, we cannot imagine what it must be like to exit this world in a violent fashion. Modern American’s are not equipped for demise of any kind, never mind the always avoidable death of the volunteer. There was something I was always trying to remember when I was in war. The feeling of security in my mom’s house, the way she called my name in joy and in anger. I wished I could explain my gratitude before I died, we all did.

Last week I called my mother after a month without contact and interviewed her. I wanted to understand what my close family understood about the war. I asked if she could place Afghanistan on a map and she could. I asked if she paid attention to the news on Afghanistan and she explained that she avoided the subject on purpose due to my service. A symptom of post traumatic stress disorder, a condition which myself and many I served with have been diagnosed. My questions focused on Afghanistan and not Iraq because of current media attention in that country which I also served. We had never talked much about the war and her voice began to crack as we went back in time. I asked what she would tell the family of a serviceperson killed in action. She wept as she replied, “I hope that they have lots of pictures and I am sorry.” My mind stopped and I had asked too much. I thought of her photo albums that I had helped her preserve after nearly losing them a dozen years ago. My heart was breaking and I felt for the first time a dash of the pain my mother never talks about.

Somewhere we lost contact, six years and this war still hurts too bad to try to put my old family back together. When I was in junior high she encouraged me to participate in an essay contest. I placed in the first and continued to place in these contests until I graduated. I remember being very young a million years ago, wrapped within in the safety of a normal American childhood and upbringing, there was a world she did not know well enough to warn about. My mom would listen to my writing and I held that feeling, the mom feeling, close to my soul in a dark world.


Gunfire and smoke locked in my mind reminds, that someday all face death, for most a distant reality. During combat we remembered our mother’s voice, her cooking, long gone summer road trips, her discipline, smile, and her embrace. First memories and last memories are for her and we will be a team forever,
I will always be young with her too,
and I can
explain
the pain

the same
as
she

can…




For the war mothers of all countries.

Corporal "Kurtz's" Dry Jungle

The character referred to as “The Bandito” is a real person. The following is a factual story, EXCLUDING THE LAST PARAGRAPH, which is a day dream.


I had not talked to my friend, The Bandito, in five years. The last time that I saw The Bandito, he pinned his medal on my chest and walked into the sunset. I thought as a military man and knew that I would cross paths again with my war mentor. I had just turned twenty when he left. In a week I will be twenty five. Years fly and come back quickly and the memories are clearer than yesterday. I met The Bandito on the first day that I had arrived to my duty station on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. My roommate and I stood at the position of parade-rest as he entered our room for the first time. He spoke English with a very calm and thick Mexican accent. Due to the low volume of his speech, he could raise the hair on the back of your neck.

The Bandito was our first look at a real Marine as official Marines who had most recently graduated boot camp and The Marine Corps School of Infantry. He was an immigrant from Mexico and participated in brutal iron man styled marathons for fun. My roommate and I were now professional infantrymen, our company’s mission statement was a bit more eccentric than your average realty firm, the mission of the Marine Corps Rifle Squad is…”To locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver and to repel the enemy’s counter attack by fire and close quarters combat.” If you break it down, our mission is to meet the enemy and close the distance between us. All new infantrymen memorized this passage through the guidance of the more senior Marines. The guidance we received from such Marines started hard and stayed that way for a year, in my platoon, if you forgot the passage or another of the thousands of Marine Corps knowledge passages, they… (Senior Marines) would sick themselves on us… (Boots), a nickname handed down to the new guys from the old guys who have retired their boot status upon our arrival. Now they get to dish out the pain that was their boot life and so the process has operated for 234 years.

The Bandito was more than meeting a real Marine, he was our first look at what our life in the platoon would be like, which we were nervously anticipating as nothing in the journey had been any less than the most difficult day of my life stuck on repeat. I stood my parade rest as stiff as I could force the position, demonstrating extreme obedience to the scariest looking human being I will have ever seen enter a battlefield. A real life killing machine, he looked like an angel of revenge flying around with a sword and armor on a religious candle, a lean muscular build, fair skin and soft empathizing eyes that he would look at you with after making a mistake, as if he would weep with you after slitting your throat. I was eighteen years old and full of bravado, which led to me volunteering to carry a burden across a desert some call a radio, others call a PRC 119F. The Bandito told me before our first training operation in Hawaii, that I was going to lose five pounds in sweat and that I would get tired and hand off my radio. I was eighteen years young and I looked him in the eye and told him that I would never hand off my radio. I went another two and a half years before I did once in the mountains of Afghanistan because my feet were melting off, I wanted to cry when I thought about failing The Bandito who had since disappeared into the sunset.

The combat veteran thinks differently than the non. There were people who would really die for you, the world we had known had become distant and unreal, as if it had never happened. He stood there, before we were combat veterans, when we were his students, and he said, “My name is Corporal… It is good that you are standing at parade rest because if you were not, that would not be good.”He wept after slitting our mind throats and I had my answer; the Marine Corps was going to continue to be the most difficult trial to endure seven days a week and twenty four a day. Our unit reached Kuwait before we had even considered a deployment to Iraq as we had been on ships that were supposed to be bound for the Philippines but the ships had taken a detour and there we were. On the ship The Bandito taught me the basics of knife fighting, an art that he had learned on the streets of Mexico. His brother had raised The Bandito to be a great warrior. He spoke often of Mexico, he had crossed illegally when he was young, and he prepared himself for his big brother’s prophesized destiny as we grew closer to the “Second Battle of Fallujah”. The Bandito explained his life outlook to me once, “If God wants to strike me down, he will take me, I can walk into a hail of gunfire and if it is not my time, I will not die.”
I watched The Bandito enter a hail of gunfire. I had seen him shot before and the second time there was no armor, only bone, and a bullet had broken his leg. Another Marine was dead in the house and The Bandito howled as the Marines carried him to the street corner. There were flies in Fallujah, big black ones that carried off less fortunate children. The Bandito held a video camera on his face and read his last rights to his parents on the ride to Bravo Surgical. Still on scene I picked up The Bandito’s helmet, stuck inside I found a prayer picture of The Virgin Mary. The Bandito was a devout Catholic and I a devout atheist; I stuck the prayer picture in my helmet to remember my teacher.

The Bandito survived his hails of gunfire and left The Marine Corps to walk into the sunset with a cane. I had heard that he had returned to Mexico. We breathed war and it burns to exhale, some of us never leave. He called me for the first time in five years, we spoke over a weak line and he told me his story. He said that he was attending University but that the violence was getting to him. He said that it was worse than Fallujah and that children were being murdered and women raped. He said that there is no justice in his land. I could hear a crying baby in the background. My heart sank for the good hearted Bandito who could have remained in the United States after completing the citizenship process…post having taken a bullet for the country. He asked about the book I am working on and wanted to know if I remembered our first fire-fight together? I asked him to refresh me. The following situation is covered in more detail in a future publication.

The gunfire erupted. We were breaking into empty houses, this had become our life. Kick in the front door, move in, search the residence and repeat the process until every building in the city of Fallujah had been cleared. As the ambush unfolded, the Marines caught in the front yard of the hostile house fell back to the house next door to consolidate and seek cover. The Bandito watched an enemy wearing black, sight in on two Marines and rake their legs with fire from an AK-47. One Marine remained on his feet and continued wounded to the house next door. The other fell to the ground and held his hand up for help. The Bandito said that he had frozen up for a second. I asked why he continued on? He replied that as he saw the Marine hold his hand up, The Bandito thought of the Marine’s parents and of his own family, he saw his probable death rescuing the fallen Marine as an honorable death. The Bandito recalled dumping two thirty round magazines from his M-16 but not the seven others he had found empty after the fight.

I watched The Bandito deliver the wounded Marine to the fall back house. Next he had a gun fight with thirty one terrorists and lived to tell the tale. His kill count was a platoon high score. The nineties west coast rap scene had nothing on third platoon. Those of us who survived Fallujah deserve a safe life at the least. Not for the Bandito, he said he returned to Mexico to help build it.

It was a dream, I flew into Mexico City, and a driver met me at the airport holding a sign with my name on it for the first time. We drive into the mountains; I see things I have never seen. The Bandito and I catch up and we get to important matters. He tells me about the murdered children, and the raped women, he explains to me how destiny has not given him a break since he went to war. Maybe it was before that and that was why he had returned to Mexico after discharge from the Marines as a combat wounded infantryman. He hands me the gun, tells me to load the first round slow, to think of the children who had been murdered. That night we drank beer and posed with guns, cleaned our guns, remembered our guns and our old young lives as professionals of arms. In the morning we found them all, unloaded magazines, the smell of hot gun oil and smoking barrel’s symphony as we shot our way to peace and for the rest of time, everything became alright and that was the dream and we never hurt again.