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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Marines Come From Connecticut

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mexican Marine

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

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

Between The Peak And Valley

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

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

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

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

To Whom It May Concern ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With proper military respect and to whom it may concern,

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

                                    Fair winds and good luck,

                                       Garrett Phillip Anderson

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

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

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

...Because I said so

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

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

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

Sailor Vic

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

A Younger Cousin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War Phone Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/26/05

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

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

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

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

Devil In Your War

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

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

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

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

The War is Over

I returned home from a trip to Georgia just in time to watch the breaking news online as the last US troops left Iraq and closed the gate behind them. Closed that rust white symbol of the end of a war. It never made it to the top of the “news pulse” on CNN’s website, which seemed about right to me. My girlfriend is gone back to Mississippi for the holidays and I found myself alone in my apartment and jet lagged. I had a party with all of my dead friends last night, we drank and danced and they told me about what could have been, that they wished they could live my life, simple. I told them that I wished we could be together and they laughed and sang, “Only the good die young…you stupid sonovabitch.” When we had had too much to drink they began to lay into me for bitching about their sacrifice on a blog as the highlight of my day, that some things were not for me to say.

They closed that rusty gate and America keeps on trucking. My grandmother wrote on a link I had posted that we should have never been there in the first place. Usually such bland sentences make me want to choke a random person but I remember that it is the grandmothers of the fallen who have to continue on and that the way she feels is a sort of genetic transference from mothers and grandmothers that must date back to the beginning of time. “Why do these men go off to die when we spent so much time raising and loving them?” I hear her heart.

Alone in a cold apartment with imaginations of people who were once as real as me and they whisper at me to stay away. “Go to school!” they all yelled at me. And they are young forever but this war is over and I will not be for long. I found myself thinking, that at least there is still Afghanistan so that my service will have some sort of prolonged relevance to American society but I remember that it never did in the first place. I pick up the phone in 2003 and my dad is back from his reporting of the initial invasion of Iraq, and he will make my high school graduation. I think about all of the parents who went to their son's high school graduations to send them off soon to die and their story was always the same as mine. Some shrink will be forever questioning what I mean when I say that I don’t want to feel better about it, this is how I keep them with me, in a haunting feeling I let ferment, the feeling of the death of a good friend. “It meant something to me grandma!” I want to yell, but who is listening?

I will clock into work tonight and clock out when I am done. The dead dancers have left my building again with a message, “It is always like this, it was always like this. Now go home kid!” No words will fill in between the lines, no tears will resurrect anything other than a void and no news coverage means any more to a stranger than it does to me. I will wake in the morning cold to light a smoke and I will remember when you will not. The only thing that has changed is someone’s son does not have to die in Iraq tomorrow.

Cajones Part 2: Jose Moracruz

I had dreamed of putting a helmet on since I was young, only to find that when I finally did, the helmet was an uncomfortable hunk of shit that dug into my scalp so I would find any reason to take it off. We debarked a commercial airliner in Honolulu and were funneled into a white school bus in our dress green uniforms. Something about the island seemed surreal and almost spiritual, a strange sort of vibe that made me think about the many Marines who had gone through this process before me. The bus chugged along until we reached Marine Corps Base Hawaii. We got out of the buses and received our room assignments, my orders were to join four other new Marines assigned to Alpha Company third platoon and my roommate would be a fellow teenager I had never met before, Jose Moracruz. We had heard the horror stories and were clear that hazing would probably be in our near future.

I did not know if a crew of bloodthirsty seasoned senior Marines were waiting for us and my new roommate looked at me in horror as we stood on a freshly mowed lawn a little before midnight. “Hey, help me fix this.” Moracruz said to me, referring to his shooting badge on his uniform which had somehow broken a link and was hanging awkwardly. Such a thing seemed a good excuse for a senior Marine to catch and commence hazing. I struggled with the cheap piece of metal and was able to jerry-rig something that resembled normalcy. A black sergeant appeared in front of us and let us know that many of our senior Marines were participating in something called super-squad and would not be present to fuck us up for a couple of weeks. The others were asleep and would guide us to pick up our gear and fill out paperwork in the morning. I thought it was a trick, but we were set free to our rooms and told to set out alarms for five thirty in the morning. I feared the morning's alarm and when it sounded, I awoke to my first day as a real infantry Marine.

Routine becomes the life of a Marine and Moracruz and I were forced into the life and became good friends. In the early Hawaii days we would watch movies every night on a television I had purchased and a video game machine he had bought, we would fall asleep to them and I would wake early in the mornings to the looped sound of the DVD's menu screen. We would usually order a pizza and a two liter of soda, only to burn the calories off the next day or in the Hawaii jungle. When the senior Marines who had been gone finally showed up I begged them to haze me. I explained to them that I had made it through boot-camp and the school of infantry without having my ass kicked and felt that I had been cheated.

The senior Marines were surprised and the word spread quickly the first day, I told them to show up at eight p.m. and informed them that I would be ready. One of the senior Marines pulled me aside to inform me that they could not kick my ass until they trusted me, so I continued to taunt them. Moracruz was horrified and not happy with my request because as my roommate the chances were good that he would be hazed as well, but he stayed with me even though he did not have to. At seven thirty I told Moracruz that I would be dressing in my "war suit" for the upcoming battle. Moracruz shook his head and said, “You are fucking crazy Anderson.” I had it all planned out and dressed in my "war suit" which consisted of; a reflective yellow glow belt around my waist, my boots with olive drab socks, a gas mask, and nothing else. I was mostly nude and ready for anything. At the strike of eight there was a knock at my door. I threw it open and howled inside my gas mask, jumping out of the threshold and shaking my genitals at those senior Marines who had showed up. They all laughed and left Moracruz and I alone, we had earned some valuable cool points.

I was waiting to board a commercial airliner today from Atlanta back to my home in Portland. I listened to a couple of Army Privates in uniform who could not have been older than nineteen and they reminded me of myself and Moracruz eight years ago. The two Privates were fresh out of training and comparing stories about how difficult and fun it had been. They are always convinced that they will deploy soon and talk about it unrealistically, idealistic about an upcoming mission that they had not yet received orders for. It made me smile, they were still innocent and baby faced. When the plane landed the stewardess requested that uniformed members aboard the airliner be allowed to be the first off and the passengers applauded as I watched the Privates leave.

When we were young there were two Marines who made it their business to give Moracruz a hard time. One was Big Mississippi and the other Big Texas. They would predict him a coward and crack jokes at him because they could. On November 12, 2004 we were in the Battle of Fallujah and the squad I was traveling with found itself ambushed by thirty terrorists. I was in the house next door to the ambush house and Big Mississippi was one of the first people to fall back to my house. He had always worked out for fun and was a gigantic meathead, his complex was not complex and I remember him looking at me with wide eyes full of fear, he simply froze and did not prove combat effective. As soon as the ambush began Big Texas ran as fast as he could away from the enemy gunfire. He ended up shot and many speculated this was because he had run into a friendly machine gun position. When he was tackled down the street by one of our Navy medics he was said to have exclaimed, “They are all dead, drop a bomb on the house!” All of us were very alive. I remember watching Moracruz walk into the house and as he did so he dumped a couple hundred rounds out of his machine gun toward the enemy position. He was bleeding from the calves from where he had been shot, he only collapsed after his job was done.

Cajones Part 1: Tijuana Prelude

Cajones will be a four part story focusing on Mexican American Marines who guided my military experience.


In the winter of 2001 I took a trip with a friend to visit his father in San Diego with the intentions of slipping into Tijuana Mexico when I was sixteen. I made the trip with sixty dollars, twenty of which was lollipop money from a school fundraiser that I hid in the back of my wallet in case of an emergency. I owed the money to a teacher of mine that coming Monday. After spending a day meeting my friend’s father and his family, and after a paintball game with some friends who played with no protective masks, we took off to the Promised Land. His father dropped my buddy, his younger brother and I at the border and recommended against drinking the water. The last thing my father had told me before I had left for the trip was, “Don’t go to Mexico.” We walked through the state fair styled turning pole gate and found ourselves in a new and magical country.

The first thing a person may notice when crossing the border to Tijuana on foot is the smell of feces coming from a concrete irrigation channel holding shallow brown water that children play in and vagrants wander. Ahead waves an enormous Mexican flag in the air, surrounded by what appears to be dilapidated housing and make-shift shacks. Filthy and impoverished children run up to the new arrivals selling “Chiclet” gum and begging for money. If you have a heart it should be shattered within ten feet of clearing the pole gate. Welcome to Tijuana 2001.


My friends and I made it to the initial shops before we reached Revolution Street, which is the main hub of the city. We stopped at a bar and sat outside as the server brought my friend and I a couple of beers and I bought a pack of smokes in my new found “Donkey Island”. His younger brother abstained from the beer and nicotine, he was a nice curly haired kid who should have been entering his freshman year in high school but had skipped so many grades that he was preparing to graduate ahead of us, and needless to say he was a genius. We finished our beers and continued the quest. I didn’t have a lighter so I would light the cigarettes back to back chain-smoking. My Spanish was good enough to get around and I knew the culture of Tijuana well enough not to get in trouble, the lollipop money would be for police, if we ran into them. My friend and I were in search of a strip club and talking about it as we stood by a fountain that is a local landmark. Out of nowhere a shady looking Mexican guy interrupted our conversation and exclaimed, “Hey! Three amigo’s, did someone say strippers?” We nodded our heads and he said, “Follow me! I know a great place!” My friend and I were determined to be the first kids in our class to get a lap dance. Our new friend guided us passed Revolution Street and passed the never ending bars until we reached our destination. A large man sat on a stool and asked for our I.D.’s, my friend and I shook our heads and said that we did not have I.D.’s. Our new friend vouched for us and the younger brother told us that he was cool with his older brother going in but that he would wait for us outside. My friend and I entered the strip club.

Having knowledge about how such things operate and having made many trips to Tijuana after this trip, I have still never told my friend the secret to my hot stripper trick. As we entered the club a server approached us and offered us a seat by the stripper pole. I let my friend lead and I put a twenty dollar bill in the servers hand and told him in his ear that this was a tip and to make sure we had a good time. My buddy had never seen my move and we took a seat. The server brought us a complimentary aluminum bucket full of ice and beer, happy with his tip. The strip club was dark and empty except for the two under-aged gringos and smelled heavily of cheap perfume. American hip hop music began to bump in the club and the DJ announced the entrance of the first stripper with gusto.

She must have been in her fifties and was missing a front tooth. She mounted the pole and went to work; my friend and I loved it, I think because we both wanted to be writers and had read Hunter S. Thompson. As the song played and the old lady danced a hot stripper came and sat on my lap; my friend looked at me bewildered as to why me and not him? I put together that it was the tip I had dropped the server but said nothing. She flirted with me and asked if I wanted to go to the back room for a lap dance that would cost twenty dollars? I explained to her that I only had ten dollars and at first she refused but finally caved. I had seen that done in a favorite war movie about Vietnam. She led me to the back room and a four foot tall Mexican man held his hand out for advance payment. I put ten dollars of the lollipop money in his hand and he shook his head no and said, “Twenty amigo.” I put the last of my money in his hand and disappeared to the back room for three songs worth of a lap dance.

After the first song ended my friend entered the backroom with the elderly stripper who had been dancing on the pole. I raised my beer at him and he waved…I laughed the whole way through the next song because I had the savvy to win the hot stripper and he had no clue why. My dance ended after my third song and my friend had one more to go when the four foot tall bill collector came rushing into the back room and asked, “Do you have I.D. amigo?” I shrugged and explained that I had already told the door man I didn’t. He looked at me alarmed and said “Policia amigo, you need I.D.” My heart sank as I looked passed the bead curtain at Mexican police who were questioning some new arrivals. “You got a back door?” I asked in a panicked voice. “You got money?” He responded.

I had spent the last of my high school lollipop emergency funds on the Tijuana stripper but figured my friend had some money so I pointed at him and said, “No but he does.” The short man broke up my friends lap dance early and ushered him to where I was standing. My friend was confused and I explained the situation as our guide ushered us out the back door that led to a courtyard where a scrap metal fence with a rusty hinge stood between us and Mexican jail. We could not open the gate that had probably been closed since the Mexican Revolution so the three of us desperately put our backs into it until the gate was forced open. The short man made my friend tip him and he guided us back to the front door where my buddies little brother was having an intellectual conversation on the political impacts of 9-11 to the doorman who could not understand a word the curly haired gringo was saying.

When I got back home I told my step-brother who was the same age the greatest story he had ever heard about a city he had never seen; a land where a sixteen year old could drink beer, smoke cigarettes and pay for a lap dance. Next I told him that I was short the twenty dollars I would owe the next day. We laughed at the story. He thought I was pretty screwed as we walked down our suburban streets heading back to our house. I saw something on the black asphalt and picked it up. It was a twenty dollar bill.

For CEB and Most Protected People of our United States.

CEB wrote a response to a blog of mine. Below is the link and CEB's comments can be found under and surprisingly..."Comments".

http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/2011/11/thrill-kill-anderson.html#comments

Combat and war is a harsh reality and I wish it were different but I don’t wish everyone to go as most modern Americans would prove worthless in combat. I do not subscribe to utopia as I don’t believe every human and every leader of humans can remain tame for a lifetime. I can’t say that my wars were just or sensible from the political perspective but as a field Marine it was not my job or my wish to consider these things. I was sent where the voters sent me. When I was young I did not want war but I did want to serve my country and with a gun, regardless of political affiliation, service is a tradition that my family has been involved in since at least the civil war that I can trace but with an oral and probably accurate history dating back to the revolution from my grandmother’s maiden side of the family, the Doans. The Doans were of English puritan stock and were rumored to date back to Plymouth-Rock, which made my grandmother eligible for some creepy club of people who were not quite Native Americans but had been here since colonization.
I do not feel more “American” than anyone else and would not consider myself a conservative or a liberal; as the extremists in both of those parties equally make me want to puke. If CEB is concerned I vote for Ralph Nader every election, not particularly because I want to see him as the president, but as a protest to a two party system that represents minorities of logic in this country. I joined the Marines a few weeks after graduating high school and did not come from a poor or tragic background that most liberals would like to subscribe to. I was not a red blooded flag waving mindless patriot angered by racism against the “towel-heads” that had brought those towers down as some conservatives would subscribe to. I came from southern California middle class suburbia; I read books on my free time, liked punk rock music from the eighties and at one time sported a Mohawk. My parents divorced when I was young, which was common where I grew up but remained proactive in my up-bringing until I left for service. My father was a reporter and my mother worked in sales for most of my childhood. I frequented museums of art and science during odd weekends as a kid and went to the movies with my family on others. I wanted to be a writer and a film director for as long as I can remember…the same amount of time that I wanted to serve my country. I am a life-long atheist but respect the religious views of all cultures and always have.
I write this not because I am special but because CEB wants to counsel veterans and is currently a student. I fell in love with a girl when I was a kid and would write her when I was in Fallujah Iraq, waiting to die and fight but finding the romance in every sunrise of every day that I had survived…marveling at that ball of light and wondering if it would be the last time I would see it or feel the warmth of anything ever again. I would write her about my observations of a strange place where people were trying to kill me and with the expectation that we would be together when I got home. After that battle many of my friends had been killed, the girl had found another man and so is the ancient story of the warrior. I was not bitter, I had a nice vacation back home where there was another woman and some rest with my family. Then it was time to leave again and start the process all over but this time in Afghanistan and with new Marines who would see battle; that I was very concerned about the same way a friend of mine who was killed would have been concerned about me the year before.
I served four years and came back home to watch many of my friends struggle with their journey and I would think to myself how strange they were and wonder why they were having such a hard time. I would drink all day and stay up all night waiting for someone I did not know to kill me in southern California suburbia. Months after returning I began to smell dead bodies before I reached an REM sleep state and would find myself immediately very awake and very alert. I still can’t sit for too long in a crowded room without breaking for a cigarette. As for humanity, I never killed anyone and never wanted to. I spent my recovery from myself writing about my experiences in an attempt to explain what the world looked like to me as a Marine Infantryman teenager who did his job.
There are many CEB’s in this world who will question our humanity through ignorance and I laugh for joy at what a pleasure it must be to go to school instead and have such an easy life without ever having a legitimate question of mortality. Today the military is an all-volunteer force…no draftees because people like me keep it that way. I have no shame for the city we leveled to the ground or for the people we killed. I am very aware that when I talk to a civilian psychiatrist who has never been shot at, that I will be talking to CEB and hope that this letter clears the air a bit. In my world CEB is a waste of space, same as the war mongers and the liberals who campaign for tolerance for everything except those things they do not agree with. The same country I left to defend was the same country I returned home to.