Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles

by Anthony Swofford

  Atticus writes the Acid Girl, even though he’s never dropped acid and by his own account he’s only fucked two and a half times. She never replies. This saddens us all.

  But soon every one of us carries an Any Marine letter or two in his ruck, sometimes with a portrait or a snapshot taken from the young writer’s pure and heavenly and patriotic life. Most of the letters are from young women, high school seniors and college freshmen and sophomores, girls just our ages or a year or two either way.

  Atticus says, “The ones that aren’t legal, by the time we get out of this motherfucker, they will be. We can’t get arrested for writing letters. It’s part of war, it’s a tradition, romancing the ladies back home.”

  Sometimes we respond to the girls, but no long-term correspondences, no lifelong love affairs, will be started. These are blind dalliances that accomplish a simple task on both ends—the girl in York, Nebraska, feels as if she’s doing her part for the Coalition to Free Kuwait and the jarheads of STA Platoon 2/7 can come together during Any Marine call for a little fun and, as with the Acid Girl, some real excitement. And there is no such thing as too many photos of pretty girls or an excess of possibilities, no matter how remote.

  I keep a photo of a girl—she’s from Iowa—for a few months. I write her after her initial gesture, and I write things that make me think I sound smart and sexy and brave, ready to die for my country. She probably thinks I’m crazy. What a genre, the response to the Any Marine letter! She writes me back and includes her senior portrait, and on the back of her portrait she writes that she loves me and that she is busy praying for my safety. The next time I’m in the rear, after laminating our newly issued maps of southwestern Kuwait, I laminate her photo along with a dozen others for guys in the platoon.

  Eventually so many Any Marine letters are floating around battalion that they’ve become a nuisance. One evening after our first hot chow in three weeks—red beans and rice that was cooked sixteen hours prior in Riyadh—First Sergeant Martinez calls an impromptu company formation. The sun is not yet down, but the temperature has begun to drop, and a light wind snaps across the desert. Because we are unshaven and have not showered in weeks, the formation is casual, and in some of the ranks men are talking in low whispers as their platoon commanders report to the first sergeant.

  Martinez explains that the Marine Corps Band, expecting a quick and concise war victory and shortly afterward an increased demand for band performances, has found itself low on trumpet and cornet players, and there’s an ALLMAR (All Marine Corps) call for potential band members. Battalion-level tryouts have been ordered, and Martinez hopes to fill the band with former proud members of Headquarters & Support Company, 2/7. He asks for volunteers, anyone who can claim even minor competency with a horn, and he stresses that the lucky few will be cut orders the next day—by the commandant himself, for Washington, D.C., and duty with the famous band—thus they will narrowly miss the carnage that awaits the rest of us poor, sad fuckers. Five marines volunteer, and Martinez orders them into line in front of the company. I think I know what awaits these jarheads. The men are all boots, new to the company since we arrived in Saudi; I recognize a mechanic from the motor pool and a supply clerk. They are smiling as Martinez whispers to them. They look proud, as though they’re about to receive medals for heroism. Martinez must be assuring them that their honor and valor will in no way be compromised if they are picked for the band. Then he pulls a handful of plastic kazoos from his pocket, gives each candidate one, and says, “Welcome to the band! Play, you coward motherfuckers, play!” He orders them to blow “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Silent Night,” and “Come, All Ye Faithful.”

  When the players are finished, and the entire company is debilitated by laughter, Martinez hands each of the marines a clear garbage bag full of Any Marine letters and says, “You marines read and respond to every one of those fucking letters! Make those girls feel good! And remember, you’re lucky to be in this combat infantry battalion! You’re lucky to have a home!”

  Martinez was being nasty and harsh but he wasn’t lying about the boots being lucky to have a home. I’d always worried about losing my home and running out of everything—out of love, money, food, shelter, and transportation. As a teenager I often suffered anxious daydreams of becoming homeless, out of a job, unskilled and unloved. I pictured myself on street corners, in the rain, with a filthy dog I couldn’t afford to feed. These worries occurred during the Reagan administration, when the topic of homelessness received much media attention, and certainly this fueled my fear. Reagan had been the governor of my state, his mansion was a few blocks from my home, and my parents had voted twice for his presidency, so I was intimately connected to his policies and failures, I thought. Sacramento had become a key destination for the homeless, and each Sunday at Mass, after the general collection, another collection went out specifically for homeless shelters. Obviously, these weren’t the only reasons for my fear of homelessness: my family was disintegrating because of my father’s disinterest and infidelity, and I projected his emotional distance many years further into my own life, when I too would become a lonely and despondent man.

  I joined the Marine Corps in part to impose domestic structure upon my life, to find a home. But Marine Corps domesticity always ends. As much as you love your fellow jarheads and love field life and training and firing weapons, you will someday have to leave the Corps, at least spiritually, and find a partner and possibly have children and create a realistic domestic realm. The simple domesticity of the Marine Corps is seductive and dangerous. Some men claim to love the Corps more than they love their own mother or wife or children—this is because loving the Corps is uncomplicated. The Corps always waits up for you. The Corps forgives your drunkenness and stupidity. The Corps encourages your brutality.

  By late December I’m no longer writing to Kristina. I regularly exchange letters with my friend Jenn, whom I slept with twice in high school and regularly when I returned to Sacramento on leave (once in the backseat of Kristina’s car). Now Jenn is at school in Santa Barbara. I look forward to her stories of college life, parties and love affairs and literature classes, a world far removed from the Desert. Later, she will tell me that her mother urged her to write me throughout my deployment, and even when she was with a long-term boyfriend, her mother advised her not to tell me about the boyfriend because I needed hope. Her mother had written to a boy in Vietnam the same way. At first I was insulted by this revelation, but eventually I realized that it was her mother’s way of telling her daughter to take care of someone, anyone, if you can, an ultimately humane if somewhat vainglorious gesture. So Jenn, among others, keeps me hoping.

  I also write to a friend of Kristina’s named Katherine, a woman a few years older than me whom I’ve met once. Katherine is pretty, and not just pretty but glamorous, and probably she writes me for some of the same reasons Jenn does. Katherine must know well enough about Kristina’s infidelities, and while Kristina writes letters peppered with jealousy and deceit, Katherine writes me as a caring friend. I know I’ll never sleep with Katherine, but this doesn’t mean I can’t attach at least some lusty excitement to responding to and receiving her kind letters. Katherine is engaged to a German air force officer and now living in Munich. She met him while working at the same hotel where Kristina works and found her boyfriend. I fantasize about traveling to Germany after the war and stealing Katherine from this Aryan.

  Katherine’s handwriting is beautiful, each delicately crafted letter like a fine sketch, and everyone in the platoon asks to see her envelopes before I open them. Her middle name is Mary, and she is deeply Catholic and always signs with all three of her names, and this adds to the aristocratic look of her letters. Also, her envelopes smell faintly of a rich European perfume. Troy is convinced this is a sexual overture, but I insist that the letters pick up the scent while being transported to the post office in her purse. Perhaps Troy is correct and I should pursue Katherine romantically, but I know it’s easy to fool one
self with perfume and distance.

  In late December I receive a note from Yumiko announcing her marriage to a man I haven’t heard of before. The announcement arrives in a black lacquer box, and also inside the box she’s packed a Japanese pear, wrapped in foam. I ask Troy to go for a walk with me, and as we pass through the perimeter, I share the pear with him, and the news of Yumiko’s marriage. I’m not saddened as much as stunned, and Troy understands this, as he always understands me. After we each take a few bites, I throw the pear, and when it lands, sand attaches to the moist fruit, like memory to the soft parts of the brain.

  In December’s mail I learn of two other marriages. The first is of my longtime friend Cliff, one of my pals from grade school and the newspaper route days. He’d known the girl for a few weeks and it was possible that she was pregnant, so one afternoon they drove to Nevada and got married at the Chapel of the Pines with no one in attendance. He’s sent me pictures from the backyard reception that took place the next weekend at his parents’ house. He doesn’t specify dates, so this might have occurred in late August or two weeks ago.

  One afternoon I open a letter from my younger sister, the photo chronicler of all family events. I look at her pictures before reading the letter. I think I’m seeing scenes from a birthday party, but I can’t think of anyone in the family who’s had a birthday recently. My niece wears a red velvet dress and both of my sisters wear white, along with my mother. I’ve never met my mother’s current boyfriend, Mr. George, but my younger sister has described him as “a round man who looks like a bald woman when he shaves his beard.” The beardless, round man in the white tuxedo does indeed look like a woman, and he’s kissing my mother in one picture and placing a diamond ring on her finger in another.

  I must’ve sworn loudly because Troy lumbers over to my cot and asks, in his comforting Michigan nasal drone, “What the fuck is your problem?”

  I hand him the pictures. “What does this look like to you?”

  He shuffles from picture to picture as a homicide investigator might go over crime scene photos, and he returns once or twice to the most expository shots. He says, “Hell, Swoff, it looks to me like your mom just married some fat dude. Bitch didn’t even ask your permission.”

  Troy is one of those rare guys who can casually call your mother a bitch and make it a term of endearment, invest the word with all that is good and wholesome and loving about the woman.

  He’s also quite capable at moving the conversation along, picking up and dropping other topics, some relevant, some not, and finally obscuring and even obliterating whatever might have been bothering you, like a jazzman might obscure the pain of living, though likely he’ll bring up some other troublesome topic.

  I say, “My mom married some guy I don’t even know. She could’ve waited until I fucking died in the war or made it home alive, don’t you think?”

  Troy says, “Nothing you can do about it. We’re jarheads, man, nobody gives a fuck. They want us to fight. It’s our job. I like your mom. I’ve met her. She’s a nice lady. But she can’t wait for you to come home before she goes and gets married. Would you wait for her?”

  “It doesn’t matter if I’d wait. She’s my mother and she married a stranger! She made me a stepson and I had nothing to say about it! What if I don’t like the motherfucker?”

  “Swoffie, you got nothing to say, man. It’s not really your business. Your mom fell in love, she got married. You’re a grown man, she’s a grown woman. She couldn’t wait.”

  “I think some people are waiting. Don’t you think Lisa is waiting for you, or Erica? Christ, Erica joined the Suck for you. She’s going to be a jarhead for you and you’ve never even met! Jenn and Katherine are waiting for me.”

  “Erica is different. She’ll know the Corps, so she’ll know me. Jenn and Katherine only know the bullshit you write to them. If you were in the States, they wouldn’t write those letters to you. Those women have set conditions. Distance is one of them. If we were in the Palms and you called Jenn and said, ‘Hey, how about I come up to Santa Barbara this weekend?’ she’d say, ‘Hey, how about you don’t.’ And let’s say you happened to be in fucking Munich, Germany, and you called Katherine and said, ‘Let’s meet down at the Hofbräu,’ she’d say, ‘Let’s not.’ Why? Because you are a jarhead, and you don’t fit in anywhere, except in their little letters.”

  “Then what about the Any Marine girls? Why are they writing?”

  “They never have to see us. It’s safe. Your little Iowa girl, she’s got a boyfriend, all of those girls have boyfriends! They’re using you. They’re using all of us! We think we’re using them, laminating their senior portraits and jerking off to them, but we’re wrong. We’re the ones being used! The Any Marine girls are sitting together in circles laughing at us because we’re about to die and they’ll feel better about themselves because they’ve written us letters!”

  “Fuck you,” I say. “All you’ve ever slept with is PI whores. What the fuck do you know about why a woman is writing letters?”

  “Every whore I ever fucked I loved her first and she loved me. I know you’re a jarhead. That’s all I need to know.”

  Troy begins singing “The Marines’ Hymn” and everyone in the hootch follows, except me. They’ve all been watching to see how I’ll react, and of course I’ve reacted poorly, because what he’s said is true. And now they will play with me.

  But they only make it through a stanza and a half before Johnny enters the hootch and says, with much fake malice, “Give me a fucking break, you jarheads! You cumsuckers don’t love my Corps. You shitbags disparage the memory of Chesty Puller every day with your lazy carcasses lying around on these cots like goddamn desert princesses jerking your rotten clits!”

  Hearing Johnny, the mildest of characters, concoct a hard-assed drill-instructor persona is always enough to flood the hootch with laughter. I forget that Troy has just tainted my primary lifelines to the States, the civilian world, and freedom. And even though my mother has completed the crucifixion of my family, I can forget that she’s now married to a man I’ve never met. I don’t need to meet him. The men of STA Platoon are my family. Mother, father, sister, brother, we play each of these to one another, because we must. This is when I begin to understand that when you are a part of a war, life goes on for the people who aren’t. They don’t stop living to write you letters and keep you abreast of how they’ve stopped living. They marry the right or wrong people, make bad investments, get in car wrecks, die, birth children, get drunk, use drugs, have sex, become infected with diseases, and eat civilized meals.

  We all join Johnny in a competing chorus of DI-ese, the language of our initial oppression. Troy mock-thrashes me, yelling, “Bends-and-thrusts. Bends-and-thrusts. My grandma is harder than you, Swofford.”

  Dickerson insults Atticus and questions his lineage, asking whether it includes animals. Crocket and Kuehn go back and forth, pointing fingers in each other’s faces, impersonating their favorite DIs, the men they’d hated most, the men who’d taught them the most. We turn the inside of our hootch into a circus, and inside of this circus we cannot be injured, inside of our circus we cannot be touched.

  But we are insane to believe this.

  In early January I realize it’s been weeks since anyone has bitched about the Desert. I know now that it has ceased to be simply a place and instead is a part of us, in us not only through the mouth, nose, ears, ass, and eyes, but in our souls. We’ve made the desert our comfortable home.

  But that’s about to change. We now know that the U.S. Congress supports President Bush’s desire for offensive action against Saddam Hussein’s military.

  Sergeant Dunn reads to us from Hussein’s Army Day speech, commemorating seventy years of the Iraqi army. Hussein calls Kuwait the branch that must be returned to the tree, the nineteenth governorate of Iraq. He advises the Iraqi people that the sacrifices they must make for this war are equal to the importance of the victory. Jihad, he says, is the way of all Arab people
, and Iraq is the center of Arab pride.

  Kuehn asks what jihad is, and Dunn says, “It means he thinks they can kick our asses with the help of Allah. We are the sinners, we are the infidels, and thus easily defeated, due to our sinning and other bad behavior.”

  Kuehn says, “I’ve been sinning since I was fourteen. They don’t know that in America sinning makes you strong!”

  The next day, STA Platoon is ordered to guard duty at First Marine Division Headquarters. We deploy two sniper teams to the roof of the four-story building, twenty-four hours a day. Mostly we pester the grunts who man the bunkers below. The dumb bastards stand outside their positions at night and smoke cigarettes, so we call to them on the freq, Bang, bang, you’re a dead fucking grunt. This pisses them off, and they despise STA Platoon anyway, so we’re offering them more reasons to dislike us.

  We read the Stars & Stripes every few days and occasionally our captain acquires a copy of the Arab Times. The problem is, we can’t believe anything either publication prints. We’re stuck in the middle, and the flow of information becomes rather gooey and imprecise when we ask questions. For instance, we have no idea the air war is about to begin. Two or three deadlines have passed, Iraq is still in Kuwait, supposedly raping and killing, we’re still ready to go, but where and for what, we don’t know. We want to get there, we’re tired of the rumors and false starts; we’re exhausted from constantly training.