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

by Anthony Swofford

  So the joy of dog tags is ordering new sets and deciding exactly how to wear them and who will be fortunate enough to receive an old set if you already have many tags hanging around your chest and hidden in enough lucky places.

  The comfort of dog tags is surrounding yourself with and disbursing so many pairs that there is no way you could possibly die, because your goddamn dog tags are everywhere: in your boot; five pairs hanging from your neck; in your mom’s jewelry box; in your girlfriend’s panties drawer; buried in your backyard, under your childhood fort; discarded at sea; nailed to the ceiling of your favorite bar in the PI; hidden in that special whore’s mattress; hanging around the neck of the mama-san seamstress on Okinawa, the one who sewed your chevrons perfectly every time. There’s no way a jarhead with that many dog tags—his name and SSN and blood type and religious preference stamped into so many pieces of metal, spread so far and wide—will die.

  This is the only true religion.

  The evening of the sixteenth of January we’re redeployed north of the Triangle with the rest of the battalion. We’ve never been so far north, and because of this we assume the war will soon begin. We want the war to start or we want the war to never start. We know nothing—we look at our maps covered with troop strength and movement symbols and minefield and obstacle locations, and we still know nothing.

  I’m happy back in the field. It will rain on and off for a month, usually in the afternoon, sopping downpours that last a few hours before the sun breaks through—I’ll later see this recorded as the worst winter in fourteen years for the Arabian Desert.

  Some mornings, I find my way to the nearest rise and stand and watch the soft haze burn away, and if I’ve found a quiet moment with no ground traffic from mechanized units, I might easily convince myself that where I stand is nowhere, that I’m an exile, stuck between worlds, between many worlds, a prisoner held captive by sand and haze and time. By politics and rhetoric too.

  I’m a soldier, in a “conflict.” A “conflict” is much easier for the American public to swallow than a war. War still has that messy Vietnam feeling—the Vietnam War was not an official war either, but a perpetually escalating conflict with many poor, dead, sad fuckers. Conflicts—or even better yet, a series of operations—sound smaller and less complex and costly than wars.

  A half million troops are deployed to Saudi Arabia, more than enough to start the fight—more than enough frontline bodies to accept mortal injury and still have numerous poor, sad fuckers in reserve. Call it whatever you’d like: the troops are sturdy, their training has been extensive and intense.

  The war begins. Within hours of the first U.S. bombs dropping on Iraqi forces in Kuwait and Iraq, on the seventeenth of January, the Iraqi air force threat is demolished. Two days later, the Coalition has flown over four thousand missions with the loss of only ten aircraft. The Iraqis are not so lucky. After the loss of many aircraft, and the transport of over one hundred Iraqi planes to safe airfields in Iran, the only semi-long-range air-delivery capability the Iraqis command is the Scud.

  The potential Scud interceptor, the Patriot missile, is a darling of the American press. Across the country, at gas stations and dime stores, in front of sports stadiums and at church bazaars, citizens spend good, clean American dollars on T-shirts printed with the slogans PATRIOT MISSILE: SCUD BUSTER!! and I’D GO TEN THOUSAND MILES TO SMOKE A CAMEL!!

  The Scuds are Soviet-built missiles originally intended for the delivery of antipersonnel bomblets, chemical weapons, and small nuclear devices. In the late 1980s, for their war with Iran, the Iraqis modified the Soviet Scuds, increasing their maximum effective range and renaming the missile the al-Hussein. But the increased range decreased the accuracy of the missiles. It’s believed that the Iraqis have thirty-six mobile Scud launchers, but due to mobility and camouflage, it is anybody’s guess how many launchers are currently combat capable.

  On January 18, Iraq fires Scuds at Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Ram Allah, and by the end of the day Israel has been attacked with the Scud eight times, causing dozens of injuries and a few deaths by asphyxiation due to incorrectly donned gas masks. Initial reports that the Scuds contained chemical weapons are false. This same morning, the Patriot missile battery at the combat air base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, destroys an incoming Scud.

  The Patriot is fired in the vicinity of an incoming missile, and the Patriot’s warhead explodes, with the intention that the shrapnel will either detonate the enemy warhead or puncture the fuel tank, causing the missile to explode or fall short of its target. You’re safe, as long as you’re not in the short zone.

  To keep Israel from destroying the Coalition by attacking Iraq—Saddam’s intention in firing Scuds at Israel—the United States sends Patriot missile batteries to Israel, and the Patriots will reduce the Scud damage to Israeli cities.

  But I am not in Israeli cities, I am on the front lines.

  It’s easier to dig a fighting hole in wet sand because dry sand tends to ship back into your hole, and when dry and falling into your hole, the sand is reminiscent of a timekeeping device from the board games of your youth, and as the dry sand falls into your hole, you aren’t sure what you’re pissed off about: the reminder that time is passing quickly and your death might soon arrive like morning, or the nuisance of the sweet memory from childhood of the family huddled around the game table dealing cards and laughing, or that the shipped sand means you must move that sand again, as though through this thankless action you might know each particle personally, as though because you now actually live inside it, you must care about this most unstable material or medium that will make futile all effort or endeavor.

  And someone is always nearby while you complain about having to dig another fighting hole; usually a sergeant is nearby to remind you that fighting holes save lives and if you were in the fucking army, they’d call it a foxhole, and the fox is a fiendish devil but not a fighter, and you are a fighter, so you must live now in this fighting hole you will make out of the earth with your hands God gave you.

  Now more dry sand ships into your hole and you wonder if any of this is worth it and how it all began.

  And you remember that novel by Kobo Abe, the salaryman out chasing his passion, insects, only to be nabbed by the villagers like an insect himself and sent to the task of fending off burial by sand. You recall that as a teenager in Japan your brother read the novel in the Japanese but you never did, because in Japan you were too young for the novel, but your brother, at night before you slept near each other on your futons, he would tell you the story of The Woman in the Dunes. Now, you wish there were a woman in the dunes nearby who’d tend to your sand wounds, save you from the villagers, convince you that all effort at escape is futile. But of course you are in the wrong country and this is a war, not a novel. You remind yourself not to forget about the war.

  You continue digging. The sound is of an E-tool entering wet sand.

  We dig our fighting holes in the wet sand that surrounds our hootch. Our defensive posture is such that any Scud attack other than a direct hit will result in minimal damage but lots of loud explosions. We’re equipped to forcefully repel a ground attack by enemy infantry, and with the help of air and artillery we will diminish the capabilities of a mechanized unit while suffering a significant number of casualties.

  No one will confuse the outline of our defensive position with the ancient tradition of scarring the earth for the benefit of the gods. But we work hard to save ourselves. We spend the entire day of the seventeenth of January digging the fighting holes. We hear planes and helicopters fly overhead, and because we’ve all been in the Corps long enough, even the boots, not to care about a flyover and what it might mean—even though now it means we are at war, finally at war—we continue to bitch and dig while ignoring the aircraft, or if not ignoring, certainly not looking at the aircraft, because only a boot jarhead stops digging his fighting hole to watch an aircraft split the sky. We take all day to dig the fighting holes either because we are tire
d and we know that when we’re finished someone will create another task, because now we are at war and there will be no end to tasks relevant to combat, or because we still don’t believe in the existence of a credible threat to our security, our remaining breathing hours.

  In fact, we go to sleep tonight, the first night of the war, without a firewatch. We crawl into our sleeping bags on top of our cots, the inside of the hootch warmer than the outside desert evening and drier certainly than the ground and a poncho.

  Perhaps Staff Sergeant Siek hasn’t assigned a firewatch because he knows no one will sleep.

  After a few hours, Doc John asks, “Is anyone else awake?”

  And we all sit up and Dickerson lights the lantern hanging from the crossbeam.

  Kuehn and I leave to take a piss. During the day you piss in a general area, the area where everyone pisses, but at night, especially on a dark night, you simply walk out from your position as far as you’d like, and you count your steps, and then you piss, and then you execute an about-face and return the same number of steps. Kuehn and I piss and look at the stars. He pulls a bottle of whiskey from his cargo pocket and says, “Hit it, Swoff, we’re at goddamn war.”

  I take a long drink, whiskey being one of my least favorite liquors, but still it tastes good, and I pass the bottle to Kuehn, and he drinks it down much farther, but I take another try, and my belly warms and I’m happy to be pissing, and drinking from a bottle of illegal booze in the middle of the desert, with Kuehn, my crazy friend from Texas.

  He says, “I didn’t think it would happen. All those deadlines, all that talk. It’s a real motherfucking war. Bombs and shit. Chemical weapons.”

  I say, “I didn’t think it would happen, either. We’ve been here too long. It’s our home, so how can it all of the sudden be a war zone?”

  “Bastards were just waiting for us to acclimatize, for the cool weather to get here. They think they’re doing us a favor by waiting this long.”

  “Welcome to the motherfucker.”

  “Welcome to the motherfucker.”

  We finish the bottle and return to the hootch. Troy, Dickerson, Combs, and Dettmann are playing poker. Goerke is in the corner, using Troy’s tape recorder to make a good-bye tape for his mother. Sergeant Dunn, Staff Sergeant Siek, Johnny, and Fountain are playing a board game, Axis & Allies. Martinez flips through a smut magazine. Cortes bought cigars from the Egyptians last time we were in the rear-rear and he’s pacing in circles outside the hootch, smoking. He announces that he’s not going to stop pacing until he smokes his entire box of cheap cigars. He thought he’d save them until the war was over, but, he says, “Fuck it, I’m smoking.” Occasionally I hear him trip over a fighting hole or his own feet, and he curses, and Dickerson yells that if Cortes is out there filling up all of our fighting holes with sand, he’ll be the one digging them out. Vann is outside the hootch as well, crouched in a fighting hole, using a flashlight, writing a letter to his wife and son, Little Vann. Soon, his wife will have another child. Sandor Vegh has a wife and a son at home in Ohio, and he’s on his cot writing a letter, a letter that must begin, Honey, the war started today, but you already know this, you probably knew before I did. I assume Vegh was raised poor, because he will not allow potatoes in his home, and he occasionally makes vague threats out loud, such as, “If I find out she’s serving potatoes while I’m gone at war, I’m going to be pissed.” He says so again tonight. Vegh often thumbs through pictures of his family. He’s a first-generation Hungarian-American, and I wonder if his parents brought their family to the United States to send a son to war for their new country. I wonder if his parents are proud or desperate, and how many generations it takes to be fully vested in a country, vested enough to lose sons at war, certainly more than one generation, I think. What if next year you decide to return home; what has your son died for, a half country, shadow country? Troy asks Doc John for sleeping pills and Doc says he’s out, and Troy asks what kind of doc is it that doesn’t have sleeping pills on the first night of the motherfucking war? Doc says he’ll raid the battalion med locker tomorrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll love you, tomorrow, Troy sings. Meyers is frantically cleaning his already clean M16, and he loses his firing pin in the sand, and three or four of us spend half an hour sifting through the sand beneath his cot before Troy finds the firing pin, and he offers to sell it to Meyers for $5,000. And so the night continues, the first night of the war, no one sleeping, Cortes smoking, Troy singing, Vegh worried his wife might be serving potatoes in Ohio, a World War II board game being played in the corner, Goerke passing the tape recorder to Atticus, who passes it to Troy, and around to others in the hootch, but I decline the offer. A “good-bye, I love you” tape is disturbingly fatalistic this early in the war. And to whom would I say these last words? I will wait for the bombs to land closer.

  The next morning at a hastily arranged battalion formation the colonel announces that we are now involved in an offensive operation named Desert Storm. He tells us that we are both the tip and the eye of the storm. I think he’s blending metaphors, and that most of us don’t know what a metaphor is, and that he’s confusing the troops. The colonel insists that chemical-laden Scuds are still a serious threat to our safety and that an Iraqi ground offensive is possible, so we need to fortify our defensive positions, and he adds, “Please do not consider this a bunch of bullshit.” After the formation we thousand or so marines of 2/7 walk slowly to our fighting holes, kicking up a sandstorm, as though by walking so sloppily with such disregard for tactical movement we might obscure the words of the BC, that by kicking the sand and saying to ourselves or others Motherfucker, we might bring peace to the region, assuring our safety and the cessation of hostilities.

  Staff Sergeant Siek decides that a trench between each of our fighting holes is necessary to further solidify his command and control. The trenches need only be deep enough for a body to crawl from hole to hole. We are lazy from the prior night’s lack of sleep, and even if we’d been well rested, none of us have ever been motivated by the task of digging holes and trenches, but we dig the trenches and bitch and the sand ships into our holes and we are reminded again of time passing and the board games of our youth and the dark futility of the entire venture.

  * * *

  The next afternoon we are given further instruction in NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) defense. We listen to an officer from division NBC tell us again that the PB, pyridostigmine bromide, pills aren’t harmful, that in fact they will help us, like all of the other things the Marine Corps insists we ingest. The officer disburses atropine and oxime injectors and PB pill packs. The PB is intended to enhance the effects of the atropine and oxime postexposure antidote that we’ll (with any luck) self-administer to reduce the likelihood of dying from the nerve agent we’ve been attacked with, such as soman, an agent that produces what the NBC officer calls “immediate casualties.” Kuehn wonders aloud why we’ve already taken one cycle of PB and are just now being issued the atropine and oxime injectors, but Siek tells him, “Shut the fuck up, Kuehn,” as often happens when Kuehn asks hard questions we’d like answered.

  Everything the division NBC officer tells us we know already because we’ve been training for the effects of nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks since roughly the eighth week of boot camp, a long time in the past for most of us.

  If rather than offering a detailed and gory refresher course on nerve agents and their effects, the officer had simply said, “Hey, I know you jarheads know all this NBC crap because you’ve been training it since boot camp, and I’m not here to tell you what you already know, I just want to give you a heads-up and make sure you understand that such an attack is not imminent but possible,” and if concerning the PB pills, our staff sergeant had said something other than, “We will have three formations per day and at each formation you will take one of these goddamn pills. Don’t fucking ask me what it is. I’m taking it too. Do you want to fucking live or do you want to fucking die?”—we might not be w
alking toward our fighting holes with our bodies and minds full not only of NBC defense knowledge and pyridostigmine bromide but also of fear and terror.

  We swallow these PB pills not because we need to, but because the intelligence is incorrect—the people at the Pentagon received bad dope concerning the number of Iraqi chemical warheads in Kuwait, and they didn’t know about the bad dope but they knew that when soldiers and marines, good old rough American boys, started dropping dead on the battlefield from nerve gas (the dropped-dead fighter the only flawless indicator of a chemical attack), the public perception of the war being a good war and worth fighting would change. I’m sure these Pentagon guys suffered nightmares, not because they were ingesting PB pills or because they lived and breathed and shat with a gas mask fastened to their body, but from watching the movie All Quiet on the Western Front during their lunch breaks. With chemically dead fighters on their hands, the political soldiers at the Pentagon would look bad for not doing all they could to protect the fighting soldiers and marines, and the public relations war that the Pentagon had been winning would sway toward the side of peace and diplomacy because after Vietnam no one wants to see great numbers of the boys coming home dead, no matter the proposed importance of the battle, be it a fight against Communism or for the stability of 40 percent of the world’s oil fields. So the political soldiers had to find something that would promote the public sham of a Pentagon dedicated to the safety and welfare of its troops: enter PB pills. None of this has anything to do with the individual lives that might be lost to nerve gas—the immediate casualties—and everything to do with the public relations battle, the real battle occurring in America.