In the midst of my parents’ divorce, my brother wrote a letter to my mother’s lawyer, outlining the years of cruelty and abuse the family had suffered under my father’s ironfisted rule. Largely, the letter consisted of fantasy, and my brother depicted himself as the hero of the family tragedy, wanting to run away as early as age eight but sticking around to protect his mother and siblings.
I read this letter a few months before shipping to boot camp, and I wept from the first sentence through the next five pages, and when I finished, I told my mother—a confused and angry and betrayed woman—that she couldn’t use this fabricated document.
After my brother’s death, among his effects I discovered my father’s reply to this letter. It was full of profanity and threats of violence. My father swore that he would avenge my brother’s lies and false accusations.
My father and brother didn’t speak for five years after my brother wrote the letter in support of my mother. Finally, the summer my father drove to Georgia to visit his ill father and my brother was attending an army school in southern Arizona, no longer cleaning teeth but studying military intelligence, they met in a Mexican border town. I do not know what was said between the two men, if my brother apologized for the egregious lies in his letter, if my father apologized for his admittedly strict but not abusive family rule, but I do know that the first night of their rendezvous, they drank together excessively and walked arm in arm through the Mexican town, looking for my father’s hotel, not finding it, and finally sleeping next to one another on the dead grass in a filthy park, and I know that after this visit the two men shared a friendship until the son died.
The first time I tried to join the Marines, at the age of seventeen, I needed my parents’ consent. I’d arranged for a recruiter to meet my parents at the house, and the recruiter had the contract ready for them. I assumed that after a few minutes of consultation my parents would sign.
For many years my father had planned for me to go to college and become an architect and design grand houses for him to build, but the construction company he’d started after retiring from the air force never achieved the success he’d sought, and most of his jobs were simple bedroom-and-bathroom additions that he could draw the plans for, on graph paper or even a cocktail napkin. Along with any desire to sustain his marriage, my father had lost interest in building his company and furthering my architectural education.
My mother did not want to see another son join the military, but she’d never said no to her sons and even recalled fondly applying the USMC iron-on to my T-shirt many years prior, and she asked me if the shirt was still around or if it had died a slow death in the cleaning-rag barrel. I was too embarrassed to admit that I’d pinned the T-shirt, too small now for me to wear, inside my closet.
I can’t recall the recruiter’s name, but he was a short and sinewy staff sergeant of Asian descent, perhaps Korean or even Vietnamese. I liked the staff sergeant. He ran 10Ks with me along the American River and afterward treated me to dinner. There he gleefully talked to me about buying sex in the Philippines and Italy and Sweden and Panama—information my mother would never see in the brochures. The recruiter guaranteed me I could book a threesome for forty American dollars in Olongapo, PI. I’d just turned seventeen. I’d had sex three times and been the recipient of five blow jobs and fourteen hand jobs. I was sold.
I wanted to be a grunt, a rifleman, I didn’t even need to hear what other options existed, and the recruiter supported this choice. “You’ll be a fine killer,” he’d say to me after our meals.
My mother made fresh coffee and arranged a cookie plate for the recruiter’s visit and sent my younger sister down the street to play with a friend.
The recruiter arrived and my father welcomed him and walked him outside for a tour of the backyard, to show off the new built-in pool and recently landscaped lawn, and to introduce him to our dogs. The recruiter was wearing his modified dress blues with ribbons and badges, and our two dogs were disciplined enough not to jump on the recruiter and ruin the sharp, clean lines of his uniform. Our dogs understood uniforms.
Inside, my father offered the recruiter his own chair, and my father sat next to me on the couch while my mother sat in her chair and faced the recruiter.
The conversation flowed amicably: the recruiter offered my parents compliments on the interior of the house, the art and furniture from twenty years of traveling and living abroad. He asked my father about the places he’d been in the air force, and my father made a joke about the feeble air force and said something about all of the crazy jarheads he’d known in Vietnam, and before that his poor, sweet marine brother who’d died, and how he’d always believed the Corps was the backbone of the U.S. military. The recruiter accepted the compliment and said something positive yet tempered about the air force. Then the conversation moved to me. The recruiter congratulated my parents on what a fine young man they’d raised, a bright young man with a promising future, physically fit and a great specimen prepared to be molded into a hard piece of USMC steel, the recruiter said with a smile. And this is when my father said, “Staff Sergeant,” and placed his hands together as if for prayer, and bit on the tips of his index fingers, and then said, “Staff Sergeant, I’ll sign your contract if you guarantee me you won’t get my son killed. Then I’ll sign your contract. Otherwise, you should leave my house.” And the polite staff sergeant began to speak and reach for one of his slick brochures, the brochures I knew by heart but that my parents hadn’t even seen yet, but my father said, “Tell me my son will not die in your holy fucking Marine Corps.” And this was the first time I heard my father curse, and the only time until I returned from war.
The recruiter said, “I’m sorry, sir. I cannot tell you that. I can tell you Tony will be a great marine, that he’ll be a part of the finest fighting force on earth and he’ll fight proudly all enemies of the United States, just as you did once. He will be a great killer.”
I walked the staff sergeant to his car. He said, “Hey, we’ll get you next time. Your dad wants something that’s impossible. Keep up with the physical training. When you’re seventeen and a half, you can join on your own.”
I returned to my bedroom and looked over the well-thumbed recruiting brochures that showed jarheads running in tight formation, their voices warped into war cries; jarheads gathered with friends, on liberty, sharing photos from their various exotic duty stations; jarheads firing rifles and climbing fifty-foot ropes and swimming the ocean.
In a matter of seconds my entire life plan had been altered. I wept. What would I do with myself? I’d already, in my heart, signed the contract and accepted the warrior lifestyle. I wanted to be a killer, to kill my country’s enemies. Now I’d have to take the SATs and visit colleges, I’d have to find a part-time job. I’d never live abroad and chase prostitutes through the world’s brothels, or Communists through the world’s jungles. I needed the Marine Corps now, I needed the Marine Corps to save me from the other life I’d fail at—the life of the college boy hoping to find a girlfriend and later a job.
My father knocked on my door and entered my room before he’d stopped knocking. I tried to look angry rather than sad.
He sat on my weight bench and asked, “How many pounds are on the bar?”
“Two fifty.”
“How many times can you lift it?”
“Twelve or fifteen.”
“I didn’t know you were so strong.”
“Lots of guys are stronger than me.”
“No, they aren’t. As soon as you can sign that contract on your own, go ahead. Until then, I’m responsible for you. I’m not stronger than you, but I know some things about the military that they don’t show you in the brochures.”
Shortly after this conversation my father left my mother, and a few months later, while he continued to run his business out of the house but slept wherever he wanted, we fought. I’d used his business phone to call a girl I was pursuing. I talked in his office for the privacy it offered, away from my
little sister’s curious ears and my mother’s sad eyes. While using his phone over the two weeks of the failed romance, I’d somehow disabled his answering machine and he’d lost several important phone messages and subsequently a few contracts. When he realized what had occurred, he confronted me, and I first attempted to lie, telling him I had thought someone was breaking into the house and so had used the phone to call 911, but he didn’t believe me, and as he spoke to me, he pounded his index finger against my chest. Crying, and telling my father he had no right to touch me that way, I walked backward through the house until I backed my way into the garage, out of the sight of my mother and sister, and I threw the first punch, a solid punch that connected with his jaw and stunned him, and then he punched back, and he connected with me, and for what might have been a minute we exchanged blows, to the face and body, until I fell slowly to the ground, of my own volition, and he continued to hit me, though I curled my body up and covered my face with my arms so his blows connected only with my muscular arms, and these blows were painless.
He stopped hitting me and sat on a workbench stool. He breathed in gasps and might have been crying and I continued to weep and settled my cheek against the broken face of my watch.
He said, “You are stronger than me, but I’m meaner. You don’t understand what I’ve lived through. I’ll never touch you again. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you, but I believe you can handle anything, especially some soft punches from your old father.”
He walked out of the garage and into the house and I heard him tell my mother not to worry about what he had done with his son. The front door opened and closed, and his car door opened and closed, and he started his car and it idled in the driveway for ten or fifteen minutes, while I remained on the floor of the garage, in the same spot where I’d once folded my newspapers, and eventually he drove away.
At the age of seventeen and a half, I signed the enlistment contract myself, though the credit went to a new recruiter, because the recruiter who’d failed with my parents had been transferred to a different station. My new recruiter was Staff Sergeant Erikson, a nice guy who smoked and drank and cursed like a jarhead should and probably hadn’t run a 10K in ten years, but still I liked him. He told crude jokes and he too had prostitute stories, and he listed from memory the price of a whore in the Philippines, Guam, Okinawa, Bangkok, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Athens, and on good days, he remembered their names.
Once, when I visited the recruiting station with a pretty girl I was trying to impress—a foolish attempt because what young woman in her right mind in 1988 would’ve been impressed with a boy joining the Marine Corps?—Erikson pulled me aside and said, “Swofford, I’d drink a gallon of her pee just to see where it came from.”
The girl might not have been impressed with Erikson or the Marine Corps, but she became my girlfriend for a short time, and the night before I shipped to boot camp I didn’t sleep because we were so busy sweating and fucking in my bed.
The next day my father drove me to the Oakland in-processing station, where northern California men and women joining all of the military services receive a physical prior to basic training. After passing my physical and being sworn in, I’d fly to San Diego to start boot camp. The Marine Corps ran a shuttle from Sacramento to Oakland every afternoon, but my father insisted on taking me himself. On the way toward the Bay Area, we drove through the town of Vacaville, and by the family home at the time of my birth. We also drove past the church where my father and I had both been baptized. We entered Travis Air Force Base, and my father pulled into a parking lot in front of a one-story concrete building. He turned the engine off and we sat for a few minutes in silence. I knew he’d been stationed at Travis after Vietnam, but I didn’t know why we’d stopped. It was December, but the sun shone brightly on the closed car, and I felt beads of sweat forming on my forehead and upper lip. I looked at my father as he looked at the sturdy building in front of us.
He patted my knee and said, “I thought you might like to see where you were born. It’s not a hospital anymore, it’s payroll. But whenever I’m on base, I come up here.”
I started to speak, but he blinked hard twice, patted my knee again, and said, “Guess we better get you on the road. There’s a drill instructor in San Diego waiting to give you a big wet kiss.”
I’ve never asked my father why he drove us to the place of my birth just hours before I joined the Marine Corps, but I think I know: to remember how he’d once loved our family, to reacquaint himself with his own lost youth and vigor, and also to ask me not to go off and get myself killed.
Sitting on the Berm, the petrol rain falling, I write other letters. I write to Jenn and Katherine, thanking them for their correspondence and support. I write to Kristina, thanking her for her lack of correspondence and her infidelity and for stealing my money and perpetrating other fiendish deeds against me.
I respond to my father’s recent letter urging me not to be a hero. He’d written that all of the heroes he knew from Vietnam were dead, and that in the first place they were stupid before dying, doing crazy things such as taking pictures of an enemy assault while standing on the supply warehouse, only to be killed when enemy mortar rounds landed on the roof, blowing all of the shit paper in the region to nothing along with the new hero. All these years later, my father is still unsure why the guy standing on the roof of the supply warehouse taking pictures of VC trying to overrun the airfield became a posthumous hero, but my father remembers wiping his ass with the Stars & Stripes for a week while they waited for a fresh shipment of shit paper from the PI. Using brave language, I tell my father that I will only be a hero if the battlefield renders me so, that I will not seek the heroic deed. Whatever occurs, I assure my father, I will not waste my time or my life trying to take pictures of the war, especially not from the vantage point of a stack of shit paper. I also inform my father of my brother’s intention to replace me in combat and that I assume this is a product of Jeff’s fantasies and wild imagination—a plain lie. I tell my father that I love him and I thank him for my stern upbringing. I begin to write a letter to my mother, but Staff Sergeant Siek calls a muster. I come out from under my poncho like an animal leaving a cave, ready for the hunt.
Three sniper teams are being sent to positions south of the minefield and east of where Johnny and I were deployed. Because Johnny and I had been out for two days, we’ll stay at the Berm. The STA marines not on missions are ordered to clean weapons and equipment and complete various other tasks: confirming the current encryption and retrieving extra batteries and ammunition and chow.
But before we break off, Staff Sergeant Siek advises us to remove any foreign matter from our rucks. By foreign matter he means letters from women or girls other than our wives or girlfriends, and also pornography or other profane materials that wives and girlfriends and mothers might not like to receive after our deaths when our personal effects will be shipped to the States, directly to our home of record. Word has it that two light-armored-vehicle crew members were blown to fuck yesterday by friendly fire—an A-10 Warthog dropped a bomb on them, by mistake, a big fucking devastating bomb, by mistake—and that among his personal effects one of the two men carried pictures of dozens of girls and women not his wife, as well as letters from and early drafts of letters to the dozens of girls and women not his wife, along with a healthy dose of pornographic material. And the rules stand that personal effects will not be edited or censored by the marines in the Personal Effects department, so that even if they’d known which pictures were of the dead marine’s wife and which were not, and they had wanted to spend the time and energy removing all other pictures and correspondence and miscellany that didn’t comply with the rules of marital fidelity and general decency, they wouldn’t have been able to do so without breaking the rules of the Personal Effects department and exposing themselves to possible punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a harsh system of justice, everyone knows.
Crocket begins retrieving from his ruck any an
d all foreign matter, and we all follow suit. Dettmann and Cortes dig a hole into the Berm and we dump our pictures and letters and other potentially offensive material into the hole and Kuehn pours diesel over the effects and lights a match and we watch it all burn. It’s this easy to say good-bye to the Any Marine girls and the pornography, and the hope that they once engendered. We know that if we live through the war, the Any Marine girls and the pornography won’t matter, that the product they offered was good only during the buildup. Next war or “conflict” there will be a new batch of Any Marine girls, a fresh helping of home and hope from the heartland, from the cities, from the suburbs, and of course and thank God, pornography never ends.
To better shield myself from the petrol rain, I spend the remainder of the day underneath our Humvee. I read from The Iliad and The Stranger, choosing a page randomly and reading aloud and then stopping and by memory trying to construct the story before and after the page I’ve read, as though closing a wound. The psy-ops bastards continue playing the loud rock-and-roll music. I like rock music, but I don’t think it belongs in my war. It was fine in the movies, on the boat with Martin Sheen going up the fake Vietnamese Congo or with the grunts patrolling the Ho Chi Minh and as they take a hill and heavy casualties, but I don’t need the Who and the Doors in my war, as I prepare to fight for or lose my life. Teenage wasteland, my ass. This is the other side.
Kuehn and Dettmann have challenged one another to see who can collect from the desert floor more propaganda pamphlets than the other, and from under the Humvee, my head at earth level, they look like reptiles searching for the last bits of food after the Bomb. Under the nearby IR netting Welty and Atticus offer a massage to anyone who will give them the same in return. Welty also solicits hugs. He has many takers, and when I finally leave from under the vehicle, I hug Welty and he hugs me and I feel better for a moment. I’ve never cared much for Welty, a loudmouth, a good marine, and a great shooter, but a very agitating person. But I think his hug idea is sound, and eventually everyone in the platoon has hugged Welty. We are about to die in combat, so why not get one last hug, one last bit of physical contact. And through the hugs Welty has helped make us human again. He’s exposed himself to us, exposed his need, and we in turn have exposed ourselves to him, and for that we are no longer simple grunt savages in the desert ready to jump the Berm and begin killing.
Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles Page 20