One day the whole sore-as-hell lot of us were sitting in an indoor auditorium, relieved to be resting our bodies. Bristol was standing on stage, sucking us in with tales of Mogadishu, one of many spots in the world where he had left his mark and probably thousands of shell casings. God knows what had been declassified by then, but he began to recite verse, which became clear to me was something he had written himself, about his exploits.
Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” had found its way to Quantico, once again, only Bristol’s burden was not just the weight of empire. He was talking about taking a human life. He was describing a nameless, voiceless Somali, a pair of dark eyes on an equally dark-skinned person, a man who was exchanging his last look with Bristol. I wonder if this man felt hatred in his last breaths, and if his contempt for Bristol was anything like mine. Had Bristol shot him then, in the skull? Or had he cradled him in his arms? Or did Bristol stand, detached, in the rubble and dust till the Somali man was dead?
This was Bristol being human, perhaps. But if he was expecting me to open my arms to his war story, he was going to have to wait a long time. I was tired of tough white men with weapons suddenly realizing their own humanity, or lack of it, at the expense of Brown and Black lives around the world. What right did he have to pen this poem about this man’s body? He was a trained killer by choice. His confessions needed to go elsewhere.
While I judged him silently, he was still reciting. Slowly, familiar verses came to me.
And the seasons, they go round and round.
And the painted ponies go up and down.
We’re captive on the carousel of time.
We can’t return we can only look behind from where we came.
And go round and round and round in the circle game.
My eyes, which had barely recovered from the recent onslaught of pepper spray, were unblinking and wide. I had no idea if anyone else knew the man had just invoked the folk singer Joni Mitchell in a lesson plan on killing, without even skipping a beat. For all I knew, they thought the big bad boss was still talking about the desert. I loved Bristol for knowing these lyrics. I hated him for using them. He had no business quoting “The Circle Game” while teaching us to tear apart human flesh. I would have much preferred that he recited death metal.
I needed a moral rerouting, badly. I was repulsed by Bristol, and at the same time, I wanted desperately to be more like him. I wanted his approval. He was getting to me.
• • •
I wasn’t at my best. I was still nursing my waterlogged knee, which was only getting worse with each training day. During lunch hour while the others chowed down, I headed to the rehab room at The Basic School, my old haunt, where a loyal Navy doc gave my knee electrical stimulation and an ice down, and then wrapped me back up for afternoon training. It was my second tour to this room in a year and a half, and some of the sailors remembered me.
My damn kneecap wobbled around in a pool of jelly, reminding me of my fallibility and pride with every movement I made. It reinforced my inferior size and strength, and boiled down the essence of this fight to how much will I had. Some of my squad members wondered why I would subject myself to this pain. At the end of each day, I could barely walk without going numb. I fell asleep on several tablets of Naproxyn and bags of ice melting in between my legs.
I had to prove I could make it on my own. Every time someone in my squad said to take it easy, I wanted to stab them. We had just done the O-course five times in a row. I was making up for my injury by muscling my way through almost completely with my upper body. On one occasion, surprising even myself, I had managed to climb a rope without using my legs. But this was no long-term strategy. Bristol came to my side and took a long, slow look at me while my face attempted to mask the misery of stabbing knee pain.
He said, in almost a whisper, “It’s easy to be hard, but it’s hard to be smart.”
Perhaps he was alluding to his own battered skeleton and the wisdom that came from decades of retrospection. But probably not. I’m sure the motherfucker wanted me to quit. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
• • •
Two weeks later, these days had turned into long and restless nights. Bristol appeared and disappeared during training, without notice, without much input or insight. I saw him now in my sleep. I was armed in my nightmares, moving through thick Quantico woods with a bayonet, ready to gut anyone who got in my way. Bristol’s eyes were on me, assessing all angles and steps, reinforcing my vulnerabilities without saying a word. There was no exit.
Bristol called me into his office one week, out of the blue.
“You’re not cutting it. You’re hesitating. Something’s missing, Lieutenant.” I was disappointing him. And yet he had me by the throat. I was lulled by his voice. Bristol had found it, finally, the son of a bitch, found a way to unnerve and destabilize me, to prove to me I would never be good enough to belong in his universe. Bristol was playing dad. My dad. I told him on the inside to go fuck himself. I’d rather take another blown leg than this psychodrama bullshit. And yet there was no way out of this chokehold but through.
Our final training evolution was something out of my dreamscape. We traversed a six-mile confidence course through the Quantico woods. I was half jogging, mostly limping, biting my tongue, muscling my way through and over each obstacle with limp legs, like a mermaid. We each had one simulated wooden rifle, carved extra long to account for the length of a bayonet. I clutched this stick, cursing my floating kneecap, shuffling along.
I was pissed off—at Bristol, at my knee, at the goddamned universe. As we turned the corner on the last obstacle, our instructors stood with cans of pepper spray at the ready, pulling the trigger, misting us as we shut our eyes and passed through the cloud. I opened my eyes and saw Bristol, looming and enormous, his giant hand outstretched in my direction, long fingers ushering me toward him. Furious, I forgot my pain. Legs suddenly pumping, I charged at him like I was going to knock his skull off the root of his neck. I was conscious of nothing.
Yes. Like that. Yes. Bristol was speaking, but I was somewhere else. Still a woman enraged, I left him behind me in the OC cloud. The adrenaline was wearing off. I limped uphill, facing my meathead staff sergeant, throwing a swing that had nothing left in it, and we both knew it.
“Harder than it looks, huh, Ma’am.”
Oh, go fuck yourself, Staff Sergeant, I thought, half sinking to the ground. So much for storming the hill. Either way, it was over.
I walked downhill, slower than ever, and joined my squad. Whatever I did, whatever madness-induced overmedicated haze I was operating within, Bristol was impressed. His eyes were wide and clear. When he gathered our class together, the glorious, dirt-encrusted mess of us begging for rest, he improvised poetry, calling me the one-legged wonder. I had finally arrived.
Bristol promoted me at graduation to first lieutenant. Each member of my squad had purchased a new knife, a weapon that, thanks to my agility, I’d taken to naturally. I looped my black belt with a single red stripe around my camouflage trousers and tucked my switchblade away in my pocket, ready for use at a moment’s notice. I was a new woman.
CHAPTER 6
A Few Good Men
The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Bristol had distracted me and a hundred other Marines from the aftermath of 9/11. A month before his course, I watched the Twin Towers go down on a tiny television box in Okinawa—crash, burn, crumble—ad fucking nauseam. My hometown was burning, and, stuck on this useless coral rock eight thousand miles away, I could do nothing to help.
In December 2001, with my black belt cinched around my waist, I got back to Okinawa and returned to training, hard. I took my platoon through predawn drills, turning a bunch of radio operators into hard-core warriors. W
hen we ran by the infantry barracks in the dark wearing flak jackets and carrying simulated bayonets, the grunts would stare at us. I was getting my Marines ready for something big.
As a GI in the Far East, I was at the intersection of foreign power plays and indigenous ways of living. Okinawa was not only the graveyard of one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. It was the birthplace of karate, a world-class scuba destination, and a region famous for its healthy lifestyle and diet, with elders who defied aging, living active lives into their nineties and beyond.
Okinawa was also the site of major protests by locals, who were fed up and furious with the presence of American GIs after a handful had raped and murdered Okinawan women. Occupying someone else’s land with big guns, bigger jets, and no sense of history was never a pretty picture. Indeed, across the Far East, GIs roamed with little to no supervision, free to discover the nature and limitations of their manhood. I had no idea how deeply immersed in this world I would be until my battalion deployed to Thailand for three months.
We were in Pattaya, Thailand, as part of an annual joint exercise meant to bolster relations between the United States and our Asian allies. I spent my working hours there with a handful of junior officers and senior enlisted Marines, behind a desk in a massive tent, keeping communication up for the battalion, monitoring data networks, phones, and radio connections.
When systems were up and running, and the senior officers had long since disappeared, one Marine monitored traffic while the rest of us took it easy. It was an opportunity for a young officer like me to shoot the shit with my gunny, or join him in watching Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson lay waste to enemy bodies on an imaginary battlefield in a bootlegged action hero DVD collection.
Two lieutenants in our battalion spent much of their downtime in one of the communications vans that was attached to the tent. It was an odd place for a break. One day, I got curious.
“What are you doing?”
They exchanged dubious looks, nodded their heads, and brought me into one of the vans. They shut and locked the door and turned on a monitor.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. Video games?
From dozens upon dozens of files, they chose one and clicked play. It wasn’t Donkey Kong. It wasn’t Mario Brothers. Whatever digital shit boys were blowing up before Call of Duty, it wasn’t that, either.
It was worse than I could’ve imagined: some poor blond woman, buck naked and stretched out on a bed, moaning hard, her sound some strange primal mix of agony and pleasure, as a glorious German shepherd entered her again and again and again.
“Fuck yeah!” howled one lieutenant.
A strange sensation came over me. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, I’d never seen a dog’s penis in action, and it was huge. But as I sat there, my face turning the shade of raw bacon, I sensed something worse: titillation, and a horrifying hint of wetness. Then quickly, embarrassment and disgust.
As if the dog panting like a champion, enormous tongue sending pools of drool across this woman’s belly and breasts, wasn’t hideous enough to impress me, the lieutenants decided to show me the depth and breadth of their subject matter by clicking on additional videos. They introduced me to a rich panoply of animal penises entering all variety of female human beings. A wide cross-section of the mammalian kingdom was on display, as if the Westminster Dog Show, Animal Planet, and pay-per-view had joined forces for a marathon viewing extravaganza. The larger the penis, the more delighted the lieutenants were. They alternated between creepy silence and demented laughter. For all I knew, these officers were as hard as these working animals. For all I knew, these van walls were covered in semen.
I wanted to run and scream, but I sat there, body frozen, stuck in time. I took it all in, frame by frame, my mind trying to summon the right reaction, trying to understand why my ass was still sitting on that chair, in that pathetic little metal container. Why I hadn’t marched out of there in a huff, or even surreptitiously wandered away, or come up with some fantastically witty comeback to put down these married-with-children, award-winning Marine officers.
My mind blocked out a good portion of this experience, each animal thrust causing some kind of dissociative state for which I would later be grateful. Eventually I left the box, forcing out some lame excuse about not leaving the gunny alone at the desk, as if the gunny now or ever needed a lieutenant’s assistance.
We never spoke about this again. My education about the Marine Corps’ underworld was just beginning.
• • •
On nights in Thailand, between twenty-four-hour shifts in the tent, groups of us climbed into baht buses—open-air pickup trucks that served as taxis for tourists—and headed toward Pattaya Beach at high speed, cool wind tearing through the tropical heat, lifting the weight of responsibility back on base. When we offloaded, we split instantly, vanishing through crowded streets toward bars, restaurants, shops, and clubs.
I spent most of my evenings wandering the streets by the beach, getting Thai foot massages for just a few dollars, or sitting at any one of hundreds of open-air beach bars that catered to the seedy white men who had come there for one thing only from thousands of miles away, as if called by some planetary homing device. I sat for hours at these bars, chatting with the local girls about their lives, drinking just enough to not feel my shyness. It was hard to tell how old they actually were. Calling them women was too convenient. Some were in their teens, some, I’m sure, not even.
Their voices were sweet and soothing, like the feeling of forgetting, but all of this struck me as a tropical hallucination, too syrupy to be genuine, and too kind to be rehearsed. They were young, but they were not new to hustling. Occasionally, when they weren’t too busy with customers, they would play a board game with me and let their guard down a bit.
“You soldier?” they asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Marine.” I got a wide-eyed response as they arranged shot glasses on the shelf. They seemed to know the difference.
“Ohhhh. Mah-rine.” There was always a pause. A reflection. Then, “You not look like Mah-rine. Why you Mah-rine?”
Evenings passed like this. I came to know their rituals, the way they enticed and welcomed foreign men to their bar stools with gentle laughter and hard alcohol, the way they prayed to and bowed before statues of the Buddha before taking leave of the bar matron and satisfying the client at some off-site location. I don’t remember the faces of these men, but their eyes were lifeless, their livers weary, and their voices heavy with exploit. There were endless throngs of them, wrinkled European men and virile American service members, roaming the streets like craven hordes, occasionally alone, but often in packs, hunting for cheap, young Thai pussy.
I’d had a few weeks of this, this lonely dance beneath the surface of reality, and I was longing for company. One afternoon, as we ended our shift, I asked a buddy named Jones if I could join him and some other lieutenants for the evening. Looks were exchanged, not very subtly, that seemed to say, Are you sure? I’d never know what made them yield. Did I have a glint in my eye that even I didn’t yet recognize? Was I becoming one of them?
That night, I hopped off the baht bus with my fellow officers and followed them down a side street that I hadn’t explored on my own. We entered a busy parlor with several benches and tables laid out in rows. Young Thai women were strutting up and down these tables in heels, inserting and expelling various objects between their legs. My fellow officers took seats ceremoniously, as if pews had appeared before them. They were suddenly silent and locked in, like they had just acquired a target.
This collective focus, which required no spoken communication, scared the shit out of me. My discomfort was balanced by my unfortunate desire not to make a big deal out of the whole thing. Right now, in this world where the lines between male and female were as thick and obvious as a sledgehammer over my skull, I summoned an existence, if there was such a thing, beyond gender, and beyond lines. I didn’t want to be that girl who raised a ruckus every time the
boys misbehaved. Every time was looking a lot like all the time, and I wasn’t sure how many ruckuses one Marine could get away with raising. Perhaps it was time to just stop caring.
Somehow, mercifully, a way out presented itself. In the middle of a particularly pelvic-heavy set, Jones turned away from the stage, eyes glazed over, and said, “Let’s go. I’m bored.” Jones and his bros seemed to realize there were only so many things a girl could jam into her private parts. I couldn’t get outside fast enough.
We headed down the street to a nightclub called Tony’s. The place was huge, the lights were garish, and the floor was packed with hundreds of high and tights. Marines were drunk off their asses and throbbing on the dance floor, lip-locked and tongue-tied with an assortment of waify, working Thai women. I spotted a handful of senior enlisted Marines I knew, dudes who worked for and with me, married men who would disappear down narrow alleys with these girls before the night was up.
I wondered about my place in this uniformed world, where there were enough written rules outlawing sex to make any human being repressed for a lifetime, and where few of those rules were ever enforced—at least, not when they challenged men’s ability to get off. I wondered why these rules even existed, why laws evoking grand, poetic notions like good order and discipline prevailed in a world where everyone was breaking them with abandon. I wondered how secrets were kept, and for whose benefit.
I tried to avert my gaze as I worked my way through the crowd, but I couldn’t help but lock eyes with guys whose careers I could end in a moment if I wanted to. Without words, something was communicated in looks between us—surprise, pleading, resignation, or indifference—a new connection and a new set of rules being formulated, by them, by me, almost unconsciously, across this thumping, hallucinogenic club music. The alcohol, the beats, and the grinding bodies on the dance floor softened the realization that maybe I didn’t really give a shit anymore about who was doing what with whom, that why should I care if no one else did.
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