Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  The viewing lasted as long as we wanted and we were all still a bit buzzed but wearing down our drunks. Someone, I can’t remember who, had said, “Let’s stop drinking, you fuckers, we’ve got to carry Troy into the ground in a few hours.”

  We continued cussing during the viewing, profanity being as clear a trumpet of grief as any. Profanity and then silence. Fuck fuck fuck and then nothing. They’d done Troy up in his dress blues and shaved his mustache. His fiancée was angry they’d shaved him clean, but I didn’t think it mattered. There might have been a few extra decorations on his chest, but I said nothing. He looked, as only Troy could, as happy in death as he’d been while alive.

  We slept for a few hours at Lisa’s parents’ house, friendly people who’d prepared beds for us on couches and roll-aways and in guest rooms, but we thanked them and all slept together in the living room, on the floor, under a storm of blankets.

  I affixed my expert pistol and rifle badges to my dress blues, along with the seven ribbons I rated, the red of my Combat Action Ribbon in the superior position, red as in blood. I hated the feel of the uniform, but at the same time I knew that I looked good, I looked like one of their goddamn posters, I sounded like one of their commercials.

  Troy’s mother was some brand of born-again Christian, and I knew she was always unhappy with his drinking and swearing, and I also knew that, just like me, he believed in no God. But, of course, she had arranged his funeral, not he, and the preacher gave a windy eulogy full of Christ the King as God and on and on, and I grew bored with the whole thing. But I thought Troy might want it this way, that for all of his disagreements and fights with his mother, if she watched him enter the ground as a believer, he was probably fine with that, because it would help her and probably others. If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there’s no use continuing such behavior when you’re dead.

  At the graveside, three marines from a nearby reservist unit arrived to perform the gun salute and fold the flag for Troy’s mother. Because of the weather—an inch or two of snow on the ground and a wind that chilled the temperature below zero—the burial lasted only a few minutes. The preacher offered more holy words, and the reservist marines fired their blank cartridges and folded the flag in that intricate and careful way that means death. We pallbearers slowly lowered Troy into the cold ground, his fiancée threw in a pair of her chevrons, and his brother kicked dirt and snow onto the casket.

  Troy had wanted to stay in the Marines, he’d wanted to die a marine, but because he’d busted that piss test years before in the PI, they wouldn’t let him re-up. One of the more annoying aspects of the Marine Corps was that rules constantly got in the way of sound decisions, and to allow Troy to reenlist would have been a sound decision, because he was a good marine and a great leader who loved and hated the Corps; he bled green, which, as they’d told us at boot camp, happens only to true Devil Dogs; he loved being a grunt, a cussed, dirty, foulmouthed and foul-minded grunt.

  After his discharge, in November of 1991, he lived in the barracks with us for six weeks, and we brought him chow from the chow hall for every meal and let him clean his old weapon, and he trained a few of our new marines in optics and camouflage. He even went to the field with us once, a poor decision on my part, as I was the chief scout/sniper at this time and could’ve been sent to the brig if anything had gone wrong, but the operation ran smoothly and Troy got his last fix of humping the desert and firing rounds through the sniper rifle.

  I watched Troy’s mother being helped to the limousine, one of his boyhood friends at each of her elbows. She clutched the flag to her chest. Visiting Greenville, Michigan, helped me understand Troy’s love of the Marines. The town had obviously been the site of a gross failure of industry. Largely white, the town was, I guessed, largely alcoholic and religious by the looks of the people we met. Nice people who were grieving for one of their own, and I couldn’t announce that Troy had not been one of them for many years; it would’ve been callous for me not to let them grieve with that fiction.

  After the burial, Troy’s family held a dinner at a nearby Lions or Kiwanis Club. On the way over, we stopped at a liquor store and bought some beer and a few bottles of whiskey. We finished all of the alcohol before entering the hall. The older folks of the party were excited to have strapping young warriors among them, and they offered numerous compliments on our uniforms and bearing and the way we’d won that last war.

  The reservists were also at the hall, and some tension started between us when their sergeant approached Atticus and questioned the validity of his ribbons.

  “You look too young to have a Combat Action Ribbon, Lance Corporal. My bet is you were in boot camp during Saudi. You know that’s a punishable offense, wearing ribbons you don’t rate?”

  Atticus said, “Get the fuck off my CAR, man. I don’t see any war on your chest. You were sucking dick over at the reserve center while I was ass out of luck in the Desert.”

  “I’ll look you up at headquarters, marine, and I don’t care if you’re active duty, I’m a sergeant and you’re a nonrate. You show me respect.”

  “I’ll respect my fist up your ass.”

  Roger, our ranking member, himself a sergeant, backed us down and told the nice reservist that unless he wanted a serious ass-kicking in his hometown, he and his boys should probably DT the fuck out of there. They each grabbed a slice of cake and exited through the rear of the building.

  After the funeral dinner we returned to Lisa’s parents’ house for a party with Troy’s friends from high school. They were nice people, the same age as most of us, sad over seeing a friend they’d known for many years return briefly only to die. We knew their names because even though Troy didn’t like Greenville, he liked his friends, and other than shoot rifles, the thing grunts spend most of their time doing is telling stories about the civilian world they left behind, even though they should be forgetting it.

  During the few months Troy had been back home, he’d told his friends about us, and so we quickly eased into the conversation as though we’d all known each other for many years. They embarrassed us with great thanks for having served overseas. They recounted combat events Troy had told them, and we realized by the context of their stories that Troy had made us heroes for his friends because we’d been heroes to him. At this point I was the saddest I’d yet been over Troy’s passing, because the true friend from war is the friend who obliterates his own story by telling the stories of others. Through briefing his hometown friends about the rest of the platoon, Troy had effectively diminished his own role; he’d become the tale teller and removed himself from the tale. If at any point during my marine experience I was proud of my service, it was then, because whatever the Marines and the Gulf War meant to me, my friend Troy had served with honor, proudly, and he’d returned a happy man, quite possibly a better man for having gone to war, and I felt joy knowing my friend had died happily, a warrior with a Combat Action Ribbon and a few campaign ribbons and useless murderous skills that filled him with pride.

  Troy’s friends left and Atticus suggested we go to the bar they’d mentioned as Troy’s favorite drinking establishment, where many of them had been drinking with Troy a few hours before he died.

  The bar was in the basement of an antique shop. Roger bought a bottle of whiskey and we finished it in one pass. Atticus sat at the bar and told the bartender how pretty he thought she was, and that if she could get him so fucked up that he forgot Troy was dead, he’d give her $100. Sandor shoved four shots of something in front of me, and I took the drinks in quick bursts and the liquor burned down my throat and I knew that before the night came to an end we would cause trouble in this bar.

  None of the locals in the bar were Troy’s friends. Most of the men had long hair and wore heavy-metal T-shirts and ripped jeans and Converse tennis shoes. The women ranged from hard-luck drunk to recent high school beauty queen on her way down. A few of us danced to industrial music on the small dance floor, Nitzer Ebb, I believe,
and because of our thrashing and beating against each other’s bodies, none of the locals could fit on the floor. We head-butted each other, and Doug and Sandor exchanged blows to the face. Roger bought another bottle and we passed it around and Atticus threw it against the wall when he emptied it. None of the citizens seemed to notice or care to react. We finished more bottles, and the bartender made us drinks she called Troy Colliers, pint glasses filled with God knows what, and we each emptied a few of those.

  The music turned to country, an obvious attempt to allow the older locals some time on their own floor, and we returned to our table. Atticus joined the bartender behind the bar, and she made him another Troy Collier before sending him to the bathroom to vomit. He returned and sat at the bar, passed out with his head in his hands. This is when a local boy made a mistake. He grabbed the little bit of hair on top of Atticus’s head, pulled back his head, and said, “Hey, jarhead, don’t you think you need a haircut, just like your fucking dead friend?” and he shoved Atticus’s head into the bar. I made it to the guy first, and I picked him up and threw him behind the bar and he fell to the floor in a clatter of broken bottles. The bartender screamed and ran through the back door. The locals charged us from all corners, and there were six of us against ten or twelve of them, and we beat them thoroughly and ruthlessly for what must have been ten minutes. We broke chairs and bottles of liquor over their heads, we broke bones and skulls and some of our own fingers, but we beat them as we’d never beat anyone before, and when they connected, rarely, we felt nothing because their blows were soft and could not damage us, and they called us dumb jarheads and told us they were happy our friend was dead, our shithead jarhead friend who came home from war thinking he was a badass, and we beat them and beat these words out of their mouths, and we cried as we beat them, we called them sons of bitches and civilian fucks and motherfucking whores and we didn’t stop until the police arrived.

  We had nowhere to run, because everyone knew who we were and where we were staying. The cops took us outside and put us in their cars. They told us we’d beat up some of the biggest shitbags in their town, and they were sorry our war buddy had died, and how about if they took us back to where we were staying so we could get some sleep before leaving town early in the morning?

  I felt somewhat sorry for the men we’d beaten. They had good reason not to want us in their bar—they’d recognized us as foreigners, just as they’d recognized Troy as no longer belonging to Greenville. Those men had actually shown Troy more respect than his family or his friends, because the family and the friends had loved Troy and with their selfishness and love had wanted him to again be a part of their world, but the men we’d fought were willing to tell Troy that he didn’t belong.

  The next morning, Troy’s mother showed up at Lisa’s parents’ house. I was half-asleep, but I heard her yelling at Doc John about the great disrespect we’d done her dead son, that our drunken and violent behavior had permanently tarnished his death. And I felt sorry for his mother, because although I understood that from her perspective we’d certainly disgraced Troy’s memory, I knew that if Troy had had any choice in the matter, he’d have wanted us spending the evening of his funeral drunk and at combat.

  We stayed drunk for many months. There was the problem of cause. Why was our friend dead? In the PI he’d been on hot jungle patrols against Islamic rebels. He’d lived through the Gulf War with us. We blamed the Marine Corps at first: if they’d allowed him to reenlist, he’d never have been driving down that cold road. We blamed the economy and the failing town of Greenville: if the nearest worthwhile job wasn’t thirty miles away, he wouldn’t have been driving down that cold road. We blamed his fiancée: if she hadn’t postponed the marriage, he would’ve been living near San Diego, where there is no such thing as black ice on cold roads. And then there is the realization that the cause of a death like Troy’s is ineffable, everywhere and nowhere at once, unknowable, like the mirage. I’d been prepared to watch many of my friends die in combat. Just before we engaged the Iraqis, I’d decided that I would soon die and this was okay, and I went forward into battle with the dumb death stare of the dead walking. But after the war I was shocked back to life, and to the glory of my friends still living, and so I was unable to comprehend that one of us was dead. The problem with living through war is the false sense that after combat you are untouchable. We stayed drunk for many months.

  It’s late October, the Saudi desert is bursting with over three hundred thousand U.S. troops, and STA Platoon is a few men short, depending on whom you ask. Some people insist a STA Platoon requires sixteen men, some say twenty-one, and others say twenty-six. I’ve heard all of the arguments over the years for the different platoon strengths, and not one of them is any better than the others. The people who want sixteen seem to be of the mind: the smaller, the more elite. The twenty-ones follow published Marine Corps doctrine. The twenty-sixes declare: the more bodies around, the smaller the chance the rockets and grenades will find me. We are running a platoon of fourteen, and no matter your preferred number, with the expected heavy casualty toll from offensive operations, STA needs more men. Because we consider ourselves highly trained and our talents indispensable, the concept of counting bodies is contrary to our idea of STA: we aren’t the line platoons you might fill with any old grunt fresh out of the School of Infantry. However, the line companies in the Triangle are full of just that—boots, real greenies five days out of Camp Pendleton, their rucks still smelling like the Pacific Ocean. STA wants grunts who’ve deployed at least once, men who have a little of the PI jungle and Okinawa training areas in them. We prepare an indoc because no one has ever heard of marines simply being assigned to STA Platoon. We plan the land-navigation course, the classes we’ll give the indocees in such areas as marksmanship and nuclear/biological/chemical defense, and we scout possible areas for a thousand-yard stalking exercise. Johnny Rotten and Combs and Dickerson, the three senior corporals, talk to Siek about recruiting for the indoc. He tells them to fuck off, that he’ll decide who’s in STA Platoon, and maybe he should run all of us through his own indoc to see if we’re actually as balls hard as we insist. Staff Sergeant Siek doesn’t care what has and has not occurred in STA Platoon. We know this all too well.

  Siek hadn’t trained as a scout or sniper, but for five years before joining our platoon he’d been running officer candidates through the gauntlet at Quantico. He was a real spit-shine guy, a classic lifer, thin and strong and mean with a torturer’s smile, the smile that says, “I am enjoying this, I am enjoying every second of fucking you.” He looked a little like Daffy Duck with a tan and sinewy muscles and a devil’s streak. He wore the tightest of high-and-tight haircuts.

  We knew he didn’t like us because he’d made that clear a few hours after Captain Thola had introduced him in June. We’d come off a month of leave after our West-Pac, and none of us was very interested in training other than a morning run and three thousand or so yards at the pool. We were at Twentynine Palms, the new permanent duty station of the Seventh Marines. The regiment had moved from Camp Pendleton in north San Diego County to the Mojave Desert. We’d been violently screwed with the Green-Weenie, the famous Marine Corps brand of screwing. The town of Twenty-nine Palms had about fifteen bars, one grocery, two army/navy stores, and one Chinese restaurant run by an Anglo family. We spent more money on gas, driving to L.A. or San Diego on weekends, and even on a few desperate weeknights, than we did on beer and liquor.

  We sat in a lazy school circle in our platoon ops room, a barracks room we’d convinced the billeting sergeant we needed to store our ghillie suits and optics but that we’d actually converted into our private rec room, with TV and VCR, porn magazines and videos, a blowup doll, a refrigerator full of beer, and a respectable wet bar. We were on the third floor of the barracks, with a nice view of the Bullion Mountains.

  After Captain Thola left, Siek said, “I know you assholes think STA stands for Sun Tan Association. Or Steal, Take, and Acquire.”

&n
bsp; A few of us let out chuckles.

  “I know you think you’re the shit because you run around wearing underwater demolition trunks just like the SEALs and Force Recon. And you make your own training schedule and shoot your own rifles. I’m not here to contest your tactics or tell you you aren’t the best shooters in the battalion. I am here to tell you that you marines are considered an undisciplined group of showboats. Being a marine means more than one-shot, one-kill. It means discipline in the rear, squared-away uniforms, and respectable behavior while on leave and liberty. I know you underage marines aren’t drinking in the barracks, right? I know you underage marines never drink, because it is illegal in the U.S. of A. to drink alcoholic beverages unless you’re twenty-one years of age. You are no longer on a West-Pac. And don’t try the old crap story ‘I’m old enough to catch a bullet, I should be old enough to drink.’ Bullshit! I’m bringing you jarheads back to basics! Charlie Uniform inspection tomorrow morning at zero six. Ribbons and badges.”

  “What the fuck, Staff Sergeant,” Kuehn said. “Tomorrow is Saturday. I’m going out of town with my wife. That’s my time off. You can’t take my family time away from me.”

  “I can take whatever I want. I’m an E-6. You’re an E-3. Do the motherfucking math! For a few years now I’ve been hearing funny rumors running around the Marine Corps, the idea that the marine’s family is more important than the Marine Corps. The ballsacks who say that are liars and possibly Communists.”

  Siek ordered Kuehn to empty the shitcans in all three of the battalion barracks, about thirty shitcans in all.

  Kuehn didn’t move until Siek said, “Or, I could take a stripe right here.”

  As Kuehn ran from catwalk to catwalk, emptying the battalion’s garbage, Siek ordered us to take off our blouses, and he ran us to the first slow rise of the Bullions, and he began to put us through the traditional Marine Corps Daily Seven, the same calisthenics that the line companies did, the same calisthenics we’d performed during boot camp. We laughed through the exercises. The Daily Seven was to STA what a frog dissection was to a brain surgeon.