Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  Combs said, “Staff Sergeant, our time might be better spent playing bridge.”

  Siek didn’t like this, and he increased the intensity and velocity of the exercises, but still no one labored. Kuehn joined us, having emptied the battalion’s garbage. Siek exercised us for many hours in the way of infantry line companies and Officer Candidate School, and throughout the ordeal we were never physically challenged, but we knew the face of our platoon had changed. Siek continually insulted us and our training and told us that what he knew of STA was that the platoon was full of cocky marines who had passed an indoc and then thought they were the top of the battalion and this to the discredit of the basic infantryman. Officers and senior enlisted had allowed the STA lie to pollute the very heart of the Marine Corps infantry battalion, and he’d joined our platoon to reverse that terrible trend.

  At the time, because he was busy busting my ass, I didn’t recognize Siek’s self-interest in breaking us down and rebuilding us his way, or at least what he considered a better way. He had a family and a career, and we were, for the most part, under twenty years of age and deeply concerned with where the next lay would come from and when the next night of drinking and fighting would occur, well trained but casual in our commitment to the skills and especially the discipline that would save not only our lives, but Siek’s. Standing in front of Siek was not a platoon of elite fighters, but a platoon of young assholes, and his safety and welfare, his life, depended entirely on the combat performance of those young assholes.

  * * *

  In Saudi, we know that Siek is conspiring to fill the platoon with people not to our liking—this means anyone given the honor of joining STA without first being tested by the platoon in the same ruthless fashion we were once tested by men who’d been tested by the prior generation, and on down the line, through the wars, back to 1775.

  On the first of November, we bivouac at regimental headquarters for a five-day stay. One afternoon Siek tells Johnny that he’s going to the rear-rear and then drives off alone in a Humvee without offering any other details. We’re happy he’s gone, we don’t care why. Probably he’ll pick up ammunition and maps and maybe a week or two of the New York or Arab Times. He should be gone at least a day.

  Regiment runs out of a semipermanent tent city that isn’t actually the rear-rear, but it offers some amenities, such as showers, though not hot showers but only lukewarm. I don’t have as much trouble here as I do with the rear-rear, the prefab bases. A tent city can crop up anywhere, a sign of the mobile Marine Corps, the quick and lethal movement of troops, the coming desecration of the enemy.

  We sleep on cots, and hot chow is guaranteed at least once a day, the mail arrives fairly regularly, and most important, Kuehn knows a guy from regimental S-2 who sells from his rather potent supply of Ho’made Desert Hooch, as he calls it. I’ve seen the guy around since I joined the regiment in 1989—a tall, slope-shouldered kid who is probably smarter than any officer in the battalion; probably he should be studying astrophysics at Harvard or MIT but his parents couldn’t afford it or he broke the law and lost his scholarship and so he joined the Suck.

  Minutes after Siek departs we track down the S-2 guy. His glasses sit crooked on his nose, and when he speaks, he talks into his left shoulder. His uniform holds as many draws and crevices as a topographical map, and he calls everyone a goddamn something, especially the officers. He tells us about the love letters he writes for his major and that after a few months he feels like he’s been fucking the major’s wife, how writing Dear sweet Gloria, I wish I were up in you now with a finger in your ass is as natural as greeting the major every morning with a crisp salute as the major exits the shitter, headed for the ops shack. The S-2 marine charges us $40 for a five-gallon water jug of his Ho’made. I think his story about the major is bullshit and that he considers us goddamn bastards with the rest of them, but that’s fine, we have our drink.

  We stay in our tent and drink, ignoring the list of classes and maintenance tasks Siek assigned us to complete during his absence. We drink the Ho’made with our canteen cups, and the liquor tastes like the metal cups, with a splash of grape juice. After a few drinks each we are getting drunk. Kuehn tops his hooch off with a shot from his bottle of Jack, and after an hour he swears he’s hallucinating, something about Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.

  Troy, after having failed miserably for years on the page, tries to record a love tape for Lisa, back in Greenville, but mostly he sobs. (The tape recorder and blank tapes are a gift from the Red Cross.) Dickerson performs push-ups in the corner and between sets he looks at himself in his field mirror and repeats what a bad motherfucker he is, that soon he’ll fulfill his destiny, kill legions of ragheads, be a war hero just like his papa and his papa’s papa. Dickerson is one of the best marines in the platoon. He’s an expert at every aspect of scouting and sniping, but I’ve never trusted him, probably because he knows he’s one of the best marines in the platoon and that no one can challenge him, and he exploits others with his knowledge as often as he shares it.

  Combs is talking to no one in particular about Oklahoma, about how all those stupid Texans never know what they’re missing. Kuehn yells toward Combs’s general direction that the only thing Texans go to Oklahoma for is to screw the loose women. Johnny Rotten has taken apart and put back together his Walkman three times, and he swears he’s improved the sound and it’s better than sitting in a concert hall. I’m attempting to read The Stranger but I’m so drunk my eyes feel as if they’ve been twisted around my skull, as if my right eye is located in the general vicinity of my left ear.

  I abandon The Stranger and pull from my ruck the letters I’ve received from Kristina and I begin to burn them. No one seems to notice. Kristina had gone to a card store in a shopping mall and ordered personalized stationery. In the lower right corner of her letters, two imp-like creatures are holding hands under a palm tree, with a caption floating in the clouds that reads “Tony and Kristina Forever.” The stationery makes me ill, or rather, the caption’s fraudulent and even dangerous sentiment makes me ill. Nothing is forever, and certainly not a cheap relationship fabricated on personalized paper, and I’m about to die or not and kill or not, but no matter what occurs I will never be the same, and that is the only thing that might last forever—exile, change, change the only sustenance I know, today is only today and tomorrow is tomorrow and a far ways away and then you might die or walk farther with your heavy rucksack and your weapons.

  I’ve received hours of ridicule from the platoon because of Kristina’s stationery. I’m angry. I try to read her lies through the folding, burning imps, but I can’t make out the words, though certainly I know her lies by heart. I dig deeper into my ruck and remove a stack of laminated photos. Three are of Kristina in various seminude positions, the only piece of cloth covering her being my dress-blue blouse. I attempt to hold an auction. Troy once offered me $20 for one of the photos, and Kuehn is known to have paid $30 for a photo torn from a German hard-core magazine, but he says, “I need penetration,” thus refusing Kristina.

  “That bitch is damaged goods,” Troy says. “Right now she’s dorking some hotel clerk. Unfaithful is unfaithful. I don’t want her photo. I got better jerking material in my head.”

  Near the regimental mess there is a Wall of Shame, where jarheads post photos of unfaithful women, women who’ve gone bad on debts or stolen some poor jarhead’s car and all of his clothes or simply informed him that the ride has ended.

  The truth about cheating jarheads is for the women to tell, and I’ve never heard those stories, told in America while the jarhead floats at sea or walks the Desert. But the players and the game are always the same: the jarhead cheats, the wife or girlfriend cheats; the wife or girlfriend cheats, the jarhead cheats. Often, back at home, old, grungy jarheads years out of the uniform, the woman’s drunkard uncle or her father’s poker buddy, will fan the flames of jealousy and mistrust with comments like “I know when I was in the Corps, I never knew a faithful jarhead,
other than myself. The problem is, they give the stuff away on the street corners, and you can’t blame the kid for partaking. That’s why he’s not writing. He feels guilty over screwing fifteen-year-old prostitutes on the streets of the PI.”

  In sexless Saudi we’re carrying on our backs the overseas sins of generations of fighting American GIs—gang rapes in Vietnamese jungles, the same in Seoul and Pusan, pregnant Englishwomen abandoned after World War II, Japanese women raped and impregnated and abandoned during the Occupation, thousands of French whores filled with syphilitic cocks while the Great War raged on.

  Forty or more photos are affixed with duct tape to the Wall of Shame, actually a six-foot-tall post that looks like a third of a telephone pole. From a distance it might appear as though a suburban American neighborhood has been afflicted with a series of suspicious pet disappearances. Most of the women are young, eighteen to twenty, with an equal distribution of wives and girlfriends and unwisely sustained cheap fucks. On the duct tape jarheads have written various messages—This bitch fucked my brother—Jones from 2/5 is now with her, used to be my girlfriend and best friend—She’s my wife and lives with my mother and my mother loves her more than me, they told me to go somewhere else if I leave over this shithole desert—Stay away from her, she’ll take all yer money, she hangs out at the Whale Club in Oceanside—She fucks all the men she wants and all I get is more masturbation. I tape the three dress-blues photos of Kristina to the pole, and I write—I don’t know but I’ve been told she’s seeing someone new. I look at more of the pictures and I think of the poor jarheads who’ve left their platoon tents and walked the slow desert walk to the chow hall, but rather than receiving hot chow they’ve proudly displayed the narrative of their cuckoldry. It is not necessarily a bad thing to be able to tell the story of your woman’s betrayal.

  I recognize two of the women on the Wall of Shame. Before my first deployment to Okinawa, while we sat mustered at Camp Pendleton with our gear on the deck and wives nearby kissing their husbands good-bye, a scuffle started between two grunts from Fox Company. A tall and pretty blonde stood between the grunts, screaming at them both, and eventually a staff sergeant and a gunny escorted the woman out of the muster area, she cussing the entire way, cussing the staff and the gunny, cussing the Marine Corps and every dumb jarhead in the bastard.

  When I asked, my squad leader told me that the man she’d been saying good-bye to was her boyfriend, and the man who’d started the altercation was her husband’s best friend, and in an hour when the planes landed from Okinawa, full of First Battalion marines returning from a West-Pac, her husband would exit the rear of the plane and her boyfriend would enter the front.

  The other Wall of Shame woman I’ve seen before was once the wife of a grunt I met in a club on Okinawa. He was walking from club to club, showing his wedding picture to every drunken jarhead he could corner and telling his sorry story. He’d just been on base at the NCO club, drinking with a group of marines from another unit, a tank unit if he remembered correctly, and they were sharing sex stories, the craziest fuck ever, the craziest place ever, the most dangerous fornication, et cetera, having a grand old time, and he hadn’t yet had a chance to tell his story when the guy next to him, new to the island by about five days, began describing a woman who sounded a lot like the grunt’s wife—dark brown hair, strong nose, nice chest, runner’s legs, Southern twang, ass as hard as a stack of bricks, hips that billowed like a flag, lips that sang like an exotic bird, et cetera, the tanker said. And then the tanker mentioned that the woman was married to some dumb grunt—and that’s a quote from her, dumb-as-a-board grunt—and how the dumb grunt had bought the woman a new convertible before his West-Pac. The tanker said that all he did his last three days in the States was fuck this broad, this poor dumb grunt’s wife, in her new sky-blue convertible, parked at the beaches at Oceanside and San Clemente and Dana Point, and God bless America and the cheap sluts who guard her holy shores, the tanker said. And that’s when the cuckolded grunt began to beat severely on the tanker, and he didn’t say a word, he just beat the tanker to the ground, probably broke a few teeth, maybe the soft jaw, certainly the nose. And then he wept his way through Kinville, from bar to bar, while the MPs looked for him on base, he wept in the drinks and the laps of former and future and currently cuckolded jarheads, and I was one of them.

  Siek arrives from the rear-rear at 2300 or so. We’ve been passed out for many hours. Someone is supposed to be on firewatch, no one knows who, and when Siek realizes we’re passed-out drunk, he curses and screams in the way of the Old Corps. He tips Dickerson and Johnny Rotten and Combs out of their racks and tells them to report outside at once. We don’t know yet, but standing at the top of the berm are six new members of STA Platoon, handpicked by Siek and Captain Thola. Siek couldn’t have asked for a better way to introduce the new marines—by thrashing his senior NCOs he’s sending the message that anyone can make a mistake, and when he does, he pays. The lantern is burning to flickering ash, and three or four of us poke our heads from out of the hootch and watch our leaders being thrashed. The six guys at the top of the berm look frightened and fascinated. Kuehn yells at them to go get their sick kicks somewhere else, and Siek says, “They are now in STA Platoon, fucknuts.”

  They’re all boots except Martinez, who may as well be a boot after twenty-four months of guard duty on Diego Garcia Island in the Indian Ocean. He recently got busted for something. He looks like a sleeper, as if he were caught just as we’d been. But rather than sleeping while he should’ve been watching over his drunk buddies, he probably nodded off in a dark corner of the head while the sergeant of the guard expected him to be walking port arms in front of a docked nuclear sub.

  The thing about getting busted is, you never want it to happen to you, but when it happens to others, you want to hear the story, you want to know how they almost got over on the Suck, and more important you want to know how they got caught, so if you ever pull the same trick, you’ll slip under the wires.

  Martinez won’t tell us anything of value. He smiles and says, “I never got busted and then I did this once and they put me on the boat straight up the ocean. Two nights ago I was in a bar with a woman on my lap and ten empties on the table. This Siek guy sounds like a real hard-dicked bitch. What is this STA Platoon shit, anyway? I lied and told him I knew how to hunt. I figured it had to be better than the line companies.”

  Crocket, from Auburn, Alabama, looks like he stepped down from his daddy’s tractor about fifteen minutes ago. On his upper lip he has something he wants to call a mustache, and Combs lets him know promptly that STA marines don’t grow mustaches. Crocket is thick, though. Pure ripped Alabama muscle.

  Dettmann is from North Dakota, and when Dickerson tells him to show us a picture of his girlfriend, he pulls out a five-by-seven of his Harley-Davidson. Dickerson asks him how many holes she takes it in. Dettmann will not remain Dettmann for long. He proudly demonstrates his double-jointed elbows, and there’s something sweet in his desire to show us this, his attempt at proving his worth. Kuehn christens him Ellie Bows and decides that with a mop on his head, Dettmann with his thick lips will look a lot like a streetwalker, and we spend a few hours amusing ourselves by threatening Ellie Bows with searching out a mop head and having our way with our new favorite woman.

  Larson is as big as Crocket, but smarter. Atticus is his first name and he quickly becomes Addie. Addie misses Wisconsin, snow-mobiles, and drinking Pabst out of the keg he and his friends installed in an ice-fishing hut in the middle of the lake.

  Andy Goerke looks like Billy Joel, and he becomes Billy Goerke or Andy Joel. His girlfriend is forty-something and she left her husband and three or so kids for young Andy. She likes baby oil and shower curtains, but that’s all he’ll tell us, at least right away.

  Meyers is one of those guys you’ll forget unless he’s standing in front of you. The jarhead you’re looking for when the head count doesn’t jibe but no one can remember who the hell is missing. He’s
from the Chicago suburbs, and his father or grandfather is a captain of a dying industry. I know already that he’ll do everything he’s told exactly as he’s told, and that if he lives through the war, shortly after we return to the States he’ll ask to leave the platoon for a line company and I’ll never see him again. He is a marine but he’s not a STA marine.

  These are the new guys, the men we must bring up to sniper speed in weeks or maybe even days because we have no idea when the war will begin, only that it will begin.

  By mid-November we know that we’re in-country for the duration. There’s been talk of rotating units to the Mediterranean for a week of rest and relaxation, but two-thirds of the Marine Corps is in Saudi Arabia, and that means no replacements. Through our mirage of news sources—the Stars & Stripes, the Arab Times, an occasional BBC broadcast caught on a shortwave radio borrowed from Comm, letters from parents and siblings and friends—we know that by the end of the month the total U.S. troop count will top 450,000.

  As the United States pours more troops into the Saudi desert, Saddam Hussein continues to mass men and weapons at the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. The UN has passed ten resolutions condemning the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. Saddam regularly heckles George Bush, insisting that the blood of the Americans will flow like a great bursting river, and hinting that he’ll use gas.

  We’re in a war zone, receiving combat pay, an extra $120 a month, even though no rounds have come downrange yet, and I wonder about this, how they justify combat pay, how the abrogation of our taxes has been approved before suffering a single American casualty. But despite or maybe because of the moniker theater of war, in the rear-rear we must shine our boots and shave our faces and salute officers and wear a relatively clean uniform, and we’ve been ordered to refrain from profanity in conversation and also cadence—the sentiments in our cadence calls must be patriotic and loyal to the Corps.