Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  Meanwhile, we’ve been attempting to line up a long-distance range, and it finally comes through. We plan to depart our bivouac at 0500 and start putting rounds downrange at 0600. Dettmann is firewatch and he’s supposed to call reveille at 0400. Dettmann is in my team, and Johnny Rotten, my team leader, has been in the rear for a few days taking care of gear acquisition and attempting to track down aerial photos of the border, and he will meet us at the range. So, as the ranking member of the team, I’ll be responsible when someone fucks up, and Dettmann does just that.

  The first person to wake up is Staff Sergeant Siek, at about 0630. Hell comes apart at the seams as Siek screams and curses, and he calls me over and asks if there’s any way on earth his watch is two and a half hours fast and he’s actually having a bad dream and the so-called elite scout/sniper platoon hasn’t just missed their first chance at rifle time in three months. He hopes to high hell I’ll tell him a sweet story about screwing so he’ll fall asleep for a few more minutes until one of my idiots calls reveille.

  Of course, I can do no such thing, because it’s 0630 and we have missed our shoot, and I have no idea where Dettmann is but I know what he is—asleep. If we were closer to the border, and if combat were closer to our hearts, my first thought would be that poor Ellie Bows had been captured by an elite force of Iraqi fighters, and I’d order my team into search-and-rescue mode, and using our highly efficient tracking skills, we’d find Dettmann and the dirty ragheads who’d abducted him, and we’d lay down some serious hellfire, killing every last one of the unlucky bastards and taking Ellie Bows home like a Best Butter trophy from the North Dakota State Fair. But I know that Ellie Bows is somewhere nearby, snoring.

  I find him a few hundred yards from our hootch, leaning against the major’s Humvee, sleeping, a half-eaten peanut-butter cracker, from the first care package his mother has sent him, in one hand, his Walkman in the other, playing a loop of his Harley-Davidson idling in his parents’ garage. I kick Dettmann in the stomach, and he coughs up cracker and peanut butter and drops his Walkman and asks me what’s my problem. The sun meets the horizon from below. I ask him what time he thinks it might be, and he says, “Sorry, Swoff, I didn’t mean to fuck you.”

  Siek thrashes me for a few hours. Not since boot camp have I received such a complete and ruthless thrashing. He uses water, forcing me to drink three canteens and then running me around the perimeter of our position, until I vomit the water, and then more water, and more running, and more push-ups and sit-ups and bends-and-thrusts and more vomiting. Commanding the team for a few days was my first try at small-unit leadership, and I’ve failed quite perfectly, confirming for Siek that I deserve the sad rank of lance corporal.

  But my punishment is not over. Not with shitters nearby. The shitters in the rear vary in size and design, and while it would make sense for the number of shitters to correlate to the number of marines in the rear, you rarely discover such logic employed. A rear area with five hundred marines might have one three-holer or ten three-holers, depending on various tactical factors such as how far the colonel is willing to walk from any point on the perimeter to a shitter.

  The shell is usually made of plywood. If the engineer acquired enough wood or was for whatever reason feeling creative that day, the shitter might be fully enclosed with two side entries and a pitched ceiling, three or four steps from the ground to the shitter proper, an actual seat rather than a hover hole, handles on either side of the seat, shit-paper holders, screens, magazine and newspaper racks, a bookshelf, even a solar-powered radio. The depository is always half of a fifty-gallon oil barrel. If the engineer was in a foul mood because he had once again been ordered to build a shitter for the lousy grunt regiments, the shitter will be a piece of plywood with a jagged hole cut into the center, placed unsteadily on top of the half oil barrel.

  A marine on shitter detail doesn’t care what the shitter looks like. His only concern is the barrel. If he’s lucky, he’ll be on detail with a platoon mate so that the two men can complain to one another and feel good even though they know the rest of their platoon is at that same moment either doing nothing at all or performing an easy task such as stacking heavy boxes of ammunition.

  The jarheads burning the shitters wish they were stacking ammunition, but the jarheads stacking ammunition never wish they were burning the shitters.

  If you are a sergeant in the grunts and you want to take care of your jarheads and keep them out of shitter detail and pure hell misery, you do the best job you can at sucking up to the S-4 marines because ultimately they decide who cleans the shitters and who loads the chow, water, and ammunition, who rakes the sand in front of the colonel’s GP tent, who puts the Armor All on the colonel’s Humvee tires, et cetera. The S-4 keeps two lists. One list is official, written on paper, and if you were to examine the list, you’d have to admit that the S-4 hands out work party duties fairly. The problem is, the other list exists in the collective brain trust of the S-4. This is the real list.

  If your sergeant is not an ass-kisser, if he foolishly believes he exists on a plane above ass-kissing, you will experience bad luck. Your sergeant can afford not to kiss ass because he will never be ordered to burn the shitters, and even if back in the days when he was a nonrate he had to burn the shitters, he has forgotten those horrible hours. Or your sergeant might be a perfectly capable ass-kisser, and not only capable but quite happy to kiss, he might even enjoy it, he might be proud that his platoon never suffers shitter detail, and if this is the case, you are a lucky and blessed bastard. It’s most desirable to serve under the number one ass-kissing sergeant.

  But you might receive shitter detail by pissing off your sergeant so that he requests the dirty duty for your platoon, or even worse, for you personally, by name and rank, as though shitter detail were an award or a promotion and not an extreme injury to your health, morale, and welfare.

  So Siek furthers the punishment of my poor leadership; I receive one week of solo shitter detail because of Dettmann’s failure on firewatch.

  I’ve been double possum-fucked—fucked twice by the same two-peckered possum. The rear is equipped with four three-holers, and that’s a lot of filthy work for one man. This seems like a gross failure of justice, and I tell Johnny this, but he only manages one of his half-wry smiles and what sounds like a blatant lie: “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The burner must report to S-4 and retrieve the tools of his trade: a metal fence post, welder’s gloves and tongs, five gallons of diesel fuel, and a box of matches. The marine handing out these items acts as though he’s sorry you happen to be standing in front of him, as though he knows a mistake has occurred and as soon as he’s able he’ll straighten things out. He wisely affects this pose so as not to be stabbed through the heart with a metal fence post covered with burning human waste.

  Though it’s not an officially endorsed practice, most men on shitter detail will sign their name or at least their unit moniker somewhere on the shitter, usually with a grease pencil but sometimes with spray paint.

  The structures assigned to me have been in-country since the beginning of the deployment, and it comforts me to read the names of three marines I went to boot camp with. But I don’t sign my name or unit.

  These are rather deluxe shitters, not the simple barrel-and-hole variety, so that the depositories are housed behind a hinged door. I use the welder’s tongs to remove all three barrels and I pour diesel over the waste, and I’m prepared to start the fires when a major approaches and orders me to replace one of the barrels so that he can shit. He’s not going to walk to the other side of the perimeter for his morning glory, as he calls it. I explain that I’ve already poured fuel into all of the barrels, but he insists. So I do as ordered, and I sit ten feet away in the sand while the major shits. I consider lighting the tinder under the major’s ass, and thus lighting the major’s ass itself, but I refrain. When he’s finished, I remove the barrel, light all three, and commence with the worst part of the job, stirring the burning
waste.

  The smell is atrocious, vomitous, bilious. I stir the burning shit and I wonder if somewhere in Kuwait or Iraq my peer enemy might at this moment be stirring the burning shit of his regiment. Maybe he’s allowed a subordinate to fall asleep on duty or otherwise discredit and shame his unit, thus being assigned shitter detail. I wonder what the Arabic term for shitter detail is, if they use diesel and a metal fence post that could also be used to build burning obstacles around a minefield, directing the enemy, me, toward my death. And I’m sure the poor man, my brother in arms at the moment, is also feeling sick to his stomach, about to vomit. And I vomit into the burning waste of my regiment, the shitblack smoke covering my face.

  Two marines I don’t know walk by and laugh at me, and I know they are pogues, probably from the S-4, because a fellow grunt would never laugh like that.

  I finish the nine other barrels at the three other shitters without incident. Maybe I needed to get that first shipment of bile out of my body and now I can burn shitters for the rest of my life.

  Back at the STA hootch my mates are cleaning their rifles, writing letters, playing cards, and sleeping. The first and only STA marine to receive shitter detail in the Desert, I will never live it down—Combat Action Ribbon, all of the other ribbons and medals I’ll rate with the platoon, Airborne School, Meritorious Corporal, epic bar fights, sexpot girlfriends, none in Palm Springs and Hollywood, none of it will matter as much as my shitter detail—for the next two years barely a week will pass without someone crying, “Hey, remember when Swoffie had to burn those shitters over in the Desert!”

  Later in the evening Johnny calls me outside and says, “I heard of a PFC in Combat Engineers who will burn the shitters for twenty bucks a day. He’ll only take cash, no IOUs or porno or booze.”

  I’ve been receiving a bimonthly disbursal of $40 cash, with no way to spend it other than buying cookies at the PX or candy bars from the Egyptians, so I find the private first class and pay him the six twenties, and I’ll kiss his goddamn feet if he insists.

  The PFC is a pasty-looking guy who blows up bridges and minefields for a living, and I can’t imagine what drives him to burn the shitters, it can’t only be the money, but whatever sickness seethes through him, for $120 I’ve relieved myself of a great misery.

  A few days later, in the barracks in the rear-rear, I hold my locked and loaded M16 against Dettmann’s left temple. Meyers sits on his rack and pretends not to notice. I haven’t planned on threatening to kill Dettmann. I’ve been cleaning my weapons, first my sniper rifle and then my M16. Dettmann and I have been competing in a weapons assembly race with our M16s, sitting cross-legged and facing each other. I’ve beaten him thirty times in a row, by two or three seconds each try, and I’ve become tired of the routine, and this last time after I yell Done, I simply lock and load a thirty-round magazine, rub the muzzle against Dettmann’s temple, and ask, “What would you say if I told you I was going to kill you for fucking me like that?”

  I know this is crazy and reckless, but I think Dettmann might learn something, I don’t know what. And I know that if in a second I say Fuck it and pull the trigger, I’ll be able to lie my way through an accidental discharge, and the Dettmanns in North Dakota will be sad, and I’ll probably spend some time in the brig, maybe even years, but I’ll be the fuck out of Saudi Arabia and the endless waiting and the various other forms of mental and physical waste, and also, I’ll finally know what it feels like to kill a man.

  I say, “Ellie Bows, I am in the firing position known as the sitting position. After the prone position it is considered the most stable shooting platform for the M16. In other words, the platform most likely to enable the marine to effectively kill his target, his target being a human, generally an enemy, but sometimes, by mistake, a friend, or friendly. We call this friendly fire, or friendly fucking, or getting friendly fucked. Sounds like finger-fuck, but it feels much different, I’m sure.”

  Dettmann apologizes for falling asleep on watch. He thinks that my killing him is a severe reaction. He says, “Come on, Swoff. I’m sorry. I don’t think you’ll pull the trigger. You’re just fucking with me.”

  I say to Meyers, “What do you think, Meyers? Do you think I’ll kill your homeboy from boot camp?”

  “Sure you’ll kill him.”

  It excites me to know that Meyers believes I’ll kill his friend.

  “You two have known each other almost five months now. You’re some salty motherfuckers. That’s why Ellie Bows can fall asleep on firewatch. She’s so damn salty she doesn’t have to do what her team leader tells her. Meyers, you don’t see shit, right?”

  “I’m not here. This isn’t even my room.”

  “Ellie Bows,” I say, “after I put this bullet in your head I’m going to drag you over to Kuehn’s room and let him throw that mop head on you, let him go to town. How’s that sound?”

  “Come on, Swoff! I’m sorry! I really screwed up! I was just sitting there bored as fuck, thinking about home. I’m tired of this shit! Just like you!”

  “You’re tired? You’ve been here three weeks!” I work the muzzle around his ear. “Let me get that wax. You didn’t learn to clean your ears in boot camp, did you? Don’t you know that hygiene is the second most important thing to bullets on the battlefield? This 5.56 will clean your dirty ear.”

  I don’t know who is more nervous, me or Dettmann, but I continue to talk, and as I talk, I soothe myself and come closer to believing that I can finish this reckless act. I am, after all, a trained killer, and my heart has been hardened so as to allow death to enter. I don’t know Dettmann and I don’t like Dettmann, he’s a goddamn boot who was eating corn and pig and praying at the farmhouse table when I deployed to Saudi. I have more in common with the Iraqi soldiers at the Kuwaiti border, men who dug in a few days before I landed at Riyadh, than I do with Dettmann. The loss of Dettmann won’t be a loss, but an inconvenience, a little bloody mess.

  I alternate my muzzle between his ear and his pulsing temple. We discuss the ballistic possibilities, depending on the bullet’s point of entry, and the technical specifics of the M16 rifle.

  I tell Dettmann to repeat after me:

  “The M16A2 service rifle is an air-assisted gas rifle that fires a 5.56-millimeter ball projectile.”

  “Maximum range, 3,534 feet.”

  “Maximum effective range for the point target is 550 meters.”

  “Maximum effective range for the area target is 800 meters.”

  “Cyclic rate of fire, eight hundred rounds per minute.”

  “Average rate of fire, ten to twelve rounds per minute.”

  “Sustained rate of fire, twelve to fifteen rounds per minute.”

  “Muzzle velocity, 3,100 feet per second.”

  Dettmann’s ears are bloodred, and he’s weeping, his eyes shut tight like a cornhusk so the tears must force their way out, one drop at a time.

  “Rifle weight, 7.78 pounds, 8.79 pounds fully loaded with a thirty-round magazine.”

  “Rifle length, 39.62 inches, 44.87 inches with fixed bayonet.”

  “The bayonet weighs .60 pounds.”

  “The rifle cleaning kit and cleaning/lubricant/protectant are stored in the buttstock of the rifle.”

  “The key to a properly functioning M16A2 is weapons maintenance and love.”

  Dettmann is shaking his head no as he speaks. Snot runs from his nose.

  “This is my rifle.”

  “There are many like it, but this one is mine.”

  “My rifle is my best friend.”

  “Without me, my rifle is nothing.”

  “Without my rifle, I am nothing.”

  Dettmann opens his eyes wide. He looks as though he’s experienced a religious epiphany. He’s moving his lips, but I can’t understand what he’s saying. He’s spitting as he tries to speak. His ears have turned an even deeper red and his cheeks are flushed, and he’s sobbing violently, his head bobbing like a barque on a rough sea.

  I push the maga
zine release button and my magazine clanks against the deck, and I discharge the round from the chamber and force the round into Dettmann’s mouth, like a dentist forcing a painful tool through the tight lips of a child. It stays there. I throw my rifle onto the deck, and the sound of the hard plastic hand guards and the rifle metal bouncing against the concrete is not unlike the mad clatter of a New Orleans funeral march returning to the city from the grave.

  War is coming, and so more men arrive. Fountain and Cortes are the next and final Siek-appointed members of STA to join us in Saudi. We begin to think Siek travels to the rear-rear and holds up a sign not unlike a beggar’s, asking for assistance of whatever kind and value. Fountain and Cortes look like a Latino Abbott and Costello. Cortes is a boot and about thirty pounds overweight, and Fountain must weigh an ounce or two above the minimum acceptable weight. Fountain is Cuban-American and Cortes is Mexican-American, and they argue over who has the better Spanish, and whose mother cooks the better food. I prefer this argument to the Texas versus Oklahoma barn burners that occur between Kuehn and Combs, if only because the Cuban-American versus Mexican-American argument is newer and nominally different.

  Cortes acts like a boot, wears his gear like a boot, and asks boot questions. He falls behind on humps, complains about the lack of hot chow, tries to hide porn mags, and swears he doesn’t masturbate and that he’ll never go down on a woman. Standard boot fare.

  Fountain had been in the Army Rangers before joining the Corps. Prior-service guys from other branches are always looked on with at least a bit of disgust and certainly suspicion. You know he joined the Corps because throughout the many sorry years he spent in the other, lowly service he walked around—and the other services don’t march, they walk—wishing he’d had the wisdom to enter the marine recruiter’s door, not the army doggy’s or squid’s or flyboy’s.