Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  So Fountain can’t be trusted. His stories are too good. One day he pulls out a Ranger patch that he thinks he might be able to sew to his uniform, and we inform him that while the other services want to look like Boy Scouts, the Marines are damn happy looking like warriors. So, no patches. Army boots leave boot camp with three ribbons: one for showing up, one for throwing a grenade, and one for finishing. It takes a marine at least a year in the Fleet to rate a ribbon.

  Combs says to Fountain, “A Marine Corps cook could skip and whistle through Ranger school while stewing together twenty vats of the best damn chili-mac any side of Riyadh.”

  Fountain speaks vaguely about action in South America; he won’t name a country or a year. We know the Rangers are high speed, but they aren’t high speed enough to keep a major mission quiet. The CIA, sure, the SEALs, sure, maybe the Green Berets, but not the Rangers. And the fact is, when you’re about to go to war and a new guy drops into your hootch one day and he boasts about the Shit, you can’t believe him. You want to believe him, because if it’s true, here’s a live, wiseass reason that it’s okay to charge across the border to fight the elite Red Legion or Red Guard or whatever the Arab Times calls them and shoot the place to oblivion, because if a guy like Fountain can make it through with the Army Rangers in an unnamed South American country, then probably combat is not so bad and you will also make it out alive.

  Other than the mystery missions in South America, Fountain has even more troubling stories, and not about a foreign country, though they do concern a kind of battle: Fountain spent a few weeks after the School of Infantry in Twentynine Palms waiting for his orders to Saudi. He slowly offers information about the state of affairs back home, and for any married guy who has a wife living in Twentynine Palms base housing, all signs point to piss poor.

  Because many houses were abandoned when the husbands deployed, wives with children in tow scattering back to their parents in Whitehall and Four Forks and Baltimore, Lance Corporal Fountain arranged a sweet deal, he tells us. Despite being a boot and a nonrate, he set his wife up in base housing and not only in base housing but in NCO base housing, structures that were newer than the nonrate structures by a good half century. Fountain tells the story of how none of the remaining war wives, home alone with the kids and the checkbook and the car, were interested in becoming friendly with him or his wife, and at first they tossed it off as jealousy and fear and simple Enlisted Wife Bullshit, but soon, after only a few nights of sipping drinks together on the porch and sleeping under the stars, in the front yard, because the desert was still warm at night, he and his wife noticed the mysterious movement of POVs, personally owned vehicles, into the driveways of the war wives late at night and out of the driveways in the early morning. Fountain says he doesn’t want to be the guy throwing the bucket of shit on the war parade, but as far as he knows, there’s a regular fuckfest going on back at the Palms, and since the base is full mostly of boots at communications school, it must hurt that much more to know that not only a boot but a comm boot not even out of school is probably doing your old lady every night, appearing and disappearing like a ghostpecker on wheels.

  We look around the hootch at one another, and after quick memory runs through marital status and just where so-and-so’s wife is, we realize that no STA wives are living in Twentynine Palms. And so we all breathe easy.

  Kuehn says, “Don’t make a fuck anyway. STA wives don’t fuck around.”

  I feel oddly proud of the term STA wife, and I’m happy for my friends who have wives that fit that description, and I’m glad to hear Kuehn’s clear and incontrovertible statement concerning the fidelity of the STA wife.

  Troy says, “Hey, Tone, too bad we can’t say the same for the STA girlfriends, eh? Those bitches.”

  I say, “I’m not sure anymore that they’re bitches. They’re on the other side of the pond. It’s all fucked up here and not there and so why should they swim this way?”

  Dickerson says, “Hey, you sound like a goddamn poet or some shit, but if my old lady fucks around on me, she fucks around on me. Two plus two is still motherfucking four, no matter what the fuck war is going on. A bitch is a bitch, a lady is a lady.”

  “Dickerson, you’re our own personal Dr. Ruth,” Troy says. “Next time I can’t get wood, I’m coming to you for advice. Do you include a reach-around or is it gonna cost me extra?”

  “The only women you’ve ever had you paid for in the PI, so don’t go talking shit to me. You almost married a bar whore! You don’t need a reach-around. You need me to slap you across your face.”

  I say, “Let’s all make up happy and remember that in the morning we get the range that Ellie Bows fucked us out of.”

  Troy says, “Fountain, what’s a ghostpecker?”

  “It’s a pecker that’s fucked your old lady, but you’ll never know.”

  We make our way back to our respective corners of our little desert outpost and talk in groups of two or three or five. Despite our various disagreements on anything from religion to sports teams to poker rules to the best measurements for breasts, waists, and hips, we are a tight platoon, and it doesn’t matter whom you train with every day in your team or whether you shat on the same shitter as the famous Vietnam sniper Carlos Hathcock after he delivered the speech at your sniper school graduation, you can look anywhere and you always have a friend. And if need be, because of your stupidity or vanity or selfishness, you also have someone near who will slap you or field-fuck you or spend a few days telling you what a worthless piece of shit you are, until you realize that whatever bug you have up your ass is about a week late in being removed. It’s not original to say that the combat unit works like a family—but the best combat unit works like a dysfunctional family, and the ways and means of dysfunction are also the ways and means of survival.

  We called Fergus Rocker because he wanted to become a rock star or a singing actor. His father, already in his seventies, had been a Protestant preacher, and Fergus’s aging mother was the choir director of all his father’s congregations. Fergus sang rock lyrics to the tune of “Amazing Grace.” He had an okay voice, but hard-metal tunes sung toward phantom church balconies are hard on the ear. Fergus had dusty brown hair, a receding hairline, and a round face, and he looked like the young son of septuagenarians, as though he’d been on a shelf for many years before being born.

  Fergus hadn’t actually passed the indoc he took, but I’d told Sergeant Dunn I would train Fergus personally, and if he failed, it would be my failure. I knew Fergus was smart. He’d placed last in one or two of the physical endurance tests but passed with high marks everywhere else. I saw some of my same complaints against the Corps in his face. He became a good STA marine, though he required much of my time and attention.

  After we returned from war, while most of us concentrated on drinking, partying, and inadvisable sex, Fergus took voice and acting lessons at a community theater in Yucca Valley, twenty miles west of base. One Saturday evening I watched Fergus deliver a strong performance in the title role of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Afterward the cast and friends went to a café in Joshua Tree, near the national park. The café was a great find for Fergus and me. There wasn’t a single jarhead in the place, and contrary to custom for businesses within missile range of a military establishment, the café’s walls weren’t covered with pictures of nearby units and weapons and munitions and dumb, smiling GIs giving you the bird.

  Fergus and I began hanging out at the café, and we received a coffee education from the owner, and he was happy to talk to us about Camus and Céline and Chekhov. A former massage therapist to the stars, he’d recently escaped L.A. and was pleased with the pace of the high desert. He had pictures of former clients taped to the counter, and he claimed to know where Cyndi Lauper had recently bought a home in Joshua Tree. We were of course not at all interested in the location of Cyndi Lauper, but his café offered a sober alternative to the bars in Palm Springs and San Diego—dollar shots until 10 P.M. and jarheads brawling in the st
reet with college kids.

  When winter arrived and so too the European mountaineers, mostly Germans, to climb and camp in Joshua Tree National Park, the café became crowded with the foreigners.

  Fergus and I occasionally slept in the park over the weekends, spending the days climbing and rappelling with our STA-issue gear. Our equipment wasn’t as high speed as the Europeans’; but we could beat most of them up and down the great boulders. Our plan was to befriend some of the Germans and leave open the door for an invite overseas.

  The Germans weren’t interested in talking to us. They seemed sophisticated—we were fooled into believing that accent equaled erudition and good taste. My older brother was currently in the army, stationed in Germany, and spending time among the Germans would, I hoped, bring me closer to my brother, distant now for many years. But I could see in the eyes of the Germans that they considered Fergus and me crude specimens from a crude culture and that we would make no inroads. I knew that their government had joined the coalition to defeat Iraq, and I also knew that these people had probably been against the action. I wanted to tell them that I too had been against the action, but this would’ve been a simplification of my complex feelings surrounding the war, and a lie, and any attempt to make the Germans believe me would’ve instantly been recognized as deliberate obfuscation. Many nights I backed myself into a corner of the café with a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus or Death on the Installment Plan, content to read and reread and attempt to understand. Fergus worked his way through the complete works of Chekhov, and we hoped that a pair of young and pretty German girls would chat us up.

  One evening, two German women in their midtwenties asked if we knew the way to Amboy. We did, and we also knew that they wanted to go to the desolate desert town to say they’d been somewhere Charles Manson had called home. They asked us to escort them in their orange VW bus.

  There was a quarry outside of Amboy, and the yellow lights from the quarry burned all night, and when greenies made their first training mission in the Palms, the salts would tell stories about marines being abducted and cooked in a stew that burned night and day, fueled by the hate and madness of Manson children. We drove toward the yellow lights and told the German women the same stories that salts had been telling boots for twenty years. The women seemed to believe us, and I saw, in the rearview mirror, both fear and pleasure in the driver’s face.

  I don’t recall their names, only that they weren’t especially pretty and were extraordinarily muscular rather than lithe like many female climbers, and that neither had showered for a few days.

  The women were rather disappointed when they realized the menacing yellow light burned from the border of the quarry and that no monuments or statues honored Manson. Amboy had one gas station and two diners, one of which had a hand-painted sign in the window that read: IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR CHARLIE MANSON YOU’RE ALREADY DEAD.

  On the return drive the women abused us verbally for being U.S. marines. The passenger laughed that we would dare to call desert Storm a war, and she told us her uncle had helped burn thousands of Jews before escaping to South America, and no matter what side a person had fought for in World War II, that was a war, not an “operation” with boys returning home complaining of false ailments because they hadn’t fought long or hard enough.

  I told her quite confidently that our war was important not because of duration or the number of dead and tortured and burned, but simply because we’d been there and only so many men know the horror of war and the fear, and they must suffer it, no matter the war’s suspected atrociousness, because societies are made, in part, by the men who have fought. I told her that the importance of a war is never decided within years and certainly not within months, but rather in decades, or even centuries. After V Day the vision of the victors is obscured by champagne and skirts and parades, increased profit, decreased loss, and joy, for the war is over and the enemy dead. The war is over and the enemy dead. I said, “The value of every war is negligible.”

  She thought I was full of shit, and she told me so: “You are fucking full of shit. You go to Germany and then tell me about valueless war.”

  I told her that the problem with believing your country’s battle monuments and deaths are more important than those of other nations is that the enemy disappears, and it becomes as though the enemy never existed, that those names of dead men proudly carved on granite monuments cause a forgetting of the enemy, of the humans who died and fought in other cottons, and the received understanding of war changes so that the heroes from one’s own country are no longer believed to have fought against a national enemy but simply with other heroes, and the war scar is no longer a scar, but a trophy. The warrior becomes the hero, and the society celebrates the death and destruction of war, two things the warrior never celebrates. The warrior celebrates the fact of having survived, not of killing Japs or Krauts or gooks or Russkies or ragheads. That large and complex emotional mess called national victory holds no sway for the warrior. It is necessary to remind civilians of this fact, to make them hear the voice of the warrior.

  These are the things I told the German women.

  Back inside the café the women joined other German climbers who were sitting in a circle on the floor, and the Germans talked about us and laughed, and I heard them call us jah-heads and throughout the night I considered fighting the laughing Germans, the women too, beating them all severely. But I read my book and kept my fists to myself. Fergus and I drank coffee and read late into the night but didn’t speak, and later, as we arrived at the barracks, he said, “What was their problem?”

  Two years after I left the Marine Corps I received a call from Fergus. He’d been living in Seattle, trying to catch the grunge music tide but failing. He wanted to visit me in Sacramento. I hadn’t spoken to any of my former STA Platoon mates since leaving the Corps. As well as I’d known Fergus while we were in and would even have called him a friend, when I discharged, I abandoned the Corps and all personal links to the institution, and his call brought me into contact with emotions and events I’d buried.

  My girlfriend knew little about my time in the Corps, and I’d only talked once about STA Platoon, when at the state fair I’d won a six-foot stuffed pink gorilla at a BB shooting contest that no one had won for three months. The carnies wanted me to sign the target, and I did, with my name and USMC scout/sniper. One of the carnies yelled, “No fucking wonder! Boss is gonna be pissed, the goddamn pink gorilla is gone to a jarhead.”

  (The gorilla sat in the corner of my girlfriend’s room for many months, until one night, drunk and angry with me for having accepted the free drinks a female bartender had offered, she told me to leave her house and to take the gorilla too. I walked three or four blocks in the rain toward my car, the pink gorilla beneath my left arm.)

  Fergus met me and my girlfriend and a few of our friends at a bar downtown, two blocks from my apartment. If it ended up that he was wasted and crazy, I’d ditch him and never hear from him again.

  His hair was much longer than mine, nearly to his ass, while mine hit past my shoulders. His beard was not as thick as mine, but less tame. We laughed at the predictable fact that we both wore long hair and beards. It was October, and only as cold as Sacramento might ever turn at night in October, the midforties. Fergus wore cutoff camouflage trousers, combat boots with olive drab socks pulled to his knees, and an olive drab, wool field shirt half-unbuttoned with no skivvy shirt beneath. He worried me. I introduced him to my girlfriend and friends, who seemed less interested than before in meeting Fergus, and they stood back from us as though they were scientists looking into the mystery of space and time. I bought a round, and my friends and girlfriend peeled off and left the two of us to reacquaint.

  Fergus had been working a series of low-paying jobs and sleeping with a series of low-life women. He was sure that one of the women, or a neighbor, had been entering his apartment at night and moving his furniture, not moving it far, but just enough so that over a few days he’d noti
ce. I’m not sure why I didn’t recognize this as paranoia. But it’s always possible that a former lover would show up at your apartment and mess with your furniture, mess with your head, and he did tell me that he’d once pulled his pistol on the neighbor, down in the laundry room when Fergus wasn’t expecting anyone else to walk in at 3 A.M.

  He wrote the lyrics to a few of his new songs on a napkin, and the lyrics were poor, and I couldn’t get the tune of “Amazing Grace” out of my head. The songs were about smoking pot and screwing peaceful hippie girls, flowers by God in their hair, and I told him that the work sounded familiar, that he might try some new themes. He asked me what I knew about writing songs, and I told him nothing. He asked me no questions about my life or work.

  In the past, we’d been tempering agents for one another, and of my many hundreds of insane drunken evenings while in the Corps, none of them had occurred with Fergus. But our restraint disappeared, and over a few hours, as my girlfriend and friends watched from the bar, Fergus and I shared eight pitchers of beer. When the bar closed, we were drunk, and my girlfriend urged us to go for breakfast. I declined the invite, and I told my girlfriend I’d speak to her in a few days. Fergus and I walked to my apartment and continued drinking, a bottle of wine, and shots of whiskey, and eventually he convinced me to pull out my ruck and change over into my desert camouflage. At this time, my body was still tight enough to fit the uniform.

  I dressed, and we began singing cadence and slapping each other across the face, and head-butting one another, and we eventually ran into the street. We were blind drunk, and angry at one another for changing, for slipping. We went on a loud cadence run through the streets of downtown Sacramento. We sang our favorites, the ones about raping and burning and killing and pillaging, and one-shot/one-kill. We drank and sang and ran and beat on each other the entire next day, Sunday.