Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  Monday morning I awoke in a park ten blocks from my apartment, Capitol Park, and as I opened my eyes, the sun hit the state capitol rotunda, and I recalled visits to the building in grade school. But this visit was different. The gear from my ruck was strewn all around me and I had no clothes on. I couldn’t find Fergus, and he wasn’t at my apartment when I returned.

  I heard from Fergus two more times. A year or so later he called one morning at four. He said he was on his cell phone, inside the U-Haul he’d loaded that afternoon in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. He was skipping out on his rent and moving to Colorado to hook up with Smith, another former STA marine. He had all of his belongings and his motorcycle loaded, and he planned to sleep in the U-Haul overnight so that his entire life couldn’t be stolen from him.

  “Why’re you calling me?” I asked.

  He’d been drinking at his favorite nearby bar, he said, hoping to hook up with the bartender one last time—her blue eyes and blond hair were amazing—when finally he’d stopped trying after last call. On his walk up the hill he’d come upon two guys beating on a middle-aged gay man across the street, and he yelled two or three times for the men to stop, and they wouldn’t, so finally he pulled his pistol and shot at the men. He didn’t care whom he hit as long as the attack stopped, and he was sure he’d scored a hit because one of the assailants fell and the gay man ran away, and the other attacker began screaming over the body of his friend.

  After Fergus had fired the shot, he’d shit his pants. He’d heard sirens and people yelling from apartment windows. Then he’d run.

  I told him to bury his gun in one of the packing boxes and get in the cab of the truck and drive away, to drive to Portland and pull over downtown and sleep, to clean his weapon Marine Corps style the next morning and then toss it over one of the bridges, and to never call me again and never tell anyone what had happened.

  He called collect a few months later, from a phone booth in Durango, Colorado. He and Smith had been getting in fistfights with each other. After a few weeks he’d moved into an abandoned building, an old bank, he told me, and he had his Marine Corps–issue cot set up in the basement vault, and through a contraption of hoses and buckets and gravity he’d assembled sort of a field shower, not a shower really but more like being pissed on from above. He felt good about the future, he liked his surroundings, and he felt certain he’d take a few theater classes at the community college next semester. I asked him if maybe he should talk to someone at the Veterans Administration hospital, and he declined, insisting that they could not tell him anything he didn’t already know. Before we hung up, he said, “We fired the same rifle. You have the same problems as me.”

  Fergus knew we would always be jarheads. The sad truth is that when you’re a jarhead, you’re incapable of not being a jarhead, you are a symbol, so that in a city like San Diego, where there are more jarheads than windows and the jarheads are embarrassing because of their behavior and dress and you want more than anything not to be associated with the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, you still are one, one of those things, marine, jarhead, and thus associated with the bad behavior and offensive style of dress of every jarhead walking the boardwalk, drinking excessively, starting fights. Though you might be an individual, first you are a symbol, or part of a larger symbol that some people believe stands for liberty and honor and valor, God and country and Corps. Sometimes this is correct, sometimes this is foolish. But either way, you are part of the goddamn thing.

  That jarhead, with the high and tight haircut, the Disneyland T-shirt, acid-wash jeans, farmer’s tan, poor grammar, and plain stupid look on his face, he is you. And that one, with the silly regulation mustachio, the overweight wife from his hometown of Bumfuck, with three kids in tow, three kids covered with sticky boardwalk foods and wet sand, one of them crying because he has to pee and the older sister just punched him in the face, he is you. And that jarhead is you, the one with the wife just twenty-four hours out of a bar in the PI, the both of them deeply in love with each other and all things American—you can tell this by the U.S. flag miniskirt she’s wearing and her red, white, and blue high heels, and the ocean-wide patriotic grin on his face—goddamn, he is you. And the two jarheads drunk-stumbling out of the bar on the corner, into the fierce noon ocean sunlight, chasing the private-college frat boys, now catching the frat boys from the private college, now beating severely the frat boys who screamed Fuck all dumb bastard jarheads in the ass before trying to run free from the bar, those two jarheads beating the frat boys and having the time of their lives, they are you. And when the jarheads pick the bloody frat boys up and say You dumb fuckers, you dumb fucking frat boys, let’s go catch a beer, then too the jarheads are you. And the jarheads fighting and warring and cussing and killing in every filthy corner of the godforsaken globe, from 1775 until now, they are you.

  This is troubling and difficult to admit, and it causes you unending anguish, and you attempt to deny it, but it’s true. Even now.

  CARE AND CLEANING

  OF THE M40A1 RIFLE SYSTEM AND OPTICS

  Tools and materials authorized Patches

  Camel-hair brush

  Bore brush, .30 cal

  Bore brush, .45 cal

  Bore cleaner

  Cleaning/lubricant/protectant

  Lubricant, medium

  Lubricant, light

  All-purpose brush

  Lens paper

  Antifog spray

  Brass rod

  When to clean the rifle Before firing

  After firing

  Cold climate

  Hot, humid climate

  Saltwater exposure

  Desert operations

  Optics Camel-hair brush

  Forced air

  The armorer is the only person authorized to break down the scope

  Optics operations in cold climate Condensation—avoid condensation

  Frost—avoid frost

  Optics operations in hot, humid climate and saltwater atmosphere Direct sunlight—avoid direct sunlight

  Humidity and salt air—avoid humidity and salt air

  Perspiration—avoid perspiration

  The man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war, and afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory and he believes he’s finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands—love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper—his hands remember the rifle and the power the rifle proffered. The cold weight, the buttstock in the shoulder, the sexy slope and fall of the trigger guard. Where do rifles come from? the man’s son asks.

  The rifle stinks like wet earth, like from where it came before being melted and molded into that sticklike form. And when you run out of ammunition and you’re lucky that the enemy has run out at the same moment, you can beat the enemy with your rifle, as though the rifle were a baton, or a branch from a thick oak. The man remembers this: there are many different ways to fight and kill with the rifle.

  Supposedly, and according to tradition and lore, the sniper needs only one bullet per kill. This is incorrect. The sniper requires thousands of bullets and thousands of hours of training per kill; he needs senior snipers on the deck beside him at the rifle range, telling him why he is not producing a dime group from a grand out. (A dime group is three shots that, when inspected on the target, can be covered with a dime.) There are reasons you’re not hitting a dime group at a grand. Your spotter called the wind at five to eight but the wind is an eight to eleven. You hadn’t completely expelled your breath when you shot. You are afraid of the rifle. Your spotter gave you the correct dope but you dialed the scope incorrectly. You are tired. You are stupid. You are bored. You are a bad shot. You drank the night before. You drank excessively the night before. You are worried about Suzi Rottencrotch and her man Jody back home, in the hay or in the alley or in a hotel bed. These are all unacceptable reasons for not achieving a dime group at a grand. A nickel group is occasionally acceptable. A quarter group and you are dead. You hav
e missed the target but the target hasn’t missed you. You must remember that you are always a target. Someone wants to kill you and their reasons are as sound as yours are for killing them. This is why you must know the dime group like you once knew your mother’s nipples. Quarters are cheap. On your corpse no one will check the group, not even your mother. Your enemy will be the last person to witness you as a living thing. He’ll acquire you through his optics and he will not pause before pulling the trigger.

  The dream starts in November, after I read an article in the Arab Times about the Iraqi Republican Guard snipers.

  I’m a boy again, wearing the glasses I had as a boy, and I’m on a quest, for what I don’t know, in a land vaguely familiar that sometimes resembles the alleys of Tokyo and sometimes my grammar school. I might be looking for the denim jacket I lost on the playground in fifth grade. I might be looking for the candy store. Women walk through the alleys wearing red tights. Sometimes I try to sleep with them, and though I’m hard, the tights keep me from penetrating, but I come on their tights. Money changes hands. There’s no logic for why I choose one woman over another, or why any particular woman allows me to choose her. Once, the nonact is consummated on a toilet. In the dream, no one speaks. Diseased dogs roam the alleys, and addicts of either pills or drink or dope float above the alleys as they take their preferred drug. I never find what I’m looking for. I sweat throughout the dream. Eventually, I turn a corner out of the alley, and a sniper shoots me in the left eye. The shot doesn’t hurt, and I return to the alley, and though my eye has been blown away, I still maintain vision through the socket. I can see the hole that the projectile made in the glasses lens. I begin coughing up pieces of shattered glass, but no blood issues from my mouth, though as I cough the glass into the dirty alley, I know my belly is stuffed with glass and that it might take me years to expel all of it. As the clean glass hits the ground, I hear the sound of chimes marking time, though I can never figure the hour.

  This dream recurs every night, until the Scud missile drills begin, and after that I’m unable to complete a full evening of sleep.

  Before joining the Marine Corps I’d fired two weapons—a bow and arrow and a .22-caliber rifle, both at Boy Scout camp, at the age of twelve. If I hadn’t requested to leave camp a week early, I would’ve also fired a shotgun and a larger-caliber rifle, but I missed my mother, I had no friends at camp, the food was lousy, I was afraid of showering in public—actually, in the forest, the shower not a shower but half a dozen garden hoses draped over the lowest branches of a pine—and the leader of the camp was grouchy and probably a drunk. Because I cried-out a week early, and my parents lost the nonrefundable fee, I had to repay the money for the aborted second week. My mother supported me and my sweet reasoning behind quitting camp (that I missed her), but my father insisted I repay the money—my Boy Scout camp fees came from general family vacation funds, and to be fair to the rest of the family, members of the tribe who stayed the duration at their camps of choice, I had to reimburse my parents for the lost week. I don’t remember if I ever repaid this money, but I did miss the larger weapons, and for many years I felt inferior for never having fired a shotgun or large-caliber rifle.

  Two years later, in 1984, I was fourteen when the marine barracks in Lebanon was bombed, killing 241 U.S. servicemen, mostly marines. The number of dead was burned into my consciousness. As I folded my newspapers each morning, staring at the front-page images of the marines, the carnage crept into my brain, and also the sense that my country had been harmed and that I was responsible for some of the healing, the revenge. My country had been attacked, and I was a part of my country. Before me my father had gone to war and also my grandfather, and because of my unalterable genetic stain I was linked to the warrior line. I knew at this early age that despite what some politicians and philosophers and human rights advocates and priests insist, war is about revenge, war is about killing others who have killed and maimed you. After war there might be peace, but not during.

  In the afternoons I watched the news bulletins, this being long before the sedating nonstop news loops of the cable stations, and as the marine bodies were carried from the rubble, I stood at attention and hummed the national anthem as the rough-hewn jarheads, some in bloody skivvy shirts, carried their comrades from the rubble. The marines were all sizes and all colors, all dirty and exhausted and hurt, and they were men, and I was a boy falling in love with manhood. I understood that manhood had to do with war, and war with manhood, and to no longer be just a son, I needed someday to fight. I thought of the marines constantly; my schoolwork, normally failing, failed even more spectacularly. Yes, I thought of the marines constantly, and I was engaged by woodshop and wrestling practice, but I sat dazed through my other classes.

  While delivering my paper route, I wore my father’s jungle camouflage boonie cover from Vietnam. He’d given it to me. Each morning I threw my ninety papers, with expertise, using the same aiming technique that would later help me while tossing grenades, and as the papers spun through the air toward my customers’ porches, I saw—in the front-page photos of the bombed marine barracks—the kaleidoscopic trajectory of my future. The two other kids whose routes adjoined mine thought I was crazy and that with my camouflage hat and talk of war and retribution I might kill someone or myself.

  They were my best friends and the three of us would, on Sunday mornings, finish our routes as quickly as possible and meet at the local donut shop and buy a dozen donuts each. One of the prettier older girls from school worked there, a girl who was probably poor and trashy but looked, through my eyes, attractive. I’d offer her a donut and she’d thank me and take a French crueller or an old-fashioned from my box, and I felt that this too was part of manhood, offering a woman a piece of something you owned, however small and possibly worthless. And she obviously already knew some of the magic of womanhood, allowing the man to think he has given you something you might not otherwise acquire, or that beforehand you didn’t even know you needed. She saw my inability to meet her eyes—that I would pretend to check my watch before looking at her, before stuttering out my incomplete sentences—and she often went out of her way to be friendly toward me.

  The donut shop is now gone, replaced by a megasupermarket. I believe the donut girl’s name was Heather—years ago I heard she’d become pregnant a few times by various men, but still I remember fondly those Sunday mornings when I offered her donuts and grieved over the dead marines in Lebanon.

  Shortly after the bombing I ordered a USMC iron-on from a recruitment ad in Sports Illustrated. One evening my mother ironed the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor onto a white T-shirt. Our kitchen was rather long and narrow, and my mother opened her ironing board in that space, and I sat at one end of the kitchen on a step stool while at the other end she applied my future to the shirt. She carefully cut the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor from the larger sheet of material, and I watched her steady hand with wonder, my mother always an expert at matters of craft and penmanship and the like. I felt the heat from the iron radiating throughout the room. The steam rose, the old iron coughed and spit, and my mother ran the iron across the shirt in smooth strokes, with the same rhythm as one might use to rock a baby.

  I wonder now if she wanted to mar the job, to blur the ink or burn the shirt, desecrate the God-holy icon of the Corps. Or if she didn’t, why not? Maybe if she had, I wouldn’t have gone on to join the Marines because I’d never have worn the shirt, but she prepared the iron-on perfectly. Before she removed the backing, my mother half-heartedly counseled me against joining the military, especially the Marines.

  “You should go to college before you decide to run off in the military. I missed college because I married your father, and the next fall when I should’ve been at the university, I was in Seville. Spain was nice, but college would’ve been better.

  “You don’t want to run away to dirty foreign countries. Every marine we ever met complained about the Marine Corps. They get paid less than anyone else and the food is suppo
sed to be the worst.” She looked away from me. “And the women near the bases have diseases. And remember your uncle.”

  My father’s brother had been a marine, an embassy guard in Denmark, and he’d died one night on duty after ingesting, with his daily half gallon of milk, an avian disease. I’d heard the story once before, told by my father one night when he might have been drunk or lonely. My mother retold the story. I wasn’t sure what it had to do with the local women having diseases, but I didn’t interrupt her.

  My father had received the news of his brother’s sickness and rushed to Denmark from Spain and stayed at his brother’s side until my grandparents arrived, and my uncle was medevacked to the States—the story goes my grandfather pumped a bellows to fill my uncle’s lungs the entire flight over the Atlantic, and my uncle died minutes after touching down in Maryland. It is best to die in America if you can. My mother was sad over Uncle Billy, my father’s closest sibling, by all accounts an honest and forthright man and stellar marine. A large portrait of Billy hung on the wall in my grandparents’ family room, and I grew up looking in wonder at the portrait, made from a copy of his boot camp photo, the famous dress blue photo.

  Four years after the iron-on was applied to my T-shirt, my dress blue photo would be tucked into the lower left corner of Billy’s portrait.

  While my mother worked on my iron-on, my father paid bills or wasted time inside his study, either unwilling to take part in the historic moment occurring in the kitchen or simply disinterested in the elite future his son might grasp, the USMC iron-on considered with the same paternal irony as Boy Scout camp and trumpet lessons and Little League, money gone and time possibly wasted but what’s the hurt, this is life, and life goes on and children live happily if we’re lucky and raise them well.