Jarhead

by Anthony Swofford

  We enter our fighting holes and our fear and terror are with us. The division NBC officer has fucked us, jinxed us, diddled us in the ass. If listening to our banter, you will not hear pleasure coming from our holes, you will hear despair. We have no confidence in our protective gear. How will we be saved?

  (Later, I will read that the pyridostigmine bromide has been approved under the condition of full disclosure, that is, the troops must be informed fully of the potential effects of the PB, both positive and negative, and then the individual service member will choose whether he or she wants to take the pills. This, of course, is not the way it works in the military. The history books tell me we were supposed to take the PB pills three times a day for a week. I recall ingesting many more pills than twenty-one, for longer than a week. It makes sense that we would want more of the pills, even though we had no idea of the possible side effects. Why not take more of something that you’ve been told might save your life? If twenty-one pills are good, forty-two must be better and sixty-three will turn me golden.)

  Now we stand in our normal platoon formation, two ranks of twelve men, two scout teams per rank, and Staff Sergeant Siek issues the orders:

  “Remove one pill from your PB pack.”

  “Place the pill on your tongue.”

  “Stick your tongue out so I can see the pill.”

  “Take your canteen from your war belt and swallow water and the pill.”

  “Show me your tongue.”

  “Now, don’t you feel better?”

  Kuehn is the only one of us who spits his pills out and buries them in the desert. Kuehn isn’t smart enough to rebel against ingesting an experimental drug into his body, but he’s angry enough to rebel against anything the Marine Corps orders him to do that doesn’t produce immediate and positive results.

  Me, I’m afraid. I rarely if ever disobey orders. I believe that the Iraqi army has tens of thousands of artillery rounds filled with chemical weapons. In my dark fantasies, the chemicals are gassy and green or yellow and floating around the warhead, the warhead on its way to me, my personal warhead, whistling its way to the earth, into my little hole. I too think of All Quiet on the Western Front. I can’t remember if chemicals were used in the book or the movie, but I know that during the early years of the Great War nerve gas killed tens of thousands, and I don’t want to die that old terrible way, not the way of books or movies, but the way of war.

  I also know that in 1987 and 1988 Saddam Hussein attacked Iraqi Kurds with chemical weapons, and that thousands died and suffered, and that, already, deformed children are being born to victims of the attacks, children with seven or eight toes per foot, without anal openings, blind babies, stillborn babies, babies so retarded they’ll be dead within years or killed sooner out of mercy and despair.

  I take the pills.

  We pass the weeks of the air campaign living between our hootch and those joyless fighting holes, each day removing sand that has entered because of fierce winds or walking too near the edge. We run patrols that are advertised as live, but we see nothing live other than each other. Most nights a Scud alert goes off. The alerts, soon viewed with great doubt, are made with an air siren emitted from a can, such as you might buy at the hardware store to add to your home-safety kit, the type the coach uses at track practice when running his kids through the hurdles. The man responsible for tooting the Scud alert is usually a lance corporal from the comm shack. While listening to the theater-wide freqs, he will receive the alert from someone else, some other Paul Revere farther up or down the line, and he’ll run out from his comm shack and toot his horn, usually at 0300 or 0400, and everyone who’s awakened will yell, “Scud alert! Scud alert!” And we’ll don our gas masks and helmets and flak jackets, grab our weapons, and stumble to our holes before settling in the sand, waiting for someone, usually the same lance corporal, to call All clear because the Scud has either landed in Jerusalem or burnt up in the sky before penetrating American or Coalition positions.

  Once the air campaign begins, I never sleep through the night. Three hours is the longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep I experience, and this occurs during a bogus patrol when Johnny says, “Let’s get some sleep,” and we take off our helmets and flaks and sleep in wet sand. If a Scud alert doesn’t interrupt our sleep, someone screaming from a nightmare or wide-awake anger and fear will awaken the entire hootch. Doc John Duncan passes out sleeping pills to those who want them, but I’m afraid of sleeping through a valid alert, and anyway, the guys who take the pills wake up just like those who don’t. The synthetic chemical for drowsiness is not as strong as the naturally occurring chemical called fear. After an alert, a game of poker might start, or if not, at least a game of sitting awake and talking shit, either about women back home, real or imagined, or the hunting in the bayou versus the hunting near Hannibal, or southern versus northern California beach breaks.

  One night after an alert, Welty announces that he’s going to sit cross-legged on his cot and throw a soda can into the air above his head and catch it behind his back, and that he will continue this act, without dropping the can, until morning. The hootch divides into two groups, those for and those against Welty, and bets are made.

  I’m not sure what has compelled Welty to play such a silly game, but I know that we’re watching him because we need the assurance, or at least the hint, that such simple pleasures, such mindless pleasures as playing catch with yourself, with a soda can, are still possible and even important. This is of course a throwback to boyhood, when we could’ve kicked a can for miles through a city or down a country road, when the most important question was, Where will I find my next can? Now we must ask ourselves, When will their bombs find me?

  We stay up all night watching Welty toss his can, rooting for him or jeering him, all of us entranced by the mystery of his endeavor, happily entranced because he’s enabled us to forget words such as Scud and gas and artillery. Welty never drops the can. I lose $5.

  Another night, after we return to the hootch from a Scud alert, Dettmann starts weeping and won’t stop. We tell him to stop, but he won’t or can’t. Combs, near the breaking point himself, takes Ellie Bows outside and thrashes him for a good hour, but throughout the exhausting cycle of bends-and-thrusts and push-ups and bear crawls, Ellie Bows continues to cry.

  Goerke, a bit of a humanist, joins Ellie Bows outside and insists that Combs thrash him as well, because even though Goerke isn’t crying, he wants to cry, and isn’t it the same thing? he asks.

  During the thrashing, I’m reclined in my cot, wide awake, hands locked behind my head, eyes fixed on the crossbeam of the hootch. Two months prior I could’ve killed Dettmann, and now I’m glad I didn’t. I think of everything and nothing, living and dying, and I know that the answers to all of the questions I’m afraid to ask are located to the north, along the Iraqi minefield and obstacle belts, in the enemy bunkers where Iraqi soldiers are at this moment being bombed by our planes.

  On the eighteenth of February we move to the Berm: the man-made obstacle made of sand, a most unstable material or medium that will make futile all effort or endeavor, that follows roughly the Kuwait–Saudi Arabia border. Shortly after arriving at the bivouac site, we receive incoming artillery rounds. The first few rounds land within fifteen feet of the fighting hole Johnny Rotten and I are digging. Johnny is the first to yell Incoming, and we crouch in our half-dug hole.

  The rounds explode beautifully, and the desert opens like a flower, a flower of sand. As the rounds impact, they make a sound of exhalation, as though air is being forced out of the earth. Sand from the explosion rains into our hole. Because we’d been deep in the labor of digging our fighting hole, and the chance of an enemy attack seemed remote and even impossible, our flak jackets, helmets, weapons, and gas masks are stacked in an orderly fashion a few feet behind our position. More rounds land nearby, and someone yells Gas! Gas! Gas!—this being what you’re supposed to yell when you have good reason to believe a chemical or biological attack is
in progress. Now Johnny yells Fuck, what you’re supposed to yell when rounds are incoming and someone yells Gas! Gas! Gas! and your gas mask is a few feet behind you, out of reach. I too yell Fuck. Then I crawl on my belly to our gear, and as delicately as possible, I throw it all to Johnny and I crawl backward to the safety of our half-hole, and we don and clear our gas masks. More rounds impact, and these explosions too look quite beautiful and make it sound as though the earth is being beaten, as though air is being forced out of the earth’s lungs, and I begin to weep inside my gas mask, not because of fear, though certainly I’m afraid of one of those rounds landing closer or even on top of me, but because I’m finally in combat, my Combat Action has commenced.

  I’ve pissed my pants, but only a bit, a small, dark marker the shape of a third world country on my trousers. My heart rate climbs. My breathing, as happens when you have a gas mask on, becomes labored. Hearing is of course muddled by the gas mask, and communication thus impaired. Johnny and I look at one another and around our defensive position, the entire STA Platoon half-dug in around the battalion CP. More shells explode near us.

  If the Iraqis have competent forward observers, they will adjust their fire one hundred feet north and land rounds directly on the commanding officer and executive officer of the Second Battalion, Seventh Marines. But this is unlikely.

  Either because the CP has a chemical detector, or someone simply feels that no chemicals have been delivered via the incoming artillery, the all clear is called, and we remove our gas masks. The artillery assault ends.

  Because part of STA’s mission is to function as the eyes and ears of the battalion commander, we commence with such work and begin to look for an enemy observation post and the bastards who called in the rounds toward our command post. We’re equipped with the best optical devices in the battalion. We scour the biblical range two thousand yards to our east, our bellies flat to the warm sand. Johnny, with his grossly impaired and oddly precise eyesight, is first to notice the enemy position. With his direction I gain visual, and while I can’t see the individuals inside of the OP, I definitely make out the physical structure, dug into the side of the range like a wound into the ribs of a martyr. Those poor fuckers, I think, those sons of bitches. Johnny dials the air freqs, and Fountain and I work the coordinates. We accomplish our map work like the experts we are, while all around us marines yell that they’re okay, that they haven’t been hit, and let’s drop some shit on those raghead motherfuckers. Johnny asks and I tell him that I think the best bomb cocktail would be a combination of smoke, for obscuration and marking, and antibunker, for killing the bastards. He places the handset in my hand and says, “Fuck ’em up, Swoff.”

  A captain from S-3 appears and pulls rank, insisting that he direct the fire mission, not me, not STA, even though Johnny has done the work of locating the enemy position and Fountain and I have acquired the coordinates. The captain has even carried his field chair over from the CP. He explains that he has bad knees from college football and that if he lies prone in the sand, it will take about three STA marines to peel him from the deck.

  Johnny takes the handset from me and gives it to the captain, and we crawl backward a few feet and listen to the captain call in the planes, and a minute later the devastation starts. I watch through my spotter’s scope. I’ve seen thousands of bombs land on targets—buildings constructed for the purpose of being bombed turning to dust and the hulks of decommissioned vehicles becoming beautifully twisted tons of steel as shocking as a Giacometti—but I’ve never witnessed the extermination of human life. The explosions look, through my scope, about the same size as the artillery explosions that had minutes before occurred directly in front of me. The bombs make a soft thud of a noise, like an E-tool striking a skull, that reverberates through the shallow valley. In the dust cloud floating slowly down the ridge I imagine that I can see the last breaths of these men now dead.

  Another jet bombs the enemy position and we return to digging our holes. We have just experienced a formal exchange of fire. The reports will be forwarded to regimental and division S-1—we’ve earned our Combat Action Ribbons. But we don’t discuss this. We remain quiet about the incoming rounds and the quick devastation of the enemy position. It seems as though we would talk about it, but we don’t, and I suppose that during war men rarely talk about warring—they talk about war before the war, when they are full of bravado and their balls and cock swing like a clock pendulum, ticking away at time and cowardliness. And afterward they talk, because they must, to remain sane. Each man has his own story of where the rounds landed and who was hit and not and why. Some men talk endlessly until they are no longer believed or even loved. You will find these men alone, drinking in bars meant to celebrate their prior service, their labor for their country.

  I continue digging our fighting hole while Johnny receives a patrol order from Captain Thola. I dig fast and I dig deep, smoothing the walls with my palms when I’m done. I use tripod poles to align our fields of fire. With my hands I dig small shelves where we might prop a photo or a charm, though I know neither of us believes in charms nor do we have photos suitable for such brazen display. I no longer doubt the existence of our enemy, but I feel good and safe and American.

  I feel this way for only a short time, until Johnny returns from the patrol order briefing. Johnny rarely cusses, only when his gas mask is out of reach or the odds he’s been handed are horrible. He jumps in the hole and says, “We’re fucked. Will you run over to the comm shack and get two Prick batteries?”

  After we had neutralized the enemy observation post, the comm shack had assembled itself on the highest point in the neighborhood, a good position for communication but not very tactical, as far as I can tell, but no one has asked me. The comm shack is about a four-hundred-yard walk or run, in the plain wide, beige open. It is the longest four hundred yards on earth. The artillery stopped over an hour ago, but that means nothing. Johnny tells me to run tactically and to wear all of my war gear and good luck and, yeah, it is damn far but we need the batteries for the sure-fucked mission we’re supposed to run in two hours.

  I run toward the comm shack. A world-class sprinter can run four hundred yards in about forty-five seconds, but wearing boots and equipment and running on sand, it’s going to take me a lot longer than that. The exhaling sound the enemy artillery rounds made upon detonating in the sand rushes through my ears. An explosion of sound surrounds me, the sound of my breathing, the sound of my gear—ass pack, canteens, first-aid kit, six magazines with thirty rounds each—bouncing around my midsection, my footfalls in the sand, the exploding sand, my breathing, my gas mask flapping against my right hip, the comm shack closer now, I’m still running and breathing and the deadly sounds continue and I’m afraid of dying. I think, You are afraid of dying, I say aloud, “Do not die now,” I think, Don’t die while running after batteries for your cheap and usually inoperative communications equipment.

  I make it to the comm shack and spend a few seconds catching my breath in the entry to the hootch.

  A lance corporal hands me the batteries and says, “That’s a long fucking run, huh?”

  I reply that, yes, it is a long fucking run and now I must go back the other way.

  I take my batteries and run toward my hole, where I settle safely as Johnny uses a red grease pencil to draw our patrol route on a map.

  He says, “That wasn’t so bad. What I’ve got here is much worse.”

  Johnny and I are to be inserted by the rest of the scout team, four members, into a hide position where we will spend forty-eight hours observing the enemy minefield and enemy troop movements across the minefield. The minefield consists of two long obstacle belts that are reportedly filled with many thousands of antipersonnel and antitank mines. To fight the Iraqis we’ll first need to reach them by moving men and equipment across the border, through the obstacle belts.

  There are problems. Psy-ops personnel have been dropping bombs for about a week, “soft” bombs that disperse propa
ganda rather than exploding ball-bearing clusters. The soft bombs deliver pamphlets encouraging the Iraqis to surrender. Some pamphlets depict a teary-eyed Iraqi soldier imagining himself dead in a desert pool of blood; others use a diptych illustrating the difference between the weary and hungry and soon-to-be-dead Iraqi soldier, alone on the battlefield, and the happy and safe and alive Iraqi soldier enjoying a picnic with his family shortly after surrendering to the Coalition. On the reverse of these flyers the flags of the Coalition countries are aligned in a fierce New World Order formation that bespeaks diplomacy and peace, but most of all, overwhelming firepower.

  Because of the psy-ops work and the hope that Iraqi soldiers will soon begin surrendering, the battalion refuses to supply fire support for our mission. No air, no arty, no mortars, not even a goddamn .50-caliber machine gun sitting on a ridge, two grand back. The command has decided we are well enough armed against a squad-strength force, a squad being what intelligence tells them we might encounter, and they don’t want us calling in two tons of bombs or an arty battalion for a platoon or larger of surrendering Iraqis.