War Porn

by Roy Scranton

  “I can’t fucking wait till I touch down on German soil. I swear to God I’m gonna fall on my knees and kiss the ground.”

  “I’m gonna kiss the first fucking German girl I see right on the lips. Just grab her.”

  “Shit, I’m gonna kiss the first fucking German I see no matter what. Klaus, Dieter, Heinrich, Adolf. I give a fuck.”

  “You know, we’ve been here so long, that ain’t even gay.”

  Bulldog Battery had already sent out their first chalk all the way to the airfield at Balad. We watched the last company of 82nd Airborne roll out.

  We waited until 0850, then found Staff Sergeant Gooley and asked what was up. “Stand by,” he said. “Stand by until further notice.”

  We waited. Some guys smoked, some guys slept. At 1015 they told us mount up. We cheered and loaded our gear in the back of the five-ton, clambered aboard, then waited, grinning like retards at lunchtime.

  “Let’s go!” Sergeant Nash shouted.

  “What the fuck’s the holdup?”

  “Can you drive a five-ton?”

  “I can, but I don’t have a flight manifest.”

  At ten minutes to eleven, Staff Sergeant Gooley came out and told us to download our gear and take it back to the tents.

  “What the fuck, Sergeant?” Bullwinkle shouted.

  “Your LT’ll brief you. Download your gear.”

  “Negative, Sergeant. Negative on that.”

  “What the fuck’s going on, Sergeant?”

  “You’ll be briefed by your platoon. Don’t make me tell you again.”

  We dispersed, dragging our bags behind us. Inside Second Platoon’s tent, Lieutenant Krauss stood down at one end talking. He was saying words but not words. I couldn’t hear anymore. The air was like water, like I couldn’t breathe, like if somebody bumped me wrong I’d slide floating across the sky.

  It sounded like something ninety days or until complete. Something about Karbala. Something mission essential. Something about not wanting to hear any fucking bitching, because we were soldiers and we were called on by our commander-in-chief, the President of the United States of America, and we would do our duty with pride.

  The fog rolled in off the sea, clouding the trees, closing in on the mountain so that when I woke it was as if from sleep to waking dream, a mirage of insubstantial gray pierced by great black spires. I’d make myself coffee and inhale the chill air and roll a cigarette and think.

  I’d sit at the formica table in the trailer and, staring through the mesh behind the slatted windows into the fog, drink my coffee and scratch poems onto notebook paper, poems about the way memory shifts in and out of focus, the way we imagine things that never happened and remember other things wrong, the daily reconstruction work of being, who I am, what I’m doing, how can I be the same I was before and who am I tomorrow.

  Sometimes I’d go out into the mist and listen to all the green held thick in the moist air, my palm on the trunk of a tree just to feel the heft of it. Sometimes a deer would come through, wild and wary, and I would fill with longing for the wholeness of animal life.

  It took the sun a long while to come over the mountains and until it did my vision was bound to the few gray yards around the trailer. It was day but not day, dim but not night, a fugue of half-thoughts and disconnected images, pulsing with power beyond easy meaning—a crow flapping, glowing black against the gray—a shadow like a man crouched with a knife—parking lots aching with pink blur—so overwhelmed by thought I’d have to sit back, set down the pen, set down my coffee, and it goes on—glass towers gleaming out of gray cityscapes, blinding silver—an old man with a red guitar—the booming flame of rockets trailing smoke—a girl’s face, her freckled cheek downy with fine hairs, fleshy lips spread in a smile over crooked teeth. I sink in reverie—and what, what does it mean?—then scrape a few more lines with my pen. Nothing even approximate. Another failure.

  I’d moved that June into the mountains just outside Newport because my uncle had finally bought a house and moved out of his trailer. He wasn’t sure what to do with the land, so he said I could stay there over the summer if I did a little work for him. There’s no TV, he warned me, no cable, no internet, no phone, no mail, but I could get letters delivered in town.

  I was at loose ends, which I’m sure my mom had told him. I’d spent the winter in Eugene, taking a couple classes at Lane Community College and working as a delivery driver for an organic juice company. I’d been dating this girl but it ended badly and I was itchy to move on, tired of the scene with all its dreadlocked anarchists, tired of weed and patchouli, the protests to save trees, stop globalization, and free Mumia. I thought about trying again with the old ex-girlfriend up in Portland, but that just made me feel worse.

  My uncle’s offer seemed perfect. It’d give me a chance to get my head on straight, really figure shit out. I thought I could work part-time and write some poems, maybe finish that screenplay. A good word from my aunt got me work at the bookstore, which was more than enough to get by. I closed shop three nights a week and the rest of the time just chilled, read, smoked a little weed, and helped my uncle with his odd jobs. I wrote letters to the ex-girlfriend in Portland. I wrote poetry. I hung out with this guy named J.J. who worked at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! I hung out with Lisa from the bookstore and her husband, Mike, a house painter. I met a girl named Alice at Nana’s Irish Pub and we started hooking up. She was a total flake, which I guess is sort of what I wanted.

  The sun came over the rise around ten, burning off the fog, unveiling vivid green. I’d lose my sense of boundlessness then, my dreamscape of wandering intellection, and come back to the blood-filled breath of life, the hum of bugs and the warmth of sunlight. I’d come back to the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was killing time, that when I went into town later I’d be the same aimless transient I was yesterday, still no goal, no point to my story.

  Often I’d hike to the top of the mountain, about two miles from the trailer, to a clear-cut along the ridge where the view opened and beyond my farthest gaze unrolled the wide Pacific’s endless sweep.

  I’d watch the blue waves and think, today you’re coming up with a plan. You’re gonna figure your shit out. You going back to school? You gonna get certified at something, get a real job, be a plumber or a nurse or tend bar? Thirty wasn’t quite around the corner but it wasn’t so far away, either, and I felt the need to do some thing, accomplish some thing, do something real.

  Oh, sure, I knew it was all a con. I knew the system was out to get me. I knew we all wanted to be free and live our lives and make art and all that bullshit, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to the dentist. And what if I broke a leg, or got sick, or hit by a car? How would I pay for anything? And why did my circle of friends seem to be shifting, turning seedier, more addiction-prone, less aware of their own lives as a series of choices they’d made and more inclined to ascribe to events wholly metaphysical causes—I just had a feeling, you know, it was like the universe gave me a sign, sometimes you do a reading and it’s just like so spot on, it was like there was this voice telling me . . . How much longer would it take till I was trapped in a world without responsibility, where things just sort of happened and we all just got along, stumbling in a fuzz of pot smoke, excuses, and superstition?

  Yet there I went into town, working at the bookshop, drinking with J.J., fooling around with Alice, getting high, ending the night in a hazy drive back up the mountain or crashed in Alice’s bed, waking to strange light through a strange window burning away the illusion of ease life wore by night and revealing beneath it the grim furrows of bad habits too deeply rutted to pull out of.

  Fog, thick, hung in the trees. I got up early and shuffled through the trailer, started the coffee pot, rolled a cigarette. I opened the door and let in the mist, let out the smoke, hoping yet again for clarity.

  I left my noteb
ook and pen untouched on the table. For some reason that morning poetry seemed even more futile than usual. I was always going over the same plucked field, picking at the same thoughts and sensations. What was the point of thinking things? Writing them down? Nobody read, nobody cared—no one needed the navel-gazing mystifications of yet another confused and sensitive young soul.

  I opened the fridge and saw I had a couple eggs, so I put on a pan and started it warming, melting butter. I cut two slices from a loaf of organic multigrain and laid them on a plate.

  For company I turned on NPR. At first it wasn’t anything, just a stream of meaningless sound, then as I stood over the stove with an egg in my hand the babble squirmed into sense. Someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. No, two planes. Both towers. One was collapsing, smoke rising up, people jumping. It was an attack of some kind. We were under attack.

  I turned up the radio and cracked the eggs, listening to voices cry out over the sizzle of butter frying.

  i am an american soldier

  i am a warrior and a member of a team

  i serve the people of the united states

  and live the army values

  Trucks roll, gunners scanning the horizon. The sun an incandescent smear. I sweat and turn up the music.

  We drive south through the desert in a line, miles long, of big green machines.

  We stand in the heat by the road and the wind whips sand at us. Waves of grit slide and ebb across the seething black. Engines hum.

  In the distance two Bradleys spin heaving clouds of dust as they circle a cluster of hooches and rumble over a hill. We hear the noise of their guns then their engines fade. Smoke oozes up. An Apache hovers overhead.

  Blackened humvees jut up from the sand.

  Pictures come out of hadjis getting fucked with at one of the prisons. Hadjis getting punched, hadjis standing on boxes, hadjis with panties on their heads, naked hadjis getting laughed at by skanky Nasty Girl bitches.

  I know what I’m looking at, but at the same time, fuck ’em. Fuck ’em to their goddamned shitsucking hadji hell. They’re shooting at us every day and I’m supposed to give a flying fuck about human rights? Fuck that. Once they quit chopping people’s heads off and lighting dudes on fire, then maybe we’ll talk.

  Command comes down and says just what you’d expect, reprehensible unprofessional blah blah blah, but who the fuck cares? A few bad apples, they say, make sure you know the regulations, but we all know the score.

  The muezzin calls out five times a day. Gunfire breaks the night. No running water. No electricity. No air conditioning. No grass, no carpet, no windows. No fans. Little shade, bad food, no joy, little laughter, no decent sleep. Everyone in the world wears camouflage—the others talk gobbledygook and stare.

  Geraldo reenlists for a 20K bonus.

  Burger King, daisy-chain. Cordon and Search. Stack team. There’s a glazed shock in everyone’s eyes, the simmer of hatred barely contained. We get in fistfights. We listen to “Hey Ya!” and count the dead.

  What had I done before? Who had I been? Was there a life before this?

  Negative. I’d never been anyone. I’d never done anything but drive down this highway forever, the road eternity itself, punishment for an abandoned dream’s half-imagined sins. This was all I’d ever done, all I’d ever do: drive in the heat through the sand and the pain and stink in the unceasing noise.

  i stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy

  the enemies of the united states of america

  in close combat

  0200 go. Stoat flips the humvee lights, starts the engine, and with a roar and crash slams through the front gate. We jog across the night-hung street around the humvee and into the yard. We take our positions by the door and switch on the flashlights affixed to our rifles. Burnett rams the door open and Bullwinkle goes in, then me, our rifles stabbing beams of white into the black. The rest of our team follows; the snatch team comes behind and pounds up the stairs. We take the first floor, living room, sofa, TV, clear the corners quick and into the kitchen, tomatoes and cucumbers in a bowl on the counter, flatbread, water, towels, we kick open a door and a hadji stands in the corner in his underpants, shielding his face.

  “On your knees, motherfucker!”

  “Inhanee!”

  The hadji’s slow to move, so Bullwinkle slams the butt of his rifle in his gut, jackknifing him at the waist.

  “Inhanee, motherfucker!”

  He goes down. I keep my rifle at his head and Bullwinkle zip-strips his arms behind him. Once he’s tied, we drag him to the other room.

  The lights on now, you can see the worn but cared-for furniture and brass knickknacks. A family portrait hangs on the wall.

  Shouting upstairs.

  We dump the hadji on the floor and my rifle slams against a vase, knocking it to the ground where it smashes.

  “Watch it,” says Staff Sergeant Gooley.

  Lieutenant Juarez and Captain Yarrow stride in, the terp behind them, just as the snatch team drags the first hadji down the stairs, a middle-aged man in boxers and a wifebeater. A woman wails somewhere.

  I hear Burnett shout, “Shut that bitch up.”

  “First floor clear,” Sergeant Nash tells Staff Sergeant Gooley.

  “Search it,” the LT barks.

  So we go back to the hadji’s room and turn on the light. He’s got a pile of letters, a little boombox, and a tiny framed picture of a woman on the table in the corner. He’s got a bed, a bookcase, a rug on the floor, a trunk, a pair of shoes. I flip through his stack of CDs while Bullwinkle strips the sheets.

  “He’s got every goddamn Sting record there is.”

  Bullwinkle grunts. He goes over to the bookcase and flips through the books one by one, then sweeps the whole shelf to the floor.

  I grab the letters from the table and stuff them in my pocket. I pick up the picture and look at it—girlfriend? Wife? I think of him lying out there with his thumbs zip-stripped, blubbering face-first on the floor.

  “Help me with this chest,” Bullwinkle says, so I put the picture down and we overturn the trunk. Clothes fall out, folded dishdashas, slacks, loose shirts, a wallet, a few small wooden boxes, a Koran.

  “Circle up!” somebody shouts from the other room.

  Bullwinkle and I head back. Our hadji’s still weeping on the floor, begging for his life, and the middle-aged one sits cross-legged behind the couch, zip-stripped, muttering, his bottom lip swollen and bleeding. A woman in a scarf is howling after Staff Sergeant Smith and Burnett as they come down the stairs. Two kids watch from the second floor.

  “Wrong house,” says Staff Sergeant Gooley. “Bad intel. Mount up, we’re outta here.”

  “Cut ’em loose,” shouts the LT, heading out with Yarrow and the terp.

  We ride back to the FOB as the horizon lightens in the east. The sky is empty, the road empty. I realize I still have the hadji’s letters in my pocket, so I pull them out and look at them. The pages dance in the wind, the words so much meaningless ink. They tell a story, maybe, just not to me. I let them go, and in the humvee’s slipstream they lift and scatter.

  babylon

  When he played till he was tired and went to sleep, he would lie in bed and attack Iraq. 235,000 troops at the borders. His staff managed to move most of the collection to safety, sending boots about fields on rutted roads.

  I was aware the apostle should capture dull rumbling in my ears

  tingling command of Allah not all were lost. Allah, who destroys insurgents and some you eat. Further lessen the abjection of war, unable in desperation to turn itself into grotesque infantile guard force

  subordinate world with no

  aberrant, outlandish Center that sets conditions for

  pornographic action, he adds, is refuge in Allah for the interrogators of the heavens and the earth, the War on Terro
r, no helping do not know

  and the blind and the inherent groping power do not know

  and the blind and purposeless officials charged with investigating do not know for to him life is the Army, and I had some idea what I was doing. The United States had invaded Afghanistan and was making diplomatic preparations for the invasion of Iraq. I had a good idea we were going and, despite my attempts to see things geopolitically and realistically, we follow the dust, heading off the main road through fields then grids of now flattened and overgrown former modular units by air, tractor-trailer, or ship can be fully functional in 24 to 48 hours. Even at the CSH level, the goal is not definitive repair. The maximal length of stay is

  policies and practices developed and approved for use on

  “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,” in fact, a “new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations.” No sane man can be a world, and do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than question the use of national military power. Most people

  shall say: Yea, associate with policy

  most surely to help the most forgiving, no doubt concealing bombs, others on the day when the witnesses of this TV, nor in the hereafter, and pediatrics benefit the unjust

  for them curse

  the inmates of fire, so we made Allah, surely Allah sees moral will to act, a reminder to men of what they planned, meantime

  How is it that I call you to salvation and you call me to the fire?

  You call on me that I should disbelieve in Allah and associate with Him of which I have no knowledge, and I call you to China’s foreign minister Tuesday. Baghdad residents have started fleeing the capital as the deadline nears for President Hussein to leave or face war. No sane man can be happy, for Saddam rejected the ultimatum, saying he has no heart of the

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