by Matt Young
Now we give hip-pocket lessons on Marine Corps customs and courtesies and grooming standards. We inspect one another for uniform discrepancies. We fill out bubbles on Scantron tests and sit in air-conditioned classrooms in tent cities congratulating one another on how well we’ve learned to be Marines when the results come back.
In the end, we tried for so long, clawed tooth and nail, and swallowed our pride to get back to our war, that we didn’t realize it had already ended.
Trajectory
In early 2009 I am tasked to hold security on an Iraqi man sedated on a hospital bed. I’ve just left him, replaced by the next guard. The man was shot in the left calf, but the bullet exited close to his abdomen—I am amazed by this. The elephantine swelling caused by the wound fascinates me. To relieve pressure the doctors cut the man’s skin to the muscle. They do not explain to me why they had to relieve the pressure this way, but it leaves the inner workings of the man’s striated sinew exposed, pink and glossy and hard to look at but impossible not to. Sometimes the nurses let me flush and loosely redress the wound. Sometimes I press just a bit too hard or am careless about where my fingers make contact. There is a part of me that wants to see the man suffer. I have been told he was shot because he was also shooting, though his bullets didn’t strike true.
Bullets are tricky. They don’t travel in the straight lines movies make them out to. Bullets move in a parabolic free fall. They begin to tumble, asteroids in space, toward their point of impact to do whatever damage.
Small caliber bullets, like a 5.56mm ball round from an M16 or M4, are not made to travel through bodies and leave an exit wound. Rounds fired from an M16A4 service rifle travel at 3,110 feet per second, but even at close range a 5.56 might not make it all the way through a person. The bullet will start to tumble through the viscera and fracture bones and make secondary fragmentation within the target’s body, and it might enter the chest or the abdomen or the face, but it might end up exiting through the kneecap or the elbow or the buttock. Both holes might be small, but internally it will look like someone eggbeatered the organs.
A human can’t act on a bullet once the bullet has entered the human; there is too much velocity, too much power. Most times the human doesn’t even know the bullet has entered them until it has exited or become lodged somewhere against some dense bone or within thick tissue.
I have acted like a bullet. I entered lives and bounced and ricocheted and broke and tore. Now I am going to exit one life and that life will have no say.
Unlike the bullet, I am exiting by choice, not because of ballistics. I am exiting because I have lied and cheated and now that I am sober I realize those things are not foundational to lifelong bonds of marriage.
I will exit ten thousand klicks away via international phone line, because I am a coward, because I didn’t have the courage to tell the truth to her face two months before with the Pacific coast of California as my backdrop. In that moment I was still somehow tricking both of us that I loved her.
I expect the conversation will be long and I am thinking of the collateral damage of my exit.
There are four weapons-safety rules Marines learn in basic training:
1. Treat every weapon as if it were loaded.
2. Never point a weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot.
3. Keep your finger straight and off the trigger until you are ready to fire.
4. Keep your weapon on safe until you intend to fire.
There is also an unspoken fifth among grunts: Know your target and what lies beyond. I am thinking about what I might hit upon my exit after these four years, how many relationships I am changing the course of. How many people won’t have control of that fallout, just like the person in the next room can’t control the bullet exiting the first body, traveling through drywall or stucco, and striking them.
I am in an AT&T phone trailer. The trailer is empty, for which I’m grateful. I use a calling card to phone.
Hello?
Hey, it’s me.
Hi! How are you doing? What time is it there?
Early. Listen. I think we should talk.
[Silence]
I just don’t think this is working. I feel like I’m wasting your time. I am not a good person.
You don’t mean that. What’s going on?
Nothing. This isn’t working. It’s over. I’m sorry.
[Phone clicks]
That’s it. Is that it? She was crying. How can that be it? No screaming, no fuck you. Clean. Surgical.
Back in the aid station the Iraqi man is gone; well enough to travel, he was taken by the men who shot him to be interrogated at some other base somewhere. Maybe he’ll be imprisoned. Maybe he’ll be set free. I knew nothing about him, only that he was reported to have fired a weapon at soldiers and I was to guard him and that because of him my sleep was interrupted and so I hated him.
The bed is spotless, sheets bright and starched and empty. And I start to feel like my bones are collapsing from the inside out, like I’m being eviscerated. I start to cry. I want to apologize to the man. I want to tell him I’m sorry for how I treated him, for not protecting him when that was the job I was assigned to. But the man is gone, and all that’s left is an exit wound.
Chewing the Fat
We have learned the lesson to work smarter not harder over the past three and a half years. So instead of cherry pickers and steam engines and mountain climbers and side straddle hops and push-ups and crunches and running we order steroids.
We consult with a friend back home via instant messaging from our air-conditioned four-man trailer. Where do we get them? What do we want to get? Orals? Injectables? How long should we take them? How much at one time? Side effects? Concerns?
We want to take them because we spend chunks of time in the gym. We want to take them because we feel our bodies getting older, worn-out from living in our gear and riding hunched over in Humvees and getting exploded and dodging bullets and living in fear and coping with drink. We want to take them to get strong, to see more gains from our lifting. We want to take them to look like the way we think we’re supposed to look for the Corps for our families and our girlfriends and wives or boyfriends or whatever. We want to take them to look good naked.
Mostly, like all other things we do, we do them because we are bored and we want to pass the time.
With research we find Japan is our answer. Japan, where our path should’ve taken us what seems like all those years ago. We imagine Okinawan soapies we never got, the Jungle Warfare Training Center we were never a part of (though we probably would’ve bitched the whole time anyhow), the cammies and school shirts we never traded with Filipino Marines, the balloons held over our heads that were never popped by the atom-spearing tip of a dart shot from the vagina of a Thai stripper. All of these things zip through our minds as we peruse the clean, medical-looking Japanese website. Test 250, add to cart. Winstrol 100, add to cart.
The six-by-nine bubble mailer arrives during mail call some weeks later. Our staff sergeant hands us the package. There is Japanese writing on the label. In our trailer we tear at the packing tape, sliding our fingertips over the kanji. We stash the juice in a pair of new boots reserved for our plane ride home.
We approach a corpsman we call Hang Ten Tony, in hopes that he might procure for us retractable syringes—enough for our twelve-week cycle. And he does. Between Hang Ten Tony and the Navy there is no loss of love. Hang Ten Tony misses his surfboard and his weed and not taking orders from dickhead Marines. Hang Ten Tony wants to fuck the system as much as we do. So he helps us. He shows us where to inject the drugs into our muscle groups, and how to avoid nerve strikes. He monitors our injection points and keeps us as sterile as possible.
We become supplicants of the iron and cable, we shun cardio, we eat as clean as we can—eggs, oatmeal, almonds, chicken, chicken, chicken, vegetables, chicken, oatmeal, eggs, chicken, almonds. Our glutes grow sore to the touch. Hang Ten Tony advises us to
switch cheeks and shoot into the left. We shoot into quads and into pecs and delts.
There are gains, but not like we thought. Hang Ten Tony has no thoughts as to why—he is a specimen, a swimmer and surfer and marathon runner, his body would make Renaissance sculptors swoon.
We grow bulky with water weight. We get stronger, though not as strong as we would like. We must be doing something wrong.
We ask around casually and hear stories of friends of friends of other Marines who ordered juice from overseas only to find later they had been injecting rooster semen. Our steroids do not look like rooster semen. But we do wonder. There is no roid rage, no mood swings. Mostly, we are calm and collected. And that also makes us suspicious.
The cycle ends. The steroids are gone. Without the steroids we begin to ask, what is the point? Why do we give a fuck about looking good naked? Why were we ever crazy enough to stick ourselves with needles in the first place? We want to go back to how we were, when we used to rely on our rank and charm to keep us out of trouble. We want to say, Eat the apple, fuck the Corps.
But still, we are in the gym every morning, and when the time comes to cut weight, in the afternoons we run. We log miles, sometimes we sprint intervals. And the entire time we are asking one another and ourselves, why continue?
We sweat and we hurt and our lungs burn and our muscles ache, and we question. We are learning, and we are cutting. We are cutting more than water weight, more than fat. We are cutting baggage. We are cutting what made us heavy. We do the thing now just to do the thing. Because we get pleasure out of breathing so heavy our throats bleed. As we sprint intervals and squat ass to the grass and push weights from our chests, the three years behind us stand in front of our eyes like a movie we can’t look away from. We see the entire time we were looking for a way to game the game, to beat the system, to work smarter not harder. We thought if we didn’t move no one would see us, but the more we stayed still the more time slowed. We see our past weakness and we shove back stronger. The faster we sprint, the deeper we squat, the harder we push, the more we move, the faster time begins to flow, and the more we begin to worry about the future.
A Moment of Clarity
Hang Ten Tony’s Apartment
Hang Ten Tony is tall, heavily muscled, tanned, blond. Hang Ten Tony has a gap in his front teeth, which are paper white. It is an endearing gap, a gap I want to see, a gap I could fall through for eternity. Freckled sunspots dot his nose. Hang Ten Tony is talking to me about surfing, about how good it is to be home, about hating the Navy. Hang Ten Tony is taking bong rips and drinking a cerveza, bro.
Now Hang Ten Tony is talking about starting a business, about skipping to Mexico, about marrying a girl in Hawaii on top of an active volcano. I try to tell Hang Ten Tony that relationships are hard, but he does not hear me. Hang Ten Tony is pacing and manic and I am uncomfortable. I am wishing I had ignored his call. Hang Ten Tony cashes out the bong, drips Visine into his eyeballs, and pops an Altoid or two into his mouth.
Hang Ten Tony says it’s time to go.
Hang Ten Tony on How to Stay Hydrated
Every morning, bro, I’m telling you, eight ounces of water right when you wake up does so much for your health. And it’s all about your health, bro, you know? I mean, if you don’t have your health what do you really got?
At this moment, Hang Ten Tony is plunging a needle attached to a syringe full of testosterone into my right buttock.
And coffee, too, you know? You want to get a little bit of that caffeine in your system. Some water and then some coffee, they’ll both work to stimulate your metabolism so you’ll burn more calories throughout the day.
My muscle feels distended and thick like an overcooked steak. I nod and say things like, For sure, and, Right on, and, Most definitely. They feel strange as they travel over my lips.
All right, bro. This is about where you’re going to want the injection site to be. Just take your thumb and pinkie—yeah like that, like the mellow sign, bro. And put your thumb on your hipbone and your pinkie at about a forty-five degree angle and then, bam. That’s where you go. Cool? And remember bro, water, a little bit of coffee, get hydrated, jump-start that metabolism early in the morning.
Hang Ten Tony on the Way to El Toro
Hang Ten Tony and I are driving to El Toro to meet Hang Ten Tony’s friend and his friend’s fiancée. Hang Ten Tony’s friend is in his twenties and still lives with his parents and attends Irvine Valley College. The house is located just off the Five but deep in a residential neighborhood where I lose all sense of direction for the lack of colors other than taupe, beige, khaki, and desert pink.
Hang Ten Tony commandeers the radio, plays loud music I don’t know, and then lights a huge joint. Hang Ten Tony yells at me over the music. He talks more about getting married in Hawaii on top of an active volcano.
So, like, my family and her family will just wait at the base of the volcano or whatever, and then, like, a helicopter will take her and me to the top and land for, like, fifteen or twenty minutes so we can do the ceremony, he says.
Wow, yeah that’s pretty—
But, bro, that’s not even it! It’ll come pick us up and then drop us back down with everyone else.
What about the officiator?
The what, bro?
Whoever’s going to marry you.
Oh man, helicopter pilots can do that.
I think you’re thinking of ship captains.
Maybe them, too, but definitely helicopter pilots.
Hang Ten Tony and After Hours Karaoke at a Sushi Bar
Onstage, Hang Ten Tony’s knuckles turn white as he clutches the microphone. The place is empty aside from Hang Ten Tony’s friend, his friend’s fiancée, and three drunk sushi chefs, who are cheering on Hang Ten Tony as he sings a sweaty and tone-deaf version of “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics.
So is Anthony going to be okay? He seems different, says Friend’s Fiancée.
He’s been gone a year—I didn’t hook up with them over there until six months ago. A year is a long time, I say.
This just isn’t him, you know? says Friend.
No, I guess I don’t, I say.
Well, like, I’ve never seen him drunk before, says Friend.
We all turn to look at Hang Ten Tony. The sushi chefs are onstage with him now. He is lifting them up and air humping them and they are all laughing.
Was this your first time in Iraq? Friend’s Fiancée asks. She pronounces it E-rock.
Third, I say.
Hang Ten Tony’s friend and his friend’s fiancée exchange looks. I am painfully aware of the look. Their look says, Oh my god. This person might snap at any moment. Look what this person has turned our friend into. This person is a monster. We pity monsters.
I want to say I am not damaged. I want to say I am not a monster. But instead I say, I didn’t even get to kill anyone.
I can tell they linger on the word get and I down the rest of my beer, turning back to Hang Ten Tony as he ends his performance.
Hang Ten Tony’s friend and his friend’s fiancée leave soon after the look and forget about me. That night I cannot sleep.
Hang Ten Tony on a Night Patrol
There is no light pollution in Iraq. There might’ve been once, but not anymore. Bombs dropped, buildings collapsed, people died. But now there are stars. More stars than I will ever see again in my life.
This is the good thing about being a turret gunner. I am in the truck, but I am also not. I am safe, but I am autonomous. I can be alone. I can think. I can feel the winter-crisp desert air numbing my face. It is clean, somehow lighter. It is January. I have less than two weeks left in country and less than ninety days on my military contract. And then I will be a civilian again.
I scan the utter dark for anything unusual, any movement, as I’ve been trained to do. I think that this will be one of the last times I will do this, and a wave of melancholy washes over me. I know this, I think. What else do I know?
The convoy
stops for a security halt.
Man, fuck this, says Hang Ten Tony from inside the cab.
It’s not so bad, I say. It’s not so bad.
Missed Connection
Dear San Clemente Cabbie,
You picked up my brother, my uncle, and me from a strip bar named Captain Cream’s in El Toro, California, and drove us back to San Clemente in early 2009. Do you remember that night in January, Cabbie? You must. How could you not? If you didn’t remember, it would suggest that kind of thing happens to you often, and if that’s the case I advise a change in profession—not that you’re to blame for my actions. That wouldn’t be fair. It was my fault. It was all my fault, Cabbie.
When I hit you, I wasn’t hitting you. I’m sure it felt like I was hitting you—I remember you vomited, which means my fist must’ve plunged deep into your solar plexus, sending a signal to your stomach to evacuate, a fight response. You should be proud of that, Cabbie. You’re a fighter, just like me. But know that in that moment I wasn’t hitting you, I was hitting myself. I was hitting who I was, who I might be.
That night was my first back in the States after a third tour to Iraq. I was leaving the Marine Corps in a month. The people I’d known and loved, they were disappearing, some were leaving on other deployments, some were dying, Cabbie—have you known people who’ve died? You must have, everyone does—and there I was, helpless, waiting, no one back home to love me, to crawl in bed with at night. I’d ruined that, ruined everything. That’s why I kept grabbing the dancers, Cabbie. I wasn’t trying to be lewd or anything, I just wanted a connection. I just wanted someone to tell me I’d be all right. Maybe that’s what I was trying to do with you, Cabbie.
When you showed up, Cabbie, I was crying and screaming at the bouncers who threw me out, and my brother had just punched my uncle in the face hard enough to buckle his knees and send him to the asphalt. Their relationship is only now starting to heal, this many years later. It was like a ripple in a pond, Cabbie, but instead of a pebble it was me and I soaked everyone in proximity, tore down my family like a tsunami.