Eat the Apple

by Matt Young

  I was out of my head, Cabbie. Can you imagine that? I think you can. You must go out of your head, too. Where are you from, Cabbie? You had an accent, but I don’t remember it. A quick Internet search tells me there are a quite a few Somali cabdrivers in Southern California. Are you one of them? How strange that would be. It seems I can’t go anywhere without running into someone whose country the Marine Corps hasn’t fucked over. I think we would get along under different circumstances, Cabbie. I’m usually a generous tipper and a decent conversationalist. I’m a blue-collar kind of guy; I appreciate how hard you must work.

  Cabbie, I know I didn’t want to pay, I know I didn’t want to get out of your taxi, I know I hit you unprovoked in the gut, and you got stiffed on the bill, but for the first time since joining the Marines I didn’t laugh about it the next day. I knew that nothing would be the same and I think I owe you something for that—not apologies, but thanks. I think maybe I did all that not because I was drunk and angry and looking for a fight but because I felt like you wanted to get rid of me, too, Cabbie. I can’t help wondering how things could’ve been different. If you see this, write back and tell me which knee my uncle kept moaning about and how my brother got me to stop attacking you. Maybe we can get a coffee, or I can at least give you the fifty dollars I owe.

  Leaving Our Mark

  In the weeks before I end my active service, Chris is on restriction—like house arrest without the stylish ankle bracelet. Even though I’ve been mostly sober (not counting a cycle of steroids, one bottle of stateside Jameson sent while deployed, and the night of my homecoming) for the past six months and I know I shouldn’t drink, we get wasted in our barracks room, and then later decide to celebrate my homecoming by attempting to burn down the thirty-feet-high diving platform just off Cristianitos Road.

  In the driver’s seat of my Jeep—now our getaway car—with the engine idling and the lights off, I’m waiting for Chris while he spills five gallons of gasoline over the water-bloated wood and molded Astroturf of the diving structure. I am starting to sober up and I think this is a bad idea. I think I’m going to fall right back into the same deep end I just pulled myself out of six months ago. I think about leaving—gunning the Jeep and driving back home to Indiana to forget the last four years have happened.

  Futures roll out in front of me: I could be a teacher, a drunk, a coward, a lover, a student, a criminal, a husband, a child, a father. There are too many variables in the future. Too many unknowns. I panic.

  I am putting the Jeep into drive when Chris comes running and hops the fence, seems to hurdle all eight feet of the fucker, and jumps in the passenger seat. I nail the gas and we fly into the darkness, into the coastal hills. Our laughs reek of beer and whiskey. We drive blacked out over rutted roads, up berms, through thickets of wild fennel giving off black licorice stink. A pale orange glow from the platform flicks in the rearview and I think we did it. We destroyed something—accomplished something we set out to do. We gave ourselves a mission and the mission is complete.

  It is a perfect moment and I see one final future: The Jeep tips, bursts into flames, turns us to ashes along with the diving platform.

  I want to die—not out of depression or because I feel horrible, but because I feel alive, and I think this is the only way I’ll ever feel alive again. I think, Maybe I’ll just angle up a hill and come down too steep, maybe I’ll just take my hands off the wheel and everything will end and I won’t have to worry about failing in the future.

  We make it back to the room, have some beers, and fall asleep.

  In the morning, during PT, I see the wood isn’t even scorched.

  Soapbox

  Rifling through old gear and notes late one night when I can’t sleep, I stumble across Past-me. He’s mouthy and cock-struts into the room, fresh from basic training. I immediately hate him. I don’t know why, but I know it’s not his fault.

  Past-me: Well first of all I want to say, thanks for your service—it’s good to know we live.

  Me: I’m not sure how I should respond to that.

  Past-me: To “thank you”?

  Me: Well if I say “you’re welcome,” it implies agreement and belief.

  Past-me: Belief in what?

  Me: Belief that we ever did something worth giving thanks for. And if I said thank you in response to your thanks it might indicate that I appreciate or even care that you want to thank me. That somehow I’m thankful you’ve taken the time out of your day to thank me for things you don’t know anything about—yet. I mean, we could’ve murdered an entire Iraqi village or raped and pillaged, and here you are thanking me.

  Past-me: But do we? Did we?

  Me: Of course not. You don’t know this yet, but most people you thank for their service joke about killing babies and fucking their mothers. They have wet dreams about pink mist, about shake ’n’ bakes, about enfilade fire. They’re chronic masturbators, philanderers, and alcoholics. They wish for five hundred-pounders to drop on mosques just so the call to prayer will stop, they take bumps of coke before they get behind the gun, and smoke weed in the corners of FOBs to even out. They shoot dogs out of boredom.

  Past-me: I mean war is hell, right? But we probably did some pretty cool shit. Firefights, rescue missions—you don’t think we should be thanked for that? For our service to the country? Hey, how many medals do we have?

  Me: None of that happens. You’ll feel so ashamed that none of it happens that you’ll lie and say we did do that stuff. You’ll lie for a long time, and you’ll lie so much that you’ll start to believe the lies.

  Past-me: Sounds hard to live with.

  Me: It keeps me up nights. I don’t sleep well.

  Past-me: We have posttraumatic stress, or whatever? Nightmares?

  Me: Everyone has PTSD, and if I have nightmares now they’re guilt-based.

  Past-me: Jesus Christ, you sound like a real civvy-boy pussy piece of shit. If we weren’t in any kind of firefight and you never killed anyone, what kind of nightmares do you have?

  Me: For a long time after the first deployment I had a dream where I was court-martialed for not doing my job as a rear Humvee passenger and not grabbing a gunner’s legs to keep him in the truck when we got hit by a culvert bomb—you’re going to get hit by a culvert bomb, by the way—I was supposed to grab his legs and pull him down.

  Past-me: Well from what it sounds like maybe we deserve a nightmare or two.

  Me: Wait until you start having the recurring dream where you’re being torn apart by decaying dogs.

  Past-me: You really fucked us over, huh? So much for being a hero.

  Me: What’s your definition of hero?

  Past-me: Someone who acts selflessly in the face of adversity. Not someone who shoots dogs and compulsively masturbates.

  Me: Would you say that someone who gets a leg blown off in war is a hero?

  Past-me: Sure.

  Me: What if the day before he got his leg blown off he pissed on the corpse of someone he killed?

  Past-me: Well …

  Me: So you use the word hero just like you thank people for their service.

  Past-me: Well it’s better than the way vets got treated when they got back from Vietnam.

  Me: Enforcing the idea that every service member is a hero is dangerous. You’re going to meet some tough Marines who did some real heroic shit, but I don’t know if that makes them heroes. I don’t know if anyone can ever really be a hero. I worry about long-term implications of calling everyone who serves in the military a hero.

  Past-me: Oh my God. Is this really what I turn into? “I’m worried about long-term implications”? You’re fucking whiny. Jesus.

  Me: Are you done?

  Past-me: Fine. Fuck. I’ll bite, what kind of long-term implications?

  Me: Like creating a generation of veterans who believe everything they did was good and that they really were defending the people of the United States and not oil interests. It feels like we’re creating an army of fanatics.


  Past-me: You don’t believe America was at risk after September 11?

  Me: I think we were able to combat that with increased airport security.

  Past-me: But we had to get even.

  Me: Beyond the fact that bin Laden wasn’t in Iraq, I don’t think we needed to go to war. Those countries simply didn’t have the infrastructure to merit such a large-scale multiyear occupation.

  Past-me: I live in the past—I’m eighteen. I just want to screw girls, get paid, and kill like I’ve been trained. You’re saying 9/11 wasn’t that big a deal? How did we get so brainwashed? Is that the kind of liberal commie pinko bullshit we learn in college?

  Me: What the fuck? No. Also, you came home from school that day in September and complained there was nothing on television but the news. You told your—our—mom you didn’t care when she called you crying her eyes out. Don’t forget that.

  Past-me: …

  Me: Listen. Christ. I’m sorry, all right? It’s not all bad.

  Past-me: Yeah? How so?

  Me: You’re going to start to figure it out—your life. Our life. After some time as a horrible, thoughtless person, you’ll start to be better. You’ll appreciate hard work and loyalty and love. You’ll quit smoking. You’ll slow down. You’ll think about the consequences of your actions. You’ll question the motivations of others. After witnessing so much inequality and violence and pain you’ll become more empathetic. You’ll come out the other side of all this scuffed and jaded and angry, but you’ll go to college and learn to use that anger. You’ll learn to transform it into thought, into words. You’ll start running to mitigate your trauma. You’ll adopt a dog. You’ll get married. You’ll go to graduate school. You’ll help people understand war. You’ll help people.

  Past-me: I guess that sounds okay. But I still don’t get why you couldn’t just say thank you.

  A Real Boy

  If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s to keep my hair long. It’s the differentiating factor between the gung ho brainwashed eighteen-year-old I was when I joined and the civilian I desperately want to be. The high and tight is what people notice first, the thing that doesn’t mesh with certain types of clothing (mainly anything not a uniform). People peg me immediately. They look at me and think, Jarhead. So I keep it long. I get a fingernail fade—if I’d enlisted two years later the style would be in vogue, the 1920s Dust Bowl cut. I don’t shave on the weekends; two-day stubble does wonders. No one gives me a second look by Sunday evening. A friend’s girlfriend says, I didn’t think you were a Marine. I smile with pride.

  Sometimes I find myself giving up and drinking at jarhead bars outside of base. I go with my platoon mates. I go and talk about fucking and fighting and shooting and drinking. Hard talk. I drink and drink until it feels like I’m downing in the booze. Until it feels like my liver is pickled and I spew my guts into a urinal because I can’t find the toilet in the bathroom.

  Then the bouncer tries to throw me out but one of my mates blindsides the man in the jaw and the bar is a wild rumpus with Benny Hill music blaring from the juke. There’s screaming and yelling and punching and kicking and I see the bouncer who tried to haul me out lying on the floor, groaning, trying to get back on his feet until another of my mates runs over and field goals the man in the ribs, and I hear bones crack. My buddy’s still kicking, slam dancing into the guy’s gut and I watch until someone else broadsides him, and then they’re tussling on the ground and I look around and there’s an abandoned beer and my mouth is desert dry and tastes like vomit and so I drink it, and then I’m wandering around drinking abandoned beers until there are sirens in the distance.

  It’s a long walk to base and the lot of us are laughing and trying to show knotty faces to one another in the dark. There’s a pool inside the gate, another half mile down the road, all lit bright blue with undulating shadows in the complete seaside desert darkness, just for us.

  I’m naked, climbing a wooden ladder to the top of the thirty-feet-high platform used to simulate water entry from helicopters, which I tried to burn down a few weeks ago. The platform is covered in moldy stamped-down Astroturf that squeaks and slides under the balls of my feet. The others are in the water below, bobbing, floating on their backs, yelling at me through the dark.

  They drunkenly sing running cadence, voices echoing off the wet concrete surrounding the pool. Through the rungs of the platform their faces blur into my drill instructor, into Sergeants Johnson and Carmichael and Mars, into Hashim Ibrahim Awad and Cheeks and Fisher and Lawrence, into faceless bar girls and my fiancée, into my family. When I reach the top of the platform and look down into the pool, the faces yell up at me. Jump, they say.

  From the summit I can see the sixty miles to San Diego International Airport, where my plane is just landing on the tarmac four years ago. I can see my own past-face in the porthole—unlined, pale, nervous. I want to reach out for that face, grab it, and tell it … what? Nothing, I decide. I want to tell it nothing. Maybe I want to see the innocence destroyed because my own has been broken or maybe I realize that there’s no point. I can talk at the face—at all the faces—tell them horror stories, make the boredom and jackassery a reality, show them loss and suicidal sadness, but it won’t matter, just as it never has.

  I leap into the dark, eyes shut, wind whirring over tiny hairs on my body. I fall for what seems like forever. Just when I think I sense water rushing toward me and hear the voices of my buddies growing louder I keep falling.

  So I will time to speed up; pray yell beg threaten bargain. But time chooses when it will and won’t move. I know that from minutes that felt like hours on the quarterdeck in basic training and from the hours that felt like days on sunbaked roofs or slogging through shit fields and rolling down pockmarked roads at two miles per hour and from the days that turned into years that ended up feeling like decades, and now I’m some decrepit ancient thing falling and falling, expecting a bottom, hoping that maybe it won’t be a hard landing and I’ll walk away intact, wet feet padding the asphalt, teeth chattering against the cool coastal night.

  Even after I hit the water and the chlorine burns my eyes, thins my hair, dries my skin to ash, I’m still falling. In that moment I don’t know there’s not a bottom. I think that I’ve landed, but I’m not on solid ground. Years from now when I’ve been out and I’m married and I’m in grad school and I’m trying to forget those times I chugged whiskey and fought and was shot at and exploded and lived in a hole and hated life and hated everyone and hated myself and shot mongrel dogs and screwed anything that moved and smoked two packs a day and hazed new joins and ran until I threw up because I was still drunk from the night before and made my family cry I’ll realize that I’ll never be a civilian—that I’m still tumbling and twisting through the air waiting to land.

  End of Active Service Health Assessment

  Compared prior to your enlistment how would you rate your health in general now?

  ○   Outstanding

  ○   Wonderful

  ○   Terrific

  ○   Super

  ○   Excellent

  ○   First-rate

  ○   Very good

  ○   Good

  ○   Somewhat good

  ○   Better than OK

  ○   OK

  ○   Decent

  ○   Fine

  ○   Satisfactory

  ○   Reasonable

  ○   Adequate

  ○   Suitable

  ○   Fair

  ○   Less than fair, but not bad

  ○   Not too bad. I can’t complain, I guess.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe a debt of gratitude to the following people, without whom this book would not exist:

  The magazine editors who gave some of these pieces early, wonderful homes.

  The fantastic creative writing and English faculty at Oregon State University—Mar
jorie Sandor, Keith Scribner, Susan Jackson Rodgers, and Neil Davison—who brought me back to humanity through writing and literature.

  The faculty in the graduate creative writing program at Miami University—Margaret Luongo, for your friendship and guidance; Eric Goodman, for not bullshitting a bullshitter; Jody Bates, for fostering in me a love for speculative fiction, which inspired many nonfiction tales in this book; Brian Roley, for helping me fully understand what I was trying to do. To my graduate cohort for your thoughtful, kind, and astute readings of my work. Without you these would still be bar stories. To Stefanie Dunning, for her course on trauma. It provided clarity, purpose, and depth.

  The folks at Words After War—Brandon Willitts, Matt Gallagher, and John Sheehy—for accepting me to the summer writing intensive at Marlboro College. It kept me writing when I thought I was done. To the vets and civilians I met there—especially Francisco Martinezcuello, Tricia Theis, and Matthew Robinson—for your honesty, counsel, humor, and motivation on early-morning runs.

  Josh Friedman, Tim Weiner, and the entire advisory board at the Carey Institute for Global Good’s Logan Nonfiction Fellowship for taking a chance on a creative nonfiction writer, for a beautiful space in which to finish my book, and for asking me hard questions over bourbon and not accepting easy answers. To my cohort there as well—especially Susannah Breslin, Justin Cohen, and Camas Davis—for your readership, guidance, encouragement, and willingness to perform an inebriated Marine Corps Daily Seven routine.

  The lovely people at Artist Trust in Seattle, for believing in my work enough to deem it deserving of a Grant for Artist Projects that kept me and mine in the black.

  Bill Clegg at the Clegg Agency, for reading what I wrote and thinking it needed a bigger life, and for introducing me to Chris.