by David Rose
My opponent was school-trained; a young black guy with an eight-pack, polite and quiet, who had shaken my hand earlier, and then sat in a corner to wrap his hands.
What a scene in the back staging area. Fighters prepped; stretching, jump roping, praying. The redneck opposition; standing around, smoking cigarettes, watching us, somewhat surprisingly in admiration.
It began. A bell rang, and a sparsely packed metal hut roared. Fights started. Fights ended. A man came back to the staging area pouring small rivers of sweat, and another man took a breath then walked out into the arena. My team was going through the night undefeated. An additional pressure to any new competitor who’s completely honest with themselves.
It was my time to enter the ring.
Now this may sound as guilty of melodrama as any “I’m starving” comments, and from a professional fighter that criticism is certainly understandable, but—when the ring floor has been wiped clear of the last fight’s residue and the crowd starts stirring, looking toward the entrance to see who is going on next, your stomach drops. There is no way out of the situation, and there is a piece of you that oh-so wants there to be. Next, a wave of emotions and physiology pummels you up and over: not wanting to let your coach down, yes; complete tunnel vision, that too; and a pure desire to put the other guy to sleep.
My first Thai fight I knocked the guy out so fast I barely broke a sweat. The second one, a loss, was a mixture of a hung-over coach and noodle legs due to running seven miles the day prior. I hadn’t really learned the train-to-rest ratio, you may say, and was beat like a redheaded stepchild for three agonizing rounds. To my credit, I never got knocked down and backed the guy up several times, but it was nowhere enough.
I left the first gym due to that fight. My blurry coach seemed far more interested in a ring girl than his fighter’s matches.
My new coach, now in my corner, had put a lot into my training and I felt an obligation I couldn’t explain. My polite, long-armed, eight-packed opponent entered his own corner. His face set with his jaw poked out, his eyes shiny white bullets. I think prayer is a silly thing in most circumstances, but I did say right then something to the effect of “let my labor show.”
The bell rang. He tucked his jaw in. I made my way to him. He met me in the middle.
Equal in size, virtually equal in training and ability, he and I beat the ever-loving piss out of each other. In the first round I backed him into his own corner and had him wobbling. I saw those bullet eyes roll into the back of his head, but it just wasn’t enough. Soon he began to rely on the Thai clench, and at one point got me down with a trip. My oh my how the drunken crowd howled at a good exchange, and my oh my how they booed during a lock-up that lasted more than half a second. He was immensely strong. My wind started to give, and the yells from both corners could have been from the North and South Pole. Any sense of time had gotten KO’d in the first round. Everyone and everything a million miles away, except the blue, sweating ring under your feet and your opponent experiencing the same harsh reality you are. Simultaneously punching the other, both backing up, wobbling, then colliding again. . . it raged on. It was like being in the belly of some huge animal. Quonset hut ribs and overhead lighting, mixed with the smell of hay and cheap beer.
In the end it was a draw, leaving my official amateur fight record at 1-1-1(1). It always makes me laugh, considering my existentialist proclivities.
I gave all I had in that fight—gaaaave everything, man!—as paltry as the setting and results may seem to some. I know this because in the street fights I got into as a kid and the few barroom brawls as an adult, I always cared about getting hit. The concern waxed and waned, but it was ever-present in the chaotic actions and reactions. Not this fight. Toward the end of this match, any technical skill I had gave way to desperate and winded haymakers. He did the same. I had to be helped out of the ring and was placed at an empty table, where I sweat and bled. A few guys came up to me at some point; “that was a fuckin’ war, bro!” Indeed.
I hadn’t felt that pure pouring-out sensation since my ARS days.
Those who have been there know; when what’s deemed safe and sane take the backseat to some wild desire. Pushing through physical and mental torture, sidestepping the blood clots and somber nights, goals are gripped—frivolous to many who don’t like the sight of their own blood, short-lived for most who do—highlights of many lives who found happiness out in the margins.
19
LENIN FOR COMMANDANT
Taking the killing pull from a bottle of Black & Gold sake, eating a couple Ambien, and blasting—for reasons that remain unexplained—the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, I start going through videos of the Marine Corps on YouTube. An idea that had remained such begins to sprout from the bean: murder, mayhem, frothing rage, and what is sure to be a bitchin’ headache the next day, the fingers begin to pound the keyboard.
Every Marine is a Rifleman, or so the saying goes. Anyone who has ever driven through a Marine Corps base will likely tell you that slogan needs a revisit. Certainly it is possible for a 200lbs woman, at five-foot-two, and a 102lbs man, at five-foot-eleven, to be efficient weapons practitioners, but what a Rifleman is is in fact far more than merely being able to shoot a rifle. To those that were, or are, in the Marines, it may seem a worn-out and old grievance, but to the laymen, still mystified by the recruiting propaganda of the beloved Corps, it may shock the senses that not all Marines are riflemen, nor killers, nor even able to see their genitalia when naked in some cases.
It is a rather barroom-conversation-provoking detail that the US military, in order to defend Democracy, displaces the democratic political model. In its place is the hierarchal dictatorship, known softly as the Chain of Command. The Chain of Command; an ancient concept presumably as old as wars themselves. It is a line of authority in which orders are passed, meaning there is damn sure no vote.
So the Marines use an undemocratic form of governance to defend Democracy. Well, fair enough, it makes sense; can’t have five lance corporals taking a majority vote to see who should go into that room with that bad haj still in there; AK-47 coughing smoke from the barrel and cursing in broken English as another frag gets lobbed from the room and down a set of stairs. No, it takes a team leader, ordered by a platoon sergeant to be god damn sure all rooms in the house that your team were assigned to clear be in fact cleared. See, a form of Dictatorship out in the combat field is just tits, biscuits, and gravy.
So the real bizarre thing then is why the hell the Marine Corps insists on incorporating yet another political model, this time into its ethos, one in which we have fought against in several different wars: Communism. That’s right, I said it. Whereas a Dictatorship in the killing fields ensures Democracy in the city square, Communism seems to come to this dance without a date, a limping car, and a tux that doesn’t fit.
Marx must be in his cenotaph, at the Highgate Cemetery in London, laughing his fuckin’ dick off. The saviors of the American Way, these brave young men—kissing their high school sweethearts good-bye to defend the nuclear family, Jesus, and the McRib from those godless Commies—all to employ some classic Communist propaganda into their esprit de corps.
And on, and to, this, I digress. . .
“Every Marine is, first and foremost, a rifleman.
All other conditions are secondary.”
—General Alfred M. Gray, USMC
The shortened version is “Every Marine a Rifleman.” It’s from this bumper sticker slogan that the original sin of the USMC germinates.
What is true is the Marines systemically function as infantry-centric. An example is seen in Marine aviation, which has retained its focus on CAS67 despite opposing military theories that propose strategic bombing as tactically superior to close air support. It’s also true that every enlisted Marine goes through some infantry training and every Marine officer goes through training as an infantry platoon commander.
However, the romance ends there. Speaking only from the enl
isted perspective, all Marines who are non-infantry (gasp, that’s correct kids. . . in fact, most Marines are non-infantry. . . like mechanics and administrative desk monkeys and pending admin seps who will go on to star in MILF porn) go through a three-week crash course, known deceivingly as Marine Combat Training. MCT: This disaster, at least for me. . .
Note (confessions of a former POG): a sadistic and shady recruiter, who could not pronounce the word ask, changed my infantry contract to “open contract” as to allow me to go to boot camp early. I found this out at MEPS68, and spent all of boot camp fighting the forces of evil from obliging me to be a “data systems specialist,” whatever that means. Nine days prior to graduation, I was pulled into a master sergeant’s office to go over my ASVAB score and potential career paths. Practically in tears, and staring with almost religious fascination at the chevrons on his sleeves, I was able to muster the words “This recruit only joined the Marines to go infantry, sir.” At this, the old POG stopped typing, leaned back in his chair, and looked up at the ceiling, almost if out on a walk and stopping to take in the smell of fresh cut grass. He turned to me and said, “Son, I started in the air wing, and looking back I wish I had started out in the infantry.” I could see the regret in his eyes. A mouse clicks later I ended up in artillery. Non-infantry yes, but a lot damn closer to the fight than a fucking data systems specialist.
. . . So off to Marine Combat Training I went. This is a place where following MRE trash gets you a passing score on a land navigation course, where getting to pound out a single belt of ammo gets you “familiar” with a .50-caliber machine gun and/or the M240G. The ruck marches can kick an ass or three, and as your grenade sump fills with water in the fighting hole you and another POG took all day to dig, you get to see exactly how shitty the grunt life would have been.
And then that’s it. . . off to the particular school that will make the Marine: admin, motor T, comm, or supply. With very few exceptions, MCT is the last time many Marines experience what it is to be a Rifleman.
And this makes all Marines Rifleman? That’s like saying all students at a high school are football athletes because they took P.E. Most skills are perishable, murderous skills included. Even within a Recon unit; if I hadn’t been shooting regularly, the first moments of holding the rifle felt foreign.
Moreover, the physical nature of the grunt. It was something to induce violent vomiting spasms when some sorority girl, with a confused stare like an overbred dog and a bleached asshole, would say something to the beat of, “He looks like a Marine, but you kinda don’t.” Fragile male egos decimated worse than if hit by an RPG. She was referring of course to the guy who worked a chair at base admin and was two hundred and ten pounds of unhindered, paper-shuffling garrison muscle, whilst you. . . lowly, and wretched you. . . had just ended thirty consecutive days in the field. Your arms skinny from inaction, and the MREs giving you that godforsaken spare tire.
The rifleman, whether apt for central casting or not, is the Rifleman.
This communist hypocrisy has been beautifully exposed via social media: some Facebook meme going viral, being shared, and slowly but persistently letting the rest of the world know what the real Marines have known all along: how the majority of the world’s greatest fighting force are not actual fighters.
My mind is fixated on budget cuts put on DOD69, and the hilarious speech of the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps at the time. The real warriors would be willing to forgo some benefits if it was a true warrior class. . . But it isn’t, not on a grand scale. The true fighters in the US military, of which there are many, would certainly take on additional sacrifices if they were not mired in pathetic physical and mental standards. . .
Screed over, I awake to the landlord’s handyman banging the shit out of something in the backyard. Limping out of bed and almost tripping over my laptop, lain down at the foot, still warm and the power cord wrapped around the nightstand like a snake, I go to the window. Stage 4 cancer survivor, smoking a Virginia Slim and covered in dirt and weeds. The need to appear less like a complaining little shithead dictates the motion of my arm; the laptop is thus retrieved. To wit:
The relationship of the Marines to the public has indeed changed. The mystique of a fighting force, almost like some ant colony or something, is on its death bed. But in its place, interestingly enough, emerges what has actually existed all along—a multi-tier service, where some are frankly more than others. The old Marine Corps is dead, at least from the outside looking in, but that shouldn’t bother anyone. The real Marine Corps, as it was rumored to always exist, always has existed in the real fighters that work under its banner.
Just hope the brig spits them out when they’re needed most.
20
WORSHIPPING
THE GODS OF WAR AND WINE
“Many of them have sought my counsel because they feel guilty, but when I ask them why, they say they feel bad because they haven’t had a chance to fire their weapons. They worry that they haven’t done their jobs as Marines. I’ve had to counsel them that if you don’t have to shoot somebody, that’s a good thing. The zeal these young men have for killing surprises me.”
—Chaplain assigned to 1st Recon Battalion (from Evan Wright’s Generation Kill)
But forget not the reckless warrior soul, and despite his roughness let us take a moment to allot compassion and praise.
For every harm that threatens your municipal gods must first face the warrior, with his wayward ways.
There are many that simply go to war to die. Why not just commit suicide? Good question. Because death, for those who actively seek it in combat, is not the ultimate goal; rather it is the tool used to achieve it. Myself, and I would come to find out several others, extracted ourselves from the civilian world, feeling far from happy about the droll, obscure box we had treaded water in. To us sad, sullen few, death in combat seemed to serve as some form of validation for what was otherwise a trite and meaningless existence.
Coming from every failure known to man and his society, a combat troop, ascending a steep hill to reload the only heavy gun, risking all to keep the fight alive and his comrades breathing, shot in the spine and through the heart, tumbles to the muddy base to die, eyes up and open, a complete and actualized being. This actualization, whether real or not, an illusion or not, is perceived as unable to be achieved in the world in which this lost soul had come from.
I considered the possibility of dying in combat to be the greatest death ever, and to some maybe it is. Much of that changed for me, however, the first time I saw someone involuntarily take that plunge. Death quickly lost all romance, and soon became the quiet, impersonal vacuum left after a bloody surprise.
However, years after I had left the military, I learned of a great death—one that still resonates, and would be the source of many midnight-hour ruminations while studying in London.
My mid-twenties will forever be chalked up to a socio-psychological wandering, full-coma induced, in what can only be called “my experiment as a cop” phase.
NOTE: Southern Ghetto. Ghetto means the poor people who live there happen to be black; get over it, it’s not a value judgement.
Central Florida, the “I-4 Corridor,” the source of media crown jewels like Zimmerman and Casey Anthony, is also one of the most relocation-prone places in the country. Yet, wedged sturdily in the transience, in a small, poor, nook exists a hearty culture that has been there since Osceola was asked to sign and Flagler was making his name on the coast. Sustenance farming and fishing still rules the day—superb fishermen, and owners of small mixed gardens that grow almost year round in the Land of Flowers. The old Southern African-American world. Peaceful, almost serene—until, that is, the 21st century inevitably reared its stiff and ugly head. The infamous demographic—black America, ages sixteen to thirty-four—where some energetically gave weight to just about every negative stereotype you’d hear out of the tooth-rot mouths at a Klan meeting. Apparently geared up with long-praised and highly illegal t
ools and traits, they’d climb up the ladder to reach what a few rappers and athletes gloated about. Would—or would die trying.
In this southern ghetto, a stolen car on twenty-six-inch fake gold rims could be seen careening down a dirt road. Chickens egressing for their lives, a dice game ruined, and a grandfather screaming, as the pink Cadillac passes the front porch, “You know yo mamma gonna kill you, boy!”
Trying to catch someone there reminded me of working in Iraq again. Just that I would have been in a shit-ton more trouble if I cooked off a few rounds in the general area of some who probably needed it. Tribalism bled out (a more primitive yet emotionally invested form of rule) into the current laws so many others from the north side of that town clung to for dear life. A man wanted for murder in Alabama, hiding in the southern ghetto of my jurisdiction, would quickly be absorbed by the community and vanish into the closest house. There was a local unification that was confrontational to my efforts, our efforts.
Yet this two-story town had trusted me, giving me a vest, a gun, and a few books to maintain good order and discipline on these streets. . . my streets, my forty-hour-a-week southern ghetto.
It was in this place I learned of a death that rang a peculiar, awe-invoking reverence, so daring, primal, and simple that no matter which way I ever tried to muck it up with melancholy it still rang its wide-grinned ring.
I had received a call on the radio about a car crash on the edge of town. An isolated group of houses sat across from what was then a massive construction site. Out of this tiny neighborhood, the city had paved a new road. Black, smooth, and straight, this road came out from the hovel to greet an adjoining road at a final downhill.
A drag race had gone bad, real bad. A grandfather and his grandson decided to race for. . . well, for the fucking hell of it apparently.
There was an accident. I was not first on scene, but I got to see enough. The old-timer had lost control and his car went into a ditch. It went into a ditch and that is where he would die, right there—grandson out of the car, wide-eyed, seeing the full results of the race.