Spent Shell Casings

by David Rose

  We managed to get booted from bars, two nights in a row. One night was in the Moroccan Quarter, a small corner pub with Middle Eastern squat-and-hover floor toilets. I hadn’t seen one since my last time in Dubai. The patrons and bartender all could have passed as citizens from there, and one of us, I can’t remember who, at a certain drink, had an amazing idea. After telling the bartender I was also a Muslim, post-conversion of my father in my adolescence, we took over the digital jukebox. Hijack our planes? Well, take some Black Sabbath, Hendrix, 2pac, and Creedence Clearwater Revival—or so went the drink-fueled mentality that evening.

  The following night was a bit of a blur. After a full day in the Louvre, we bounced around some nearby pubs in the evening. By night we had made our way to an industrial area. There is this lingering memory, without a previous event to connect how we got there, nor a clear post-event to connect some much needed dots. Finding a group of guys behind a barred gate, dressed in light clothing, these figures were reverse silhouettes in the bleak dankness that looked almost like a tiny prison yard. “Hey, how can we get in there?” I shouted, with an accent that probably sounded to them like an unlettered cowboy. We were ignored, and we subsequently wandered around in a staggered daze to wind up in some cellar bar from which Derrick was immediately kicked out. It was only after much tact and wheedling I was able to convince the colossal, French-ebony bouncers that we were not drunk, but in fact still messed up from the Dramamine, as we indeed had just flown from the States. We were allowed to reenter but got kicked out for good a short time after. The committing of some unknown insubordination had put us back out onto the street. At some point we found the tube.

  Returning to our hostel, after careening in the darkness with the luggage of girls who’d occupied the vacant bunks in our absence, we racked out. The next day would take us to a place I had been hearing about since I was nineteen; and as I spun in bed, the sound of a distant M1903 Springfield started to echo out from the near shores of recallable time.

  Into the French countryside we were soon lost. Off the train and on foot, we had followed the one and only sign we found for the war memorial. We assumed we would see some larger-than-life monument, or touristy signs pointing even the dullest to their destination. This was not the case. Finding a quaint diner, we entered to ask upon the towns people.

  For my entire life, I had heard how sneering and rude the French are, in particular to Americans. The diner was smoky and hollow, like an American 1950s diner that had been abandoned for many years and the only remodeling was a new deep fryer and some full sheets of plywood covering a rotten wall. At the bar were several men, caricatures promoting French stereotypes to such a degree that it was like we had walked onto a film set. Of the four men in the diner, three didn’t speak English and one, after careful attentiveness that visibly strained and scrunched his brow, could make out base sentences. Despite the barrier, and after charades and exaggerated gestures of rifle firing and basically a bad war reenactment, they commenced to a low-mumbling huddle. Would we ever leave this place? The huddle broke up; one emerged with a cell phone. “Bell-Ah-Wude?” Zee French had come through! Before long the cab they had called on our behalf pulled into the parking lot and we were off.

  To the World War I battle site of Belleau Wood, and to the place where, in many respects, the Marine Corps’ reputation was born.

  Hidden in hilly countryside, the weather above was overcast, just like every artist rendition that I had ever seen. The cab drove us along a winding, hard river. The road was thin and black and wrapped around every levy, mound, and stone outcropping. All the while we were trying to keep track of landmarks under the plausible assumption that we would not have a ride out of there that night. We passed through farm and thicket of autumn wood, and then onto hallowed ground.

  While it first appeals to the eye as some ornate entrance to a golf course, complete with tasteful modernizations and perfectly aligned trees, there is a moment when, following the road, that a dark, elevated plot of land emerges. Knowing for sure we were there, our eyes opened all the wider, attempting to engulf its presentation: a manicured, massive lawn leading up to the wooded hillside; a lone building resembling a medieval keep; and numerous white specks of white on the final lawn of the hill, what was sure to be graves.

  Exiting the car and paying the fare, the wetness and chill of the air rested on my lips. Not a sound, except an American flag, flapping, and permanently at half-mast. Staring at the flag, months away, yet again, from my country—now one of its numerous criminals, I felt the odd sensation of being more American—and proud to be such, in a foreign place than ever in the efficiency-obsessed, congested madness that is the United States.

  The picket line of trees leading up to the actual battleground looked odd and out of place. It may have just been the time of year, but they looked like the descendants of that tree in Harry Potter that whipped its thin branches about and tried to take the kids out when they were in that flying car.

  We made our way to a small building that had a lone car parked next to it. The dampness of the place became palpable, slowly making its way through clothing and giving one that wet cloudy exhale. It was refreshing, neither of us minding the coolness.

  Entering the information office, we were soon greeted by the curator. I half expected some crusty American, with a prosthetic leg and recounting his erstwhile profession to droves of tourists. The curator stopped Derrick and me in our tracks. Her sheer physical beauty was striking: tall, leggy, and blonde, with a chiseled face of almost perfect symmetry. She had black boots up to the knee and was dressed like she had just performed in dressage. Meeting us with a blue-eyed smile and a “hello,” she confirmed that the three of us were the only people there.

  Derrick and I didn’t talk for hours. We went our own ways, on our own individual pilgrimages, our Haj, randomly meeting at the same place throughout the day to take pictures or comment on this and that.

  On plaques spread about the place, the retelling of the bloody conflict was brought to life.

  In 1918, the German army launched a sizable offensive on the Western Front. In the month of June, heavy fighting took place all over the area around Belleau Wood, which up until then was a hunting preserve. On June 6, Marines, with heavy losses, advanced on the German stronghold within Belleau Wood. From that day until June 26, the Marines fought one of the bloodiest and chaotic battles of the entire war. It was almost heartening to learn that one element of the Marine Corps Experience has remained unchanged: plans got fucked and it all went awry. Amidst the splintered trees and mustard gas, fighting boiled down to squad level, then team level, and then even to individual hand-to-hand combat.

  Little sectarian-styled buildings were hidden on the hill. The stained-glass windows were vibrant under the thin, drab canopy. The whole area, but the trees especially, seemed to contain a memory, some remnant of the struggle and incomprehensible destruction that had taken place.

  Inside the buildings, clean and white, an American flag drooped, motionless, a legion of names carved into the walls.

  Fairyland trails, straight out of a children’s book illustrated by Gary Embleton, hung to the edges and cut stony or muddy aisles through the forest. Following the trails, going deeper into the woods, I discovered old weaponry, maintained and on display.

  “Man is the creature of circumstances.”

  —Robert Owen, The Philanthropist

  I found Derrick at one of the artillery pieces. A few hundred yards away, unmarked graves read “here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” Here I couldn’t help but deliberate my own service. The irksome and unavoidable sensation of “I didn’t do enough, I didn’t get to do enough” pummeled me to the ground, an event that had occurred many times. Comparing the Marines, running through Germans with their bayonets after wading through fields of machine gun fire to IED blasts and the often impersonal assaults on farmers in man-dresses. . . the value difference is undeniable. But, returning to the stand
ing and wiping the leaves from my knee, the lesson is finally realized: Rarely does anyone fight the war they want to.

  Why didn’t I stay in?

  Because we didn’t get to fight a war

  And that’s the god’s honest truth.

  But

  Looking through a buddy’s old pics,

  I was too stupid to take many.

  I see the smiles,

  The boyish faces

  Riding in a hijacked vehicle,

  Gun barrel to the driver’s head

  In that great shithole

  Together and alive.

  We were doing something right.

  Derrick and I both were connected to our Marine forefathers that day, in a way that is diluted by the bumper stickers and lost on the back of shirts. There were trenches still visible, despite a hundred years of time settling on the place. There were bomb impacts still visible, some holding puddles. You could take a knee on the forest floor; wet brown leaves and scattered clumps of grass; observe your own body position; the kneeling, and could too easily be holding a rifle; as if one would readily appear if you could just stay there long enough. But, “long enough” would surpass the natural lifespan left in us, and it was time to go.

  Descending out of the wood line and past the headstones, we reentered the information office.

  “How was it?” she asked with a smile.

  “Oh, it was really amazing, thanks.”

  “So did you get to see everything you wished to see?”

  It was fortuitous she asked. One thing we had both heard about, and were unable to find, was a fountain in the area that Marines would come to drink out of. Nothing short of a religious gesture, Marines would sip from its water—the simultaneous action of paying respect and a halfhearted superstition to stave off, or dull, the VD, the Article 15, brutal divorce, effects of Agent Orange, getting beat by the female supply clerk at the division meritorious board, the annoying neighbor back home, traffic jams, suicide in the family, those who won’t write back, high cholesterol, and the side effects of two decades of taking Motrin.

  “Well, I am just finishing up. If you would like I can take the two of you. It’s actually on the property of a nearby farm.”

  It may have been a type of carnal hangover from the Amsterdam excursion, feeling a lot like satisfaction just with the added element of depravity. It may have been the profound respect we had for her excited and encyclopedic knowledge of the Marine Corps. Or it could have been both, but whatever the cause, not a sexual thought was uttered nor a glance to guide a buddy’s eyes to a fond spot on her body was initiated. Loading into her car, she took us down to a farmhouse, along the way verbally revisiting every square inch of history we had spent a day absorbing.

  As one walks onto the property at a slight downhill, past a tiny mound of earth and turning hard left, the fountain is on the inside wall of the mound. From a solid, manmade wall of stone and some type of mortar protrudes a rusty head of a bulldog, mascot of the Marines. From its mouth flows the water, collecting in a moss-covered pool.

  Stepping onto the wall of the pool, I noticed several unit coins and a bottle of champagne resting at the bottom. The curator watching our every move: a hesitation, and then one of us goes for a sip, then the other, then a gulp, then another. . . all the while her standing silent, having seen US Marines perform the act, times innumerable. It was time to go, but not before donning the piss cutter on the Bulldog.

  Giving us a ride into town, we thanked this angelic curator wholeheartedly, soon flagging down a cab and making the trek back to the bus station.

  It had been dark for several hours by the time we made it back into the modernization of Paris, where another night of drinking commenced. This time mulled wine on Avenue des Champs-Élysées.

  26

  WHY GO AT ALL

  Why did we—the ‘80s born millennials—stop playing beer pong and go off to war?

  The answer of course varies depending on who is asked. Immediately, three reasons pop up in my head: patriotic duty, career obligation, and for the experience. I suppose there is a fourth category: to sate a blood lust. Did people go specifically for that? I am not quite sure. Grand curiosity, yes, the desire to kill an enemy, most certainly, but I think an even more brutal motivation than the mere act of killing develops only once you are already boots on the ground.

  In a combat zone the rather annoying absence of death spurs an internal evolution. In so many who possess the simmering combination of an adventurous spirit and several years of being molded to take life, the “I want to kill a bad guy” slowly becomes “I need to kill a guy.”

  Being spared none of this transformation, I was always tightlipped during the many thanks for service. It’s a funny thing to consider. . . the people we “defended” were actually thanking people who were more of the mindset of the men they were terrifled of, and then of course that means, in a singular way, we are more like the men we were fighting than the people hugging us at the airport. It fades, at least for most of us. The rage. The thoughts of life-taking that make one salivate. The lethality dripping in disappointment. The fading process is as random as what spots in Iraq were hot and what spots were dead cold. Some it leaves as they board the Maine-bound plane, some a decade later, some at an internal investigations tribunal for excessive use of force that pumps the veins swollen with ice water. And for some it never fades. Their bullets find a target, themselves high on the list.

  By and large, however, the average citizen assumes not all this troublesome kill-talk, but rather patriotic duty. After all, it’s what fuels the memes with the term “best and brightest” punched in somewhere. There seems to be this belief that those who put on the uniform and go fight are doing this out of love for their country. At first glance it seems ludicrous to think otherwise. But feelings for a country isn’t just limited to feelings about its framework, but also interactions with the people in it and the systemic liberties and restrictions—for good or for ill.

  It has been my experience that patriotic duty—for God and for country—was not always the case. Many who fought from my generation did so for themselves and with nothing short of contempt for the American society they came from. Going to war was a finite window to touch the vanquished barbaric world that modern reality has so woefully blighted out.

  “How many people have you killed?” The answer is I don’t have the wildest idea. The mutual engagements I participated in in Iraq were like a twenty-first century Gettysburg only with larger weaponry, on a smaller scale, and with a purpose far less clear. They shot, we shot; us generally behind vehicles and/or body armor, them behind bushes and easily penetrable walls. In the end, they stopped firing and we drove off to later mix protein shakes with liquor out of mailed Listerine bottles.

  But how did I end up there, psychologically disposed prior to a seat in a C130 with my name on it?

  Smoke still lingered in Manhattan’s scarred, deformed skyline. The news said highly trained US personnel had touched down in Afghanistan. I was living with a friend in Imperial Beach, California.

  Only a Modelo can toss from the Mexican border; our neighbors were massive Samoans and large families of first-generation Americans. From our balcony I’d sit and watch the I MEF78 train in Coronado Bay. I sat there, without a job, without even a good answer as to why my friend and I moved across the country. Ah, yes, to be in a punk band. And where better than So Cal? I must have just not had the moxie of Greg Ginn or Henry Rollins, because our two-man practices died quick, and we set the guitar aside to start looking for work. Watching those Marines train in the bay, I had one of those moments.

  Prior to, I had spent my last year in high school missing enough days to technically have to repeat twelfth grade. However, the secret agreement I made with my mother—to excuse my Monday absence, and I would make up for it during the other four school days—allowed me to graduate. That and then some, actually. Missing thirty-six Mondays in a row and graduating with an academic scholarship
had to have been some sort of a record.

  Why I missed so much school was simply because I hated it, why else? The people, the institution, the lowest common denominator. The only reason I did so well regarding my grades is I always took a fierce, almost psychotic pride in meeting challenges and coveting the crowning achievement wherever I found a place to put it. And eventually it was over.

  Finally free from the mediocrity and bondage of school, I immediately moved out. Greyhound bus to New Orleans with career-related stops in Tennessee. It took twenty-eight hours just to get to Memphis, and between walking onto the bus and walking off, I made out with a girl who smelled like Newports, watched a fistfight, got sick as hell in Nashville, and had to fend off a vagrant from stealing my bag.

  I was terrifled the entire trip, with the brief oasis of kissing that girl. After all, I was eighteen and came from a house where waffles, milk, and bacon were provided every morning, a twenty-minute hot shower at night was available, and some sort of roast would always be cooking on the range. I had a mom and live-in grandmother practically competing over 1950s era housework; it could have been a reality TV show, really. Who will win this week and get to cook the green pepper steak? So, despite some promising dispositions, I was nowhere as hard as I would soon grow to be. There were many scars ahead, and much to learn from all of them.

  Finally in New Orleans, I did some DOT stuff and was issued my Z card. Back to Mommy’s house for a few months of pacing around like a caged hunting cat and I was off.

  For six months I worked for a tugboat company all up and down the eastern seaboard. Starting in the Chesapeake Bay, we were abruptly pulled from the job right after the towers went down. The company had won a contract to assist with the cleanup. We immediately moved to the Hudson. Coming in from the south I was more fixated on the tiny, growing green sliver of the Statue of Liberty. Everyone else in the bridge of the boat was silently looking east. Men who’d seen the towers since boyhood stood there, shaking their heads, cigarettes dangling from their grumbling mouths.