Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles Read online

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  Copyright © 2003 by Anthony Swofford

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  DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

  Text set in Granjon

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Swofford, Anthony.

  Jarhead: a Marine’s chronicle of the Gulf War and other battles/Anthony Swofford.

  p. cm.

  1. Persian Gulf War, 1991—Personal narratives, American. 2. United States. Marine Corps. Marines, 7th. Battalion, 2nd. Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon. 3. Swofford, Anthony. I. Title.

  DS79.74 .S96 2003

  956.7044’245—dc21

  2002030866

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-5428-7

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-5428-1

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

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  This book is for

  the U.S. Marines of Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon,

  Second Battalion, Seventh Marines,

  August 1990–April 1991

  and

  in memory of my brother.

  JARHEAD

  But if you want to go on fighting

  go take some young chap, flaccid & a half-wit

  to give him a bit of courage and some brains

  —EZRA POUND, Canto LXXII

  I go to the basement and open my ruck. The basement is in Iowa, after a long, harsh winter, and deep in the ruck where I reach for my cammies, I still feel the cold of February. We were supposed to turn in our desert cammies, but I kept mine. They’re ratty and bleached by sand and sun and blemished with the petroleum rain that fell from the oil-well fires in Kuwait. The cammies don’t fit. While in the Marines, I exercised thirty hours a week. Since I’ve been out, I’ve exercised about thirty hours a year. The waist stops at my thighs. The blouse buttons, but barely. I pull out maps of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Patrol books. Pictures. Letters. My journal with its sparse entries. Coalition propaganda pamphlets. Brass bore punch for the M40A1 sniper rifle. A handful of .50-caliber projectiles. I think of what I must look like to the late-night walker peering through the basement windows: the movie cliché, the mad old warrior going through his memorabilia, juicing up before he runs off and kills a few with precision fire. But, no, I am not mad. I am not well, but I am not mad. I’m after something. Memory, yes. A reel. More than just time. Years pass. But more than just time. I’ve been working toward this—I’ve opened the ruck and now I must open myself.

  It would’ve been easy to sell my gear to a surplus store. After the war, when I spent most of my monthly pay in the bars in Palm Springs and Newport Beach, Las Vegas and Santa Monica, I’d steal a case or two of MREs (meals ready to eat) from Supply each week, and on my way out of town for the weekend I’d sell the meals for $80 per case in an army/navy store in San Bernardino. And occasionally I’d steal more than meals. Or I wouldn’t necessarily steal. Sometimes I’d happen along a Sergeant Smith’s ruck, and he’d be nowhere near, and I’d remember the saying Gear left adrift, must be a gift, and I knew that the ex-marine who ran the army/navy store would give me $300 for the sergeant’s misfortune.

  So my ruck didn’t have to be here, in my basement, six or seven moves and eight and a half years after my discharge. I could’ve sold it for one outrageous bar tab or given it to Goodwill or thrown it away—or set it afire, as some jarheads did.

  I open a map of southern Kuwait. Sand falls from between the folds.

  As a lance corporal in a U.S. Marine Corps scout/sniper platoon, I saw more of the Gulf War than the average grunt. Still, my vision was blurred—by wind and sand and distance, by false signals, poor communication, and bad coordinates, by stupidity and fear and ignorance, by valor and false pride. By the mirage.

  Thus what follows is neither true nor false but what I know. I have forgotten most of the statistics and must look them up. I remember the weapons, though not their capabilities, so I must look those up as well. For the place names I refer to maps. For unit deployments and order of battle, I must consult published charts. I search through congressional reports and presidential statements at the Federal Depository Library. I remember most of the names and faces of my platoon mates. I remember the names and faces of some of their girlfriends and wives. I think I know who cheated and who stayed faithful. I remember who wrote letters and who drove their men mad with silence. I remember some of the lies and most of the questions. I remember the dreams and the naive wishes, the pathetic pleas and the trouser-pissing horror.

  I remember some of the sand, but there was so much of it, I should be forgiven.

  I remember about myself a loneliness and poverty of spirit; mental collapse; brief jovial moments after weeks of exhaustion; discomfiting bodily pain; constant ringing in my ears; sleeplessness and drunkenness and desperation; fits of rage and despondency; mutiny of the self; lovers to whom I lied; lovers who lied to me. I remember going in one end and coming out the other. I remember being told I must remember and then for many years forgetting.

  On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops drive east to Kuwait City and start killing soldiers and civilians and capturing gold-heavy palaces and expensive German sedans—though it is likely that the Iraqi atrocities are being exaggerated by Kuwaitis and Saudis and certain elements of the U.S. government, so as to gather more coalition support from the UN, the American people, and the international community generally.

  Also on August 2, my platoon—STA (pronounced stay), the Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon, scout/snipers, of the Second Battalion, Seventh Marines—is put on standby. We’re currently stationed at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base, in California’s Mojave Desert.

  After hearing the news of imminent war in the Middle East, we march in a platoon formation to the base barber and get fresh high-and-tight haircuts. And no wonder we call ourselves jarheads—our heads look just like jars.

  Then we send a few guys downtown to rent all of the war movies they can get their hands on. They also buy a hell of a lot of beer. For three days we sit in our rec room and drink all of the beer and watch all of those damn movies, and we yell Semper fi and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging. We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals. We rewind and review famous scenes, such as Robert Duvall and his helicopter gunships during Apocalypse Now, and in the same film Martin Sheen floating up the fake Vietnamese Congo; we watch Willem Dafoe get shot by a friendly and left on the battlefield in Platoon; and we listen closely as Matthew Modine talks trash to a streetwalker in Full Metal Jacket. We watch again the ragged, tired, burnt-out fighters walking through the villes and the pretty native women smiling because if they don’t smile, the fighters might kill their pigs or burn their cache of rice. We rewind the rape scenes when American soldiers return from the bush after killing many VC to sip cool beers in a thatch bar while whores sit on their laps for a song or two (a song from the fifties when America was still sweet) before they retire to rooms and fuck the whores sweetly. The American boys, brutal, young farm boys or tough city boys, sweetly fuck the whores. Yes, somehow the films convince us that these boys are sweet, even though
we know we are much like these boys and that we are no longer sweet.

  There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force Base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck. It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar—the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.

  We watch our films and drink our beer and occasionally someone begins weeping and exits the room to stand on the catwalk and stare at the Bullion Mountains, the treacherous, craggy range that borders our barracks. Once, this person is me. It’s nearly midnight, the temperature still in the upper nineties, and the sky is wracked with stars. Moonlight spreads across the desert like a white fire. The door behind me remains open, and on the TV screen an ambush erupts on one of the famous murderous hills of Vietnam.

  I reenter the room and look at the faces of my fellows. We are all afraid, but show this in various ways—violent indifference, fake ease, standard-issue bravura. We are afraid, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to fight. It occurs to me that we will never be young again. I take my seat and return to the raging battle. The supposedly antiwar films have failed. Now is my time to step into the newest combat zone. And as a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam War, I want ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers.

  When the Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait City, Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Jabir al-Ahmad as-Sabah flees to Saudi Arabia and establishes his government either in a Saudi palace or the Ad Dammam Hilton, depending on what paper you read. At a press conference on August 3, President George Bush calls Saudi Arabia, Kuwait’s southern neighbor, a “vital U.S. interest.” Defense Secretary Dick Cheney visits Saudi Arabia on August 5 and brokers a historic deal allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil for the first time ever. On August 6 the UN Security Council passes Resolution 661, imposing an economic embargo on Iraq and occupied Kuwait. On August 7 the deployment of American fighting troops begins.

  I’m in the base gym at noon on August 7, lifting a few hundred pounds over my chest, working off the days-long damage from our Vietnam War Film Fest, when I hear an announcement over the public address system: All personnel from STA 2/7 are ordered to report immediately to battalion headquarters. Get some, jarheads! Now we’re locked down on base. Our deployment is inevitable.

  On August 8, Iraq formally annexes Kuwait, and two days later twelve of the twenty-four Arab League countries vote to send troops to help defend Saudi Arabia. Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets are frozen by the United States, Great Britain, France, and West Germany. On August 14, two days after my twentieth birthday, the Seventh Marines arrive in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

  As I debark the plane, the oven heat of the Arabian Desert grips my throat. In the distance the wind blows sand from the tops of dunes, cresting beige waves that billow like silk through the mirage. The tarmac is full of American civilian jumbo jets—American, Delta, United; we flew United. The scene on the airfield is like that at any busy international airport, only we passengers are wearing fatigues and carrying loaded rifles, our gas masks strapped to our hips. Just beyond the tarmac, artillery batteries point their guns east and north. Fighter jets patrol the sky. During the twenty-hour flight our mode of debarkation was debated—tactical or general—and I’d hoped for the tactical approach—live rounds and a defensive perimeter could be the only authentic introduction to a theater of war. This won’t be like jumping off a Huey at Green Beach in the Philippines, trading an MRE for a plate of hot noodles and blood pork. We received our rounds, but we exit the plane in an orderly single-file line, and I realize that we’d surely look ridiculous surrounding a civilian jetliner with our weapons drawn, the cabin crew performing inventory in the galley while we scream for war.

  We’re marched toward a series of large, bright green Bedouin tents. Inside the tents marines drink bottled water and attempt to stay cool by draping wet skivvy shirts over their heads. Jarheads from other units who’ve been in-country a few hours affect the air of grungy desert veterans, pointing to the pallets of European spring water and saying, “You better drink a lot of that. It’s hot here,” as if offering us religious insight.

  After we sit for an hour in the hydration tents, the colonel calls a battalion formation and proudly announces that we are taking part in Operation Desert Shield. He explains that the Kuwaiti-Iraqi conflict is not yet our concern, but that currently our mission is to protect, to shield, Saudi Arabia and her flowing oil fields. We’ll be shielding enough oil to drive hundreds of millions of cars for hundreds of millions of miles, at a relatively minor cost to the American consumer. We joke about having transferred from the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps, or the Petrol Battalion, and while we laugh at our jokes and we all think we’re damn funny jarheads, we know we might soon die, and this is not funny, the possibility of death, but like many combatants before us, we laugh to obscure the tragedy of our cheap, squandered lives with the comedy of combat and being deployed to protect oil reserves and the rights and profits of certain American companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House and oblique financial entanglements with the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, and the commander in chief, George Bush, and the commander’s progeny. We know this because Kuehn, one of our representatives from Texas, says, “All those old white fuckers from Texas have their fat hands in Arab oil. The motherfuckers drink it like it’s beer.”

  And at this point we also know that the outcome of the conflict is less important for us—the men who will fight and die—than for the old white fuckers and others who have billions of dollars to gain or lose in the oil fields, the deep, rich, flowing oil fields of the Kingdom of Saud.

  By late September the American troop count in Saudi reaches 150,000 and the price of crude oil has nearly doubled since the invasion. Millions of Kuwaiti guest workers from the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and India have humped across the dry desert to the relatively safe haven of Jordan.

  Our days consist of sand and water and sweat and piss. We walk and drive over the sand and we drink water, gallons of water. And as we drink, we sweat, and as we sweat, we drink. Six times a day we gather for formation and swallow two canteens per man, and between formations we ingest more water, and we piss and sweat and walk the desert and drink and piss and sweat. We look north toward what we’re told is a menacing military, four hundred thousand or more war-torn and war-savvy men. Some of the Iraqi soldiers who fought during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war (September 1980 to August 1988) began tasting combat when we were ten years old. The Iraqi dead totalled more than 120,000, with 300,000 or more wounded and 60,000 prisoners of war. An army capable of sustaining such damage and invading another neighbor two years later sounds like a truly menacing force. And the civilian population that supports this army and its missions, that accepts such a staggering mutilation and loss of fathers and sons, must be extremely devoted to the country and the protection of its leader. While fighting Iran, the Iraqi
s became experts at fortifying their border using mines and obstacles, such as the thirty-kilometer-long and eighteen-hundred-meter-wide artificial lake used to defend the city of Basra. We’re forced to wonder what the Iraqis are preparing for us at the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. And in 1981 and 1984 the Iraqis used mustard and nerve gas against the Iranians, including civilians, and since then they’ve dropped nerve gas on the Iraqi Kurds. We believe they’ll do the same to us. Gas! Gas! Gas! We wait for the Iraqi army. This is our labor. We wait.

  We’ve been in Saudi Arabia for six weeks, and we’re currently operating in the training/security area called the Triangle: on my map, its coordinates form a rough triangle, the tip of which points toward Kuwait; twenty miles rear of our position the pogues (regiment and division-level headquarters and support personnel) eat three hot meals a day in a chow hall and sleep in an air-conditioned oil-company barracks while we’re boonies-stuck and out of luck, no showers, no hot chow, no rack, no wadi in sight, no oasis. We can’t see the superhighway and the Saudis and Kuwaitis driving toward Egypt and safety, though we know the road runs just to our south and we hear their Mercedes diesel engines racing through the night, their sound like some kind of muffled cosmic laughter.

  We’re excited this morning because the reporters are finally coming. It’s late September and we’ve each received newspaper clippings from parents or grandparents or siblings, neat cutouts of stories in our hometown papers about other hometown boys deployed to the Arabian Gulf, the margins penciled in by a parent or grandparent or sibling: Didn’t you know Private Douglas from school? Is William Wesley the kid you beat up in fourth grade? I thought Hall was in jail? Now the clippings will end. The reporters will write about us, and when you’re written about, you don’t need the clipping. You stand tall and have your picture taken and you say wise, brave things that your family and friends read and they become even more proud of you, and girls not your girlfriend read about you, the ones you almost had, and they become sorry for having said no, because now you are brave and wise and your words and photo are in the newspaper. And people will take time out of their busy days to read the article and send it to someone else serving in the U.S. Marines, in Operation Desert Shield, and they’ll write in the margin—Wasn’t Swofford an altar boy with you? Is Swofford the kid who stole your third-grade science project? Is he of the Swoffords recently divorced in Carmichael, the father arrested for chasing the mother’s boyfriend out of the house and down the street with a pistol? You never know what other people know about you, what they remember, what they write in the margins.