Jarhead Read online

  Since we’re in an OP, and I’m unable to leave, I change the subject to the only thing Fowler and I share, unfaithful girlfriends. We spend the next eight hours talking about his girl and how she ruined his heart.

  But with a storyteller like Fowler, if one asshole jarhead won’t listen, he’ll go to the next because at the root of all of his storytelling and the acts he either commits or fabricates in order to have a story to tell, at the sick root is a desire to be held in awe by others, so that he can feel better about himself. Over the next few days the whispers around the platoon and the division are that Fowler has shot at least one camel, maybe three, with his forty, and what a crazy motherfucker.

  Fowler is bad for morale, and the camel rumors haven’t helped his standing with our leaders. Because he considers himself a more skilled shooter than anyone else and he spends a lot of time telling all other members of the platoon how stupid and incompetent they are, he couldn’t have noticed the tide turning against him, and he must be genuinely surprised when Staff Sergeant Siek and Captain Thola approach him and tell him they think it best for STA Platoon and best for the mission and the safety of the battalion if they find another job for him. In fact, they’ve already found another job for him, as Headquarters & Support Company police sergeant, the man in charge of handing out five-gallon water jugs and rolls of shit paper.

  Years later, at a house party in Sacramento, on the bluffs of the American River, a man I knew approached me as I chatted with a pretty girl from the local state college, a communications major, bound for big things in the news business, or so she said. He asked if I knew Tom Fowler, if wasn’t I the guy who had served in the Marines with him, and if so, I should come inside and have a listen.

  I left the news girl and followed the man inside to find Fowler, Headquarters & Support Company police sergeant, master of shit paper, telling a crowd of fifteen or twenty people, mostly women, about the time in the Gulf War when he’d fought hand to hand with four raghead bastards, how he’d run out of ammunition after killing a few of their comrades in a fucking fierce firefight and was now using his bayonet, he screamed, his fucking bayonet, like Dan Fucking Daly at the Boxer Rebellion killing the fucking Chinks by hand, and that’s what he did, stabbed each of the Iraqis in the heart with his bayonet, thus saving a crowd of Kuwaiti women and girls, next up to be raped by the aggressors.

  After the war, and after I’d attended Army Airborne School, Fowler wouldn’t talk to me except to tell me to fuck off. He’d leave any room I walked into; once he left a full beer at a bar. Even though he’d handed out shit paper during the war, he thought he rated jump school, or at least he was certain that I shouldn’t have received the battalion’s only billet. I couldn’t have cared less. Airborne was an easy school, the simplest thing I’d ever accomplished in the military, and a good bit of fun, jumping out of an airplane five times, five-jump chump, and I wore the handsome jump wings on my uniform and good-naturedly joked with my platoon mates by calling them Legs, but otherwise Airborne School didn’t matter to me. Though I did enjoy that it burned Fowler’s ass. It must have been because we were from the same town that my jump wings so disturbed him, and his nightmare was that I’d show up at the party where he was crying his heart out, but I’d have more shit on my chest and know what he really didn’t do.

  The women in the small crowd cried and the men looked proud to be Fowler’s friend, or his new friend, and as Fowler wept and hugged one of the women, he saw me, and he froze. But I said nothing. I walked outside and found my friend in communications. A few hours later when I left the party with her, I saw Fowler lying on the couch, his head in a woman’s lap, she patting his small, bald head and helping soothe his pain as he wept from the horrors that haunted his waking and sleeping hours.

  Unfortunately, I encountered Fowler a few more times, at bars and at parties, replaying the same story, so that I knew he believed himself, just as when with our platoon he’d believed he was the best shooter, the most competent camouflage artist, the master man-tracker, the chief of chiefs.

  The last time I saw Fowler I was out late at a bar frequented by off-duty strippers. I wasn’t necessarily there for the strippers, but for the cheap drinks and the proximity of the bar to my friend Cliff’s house. Cliff had heard me speak of Fowler and had even met him once, and a few drinks into our night, he pointed toward the dance floor, toward the biggest fool on the dance floor, and said, “Jesus Christ, isn’t that that Fowler guy?” And of course it was Fowler, dancing with a rather degenerate-looking stripper, probably not off-duty but years out-of-service, strung out, she looked, with teeth ground down to the gums and her broken arm in a cast. The sight of the short, bald, and extremely drunk Fowler dancing with the burnt-out stripper nearly toppled me out of my chair. I had witnessed many comical and sick moments in my life, but this beat most of them. I nodded and smiled at Cliff, the sign that we should finish our drinks and exit the bar, but we weren’t fast enough, and within seconds, Fowler stood beside me, smiling.

  He yelled in my ear, “If it isn’t fucking Swofford! Here to beg some free tittie?”

  “We’re leaving.”

  “Come on, Swoff, just like the old PI days, we’ll get all fucked up and screw some whores! I know you still got the hunger, you’re a fucking jarhead until the day you die!”

  “This isn’t the PI. Get the fuck over whatever is bothering you. So you handed out shit paper during the war? Nobody gives a fuck about that war.”

  “They have to! I’ll make sure of it! They fucking have to, Swoff. It was our goddamn war! The only one you’ll ever have.”

  “I don’t want any more. Fuck the Suck.”

  “I’m back in! I joined Reserve Recon. I finally went to jump school! You don’t have shit on me anymore!”

  He’d always spoken loudly, as though to help convince you that what he was saying wasn’t a lie; he needed to turn up his volume so you might not hear the lie but only the noise surrounding the lie. But I believed that he’d reenlisted and gone to jump school. I could see the pure joy in his eyes—he’d finally gotten one over on old Swofford. Fuck you, Swofford, his eyes said.

  I recalled that after his reassignment to police sergeant certain people had taken to calling him Huggies, as in the diaper.

  I said, “That’s great, Huggies. I’m glad to hear it. I’m sure jump school is still a piece of fucking cake.”

  “I think it’s a little harder than when you went through. There’s more running and shit. They’ve toughened it up. They even dropped a couple of jarheads from my class!”

  “I bet they did. Maybe it’s so tough now they’ll go back and take it off my DD-214.”

  “That’d be fucked up. But I’m glad I got my wings!”

  “Shit, Huggies, all you had to do was ask. I’d have given you a spare set. You could’ve carried them around and showed them to people without reenlisting. Hell, you could’ve pinned them on your civilian clothes like a cracked-up Vietnam vet.”

  “You’re still a funny guy, Swoff. But I got bigger news than jump school. You’re gonna shit, man. You are going to shit. Guess where I’m going tomorrow?”

  “Where are you going, Mr. Police Sergeant, Mr. May I Wipe Your Ass?”

  I was enjoying talking some trash. It had been years since I’d broken it down like that, speaking jarheadese, pure profane smack.

  “I’m going to gay fucking Paris to join the French Fucking Foreign Legion! You’ll never see me again! You’ll hear that the Legion has done some crazy shit, some crazy fucked-up shit, and you’ll know I was in on it, with a new name like Pierre, but you’ll know it’s good old fucked-in-the-head Tommy Fowler, still tearing shit up!”

  He smiled as wide a smile as I’d ever seen and his drunken-red cheeks beamed like stage lights. I was a bit surprised, shocked even, over the Foreign Legion news. But again I believed him, because his eyes were still saying, Fuck you, Swofford, fuck every jarhead who never believed I was bad enough and mean enough, fuck every jarhead I hand
ed shit paper and water to, fuck you all, I’m big, bad French Foreign Legion Tommy Fowler!

  He told me he could get me on the plane with him, I could purchase a ticket overnight for a grand, all I needed was my DD-214 to prove my background, and in ninety-six hours we’d be in North Africa, together again, Swoffie and Fowler knee-deep in the shit.

  “Or maybe you don’t have the balls,” he said.

  I told him he was correct, my balls had been used dry. I wished him well. I even bought the bastard a drink, and I bought a drink for his stripper with the broken arm. And I sat there for a few minutes with my friend and we watched Tommy Fowler dance himself closer to oblivion or North Africa.

  I don’t know if Huggies joined the French Foreign Legion, but I lived in Sacramento for a few more years, and I didn’t run into him again, so he may well now be a Pierre or Jean-Luc, living in the desert, getting even for all of those rolls of shit paper, attempting to reshape his past, to make sense out of nothing, in his peculiar and perpetually fucked-up fashion.

  All over headquarters, marines are excited to hear that a .50-caliber sniper rifle has been installed on the roof. Jarheads dial our guard frequency all day, asking questions—How far does that bitch shoot? How many rounds in the magazine? Bolt-action or semiauto? How the hell can I get me one?

  One night on the headquarters roof, Johnny notices that we can look straight into the general’s office, and if we use a pair of binoculars, we can see every symbol on his wall map, every symbol that reflects troop strength and movement, both enemy and friendly, and so, with a little bit of sniper ingenuity, we construct our own model of what the hell will occur at the border.

  After three nights of constant map observation, and transferring all we’ve seen on the general’s wall onto our own maps of northern Saudi Arabia and southern Kuwait, we’re quite sure that we’ll soon be some dead jarheads. Two-thirds of the Marine Corps is in-country, the First Marine Division, our division, and the Second Marine Division, plus attachments. The map locates the First directly south of the Burqan oil fields in southern Kuwait, about fifty miles inland, with the Second directly to our west. Coalition Arab forces are to our rear in “support positions.” A Marine Expeditionary Unit with amphibious and air assault capability floats off the Kuwaiti shore. Farther west of the Second Marine Division, army airborne and mechanized armor units are positioned for attack into Iraq. Across the border, after the two minefield/obstacle belts, the Iraqi forces look formidable if not intimidating. Johnny does the math, and he has us outmanned at the infantry level by three men to one. Directly north of the First Marine Division assault route we count fifteen artillery batteries, to our three. An Iraqi armored brigade is spread west to east across the middle of Kuwait, and an armored division holds defensive positions directly south of the Burqan oil fields. There they are, the enemy, our first sighting.

  We haven’t talked about body bags for a few months, but we start again. Word is they have about one hundred thousand of the damn things waiting in Riyadh. We wonder if they don’t come in sizes, because a small jarhead about Goerke’s size, you could fit two and a half of him in a bag that would barely fit a Combs, big Oklahoma bastard as thick all over as a tree.

  We decide that the size of the bag doesn’t matter, only that you’re dead and on your way out, shoved in the cargo hold of a plane, stinking the place up with your death and the death of those gathered around you, maybe jarheads you knew, maybe a few of the jarheads you’re joking with right now, about body bags and dying.

  It’s been a few months since the command ordered an official dog-tag check, so we perform one of our own—you need at least one around your neck and one strung in the lace of your left boot.

  Without looking, I know that my tags misrepresent me as a Roman Catholic. I’d prefer to be known as a nonbeliever, but Johnny says, “I don’t care if you don’t believe in God and some padre tries to give you the last rites. Anyway, when we get hit, there won’t be a priest within miles. Just make certain your blood type is correct. And wouldn’t you rather get some useless last-breath religion than the wrong goddamn blood?”

  He has a point. And I can’t not believe in blood.

  My parents were converts to Catholicism, my mother from Methodism, while my father was in Vietnam, and my father, after a troubling Southern Baptist upbringing, converted when he returned from his tough tour through war. I was born a few weeks after my father’s baptism, and the same priest baptized us both.

  I enjoyed being an altar boy for a few of my teenage years. I solemnly performed my duties, and I considered our leader, Father Bill, a mentor and friend. My high moments of Catholic belief occurred during the fifteen minutes before Mass started each Sunday, when I’d be alone in the sacristy with the priest and my fellow altar boys as we donned our vestments and prepared the wine and host.

  When I joined the Corps, I called myself a Catholic.

  At boot camp I was chosen Catholic lay reader. When all of the Catholic recruits had been herded into one corner of the squad bay, I was within arm’s reach of Drill Instructor Seats, who grabbed me by my collar and said, “You, fuckface, you’re the goddamn Catholic lay reader. Whenever a Catholic recruit wants to pray, you lead the fucking prayer. If a Catholic recruit wants a goddamn Bible, you shit him a Bible, pronto. You lead the Catholic prayer every night. This is the catch. There really isn’t a Catholic prayer every night, there isn’t any prayer every night, except the one your drill instructors tell about praying that you shitbag recruits become mean, green killing motherfuckers. On Sundays, you march this shit bucket of Catholics over to the church. This is another catch. There isn’t a church, but there’s a big goddamn theater, and from ten hundred to eleven hundred the Catholics own the theater. That’s when you march over there. You do your damn praying and singing. And then you march back. If it’s taps, and the officer of the day walks on deck, and one of your drill instructors says, ‘Pray, recruits,’ you better start praying, pray like a motherfucker, like you do it every night, like it’s as natural as sucking on your mommy’s nipple. And any other time your drill instructors decide it’s time for the Catholics to pray, you better shit me a prayer, do you understand, fuckface?”

  This sounded like a lot of pressure, and I considered asking Seats what exactly it meant to pray like a motherfucker and if someone more devout than me might be better for the job, but after my altercation with Burke, I was smart enough not to ask.

  My fellow Catholics seemed disappointed in their lay reader. Often, on Sundays, I’d forget about Mass, busy as I was cleaning my rifle or spit-shining my boots, and one of the Catholics would find me sitting in front of my rack at 0955 and say, “Recruit Swofford, we need to get to church.” And I’d run us Catholics in double time the mile to the theater. On the rare occasion that the DIs ordered prayer in the squad bay, I’d muster the Catholics, and they’d all look to me for guidance, because they were required to, and I’d suggest, like every other time, “How about a couple Hail Marys and an Our Father?” And we’d mumble our two simple prayers, led by me, while at the other end of the squad bay the Protestant lay reader was busy sweating and throwing down some serious fire and brimstone.

  Because of my lay reader assignment, the base chaplain contacted the monsignor from my church of record, and I received a kind letter from him. He remembered me as a young boy, and then as an altar boy, and he wished me well in my current incarnation as a marine. I remember being happy to hear from the monsignor, a man whose homilies I’d found complex and inspiring, but his letter didn’t buttress my crumbling faith.

  Already, I recognized the incompatibility of religion and the military. The opposite of this assertion seems true when one considers the high number of fiercely religious military people, but they are missing something. They’re forgetting the mission of the military: to extinguish the lives and livelihood of other humans.

  What do they think all of those bombs are for?

  I tap the dog tag laced into my left boot, and I rea
ch into my blouse and retrieve the multiple tags—they are icons, really—hanging from my neck. I tell Johnny that even if they are incorrect about my lost religion, I have the proper number of tags, plus some.

  Before going to war, the marine is afforded ample opportunity to order additional dog tags. You are only supposed to order more when you’ve actually lost a dog tag or a set (two tags to a set), or you need to change some of the information, and the only information that can possibly change is your religion of record. You either have a religion of record, or they stamp NO PREFERENCE on your tag, but this still makes it sound as though you want something, in fact it makes you sound like a religion whore, as though you’ll take it in any hole, from any pulpit. They make it hard for a nonbeliever.

  Shortly after joining the Seventh Marines, I ordered new dog tags, and I requested that NO RELIGION be pressed into the metal, but when I received the tags, prior to deploying to Okinawa, I realized I was still a Roman Catholic, according to my tags. I ordered a corrective pair, and they came back the same way, and over the years I ordered numerous NO RELIGION pairs, and I requested, finally, NO PREFERENCE, but still the tags came back ROMAN CATHOLIC. My mother insisted these typos were signs from God, but I knew better. Eventually I realized that I enjoyed ordering new sets of dog tags, and that it didn’t matter to me what they listed on the religion line, I didn’t care: I enjoyed receiving the shiny new set of dog tags, removing the tags from the tiny Ziploc bag, and I liked the noise the new tags made when clanked together.

  New dog tags afford the marine the opportunity to replace or reassign an old set. For example: reassign a set to your mother and your little brother and your girlfriend and maybe even that casual sex partner from the town outside base (how many sets with different SSNs does she own?). Now decide exactly how you will make the new set tactical, because as much as the clank of the new tags sounds clean and crisp and alive, such noise might be deadly. And you’re ordered to separate the tags; per regulation, one should hang around your chest and one through the lace of your left boot. But the jarhead does things to his dog tags that aren’t regulation, such as spray-paint them, usually olive drab but sometimes shit brown, or he’ll stack five or six tags on top of one another and wrap camouflage duct tape around them. He’ll also tape odd heir-looms to the dog tags, such as strands of his girlfriend’s pubic hair or the projectile from his favorite rifle. If you ask him, he’ll unpeel the mess of dog tags and tell you exactly where he was—on what ship, in what port, stationed on what shithole base—when he received each tag, because though to the untrained eye each dog tag looks exactly the same, the jarhead knows the difference between the dog tag press at Camp Pendleton and the one on the amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu and the one at Subic Bay and the one at Cherry Point Air Station, North Carolina.