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The following excerpt from the book "Jarhead" by Anthony Swofford, a marine
veteran of the Gulf War. It's long, but it's great literature and well
worth the read.
Ed Weick The sad truth is that when you're a "jarhead," you're incapable of not being a jarhead, you are a symbol, so that in a city like San Diego, where there are more jarheads than windows and the jarheads are embarrassing because of their behavior and dress and you want more than anything not to be associated with the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, you still are one, one of those things, marine, jarhead, and thus associated with the bad behavior and offensive style of dress of every jarhead walking the boardwalk, drinking excessively, starting fights. Though you might be an individual, first you are a symbol, or part of a larger symbol that some people believe stands for liberty and honour and valour, God and country and Corps. Sometimes this is correct, sometimes this is foolish. But either way, you are part of the goddamn thing. That jarhead, with the high and tight haircut, the Disneyland T-shirt, acid-wash jeans, farmer's tan, poor grammar, and plain stupid look on his face, he is you. And that one, with the silly regulation mustachio, the overweight wife from his hometown of Bumf---, with three kids in tow, three kids covered with sticky boardwalk foods and wet sand, one of them crying because he has to pee and the older sister just punched him in the face, he is you. And that jarhead is you, the one with the wife just 24 hours out of a bar in the PI, the both of them deeply in love with each other and all things American -- you can tell this by the U.S. flag miniskirt she's wearing and her red, white, and blue high heels, and the ocean-wide patriotic grin on his face -- goddamn, he is you. And the two jarheads drunk-stumbling out of the bar on the corner, into the fierce noon ocean sunlight, chasing the private-college frat boys, now catching the frat boys from the private college, now beating severely the frat boys who screamed F--- all dumb bastard jarheads in the ass before trying to run free from the bar, those two jarheads beating the frat boys and having the time of their lives, they are you. And when the jarheads pick the bloody frat boys up and say You dumb f------, you dumb f------ frat boys, let's go catch a beer, then, too, the jarheads are you. And the jarheads fighting and warring and cussing and killing in every filthy corner of the godforsaken globe, from 1775 until now, they are you. This is troubling and difficult to admit, and it causes you unending anguish, and you attempt to deny it, but it's true. Even now. In early January I realize it's been weeks since anyone has bitched about the desert. I know now that it has ceased to be simply a place and instead is a part of us, in us not only through the mouth, nose, cars, ass, and eyes, but in our souls. We've made the desert our comfortable home. But that's about to change. We now know that the U.S. Congress supports President Bush's desire for offensive action against Saddam Hussein's military. Sgt. Dunn reads to us from Hussein's Army Day speech, commemorating 70 years of the Iraqi army. Hussein calls Kuwait the branch that must be returned to the tree, the 19th governorate of Iraq. He advises the Iraqi people that the sacrifices they must make for this war are equal to the importance of the victory. Jihad, he says, is the way of all Arab people, and Iraq is the centre of Arab pride. Kuehn asks what jihad is, and Dunn says: "It means he thinks they can kick our asses with the help of Allah. We are the sinners, we are the infidels, and thus easily defeated, due to our sinning and other bad behavior." Kuehn says, "I've been sinning since I was 14. They don't know that in America sinning makes you strong!" The next day, STA Platoon is ordered to guard duty at First Marine Division Headquarters. We deploy two sniper teams to the roof of the four-storey building, 24 hours a day. Mostly we pester the grunts who man the bunkers below. The dumb bastards stand outside their positions at night and smoke cigarettes, so we call to them on the freq, Bang, bang, you're a dead f------ grunt. This pisses them off, and they despise STA Platoon anyway, so we're offering them more reasons to dislike us. We read the Stars & Stripes every few days and occasionally our captain acquires a copy of the Arab Times. The problem is, we can't believe anything either publication prints. We're stuck in the middle, and the flow of information becomes rather gooey and imprecise when we ask questions. For instance, we have no idea the air war is about to begin. Two or three deadlines have passed, Iraq is still in Kuwait, supposedly raping and killing, we're still ready to go, but where and for what, we don't know. We want to get there, we're tired of the rumours and false starts; we're exhausted from constantly training. Our captain assures us that our current guard duty isn't a training cycle -- it's highly probable that Iraq has operatives in Saudi Arabia who want nothing better than to take out a marine general and a handful of staff officers in the midst of planning the Coalition ground offensive. But we don't believe this threat. For one thing, there isn't another building (a possible hideout for enemy snipers) within 2,000 metres of the command post, and the perimeter is so heavily armed, with both an infantry and a weapons company, that the sorry bastards who try to make it through would be shredded to nothing by the time a sniper gets a shot off -- we'd be shooting at piles of human hamburger. I assume that if an attack is committed, it'll be Lebanon-style, a five-tonne truck loaded with enough explosives to blow the entire building to ash. We're ordered to shoot to kill any intruder, and if they're barrelling toward us in an explosives-heavy vehicle, we'lI try like hell to hit the driver. A week into the guard-duty rotation we're fortunate enough to receive a .50-calibre sniper rifle and the training to go with it. The marksmanship training unit, at Quantico, Virginia, has been working on retrofitting a civilian .50-calibre semiautomatic rifle into a combat weapon. They've been at it for a few years, and the rumours were it would be a few more before they'd roll it out. But the desert accelerated their schedule. Twenty Barrett .50-calibres have been shipped for dispersal. In the middle of the desert, on a range out to 2,000 metres, 100 or so of the best shooters in the world will test a new weapons system. The captain calls four sniper teams to the guard shack. He gives us map coordinates, tells us to bring enough chow and water for a week, and to go get our present. Me, Johnny, Troy, Dickerson, Fountain, Combs, Dunn, and Kuehn jump in a Humvee and head toward the middle of the Triangle. We arrive at the coordinates and the area looks like a Gypsy camp. Forty or so Humvees are haphazardly parked with IR netting covering some of them, blue tarps over others, some fully exposed, and a few hosting what look like tailgate parties, as snipers from all over the Marine Corps are meeting up for some serious rifle time. We attempt to locate other snipers from our regiment, with no luck, so we park near the Battalion Recon team we trained with in November on the coast. One of the great things about the Marine Corps is the lack of regalia that you're required to attach to your uniform. You can look at an army guy, for instance, even in the field, and read his life story on his sleeves and chest. And in the Marine Corps everyone wears the same cover, no silly berets or baseball caps. So this gaggle of marines, this clutter of snipers and recon gurus, all look the same. We're wearing desert cammies with boonie covers and nothing else. The only variation occurs with boots, and even there, little variation is visible because we all buy our boots from the same high-speed, mail-order catalogue. Guys wander from unit to unit and reunions are occurring here and there as snipers share stories from the different schools they've attended: Scuba, jump, sniper. I'm not division-level school-trained, so in the eyes and hearts of the division-schooled snipers, I'll always be a lesser shooter, a Pig. This doesn't bother me because I know the job, Pig or not -- I know I hit the same targets at the same distances, handle the compass and map with the same expertise, call in bombs and artillery just as swiftly, crawl on my belly for thousands of metres in awful terrain and weather, wait and wait and wait, and I know I'm as ready as the Hogs for combat. My STA mates have fanned out to find friends and talk trash, but I sit in the back of our Humvee and read The Iliad. I rarely socialize with other units, and sometimes this causes me trouble, because people assume I'm either a sniper elitist or simply an asshole, but around other snipers and recon marines social disorder and dysfunction are expected, and I can sit in the back of our vehicle and read all day without offending anyone or inciting a fight. A recon sergeant has started a wrestling tournament, and in the middle of the bivouac site, sand rises into a storm as snipers from all over the Corps wrestle and cheer their fellows. All around me, jarheads fight and wrestle and swear and trade war stories, and I read my book. Two jarheads who have lost their first wrestling matches are consoling and coaching one another when one of them notices me. He approaches my vehicle and says, "What the f--- are you reading?" "The Iliad." He reaches toward me and I hand him the book and he examines the back cover. He says, "That's some heavy dope, sniper. Cool." And he returns to grappling with his partner. For the sniper, dope is anything that helps him acquire a target. In the middle of the afternoon the Quantico instructors call the crowd to order and commence classes on the .50-calibre. They've aligned the weapons on sheets of plywood, an impressive and deadly display. One of the instructors breaks down a weapon and explains the nomenclature and capabilities. The rifle is matte black and a few inches longer than the M40A1. It has a pistol grip, a comfortable-looking stock, and an octagonal barrel and triangular flash suppressor that resemble a whale harpoon. The weapon looks truly devastating, as though you might create casualties simply by flashing it on the battlefield. Yes, the motherf----- looks so deadly it makes me giggle and blush. (I don't know this in January of 1991, but the Barrett .50-calibre sniper rifle will become a controversial weapon in America. After the Gulf War, the militia movement and white separatists will latch on to the Barrett as a standard for the individual's potential power against the tyrannical state. The Barrett will make junkyard relics of "bulletproof" limousines and the safety glass that surrounds public podiums. Presidential candidates will never stump the same way again when the shooter has an effective range of two-and-a-half kilometres. The militia will adopt coveted scout/sniper sayings -- One Shot/One Kill and Death from Afar -- and print them on their T-shirts. After the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, reports will emerge that the truck-bomber, Timothy McVeigh, owned a Barrett. The Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, will force the ATF and FBI to use military troop carriers as cover against their .50-calibre sniper capability. And in Phoenix a man will make half a million dollars a year selling untraceable "build your own fifty" kits through the mail. Representative Henry Waxman of California will become a major opponent of the idea that your neighbor might own a gun that can fire rounds through your living room and on through the living rooms of the next 10 houses down your block. The marksmanship training unit has affixed the same scope that we use on the M40A1 to the Barrett, the ten-power Unertl. This is controversial because the Barrett needs a scope manufactured to match the trajectory of the .50-calibre round. The Unertl 10 had specifically been manufactured for the M40AL The point target maximum effective range for the Barrett is advertised at 2,000 metres, but the 10-power Unertl cuts that down to 1,600 metres. The Barrett has more problems than just the scope. The five-round magazines we've been issued are cheap and thin, made from subpar sheet metal by slave labourers in China, maybe sufficient for the civilian shooting in pleasant weather, wearing a fancy shooting glove and jacket, but they're not well built enough for extended use during combat. The rounds catch in the magazine, interrupting the feed, interrupting the supposedly sustained and oppressive pinpoint fire. We're forced to use a metal file to customize each magazine to each weapon, and this is a pain in the ass and absurd. The weapons must have cost more than $5,000 apiece and Quantico went out and bought magazines for a nickel per, from the communists. But when we complain, the instructors tell us to shut our holes, that we're damn lucky to receive the rifles, that they've been working their asses off since early August trying to deliver the weapon to us, and that we're making marksmanship history, integrating a .50-calibre sniper rifle into the armament. They tell us we'll really make marksmanship history when we tear the asses out of the Iraqi armored brigades from 1,600 metres. But do I really care about tearing the asses out of the Iraqis? This is what I ask myself as I fire my 100 rounds for the afternoon. >From 1,600 metres away I'm achieving tight groups and punching armour-piercing projectiles through hardened steel. This is marksmanship magic. But also, this is death -- the war moving closer, encroaching upon me. How long before I'm really pulling the trigger? Who is that man quartered in my crosshairs? Who will sight in on me? After the shoot, the instructors treat us to a hot meal. Some of us haven't eaten hot chow in weeks or even months. We're being pampered for some reason, as pampered as one might get in the Triangle. Not only have they trucked in hot chow, but there's a whole Humvee full of pogey bait, and it's free. The head instructor says, "Take what you want, it's on the commandant. He's excited about this weapon." To be a marine, a true marine, you must kill. With all of your training, all of your expertise, if you don't kill, you're not a combatant, even if you've been fired at, and so you are not yet a marine; receiving fire is easy -- you've either made a mistake or the enemy is better than you, and now you are either lucky or dead but not a combatant. You will receive a Combat Action Ribbon, and if unlucky enough to have been hit but not fatally, a Purple Heart, or if you're hit fatally, your mother will receive your Purple Heart, but whether you are dead or not, you haven't, with your own hands, killed a hostile enemy soldier. This means everything. Sometimes you wish you'd killed an Iraqi soldier. Or many Iraqi soldiers, in a series of fierce firefights while on patrol, with dozens of well-placed shots from your M40AI, through countless calls for fire. During the darkest nights you'd even offer your life to go back in time, back to the desert for the chance to kill. You consider yourself less of a marine and even less of a man for not having killed while at combat. There is a wreck in your head, part of the aftermath, and you must dismantle the wreck. But after many years you discover that you cannot dismantle the wreck, so you move it around and bury it. It took years for you to understand that the most complex. and dangerous conflicts, the most harrowing operations, and the most deadly wars, occur in the head. You are certain you'd be no better or worse a man if you'd killed one or all of the men you sometimes fantasize about killing. Probably, you are incorrect, and you would be insane or dead by your own hand if you'd killed one or all of those men. You would've been a great killer. You would've been a terrible killer. If you'd killed those men, you would've told your mother: "No, I never killed anyone," and even though you have indeed killed no one and have told your mother this, still she has said, numerous times, while weeping: "I lost my baby boy when you went to war. You were once so sweet and gentle and now you are an angry and unhappy man." From JARHEAD by Anthony Swofford. Copyright 2003 by Anthony Swofford. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., NY. |
