The Business We've Chosen
Tatiana Gutheil
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done…In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh."
—Tim O'Brien, "How to Tell a True War Story"[1]
“meat tag,” Jon Goldman explained, is what you call a soldier’s dog tag that has been tattooed on his body. A soldier gets “meat tags,” Jon said, “just in case you die.” One of Jon’s friends in Iraq had a “meat tag” tattoo. His friend was killed there. The only tattoo Jon has is a Marine Corp eagle, globe and anchor on his bicep.
Jon told me this as we drove down route 91, headed for a shooting range in Springfield, Massachusetts. Jon said he had a “rusty trigger finger” but still considers himself a “somewhat qualified expert.” If I shot better than him today, Jon joked, I had to promise to keep it to myself. 
Jon is from Brookline, Massachusetts and turned twenty-two at the end of April. He spent a 7-month tour in Iraq, from late March 2006 to late October. In Iraq he carried a M16 A4 203 and a 9mm. The 9mm is the Marine’s standard issue side arm. In WWII, Jon explained, soldiers carried Colt 45s.
As John talked, he would interrupt himself to explain military procedure and military history to me. His voice would get louder and more excited.
“A 9mm will stop them, but it wont put them on the ground,” he said. “The 45mm is a larger round and will blow a hole in someone this fucking big.” With one hand on the steering wheel, he gestured a huge hole on his chest. “Let’s say you were my wife or mother,” he continued. “In WWII you could send a soldier a .45 in the mail.” He smiled, pushed up his glasses and added, “If I could, I would send home for two .45s.”
Last weekend, he and his brother, Michael, shot at some pumpkins with a 40-caliber pistol. His brother, also a Marine, “kept the lights on” (was on active duty) in Japan, where he had been stationed for a year. Jon’s brother joined the Marines in 1999, but his contract expired in 2004, before he could serve in Iraq. His brother was disappointed. Jon described his brother as a “mote dog.” “Mote” stands for motivation, and a “mote dog” refers to a soldier who is a war hawk.
During our forty-minute drive to the shooting range, Jon recited the timeline of his military service; he remembered the dates exactly.
He went to boot camp January 4th 2004, as a recruit. He graduated April 2nd 2004, as a Private E1. He attended the S.O. I. (School of Infantry); he graduated June 15th as a 0331 (Machine Gunner) PFC (Private First Class). He joined unit 125 (1st battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine division) and was activated for duty December 5th, 2005. He then did a three-month work-up practice training in California at the 29 Palms Marine Base from January to late March. (Jon said 29 Palms is known as “The Devil’s Asshole.” The base is all rocks and desert, Iraq in California.) By the time Jon left for Iraq March 2006, he’d been promoted to Lance Corporal. It took 2-3 days to get to Fallujah. 7-months later, on September 4th, 2006, during his last month of service in Iraq, Jon’s humvee hit an IED (improvised explosion device).[2] Jon was injured in the explosion. His knee was torn open and he had first and second degree burns on his face and arms. Two other Marines, Murray and Burke, were also wounded. Each man lost a leg.
At the Smith & Wesson shooting range in Springfield, the clerk asks us for two forms of identification. Jon hands the man his driver’s license and his military ID. He gives me a self-conscious little smile. We decide to share a gun and range lane. We choose a Smith & Wesson 9mm. Jon hasn’t fired one since he came home from Iraq. The clerk issues us protective glasses, ear coverings, and white caps that say, “Shooting Sports Center.” We pick up our gun, our ammo, and silhouette targets from the transfer door.
At our range lane, Jon takes out the clip and begins loading it, pushing the bullets in with his thumb. The 9mm we’re using has a 10 round clip; his 9mm in Iraq had a 15 round clip. As Jon loads the clip, he explains the difference between a bullet and a round: a bullet is what you load in the gun; a round is the bullet once it’s fired. It was hard for us to hear one another through our headsets; we shouted back and forth to each other over the sound of other people firing.
Jon decided to shoot first. He pinned the silhouette target to the holder with a clothespin and pushed the button that sent the target down the lane. He cracked his neck and raised the gun, fell back into his shooting stance, rigid and familiar. He shot well, but not as well as I’d imagined. Many rounds hit in the black rings near the center but some were off to the side, especially in the beginning. He improved as he got used to the gun. When it was my turn to shoot, Jon coached me on my posture and reminded me to breathe. He told me to pull the trigger slowly, after breathing out, when the body is completely still.
I did pretty well for someone who had never shot a 9mm before. My next few turns however, didn’t go as well because in anticipation of the shot’s sound and kickback, I led the gun down. My shots grazed the bottom of the target. When I was doing badly with the 9mm, Jon told me not to worry about it, nodding to the group of Asian men near us.
“The Asians next to us suck,” he shouted. “One was taking a couple chunks out of the ceiling before he started hitting the target. So don’t feel bad.”
Every time Jon reloaded a clip, he shouted part of his story to me.
He’d reload, and then thrust the clip into the gun with the palm of his hand. By the end of our day, Jon’s fingers were black and his thumb was stiff and sore. The clip always made a loud, satisfying click as it slid into place. Jon would hand me the loaded gun and I’d shoot. He'd reload and shoot.
He’d shout about Iraq, about 50mm rounds, about how he and his friends in Iraq used to open up bullets and make trails of gunpowder and light them on fire. He’d laugh, then make an explosion sound--the sound effects of a kid playing with his G.I. Joes.
After two hours, we’d shot over 150 rounds—3 boxes of ammo.
Back in Amherst, we sat in Jon’s room in the North Apartments of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Outside the window, it was dark and raining. The room was sparsely decorated; Jon kept most of his things organized in containers under his bed. On the walls were a few posters; Christopher Reeves as Superman stood akimbo, Michael J. Fox was on the opposite wall: Marty McFly from Back 2 The Future. Batman and Green Lantern action figures were propped on Jon’s desk, next to the car from Back 2 The Future and a row of videogames and DVDs. There was a large television; South Park was paused on his laptop. On top of his closet was Jon’s Marine Corp Dress Blue Barracks Cover (a formal white hat with a black brim and gold medal) and his uniform camouflage fatigue cap.
Jon’s dorm room was roughly the size of his room in Iraq, but in Iraq he had to share it with five other men in three bunk beds. UMass North Apartments consist of suites: a kitchen, two bathrooms, and a living room with stiff, uncomfortable furniture. Jon lives with three other guys, one of whom he has seen only twice since he started this semester. The living room walls are bare—you wouldn’t know anyone was living there if it weren’t for a pan of brownies on the counter, half-eaten, a sign of life.
Jon talked about what happened in Iraq on September fourth, 2006 when his humvee went over the IED. Despite being injured in September and having the option of returning home early, Jon stayed to complete his tour, then left with the rest of his company. After being injured, he received the Purple Heart and a letter of commendation for bravery.
Jon was stationed in Fallujah, at what had been Uday Hussein’s weekend resort town. The Marines renamed it Camp Baharia. “Baharia” is an Arabic word, meaning Marines.
Jon showed me an old Iraqi commercial he’d found online. It was an advertisement for the resort before the war started. We watched on his laptop as an excited voice encouraged, in Arabic, to visit the place. Arabic script in different colors flashed on the screen as the camera panned across rows of small houses with patterned curtains and small gardens, rows of brightly colored tents and cabanas, lights wrapped around palm trees, restaurants and boats on the main lake. Jon pointed to different places where he had been. Then he showed me pictures he took while he was stationed there. The small houses were lined with walls of green sandbags; the curtains were long gone; the windows boarded up. Bullet holes riddled every surface; buildings had crumbled and fallen over, the cabanas were bombed out shells. No grass, no lights, no color, no plumbing, just porta-pottys.
There were rumors that Uday Hussein had raped and tortured people in various places on what was now the base; his crimes haunted the rooms like ghost stories. Jon had wanted to swim in the lake; he wasn’t allowed because they’d found corpses in it. Around his third or fourth week there, an interpreter for the Marines drowned in the lake and Jon was sent, along with five others, to fish him out. It was the first dead body he saw in Iraq.
Early in the morning, around 8 or 9 am on September 4th, before Jon was hit, four of his friends in his company hit an IED in their humvee. Three were killed, one severely wounded. They were hit with what is called a “belly shot.” A belly shot is an explosion directly under a humvee. In this case, it hit right under the Backseat GIB,[3] a Navy medic named Christopher Walsh, known as Doc Walsh. The blast liquefied Walsh in an instant. The gunner and VC (Vehicle Commander) were also killed. In Jon’s words, the Gunner was “blown into a million pieces” and the VC was blown in half. The driver was on fire when another Marine pulled him from the vehicle; he suffered 3rd degree burns on over 60 percent of his body.
Jon was told recently that the driver had just had surgery on his eye; his new cornea lets him see shapes. It was a combination of luck and coincidence that the driver could be pulled from the vehicle at all: Humvee doors are equipped with Combat Locks. It is S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure) to have every door locked during patrol. The Combat Lock prevents people from being able to open a door from the outside. That day, the doors weren’t locked. A Marine could pull the driver out in time.
Jon, who was patrolling the next block over, heard the explosion of the humvee and thought things were ok when he saw the white smoke. Up until that day, there had not been any IED deaths during Jon’s tour. He realized something was wrong when he saw the black smoke. Parts of a truck or bodies were burning. When they reached the humvee almost nothing was left of it but the shell. It was still burning.
Jon’s platoon patrolled the area for six hours and did not know what had happened or who had died, because names were never said over the radio. All they were told was that their had been three KIAs (Killed In Action), and one wounded in action. The whole afternoon, Jon was wondering who it was, going over people in his head, making lists of his friends. When they returned to base, they were told who had died.
Later that night, they received new orders. Jon’s platoon would have to go back to the ECP (Entry Check Point) to retrieve the stuff they had left there from the night before. The news of who had died was still sinking in. An hour later, less than 100 yards into the city, riding down one of the biggest streets in Fallujah, Jon’s humvee ran over the IED.
“All of a sudden BOOM,” Jon said, making a loud noise and gesturing explosions upwards with his hands. “Our truck was on fire. Our IED was a pressure plate that lit up our fuel instantly. The fuel that our humvees rolled on is called JP8 fuel; it’s not combustible, you can't drop a match on it, it won’t light up. You’d need to be hitting at this thing with a hammer at 1000 mph; you really need to be causing some severe pressure. So the pressure plate that hit our truck, hit the engine going like 1000 mph.”
He leaned in and told me to imagine a manhole cover, from a sewer. Then to imagine explosives packed beneath it so that when it goes off, the sewer cover is superheated and warped into a cone by the explosion. It goes from being flat, to being pointed. A pressure plate like that will tear through any armor—anything you put in front of it.
“I forget what happened next,” Jon said. “The guy driving behind us said he saw our vehicle lift up off the ground. I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, the whole truck’s on fire.’ So I rolled over the side, while the humvee was still moving--we were going a pretty good speed, maybe 15 miles an hour. I don’t remember rolling much, I just remember hitting the ground.”
He was crawling around in the street on all fours when he realized what had happened. “I thought I was dreaming at first, really,” he said. “I was knocked back two weeks. Then the Muj’s[4] started firing at us.”
The explosion had slammed Jon’s knees into the gears of his gun; his left knee was torn open. He had first-degree burns on his face, second degree burns on his arms, and a crushed ankle.
“There’s still this red mark on my face, Jon said, touching his cheek. He pulled up his sleeves and showed me the second-degree burn scars on his wrists.
Sometimes, Jon would stand up while he was talking to me. He’d act out a scene, or show me the positions of people. He’d gesture with his hands or put on voices for different people: a woman’s high, breathy voice, the slow, voice of a doctor, the screaming voice of a Corporal, and the gruff, deep voice of a higher up, or a General.
After Jon rolled onto the street, the Mujahadeen opened fire. A fellow Marine later told Jon that the Muj tried to shoot him as he was crawling on the ground. They fired two RPGs (Rocket Propelled Grenades), but Jon never heard them because his ears were still ringing from the explosion.
Jon stopped the story to explain that any platoon movement is always a 7 or 8-vehicle convoy. Jon was in the second to last truck. Six trucks had gone by without setting off the IED. Jon thinks about that a lot. Thinks about why the trucks before him hadn’t set the explosion off.
“Must have just been bad luck, I guess,” he shrugged.
The trucks ahead heard the blast from behind them. They saw the firefight, turned around, and opened fire.
“They lit this building up, it was what’s called an ‘ammo dump,’ ” Jon explained. “My buddy Sully shot like 600 rounds, they opened up on them. Diaz melted two SAW [Squad Automatic Weapon] barrels, but that’s because he’s an idiot. After those assholes shot us, my entire platoon just fired like a wall of lead; they tore that building up. Then we went to the hospital.” Jon paused, then smiled to himself. “Well, this is a funny story.”
He paused again, thought for a minute, then continued.
“So I’m crawling on all fours, getting shot at, not knowing what the fuck is going on, and then one vehicle pulls up behind me and Doc Jordan jumps out and asks if I’m ok.” Jon tells Jordan he’s fine, tells the Doc to go help Burke and Murray because Jon had no idea where they were. “I was unarmed in the middle of a firefight,” he said. “I wasn’t wearing my pistol, I don’t know why, and my rifle was blown to like 300 yards away. Someone actually found it later, like down the street.”
Then he heard someone scream, “Get in the truck!” He climbed into the back of a humvee. That’s when he felt his knees.
“It felt like someone had hit my legs with a baseball bat. It really, really, really hurt,” he said. “And my face felt wet; I thought I was bleeding. It turns out it was from the burns. It’s hard to describe, it just felt wet. I look out the window and people are shooting everything up. And I start seeing people dragging bodies, I don’t know if it was Burke or Murray, but they were getting them on stretchers. For some reason, the vehicle that I jumped into, the driver and the VC jumped out. No driver and no VC, just me and the gunner, Diaz, in the turret.” He made a shooting sound. “Just blowing shit up. The idiot was hitting a telephone pole, I could see it, and this is the funny part.” Jon laughs. There are four windows in a truck, he says. Every fifth bullet in a link of ammunition, especially machine gun ammo, is a ‘tracer’ so you can see where you’re firing. Tracers are magnesium-tipped rounds and when they burn they show up red, like lasers.
“I’m sitting in the back, my knees ache, and I keep seeing these red things hitting something and bouncing all over. It couldn’t have been more than 50 feet to Diaz’s left; he was trying to shoot at the bad guys; they were on the other side of a telephone pole. The driver had left so the vehicle was stuck in a bad position, with the Diaz at a bad angle to aim and return fire. So I went around to the other side, not even thinking really, and moved it up like 5 or 10 feet and said, ‘Is that better?’ And Diaz shouts, ‘Yeah, Perfect.’ Then he started shooting them, I think. But he had been lighting up this telephone poll for like five minutes.” Jon laughed again.
A Corporal, a VC from another truck, jumped into the humvee Jon was in. He said to Jon, “We’re going to do a med-evac. Drive!” Other VCs were jumping out of their trucks, running to other trucks, trying to help, trying to shoot, trying to do something.
“So I’m thinking,” Jon said, ‘Should I tell someone that I can't feel my legs?’ The Corporal says, ‘Drive!’ I could have said, ‘No’. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I said, ‘Ok’.
“I was driving the lead gun truck,” Jon said. As he spoke, he became animated; grew louder. He sounded like he was describing a car chase scene from an action film. “Burke and Murray were in the highback behind me. So as we are driving, I start feeling worse and worse, my adrenaline is going out the window. We were doing 70, which for a humvee is flying. Those things are weighed down with like a million pounds of armor, steel and bullets, 
and a cooler with ice. So we are flying at like warp speed and I’m cutting corners, the thing is almost flipping over.”
“We get to the hospital. It took like ten minutes. The Corporal starts assigning jobs. I tell him, ‘No, Corporal. I think I’m going to check myself in.’ He says to me, ‘You’re not going anywhere; you’re going to stay in the vehicle.’ He didn’t know that I had been in the truck that hit the IED. He just thought I was being a bitch or something. I look in the review mirror, and I can see them pulling Burke and Murray out, and I step out of the vehicle, and my adrenaline was gone, I could not walk, so I just fell straight out onto the ground.”
Diaz and Atwood had to carry Jon into the hospital using a fireman’s carry.
Jon put on his Corporal voice. “Meanwhile the Corporal is screaming, ‘Where is he going? Where is he going? Get back here!’ Then some nurse comes up and she says [Jon imitates a woman’s voice], ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of your friend.’ And he says [screaming Corporal voice], ‘What?! What’s wrong with him?’ And then she says, ‘Oh, he was in the explosion.” And he says, ‘WHAT?! He didn’t tell me!’
“So we get in there and they are pulling off my flack jacket, pulling off my Kevlar, they’re tearing off my flightsuit because they don’t know where I’ve been hit. I’m bloody and burnt all over. Burnt, battered and bashed. They start looking at my knee and some asshole says, ‘Can you keep his knee?’ and I had a heart attack.” Jon grabs at his chest as he says this. He looks panicked. “For a minute or two there, Oh my God.” He looks at me knowingly; he had thought he was going to lose the leg. He pointed to the scar on his knee. “My whole knee just kind of opened up,” he said. Jon held up a closed fist and then opened his fingers, like a blooming flower.
The doctors thought there might be shrapnel in the wound. They had to remove the shrapnel before the wound became infected. They told him they were going to put some fluid in the wound to push out the shrapnel. Jon protested that there was no shrapnel.
“So they inject this fluid into my knee, my God, you don’t know the pain. It’s like putting my knee in a vice and screwing it tighter and tighter. That little tablespoon of fluid felt like they were crushing my knee. I was on stretcher and I thought I was going to break it apart because I was grabbing onto it so hard. As soon as they said, ‘Done’ I just collapsed, like 12 orgasms, I was done, I was wasted. Then they start giving me an ultrasound. That’s right, ultrasound. I was like, ‘No, I’m not pregnant! I’m not pregnant!’”
The ultrasound was to check for internal bleeding, and organ damage. A ruptured spleen or a punctured lung.
“They are forcing this thing into me, really pushing it into me and ramming it into my stomach.” Jon pushes his fists into his stomach. “Then they checked my junk, to make sure it was all still there—Thank God, it was. They gave me a fondle and said I was all there, I was like ‘Uh, thanks.’” Jon squirms, pretending to push away the doctor’s groping hands. He laughed, joking to the imaginary doctors, “But you haven’t even bought me dinner yet! Jesus!”
After Jon was lying in the hospital for a while, First Sergeant Delcort came in. Jon asked about Burke and Murray. Delcort said that they were both going to lose one leg. Jon’s voice grew serious.
“Honestly, that’s when I went to pieces,” Jon said. “I cried. I was upset because me and Murray switched out a lot, so it easily could have been me. It’s just bad luck, I felt terrible.”
Jon got up and walked over to my left side. Standing to my left, Jon said, “Let’s say you’re the VC. You’re to my right, the driver stands here.” The pressure plate had exploded up through the middle of the hood of the truck, Jon explained. Since Murray and Burke were the driver and VC, respectively, the driver lost his right leg and the VC lost his left. Jon slapped me hard on my left leg, the leg the VC would lose.
“They both lost their legs above the knee,” he said.
Jon and I were silent for a minute. I knew that it is worse to lose a leg above the knee than below it.
I’d met Murray when Jon and I went to the Marine Ball last December. Murray was there in his dress blues, walking on a prosthetic leg. Burke was still in the hospital recovering. Most people assumed Murray wouldn’t come, since he had only been on the prosthetic for a little while and was still adjusting to it. Everyone was in their dress blues and ribbons; Murray and Jon wore the stripes from their Purple Hearts. There was a lot of drinking. By the end many of the Marines, including Jon and Murray, were very drunk. Murray looked frail, his eyes were sunken in and his face was sweaty.
Late in the night, standing in a crowd of Marines, I watched in horror as Murray grabbed his prosthetic leg, twisted it around and upwards so that he was standing with the black, polished shoe up near his chest, the leg twisted at a horrible, disturbing angle. He smiled a sick grin and rested his beer bottle on the sole of his shoe. He was laughing, but he looked so strained and miserable that I had to look away. The Marines around me laughed with him and patted him on the back, but they looked uneasy. At another point in the night, while a slow song was playing on the dance floor, Murray again twisted his leg up. This time he held it and swayed back and forth, as though it were his dance partner. I got the impression that if Murray had never been a Marine, he would have been that drunk guy at the party who was dancing with the lamp, instead of his prosthetic leg.
Back in the hospital, the night of the explosion, Jon was told they were going to ship Murray and Burke to a better hospital and if he wanted to see them before they left it would have to be then. He told the doctor, “Yeah, take me to them.”
Jon paused.
“I probably shouldn’t have. They took me to Murray first, and he was in a black body bag. That’s how they travel when somebody’s hurt like that and they’ve done an amputation. Murray was a surgical amputation, and Burke’s was, what is called, a traumatic amputation, meaning his leg was blown off in explosion, so he was a lot worse. Your body temperature starts to go down, you get cold, so they wrap you up in this body bag. He had breathing tube stuck down his mouth; he looked like he was on death’s door. His eyes were closed, he looked terrible. There was a little shrapnel in face and his hair was all greasy, I think there was some blood.”
Jon paused again and looked down.
Quieter he said, “I’ve never fainted before in my life, but I almost passed out, it was that bad to look at. There was a doctor there who helped carry me in because I was on crutches. As soon as I saw Murray, within like five seconds I was like, ‘Doc, get me out of here before I pass out.’ He asked if I wanted to go see Burke and I said, ‘Hell no.’ I should have, just to go see him, but I would have passed out. Murray just looked so terrible, I thought he was dead.”
Later on, the Sergeant Major and the Battalion Commander came by to visit Jon. Jon knew them well; the Sergeant Major knew Jon’s brother.
The Commander looked at Jon and said, “Tough night.”
Jon said, “ ‘No, sir. Tough day. Bad fucking day.’ ”
“Did you notice my gray hair?” Jon asked self-consciously, running his hand through his hair. He said that while he was in Iraq some of his hair turned gray. He thinks it’s from the stress. I told him I hadn’t noticed, but then when he stepped into a different light I saw the little glint of silver sprinkled throughout his thick, black hair.
This is Jon’s first semester at UMass and he hasn’t made many new friends. “The North Apartments are so fucking lonely. Biggest mistake ever to move there.” There has also been some drama with the girl he has been hooking up with. “That’s a mistake,” he said, leaning over me to make sure I wrote that down. I sat on the floor; Jon sat in a chair. He leaned forward as he spoke, propping his chin on his hands, elbows on his knees.
“Before I went, I was a resident scumbag college student who was in the Marines, but coming back now is more like I’m in the Marines, but going to college. It’s hard at times, I feel different from so many of these kids here. Politics aside, they haven’t been through what I’ve been through. It’s so cliché, but once you’ve lived it, you know, it’s really weird. They’ve never seen their friends blown up in front of them. You never had some guy really trying to kill you. It’s kind of funny at times, just seeing how easy it is, how simple, college kids just getting drunk and partying and no one out to hurt them. And it’s like, wow, six months ago, someone was trying to kill me. I was getting up at zero five in the morning and going on patrols all day and getting shot at and eating shitty food. And now I’m back in the states and no one is trying to kill me, there is nothing to be afraid of.”
Jon paused and leaned back in his chair. Usually when he talked, he spoke loudly, making jokes or putting on voices. Now he was quieter, more serious. “But then again,” he said, “I kind of miss the excitement. I got stir-crazy at first. Honestly, I missed carrying my rifle. I thought I was missing something. Carrying something around for so long, it became like a part of me.”
Jon is surrounded by people with good intentions who expect him to break down at any moment. He has friends who have not had good transitions after coming back from Iraq and have started abusing drugs and alcohol.
“I was told that I should be in a lot worse shape,” he said. “They are expecting me to be. But I’m fine. I’ve been told by a lot of people, including my father, that I’ve adjusted pretty well, that I was wired right.”
Jon keeps reassuring me that he is fine, just bored, just feeling shitty, but he’s been sleeping a lot during the day. He’s been skipping classes. He is always careful about not seeming weak. He emphasizes that he doesn’t regret going to Iraq at all. People are expecting him to be having trouble. He doesn’t want to live down to their expectations.
“I would kill for some excitement,” he said. “I’m not cracking, yet, but man, I’m dying over here.”
I suggested to him that maybe he should talk to someone who understands veteran’s experiences. He acted offended.
“Tia, I’m fine,” he said. “Do I look crazy to you? I’m beyond fine. By looking at me, you couldn’t even tell I was there.”
I told him that I worried that his napping during the day, skipping classes, and insomnia can be signs of something not being ok.
“Duly noted,” he said. “The only reason I skip the classes is because they are boring. You would skip them too.”
“The only problem is I can't sleep at night,” he said. “I don’t know why. I just stay up, staring at the ceiling.” He said he doesn’t need to talk to anyone, that he has no secrets from his Marine buddies and that he talks to them. He said he’s not the kind of guy to spill his feelings to some stranger.
“Chicks dig the whole wounded war-veteran thing, so maybe I shouldn’t get treatment.” he said. “Chicks dig war scars, right?” Then sarcastically, “I have three visible war scars. Not to mention my damaged psyche and wounded soul.”
People keep suggesting he go into therapy. “Fuck that noise,” he says.
There is a possibility that Jon might be redeployed to Iraq in 2009. He has been on “light duty” since he was injured. He is waiting to hear from the doctors and the Marines if he will ever be taken off “light duty” and made active again. He’ll find out in June.
“If I was told I was going back in ‘09, would I be nervous? Yes. Scared? ‘Course. Would I desert and run to Canada? No.”
“There have been rumors about sending troops to Africa,” he said. “I’d go on an African mission tomorrow. Darfur? I’d volunteer tomorrow. There’s good to be done in Iraq, but Africa would be such an easy mission. We’d go there, and just our presence alone would stop genocide. No one is going to fuck with us,” Jon says. “All you have to do is camp out by one city and the first time some machete-wielding tribe comes over to us, then we just lay them out and that’s fucking it. That’s game.”
He thought for a minute. “And just to say, ‘I was in Africa and I stopped genocide,’ I’d do that. To have it on the resume, you know: Iraq and Africa. The old man says: ‘Life is long. No one is holding a gun to your head saying you have to graduate by 2007.’ If that were true, then I never would have joined the Marines and probably would be more of a scumbag…than I am now.” He laughs. “If there is another activation, then I won’t graduate until 2010 or something.”
I ask what he’d rather be doing now. He laughs again.
“I’d rather be whacking Tangos,” he says.
I ask what that means.
“Killing,” he says. He laughs. “Some mote First Sergeant has that as a bumper sticker on his car. The guy is an idiot, and a mote dog.” Jon laughs again. “Tangos means Targets. It’s a nicer way of saying bad guys. I’d rather be whacking Tangos means I’d rather be killing people.”
Two nights ago, Jon dreamt he was carrying his rifle in Iraq and talking to Val, one of the guys who was killed a few hours before Jon was hit. Jon had lied to me about having night terrors; in fact he does have them. They are usually about explosions. The last one was a month ago. Since he has trouble sleeping at night, he naps during the day.
“I don’t want being a Marine to be the thing that defines me,” he said. “My greatest fear is to be made a spectacle. There was some article in the newspaper that just made me laugh about some army soldier, non-infantry,” –Jon rolled his eyes—“who went to Iraq in the invasion in ‘03 and came back in ‘04 and it was all bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch. Seeing what I’ve seen and how close I came to losing a piece of myself and knowing those who did, I could never complain. I do my share of bitching, but I’d never publicize it like that when there are so many others who have it worse off. Like there was some Newsweek cover with a female soldier missing two legs and one arm…I couldn’t wear my Purple Heart next to her, I’d feel terrible. This article though, about the non-infantry army solider, this ‘poor engineer,’ ” Jon sneered. “There was this one paragraph where he was like [Jon puts on a wimpy voice], “ ‘So, me and my friend were walking on the base one night and we hear this firefight from two miles out and it made us sad.’ ” Sarcastically, Jon spat, “Oh, you poor bastard!”
“How about the guys who are responding to that fucking firefight?!” Jon leaned forward; his voice was loud and indignant. “Here you are, walking around the base with no place to go, just killing time. It’s one thing when the infantry bitch, it’s another thing when the non-infantry bitch. It’s like: Shut-up. The worst is when I see articles about people who come back and say, ‘I shouldn’t have gone because war is terrible.’ Well, no fucking shit! I hate these people who go to war and then expect to come back the same, not come back changed. These people who come back and they are all, ‘War is hell.’ And ‘I’ve changed.’ No Fucking Shit. Don’t go into something like this, think you’re going to be ok and then come back and say, ‘Why aren’t I ok?’
It’s like that quote from The Godfather, ‘This is the business we’ve chosen.’
1 O’Brien, Tom. “How to Tell a True War Story,” in Paula Geyh, et al.,eds., Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Pg 174-179
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2 IEDs (improvised explosion devices) are the biggest killer of American troops. Usually roadside bombs, IEDs can come in the form of artillery shells, pressure plates, anti-tank mines or rigged mortar rounds, among others. These bombs can be placed in cans, boxes and sometimes animal carcasses along the side of the road.
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3 A “Backseat GIB” is a term that refers to the individual in the back seat of the humvee. GIB stands for "Guy In Back."
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4 “Muj” is short for “Mujahadeen,” an Arabic word meaning insurgent or terrorist.
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