Just Another Soldier Read online

  October 23, 2004

  THIS IS MY WEAPON, THIS IS MY GERBER…

  The first and second squads of my platoon share the bottom floor of a two-floor barracks. It’s an open bay, and we do most of our squad-level classroom-type training here. It’s just one big room with a bunch of wall lockers and bunks, except ours is seriously run down. A few days ago we’re all working on disassembling and assembling the M249 machine gun. I had the best time behind Dan. I think I could have beat him, but as his team leader, I believe that the politically intelligent thing to do was to just let him win. I think there is more value in his feeling superior than there is for me in the gratification of beating him. Or I could just be full of shit, and this is my elaborate excuse for not beating him. It’s probably a little of both.

  Anyway, after the guys got tired of this, we started working on taking the weapon apart and putting it back together while blindfolded. This can be really tricky, by the way. While Jimmy (another cop in real life) was taking his apart, he was having trouble with one of the parts and asked, “Does anyone have a Gerber [multi-tool]?” and he puts out his hand. Without missing a beat, Sean says, “Yeah, here,” and whips out his dick and puts it in Jimmy’s open hand. Everyone was on the floor, in tears. For about a good ten seconds, Jimmy didn’t seem to know how to handle this unprecedented violation, and continued to work on the weapon before finally taking the blindfold off and making an attempt at trying to find some sort of physical retribution for the affront. This incident has become a source of much discussion, and the jury is still out on who is more gay: the guy who touched a dick or the guy who let a guy touch his dick.

  One could write volumes about the homophobically homoerotic undercurrents in the infantry.

  October 27, 2003

  Long before Fort Drum became Fort Drum, it was Camp Drum. The remnants of what was once Camp Drum are a series of aging buildings known as “Old Post.” The run-down barracks of Old Post are where National Guardsmen are kept when they train at Fort Drum. Three days ago the barracks we were staying in were condemned. So instead of living in a shitty open-bay barracks, we now live in a shitty four-man-room barracks just down the street.

  I think my favorite part of our dilapidated barracks is the latrines. The paint on the floor is at least four layers deep, worn down to the concrete in most spots, particularly in the shower, creating a worn-down-gobstopper rainbow of dreary military colors. The sheer economy of the latrine is the most entertaining part. There are three unpartitioned urinals so closely spaced that if three of us all had to go at the same time we’d all be hip to hip to each other. There is one tiny concrete room in the corner with four shower heads that is supposed to function as a shower for a platoon of sweat-salted grunts. It’s rare for all four shower heads to work, and when any of them does, the hot-water pressure oscillates like a bipolar girlfriend, creating a torturous wave of hot-cold-hot-cold. The toilets are actually partitioned, but they seem to always be occupied with guys trying to rid themselves of MRE-induced constipation or shamelessly masturbating. I think I’ve been duped. I’m not actually at a modern U.S. military installation but at Sing Sing, circa 1940.

  On Saturday we did a little land-navigation training. The standard land-nav training consists of each soldier having to find five eight-digit grid coordinates, in three hours, using a map and compass, but instead we were given one point that a twelve-year-old Boy Scout could have found. Then we did the dead-reckoning course, where you have to find three points given three different directions and distances. Once you reach your point, there is a sign or post of some kind with a code on it. You record the codes and turn them in once you’ve finished. I was walking back from my third dead-reckoning point when I heard someone yelling, “Help!” from a hill. At first I thought someone was just playing around, but the pleas continued. I walked up the hill (as did another sergeant who was in the area) to find a young soldier who had gotten his foot stuck between two large rocks and had fallen down, twisting his ankle something wicked. He was in a lot of pain and was unable to untwist himself. His leg looked bent in a wholly unnatural way, implying a good compound fracture. The rocks weren’t gonna budge, but after a little work we finally got his leg unwedged. Turns out his leg was fine, just tweaked his foot pretty good. I couldn’t believe it. Young soldiers are made of rubber, I swear. Later he told me that once he realized he couldn’t move and no one was responding to his cries, he fell asleep for a while. Testament to the fact that soldiers will sleep anywhere.

  November 3, 2003

  Training right now is in the “check the box” phase, where the brass want to be sure we cover all the bases necessary to put young men in harm’s way. First aid, check; weapons qualification, check; PowerPoint presentation on [enter training topic here], check. I wish I could say that the training has been intensive and pertinent, but in reality it’s been somewhere between decent and complete-waste-of-time. My squad leader, Chris, is very competent when it comes to CQB, and we’ve hit that pretty hard, but other than moving tactically through an urban area and learning room-clearing techniques, most of the training has been purely masturbatory.

  John, Willy, and I have been thinking a little about who we’d like to induct into the Monastic Order of Infantrymen and have decided that Ray and our friend Ernesto should be the first two. We agreed that for a novitiate to be admitted into the MOI, an act must be performed involving physical pain or discomfort, and public nudity. Assuming that there’d be snow at Fort Drum by now, we were thinking something along the lines of naked snow angels, to be witnessed by at least one of the MOI brothers and at least one innocent bystander. Except there’s no snow yet, so we’ll have to come up with something else. Ernesto was going to be given a pass on this rite of passage and simply grandfathered in, due to the fact that he’s thirty-eight and completely devoid of the familial liabilities that prevent admittance (children, wife, girlfriend), a shining example of the infantry monk. Ray, however, needed no guidance on initiation.

  For Halloween, all soldiers the rank of E-4 and below were given a chance to be free from all details for a month as the prize for a costume contest. Considering that we’re at one of the coldest posts in America and haven’t even been issued cold-weather boots yet, scraping up enough materials to put together any kind of costume turned out to be no small feat, despite the reward (no cleaning latrines, no sweeping, no mopping, etc., for a month). There were the usual entries: first sergeant impersonation; company commander impersonation; guy dressed up in nothing but a black ski mask, black boxer briefs, and combat boots (Bring out the Gimp!); and so forth. And then there was Ray. Covered from stem to stern in camouflage paint (light green on the body, dark green as lipstick and eye shadow) and wearing nothing but a field-expedient string bikini made from bandannas and 550 cord. Public nudity? Close enough. Physical pain or discomfort? Ray: “Damn, it’s balls cold out here. And this g-string is kicking my ass!” I’d say it qualifies. The next day, after Ray had spent hours scrubbing cammo off his body, we pulled him and Ernesto aside, taught them the secret handshake, and presented them with their MOI dog tags. Ray: “Wow, I’ve never been part of an order before. What the hell does ‘monastic’ mean?”

  Ray continues to make us proud. Last night, the battalion commander, recently back from a trip to Iraq, gave us a brilliantly verbose speech complete with the “I won’t lie. There will be casualties” line. We all knew what he really wanted to do was quote Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket and say, “Most of you will go to Vietnam. Some of you will not come back.” Anyway, right around the part of the monologue, toward the end, just before soldiers start asking stupid questions, he starts telling us how we need to be sensitive to the Iraqis and the painful period the people of that country are going through. Ray, like the dedicatedly amoral sniper that he is, yells out, “SIR, GIVE ME AN M24, SOME RAMON NOODLES, AND PLENTY OF AMMO, AND EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT!” God, I wish I had that kind of clarity.

  November 13, 2003

>   IN THE KILL HOUSE UNDER A DEAD MOON

  Our first day in the field was spent at a CQB live-fire site. There once was a “tire house” that served this purpose, but it was recently replaced with a structure made of giant sectional fiberglass-reinforced concrete blocks—sometimes called a “shoot house,” sometimes called a “kill house.” Every time one particular instructor said the word “shoot house,” I swore he was saying “shithouse.” Anyway, the layout consists of some basic building scenarios—smallish rectangular rooms, wooden doors, narrow hallways, etc. In place of a floor there is sand, and at the top of the high walls is a railing where instructors can observe the would-be carnage. There is no ceiling, and the entire building is under an enormous pavilion roof. The way targets are handled is pretty clever. A dummy is hung by a wire that is attached to a balloon inflated inside the dummy’s chest. If a proper shot is delivered center-mass of the dummy’s chest, the balloon pops and the dummy falls to the ground.

  Each squad ran through the same two rooms over and over again, first as a dry fire, then with blanks, then with live rounds. The squad is broken down into two fire teams and led by a squad leader. Alpha team takes the first room, then Bravo team—the team I led—takes the second. Once the first room is clear, my team enters the building and lines up against the wall next to the door of the room we are about to enter. This is called a “stack.” In this case, we stacked left of the door. Number-one man in the stack calls that we have a closed door. I am number-three man. I call up the number-four man to the front of the stack to breach the door. In this case it only means he kicks the door in. In other cases he could pry, cut, or blow the door open. Once the door is kicked in, the stack flows into the room, with the number-one man entering the room the way that is easiest for him, usually opposite the way the door swings. In this case, the door swung inward to our left. He entered the room following the right wall, number-two man followed the left, three the right, four the left. In the room there were two dummies in the far opposite corners, one with a cardboard cutout of an AK-47, one without.

  Once it came time to perform the drill with live ammunition, I’ll have to admit I felt pretty amped. Live-fire drills aren’t performed as often as one may think. The Army is fairly obsessed with safety, especially since more fatalities occur due to accidents than anything else, so drills involving live rounds are executed only occasionally. This may not be true for the more elite units, but in general, when soldiers are killing themselves by acts as pedestrian as slipping or falling, I can understand the trepidation a commander may have when it comes to giving a band of bruthaz real destructive power. We donned Ranger body armor—those forty-some-odd-pound ceramic-plated jobs that feel like anvils in the shape of vests—and prepared to run the drill. The entire procedure went down without a hitch, other than Matt’s gunning down the “innocent civilian” in our room who wasn’t sporting a Magic Markered assault rifle like the other mannequin-at-arms.

  The next night, we were to run the same live-fire drill, this time with night-vision goggles. Not a big deal, really, but doing anything with NVGs (night-vision goggles) feels like being underwater or in a videogame, especially since depth perception goes straight to hell. Once you get used to them, it can be manageable, but still somewhat surreal. But then came the wrench in the whole thing. While trying to remove a blank adapter from Matt’s rifle with some pliers, Dan pulled a tendon (ligament?) in his left wrist. His wrist hurt him so badly that he was unable to hold up his rifle. Seeing as how Dan was our number-one man and would be doing most of the shooting once we got in the room, his not being able to hold up his weapon put a serious kink in things. For our squad to certify on this task, we had to perform it as a team, including Dan. Chris, our squad leader, decided to make Dan the number-four man, since that position didn’t need to shoot anything in this drill, only kick the door in. I would be number one, Matt would be number three and the acting team leader, and Peter, normally the number-four man, would be the number-two man. Since Peter had never had to do any shooting on any of the other iterations of the room, the fact that he was now going to be shooting a target with live rounds a few feet in front of me for the first time, in the dark, gave me some pause. Peter is a really good-hearted kid and a potentially decent soldier, but a bit young and inexperienced, and sometimes this is very apparent. I made him put on his goggles long before we were to enter the kill house, to get him adjusted to wearing them, and then I verbally ran through the drill with him over and over again—in retrospect, I think more for my sake than for his.

  All night the moon was full and the sky was clear, providing enough illumination that with the goggles, everything appeared clear as day, although it was all bright green. This of course was too good to last. While we were waiting for our squad’s iteration, the moon slowly started to wane. Turns out our two-minute live-fire drill coincided perfectly with a lunar eclipse. By the time it was our turn to run the drill, the now barely visible moon was a dead gray-red. Our NVGs strained under the starlight, making the infrared lasers on our rifles look like light sabers. So there I am, standing in our squad stack outside the kill house, moments away from breaching the door to the first room, and I’m thinking about how the pain in my frozen toes is almost imperceptible now that my heart is racing, and how my weapon is noticeably heavier when it has live ammunition in it instead of blanks. From there my mind wandered farther. It’s funny how many simple little beautiful things I’ve been able to see while doing an ultimately ugly job. Several nights earlier, I saw my first aurora borealis. It was amazing. The waves of light sometimes filled as much as half the sky. I watched it for an hour. Now I was looking at a lunar eclipse. The sky was perfectly clear, and once the moon was gone, the stars were more brilliant than I’d ever seen them, with no light or air pollution from the city to obscure their view from earth. It became almost suffocating for me to try to absorb the overwhelming enormousness of space, to look into the Milky Way and think that I was looking into my own galaxy. I started to feel ridiculous—meaningless, even—standing there wearing an unwieldy amount of gear, the culmination of human civilization’s technology, all centered on industrialized death. I’m looking at the wall, thinking about how a few minutes ago I thought it was pretty cool how when a bullet hits it, the concrete and fiberglass are made to crumble just enough to absorb the round and then drop it to the sand floor, inert. I hear, “Closed door on the left!” I’m saying, “Breach man, come to the front to kick in the door.” I nod. He kicks. I’m walking into the room, slow and smooth, I scan the first corner, it’s empty, I scan over to the second corner, dummy, no gun, I scan over to the third corner, dummy, gun, I press the lever on the PAQ4 on my weapon, a green laser illuminates the room, I paint the dummy’s chest with it, I squeeze the trigger twice.

  Everything went as it should have. Peter performed perfectly, as did we all. The eclipse came and went, and the platoon slept fitfully in a cramped tent.

  Quotes of the Week

  After busting his lip open on the rear-sight aperture of his SAW during a react-to-contact drill earlier in the day, Juan then puked due to the dehydration he suffered on our establish-an-observation-post drill later in the day. One of the instructors, bemused by Juan’s apparent run of bad luck, tells him, “If it were raining pussy, you’d be the only guy to get hit by a big ol’ dick.”

  In light of the Army’s apparent lack of funds when it comes to providing us with adequate gear for our mission, Jimmy announced, “We’re not going to be issued DCUs [desert camouflage uniforms] because the Army has decided that it will be cheaper to have us keep the green uniforms and just plant trees in Iraq.”

  November 18, 2003

  Our recent field exercise involved more urban operations, this time with us operating as a platoon and using Humvees—both for the first time. I know that a Humvee on a street is a much more tantalizing target for the enemy than a soldier on foot, but can I just tell you how awesome it was to drive to the fight rather than trudge there while wearing
over a hundred pounds of gear? With the trucks, things happen at such a faster pace in general. We roll into the (mock) town, dismount, assault the assigned building (my squad’s part of the mission), deal with the enemy dead and captured, friendly casualties, and any detainees, then mount up and split.