After my stool solidified, I spent three days on a work crew. My single duty was changing the marquee at the base theater. I don’t recall the titles of the movies I advertised, though I’m sure they were either hyperpyrotechnic combat stories or sorry love stories. Morale builders. On the third and final day of my duty I spelled FUCK IT, SHOWING ALL DAY. An officer’s wife noticed the marquee as she left the base beauty parlor or a wives’ meeting, and she called the theater manager, a grungy first sergeant, and complained.
I corrected the marquee and performed calisthenics the rest of the day, long into the evening, in the back parking lot, the first sergeant sauntering out every fifteen minutes to alter my punishment from push-ups to sit-ups to cherry pickers and back. When the projectionist took her smoke breaks, she’d laugh at me, calling me a greenie and a newbie and a bitch; she was a hagish marine wife, and while the popular literary compulsion is to tell seedy rumors about female projectionists or to recollect filthy encounters involving such a poor hag, I cannot, for to do so would be pure fiction.
I arrived at Seventh Marine headquarters early on a Monday morning. The Seventh Marines were headquartered at San Onofre, the farthest-north subcamp on Camp Pendleton. This was the real Marine Corps, and to be sure, I had not yet experienced the real Marine Corps. Marines ran all around the place, saluting and shouting and spitting and cussing. I was assigned to the Second Battalion. The battalion had just returned from predeployment leave, and they’d be departing in three weeks on a West-Pac, a six-month training tour of Okinawa, the Philippines, and Korea. The duty staff sergeant who checked me in was a short, harsh man. Most of his ribbons were for individual valor in Vietnam. As he looked over the battalion roster, deciding which grunt platoon to send me to, he spoke through his cigar.
“Swofford. What kind of fucking name is that?”
“It’s English, Staff Sergeant.”
“You sound like a goddamn choirboy. Do you play any instruments?”
“I played the trumpet in third grade, Staff Sergeant.”
“The trumpet? Can you still play?”
“Maybe, Staff Sergeant.”
“Maybe my ass. I need a bugler to blow taps and reveille and the battle march. It’ll get you out of the grunts. Headquarters and Support Company. You won’t have to carry a rifle. We’ll give you a sidearm and a bugle. Your pack will be light. If you’re interested, I’ll try you out.”
“Yes, Staff Sergeant, I’d like to try.”
I thought the chance of being a bugler was rather a stroke of luck and to not at least try for the position would be ignorant, even indicative of a certain stupidity, a love for the grunts that many boots professed because they thought the grunt held Spiritual High Ground in the Corps. I didn’t need Spiritual High Ground. I needed a bugle and a sidearm and a featherlight pack. The staff sergeant told me to stow my gear in the rec room and meet him at the flagpole at 0900 for battalion formation and my bugle tryout.
The rec room was full of grunts playing cards and billiards. They all looked at me but no one spoke. They didn’t need to speak, I was the new guy, I was fucked, and they were going to do the fucking. “Bend over, sweet cheeks,” I heard someone whisper as I left the room. I met the staff sergeant at the flagpole. He seemed giddy, oddly excited for a man who’d fought in one of the more senseless wars of the century.
“Swofford, do you wonder why I look old enough to be your grandpop but I’m still a goddamn staff sergeant?”
“No, Staff Sergeant.”
“Because in Vietnam I beat a lieutenant over the head with my E-tool. He wanted to send my platoon into a gook valley, and I told him to fuck himself, to which he told me he’d send me to the brig, to which I pulled out my E-tool and split open his fucking head before calling in a medevac for his dumb ass. I didn’t go to the brig but I lost my stripes. An hour later another platoon went up that valley and got carved to fuck. Poof, the sorry fuckers were dead and gone. My platoon mates still send me birthday cards, did you know that?”
“I didn’t know that, Staff Sergeant.”
“Well, now you do. And stop calling me staff sergeant. Was your old man in the war?”
“He was in the air force. He built hot runways.”
“The fucking air farce. He ever tell you about it? Did he live?”
“Yes, he lived. He spoke once about Vietnam.”
“If he only spoke once, he wasn’t lying.”
The battalion poured onto the parade deck in a U formation. After the company commanders reported to the major, “All present and accounted for,” the staff sergeant left me at the flagpole and joined the colonel and the major and the other staff officers.
The sergeant major used a bullhorn to address the men, welcoming them home from leave, reminding them he had granted an extra seventy-two hours of liberty, a bonus three days of freedom, and he expected recompense for his charity, in the form of gallant behavior overseas.
He said, “No rapes of village girls, marines. No beating up old Okinawan women for a free plate of yakisoba or a bowl of jungle juice. If you’re gonna screw working girls, make sure they’re clean. And if you’re married, don’t let me hear about it, don’t let the docs tell me you’re on treatment, because I’ll give you office hours, minimum of one stripe and two months’ pay. Goddamnit, check their Clean-Crotch cards. Last West-Pac we had over two hundred cases of the clap, seven herpes, one syphilis, and possibly one AIDS. Don’t bring dirty members home to America. Right now on Kadena Air Base there’s a flyboy who’s got some disease they’ve never seen before. His little pecker is falling off in pieces. He’s quarantined. The horny bastard’s going to die.”
The sergeant major ordered the battalion to return to the barracks and commence with field day.
The staff sergeant joined me at the flagpole and said, “You still want that bugle job? There isn’t a bugle job, you fucking monkey! I could’ve humiliated you in front of the battalion, called you out there to make bugle noises with your mouth. But I didn’t because for some reason I like you. Swofford, you are a goddamn Marine Corps grunt. You are the most savage, the meanest, the crudest, the most unforgiving creature in God’s cruel kingdom. You are a killer, not a goddamn bugle player. That bugle shit is from the movies. You ain’t Frank Fucking Sinatra.”
“Aye, aye, Staff Sergeant.”
“You’re in Third Platoon, G Company. Third is full of drunks and half-wits. Maybe you can bring some respectability to the sons of bitches.”
“Thanks, Staff Sergeant.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t fucking die.”
I was being forced into the Spiritual High Ground of the Marine Corps grunt. I appreciated the staff sergeant’s generosity in not ordering me in front of the battalion for the mouth bugle tryout. I thought that perhaps I reminded him of a son he’d lost contact with or never had.
I retrieved my gear and the G Company duty sergeant told me I was assigned to room 325, with Private Bottoms and Private Frontier. I entered the room and saw a large crowd gathered around an unmade rack, my rack. One marine was biting his fist as another used a propane torch to heat wire hangers bent to form the letters USMC. I dropped my gear and watched.
Someone said, “Fucko is here.”
When the hangers pulsed red-hot, the branding marine shoved the four-letter contraption against the other marine’s outer calf. The marine bit his fist until he broke skin and began to bleed. Tears streamed from his eyes and the room filled with the dank stink of his flesh. I vomited into the shitcan and the room erupted in cheers. Before I could speak, the men piled on top of me and bound my hands behind my back with an electrical extension cord and gagged me with dirty skivvies.
The marine at the torch reheated the hangers, and as he did, flesh and hair from the prior man smoked on the metal. At first I struggled and then I did not. The burning-hot metal was extremely painful, but the psychological tumult of the morning took over, from battalion bugler to Fucko, and the pain slowly receded and a deep euphoria took
over. The smell of my own burnt leg-flesh did not make me ill, in the same way a man can smell his own shit and not mind the stench, while the smell of another man’s waste is vomitous. I was in the stink and the shit, the gutter of the Marine Corps, the gutter of the world, and I knew I had made a mistake, but perhaps I’d discover ME in the gutter, perhaps I’d discover ME in the same way centuries of men had discovered themselves, while at war, while in the center of the phalanx, drowning in the stink and the shit and the rubble and the piss and the flesh.
The men left the room and I fell asleep and didn’t wake until it was dark and the man named Frontier untied and ungagged me and offered me a plate of food and a bottle of whiskey to drink from. I reached down to feel my branding wound but my skin was smooth. My branding had been a fake; they’d placed a cold piece of metal against my skin!
Frontier said, “That’s a little fuck-fuck trick we play on the new guys. Someday you’ll rate a branding. You gotta be a crazy motherfucker first. That sergeant we branded, he’s one crazy bitch. He spent six months in Honduras on patrol and all he ate was cocoa and rehydrated pears. He screwed about ten jungle whores a day. Didn’t even catch the clap. In the PI he paid a jeepney driver a hundred bucks to drive through the gate at Subic Bay while he fucked a bar girl doggy-style on the hood, and he and the whore both were wearing gas masks. You gotta pull some shit like that before we brand you.”
Bottoms and Frontier were drunks and not the simple drunks who are concerned only with their own drunkenness, their own sad stupor, but social drunks, the poor bastards who feel it is their duty to fill every mouth in the house with drink. So nightly they filled me up, with decent whiskey mostly, but as their funds ran low, they switched to generic gin and powdered Gatorade. The two were pleased with hydrating themselves and catching a drunk at the same time.
I was happy to drink with Frontier and Bottoms; they were decent young men, ruined early by the Marine Corps and dedicated to debasing the standards and policies of the institution that had struck them nearly dead in the moist tracks of youth. I enjoyed hearing their manifestos against the Corps—the Suck, as they called it, “because it sucks dicks to be in it and it sucks the life out of you.”
After spending time around Frontier and Bottoms, I realized the grunt holds Spiritual High Ground because he creates it; through constant bitching and inebriation he creates his own Grunt Island, and the poor, sad, angry grunt on the outside is actually a happy and contented grunt on the inside, because he has been heard, someone understands his misery: through profanity and disgrace he has communicated the truth of his being—an awful life punctuated by short bursts of mostly meaningless action, involving situations where he might die horribly or watch his friends die horribly. The very real possibility of dying at any moment—that is the grunt’s magic, his Spiritual High Ground.
The constant clatter of the discarded liquor bottles and the cackles and howls from my roommates helped me forget that I’d made a mistake by joining the Corps.
A few weeks after my fake branding we deployed on our West-Pac.
I spent a lot of my time on Okinawa working out. I went to the gym with Graycochea, a huge Hawaiian guy who hated running and swimming and shooting rifles and every other marine duty except lifting weights. The few gyms on Camp Hansen were primitive and small, one end of a barracks stuffed as full with free weights as possible. Graycochea was much stronger than me, but we were good partners. I could max bench-press 350 pounds, and I started my sets with 225; he could max 450 and he started with 300. We pushed each other, and we screamed at and insulted each other, and after our workouts we walked slowly back to our barracks, tired and cussing the world and our loneliness.
I learned from Graycochea that just because you’re a marine, it doesn’t mean you must like other marines or even care about them. I was in awe of the Fleet Marine Force—the fighting Corps, hard Corps—definitely a boot. I wanted to talk to everyone and find out where they were from, ask questions about their hometown, buy them a beer, just hang out; I thought I’d been invited to one big party, and we should all be friends. One day after we left the gym (I’d been talking with some tankers between sets), Graycochea told me flatly, “Swoff, stop that socializing. You think these guys give a fuck about you? They flap their lips’ cause you ask questions. You’re too nice. Stop smiling. Stop acting like a girl on her first date. This is the Fleet, motherfucker, this ain’t high school. These guys will backstab you in a second. Third Platoon, that’s all you can trust, no one else. No one else in the whole Suck.”
Graycochea told me about his village and his girl waiting back home. We shared a barracks cubicle, and her pictures hung from our walls, and I knew that nothing mattered in the world to him but loving his girl. I wanted to love like that. After our West-Pac, Graycochea still had eighteen months on his contract. He took his leave to Hawaii and stayed. I hope they never caught him, that he’s still free, in his village, loving his girl.
About a month into the deployment a Corporal Wagner from the battalion Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon, STA, visited me in the barracks. He said he’d heard I was a hard bastard, that on humps my platoon handed the heaviest gear to me and I carried it without complaint; he’d heard that I’d fallen from a cliff in the Northern Training Area, with full ruck on my back, fifty feet to the ground, and walked away; he’d heard that I spent time in the library when I wasn’t in the gym. He looked over my stack of books, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Anabasis, The Portable Nietzsche, Hamlet, and said, “I don’t know what the fuck any of these books are, and I don’t care, but if you’re tough and don’t complain and you’re at least a little smart, I want you to take the STA indoc. I think you could be a scout/sniper. The major doesn’t want us recruiting, so let’s just say a bird told you to start running more and lifting less and studying patrol orders and weapons nomenclature and the history of sniping.”
I asked Graycochea about Wagner, and he told me I could trust him. He told me he wouldn’t let me lift with him anymore, he wanted me to improve my cardio. But I told Graycochea I wasn’t interested in STA, that I liked being Third Platoon’s mule, and I liked everyone in the platoon. He told me I was stupid, that I should try for STA because after the deployment most of Third was discharging anyway, and in a grunt platoon you never knew what kind of new assholes would be in charge of you, but with STA you were at least assured that the assholes could kill the enemy with one bullet from a thousand yards. I didn’t know anything about STA—they’d been the guys who wore different physical-training gear and flew in Hueys while the rest of the battalion humped, while the line platoons walked up and down hills, and up and down hills. I talked to the battalion weapons officer and acquired training materials and articles on STA and scout/snipers.
Now I would learn what a sniper really was. The term was first applied to a rifleman during the eighteenth century by British army personnel serving in India. The snipe was a bird so difficult to shoot that only the most disciplined, well-trained, and artful hunters could take it down.
The reticle telescope, invented in 1640, had already initiated the birth of sharpshooting. During the Revolutionary War, the navy employed marines as “fighting tops”—the men who fought from the mast rigging aboard ships and used their overhead vantage to harass and kill the enemy with precise fire. Americans tried to develop a sniper rifle, but the weight of the gun and its recoil proved problematic. The scopes were as long as the rifles and would often break free from the weapons.
During the Civil War, both sides used sharpshooters on the battlefield. The Union’s best shots were recruited for Berdan’s Sharpshooters, a distinction that required the member to shoot ten rounds in a five-inch group. Most of the men owned their own weapons, heavy rifles that weighed as much as thirty pounds. General Lee used sharpshooters as well, most notably at the battle for Fredericksburg.
Prior to World War I, most military professionals thought the Gatling gun had nullified and made useless the precision fire of the snip
er. The stream of bullets that the Gatling gun created was assumed to be far more effective than the sniper’s single, concentrated shot. But the M1903 Springfield, first manufactured at the turn of the century, and capable of repeated accurate fire, boosted the competition between and within the services for marksmanship expertise.
During World War I, trench warfare was ideal for the sniper—grouped enemy soldiers, often bored and in low morale, unwilling to stay put in defensive positions, proved ripe targets. The Germans, using scopes made by their superior optical factories, deployed their snipers with verve and bravado, eschewing cover and camouflage for open firing positions and body armor! There also exists the apocryphal story of the German sniper who disemboweled a felled horse and fired from within the remains of the carcass, the muzzle protruding through the mouth of the corpse, the sniper acquiring his targets through the dead animal’s eyeholes.
The British established a sniper, observer, scout school in France during the war, in hopes of countering the great German sniper advantage. The instructor, Major Hesketh-Prichard, combined the hunting and tracking skills of the Scottish gamekeeper, the ghillie, with the marksmanship skills of the British competitive shooters. The ghillies captured wild game and introduced the animals to preserves. The ghillie suit, the modern sniper’s principal camouflage uniform, derives its name from these Scottish game hunters. The training developed at this British school also included the craft of hide building, and much that the British learned in World War I concerning hide construction and sniper employment is still, in modern times, essential to the proper utilization of snipers.