[From Max]

I’m still at the airfield.  I’m never going to leave this fucking dump.

My timeline gets pushed right every other day.  The captain in charge of scheduling the movement mentions it casually, in passing, and shrugs at me.

“Oh, you’re leaving on the . . .”

Thanks.  Dick.

My relationship with the CO is shot.  I’m certain he’s going to fire me.  At this point I’ve already accepted it.  He threatened me the other day.  Called me a “dead man”.  I doubt he was serious, but it caused a strange reaction – I felt strangely better.  I had a flash thought in my head of him grabbing me by the collar.

I wish it were that simple.  If he put his hands on me, that would be a problem I could solve.  Quick.  Efficient.  I shook it out of my head, coming back to the reality that for me the Infantry consists of reams of paperwork and mountains of bullshit.  Unrealistic time lines.  Fluid deadlines.

It rained the other night.

I walked outside in the early morning to piss.  There was a smell in the air – something other than JP8 fumes – a wet, earthy aroma.  It took root in some old part of my brain I thought I’d killed off.  Suddenly I was standing in the middle of my hometown.  That stupid little town by the river.  It was verdant in the summer, aromatic and humid.  It always felt like an old place to me.

I must have walked forty or fifty meters without seeing where I was going.

This is one of the unfortunate side effects of being clear all the time.  The pregnant emotions.  It can never be as simple for me as going somewhere to do a task, completing the mission, and moving out smartly.  I get stuck somehow.  Stuck living in my own head, processing a rubix cube I’d forgotten was ever in there.

I walk everywhere here.  I find myself concentrating on bizarre details – relaxing my shoulders, controlling my breathing – I lose myself in that, like meditating.  I focus on the present, on being present.

I don’t want to think about home.  She is there, and I’m not, and I know what that means and I don’t want to deal with it.  She is supposed to be in the past tense.

Nothing is ever past tense.

The night I met Jerome, they took him away in cuffs.

He was in town for a Genitorturers show.  I knew him from message boards. We met for a drink and I tagged along to Dante’s. At some point he wandered into the crowd. Some dummy was trying to start a mosh and slammed his elbow into Jerome.

Jerome broke his nose.

The dummy was a regular who knew all of the bouncers.  Two police cars showed up.  Jerome’s partner was all business. As he sat in the back seat, she talked to the cops like they were about to do some work on her transmission.

A year later, the two of them moved to Portland and invited a few of us over to watch some fights. Their place was hard to find, tucked deep into the west hills. I was wondering if I was at the right address when Jerome answered the door. He looked smooth in a black dress shirt and slacks, expensive but not flashy. I followed him downstairs to the bar.

I never got a full tour of the house, even when—years later—I lived there for few weeks. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call a mansion, but it did have separate guest quarters. It also had a walk-in gun safe and an octagonal poker room decked out like Mandalay Bay.

I started going over for UFC regularly. We’d make whatever we wanted to drink at the bar. Jerome usually started with Red Bull. He slept during the day, so he was still waking up at seven. He didn’t work, and I was never sure what he did for money. He told me he invested, and I got the impression over time that he did a fair amount of gambling. He was good with numbers, and he was all about learning the tricks.

After the fights were over, they’d let the dogs out—two stout American bulldogs named Brutus and Loki.  Brutus was a beast, but a big cuddler. He’d get butt-hurt if I stopped scratching his back. Jerome always made fun of him.

“Who’s a killer?…”

We’d hang out at the bar for hours, and Jerome would grind away at some point he was trying to make.

Jerome had strong opinions about things.

He gave a lot of people shit, but I felt like I gained his respect the night he dared me to fight him with shinai on the back lawn. We traded a few whacks and he put a gash in my forehead, but I shrugged my shoulders and we were solid after that.

I emailed Central Office to tell them Jerome was the real deal. Satanists imagine themselves as Basil Zaharoff types—opportunists playing player against player to their own ends. Most Satanists are middle class libertarian atheists who like horror movies. Anton LaVey’s pitch was for the individualist who sees life as a fleeting opportunity to find pleasure in a hard world. The ideal Satanist takes steps to create a “total environment” where he can enjoy whatever pleases him, with minimal hassle from “the herd.”  That’s what a lot of people aim for—they just don’t call it Satanism.

Jerome had an idea of how he wanted to live, and he was living exactly that way—almost without compromise. He did what he damn well pleased. He rode motorcycles, smoked cigars, drank high-end liquor and nerded out on firearms. He took me shooting a few times at a gun club he belonged to, always as a guest. He was the kind of guy who would get insulted if you asked to pay for anything.

Jerome and I fell out for a good reason, but I never wished him anything but the best.

His partner left him. Turned out the house was hers. Maybe a lot of the money, too. It would be trashy to ask too much, and I don’t really want to know.

She called me last week to tell me he was dead.  I asked her if it was an accident. She said, “No.”

I got some more details from a mutual friend. Apparently Jerome had stopped paying his bills, gone out to the woods and shot himself.

I didn’t ask “why?”

I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t see him as a sad or troubled person. He was a guy with a big ego and a clear sense of how he wanted to live. He admired samurai—he owned a sword with a pedigree—and we had argued about the finer points of the Hagakure around his bar. I thought of one of my favorite passages:

Nagayama Rokurozaemon was going down the Tokaido and was at Hamamatsu. As he passed by an inn, a beggar faced his palanquin and said, “I am a ronin from Echigo. I am short of money and in difficulties. We are both warriors. Please help me out.”

 

Rokurozaemon got angry and said, “It is a discourtesy to mention that we are both warriors. If I were in your state of affairs, I’d cut my stomach open. Rather than being out of money for the road and exposing yourself to shame, cut your stomach open right where you are!” It is said that the beggar moved off.

A friend who’d kept in contact with Jerome mentioned that he’d run into some problems with his gambling operations. Maybe that was it. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was something else. He was so circumspect about his work that it left a lot to the imagination.

Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. No one really knows.

I knew Jerome for years, and I know that he was adamantly against serving anyone. He wanted to live life on his terms, or maybe not at all. He refused to tolerate the petty indignities and insults that most of us put up with every day. If he felt like he was going to be forced to take the position of the beggar—which could have meant many things to him—he might have followed the advice of Rokurozaemon.

That’s the truth I want to believe, and it’s the truth that suits the kind of man he was.

I didn’t have much to say at the wake.

His ex had it set up smooth and classy. 5 star hotel. Open Bar. Free cigars. Sinatra playing. It felt like another one of his parties.

She only broke for a moment. Otherwise, she was as calm and collected as she was the night the cops took him away.

[From Max]

It was sunny and pleasant when I pulled up to the old man’s trailer. Unseasonably warm for early November. Leaves still clung to the trees, or skittered across the street and stuffed themselves into the grassy little corners of unkempt lawns.

“This can’t be it,” I muttered, staring at the Toyota in the driveway.

I circled the block several times, checking off the possibles. Run down tin-can housing with rusting beaters broken down in the driveways. I checked my directions again; five years old and given to me third hand.

The trailers behind the harness track.

I shoved the Jeep into park. I felt my pulse quicken. For a moment I was back in Ranger School. I thought about the forty foot beam, and my mortal terror of heights. I yanked the keys out of the ignition and walked around to the front.

It took a few moments for him to open the door. I had my back turned when I heard the hinges creak. He said nothing at first. He didn’t recognize me.

“Can I help you?”

There was irritation in his voice. I may as well have been holding a vacuum cleaner.

“You don’t recognize your own son . . . ?”

“And . . . ? What do you want?”

It took me ten years to work up the nerve to put myself on his doorstep. To work out enough of the anger to make it that far into the conversation without hitting him square in the mouth. I looked away to stifle the tide of anger rising in the pit of my belly. I had prepared myself for anything but indifference.

He looked old. His hair was shock white and thinning. My father had always been a skinny man. His face and belly had bloated. I barely recognized him.

“Did you come here for hostility?”

“No,” I lied. “If I did, you’d already be unconscious . . . .”

“Is that so?” he shot back.

“Yeah. It is. You couldn’t stop me with a fuckin’ missile.”

I stared up at him. The pause felt exponentially longer than it was.

“ . . . I’m not here for that.”

“Then why are you here? What did you-. . . Why did you come here? How long has it been, and now you just show up here . . . ?”

I hadn’t planned this far ahead. The sequence playing out in my head involved me breaking his jaw. The old man was asking me uncomfortable questions that I had no answer to.

“All this time and you’ve got nothing to say to me?”

My mouth was dry. My voice low and raspy. This wasn’t going like I expected. I stepped down off the porch, looking anywhere but at him. The sight of his face was almost unbearable. I was about to walk away. I thought about everything it had taken to put me on that doorstep. I stopped and looked up at him.

“I’m leaving for Afghanistan. I thought you should know.”

There was a noise from inside the house. He leaned back into the doorway.

“It’s my kid . . . ”

It must have been the German bitch. Number four. She had never met me. Probably didn’t even know what I looked like. I was fine with that arrangement. He stepped out onto the little porch and shut the door behind him. We stood there, sharing a long and painful silence. It was one of the only things we had ever shared.

“That’s it? You came all the way here just to tell me that?”

“Yeah . . . I did.”

“Been there. Done that.”

I wanted to hit him. I wanted to grab him and throttle him back through that shitty aluminum door into his ugly little living room. I wanted to beat him in front of his wife. The door opened behind him. She poked her head out.

“Go back inside and shut the door. This doesn’t concern you . . . “ I commanded. I glared at her.

“I just thought maybe you’d want to come inside . . . ”

“No . . . ”

She lingered a moment, confused. I didn’t raise my voice, but the sharpness of my response startled her. She retreated. He looked at me, irritated.

“Don’t talk to my wife like that . . . ”

There was no conviction in his voice.

“I was being civil . . . ”

I stared at him. He sat down on his steps and looked back at me. For a moment, the fight went out of me. He wasn’t my father at all – just a sad old man. I realized then that there was nothing between us but my hatred and his loneliness. All of his children had rejected him. His first three wives rejected him. When his mother died, his own father rejected him. He was orphaned at age five. How much worse could I really make things?

“You can drop the armor,” he said.

“No,” I replied. “I can’t.”

We talked for a while, with stops and starts. The conversation went nowhere. I was there looking for validation. He was begging for pity. We were asking the impossible of each other. I told him he would never see me again.

I knew that any attempt at reconciliation was a waste of time. He isn’t capable. Secretly, I hoped that he would beam with pride just a little. That just once I would see that I had reached him. All I saw was resignation.

I took the back roads home. I needed to be alone.

[From Max]

The last two weeks have dragged by.  I spent most of it working, hoofing it back and forth across KAF.  This place is short on charm.

The wind picks up for days at a time and the air is thick with dust.  It has the texture of talcum powder.  We are not authorized to wear scarves to filter it out.  I snort and sneeze and cough up mouthfuls of vile yellow phlegm.

I spent three days outside without a break, sixteen hours at a rip.  My eyes and nose were raw.  They all ran simultaneously, dampening my face with tears and snot.  No amount of dabbing or coughing or blowing made it stop.  At night, the mixture hardened and stifled my breathing.

Doc saw my frustration and tossed me a box of pseudo-ephedrine.  Bless his heart.  It took two days for the pills to dry me out.  Once more able to breathe, I slept like a corpse.  I didn’t stir until six.  I stuffed my swollen feet back into my boots and scraped my face with a razor.  I had coffee and pills for breakfast and moved out.  I stole a little gym time.

A few days passed like this.

Last night the CO sent me on a wild goose-chase.  He wanted me to reserve a space for the company at the American chow hall.  At 8:00 PM, on Christmas Eve.  I put my boots back on and headed out.  The manager just shook his head at me.  I relayed this to the CO, and he promptly lost his temper.

Not long after I heard him bellow my name across the tent.  I hopped the wall.

He tore me a new ass over something I’d told him about a week ago.  I’d reminded him twice in the days between, but he didn’t seem to register it.  He joked with the other PLs, but I made no attempt to join in.  He ignores me while they’re around.

I feigned attention through the evening meeting.  I scribbled unrelated notes and said nothing.  Everything takes longer than it should.  Half of everything said leads nowhere.  Afterward, I stepped out into the cold.  The night sky was hazy with dust.

I sparked up a Lucky and stared at nothing.

[From Max]

Message from the JDOC: There will be a controlled detonation to the southeast of KAF in five minutes . . . I say again . . . Five minutes . . . End of message.

The big voice echoes through the compound.  It happens periodically – followed by a  distant TH-WUMP!  Yesterday there were four or five explosions.  It sounded like incoming.

I woke up at 0300 and couldn’t shut my eyes .  I laid on my rack enjoying the darkness and silence.  No noisy privates.  Just the sound of the flimsy plastic ventilation tubes breathing.

The air is cold, and full of diesel fumes.  They burn trash in the morning.  The smell alternates between shit and plastic.  Today it was plastic.

The last week is a blur.  I have to check my watch to see what day it is.  There is no rhythm to the time here.  Friday isn’t the beginning of the weekend.  It’s just another day.

Somewhere nearby enthusiastic young men are singing along to Katy Perry.

I shuffle around waiting for orders and FRAGOs to come down.  I stick my nose where it doesn’t belong, sniffing out information and resources.  I probably shouldn’t have been  digging around at HQ.  It was impressive what a gold bar bought me.  A top-down view for the entire Region.  None of it was above my clearance, but it was certainly above my pay grade.

The field-grades there were surprisingly enthusiastic to show a stupid lieutenant their products.  They slave away in a windowless room for some General, designing a dozen versions of his part of the war.  Thousands of men and billions of dollars reduced to a series of operational graphics.

A Tornado streaks overhead.  They are exceptionally louder than other fighters.

I got more information in half an hour than I’ve had in months.  My little piece of the war suddenly came into sharp relief.  I could see four levels up, and think it down to the ground.  Nothing they draw up in that room matters if one Joe smokes the wrong guy.

Nothing they draw up in that room matters to the guy suffering from traumatic brain injury from his last tour.  The guy with half a master’s degree who can’t concentrate long enough to read a newspaper anymore.

He plays on his Nintendo DS for a little while and goes back to sleep.

[Dispatch from Max.]

It was dark when we stepped off the C-17.  Everything was covered in dust. The pilot pulled us right up to the terminal, an old hajji building made of mud and brick.  The walls inside were riddled with bullet holes.  After a bit of admin finger-fuck, we collected our bags and climbed into a hajji van scrawled with kanji.

We all joked about the appalling condition of the vehicle.

“If I’m gonna die in Kandahar, it’d better not be in this fucking hooptie.”

The van was quiet for a moment.  I decided to snap on my kevlar.  We were dropped off in front of an RSOI tent; a flimsy looking structure surrounded by concrete walls and hescos.

We ran circles while the CO touched base with other guys that had arrived before us.  They frittered over details that would change by the minute.  All I cared about was securing a good bunk near a wall outlet.

Someone had supposedly “secured” us beds a few days prior.  The tent was almost full, all mixed up with other units.  The only billets left were top bunks.  Most of the mattresses were too large for the frames.  Rusty springs poked out the sides.  Dust covered all of them.  I threw my M4 onto what was supposed to be my bed and a cloud of fine particles rose into the air.

“Oh, fuck no . . .” I muttered.

I went to see if the rest of our bags had arrived.  The truck with our equipment pulled up as I walked outside.  I returned to tell the others, but they were gone to chow without me.

I curled my lip in frustration and grabbed up every name I recognized.  I dragged our bags in pairs into the next tent over, a cleaner tent with hardly anyone in it.  I tossed each bag on a rack.  I picked out a choice corner for myself.

Kandahar Airfield.  What a shithole.

KAF is a modern frontier town.  I was reminded of a passage from Heart of Darkness, when Marlowe was still downriver.  He walked around one of the company outposts and described its clusterfuck disorganization.

The sky here is choked with dust.  It casts an eerie halo around the lights that rise up over the hescos.  C-wire clings randomly to the top of them.  Weeds grow up out of the dirt, around the wicked metal barbs.

Walls of shipping containers line the roads.  I can hardly take a step without kicking stones the size of potatoes.  The living areas are all individual compounds, broken off by country of origin.  They are a maze of concrete t-wall.   Generators.  Fences.  Emergency bunkers for rocket attacks.

Soldiers stand outside smoking, their dark silhouettes distinguished only by the movement of their cigarettes.  “Hotel Kandahar” stands at the edge of our compound.  From the outside, at night, it looks like a crack den.

I followed signs to the British dining facility.

The man at the counter handed me a paper plate.  Inside it looked like a multinational conference.  An attractive, athletic female in foreign PT gear was waiting in line for food.  She had a Steyr slung over her back.  I felt my groin twitch.

She can definitely get it.  I thought.

I found the rest of my group watching cricket near a group of Canadians.  We went to the Boardwalk after dinner – a massive ring of hajji shops and concessions.  In the center was a hockey rink, a quarter-mile track, and what looked like a pair of half-court football pitches.  There was a KFC and a TGI Fridays.

The shop lights glowed neon in the dust.

Sarge sneered.

“This doesn’t need to exist,” he muttered, echoing my thoughts.

“Yeah, no shit.  If somebody found it necessary to build this, clearly our priorities are fucked up . . . ” I replied.

“Clearly.”

On the way back to our bunks we passed another shady looking “motel”.  We walked past the NATO barracks; a series of large, clean brick buildings.  All of them brand new, and nicer than any barracks I’ve seen in the States.  Outside sits a row of global-platform pick-ups.  Toyotas.  Nissans.  The occasional Defender.

I dropped onto my rack.  The other guys disappeared.  I pulled off my boots and powdered my feet.

[First in a series of dispatches from Max, who is currently on a "long backpacking excursion." ]

I stepped off for Afghanistan on the first.  Getting out the door turned into a frantic nightmare.  I got a last-minute phone call the night before, informing me that I needed to report early.  My boss’s boss wanted to personally chew my ass over something petty.

His version of Counseling and Personal Development goes something like, “You’re a piece of fucking shit . . .”

He wasted a lot of other words.

I left his office shaking with anger.  It was completely unprofessional; nothing but a personal attack.  His ass is in a sling with his higher-ups.  If I hadn’t known it before, he demonstrated it that morning.  He was rolling shit downhill; venting his frustration where he couldn’t really place any blame.

I wouldn’t follow that man into a food fight.

The rest of my day was soured by that early morning exchange.  I tried not to let it get to me, but it did.  By the time we boarded our aircraft I was completely wrung out.

I slept most of the first leg.  I tucked my M4 behind my feet and a pillow between me and the wall.  By the time we reached cruising altitude I was out.

We flew over London enroute to Germany.  I shaved in the bathroom, cut myself with a cheap disposable, and bled all over the airport.

We reached our destination early in the morning.  The farm fields below were covered in snow.  So was the flightline.  We pulled up next to the terminal and I turned to the sergeant next to me, laughing.

“Fuckin’ look at that shit . . . “

Kyrgyzstan is a former Soviet Republic.  One of the many.  The name on the terminal was written in Cyrillic.  The sarge and I laughed.

All of the buildings on the airport side were Cold War relics.  Off to one side was a compound that looked like an internment camp.  Pieces of aircraft were scattered on both sides of the road.  On the back side of the flightline sat a dead bird.  727-type.  Its wings were frosted with snow.  The forward door hung open, unattended.

Everything was made of concrete, brick, and rust.

We lost a day in flight, plus travel time.  We spent two more days there, budgeting our time between napping, reading and meals.  The chowhall was packed with females.  Kyrgies.  Air Force broads.  The occasional female Marine.

Female Marines are almost all hispanic, and typically attractive.

A female Airman walked by with a dropleg holster and an M9.  Security Forces.  Everyone at the table looked.  She was blonde.  Girl-next-door face.

“I’d fuck her,” sarge muttered.

“Yeah, shecangedit . . . ” I replied.

She can get it.  Scotty Newendyke used to say this all the time.  The drunker he got, the more he turned it from a sentance into a single word.  By the end of the meal we were all playing the Shecangedit game, sizing up every female that walked by.

It never ceases to surprise me at how much more discrete I am about objectifying women than most other guys.  They talk too loud.  They leer.

There was free candy and granola bars on the way out of the chow hall.

It was something like two in the morning and we were walking down a stretch of suburban road. Max and the cab driver had agreed to disagree about the best route back from O’Malley’s. I looked over my shoulder and saw a man cleaning spit off his passenger window.

A night out drinking with Max is guaranteed to include an awkward altercation with a complete stranger over nothing important. He’s a bindfolded kid swinging at a piñata. It’s not personal. It’s not about the candy. It’s about the swinging.

Max wants to fight the whole world. His problem is that the world won’t put up its dukes. That just pisses him off.

Max is barely interested in the pornography of conflict. He doesn’t play video games and he doesn’t care about your team. He has no fight in him for metaphorical battles. He drinks to try to jump start some kind of ordeal, with mixed success. He wants some kind of story to tell, something worth telling, something good enough to make you wonder if it really happened like that.

Everyone wants Max to calm down. But he can’t. He can’t relax. He tells me it’s getting worse. Whatever is coming is getting louder.

My theory is that Max is looking for a climax in his narrative. I don’t know that we’re all guaranteed that kind of climax in life. Modern men lead anticlimactic lives.

Where he’s headed, though…I think his chances are good.

Max is going to pick a fight.

That’s where I come in.

While Max is on his “long backpacking excursion,” I’ll be here.

For the most part, I’ll be posting whatever dispatches he sends down the line.

If the spirit moves me, I may post a few stories of my own.

I’m used to writing about men one way. This is another way.

* * *

The skeleton on your left was photographed at Dirty Oscar’s Annex in Tacoma, WA.

He just hangs out at the end of the bar. Good elk hash.

America doesn’t want soldiers.  It wants Warrior Monks.  Sterile, selfless men who can function in the string-theory dimension that exists between Policy, Expectation, and Reality.  America doesn’t get warrior monks.  It gets men.

Men aren’t selfless.  Men have needs.  And wants.  They wrestle with these things – pressing and instinctive things – to do the dirty jobs they are asked to do.  Not just the glorious ones – the high profile missions the Media can sell back to the world and say Look at how great America is!  They do the ugly ones.

Hollywood doesn’t show the scout-sniper pissing and shitting in his pants for three days.  They show him pulling a trigger.

Nobody wants to talk about the divorce rate.

What drives a man when someone else is raising his kids?  Fucking his wife?  Living in his house?  What drives a man beyond sleep and food and pain?  Beyond humiliation?  Alienated from a society that has no idea what to think about his calling?

That calling . . . that thing he does . . .

Nobody duct-tapes their blood type to their boot working at Kinkos.

It’s been almost two years since I’ve trained with them.  Some of the old crew was there.  Most were new.  They were surprised and happy to see me.  They offered me an open mat whenever.  The dojo politics started the moment I walked through the door.  Names and whispers.

I kept it light.  On and off the mat.  It was nice to be welcomed.

The basic mechanics were all there, but the finesse was gone.  I didn’t have to muscle anything.  I couldn’t.  I rolled with a fresh tattoo – less than a week old and just starting to heal.

I passed a beat cop walking back from the gym.  I was on the edge of a shitty neighborhood, and I had a large knife tucked into my waistband.  When someone is carrying a weapon self-conscious body language manifests.  I’m used to having large pieces of steel tucked up against my cock.  I kept walking.

My latest brand sits on the inside of my forearm.  The soldier’s canvas.  The latest in a long line of road signs jammed into my body.  Older work peeks out of my sleeves, but this one is different.  Going below the elbow is brandishing.  Crossing that line is the difference between concealed and conspicuous.

If you’re a cop, the guy with the visible marks is exponentially more likely to have a large piece of steel nestled against his dick.

Perception is reality.