Part 3: Explosion at the Powder Keg
So there I was, knee deep in the urge of a major breakthrough. It was just after midnight and I was in middle of the Iraqi desert, three miles outside of Fallujah, lying on a cot that hurts my back when I lay in the fetal position. I was angry, damn it. Not so much because of the cot, but more so because I had just watched Fahrenheit 911. And it inspired me, man. It made me see that which I had yet to see: that I am somebody's whore. Standing on the edge of an epiphany, I decided to craft a stern but tasteful letter to the people of the United States of America. This letter would embody my every emotion pertaining to the war. It would be a metaphor for the blood and sweat I had poured on this battlefield we call Iraq and the utter disdain I felt for apathetic politicians and left-wing whack-jobs, who, despite impassioned attempts to describe the soldier's situation, have failed miserably. In detail, the letter read as follows:
An Open Letter to the Media, The President of the United States, and Mr. Michael Moore:
Dear Fuckos,
Please stop exploiting me.
Very respectfully,
SGT Marshall Smith
Your average reader might scoff at the inherent slander presented by my choice of words. I, however, found in it a certain sense of poetic justice yet to be found in all other forms of war protest. Satisfied with my product, I laid down my pen and moseyed uncomfortably into a light and oft-disturbed sleep.
When I awoke the next morning and reread, I realized I might have been a tad overdramatic in expressing my emotions, if not blatantly disrespectful to certain elected officials. I also realized the letter failed to convey any sign of coherent thought. This absence weighed heavily on my conscience. I fancied myself an intellectual and a patriot, yet the utter lack of logic could detract from the effectiveness of my intended message and thus defeat my purpose entirely. Rather than be seen as a dutiful American who had witnessed firsthand the ugliness of war, a soldier wrought with guilt over its fundamental wrongness who painfully made the decision to stand-against those who cruelly perpetuated this senseless bloodshed, I could be labeled a dissenter, traitor, or worse, a liberal. My indecision consumed me. I wondered if this was how Tecumseh Sherman felt before burning Atlanta to the ground.
It was precisely at that moment when SGT Hendricks, a compatriot of mine who, as a source of entertainment, regularly passed out pork grinds to hungry Muslim children, and with whom I played Dominoes on Thursday evenings, pressed play on his boom box. The magical words of Heron filled the tent,
"You will not be able to stay at home, brother,
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the Revolution will not be televised.”
"What do you think he meant exactly?" I asked Hendricks.
"You can’t stray from change, brother," he responded. "It's coming for all of us. And it's gonna be bloody and ugly and not on TV.”
"That makes absolutely no sense. But I think you're right. Those who have the ability should do...something. Does that make sense? It doesn't matter. I must do."
"I know brother. I know. Me and Jeffries are gonna drive downtown tomorrow and pass out some pork grinds. You wanna come?”
“No,” I said. "I have another mission that I must accomplish.”
"Rock and roll," he said knowingly. "Rock and roll." I placed the letter in a manila envelope, addressed it to my hometown newspaper, and solemnly made my way to the post-office, located in the camouflaged tent three camouflaged tents west and two camouflaged tents south of my camouflaged tent.
Part 1: The Product’s Cause From the First Day’s Afternoon
I was at an elementary school in Fallujah passing out pencils when a boy of about six wearing an Arab garb usually worn by a man of about thirty stared up at me and asked, "Aftan beyak mozarum?"
"I'm sorry, my good man," I responded, "I failed to catch that the first time around. Could you repeat please?"
"He asked how long you’ve been in Iraq, sir," my translator informed me.
"Five months and two days. You?"
The boy inspected his new pencil, rolling it around in his fingers, using it to scratch his head. "Aftan begat hokunum?"
"Interesting you would ask that," I said. "What did he say?"
"He asked when you are leaving, sir."
"Well, as a matter of fact, I'm leaving right fucking now if he keeps asking me smart-ass questions. And I'll take his new head scratching-device with me. No... wait, don't translate that. Ask him why he wants me to leave."
When asked, the boy responded.
"What did he say?"
"He said this pencil is no good because he can’t eat it and because his mother is sick and this pencil will not help her either. Therefore, you should go back to America and not come back until you have pencils that can fix those things." And this was my life; berated by a six-year-old citizen of a third-world country for not bringing the right type of pencil.
I find my job incredibly depressing. The sense of aesthetic I expected to attain when I enlisted in the military four years prior has yet to arrive. I am instead visited by a molesting sense of irony on a more than daily interval. Take the aforementioned incident for example. As I pass out these pencils, my collective subconscious is screaming at me, “They can't eat these fucking pencils.” But I pass them out anyway because a soldier does what a soldier is told to do.
I work in what the United States Army refers to as "Civil Affairs.” It is my job to win the hearts and minds of the recently destroyed and conquered peoples of Iraq. Our modus operandi is simple: to throw candy and school supplies at children with relentless and uninhibited fervor and to give Iraqi adults much-needed personal hygiene products. Needless to say, our success is rampant and well documented by the Fox News Network.
As morally rewarding as some of your more compassionate conservatives may think my job to be, it really isn’t. I don’t get high on whatever ethical buzz this job is supposed to give me. On the contrary, most mornings, I awake indifferent to the day to follow. Though the psychological torture caused by the non-stop mortaring, the random gunfire in the middle of the night, and the green eggs they serve for breakfast at the chow tent ceased to affect me long ago, in the past few weeks, I’ve just felt sad. No specific reason. Just plain sad.
I’ve tried to analyze my state of being and its potential causes. After careful review, I’ve concluded that I don't understand my job, or the job of a soldier for that matter. I think this is where the depression comes into play. As far as my role in the whole "war" thing, I know I'm to befriend people, make them appreciate the democracy we've given them, then leave them smiling on the side of the road with a box full of cotton swabs and soap products. When outlined like that, it almost makes sense. What I don't understand is, as soon as I'm done passing out the cotton swabs and soap products, some infantry unit will roll through and start shooting up the place. It's absolutely absurd, really. We come, we give gifts. Infantry comes, shoots a few people, then leaves. We stand there shrugging our shoulders and offering more pencils. Maybe that's what makes me sad, the hypocrisy of the thing. It’s incomprehensible to me. So I'm depressed. And a little frustrated. I think the frustration stems from the feeling of being exploited by various proponents of public policy and world media. I, the soldier, am used to advance or vilify one cause or another. For example, speaking in a purely symbolic sense, my image is synonymous with heroism and sacrifice. I contribute this in no small part to the current administration, who I’m sure did it less for me and more for purposes related to reelection. That's fine; it's cool with me, man, because it’s the republicans that tend to buy me the most beer when I’m at the bar (a Democrat sent me a bottle of wine once). And by golly do us soldiers love beer. However, I am slightly concerned about the complete lack of anti-soldier protests. Though I’ve never killed a baby, I have yet to be called a baby-killer by a disgruntled hippy. This makes me unhappy. It doesn’t make much sense to me either, but at least when I read about the soldiers who served in the Vietnam era, I’m left satisfied by the many instances of free speech used in protest. That’s what I’m really fighting for. Nowadays, if you’re caught talking shit about a soldier, you’re an unpatriotic monster who deserves to be shackled and put on public display. But I want that man, not that shackling thing- the free speech. I want to be berated for killing Iraqi children. That’s what makes our country great- the fact that some disheveled burnout can call me a murderer. I need that kind of America.
I am also a little perturbed by the alarming rise in popularity of country music songs dedicated to my service, and I truly wonder if the current administration is somehow secretly contributing to this. There's no other explanation for it. I don't particularly enjoy country music. Nor do I enjoy listening to Toby Keith when Toby Keith threatens to put a boot in some Arab dude’s ass. It's not really his boot, man. He's not over here kicking anyone's anything, not even in the metaphorical sense of kicking down doors to peace and understanding. He's selling albums and wearing ten-gallon hats and fucking groupies. Why can't I fuck groupies? I'm the one doing the kicking.
Being used by the media doesn't sit well with me either. I'm always a headline or a reoccurring blip at the bottom of the screen of some twenty-four hour news network. My death sells papers. People love reading about the bloodiest month since the start of the war or the beheading of a recently captured GI. I think I accepted the possibility of death sometime within my first month here. However, I have yet to accept the fact that these khaki-vest wearing, unshaven, tearjerker reporter types get paid for talking about that death. If they died and I talked about it on television, be damned if I weren't labeled a barbarian and put on some cleaning duty where I'd have to scrub the showers with a toothbrush.
In addition, I get pimped by foreign policy. I'm sold to a loving public as a selfless servant, guarding the world against the evils of terrorism and inflated petroleum prices. But what most of our more appreciated residents of expensive suburban communities conveniently located outside of every major metropolitan US city fail to recognize is that this righteous protector is also burning in effigy somewhere in Syria or Yemen or some other Middle Eastern nation whose government supposedly conforms to the American world order but in actuality is funding an unknown number of Muslim fundamentalist organizations. We could be fighting said countries in the future. And that's not cool.
The Iraqis hate us. Not to our faces so much, they won't just come right out and say they hate us because if they did, they wouldn't get the soap, and I'm pretty sure they like the soap. They don't say they hate us, but I can feel it. Take the six-year old dirt-monger for example. He hated me because my pencil didn't cure cancer. He expressed this by making an offhand comment about me going home and getting new pencils. But I can't go home...and he knows this. So it's not really about the pencils, it's about the ability of a goddamn six-year Iraqi to mask hateful comments about foreign policy in requests for the most basic educational sustenance. This is what I go to sleep with at night. I've become a slave to depression, frustration and the unyielding heat of the desert. I have a job I don’t understand, serving a purpose I don't understand, in a place that probably resembles Hell more closely than anywhere else on Earth. I take shit from six year olds. This forces me to reflect: what the fuck am I doing with my life and how can I change my present situation.
Part 2: Standing to Close to the Powder Keg, Just Before Midnight on The Second Day
I heard Hendricks barrel into the tent. He walked up to my cot and kicked. "Hey man, you want to watch a movie?”
No, I didn't want to watch a movie. I wanted to sleep, that's why I was sleeping. "What movie is it?” I asked.
"Fahrenheit 911, man. It's changing lives, man."
"Is that by the same guy who did Bowling For Columbine?" I asked.
"Yeah, brother."
"Didn't he get booed off of the stage at the Oscars for rabble-rousing?"
"I think so, man. What's rabble-rousing?"
"It doesn't matter. Put it in."
"Alright, man," Hendricks said. "But they say it's deep. Don't go ape shit on me, man."
"It's a documentary by some socialist fat dude from the slums of Flint. I seriously doubt it'll do anything more than further my growing distaste for the varying types of crap Miramax is putting out these days."
I wrote the letter about two hours later. With it came a small sense of catharsis, but not really.
