Spent Shell Casings Read online

  Published by Gatekeeper Press

  3971 Hoover Rd. Suite 77

  Columbus, OH 43123-2839

  Copyright © 2016 by David Rose

  All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form without permission.

  Layout Design by Mr. Merwin D. Loquias

  Back Cover Art (woman) by Bryce Cameron Liston

  Author Photo by Scott Dentinger

  ISBN: 9781619844582

  eISBN: 9781619844599

  Printed in the United States of America

  Thank you, David Aretha, Mike Scotti, Pippa White, and damage to the limbic brain.

  An immense thank you to a number of students at the London School of Economics. While I bit, hammer-fisted, and blood-choked the implications of ideas, your patience with the bull in the china shop was my education’s ultimate guiding hand.

  Finally, thank you to numerous gunslingers, in particular Devin Denman and Rob Glenn. Beyond the enthusiastic criticism, your humor, perspective, and chain texts undoubtedly nurtured the embryo of this book.

  Where are the happy young men

  I hung out with in the old days

  Who sang so well and spoke so well

  So excellent in word and deed?

  Some are stiffened in death

  And of those there’s nothing left

  May they find rest in paradise

  And God save the ones who remain.

  —Francois Villon

  Contents

  1-STONE TOWN AT THE END OF THE RABBIT HOLE

  2-ANOMIE ON THE BACK NINE

  3-NEVER SHALL I FORGET

  4-ATTACK OF THE TREASURE TROLLS

  5-TONY PREACHING IN MY DREAMS

  6-BOOT NIGHT

  7-HEARTS AND MINDS

  8-FUCK YOU, POGS?

  9-MYRTLE BEACH

  10-HOSPITALS, WARDS, AND JAIL CELLS

  11-THE SNOW-BIRD

  12-THE BRIDGE REP: A GOOD ARS STORY

  13-GET THE FUCK BACK IN THE BARRACKS

  14-EXISTENTIALIST NIGHTMARE AND WRITINGS FROM IRAQ

  15-B.A.H.

  16-CLEAN AND GREEN VS. THE GOTH

  17-EMAILS FROM THE AL ANBAR

  18-GAVE YOU EVERYTHING

  19-LENIN FOR COMMANDANT

  20-WORSHIPPING THE GODS OF WAR AND WINE

  21-BARROOM ENCOUNTERS

  22-E & E

  23-ON THE RIVERS OF BABYLON

  24-LIFE OF PAIN

  25-BELLEAU WOOD

  26-WHY GO AT ALL

  27-AMPHIBIOUS, AND SOMETHING ELSE

  28-THERE AND BACK AGAIN

  29-THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AND THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY VETERAN

  30-

  WARNING ORDER INTRODUCTION

  The US military’s ground-combat units contain some of the most prolific degenerates, sociopaths, reprobates. . . and skilled war fighters the world will ever produce. Period.

  The sun setting over a desolate hill, smoke from trash fires hanging; warriors stepped out from their living quarters. Grunts, Rangers, SEALs, Recon, and others; wearing plate carriers, drop pouches and tourniquets, donned their night vision goggles with the hand not holding their rifle. Rolling out of the wire in Humvees, covert local vehicles, or on foot, while others boarded Chinooks and Black Hawks, the tools of foreign policy made their way to hides, houses, hillsides, and mountaintops. “Warriors,” “heroes,” “modern-day Spartans,” and all sorts of other headliners that sell the movie tickets and infect the hundred-pound high schooler to be a sniper, those boys set out to observe, to report, to raid, and to kill.

  Blasted out of the gun barrel and onto the silver screen, women left in their juices as the next protein shake is mixed, an imposter pulverized at the bar, and a hammer pair shot into the vitals, these best of friends, these sick fucks. . . teeth-whitening strips inserted as pushups go on for days; tattoos, steroids, porn, gloating pictures of the dead, precision fire, pink mist, and wild nights in whatever town surrounds the training area; women will scoff and squirm, and men will scoff and bleed. The American warrior; letting the groupies smell the black powder, giving them just a sniff of the chaos as carnage is left in their wake.

  The Red, White and Blue flies before you, yet this time. . . and for the first time. . . waves and whips with the wry mania of the best who redden its stripes.

  Behold now, alive and lurid, one explanation for why so many millennial men chose to experience War.

  1

  STONE TOWN AT THE END

  OF THE RABBIT HOLE

  “Nobody thinks anymore how marvelous it is

  that the whole world is diseased.”

  —Henry Miller, Black Spring

  SUMMER 2013

  Carved and crafted on a lush green island off the Tanzanian coast, Stone Town; the former slave trade nexus for the Middle East and the African Great Lakes region sits eternal. The Islamic influence on the island is undeniable, especially for anyone who has spent any real time in the Muslim world. And by “Muslim world” I don’t mean by any American experience, in Dearborn, Michigan or a mosque next to a McDonalds. Anything America, whether Irish pride in mid-march, or inexplicable bouts of defense or boasting about a nation due to a great-grandparent being born there—the American version is a cheap mimic of the homelands, the home turf, usually in places most Americans wouldn’t venture to without a fresh vaccine and a Sandals event coordinator. I’m talking Kuwait, Iraq, Dubai, Afghanistan, and eventually a sliver of east Africa. The Muslim world I patrolled, vacationed, fought, drank, and puked in was of the Eastern Hemisphere species.

  Inside an old bare room, I stand in its mirror. A bow of daylight blasts out from a rip in a moth-eaten curtain. Through the dust and through the jagged fragments of light, my eyes scan all the tattoos. Punk. Fantasy. Mostly beaten by the sun, and a decade old long before I would look at 30—come together like a drunken sailor, or a wayward rock-n-roller maybe. They sit on a thin frame, a frame teased into a semblance of fierceness from lifestyles most readily abandon. Taken as a whole, the mirror shows sort of an early ‘70s Iggy Pop without the heroin meets a young Liam Neeson without the talent. A shirt goes over it all and the door flies open.

  There is something about stepping onto a dusty street, hearing close unseen speakers kick on, and then a man tasked with prayer clearing his throat before the almighty and lengthy “Allaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. . .” There is something about walking down the winding, serpentine alleys, accentuated by the high, white walls, containing large, wooden doors with the Arabic swirls and floral patterns I immediately recognize from the Quran I stole while in the Al Anbar Province. Those strange stares from those sun-beaten faces, contrasted against the off-white garb, stained with human grease. . . For a son of the GWOT1 generation, whether in possession or absent of potent disdain, there is an awkward at-home sensation when immersed in the old world of Islam.

  Trying to untie myself from the knot my postgraduate sojourn into analytic philosophy had left me in, I had forsaken the sky-rises, efficient plumbing, and society without machetes to cleanse myself in the gritty realism of the third world.

  The third world: from the tourist perspective, you will only get a contorted, angular view of what it’s really like. An example follows from my first week on the Dark Continent: stay at a dive resort in Nungwi, experience top-of-the-line scuba diving, then enjoy brunch on the boat as malnutritioned locals scurry to get all the tanks off the vessel and back to the dive locker. Later that evening, watch a tumbling group execute their routine, with a good, solid, primitive drumbeat in the background and fully adorned in animal hides no less campy than a Disney presentation. Tuck off to bed with a good buzz of imported beer—

  Wake up in the morning and almost
step in a dried pool of blood, as large as a manhole cover, and not a stone’s throw from where someone’s SPF50-caked wife sat and Skyped with her sister about “how scenic and lovely and euphoric the place is.” Must protect the tourist. Must protect the US dollar and the Euro and the Yuan. The Masai security had caught a local man jumping the gate; then hence forth beat him to death with their iconic Masai clubs. Having procured one of my own in Dar es Salaam, holding such a club in one’s hand, it is apparent that a culture whose lineage is bursting at the seams with fighting enumerable tribal conflicts, while rife with some of the most extravagant mega-fauna in the world, has taken the time to perfect their weaponry. The o-rinka, whose skinny handle is about as long as the average human arm, comes to a sudden bulbous crown. The face of the crown owns a small but significant notch. It was likely not through a physics class, taught in a land where such practicum is vehemently shunned by the bland and proper, but through trial and error battling man and beast that the Masai learned of pound-force per square inch, and the power of concentrating forces to smaller surfaces. Such science was the ultimate reality for the dead intruder.

  Life is cheap in many parts of the third world, and the champagne, leaf-blade ceiling fans, and Wi-Fi only distract the naïve tourist long enough; proud of roughing it, that they are not a moment away from being robbed, butchered, or eaten.

  After diving off the northern tip, I had pushed south to Stone Town, set up, and punched out. On the west side of the island, at Kendwa Rocks, a sort of party hub where vacationers from various resorts all conglomerate, I walked past a young man talking to an employee at a laundry counter. The thick southern drawl in conjunction with what had to be three “fucks” in one sentence caught my attention. I had run across a few Americans, yes, but it was not common in those parts. Stopping to see who the foul-mouth was, I immediately saw green USMC PT2 shorts, and what was a medium regulation haircut, overgrown by a week or so.

  Like the Masons maybe, through the subtleties of word and symbol, we had found one another. In all the great expansion that is Africa, I had somehow stumbled upon a Marine. Bud introduced me to the other Marines he was with, and I learned that they worked at a nearby US Embassy. On leave and unable to fly back to the States, they swarmed Kendwa Rocks in search of some wine, women, and song. In addition, Bud had flown a friend from his home state of Alabama. His friend, Bill, was this baby-faced Southerner, somewhat in the realm of a young John Candy, and had never left ’Merika before. Witnessing him have to converse with the locals who referred to the USA as “Obama Land” was a lesson in hilarity. He was in pure culture shock, though handling it like a champ. Exposing him to as much as possible soon became a reoccurring motivator of mine.

  The embassy Marines asked me what I had done when I was in. I had been a Recon Marine, to some, a fabled type of grunt.

  Infantry; noun 'in-fǝn-trē: military personnel trained, armed, and equipped to fight on foot. The colloquialism “grunt” is used interchangeably, in both the US Army and US Marine Corps, for “infantryman.”

  Special Operations; noun 'spe-shǝl, ä-pǝ-'rā-shǝns: groups in militaries trained in unconventional warfare. In the US, popular outfits such as Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and Army Green Berets fall under this category, as does Marine Recon. The vast majority of Spec Ops are specialized infantry/grunts.

  Answering them did what I figured it would do, and the fact that I was from the cowboy days of Iraq made my seat at their table all the cushier. I quickly was given a place among them, and palled around with this group for the better part of a week.

  After a few nights, the group split in two. The next day we would all rendezvous and take the ferry to the mainland. As one element stayed in the northwest, Bill, Bud, and I traveled south for one last night in Stone Town.

  What occurred that night, if put regally, was some strange returning to the USMC. I was perhaps begged, or perhaps driven to show the new generation how fearless and depraved were the alumni of the GWOT’s golden age.

  We bought beer and sat out on the stone, second-floor balcony that was attached to our room. We were in some ancient building, recently converted to a hostel, and from our height the city was a web of thin power lines, leaning, pointy rooftops, and laundry hung out to dry. The buildings so close together, one couldn’t help but contemplate the valiant run-and-jump; the extending porticos and ledges met one another from opposing sides of the cobbled streets.

  I had some Ambien on me. I hadn’t taken any while diving in the north, or during the safari—but drinking on that balcony, alive with an electric current, realizing that you are there, right then, at that moment.

  Ambien: It is a mystery of modern medicine how ten milligrams worth of sleeping pill can cause the extraordinary hallucinations and euphoric states that it does. The first time I took Ambien was flying from DC to Dubai. A contractor whom I worked with at the time gave me one, along with some muscle relaxer he failed to identify. Moments, and a Miller High Life later, I was transfixed on the swirling waves of blue. Eerily, the TV screens on the back of the headrests in front of me were all showing Avatar. The collection of screens danced and swayed, and the chemicals that induced “happiness” flooded my brain as I melted into my seat. The fifteen-hour plane ride was over in a blissful and vivid forty-five minutes.

  The VA’s3 Refillable Answer, I took Ambien on those nights when I would wake up in a sweat and couldn’t fall back to sleep. The nights when the anthropomorphic nature of my brain made the towel hanging on the bamboo rack a menacing burglar. The nights I was so bored I could cut my feet in the shower just to watch the crimson mix with the water and feel alive. Or maybe the nights that I just wanted to talk to the inanimate objects in whatever room I was occupying, turned bubbly and full of personality.

  “I dunno man, my stepmom took some of this shit and ordered $300 worth of crap from the Home Shopping Network and didn’t even remember doin’ it,” said Bill.

  “I dunno man, there’s a shit load of bad shit that I have heard about this shit. People waking up while drivin’, err wakin’ up with all the knives from the kitchen now in their bed,” said Bud.

  Once proposed, and reassured of the positive effects, Bill and Bud cautiously accepted their pill.

  Out of beer and on the ambiguous shoreline of the pills kicking in, we decided to emerge back out onto the streets. This time we weren’t going to wallow with tourists, listening to Queen over and over; we were going into the heart of darkness. Our supplies: my MP3 player, several dispersed stacks of Tanzanian currency, Bud’s portable speakers, and my Rx bottle of Ambien, just in case.

  Heading north we asked some merchant types what bar the locals go to. Once they were convinced we had no interest in their fish, paintings, or rambutan, several ashy and calloused hands sprouted in unison, pointing in the direction we were already going. The men rattled off a name, but none of us could decipher it, and none of us seemed to care.

  Passing some great tree on the inland, and a crowded shallow bay of canoes and fishing boats on the seaside, we saw the town open up a bit, and in its grimace was a noisy building, crawling with people like an ant pile stirred with a beer-soaked twig.

  The white boys had come into town, as it were. With the recondite properties of the pills, broken down to their base forms, flowing through our veins, we entered.

  Swinging wide the saloon-style door, I had the speakers draped around my shoulders and hanging about my armpits—playing Lynyrd Skynyrd. The setting sun glowed a deep orange all over the nightclubish interior. The fading rays would cut through twirling dust and occasionally ended against the few patrons populating the room’s bar and edges. I noticed a stairwell leading to an upper deck. We made for the bar. Leaned against it were a few young guys who had noticed our entrance and seemed to be amused.

  If there is one place that confirms the influence American music has on the world, it is Africa. These guys at the bar looked like. . . well, basically, imagine if an alien civilization was in the path of the
waves emitted from a year’s worth of rap and R&B music videos. If those aliens flew down to the African plains, quickly dressed some cow herder in the regalia idolatrized in said videos, you would begin to have an understanding of the African take on African American culture.

  A mix of ’80s-style high-top fades, opaque sunglasses that would look perfect scowling over the smoking barrels of a sawed-off .410, gaudy fake gold chains, sweat-pants and Nikes; they welcomed us to sit with them and immediately asked us about New York City.

  With Skynyrd turned off and our personal sound system (which was later stolen) placed on the bar, we pounded Ndovu as Fuse ODG was cranked up and the locals began to pour in.

  We each took another Ambien, and before the fairyland claimed me, I had just enough sense to execute a single action that I credit with saving our asses. I found the biggest guy in the place, alongside some dreadlocked spider who made sure to tell me he was half-Persian.

  “Here is 20 USD,” I told them. “Follow us around tonight and make sure we don’t get robbed and I will give you another 20 USD back at the hotel.”

  With new best friends added to the entourage, we sunk down the rabbit hole.

  I remember colors—everywhere—blinking in and out of the dark corners of the crowded nightclub. At one point we were surrounded, the locals pawing at us, fondling the buttons on my shirt. A large man in a black hoodie and a necklace of bones kept coming up to me, getting in my face and yelling. His hand gestures—leaving trails in their wake—seemed to be some kind of curse. After like four or five curses, I apparently didn’t turn into a toad, or a snake, or a green card out of that place, or whatever, making this club-hopping witch doctor become thoroughly unhinged. As he charged me, I stood like a pale, laughing statue as my body guards intervened and carried him out of the place, kicking and screaming.

  Next, the hookers. The guy with dreads was, come to find out, just the guy we needed. As the sea of dark skin, sweat, and beer suds washed over me, I felt weightless. Only after Bill grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me to the bar’s edge did I see our approaching Nubian companions.