Spent Shell Casings Read online

  His three subordinates, all with hair so grossly out of regulations it would give a garrison commando a coronary, were blasting away in the direction of the enemy berm. One was on a mounted M240G20, and the other two on a knee, bent forward, hugging their M4s into them. Watching them all it became apparent they were fighting an enemy that somehow continued to elude me.

  Their team leader must have shared my reality. “Cease fire! Ceeeease fiire!!” he yelled, frantically flapping his arms like a robust chicken. But it was no use; the three were on some communal rampage. Their hair, maybe excited by the melee as that of static electricity, was standing up and swaying in the wind. Looking like treasure trolls, they tore the air, firing at anything and everything, unleashing some crazed frustration that had been building since stepping foot in Iraq—but I would reckon had existed long before.

  I stood there. Sheer amazement. But was taken quickly out of low-grade hypnosis when an Apache’s thirty-millimeter casing bounced off the top of my helmet. Two Apaches, having come swiftly from the north, were now executing gun runs; one following the other. From the ground-view of a friendly, the violent low-altitude maneuvers were an amazing thing to witness. The deliberate, quick, repetitive bursts of their M230 chain guns hummed in the air. As they flew in low at times, showering our convoy in shells, one could see them rock and wobble as last-moment adjustments were made for a retreating enemy they could actually see.

  Word came from the birds that most of the remaining enemy were fleeing into the river, while a diehard remnant laid dispersed on the other side of the berm, as well as in an overgrown field between us and it.

  After several more runs the Apaches departed. Next, the field artillery.

  Coming in with the occasional whoo-whoo-whoop overhead, followed by the dirt-throwing concussion of impact, volleys of artillery munitions came raining down from the howitzers in Camp Fallujah.

  I was terrifled beyond belief. Having been former artillery myself, I could just imagine some degenerate with a horseshoe haircut, dreaming of the underage beer joints or jack-shacks in Lawton. Doing so while calculating death’s rain in proximity of my naked location. And they kept coming.

  “Wow. . . so we are going to include everyone,” I thought, as it became increasingly suspicious that Higher’s thrilled and understandable opportunity to check every box they could, in fact, was occurring.

  Nine line; check. Call for fire; check. Let’s get those god damn Small Craft faggots out there and clean house! We gotta mortar platoon anywhere in the area? And get the FAC on the horn about some fixed wing.

  The last shell landed, the last rifle fire spat at the distant berm, and both platoons were saddled up. No one on our side died, and later the Nemesis 1 boys told us of the encounters prior to our arrival. Apparently seeing our trucks was too much for Haj, but before we came swooping in for the action, some intense one-on-ones transpired, including Iraq’s answer to the high noon duel; SAW versus RPG21.

  My first firefight, if it can be called that, was an interior mixture of exhilaration, confusion, and hilarity. The thirty-millimeter casing that hit my head, which would have made a great double shot glass, would later be confiscated by US Customs. Misfit 2, or at least members of it, laughably went berserk at the first opportunity to do so. The blatant disregard for ammo conservation, or even positive identification for that matter, was indicative of some truer intentions than passing out MREs22 or securing elections.

  5

  TONY PREACHING IN MY DREAMS

  SPRING 2011

  Back in Florida; a solid break in the median, no guard rail, and not a cop in sight, I quickly but carefully pull an illegal U-turn. My freshly hired lawyers want me in their office, wanting to cache my truck and likely myself along with it. With only a couple of hours to get there, I fight the typical vehicular congestion and try to avoid main thoroughfares. Most nerve-wracking of all, they need crucial paperwork that is at my house, a place that is likely being watched. Just a few years prior, I was a cop myself; now on the run.

  Still jet-lagged from the Kabul flight, an insane and rock-bottom night, accused of and involving: a bullet through a TV screen, white Russians, a series of incendiary texts, three sliced tires, and a dead chicken, a caprice of mind-shattering random action resulted in nothing short of a man hunt.

  Leaving my house, the needed paperwork strewn about the passenger floorboard, I creep out of the subdivision and toward the law offices. Undetected, I become a bit more galvanized as I make my way onto a main road. “Band on the Run” plays in my truck’s tired sound system. I keep hearing “man on the run.” I visualize, as best I can, some perspective of my situation, just this time not desperate, but noble—a figure of the Wild West. Grandiosity got to me, some coping mechanism for sure; in years I would be praised for my audacity and never-say-die perseverance, owned by no master but my renegade heart.

  Making my way back to the familiar, I cut right through the same exact streets I myself had once policed. The strange days that followed Recon. I see the gas station where the lady was carjacked, pass where that Mexican guy was stabbed to death outside the pawnshop, and the places I would nod off at 4 a.m. while listening to radical AM radio DJ mutants; stuffed into only the most obscure hours. I pass the road that leads to the subdivision where a filming of animal porn went bad, resulting in the death of a girl, cyanotic and pumped full of pit bull semen. I make it, in cliché fashion, just over the “county line.” Traffic slows to a crawl and then it happens. A swarm of unmarked law enforcement vehicles box me in at a red light. I watch the guns and badges draw down on me.

  Years after I returned to the civilian world, I found myself once again fighting for my life. This time, however, it was not in the prone, like a flounder, trying to avoid a salvo of AK-47s, nor was it trying to avoid mortar impacts while returning to a patrol base. It was arguably the biggest legal shit storm since the O.J. trial, and I would spend almost a year and half scratching a GPS anklet the way a recalcitrant dog battles it out with an E-collar.

  Just prior to this low-grade hell of attending docket soundings; dodging the scowls of a rabid and personally invested prosecutor; losing my house, my job, the ability to stay out past midnight, and/or swim in a fucking pool, I had done what many former infantry and special operations boys of the GWOT generation did: contracted for the big bucks. I’d left Recon, left civilian law enforcement, and opted the third armed go-round for money to be the top priority. One thing uniformly experienced by contractors, other than the money, is the righteous mixing of various services. Two 4th ID23 guys, an Army Ranger, a grunt from 1st Battalion/5th Marines, and three Recon Marines are now on the same team; usually combing their glorious beards in a black SUV or playing Angry Birds in a Bearcat. It’s a great way to meet like-minded dudes, and the war stories were a thing that rarely, if ever, ceased.

  That was over.

  Tossing and turning in my bed one night, refitted in my old room at my parents’ house, packed tightly between the contents of the home I had just lost, I had the most profound of dreams.

  It was not uncommon in those days to have vivid head trips. One in particular was when I was in a tiny bar, so dank and gritty that the noon day could have been mistaken for midnight. I was being interrogated by some vulture of a woman, with the Reaganera shoulder pads in her business coat, hair like a schoolmarm, spitting her poison my way while poking her long, bony finger to my chest. Her entourage was a goon squad of middle-aged men, also in business attire. Their faces were quintessential of Shakespearian heat, elevating from irritated to contemptuous and finally to violent. Prior to being ripped to shreds by the system manifest, I bolted out the saloon door. Wolves were on my heels, spilling out from the black mass that I knew to be woods across the street from the bar. In front of me was a lone streetlight, shining down on a solitary object: the first Harley Davidson I had ever owned. It was my freedom, in its entirety. Jumping onto the seat, gripping the bars, and setting its circulatory system ablaze, I got low in the
saddle. As I sped off I slowly awoke, and didn’t move for quite some time after.

  This night, as I tossed about, I contemplated the dark tides that assisted in my swift and maniacal downfall. Among others, two out of my three character references on a former security clearance were gone; one dead, one good as dead.

  At some point I fell asleep.

  I was in a room. There were dark blue walls and the faint wisps of smoke that inexplicably occupy many of my dreams. I was a soul at zero, a complete victim of the world. Helpless. Dumb. Feeble. I admitted it to myself, I was a failure, and worse than losing friends, trust, or face was the complete loss of controlling my own destiny. Unable to weep, I laid still for a while.

  Something shifted. Due to some force I could not identify, I slowly arose from a fetal position to come to my knees, seeing the figures that were now in front of me.

  If one could mesh a football locker room with the pulpit of a holy roller, this was surely it. Tony, a tall, lanky, black Army guy I had met in Texas in 2010 and whom I worked with on random occasions in Kabul, was barely able to stand on one leg. Writhing and undulating as if the leader of an encampment of Hard Shell Baptists going over the juicy sections of the good book, he was a man on a mission. Looking dead into my eyes, occasionally clasping his hands together, soon returning to their wild flailing, he emitted words too perfect to remember in the land of the awoken.

  Behind him was a seated picket line of men I recognized from the Recon days. The one I remembered the most vividly was a guy who I had gone through RIP24 and ARS with, and we ended up being in cells next to one another in SERE25. All of these seated men stared at me, not in judgment, but in something else. Necks stiff, shoulders rolled forward, making their arms slightly hung in front of them, they nodded as Tony preached the truth.

  In my most drastic times of need and loneliness, it was the idea and remembrance of my brothers-in-arms that gave me strength. Not family, not clinging to some ancient dogma, but the men who knew the savage things that I knew, that saw me, as I saw them, blossom into our own time and place, beautifully and fierce.

  Tony smiled; his warrior-choir nodded in agreement. I awoke. Not too long after, a Recon brother came to help save my life for the second time. The only difference between the turret with a MK-19 and the courtroom witness stand was that the celebratory chicken dinner afterward wasn’t out of an MRE.

  6

  BOOT NIGHT

  SUMMER 2005

  We, a merry group of three, decided that this Friday night was to be special. Having heard the rumors that Recon boys out in Cali had occasionally dressed like SOI students and gone out into town to party, we decided to bring this upon Jacksonville, North Carolina.

  Boot; noun 'büt: A pejorative term indicating someone new to the military. Emphasizing both close chronological proximity to graduation from boot camp, as well as the figuratively lowly place among both the enlisted and officer communities.

  Donning the boot attire meant we needed to find the right men for the wardrobe collection. Personally, I didn’t own any “OORAH, it’s a Marine thing” T-shirts, or a beat-me-up jacket with massive EGA26 on the back. We had to somehow find a person in a Recon barracks that actually owned the clothing necessary to pull off this histrionic caper. We knew immediately who to turn to.

  In every ground-pounding unit that has ever existed, it seems there is some bizarre personality spliced into the ranks. Some “how the fuck,” completely slamming back to the ground any grandiose fantasy that your unit is all Hollywood bad-ass. It is almost certain that when Genghis sent Jebe and his two tumen to capture Kuchlug, that during the final moment of Kuchlug’s freedom, some runt-of-the-litter, squirrelly Mongol was on the crest of the hunting party; and that even during the exhilaration of capture, a few Mongols writhed at the irksome, unintimidating appearance of their comrade.

  Rapping on their barracks door, they answered, glasses first. Putting the Dance Dance Revolution pad away, they took us to their closets, where in no time we had an armful of scarlet and gold.

  Now I must admit, I dressed the most conservative of the three. In a white USMC shirt, with some cliché cartoon on the back of rifles, fantastic creatures, and scary animals, I also wore my MCMAP27 tan belt and some desert boots (with dog tag inserted, of course). Isaac and Derrick, however, were to be the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of what was surely to be a most magnificent “libo28 incident.”

  Isaac hailed from the rust belt. With his blue eyes, a boyish face, and a body like a statue, running next to him on the beach was humbling only second to contrasting my frequent cynicism against his unbreakable good attitude. Derrick, from Chicago, left Recon a legend to some, a cancer to others. Not even slightly effected by cliché Marine Corps attitudes, Derrick proudly maintained the most out-of-regulation, Malibu haircut on the entire East Coast. But despite a façade of unprofessionalism, he contained an incredible aptitude and physical ability, and while he blatantly challenged dubious Marine Corps tenets, his covert love for the job and community would peer out from time to time, and usually when no one was looking.

  Both with white undershirts, they wore red sleeveless Marine shirts, one stating “Marines” in white and the other stamped “USMC” in gold. Outdoing my tan belt, they went with our more formal web belt. Moving down, they bloused their jeans into their desert boots. Derrick, as per SOP29, added a few more trinkets. With his dog tags hung out on his chest, cammie paint still under his eyes, like mascara, from the sniper school he was in the process of completing, and an ammo pouch on his hip, we were now geared up, outfitted, and in the proper uniforms.

  Next, the pre-game. When I was in artillery, I learned of a game called Power Hour. A CD with sixty songs, all only lasting their first minute before bleeding into the next, necessarily exists at the core of this game. Upon the transition from song to song, the players take a shot of beer. It is the type of game where there are no winners or losers per se, just those who finish and those who don’t. Having played it a few times, I learned it was common to see first-timers scoff at how easy the game is during the first quarter or so—taking double shots or something. But, Power Hour, of any drinking game to ever be played, has a way of sneaking up on you. Right around the fortieth minute it crosses everyone’s mind: “Hey, some asshole made this CD to where songs get shorter and shorter!” The last ten minutes you seem to be taking a shot moments after the one before.

  And this was the fate of our pre-game. We had sucked a few others into my barracks room, turned on the music, and started tearing into the twelve-packs. What was exactly an hour later, we spewed out and onto the lawn of BB 148. I grabbed our standard bottle of Jägermeister. Derrick and Isaac were standing in the uniform of the day, arguing with one of our more melancholy Recon brothers. This almost permanent buzzkill had brought some friends from his hometown to enjoy our company. Derrick and Isaac had tasked themselves with figuring out why the fuck they weren’t immediately coming out with us; then later came up with some makeshift, slightly-staggering comm plan: “OK, dude, you guys go now, and when we are ready we will meet you down there. Everyone got a phone? Good—”

  Meanwhile my focus turned to a peculiar, bipedal monstrosity that was slumped over against the front wall of our barracks. This thing, clothed in blue jeans and placed accordingly to their ergonometric instructions, looked human enough. Brown, pinkish skin over gut, chest, and back—all features starting to ring a bell. This. . .this thing reared its head up, exposing its drink-ravaged face. Then he threw up. Big-time. It was Dirt, a guy from our Bravo Company. He had sat in on the Power Hour game, disregarded the rules, and paid the price. Now, Dirt was on all fours, projectile vomiting onto the grass. Despite the spectacle of Dirt, the thing that stuck out more was actually the random two guys, just standing there, behind him. For years Derrick and I debated who the hell those two actually were. New joins? Family members of some Marine not cut loose on libo yet? A couple of the CIA’s SAD30 guys, getting precise intel regarding the American Mari
ne Corps’ garrison habits, with specific emphasis on returning Victor units several months back to the retrograde of the garrison growl?

  “—Good, let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  Anyway, Dirt was done. The original three, the merry band of brothers we, called for a taxi-van. We hopped in and said we wanted to go somewhere our outfits wouldn’t be appreciated. The three hundred-pound behemoth driver, a woman who once offered to suck my dick for $20, got a gleam in her eye. The sliding door shut, that fat hand ripping the shifter out of “P” and throwing it back into “D”. . .We all knew where we were going.

  Not far off SR-17 sat the bar. We were in the American Southeast, and in a military town no less. It was all too easy finding a shit-box that had chew stains on the wooden planks, hyper-patriotic insignia flying about, some tonk twangin’ good and loud, and a few good ol’ boy Marines ready to stomp some ass. Hell, even the civilians may have been ready to kick in a throat if someone—some inexplicably stupid, rude motherfucker—disrupted the sanctity of their watering hole. And God save the one who stole the attention from the women who should’ve been lavishly stroking the brim of their cowboy hat.

  I paid the cab fare. Isaac started giggling. Derrick marched straight for the front door. The first “hell nahh” was soon followed by a second. Then the “you gotta be shittin’ me!” followed by waves of half-confused laughter and an audible ruckus resembling a disturbed chicken coop. By the time Isaac and I had sifted through his wake and gotten inside, Derrick was standing in the entrance, hands on hips, proud, like something you would see in the Louvre. Then he turned and flashed an unmistakable “allllll right, mutha-fuckers, it’s on” smile.