Long Time Coming

I haven’t written on this thing in a while so it’s due time I write something new. The other day I’m walking down the street and I see Rembrandt asking for spare change. No shit, I thought, Rembrandt in Utrecht.

I’m living in the Netherlands with Kathryn. We’ve been here for almost four months and in less than two weeks we’ll be flying back home to Chicago and then to L.A. I really miss America, especially the California sunshine and unnecessarily large coffees. Yesterday we spent the day at Keukenhof Gardens with a friend of ours. The tulips were lovely and really worth the trip. Whenever we return to Europe it’s hard to imagine it once under Nazi control, that WWII was raging and shelling the hell out of half the world, planes falling from the sky by German artillery, men picked-off from treetops and telephone wire they’d mistakenly parachuted into…You travel by train and enjoy the countryside and windmills and long stretching canals flanked by grazing cattle and rows of flowers betwixt pasture and geese and farmers…and you wonder who these tracks transported more than half a century ago, what villages burned quickly or slowly to the ground, and how similarly quiet things must have felt with the war moving in full gear.

Everyone in the Netherlands speaks English very well, but beginning a conversation in English isn’t generally liked. Just try and say something in Dutch. Daag, hoi, hello…They do sell weed legally in coffeshops, offering pre-rolled joints half-mixed with tobacco and cheaply priced grinders with free papers. In the small town we live in, Utrecht, we have our own Redlight District, which is right next door to the neighborhood grocer. Also, mustard comes in tubes and the Dutch douse their French fries in mayo. I’ve grown to like mayo gooped all over my fries. It’s pretty good.

For the first time in my life I’ve been living life without having to go to work or school. While it’s sort of fun and a complete waste of time, I don’t think it’s worth it. I need something to do and am a happier person being productive. Maybe it’s a permanent sense of responsibility and duty the Marines Corps has drilled into my brain housing group that’s enabled me to not want to sit idling, or maybe it comes from growing up in the desert with parents who constantly kept you busy through childhood, like accompanying them to HUD home projects and weekends working for Habitat for Humanity.

Anyway, last month I found out I was accepted to grad school in Iowa. I nearly shit my pants hearing the news and had to confirm it by calling the main office that Monday morning. It was no mistake. I’m in. Since then we’ve watched Field of Dreams with an Australian friend of ours. She didn’t get it, especially the part where he asks,

“Is this Heaven?”
“No, it’s Iowa.”

Up until then I’d given up on the whole writing thing. I tried reenlisting, first as an officer and then as enlisted scum. But I was shot down, kindly though, by a nice female Marine recruiter who told me to enjoy my stay in Holland. I must remind myself that I am a broke-dick. A month later I was bent on going back to UCLA for a geology degree, which would take about five more years plus some change. I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, but when you come to the end of a long four-year journey—like with the Marines or graduating from college—you get cold feet and scared with what might happen next. I was also looking at the US Forest Service and the California State Parks, and actually received a nice reply from one of them. In the not too distance future I can see myself doing something like that, protecting the parks…

But now I’m going to writing school, and I’m writing and reading more than before, realizing that it’s not all that terrifying of a thing to do. I hung onto my short fiction books, even bought a few old novels I’d read In Iraq. It’s all been very helpful and Kathryn has been more than supportive with my move to Iowa; she’s actually considering coming herself. Who thought, L.A. woman in the Midwest, and for the second time!

I’ve been working on some new stories, some not even military related—I know, who would’ve thought? But it’s been nice to separate myself from that long ago life that’s always too eerily close to want to remember for the better of everything.

During the last two weeks I have in the Netherlands I’d like to explain this country a little more clearly throughout this blog. Today is the first day of Queen’s Day. It’s a giant nationwide weekend party that starts on Thursday and ends whenever. I’ll be taking pictures and making mental notes. Keep posted for the after-action report.

Well, thanks for reading whoever’s out there. I promise I’ll keep you posted on the new and the fun.
Daag

A Word on Terrorism

I’m scared. I’m not going to lie. With the recent fatal shootings in Ft. Hood, Texas I start to wonder if I am really that much safer in the US than I was in Iraq. In Iraq we had exploding IEDs, ambushes, incoming mortar and artillery fire. One time someone even lobbed a RPG over our camp, timed perfectly to explode about ten feet above our heads. That, I thought, was impressive. But in Iraq we had immense firepower to retaliate with, sometimes without hesitation, at times with extreme prejudice. But now? With what has happened in Virginia Tech and Ft. Hood I don’t know what to make of my personal safety in America. I like to think that this would never happen to me, that I would never be in a situation where a madman opens fires on a crowd. But I just don’t know anymore. Even when I walk to and from class, keeping in mind all the armed robberies occurring in broad daylight and zero-dark thirty, I just don’t freakin’ know anymore. Am I all that safe in a country fiercely fighting for gun rights, where the most unsuspecting citizen breaks those rights by killing other unsuspecting citizens? I’ve lived through two deployments in a war zone where the US maintained gun control by the numbers. But when you have someone from the military shooting at the military, you’re left stupefied. This happened in Kuwait, 2003. Six years later it’s happening here. What to make of it…

I’ve never really been pro-gun rights. Never thought it was necessary and felt that the Marine Corps and combat had exposed me to enough of that. Personally, I do feel safer outside of war. But over time it all meshes together. In the beginning of the Iraq invasion some of the enemy wore uniforms, then the enemy dressed as civilians, leaving us the only ones wearing uniforms. That’s how I feel now, as I’m sure a lot of recently returned combat veterans might feel: everyone is a possible target, anyone could begin shooting at any moment and not having a sidearm leaves you exposed, leaves you unarmed. The vulnerable feeling doesn’t come from living among civilians, i.e., easy targets. No, it comes from not carrying a sidearm, be it a M16, 203, 9mm, even a SAW, and being afraid of civilians. No sidearm in Iraq increased your chances of death: more weapons equaled higher chance of survival, whereas fewer weapons equaled almost certain death.

I ask myself if the war has hit home yet, especially with the murderer at Ft. Hood who said he would have rather killed Americans than Iraqis, even though his job as a psychiatrist wouldn’t have exposed him to kill Iraqis. I think the war on terror has transmitted strongly from overseas to the US. It seems to have left our TVs and soaked in our soil, reverberating from 9/11 to the Middle East to the South, planting and sprouting into homegrown recipes of terrorism self-consciously constructed in the form of the American born citizen. I don’t know how embedded-terrorism will evolve from the virus-like presence we see now and into something else. But I do know that the imaginary sidearm I self-consciously carry might very well soon take form of the real thing.

Penny for Your Thoughts, Part 3, by J. Scott

During all this walking you’re constantly thinking about humping, hiking your pack and all your weapons, a freakin’ hundred pounds of valuable sentimental government gear up and down mountains that come with names like, Mount Mother Fucker, 1st Sgt’s Hill, Iron Mike, and the gawd damn Radio Tower! because in that past life that’s all you did, and did you did well: a Corporal of Marines flown into a combat zone filled with many Marines killing many Hodgies and many Hodgies killing some Marines and…how many times? How many deployments? Once, twice, maybe thrice? OIFI, II, III, IV, V. Lieutenants eager to win the trust of the enlisted, hoping to save a life without losing one to save two, or two to save three, or three to save a platoon. We have 1st Sergeants and Gunnys, WO2s and lifers, all putting their time in the Sandbox, waiting, hoping, existing for the wait that brings the war, for the effort of the war, the affect of the war and then the Corps,

God Country & Corps,

Your Corps,

My Corps,

Marine Corps!

And now?

Now look at yourself. Not even a sidearm, not even a freakin’ 9mm because you’ve replaced it with that goddamn uncomfortable pack of yours, sitting high and poking you in the back, itching and scratching and wishing it was off, removing the books, inserting the mag…round in the chamber, bolt forward, weapon on fire, backblast area all clear, fire in the hole, hellcopy, Whisky Tango Mike; call signs, nomenclature, jargon, Marine jargon: Big Fish, Little Fish, Guppy, Stupid the pigeon, Farmer John: Doc is gone…(silence) I repeat, Doc is gone…(more silence)…………………………………………………………………….................

Even the word makes you cringe, backpack, and so you think, hatchback, as in the hatchback of the humvee you were once responsible for, including the dead Corpsman and the wounded gunner and the shaken up crew who miraculous survived. To be honest, you can never escape the thoughts, like in the motion of walking and how it reminds you of all things military: patrolling under the desert sun and on the unpaved ground, foot patrols through dark alleys, precarious markets bleeding forth nefarious characters, early morning raids, late night firewatch, wailing women who long for their dead husbands—their working faces and statue-like stares offered to us, us the killers, us the destroyers—مجاهدين. Long, boring, dreadful VCPs, crumbled villages circled by burnt crops and blackened corps; convoys moving to the South, traversing to the East, then to the North, with bullion from the South. Early-Sadar city with its suicide bomber and poor dead Owens who got shot in the neck during a night patrol in the dark-night alley, the quiet dark night alley ringing to life by celestial fire striking down high above thee; and then S/Sgt. Tejeda exposing himself to stop the fire, to call them out, to challenge the enemy, to stop this pussy footin’ and fight like real…
And the enemy spoke.

You go to sleep knowing Owens and his platoon sergeant is dead. You wake up the next morning before stand-to and think about what MRE you will eat. Later, in the heat of the day, you will write letters home, the letters become sprinkled with drops of sweat, a never ending stream of sweat pouring from your forearms, from your nose, running down your forehead and stinging your eyes, clouding your vision, salting the tip of your tongue.

 
The city still smolders, loose rubble breaks free from bombed buildings, habitations. Squad size fires are made in the perimeter of our 360 degrees of protection. We warm our hands and throw a bouquet of purple flowers onto the hearth. They quickly wilt, sending up thick curly plumes, thick lines tracing the air, laden with ash, raining down nothing but ash.
No bell rings, but class is dismissed. I grab my pack and take a breath. I push through the front door onto the night-colored asphalt; you can still smell the oil in it.

I see the hoard moving, casually, lazily.

I join after them.
My grip tightens and I check my gig line. I buck. I step into the shade offered by the poplars, shade splayed across cracked slabs of sidewalk, the shattered concrete. I have entered the world unbeknownst to all of us dying from the slow death that comes from fighting in the East. And my next class is located West of campus. So I head West.

 
I walk West.

I go home.

 

Penny For Your Thoughts, Part 2 by J. Scott

Walking becomes a difficult task. It requires you to concentrate on going from point A to point B without thinking about all the vantage points an enemy sniper might take advantage of before he sends a tumbling 7.62 through you sinus cavity, or key-holes your forehead, or stings your clavicle with cauterizing tracers. And then there are the defilades, the many defilades giving way to ambush: rising knolls and sparkling fountain heads impossible to see past, impossible to ignore, especially for the grateful enemy who will make you bleed from many holes with simple pull of trigger...
Gha-cunk, Gha-cunk, Gha-cunk

A healthy three round burst sending a volley of AK-fire throughout your body…and do you see him? This enemy dressed like the rest, the crouching enemy lying in wait for the moment of attack, waiting for the next moment he can call, call to talk, talk to you and elect send to make IED.
If you can get past all the ways you might die in walking to class, or anywhere really, you have to switch gears because sooner or later you’ll be stepping into the classroom seated with students and not Hodgies or Marines, or even the USO. And here (in lecture) one must engage the professor in worthwhile discussion, observe what they have to say because it is important, as important as it was in Division Schools, or SOI, or in the process of interrogation, or when not to drive down streets named RPG Alley, or over bridges rigged with 155s waiting in due time to explode so violently into a head-numbing orb of rage that your bladder will pop before your skull cracks.
I present to you the ever evolving IED, set off by the same cells phones fellow students text with in class.
WTF?

But I do enjoy walking around campus, my lovely campus, and I look forward to autumn when the leaves change colors and the water fountains ice over and begin to stop smelling like the men’s restroom. But before that, when it’s that unbearably hot, when you feel sweat trickle out of your armpits and run down the side of your torso and drip onto hot parched brick, all of this again reminding you of the hiking and the patrolling and the…the urge to go back again, yes! to go back over there because you’ve not yet found that same type of disgruntled camaraderie in the civilian-sector, the same type of hateful love one Marine has for another, the same kind of “fuck the Corps eat the Apple” mantra that spawns from the disgusting lifestyle an 03 lives.
And you may never.

Penny for Your Thoughts, Part 1 by J. Scott

My campus is a nice campus. We have lots of paved brick and a good supply of Jesuits dressed in white gowns, white hoods, wrapped together by thick white rope. Strategically placed statues guard the campus: Indians (Native Americans), more Jesuits, Roman and Greek gods, poets, a guy named Ted, and a potbellied goblin. My favorite statue is a bronze one of Robert Frost, cast in a moment of inspiration right outside the library. He sits, pen in hand, contemplating, searching for something, looking up at nothing in particular, grinning as if to say “life is good.” Seeing Mr. Frost like that every day makes me happy, and I thank him for that. I wish more students looked like him. I mean, I wish more students looked frozen, speechless, harmless. Some days, I’ll walk through the center of the student body in between classes, taking a deep breath and reminding myself,
“They’re just babies.”

But I’ve had a hard time doing that lately; I’ve always had a hard time putting that thought into practice because it reminds me too much of crowd control in Iraq, which reminds me of M16s and concertina wire, which then reminds me of Bagdad, ambushes, shooting dead dogs, and taking pictures of the dead and the dead we shot. And you don’t need to show symptoms of an epileptic seizure while having a flashback, like most movies depict. You just have to be in the right place at the right time, which for me happens to be my campus on any given day.

So my walks to and from class are occasionally done on the sidewalks outlining my campus. Sometimes, however, a diesel truck might drive by and blow that sweet reminiscent smell of Hodgie-truck exhaust into the air, the grim perfume, the all too familiar smell of war and invasion, of burnt pita and burning oil and dried shit and fresh piss all mixed together to create a special kind of scent only you and maybe that guy over there wearing his unit’s tee-shirt might know about. And then I’m back to square one again, trying to remember and forget about a war still budding, the war still working its mysterious fog in and around the civilian-sector I’ve crossed into, that fog that followed me off the plane and into my room and under my bed and into my lungs. All the meanwhile I see gargantuan elephants stamping on the minds of combat veterans worldwide, killing us slowly, killing the ones who breathed in the fog that crept out from under the tent flaps, inhaling it, holding it, not releasing it. These are the ones who innocently and not so innocently wanted a peek, just a peek at these large beautiful elephants they all went to see one day.

The EG&A

We stole the Eagle from the Air Force,
The Anchor from the Navy,
The Rope from the Army.

And on the seventh day when God rested,

We overran his perimeter and stole the Globe,

And have been protecting our shores ever since.

The Luck Ones, by Chris Jones UMSC

Just who are the Lucky ones?

The ones who made it home,

From the first, second, and third tour,

However many they’d flown.

Just who are the Lucky ones?

The ones working in the rear,

Who help out greasing the gears,

Running supply there and here.

Just who are the Lucky ones?

The ones way up there,

Soaring high above in the air,

Only to be shot down, by anti-air.

Just who are the Lucky ones?

The ones who stayed home in the rear,

For they lost friends too,

Silent voices too loud to bear.

Just who are the Lucky ones?

The ones who lay in there,

They have no worries now,

Those are your Lucky ones,

The ones without a care.