Scattered Thoughts In a Moment’s Peace

Posted on Friday, 05.02.08 at 15:34 in Contemporary~Fiction

When this story was written, only Rangers wore black berets. That’s changed now. The Rangers wear tan berets now because the regular army decided all of them should wear black ones. This story has seeds of truth, but is more fiction than not, hence the “fiction” classification. Shannon will not clarify which portions are true, so don’t ask.

“Blood red.”

Two words. People say them. Write them. And why not? It is descriptive. It might be cliché, but at least it draws a picture in the mind, since almost everyone has seen the color of blood.

I wonder how many people would use those words if they had seen the color as often as I have.

I suppose I could get philosophical and ponder the fact that blood is the same color, regardless of the color of skin or the location of your house. I could build an emotionally moving argument based on the idea that we are all the same; we are all brothers and sisters, but that idea has been presented often enough in the past by others, and many would think my actions make me a liar or hypocrite anyway. But it is true: I mean the fact that our blood is the same. My entire body is caked with drying, crusty blood. My clothes are saturated with it. The fabric is stuck to my skin, meshed with the little bit of body hair that hasn’t already been ripped free of my hide. It’s under my fingernails and mixed in with the camouflage paint on my face. It’s flaking off of my bald scalp like dandruff. I wonder if Head and Shoulders has a special formula for this?

Some of the blood is mine. Some of it belongs to my friends. Most of it belongs to the men who shot and killed my friends. All of it is red, and it all looks the same to me. I just don’t want any of it flaking off onto my oatmeal bar. It tastes like shit as it is, without any added seasonings.
I have fifteen minutes that I can use to eat, sleep, or take a shit.

I slept for three hours sometime yesterday, so I don’t need sleep yet, and I don’t think I could, even if I needed it; I have a bad case of prickly heat that is slowly driving me insane. Prickly heat happens when you sweat for long periods of time without changing clothes or bathing, and the salt in the sweat crystallizes and gets wedged into the pores of the skin. Then when you cool down, the pores contract, and the salt crystals cut you. It feels similar to the prickly feeling you get if you get into a patch of nettles. The only way I know to fix it is to take a scalding shower for an hour or so. Scrubbing a layer of skin off with Lava soap helps too, if you can stand to use that harsh stuff on all of the scrapes, scratches, cuts, tears, and bruises.

I haven’t had any real food in three days, so my bowels have nothing that needs to come out. I stink of ammonia so bad that I can barely keep from puking at my own stench. That’s another bonus to being without a shower or clean clothes for days. Sweat has minute amounts of uric acid, the same compound that stinks in piss. It won’t evaporate in this humidity, and given enough time in open air, it breaks down into ammonia and water. I smell like a walking pool of piss that some one poured ammonia into, but I guess I’ll try to eat this freeze-dried, vacuum-sealed oatmeal cookie and get my head together.

I just need a fifteen-minute reality check. I play a favorite song in my head, where only I can hear it. This time it is “One of These Nights” by the Eagles. I find that in times such as these, I also like Pink Floyd and Bonnie Rait. Right before we spring an ambush or raid, I often “listen” to Metallica or the Pantera to get worked up. The Eagles dwindles out of my head, and I try to think about something to keep me grounded in reality. My wife. My novel. My bills.

Speaking of bills, I’m getting paid about $23,000 a year to be sitting here, but I don’t do it for the money. This job has excellent fringe benefits, like the blood baths, ammonia aroma therapy, and fine cuisine.

I killed four men today. The survivors in our team have patted me on the back and whispered congratulations like we’re all at deer camp and I bagged a trophy buck. These four deer had names. I can’t pronounce them, but I know them. When I searched the bodies, I recovered their personal effects. I broke my own record today with four bodies completely searched in two minutes and twenty-seven seconds. When I finished with them, their clothes were mostly ripped off, and I broke their arms in my haste to search them. It looked like they had been ravaged by some terrible brute of a beast.

Breaking my own record earned me the oatmeal bar, a prize from my team leader for being so good at what I do. Most people in America would turn their noses up at this hard piece of processed, compacted sawdust, but today it’s my Scooby Snack.

The military teaches us to dehumanize our enemies, to make it easier to kill them. Even so, the most ruthless soldiers can have a hard time actually pulling the trigger. I think that’s why I’ve been congratulated so many times tonight. These men aren’t jealous because I have four more confirmed kills, and they’re not impressed that I killed two of them with a knife and my bare hands after my rifle jammed. They think I need support to keep it together, because they would be ready to lose their minds right now, and they need to reassure themselves that I’m all right. They don’t want to think that I might flip out and do to them what I did to the “bad guys.”

I understand their fear. It wouldn’t be an issue if the enemies were Asian or African, but it’s hard to dehumanize a corpse when it doesn’t have different skin color or eye shape. When they look just like you, when they’re lying right beside your own dead friends, and the corpses look the same, it’s hard to stay focused.
I think it unnerves the rest that I could be so ruthless against a man that looks so much like us. Two years ago, I tried to tell my platoon sergeant that exterior characteristics don’t matter. The blood is what we’re after, and it’s all the same. He put me on a psyche profile for two months. I kept my mouth shut after that.
I never loose sight of whom I’m killing. I resist the urge to dehumanize my enemies. I don’t need mental tricks to help me do my job. I know when I use my rifle, or my knife, or my hands, my target is a person, with dreams and a family just like me, but that doesn’t stop me from doing what I have to do.

Obviously, a rifle or pistol gives better chances of personal survival than a knife or hands, but I detest the mechanical process of a firearm. Dying is just as significant as being born. I don’t want to die from a piece of metal fired from a machine 200 yards away, without knowing the face of the man who killed me. When I have to kill a person, I prefer to be right there, where I can smell their flesh and feel their heartbeat stop. It’s important to me that they have some one near them when they pass, even if it’s only the person who killed them. I need to see their dreams fade out of their eyes with their last breath. If I live to see the States again, I’ll take a long shower after a hot meal and wonder then if my ways make me more or less of a monster.

I have all of the personal documents of the men I killed in a Ziploc bag in my right breast pocket. One of them had three daughters, and a beautiful wife. Did he hear her voice in his head before he died? I wonder what he planned to do with the rest of his life. I’m the one who took those years from him, but that doesn’t bother me. His choices led him to collide with me. My choices led me to collide with him. One of us had to die, as a result of our own choices, but I do wonder what he might have been if he had lived. I might have just killed the man that could cure cancer some day. Not knowing aggravates me.

The water in my canteen is red as blood. We strained the chunks out of it with our shirts before putting it in our canteens, and then doubled the iodine tablets. The iodine should kill most of the bacteria, viruses, and parasites, but there’s enough heavy metal in this sludge to destroy three livers. It tastes like rubbing alcohol on my tongue and throat, but I have to drink it or die of dehydration, assuming I don’t choke to death first on this oatmeal bar. There was a time not too long ago when I wouldn’t drink water if it wasn’t cold enough, or if it had too much chlorine in it.

If I get back home, I wonder how many weeks I’ll be on antibiotics and how many tubes of anti-fungal cream I’ll have to use this time before they let me out of Quarantine?

Home. What a joke. I mean, of course I want to live, but I’m not so sure I want to go back home. Life makes more sense out here, regardless of where “here” is from one mission to another. If I died here tonight, my wife would be told that I was killed in a training accident, or that my parachute had not opened. She’d get a check for $450,000 from my insurance companies, but neither she nor the rest of the country would ever know I was here, taking care of a threat to our way of life.

And don’t think I’m brain washed. I don’t buy into that patriotic bullshit the politicians spout just so I can feel righteous and justified. I know the real deal. The men I killed today were threats to America. They belonged to a terrorist group that bombs busses and buildings. They hijack airplanes. They kidnap American women and children and sell them into slavery across the world.

What? You don’t think that could happen in America? Was September Eleventh not enough to wake you up? Pull your head out of your ass and look around. There is so much going on that no one knows about, like Germany’s secret biological weapons initiative, or the huge subterranean construction going on in the Libyan Desert. That’s just two of hundreds of secrets that most of America doesn’t even know about. But I know about them. I know about them because it is my job to do something about them.

Why does it fall to me and others like me to do these things? Because we can do what needs to be done, and we can do it very well.

Don’t dare ask me why I did nothing to stop the Towers from falling. While you were sitting in your living room watching that happen on CNN, I was fighting another unsung fight in the sewers of Mexico City. I had a broken hand and stress fractures in both heels. I won’t even try to describe how I smelled.

A good friend of mine caught a disease that has no cure. He isn’t going to die from it, but he can never set foot in America again. The government won’t even allow him to be buried here after he dies. He was so worried about catching something from the cheap pussy down there, but it was a rat that bit him, and now he will never see his home again. Before the rest of us left Mexico, he told me that he’s going to fuck every piece of ass he can find until he finally catches something that will kill him. Before Mexico, he was going to school in his spare time, so he could go into nursing when his enlistment was up.

My reward for surviving that day was hearing about New York and the Pentagon. I didn’t cry until I got back home a couple weeks later and heard about people “suffering” from “trauma and guilt syndromes” caused by seeing the graphic images on TV. I cried then, because I truly understood once and for all that America has become the Land of Spineless Pussies. When did we get so soft?

My wife is at home right now, asleep, thinking I’m training with blank ammunition in Texas. If I had died tonight, she would never know the truth.

No one in America will know that my enemies ever existed. No one will know that I risked my life to kill them to protect my countrymen. I don’t want recognition. I don’t want thanked. I just wish people would appreciate the freedoms that I’m risking my life to protect. I think folks are more aware now, in the wake of the plane crashes, but that awareness will fade.

You want to know the worst part about 9-11? There was a lesson to be learned there, and if we learned it, most have already forgotten. The smoke has barely cleared from the New York skyline, and life is back to normal, except it takes longer to fly. Gangs still kill each other over drugs and turf. Pro-lifers and Pro-choicers are at each other’s throats. People are still rude and mean without thought or concern, just because they can be, because it’s America, where you can say what you want and sue any one who doesn’t like it.

Politicians cheat and steal and lie to us every day. I wonder how many millions of dollars have been raised for 9-11 victim relief, and how much of those funds will the families actually receive.

White and black, gay and straight, Christian and Jew, they all squabble like children over issues that only matter because they have no external threats to worry about. Sure, everyone is still a bit edgy, but soon they will forget, because men like me and my three dead friends go to the shittiest places on earth to die, to stop external threats before they get close enough to harm America.

I wonder if I’m causing a problem by fixing another. I wish I could get above the world and look down, from an objective viewpoint, and decide the best way to spend the rest of my life. Down here, on the ground, I have too much blood in my eyes to see clearly.

People who could never survive an hour of my daily existence burn the same flag that will drape the coffins of my three friends. They’ll yell that they’re “soldiers” of a new order, “fighting” the old ways. Some proclaim that they aren’t afraid to die for their beliefs. It makes me want to bomb a busload of the ungrateful, ignorant bastards.

Any fool or coward can die for a cause. After they die, their troubles are over. Living for what you believe is hard. That’s why every major religion makes such a taboo of suicide. Personally, I think it is a shame. Our world would be so much better off if we had fewer weak-willed fools. It’s too bad that organized religions take advantage of their frail, stupid intellects to scare so many of them into not hanging themselves.

I should get out of Quarantine just in time to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Savannah. When we march down the streets, looking always so proud and serious in our uniforms and tan berets, some people will cheer, but others will cuss and throw food or beer cans at us. We will never flinch as we march on.

Young girls will run up to those of us on the outside ranks and kiss us with heavy lipstick or flash their tits at us, trying to get one of us to grin. But we won’t. Old ladies will hug us. A few of us might even get kissed by a cross dresser or full-out fag. Even then, we won’t break rank or step, or change expression.

Later that night, the cops will watch for us, because they know every punk in town with something to prove wants to fight a Ranger, and the pigs love it when we’re involved in fights, because it makes them feel powerful to arrest us and “put us in our place.” Some of my single buddies will try to pick up women, and they might, if they hook up with out-of-town girls. None of the local women want anything to do with the “baby killers.”

I’ll be at home with a few other married couples, having our own party. My living friends and I always silently dedicate the last drink of our beers to our dead friends, to the Airborne Rangers in the Sky. If you see one of us making a toast to no one in particular before he downs the last drink, he’s just saying “Thank you” and “Wish you were here” both at once.

All of that is back home, the Land of the Free. I have to survive another four days if I’m going to see it again.

This life has changed me. I’ll never be able to see the world or society the same. I was always the crazy, reckless one. Now I’m methodical, focused, and determined, but still crazy, I guess.

When I’m home, and I mean all the way back home, in West Virginia with my parents and friends, I have to make up things to talk about. I have to pretend to be interested in their concerns and worries. It all seems so petty to me now. I can’t talk about the things that I know, or the things I’ve done. I can’t even talk about the training I do, because they just can’t relate. How can I expect some one to understand the excruciating details of a thirty-mile road march when no one in the room has ever walked thirty miles at once, let alone with a seventy-pound pack?

My dad did a tour in ‘Nam, in a Marines Battalion Recon unit. He knows without having to ask. The first time I came home, we grilled steaks out on the riverbank, and he didn’t even ask if I still liked my steak well-done. He just handed it to me bloody rare, because he’s been through it, and he knows. A man is just like any other animal. Once you develop a taste for blood, nothing else will ever do.

My wife worries too, because she knows I plan to get out of the service at the end of this enlistment. She’s glad I’m getting out, but she still worries. She’s been to the Company and Battalion parties. She knows how a lot of the other men regard me, even if she isn’t totally sure why. She’s worried that I’ll have trouble readjusting to normal civilian life, and I know she’s right. I don’t have any respect for civilians. I have no fear of civilians. I see them all as a bunch of meandering, stupid sheep that are easily fooled and easily frightened. I’m unsure if I’m the Sheppard or the Wolf. But again, all of that is back home, thousands of miles away.

You’re probably wondering why I live this way if it sucks so much. I endure this because I believe that it has to been done. I know that most people could not do this. They could not be here, covered in blood, eating a candy bar in the shadow of death. But I can. I excel at this. My unit is respected throughout the world as one of the most deadly military units anywhere, and among these men, I am one of the best. How many people can truthfully say that they are among the best of the best in their chosen field? In a broader sense, I’m the equivalent of a Noble Prize winning scientist or Pulitzer Prize winning writer.

I suppose you might also wonder why I plan to leave, if I’m so good at it. Well, I’m not a fool. I might be very good at this, but look at what “this” is. I kill people. I destroy lives, and frankly, I’m getting to where I enjoy it too much.

I’m to the point where I hate the society I protect more than those that I kill in their defense. I used to get through a mission by concentrating on the Americans I protected, not who I killed.

When I killed those four men earlier today, I was still thinking about Americans, but not in the same way. I didn’t see four European men. I saw the smart-mouthed cocksucker on Martin Luther King Drive that sells crystal meth to kids on their way to school. I saw the little shit in the expensive suit that had the balls to flirt repeatedly with my wife at Malone’s. I saw the lazy sack of shit at Burger King that gave me a hard time when she screwed up my order. I saw the white trash bitch that popped out four bastards so she and her boyfriend would have enough welfare money for liquor and cigarettes while her kids play naked in her front yard in mud and dog shit. I saw the child molesters and rapists and murderers. I saw the motherfucking shrinks that protect those freaks with their “science” and “mental disorders.”

I’ve decided no one in my entire country is worth dying for, and my luck is going to run out eventually, maybe a day from now, or an hour from now, especially with my head all screwed up like it is. Confusion or hesitation will kill you out here. I have to get out of the army before I get killed or really do lose my mind. One or the other is going to happen sooner than later. I can feel it coming down on me like a heavy thunderstorm.

I have three American dog tags in my right breast pocket, and three American bodies at my feet. We don’t have the means to extract the bodies, so we carry them with us. There is no time right now to mourn them. The platoon sergeant looked at their bodies after the raid and said,

“Recognizing that I volunteered as a Ranger, fully knowing the hazards of my chosen profession… Surrender is not a Ranger word. I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy.”

Words from our Creed. I hope I am worthy of a similar epitaph when I am the one on the ground with my face blown off.

Three dog tags mean nine separate letters, three to each family. The Department of the Army will call the next of kin and send a letter, as they inform the mother and father or wife of the tragic training accident that has resulted in the death of their son or husband, and unfortunately requires a closed casket ceremony.
Then I’ll write my letters, if I’m still alive. I’m the lucky guy in the platoon who gets to write a personal letter to the family of the deceased. Somebody figured out that I used to be a creative writing major in college before I joined the army. I must have said something one night when we were drinking. All I know is that it always falls to me to write the letter that always starts off,

Mr./Mrs. Such and Such,

Your son/husband was one of our finest, and he will be missed. He was a good friend to us all, and we wanted you to know that he will always be remembered here, and that you are not alone in your mourning. Even now I remember the time he blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It will be the same, even if he was a worthless shit bag that no one could stand. I’m a writer, and rumor has it that writers are good at writing things. So I always get to write these letters. If I ever get out of this unit alive, I don’t know if I’ll ever write again.

If I don’t get out of here alive, I wonder who will write a letter to my wife? I hope they can spell and use decent grammar.

But that’s just six letters, right? One from DoA, and one from me, for three men. Well, that’s the secret, you see. On a Friday, a few weeks after they’re buried and we’ve had our memorial services for them, I’ll sit up all night and type three more letters. These letters will tell the families enough of what really happened so they know why the government wouldn’t let them see the bodies.

I never tell specifics, and I never relate the graphic details, but it will still be enough to put me in prison for the rest of my life if anyone finds out. I know that I would want my wife to know that I died fighting for something, that my own incompetence or dumb luck had not gotten me killed in a “training accident.” I would want her to know why she was not allowed to see or touch me again before I was put into the ground.

These letters are where the real writing happens. I labor over these texts, ensuring that the voice of the letter is completely different from the tone of the others I have already sent. I make sure that I use different vocabulary and syntax from the first letters, but I also have to avoid using words and phrases that I actually use myself. Through all that, I have to tell them enough of what happened to let them know, without really telling them anything very specific. Sometimes I have to get creative. If the guy really was worthless and his own stupidity really did get him killed, I try to downplay that angle. I’m a really nice guy like that.

When the letters are finished, I save them to a floppy disk and set my computer hard drive to low level format, to completely and utterly erase everything in it. Then I go to Kinko’s, where I have a civilian friend. He lets me print the letters out in the back office with their cheap Epson Inkjet printer and doesn’t ask why I’m wearing latex gloves when I do it. He’s a really good friend. I always clear out the printer buffer and defrag the hard drive of the computer before I leave.

I burn the floppy disk when the letters are sealed and addressed in envelopes and placed together in another, larger envelope with another address on it. Then I drive to Jacksonville, Florida, to spend the weekend visiting an old friend of mine from my college days. I drop the letters off somewhere across the state line, and they get mailed to a re-mailing service in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that I set up with a fake ID when I was home on leave a few years ago. From there, they’re mailed to the families and cannot be traced back to me by any means that I know.

I’ll leave my friend’s place early Sunday, drive back to Savannah, and reinstall my computer’s operating system and my files from back up copies.
As far as I know, only one man knows that I write these letters. He was my roommate in the barracks before I got married. I never worry about him turning me in, because he’s the absolute best friend I have ever had. I have discovered a level of friendship here that I suspect cannot be found anywhere else, under normal circumstances. Amazing bonds are formed between people in terrible accidents or near death situations. In the Rangers, we’re put in those types of situation many times.

There are plenty of guys that I don’t like here, but when we’re on a mission, I trust them with my life just as they trust me with theirs. I know I will never find friendship at this level ever again.

My buddy and I have torn up bars across the world, from Germany to Thailand to New Orleans. We quit counting the times we saved each other’s lives.
When we get drunk, sometimes he’ll run his mouth about my “secret” but everybody just figures he’s giving me grief, like he’s hinting at me being queer, just to piss me off. It used to bother me though, and we even got into a nasty fight over it once, but I don’t worry about it anymore, since I have his blood on my hands and his tag in my pocket.

Don’t worry, old friend. I’ll write two really good letters for your folks. I’ll make sure that they’ll know enough to be proud of you.

My fifteen minutes are up. I guess its time to climb into my 125-pound pack and try to stand up. We have four days of walking, with no re-supply, and no fire support. We’re carrying three dead men and their equipment, and four others are walking wounded. I think we’ll be all right as long as no one goes tits-up from heat stroke, bleeds to death, or steps on a booby trap.

If we have to redistribute any more gear, or carry any more bodies, I think we’ll be fucked, but I’m not worried. The Rangers are renowned for turning dog shit into diamonds. I’ll be home before I know it.