This is an account from one of the US soldiers who serves in the Gulf. I think you aren’t likely to see Gen Tommy Franks highlighting this type of account of ‘our brave boys’ when he delivers his immaculate military press briefings. It’s quite graphic reading but then war isn’t always as surgical or clean as they make out on the tv:
Anthony Swofford’s graphic account of the anarchic existence of American Marines — jarheads — during the last Gulf war reveals the savage and sometimes hilarious reality of the modern battlefield behind its high-tech gloss
On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops drive east to Kuwait City and start killing soldiers and civilians and capturing gold-heavy palaces and expensive German cars. Also on August 2, my platoon — STA (pronounced stay), the Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon, scout/snipers, of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines — is put on standby.
We’re currently stationed at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base, in California’s Mojave desert. After hearing the news of imminent war in the Middle East, we march in a platoon formation to the base barber and get fresh high-and-tight haircuts. And no wonder we call ourselves jarheads — our heads look just like jars.
Then we send a few guys into town to rent all of the war movies they can get their hands on. For three days we sit in our rec room and drink beer and watch all of those damn movies, and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging.
We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals. We rewind famous scenes: Robert Duvall and his helicopter gunships during Apocalypse Now, and Martin Sheen floating up the fake Vietnamese Congo. We watch Willem Dafoe get shot by a friendly and left on the battlefield in Platoon.
**We are afraid, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to fight. As a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam war, I want ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherf------. **
…The colonel calls a battalion formation and proudly announces that we are taking part in Operation Desert Shield. He explains that the Kuwaiti-Iraqi conflict is not yet our concern. Our mission is to shield Saudi Arabia and her flowing oilfields. We’ll be shielding enough oil to drive hundreds of millions of cars for hundreds of millions of miles, at a relatively minor cost to the American consumer.
*We joke about having transferred from the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps. We laugh to obscure the tragedy of our cheap, squandered lives and being deployed to protect oil reserves and the rights and profits of certain American companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House and oblique financial entanglements with the secretary of defence, Dick Cheney, and the commander in chief, George Bush, and the commander’s progeny. *
We know this because Kuehn, one of our representatives from Texas, says: “All those old white f—ers from Texas have their fat hands in Arab oil. The motherf------ drink it like it’s beer.”
We’re excited this morning because the reporters are finally coming…We shave for the first time in a week, pull new cammies (camouflage kit) from the bottoms of our rucks (rucksacks), and helmet-wash our pits and crotches. Sergeant Dunn gathers the platoon in a school circle. He has already recited a list of unacceptable topics…
Kuehn says: “It ain’t simple. This is censorship. You’re telling me what I can and can’t say to the press. This is un-American.”
Staff Sergeant Siek arrives. He says: “You do as you’re told. You signed the contract. You have no rights, you can’t speak out against your country. We call that treason. You can be shot for it. I’m sick of hearing your complaints. Tell your complaints to Saddam Hussein.”
The reporters introduce themselves. The man is from The New York Times and the woman from The Boston Globe. She looks not very interested in what we might tell her.
“Yes, ma’am, I believe in our mission. I believe we will quickly win this war and send the enemy crawling home.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m proud to be here serving my country. I’m proud of our president standing up to the evil. Them ragheads is gonna go down.”
“This is about freedom, not about oil. This is about standing up to aggression, like the president says. Nobody wants to go to war. We just got to be ready. We can shoot out someone’s eyeball from a click away. Ain’t no better shot in the world.”
The Times reporter wants a look at the psyche of the frontline infantryman, and I can only offer processed responses. I wish to speak honestly and say: I am a grunt, dressed up in fancy scout/sniper clothes; I am a grunt with limited vision. I don’t care about a New World Order. I don’t care about human rights violations in Kuwait City. Amnesty International, my ass. Rape them all, kill them all, sell their oil, pillage their gold, sell their children into prostitution.
The colonel has exited his vehicle and instructed Staff Sergeant Siek that better than a workout of calisthenics we should play football for the reporters, wearing full MOPP (mission oriented protective posture) gear and gas masks.
We were issued the MOPP suits at Twentynine Palms. They weigh 10lb and were once hermetically sealed, but after six weeks of being beaten around in our rucks, most are bound together with duct tape and nylon rip cord. We’re happy to use the suits for this foolish game, because now they’ll really be useless for protection against chemical attack and it will take Supply months to issue replacements. Grunt mathematics: ruck minus 10lb equals happy grunt.
Doc John Duncan, our navy corpsman, reports that the temperature has reached 112 degrees. In combat we’d wear our cammies under the suit, but we’ll cut down the heat by wearing only skivvies, and those of us, like me, who wear none will go naked beneath. With just the bottoms on, I begin to roast. Dunn orders us into formation, and before we don our masks we each drink a canteen of water. We put our masks on and tie the hoods.
The MOPP suits are in jungle camouflage, so we look like a moveable forest, something from a Monty Python skit. We use five-gallon water jugs to mark the goals. This football game will kick our asses, but it might be better than standard-issue boredom.
I drop a touchdown pass. Dickerson and Fowler argue back and forth across the line of scrimmage and throw sand at one another and insult each other’s mother. Combs and Johnny Rotten get into a pushing match, and a few of us pull them apart. The drama of the scene is catching, our audience is entranced. The reporters are taking notes and Siek looks happy with our performance. We’ve been forced into this inhumane game and we’re going to play. The heat is intense: 125, 130, 140 degrees inside our suits.
We’re all bent over at the knees, trying to catch our breath, and Siek shouts at us to continue the game. The Pentagon insists that warriors can fight at 100% in full MOPP and gas mask for eight hours. Siek wants us to play ball for an hour.
At halftime, to demonstrate to the reporters the usefulness and practicality of the drinking tube, Siek orders that with our gas masks on we drink from our canteens, as if to say, Aren’t we smart, we’ve thought of everything.
The gas mask and hood cause your hearing to lengthen and stretch. I hear Siek telling the reporters that our gas masks are high-tech pieces of equipment, that combined with the MOPP suits we are virtually an unstoppable fighting force, that the only chance the Iraqis have is to drop an A-bomb on us.
A few of us break the seals on our masks to catch fresh air. The air tastes sweet. It swirls around my face and cools my lungs and I think of fighting with this gear on and I hope, more than anything, that if we are going to war, and they are going to kick our asses, that they’ll do it with an A-bomb.
We stand in line and Siek issues instructions on using the drink tubes from our canteens. Of course we know the directions, but this is part of his show. The problem is, even if your drink tube is intact, the device on your canteen cap designed to interact with the drink tube will probably be broken. The atmosphere is one of glee.
Kuehn yells: “I’m f------ dead already. The cap is broken on my canteen. If I drink this I’m gonna drink some f-----’ mustard gas. I been saying for three months I needed a new canteen cap.”
Vegh says: “My drinking tube is broken. I’m not going to break the seal on my mask, because that would kill me. I’ll die of dehydration. Sir, thank you, sir.”
“Staff Sergeant,” I say. “I requested a new gas mask four months ago. My drinking tube fell off in the gas chamber at the Palms and Kuehn stepped on it. And we have unserviceable filters in our masks. We’re all dead. We are the ghosts of STA 2/7.”
Fowler has been wrestling with his drink tube and canteen, and finally he rips his mask off his face and punts it down the field. We’re breaking up with laughter, but Siek is not happy. He whistles like a referee and we resume the game…