low right leh-oh …
Looww right right, your low right leh-oh …
When I get to heaven …
Saint Peter’s gonna say-ay …
How’d you make your living boy, how’d you earn your pay-ay …
Iiiiiii’ll reply with my kni-ife …
SHUT UP, BITCH, I’m GONNA TAKE YOUR LI-IFE!!
I had loved the fact that a group of teenage kids had felt cocky enough to threaten Saint Peter with a knife (never mind referring to him as a bitch) and, later on in the chant, to put Satan himself on notice. Their attitude had seemed amusing, foreign, and attractive all at once. I had never developed the chutzpah to talk about the sacred so casually, and some part of me envied my Marines their bravado.
N ow, standing in the desert of Kuwait for the third time with the harsh reality of deployment all around me, I heard the same chants as I had that day in Pendleton, and I remembered that just a few short months before joining Joker One, I had been just like my Marines. I also had thought that scars were cool and that getting wounded doing heroic, leadership-type things wouldn’t necessarily be all that bad. In the Corps, we’re thoroughly trained on stories of its magnificent battle history, a history writ strong by people like Gunny Basilone in World War II, and, more recently, Captain Chontosh in Operation Iraqi Freedom I—both of whom single-handedly destroyed fiercely defended, numerically superior enemy strongpoints and saved lots of Marine lives in the process. Officer and enlisted alike pray that that kind of fortitude combines with that kind of opportunity to produce that kind of glory.
As I stood there in the desert sand, stretching and cooling down and reflecting on all these things, I hadn’t yet been shot at or returned fire, but I had been in a combat zone, and I had met plenty of blooded infantrymen. All the good ones had more or less carried themselves the same way, and the chest-beating machismo embodied in our chants was nowhere to be seen. The only words I can find that might come close to suggesting what had replaced that false bravado are “grim determination.” Nothing else can really explain that battle-hardened air, but you know it when you see it.
I had also seen a few of the lightly wounded brought back to my base; heard firsthand about the Marine who shot his friend in the face to prove that his weapon was unloaded; and stood and watched the flies congregate on the congealed blood outside the port-a-john where some nameless major had put his pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. My stupid, young machismo had been largely burned out of me. Death was no longer an altogether complete stranger. Glancing around at the high walls of the desert berms around us, it hit me more than ever that Joker One was headed north soon, headed into an area officially designated a war zone. I didn’t think that the fighting would be all that fierce, but I suspected that at least some would occur, and I suspected that someone, somewhere might get hurt.
And what you don’t hear about in training is the anonymous officer who was crushed to death because one night he slept too close to the amtracs, or the PFC who got shot through the lower spine on his first week in countryand who will now never walk again, let alone perform heroic feats in combat. And what you can’t see—and what no one can teach you and what you can’t really even envision until you get into it—are the wounds. Before they heal, most look more or less the same (if you can even see them through all the blood): like raw, red meat. Afterward they sort of differentiate themselves, but I have yet to encounter any combat scar that looked cool in any form or fashion. Mostly they look pink and jagged and discolored and puffy—accurate reflections of the trauma that cause them. Bullet entry wounds are often puckered and the exit wounds, if you’re unlucky, are swollen and deformed where the flesh has been blown out. Shrapnel wounds almost always look like someone
Looww right right, your low right leh-oh …
When I get to heaven …
Saint Peter’s gonna say-ay …
How’d you make your living boy, how’d you earn your pay-ay …
Iiiiiii’ll reply with my kni-ife …
SHUT UP, BITCH, I’m GONNA TAKE YOUR LI-IFE!!
I had loved the fact that a group of teenage kids had felt cocky enough to threaten Saint Peter with a knife (never mind referring to him as a bitch) and, later on in the chant, to put Satan himself on notice. Their attitude had seemed amusing, foreign, and attractive all at once. I had never developed the chutzpah to talk about the sacred so casually, and some part of me envied my Marines their bravado.
N ow, standing in the desert of Kuwait for the third time with the harsh reality of deployment all around me, I heard the same chants as I had that day in Pendleton, and I remembered that just a few short months before joining Joker One, I had been just like my Marines. I also had thought that scars were cool and that getting wounded doing heroic, leadership-type things wouldn’t necessarily be all that bad. In the Corps, we’re thoroughly trained on stories of its magnificent battle history, a history writ strong by people like Gunny Basilone in World War II, and, more recently, Captain Chontosh in Operation Iraqi Freedom I—both of whom single-handedly destroyed fiercely defended, numerically superior enemy strongpoints and saved lots of Marine lives in the process. Officer and enlisted alike pray that that kind of fortitude combines with that kind of opportunity to produce that kind of glory.
As I stood there in the desert sand, stretching and cooling down and reflecting on all these things, I hadn’t yet been shot at or returned fire, but I had been in a combat zone, and I had met plenty of blooded infantrymen. All the good ones had more or less carried themselves the same way, and the chest-beating machismo embodied in our chants was nowhere to be seen. The only words I can find that might come close to suggesting what had replaced that false bravado are “grim determination.” Nothing else can really explain that battle-hardened air, but you know it when you see it.
I had also seen a few of the lightly wounded brought back to my base; heard firsthand about the Marine who shot his friend in the face to prove that his weapon was unloaded; and stood and watched the flies congregate on the congealed blood outside the port-a-john where some nameless major had put his pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. My stupid, young machismo had been largely burned out of me. Death was no longer an altogether complete stranger. Glancing around at the high walls of the desert berms around us, it hit me more than ever that Joker One was headed north soon, headed into an area officially designated a war zone. I didn’t think that the fighting would be all that fierce, but I suspected that at least some would occur, and I suspected that someone, somewhere might get hurt.
And what you don’t hear about in training is the anonymous officer who was crushed to death because one night he slept too close to the amtracs, or the PFC who got shot through the lower spine on his first week in countryand who will now never walk again, let alone perform heroic feats in combat. And what you can’t see—and what no one can teach you and what you can’t really even envision until you get into it—are the wounds. Before they heal, most look more or less the same (if you can even see them through all the blood): like raw, red meat. Afterward they sort of differentiate themselves, but I have yet to encounter any combat scar that looked cool in any form or fashion. Mostly they look pink and jagged and discolored and puffy—accurate reflections of the trauma that cause them. Bullet entry wounds are often puckered and the exit wounds, if you’re unlucky, are swollen and deformed where the flesh has been blown out. Shrapnel wounds almost always look like someone
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