to advance over the trenches
“avec courage,”
helmets
“sur la tête.”
In the hush following the speech, one private, sick with louse bites and scarlet fever, quipped, “That’s not the head I’m worried about.” (
C’est ne pas cette tête qui me préoccupe!
)
Weapons manufacturers explicitly exploited this anxiety in the second half of the twentieth century, designing explosive charges that jumped from the ground to hip level before they exploded—theBouncing Betty, named after Betty Boop, the first hypersexualized female cartoon of the postwar era. The chant that Marines out at Parris Island introduced in 1966: “This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun.” Lose either, and the fun ends.
The fears: soldiers spent a lot of time not really thinking to avoid them, and when they did think, it was about home and girlfriends and fiancées and sex, and after that, when they thought about the future, which seemed to loom in the country overheard to the north, it was about their balls. True fear and the language of courage. Testicles,
cojones
, testosterone to stand up under fire and not be a pussy.
Since arriving in Kuwait, Peoria had spent more than twenty days in the Humvees with the soldiers—mostly men, mostly nineteen to twenty-eight—prepared for the invasion. We need color, the editors had said, and maybe find a scandal too. War crimes are always good.
Peoria has assigned each of them a place in the group hierarchy. Characters, all of them. The staff sergeant is someone you could say is straight from central casting—is there a central casting anymore? The men are stereotypes with legs and animated mouths. They have affected their roles in the unit almost cinematically, so much so that Peoria feels like he has watched this scene before, certainly he has read about it in all the war novels, heard the banter, or a variation of it, in the dispatches from the front from every other war reporter he has ever studied. Chicken/egg, egg/chicken. What comes first: the drill sergeant or the drill sergeant in
Full Metal Jacket
?
Phelps is the badass, can-do NCO, a veteran of four deployments who has seen it all, no sweat, regularly abusive. Yelks is the typical private: talkative, youthful, running at the mouth in an ongoing and evolving profane banter with his buddy, Specialist Lenny. Yelks is always anxious to explain and make sweeping judgments on Army life and on his fellow soldiers, like “problem in the Army is that mostof these guys didn’t have friends in high school. I mean, they were picked on in high school. I mean, if they had friends, you know, they were fucking losers, to be honest, and now they’ve got guns?”
There’s the large southern redneck, with a neck red from the sun, from Arkansas. A pair of black kids from Brooklyn and Jersey, who even today make jokes about the white man, though there is the double irony that they really don’t feel very oppressed. The young lieutenant, an intellectual sort from one of the Ivy League schools who went against the grain and signed up to learn about war because, as he puts it, “it was such a part of human history, the human experience, and to understand myself and the world, I need to understand war,” with whispers that he is thinking about a career in politics.
And then there is the quiet loner, non-aggressively awkward, effeminate, near pretty, always a half step behind, not on the ball, with a silent mystery hinting at some hidden depth, some sensitivity in a very insensitive environment—and in this unit, that soldier’s name is Justin Salvador. From what Peoria has gathered, he’s Puerto Rican, though he’s often called Mexican or Honduran or Panamanian, and his nickname—as most in the unit have a nickname, just like soldiers in the movies—is Chipotle. He is the soldier the conversation seizes on in moments of silence. Rather than talk about the weather, a joke thrown Salvador’s way acts as the
“avec courage,”
helmets
“sur la tête.”
In the hush following the speech, one private, sick with louse bites and scarlet fever, quipped, “That’s not the head I’m worried about.” (
C’est ne pas cette tête qui me préoccupe!
)
Weapons manufacturers explicitly exploited this anxiety in the second half of the twentieth century, designing explosive charges that jumped from the ground to hip level before they exploded—theBouncing Betty, named after Betty Boop, the first hypersexualized female cartoon of the postwar era. The chant that Marines out at Parris Island introduced in 1966: “This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun.” Lose either, and the fun ends.
The fears: soldiers spent a lot of time not really thinking to avoid them, and when they did think, it was about home and girlfriends and fiancées and sex, and after that, when they thought about the future, which seemed to loom in the country overheard to the north, it was about their balls. True fear and the language of courage. Testicles,
cojones
, testosterone to stand up under fire and not be a pussy.
Since arriving in Kuwait, Peoria had spent more than twenty days in the Humvees with the soldiers—mostly men, mostly nineteen to twenty-eight—prepared for the invasion. We need color, the editors had said, and maybe find a scandal too. War crimes are always good.
Peoria has assigned each of them a place in the group hierarchy. Characters, all of them. The staff sergeant is someone you could say is straight from central casting—is there a central casting anymore? The men are stereotypes with legs and animated mouths. They have affected their roles in the unit almost cinematically, so much so that Peoria feels like he has watched this scene before, certainly he has read about it in all the war novels, heard the banter, or a variation of it, in the dispatches from the front from every other war reporter he has ever studied. Chicken/egg, egg/chicken. What comes first: the drill sergeant or the drill sergeant in
Full Metal Jacket
?
Phelps is the badass, can-do NCO, a veteran of four deployments who has seen it all, no sweat, regularly abusive. Yelks is the typical private: talkative, youthful, running at the mouth in an ongoing and evolving profane banter with his buddy, Specialist Lenny. Yelks is always anxious to explain and make sweeping judgments on Army life and on his fellow soldiers, like “problem in the Army is that mostof these guys didn’t have friends in high school. I mean, they were picked on in high school. I mean, if they had friends, you know, they were fucking losers, to be honest, and now they’ve got guns?”
There’s the large southern redneck, with a neck red from the sun, from Arkansas. A pair of black kids from Brooklyn and Jersey, who even today make jokes about the white man, though there is the double irony that they really don’t feel very oppressed. The young lieutenant, an intellectual sort from one of the Ivy League schools who went against the grain and signed up to learn about war because, as he puts it, “it was such a part of human history, the human experience, and to understand myself and the world, I need to understand war,” with whispers that he is thinking about a career in politics.
And then there is the quiet loner, non-aggressively awkward, effeminate, near pretty, always a half step behind, not on the ball, with a silent mystery hinting at some hidden depth, some sensitivity in a very insensitive environment—and in this unit, that soldier’s name is Justin Salvador. From what Peoria has gathered, he’s Puerto Rican, though he’s often called Mexican or Honduran or Panamanian, and his nickname—as most in the unit have a nickname, just like soldiers in the movies—is Chipotle. He is the soldier the conversation seizes on in moments of silence. Rather than talk about the weather, a joke thrown Salvador’s way acts as the
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