The Unlikely Short-Timer

Goddammit, MORE?!

2011-09-16T04:19:00.001-07:00

Yeah, I'm like a little bastard on an airplane; I don't fuckin' quit. Here's some new shit for people that care.

http://1000th-yard.blogspot.com/

Clothing optional.

The Final Word

2009-03-12T09:40:00.001-07:00

I tried to gather a list of reasons why I should be exempt, allowed to leave. Tried to think of a way to present them that would somehow persuade them. Then it dawned on me that it wasn't going to happen.

No Poor Me excuses are going to work. As I stepped back and looked at the case I was trying to present, it just looked weak. Feeble. Selfish.

Then, for the first time, I REALLY realized the gravity of the truth. I really did sign a contract.

See you in Part Four.

All Volunteer

2009-03-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

"Hey! What's up, Stop-Loss?"

"Hey man, I thought you were getting out? Did you get stop-lossed?"

Sometimes I manage to stop and make eye contact. "How the fuck should I know?!"

Right now, I don't want to see any of these faces. The uniforms. The carbon copy buildings. My head turns into concrete and cracks. You couldn't chisel the scowl off of my face with a jackhammer.

I wait to find out if my situation is enough to warrant letting me go. Hinging on the college acceptance letter, sometimes even fooling myself into thinking that it'll work. I move from group of guys to the next every five minutes. The army talk gets to be too much and I have to find something else, anything. That doesn't work so well when it's everywhere around you.

"I thought you were getting out...?"

Just keep walking.

God I hope so.

For some reason, I guess I really believed that after I put in four years, that would be it. I'd be able to pick up where I left off, and move on. Start a new chapter and all that flowery poetic shit. It seemed so plausible. 2009? Shit, shouldn't be much going on by then, right? No?

"Hey man, you signed a contract, you knew what you were getting yourself into."

That is where I disagree. If we actually understood what we were volunteering for, we would have had second thoughts.

You volunteer to be shot in the head. Blown up. Drowned in the Tigris. Burned alive. Lose eyesight, a limb, an important function, or everything. If none of this happens, excellent! It's the dark ugly truth that sits in the back and stares at everyone else in the room, but somehow no one really notices it. You didn't even realize it, but you volunteered for it. You invited it into your life. You volunteered to learn more about death and loss than you ever wanted to know in a thousand lifetimes. You volunteered to have hope snatched out of your hands and blinders ripped off of your eyes.

I avoid the new guys, plenty of the old guys too. Someone from the University I got accepted to calls me to see if I have any questions. That's about when I swallow hard, pull the knife out of my ribs, and croak a response. Keep the conversation short, give your thanks, hang up, and roll over again. Sure would be nice to have the day off, go somewhere and chill, away from Fort Lewis. Away from combat patches and CIBs and desert boots. Try to blend into the crowd, fake it as long as I can.

I was almost there. That close. Now? Now I'm not so sure. So thanks, Iraq. Thanks, Afghanistan. Thanks, Stop-Loss. Thanks to the able bodied and capable would-be soldiers, college drop-outs, pot head burnouts, dead-end minimum wage peons. Thanks, me. Well played.

Ever have a REALLY good dream, and your alarm wakes you up halfway through it? You shut your alarm off and wish that you could go back to that, but you can't. That's what this is like, to put it lightly. It's a wake-up call. One MotherFucker of a cup of coffee. Extra Strength. Guaranteed to burst your bubble or your money back.

So here's what happens:

A) An update with some great news is posted

B) We'll see you in Part Four.

Suspect out.

Belittling Others

2009-03-10T13:54:00.001-07:00

This is a little something I found on an internet forum full of young'uns eager to enlist. The guy that wrote this, I want to give him my spot. This guy needs to be the new Suspect. Maybe I'm a dick, but his unique writing style entertains me to no end, and the content, the substance, c'est magnifique!

"What the hell, there is a lot of soldiers with adhd in the army,I have been commenting for weeks here.Look not everyone is the same, it depends on your symptoms,I am planning on joining on may and I have add.Not everyone is the same is gonna be tough on bootcamps yes,but who says is immposible if a lot of soldiers have done it why can I what makes me diferent from them.

To tell you the truth I am 26 and what it really has help me is being mature,detemination,you think bootcamp was made to be impossible to pass no it was made to be really hard to be a soldiers.

I bought the book ultimate basic training guidebook,and I. Am preparing before I go over there and I am doing runing exercises.

There is a lot of things you can do to help yourself too pass bootcamp,preparing early,determination.

But is truth add is a condition if it is not treated since the begining, it can be a very serious condition I have been treated and the symptoms that I have are very little,boot camp is gonna be my test to see if I pass and I will let people here know that it can be done.

What is hard is not impossible and impossible is just a word."

Really, I just want to take this one line and put it on a t-shirt and wear it every day, covered in ketchup/mustard/hotpocket stains, seldom if ever washed, letters peeling.

I bought the book ultimate basic training guidebook,and I. Am preparing before I go over there and I am doing runing exercises.

Oh man, I want to sign all my gear over to you RIGHT NOW.

Seriously though, maybe we can work something out. Wher did we suposed to fucked up?!

Acceptance

2009-03-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

I still have little more than hearsay and rumors to go off of.

The odds of me being stop-lossed are very good. In fact, for all intents and purposes, I am already. There are medical issues I can try to bring up, and supposedly someone higher up said that if you've already got a letter of acceptance from a college or university, then there's a 90% chance you'll be able to go. Again, that's hearsay.

I wasn't even mad when I walked in and heard the news from my friends. I just had questions. A definitive answer is all that I want. Whichever way this thing goes, I'll go along with it, sure. I just want to stop wondering.

Yeah, I'd like to get out, get schooled, live. Then there's a part of me that's slightly relieved. I don't want to see these guys get deployed while I chill. This should be the last one, right? Maybe?

There's a lot of people on this side of the pond that have been waiting patiently, with fingernails chewed to ragged bloody scraps, for me to be done with all this. There's people here that expect me to continue to contribute to the unit. They want to keep the guys with experience, and I can understand that completely.

Me? I'm split in half, right down the middle. Get out, or deploy. That sense of moral obligation I first had, four years ago, it resurfaces in small glimpses.

So who do I let down?

You? Them? I don't even know if the choice is mine. I almost hope it isn't.

A Good Sign

2009-03-05T17:50:00.000-08:00

If what I've heard from multiple sources is in fact true, I just might eek past this stop-loss ordeal.

Exciting huh? Cross your fingers!

A part of me feels a little guilty already, but let's not speak too soon eh?

Worthy Enough

2009-03-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

Just got this email and it seems righteous enough to pass along. Here it is:

I was introduced to your blog through a good friend who is retired from the military and first off, thank you for your sacrifice and service to our country.

I am writing to introduce Muze Clothing and our current partnership with the Wounded Warrior Project to benefit troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought that perhaps the Veterans, Soldiers, and others in your circle of contacts may have some interest in supporting this worthy cause.

Muze Clothing’s unique concept of creating shirts with compelling graphics and classic movie lines has created a tremendous fan base. The company will use this fan base to assist wounded troops, when service members and their supporters will submit movie lines and complementary shirt designs that exemplify the motto of freedom’s defenders, sacrificing their lives for their fellow Americans.

These submissions will be judged by a panel of celebrities. The winning submission will be incorporated into the newest Muze T-shirt with 100% of the proceeds on the sale of this shirt being donated to the Wounded Warrior Project.

The Service Member with the winning submission (or the Service Member identified by the supporter with the winning submission) will be flown from a continental United States location with 3 friends to the shirt launch ceremony in Los Angeles on May 16^th, 2009.

You can get more details on the promotion at: www.muzeclothing.com/blog/woundedwarriorsinfo

Thank you for helping us spread the word on this partnership.

Best regards,

Kyle

Schizophrenic Headbashing

2009-03-02T23:32:00.001-08:00

Schizophrenia loosely translates to "split mind".

From the comments I've received, it shows that I don't need to be cryptic anymore. There's a decent chance I could be stop-lossed and deployed again. Not five feet from me is a complete copy of my medical history from the past four years. Two inches thick, one sided paper.

Fuck them, dude, fuck all of them. Fuck everyone, you did what you said you would, your time is up, this is YOU now, they can all eat a big bag of dicks.

Yeah, and that contract I signed? You ever take a closer look at it? It's very OPEN on their end.

Are you fucking serious? Please, for the love of GOD, do not be one of those fucking tools who buys into that, "Well you signed a contract" bullshit.

...But I did.

Without any clue what you were getting yourself into. Yeah, you THOUGHT you knew, you know, cuz you were nineteen and a fucking genius and all. That was several funerals ago.

Back then, I signed up to help the guys who were already getting nailed. Now? The guys I fought with are going again, plus new guys, plus guys from other units joining us. No matter what, THEY ARE GOING.

Someone is ALWAYS going to go. Think about it, you schmuck. A little over four years ago, you didn't have SHIT to worry about. Now you've done your four, but because of that waiver of rights, I mean "contract", you can be stop-lossed or called back, or any other manner of Voluntarily Molested By Uncle Sam.

There's still that National Guard option. They have a slot open for a combat medic.

Yyyyyyeah, plus your previous MOS, either way, you're still on the ground.

But odds are, we wouldn't even get deplo--

.....Combat medic and what, EMT as a civilian? Good plan, chief. Fuck yourself up a bit more. GET A REAL EDUCATION AND LIVE LIKE A NORMAL HUMAN BEING FOR AS LONG AS YOU CAN, HOW'S THAT SOUND?

If they DO stop-loss me, this time around, I know to save ALL that money. I have hardly any bills.

Are you fucking serious? Really? Open your eyes, man. Most 18, 19 year olds, they start their lives just fine, without having to enlist to support them. They aren't all trust fund babies either. These are the average Joes and Janes, and not the GI type either.

That doesn't change the fact that I'm bound by contract. I can't go, "Oh, my bad, this doesn't work for me." I'm so invested in this already that we're too far in to go and fuck it up now.

Shit, they probably wouldn't even so much as issue a warrant.

And that would make the GI Bill worth LOTS, wouldn't it?

GI Bill isn't worth shit when you're dead either.

Fuck you.

Fuck YOU. You goddamn bleeding heart. Go back and read the horseshit you wrote back in the early days, bright eyes and high hopes, blinders in full effect. Try to buy into that again if you can, really, I would just LOVE to see it.

It's just a matter of doing time, covering your ass, and getting out. Going along to get along, playing the game.

Sure, sure it is. It's Russian Roulette. Fuck man, open your eyes. EVERY NEW BULLSHIT MOVIE THAT COMES OUT FINDS A WAY TO SOMEHOW SHOWCASE THE NEW ARMY WITH THE NICE NEW UNIFORMS. Strange coincidence? It's a fucking recruiting tool.

Yeah, and it's sick and insulting and apalling.

AND it's ineffective, or else you wouldn't be writing this, Dude wouldn't be writing about his friends getting The Letter either.

And HOW much of this is even up to me? Uhh......nnnnnnone. It's a gamble no matter which way you slice it.

Well, hindsight is 20/20 they say. Remember how they all said you should try college first? Hmm. About that. Too late now. Now you went and put your name in the hat because you knew everything, and you were out to crusade and pick your share of cotton for the Greater Good. Where did it get you? Panic attacks? You don't even remember 90% of your graduating class. Is that because there were just too many people, or were you blown up a bit too much?

I can't do shit about it except for hope for the best and prepare for the worst and you know that.

And how trite. You are staring straight down the barrel of another deployment, and for what? Not even TOUCHING the WMD etc argument, we're talking another year of your life (and you have no idea how many of those you even have left) spent in a section of the earth that isn't worth living in, supporting a culture that couldn't give two shits about us. Two-faced lying bastards. If they had ANY sense of community, this shit would not have gone on for SIX YEARS. Just like that call you got last time around. About the building that was rigged to blow? The Iraqi Army got wind of it, but when asked about what they were doing, they said, "Oh, we're waiting for the Americans to get here." And who walked in there? You and two officers. Real bright man. You even ate lunch in there.

Fucking think about it dude, YOU, an E4, have say in exactly JACK SHIT. You want to roll the dice for another 365? Pass that revolver around long enough and your number is bound to come up. Trying to fight a nice neat, tidy politically correct conflict? Fuck you dude. Fuck you. Voluntary sitting duck moron. You're a tool, a cog, and nothing more. Raising your hand for a chance to be a statistic in the newspaper. Iraq doesn't sound so cool the second time around, does it?

Fuck you, Call of Duty.

Fuck you, Jerry Bruckheimer.

Fuck every lying, conniving recruiter out there.

Back in six months? Fuck no, you let me out and I'm gone for GOOD. I'll flip burgers or sweep parking lots.

Fuck every last prick who doesn't have the balls to admit that we FUCKED UP, and would rather lay young men and women to rest than claim responsibility for a failure. Iraq is supposed to be stable after we pull out? Gotcha.

Fuck every liberal opinionated douche that I've yet to meet, especially the one that'll get my seat in class if I get sucked back into this. Fuck every whiny, suicidal, self-pitying emo fuck that would rather choke on downers than sign up and hold a spot so that a vet can go to school.

Fuck every Go Army bumper sticker, every magazine ad, every commercial, every lie. Fuck every left-wingnut who assumes that every last Joe is brainwashed.

Fuck Iraq and everyone in it, every last one of them. Each and every one of them assuming that THEY are a special case. Fuck them and both of their two-faces.

Fuck every overzealous bastard that fills third world citizens of religious fanaticism and drives them to murder in the name of a god. A god isn't SHIT if he or she or it cannot kill on their own. Fuck the mosques and fuck the churches, like you need some sort of reserved area to be religious? Deities aren't native americans, you can't push them aside and then try to buy fireworks from them.

Fuck whoever decided that America is #1 and has to govern the rest of the planet. This is just a hunk of land. Imaginary borders. The only thing that seperates us from anyone else, is the illusion of seperation. Fuck that.

Fuck me for buying into all of this.

Fuck every conversation about it all being for oil, and fuck every conversation about it being for democracy. Call it what you want, but the real reason is simple: we're sick. SICK.

Fuck this blog and every contradiction in it. Fuck this whole organized mess. But really, all I'm doing is spraying it in any direction I can see. What I want to say, is fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me for thinking that it was going to be that simple. Fuck me for putting myself in the position to feel like I have to choose between the guys in uniform and my own future.

I'm going to continue going about clearing post and getting out, looking over my shoulder the entire time. Completely unable to get excited about college or anything else with the shadow of the back door draft (you signed up for it -- FUCK YOU!) looming overhead.

Fuck it man, it goes one of two ways. They let me out, I go about my life as a relatively normal and decent person. Or, they keep me in, deploy me again. Paranoia like a motherfucker, trusting no one who isn't in uniform, and even then it's up for debate. All bets are off, it's about saving money and staying alive and intact. An old man on a bike doesn't stand a chance against my will to live. Humanity simplified down to its finest and most honest: me before you, asshole.

That isn't who I want to be. That's what I mean when I say that my soul hangs in the balance. If I get deployed again, I honestly don't think I'll have room for any emotion other than hate. Hate for me, hate for my superiors, hate for all of them. Hate for everything within sight. When you can't trust an eight year old boy, that's when you know things are really fucked up.

And make no mistake, things are VERY VERY fucked up. Fuck all of it. And fuck every second I spend waiting to find out what happens. DEMOCRACY LIVES. Hooah?!

Call It In The Air

2009-02-28T13:31:00.000-08:00

This can go either way. Chew the fingers to the bone while waiting for further information. The decision for Suspect's soul apparently hangs in the balance. Keep ya posted.

2009-02-27T11:08:00.000-08:00

My fellow short-timers are vanishing one by one, off to the mythical holy ground of civilian life, and new guys appear out of thin air to replace them. I meander from appointment to appointment, hoop to hoop, goose chase to goose chase with extreme pleasure.

Any time away from the unit is good time. The more hours that a uniform doesn't touch my body, the better. The thick medical records, the ETS to-do list, and a sense of bastardly determination are all that I need. Swimming upstream, clawing and fighting my way out, it's a very long process. I'm ready to be gone NOW.

Erase any evidence that I was ever here, turn in all my gear, wage paperwork war and take signatures as prisoners, make no mistake: this is a battle and it IS personal.

Load up the car with whatever material possessions I bother to collect while I Tasmanian Devil my way out, punch the gas and fly out the gate for the final time as nothing but a blur, rear view mirror detached and laying on the floor because we won't need it.

Heaps of uniforms piled in an ominous hill that we'll make reek of combustible fluids and chuck a cigar at the center and dance around the flames, temporarily insane from the rush of freedom I could never be prepared for.

If I were to be fired from a shitty job, I would hug my boss. Fired? That's it? That works out for BOTH OF US!

I gave more than I ever imagined I would, and no hard feelings as long as you just leave me alone and let me leave in peace. Great run, eh? Later homes.

No, now. Ticking down the days is making me lose my mind. Waiting for appointments and paperwork, waiting, always waiting, when it's right fucking there! I can see it, just down there a bit further, that's ETS, man! Fucking move it! Come on, faster faster faster, let's go, give me the leave form dammit, are my orders here yet? Why the fuck not?

Look at that guy, he got out, hasn't shaved in a week! That's so cool! I bet he doesn't even get up until two in the afternoon.

I heard an NCO tell a dude that he couldn't hear him because the dude wasn't standing at parade rest. I thought, yeah you can, that's stupid. All those little weird things that the army does that you learn to accept as being normal, you start to see that no, they aren't. Not at all. We're saluting because Reveille is playing? Why do we even salute? We aren't knights, we don't have to lift visors to show that we're recognizable dudes. Whatever, sure, I'll do it as long as it keeps them off my ass.

But this is good, my ability to think for myself is regenerating, like a starfish that was cleaved in half.

What's that man? You only have three weeks left? Fuck you man (envious verbal assault). But I'm not that far behind, am I? Sunday, that's the 1st of the month, another down. A month and a half as long as everything goes well, and for the love of GOD, please let it.

I need this with every ounce of my being. I have a FEVERISH NEED, ravenous hunger, vampiric compulsion, cannibalistic disregard for everyone else, this is for me, this is mine, GIVE IT TO ME. Dangling on a string above me and I'm reaching for it like a cat, leaping and swiping and growing more irritated. I'm going to get out, I am, really, that's what happens right? I am believing this, even though how can it be real? Guys don't get out, they just disappear, right? Ol' Suspect here sure will. Lost somewhere on the highway between Fort Lewis and Tacoma, trailing like ashes behind me, fading and collapsing on itself like a dying star, replaced with a dormant but wiser version of who I might have been at one point, and god bless and pass the gravy.

I'm going to get out, good God, yes I am. I've never been more sure of anything.

You Can't Make It Outside The Army

2009-02-21T15:52:00.000-08:00

Suspect has been accepted into a certain university and will soon begin preparations to learn and be a normal person and shit.

Suck it.

Eyes Dried Open

2009-02-20T11:51:00.000-08:00

This brief dispatch comes to you after a 24 hour shift at a desk, watching my hair grow and thinking about all the things I could have been doing instead. Like painting a shitty picture in a park that wouldn't resemble anything other than a truck-stop bathroom stall. The splatters, I mean.

As far as that incident, I haven't heard anything new, probably never really will. Guess it didn't happen in our neck of the woods. But fuck, man. Death? I still try to wrap my mind around it sometimes. Spent a good portion of the last 24 hours thinking about what it must've felt like for my friends, when they got hit. Did they even know what hit them, or was it some instant confusion, blurry and discombobulated?

Thought about that Robin Williams movie, "What Dreams May Come". Caught myself wondering if I was going to run into those dudes again on some other plane. Shook the hand of a guy that was leaving for a different duty station, didn't even know him that well, and I actually thought to myself, "See you on the other side."

Almost feels like I'm dying too. Quietly, with a schedule, and appointments. But I don't think it'll work that way. Suspect won't just die when I'm out. I'm a collector, I pick things up.

Well that's ok.

With those long hours and too much time to talk, I found myself kind of wishing I was still back there, when our missions were all about kicking ass. But chill, man, that's over. Just mellow out and move forward to the next station.

I lucked out man, wow.

I still think about death a lot sometimes though. Just try to understand it. Gory images in my mind don't disturb me so much as they just scientifically show what went wrong and what isn't working the way it's supposed to (or where it's supposed to). I seriously don't think that the human mind can grasp the concept of no longer existing, in terms of the mind itself, not the brain, but the sequence of events that causes what we call the "mind". That's all we really are, I guess you could say that's our soul too, maybe?

You can't fully grasp NOT existing anymore.

Me, yeah I'm afraid of dying. I get nervous around strangers. I don't like it when they start conversations with me anymore, don't know if I can trust them, I WANT to, but I still haven't even figured life out, let alone taken a good bite out of it. A well-meaning stranger makes small-talk and I'm just a 16 year old kid in jeans and a sweatshirt again, my gun is missing, and my number is up at any moment.

Despite all that, I flushed all my klonopin down the toilet. Antegrade amnesia or something like that, you forget entire days. Like they never happened. Like you were benched and someone else played for you. Substituted and didn't even get to watch. Cryogenically frozen. But expected to know where things are. Fucking pills, man.

No one is trying to shoot me or blow me up now, I'm pretty sure. So these days, I'm mainly just afraid of car accidents. I don't know, I guess now, part of the animal in me is awake, and it's fully focused on survivalism. Crazy.

Well I've got some z's to catch, I'll join your world again in a few hours, and we'll mingle on the roads as total strangers, sneaking glances at each other in our mirrors, hoping you don't catch us singing along to our music. Stop at the designated signs and lights, take turns, shiny happy people, all of us. You going your way, me going my way. I'm passing hundreds of you going in the opposite direction and each whoosh is another story I'll probably never know. Outside my window, right now, more stories than you can count. If my eyelids didn't weigh eighty pounds each, I'd probably go out right now and look for an old person to listen to for a while.

But not righnow...ahm*hhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwnn* justreadyforbed.

Join you all in the Great Mosh in a while. Much love,
The Goddamn Suspect

This Is Us? Really?

2009-02-18T02:02:00.000-08:00

My roommate, my Tokyo partner in crime and self-discovery and altogether life-experience amazement was the one to fill me in on the pitifully brief details.

Two girls. Underage apparently. One dead on arrival, the other unresponsive. In some barracks on Fort Lewis. I was an hour drive away from all of this, and I still don't even know what day it happened on. I just showed up and there it was.

Too young to even BE in the fucking barracks. And whose barracks was it? We sure as shit don't know. I pray it wasn't the barracks of our brigade, not for our sake, but for theirs. No one deserves to live their final moments in these pisspoor laughable prison-like containment cells, regardless of the great company they may have had.

Shit, maybe it was one hell of a night, and they were into more than they could handle, chemicals to deviate and alter the mind, really Jackson Pollack the night with reckless abandon. I don't know the specifics. All I know is that it ended with someone's daughter dead, and the other supposedly incoherent. I'm not chasing the story. I'm not that guy. I don't have a future as a journalist because of things like this. Respect for privacy. Not that I'm even privy to confidential information. But if it were to happen to anyone I knew, on either side of the equation, you can bet your Patriot Acted-ass that you'd hear no more.

You haven't heard the specifics of the things that make me clench my teeth into cracked shards, so why would I talk about strangers?

Here's my take, ladies and gents. The Army is the fucking Jungle. This is where your sons and daughters go to become corrupted and disturbed and sent to foreign countries to either cause and bear witness to death, or fuck like stoned test bunnies. No one is innocent in a third world country and you would be fucking insane to think that a Porta-Shitter is a place that your kid would not fuck someone. After a while, you can't even SMELL shit. This species prevailed for a reason. We'll fuck ANYWHERE. If we had to, we'd fuck on the wreckage of Princess Di's car and JFK Jr's plane, and if we had the gear we'd dive down to the ruins of the Titanic to bone there harder than Leonadro DiCaprio ever could.

But two underage girls? I'm as baffled as the rest of you. I just shrug and think "drugs". As far as underage, I'm not surprised. Fuck, in my own hometown, some of the Airmen cruise our high school girls for tail. At the time, I thought the dudes that lived off post, I mean off BASE, threw decent parties. In retrospect, oh my fucking GOD are they laming it out.

I'm getting off subject. On an issue I've specifically chosen not to follow too closely, I've already learned more than I wanted to. Someone's daughter DIED here, and another was in critical condition. But they'll still call us soldiers, everyone but those families. See if they put those yellow magnets on their cars now. You remember me going off about how we are so different from the commercial bullshit? A repressed fraternity governed under psychotic inhumane rules that we no shit EAGERLY AGREED TO (myself included).

I talked to a cab driver on post about this, and these fellows are more connected than I, they are veterans AND they listen to the drunken drivel of wretched hyenas like me. This person said that even the POST COMMANDER would suffer because of this.

Now normally, I am all for fucking The Man right back for my reparations, wanting to trade a good friend for an opportunity-seeker, switch 'em out real quick and let the asshole take an explosion or gunshot wound, but this, this is out of control.

You can NOT punish a POST COMMANDER for the actions of one or two soldiers. At the platoon or company level, its bullshit, because they cannot control their soldiers 24/7, but if heads roll at the platoon and company and BATTALION AND BRIGADE AND DIVISION AND POST LEVEL, then my distaste for bureaucracy DOES have some level of merit, because that is wrong. WRONG.

"Heads will roll" is a statement that a yes-man issues to a superior to appease him, fuck the underlings to keep things on an even keel. That's bullshit. Down to the level of CQ (for those of military knowledge; the rest of you, just fucking google it), CQ should receive no more than a slap on the hand. No loss of rank or pay, maybe some bullshit extra duty to be a public spectacle as to how serious this is, but for fuck's sake, why compromise the career of an upcoming E5 or E4 because of something they had little control over.

CQ CANNOT watch over every room all 24 hours. And that's the small picture. You have CQ for one company. Now zoom out to one battalion. You quadruple the responsibility. Zoom out to brigade, you MORE than quadruple responsibility again. Zoom out some more, to EVERYTHING ON YOUR INSTALLATION, EVERYTHING THAT HAS THE NAME "FORT LEWIS" STAMPED TO IT. You want to punish this one man because of one infraction out of THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF SOLDIERS? A man who has built his life with this Army, who has seen this shit come and go time and time again, you want to bleed HIM out because of it?

I'm obviously no fan of the Army or its system and I want to depart from it as soon as humanly possible, but there is no fucking way I want to see a lifetime soldier who has become a General Officer be punished for the fuckup of some barracks-dwelling soldier.

Common fucking sense. You don't have to fuck the whole chain. Even the CQ had limited power. The individual(s) responsible can be dealt with. As for the rest, fuck, BRIEF them and leave it at that. Keep it out of the records. They can't walk the halls of the barracks every fucking night to try to prevent every possible travesty. Yes, they are accountable for all of us, but you cannot send the shitstorm that high when the incident comes from such a low level.

I don't even know what unit or brigade this happened it, but I'll still be sickened, offended, and enraged if it goes beyond the lowest level that it has to.

As for the families of the girls, there is not a single thing I can say to excuse what happened, I can't even successfully apologize on the guilty party(ies) behalf. But how would you handle this in a civilian event? You wouldn't attack the entire extended family. The parents, probably, but not everyone.

That's all I have to say about it. I am honestly hurt that it happened here, I want to be able to relate to every last beating heart in uniform on this post, but that's not the case. Just don't cast us all in the fire. Most of us, even the angst-ridden hate-filled short-timers are ok people.

I promise you all, we are ok people. Some of us may need some adjusting to say the least, but we are good and honest people. We have been waging a bullshit war for each other, for your sons and daughters, while the world forgets about Afghanistan, which was actually justified.

But then there was Baghdad, for some reason.
JCS
TMcF
VG

And Baqubah
CN
MF
JL

Not counting the wounded, I can still find and shake their hands. Or the guys who had near misses. I don't even know everyone who did. Minor wounds. Next to death but what-the-fuck-saved-me moments.

SF.
RK.
JS.
JA.
DC.
DB.
FW.
CM.
RW.
JM.
Sny.
JH.
PL.
CPT H
CPT M
CPT M

From here I lose track. I haven't even scratched the surface. It's not that I've forgotten anywone, it's that after a while, you get flooded with how many people got fucked up during this weird ordeal we signed up with psychotic eagerness.

No one is punishing high ranking officers, and it isn't because of the contract we signed. Don't crucify someone who had nothing to do with something horrible.

Fuck You Very Much, World,

The Goddamn Suspect

Call It A Night

2009-02-11T00:50:00.000-08:00

The closer I get to getting out, the more I find myself thinking about why I'm getting out. And what I'll do if they call me back.

The way I look at getting out, it's like choosing NOT to bet on a fresh hand at the table. Like swallowing your pride, standing up and walking away from the table, ego bruised, cutting the losses and just walking. Just praying that the pit boss doesn't walk up behind me and give me one of those taps on the shoulder to let me know that I owe them more.

Nah, don't think I could do it again. Not after experiencing first-hand how restrained we are. Powerless. Armed to the teeth but tied up with red tape. Blindfolded, one arm tied behind the back. Lit cigarette dangling out of the mouth, waiting for the firing squad or the big angry bull. Blind and paranoid and expected to smile and wave and win over strangers that don't give a fuck about you, doing the bidding of powerful men who also don't give a fuck about you.

We fight someone else's fight...why don't these decision makers just have good ol' fashion duels?

I think about it plenty. I have a metric fuckton of respect for the people that choose to stay in. Not me though. I don't want to roll the dice anymore. Russian roulette for combat pay, and nowadays the odds aren't so bad, right? I don't care if it's for million dollar paychecks, because if it's you that ends up on the wrong end of the revolver, no amount of money is going to help you.

"We'll see you in six months," they say. They love to say that lately. And don't forget to mention the economy. Make us afraid to live outside the army. I'll choose a trash fire before I take another crack at this gig. No hard feelings, I'm just done. Rather not spin the wheel again and hit Bankrupt, Pat. No Deal. This is a good place to stop, Regis.

I'm not going to be a memory while the rest of the world rots anyway. Call me selfish, call me a coward, tell me I have no heart, whatever. But no one is going to put words in my mouth at my funeral, saying that I believed in the cause. If I were to be killed in another deployment, I wouldn't have any inspiring things to impart on everyone else, that's the shit that higher ups make up to try to make it all seem better, seem like there was some sort of purpose.

Everything happens for a reason, but sometimes the reason isn't that good, sometimes it doesn't make any sense at all. But all of this is going to continue anyway, and more people will die. Why would I choose to be a part of it? I didn't listen just like the new guys don't listen. You touch the plate after the waiter tells you it's hot, that kind of thing. Learn the hard way. Got it, got it WELL. I'm not even taking a political stance or harboring desires to soapbox my opinions to cause some sort of change. Just a personal decision.

That's it for me, dealer. I'm out.

How To ETS Out Of The Army

2009-02-03T13:24:00.001-08:00

Finding the answers and guidance to this is a bitch, moreso than one would expect. There isn't much information on the net, and what IS on there is tends to be written by gung-ho re-up types.

So here's the deal, this is what you future Short-Timers must do. For everyone else, this is boring jargon.

Keep all your hand receipts so you don't get fucked out of money. If you loaned a buddy gear, get that shit back. I haven't turned my shit into CIF yet, and I might be paying for a few things. They say its cheaper to pay the cost at CIF than it is to buy a replacement. Either way, keep track of your shit.

180 days from your ETS date, you can get your initial ACAP (Army Career and Alumni Program) brief. This is the beginning. You can choose to continue the ACAP process for one of two reasons:

1) It helps you line up a job as well as write a half-decent resume and how to bullshit your way into saying that the one week that you "were in charge" of your peers is leadership experience, and now you are qualified to bravely lead the mail room or the McGrill.

2) It gets you out of work. Just make sure you have an appointment slip. There's a lot of useful information at these sessions, and you get to wear civilian clothes.

You can get an optional medical exam through Tricare. Your "Final Physical" is a pen and paper session with your PA, and sadly, no, it does not mean you don't have to do PT anymore. But if your unit seems to believe that it does, keep your mouth shut and enjoy shamming.

Keep sick call slips, profiles, get injuries documented, all that. Fuck that Army mentality, "sick call ranger" bullshit. They prattle on about how great the healthcare system is, USE THE MOTHERFUCKER. You might catch shit for "riding a profile" but what is your unit going to do for you two years from now? You're already forgotten, flipping burgers or roofing or marrying your boyfriend or god knows what. The reason I stress the medical issue is...

DISABILITY CLAIM. If you even remotely have a chance to get disability, take it. I sure as hell am. I paid dearly for this enlistment. Extra money for it? Put that shit in my hand. Or, be "hard" and whatnot, and enjoy your aches and pains and inability to do the things you used to, and have nothing to show for it. And for fuck's sake, if you're seeing headshrinkers thanks to your adventures with this army, you know where I'm going with this. Take advantage or don't. It isn't a moral judgment, it's common sense.

90 days out you'll be able to go to an ETS briefing. You bring the packet that the ACAP people gave you at the first brief you had there. At this ETS brief, they will take that packet and wonder why you don't have a shitload of other forms. You'll get those as you can. On to that.

There's a mandatory one-on-one with a reserve career counselor. You have to go. Keep the paper he/she gives you that proves you went. You need that, a copy of your ERB (update it, fuckstick, and make sure your deployment(s) are on there), your life insurance forms, the first three pages of your contract (don't worry, no matter the case, you can get them), and your leave form if you're taking terminal leave.

Getting this leave packet done can be a pain in the ass. During this entire process, keep hitting up your S1 and training room desk dudes. No one is going to walk you through this, you gotta chase that chicken and choke it yourself.

There's much more to it, like having your shit sent back home to mom and dad, and let them worry about where to store it for two months while you dick off, not to mention cleaning and turning in your gear, and jumping through a billion hoops and God help you if you don't have the necessary paperwork or else you gotta come back later, son.

And they told me I was an idiot for starting early. There have and will be snags and hangups. Do it as soon as possible. And never, EVER forget the Short-Timers Code of Conduct. (Stand up at a halfassed version of Attention as you read, nay, SHOUT these sacred words)

THE SHORT-TIMER’S CODE OF CONDUCT

Anonymous

Article I.
I am an American short-timer. I serve in the forces into which I was so carelessly drafted/enlisted/recalled/stop-lossed. I am prepared to leave them at the time so designated by the Department of the Army, or sooner if at all possible.

Article II.
I will never extend or re-enlist of my own free will. If I am in command, I will never allow my fellow short-timers to fraternize with the lifers.

Article III.
If I am called before the Commanding Officer, I will continue to resist his re-enlistment talks by all means available. I will make every effort to escape.

Article IV.
If I should become the victim of an involuntary extension, I will keep the faith with my fellow short-timers. If I am the shortest, I will assume command; if not, I will obey the shortest.

Article V.
When questioned, should I become the object of a re-enlistment interview, I am bound to give only my name, rank, service number, date of birth and date I am due to be discharged.

Article VI.
I will never forget that I am an American short-timer, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which have made carefree, happy civilians out of thousands of short-timers before me.

Fuck yeah.

I'm somewhere in the whole process, so there are things I still haven't learned the hard way. Any of you ETS-successful readers out there, feel free to add to this guide. This needs to be completed, edited, perfected, and widely distributed so that no short-timer go unseperated.

It All Compounds

2009-01-28T23:01:00.001-08:00

They can't stop adding new things. Elbow pads, the new requirement. More to follow I'm sure.

Yeah yeah, Suspect, quit your bitching, you're out soon.

Well what about the brand new faces I'm seeing every week? Should I not care that THEY are getting fucked?

Reveille. TAPS. Taps just played. Last time I heard Taps? Burying friends. It isn't much of a Good Night to me. So Sorry, big army. I get it,there are all these traditions and whatnot. But has anyone ever stopped to think about how old and archaic some of these are? We generally don't shit in holes in the gound (civilian-wise). We don't die of dysentery on the Oregon Trail.

Tradition: a HUGE part of the army. You march in formation, well, cuz that's how they used to do it before the Indians/Native Americans showed them how to hit and run and kick some serious ass.

Tradition.

Are you serious? REALLY? WE ARE HIRED FUCKING KILLERS. Dress us up pretty with shiny new ACUs? Really? Stand tall, look good, oughta be in Hollywood? Well Hollywood is full of shit, and sometimes, so are we. Get rid of this goddamn image of us being stellar robots.

We piss, we moan, our senior leadership does the same goddamn thing behind closed doors and we all know it, and welcome to the army and all that.

TRADITION. Sorry, but it's archaic, done, erased, over, and out. We don't fight in rans and columns anymore. We use our brains. Tradition....

It's bullshit. Posturing. Parading. Lemme add a new paragraph and headbutt the capslock.

WE ARE NOT DIPLOMATS, MY PREVIOUS COMMANDER MADE THAT CLEAR. WE EXIST TO STAND GUARD, CLOSE WIDTH, AND KILL. WE ARE LEGALLY SANCTIONED MURDERERS. WHY DO YOU WANT US TO LOOK PRETTY? DO YOU NOT REALIZE HOW FAKE AND FULL OF SHIT ALL OF THIS IS?

Pristine uniform, crisp salute, lookin' good, ready for a camera. FUCK YOU. We get sent out to kill and die. You want us to look good and move with crisp discipline? You must have lost your fucking mind. Lemme speak for the rest of us.

We are 17-20+ years old. We don't care about your career. If we're new, we aren't going to fully listen to the old-timers cuz goddammit we're nineteen and we know it all. But furthermore, we do NOT care about whether or not YOU make Major or Lieutenant Colonel or what have you. You're just a face in the crowd to us. The only difference is that when YOU are around, we have to be fake and full of shit. Go along to get along.

We're getting new guys almost every week it seems. Phasing us short-timers out with cherries. And that's great. But these cherries, I WANT them to know certain things. I WANT them to know NOT to let people get within 30 meter of you. I want them to NOT be a picture on the wall with KIA (date) stamped on it.

This whole ordeal? It's a goddamn mess, and sometimes, so am I. Now and then I gotta let a few screws loose. Like one of my readers told me before: it never goes away. Well fine. I used up PLENTY of my nine lives if not eight already. I hear you loud and clear buddy.

Know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna contradict myself, and use one of those damn army cliches, and DRIVE THE FUCK ON.

LESS THAN 80 DAYS, BITCHES. Remind me to start uploading some pics. Thanks to all of you for reading this. Sometimes I use a keyboard to bleed some heavy stuff out, and I haven't gotten to the stuff that really eats me, but so far I think this works.

And everyone who comments, critiques, shares opinions, offers insight, kicks me in he ass, it all means the world to me.

Now gimme a nice, loud, thunderous smartass HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAHHHHH. (If you're just appeasing me, you did it right.)

On Being Short

2009-01-22T18:49:00.000-08:00

Two digit countdown.

Anger, irritation, why me? I'm short, motherfucker!

Til it hit me, that is. We were doing a roadmarch, for conditioning, in the morning before the sun came up. I'm looking at the helmet of the guy in front of me, and I almost bring my rifle up to the ready as someone else doing PT runs in our direction. It all came back to me for a second with surreality. Not that Hollywood type shit, I still knew where I was and what we were doing, but good God man, I could FEEL it.

We explained the subtler points of footmarching while deployed to our new guy, and I glanced around. My friends in full kit. Me, my gear, the trees behind chain link, the long roads, the carbon copy buildings and gargantuan motor pools. Strykers passing. Gathering around at 4:30 PM wondering when we're going to get off work, shooting the shit, jawjacking and fucking off.

It's all going to be over soon.

Yeah, it's miserable here for a person like me, but if I don't take some good from this, then what a waste. It's not the gung-ho shit, it's not trying to look good in a uniform, its not standing tall in formation and bursting with pride that I'm expected to have. It's harassing new guys, exchanging insults with the dudes I've spent too much time around (competitively at that). Finding creative ways to accuse each other of being raging homosexuals. Being young and uncivilized and forced to live the shitty life with the other guys.

Everyone talks about how they'll get together after they get out, make all these plans, maybe run a business together, but we all secretly know that it's never going to happen. Two digits worth of days left of this life.

Short.

Kinda Funny Eh?

2009-01-20T17:08:00.000-08:00

There's pages upon pages, resources, pamphlets and porno mags all designed to help you get into the Army. Over-eager recruiters and MEPS stations in convenient locations, like they're competing with Starbucks. Oh yeah, it's easy as all hell to get in, shore 'nuff.

And if you REEEEEEAALLY want to get out? Truth is, you can. But they got you by the balls with all sorts of punishment because maybe, just maybe, you don't want to be subjugated anymore.

"Hey man, you raised your hand, you made that oath!"

If I was really defending this country from enemies foreign and domestic, I'd be kicking down the doors of prime time game show/reality TV series locales and CLAYMORE CLAYMORE CLAYMORE and expending every last round I had, filling vapid celebrities with holes, then torching the entire place like one big Vietnamese hooch. Oh yeah, the flames would singe the sky and the letters HOLLYWOOD would turn blacker than the hearts of the soulless fucks that are ok with letting us get collectively dumber.

But that isn't the case. Still, do you want to join the Army? It's fucking EASY-PEASY, pal. They'll hold your hand every step of the way, even after you swear in and sign up, and they suddenly aren't so nice about it.

Yeah, getting in is pretty simple. But what about getting out?

How many pamphlets do you see laying around that explain how to go about wrapping your enlistment up? Your time is coming to a close, right? Sure, they got a program that helps you write resumes and maybe even look for jobs, great, but hold the fucking phone:

HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GO ABOUT GETTING OUT, PERIOD?

What form? Take it where? What do I need? How do I get it? Where do I go? Who do I talk to? What am I supposed to be doing? How do I go about taking care of myself for once?

Bitch, you don't. You fucking gear up and get ready to go do some more TRAINING! Training for what? Live-fire exercises so I can scan your groceries?

"You're still drawing a paycheck, you should still--"

THEN STOP THE FUCKING PAY. Point me to the VA so I can start letting them know just how fucked and medicated I am these days. Ask your chain of command? THEY RE-ENLISTED! They don't know how to get out! Even if they do, there is some strange deal where people in the Army don't LIKE to see other soldiers get out. The Lifers? They seem to hate that shit. God forbid you move on with your life and maybe, just MAYBE start treating it like it really is your own life.

So what next? Training? Sigh, see ya there sarge.

Someday Bloody Someday

2009-01-09T10:24:00.000-08:00

I vow to myself and to all future employers that I will never again put myself in a position like this. You will not play inane mindgames with me. There will be a purpose to what I'm doing, no matter how menial, or I will not do it.

One day, I will have the freedom to tell you to go fuck yourself, and quit, and find a better job. And I will.

I'd rather pump gas. I'd rather panhandle in a Stormtrooper costume, rather wash windshields at busy intersections. I'll flip your burgers if I have to. Park your car, deliver your pizza, substitute teach your kids' gym class, do temp work, answer phones, take notes, sort mail, count sheep, buy and trade souls, fund Starbucks, wear a tie, stress over finals, become a monk, be a door greeter, anything.

"Technically, you don't have the right to wear civilian clothes. That's a priveledge."

All it takes is one sentence spoken to really fuck things up. Oh, I'll keep playing your game, but only for a little longer. In fact, I'll even start participating, nay, COMPETING. I'll make myself a greased pig, fucking TRY and catch me.

No, I won't go reserve or national guard. I did exactly what I said I would do, did it, DONE. I'll take my chances with the inactive reserve, kthanks.

Less than a hundred days, let the games begin.

Suspect Loses The Game

2008-12-05T07:57:00.000-08:00

I was standing outside, thinking my usual thoughts about how little what we were doing makes sense, perfectly satisfied with my moderate rebel mentality, when one tiny firing of a neuron or synapse or whathaveyou completely screwed it all up for me.

Oh man this is ridiculous. Why would they even BOTHER having us do any of this? Makes no sense at all, none of the new guys are even here right now to learn from it, and all of us are getting out in a few months, it's so undeniably moronic. Seriously, why? If there's nothing for us to do, they should just let us chill. How awesome would that be? My job would basically be to just hang out and wait to get out of the Army. I would get PAID for that.

I get paid for this.

I have to do this because they pay me.

No! NO! FUCK! TAKEITBACK!!! FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU--

You know how there are some things that you can't unsee? Doors that you can't close again once you open them, revelations that you can't forget? Well this was mine. God DAMN it.

Counting Down

2008-11-30T20:38:00.000-08:00

By days.

Weeks, months.

By miles run. Vehicles PMCSed. Hallways mopped.

By loads of laundry. By haircuts. By weekends.

Counting down by movies, details, 24 hour shifts at a desk. By oil changes. Holidays. Phone calls.

By morning report and close of business. By beads of sweat. Speeches and safety briefs.

Counting down by New Arrivals, Old Timers riding off into the sunset. By insults between friends.

By stops at the gate to show the ID. By traffic jams on I-5. Gallons of gas. Episode after episode, channel after channel. By infomercial.

By winks and nods.

By clenched jaws and rolled eyes. Moments of clarity and hours of mundane confusion or blind indifference.

Counting down from each time the boots are tied. By pairs of socks peeled off of sweaty feet.

By meals.

By wakeups.

High On war

2008-11-21T08:30:00.000-08:00

I was shutting Fort Lewis out for as long as people would allow before they'd break my concentration. 24 hours at a desk, it's called CQ. Charge of Quarters. If there was a receptionist at Jack Bauer's CTU headquarters. then a CQ shift is one season for them.

I was reading a book full of miscellaneous writings by Henry Rollins when I turned the page and read a new entry that blew my mind. Described my feelings better than I could.

All my war stories are old
They hang like old clothes in the closet
No one wants to hear old war stories
It's all I have right now
My mouth flaps dry in the air
I am in this room pacing the floors
Sun up sun down grinding my teeth
Jumping at shadows waiting
I don't want to think about that old war anymore
It's driving me up the wall with bad insanity
I need new war
High on war

I Had A Gun Once

2008-11-20T18:49:00.000-08:00

Some artillery training exercise in the distance tenses everyone up for a second, that flash moment where the brain demands to know what this trickery is, when it remembers Iraq but it sees Fort Fuckin' Lewis. Then it gets everyone throwing around Iraq stories. Hot potato. One story overlapping another. Arguing. Corrections. Laughter. New guys' ears perking up like dogs.

I look at them, then I look at myself. We're all wearing those weird uniforms that the All American Boys wear in the magazine ads, GoArmy this and that. I got my hair cut just right and my boots bloused, I have my pen and paper on me at all times, my beret tucked away in my cargo pocket and I am fully programmed to routine.

Except I don't give a shit. Iraq is over.

We aren't hitting the training all hard again or anything. Busy work. For whatever reason. Counting down days or weeks or months. But you don't want to make that known. You don't stop being a soldier once you come back from deployment. I got it.

So why don't I FEEL like a soldier? I got this uniform, but I don't really know what it means. I live in this building, but it isn't mine. I don't care to remember it these days. Ready to wash all that dirt off my face and change clothes. Flush my brain out too, full-service, the works.

Just ready to put it all behind me. Disappear like Kaiser Soze. The Great Escape complete with Men In Black memory wipe. "Put that stuff away in a shoe box." Never even mention any of it, never explaining the four year lapse of existence to anyone but potential employers.

And one day when you see me on the street and you won't even realize it. It won't even dawn on you that I was one of those one percenters. Or the one percent of one percent, whatever it is they call us. That was a different lifetime buddy!

2008-11-01T21:56:00.001-07:00

Holy friggin' crap, it's November!

Ha ha haha HA HA HA HA HAHA HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHHAHAHAAH!!!

WHOOOO!!!!

Aaaaaah hahahahaha.....

Awesome.

[Little haiku for ya.]

Epiphany

2008-10-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

I walked past a few new guys that I didn't recognize, know, or care to. Can't wait til more of them filter in. It brings the NCOs to Larger Than Life again. They scream and fuck with the new guys, just like they did with us, when there was a hundred and fifty of us, all new and stupid.

Well, I walked on past those new guys and down the stairs. It was almost six in the morning, 0600 is what they call it I do believe. I was wearing shorts. I stepped outside, and I could see my breath. My balls rescinded so far up into my body that I think I maybe could have tasted them in my throat. You know it, the kind of cold where your fingers and lips don't operate with normal dexterity.

We stood in formation, and I had a moment of clarity.

"You know," I said to no one in particular, "...this isn't normal. Normal people don't do this. Normal jobs? Yeah, they don't include shit like this. Even IF your job requires you to be outside at this hour, in this temperature, you still atleast get to choose what you wear. If it's fucking cold, you get to dress like it's fucking cold."

Couple of chuckles a la 'here goes Suspect again, one of his rants'.

Every time we'd been out in the cold, sucking, or in the rain, or whatever shitty circumstance or condition, it never flashed across my screen that it wasn't normal. In the Army, you get used to some weird shit. You don't bother to question it, you just accept it, and joke and bitch about how stupid it is, but you don't really ponder it.

Standing there, shivering me timbers off, I pondered it. Then I added some sprinkles to my rant.

"You see this? This right here. This is exactly why they can't get me to re-enlist. It baffles me that it isn't already painfully obvious. It's fucking freezing but I can't wear pants? Yeah, pretty sure it's time to write a resume or something."

My American Dream

2008-10-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

My American Dream does not include any more tours to foreign countries.

In my American dream, I have more options, choices that I make for myself.

Someday, I will have my own washer and dryer; I will not share them with fifty people. I will have more than one small room to keep all of my personal effects. I will have a kitchen. To me, a studio apartment is an incredible palace. I will have a home of my own.

I won't have all of this immediately. I will likely face a somewhat mirrored situation in college. However, I will be free. I will be normal.

I want the education and the experience that comes with it, to soak up the twentysomethings while I still have them. I want to land the kind of job that I race to, not for fear of being late, but because I don't want to spend another second not doing it. This is my pipe dream.

I want to make money like everyone else, hopefully good money. I want to get my own place, furnish it with the necessities, establish myself. I want a normal life.

For the most part, it's all pretty simple. Picket fence? I don't care about that. I want to walk down the sidewalk to the mailbox and pull out bills. I want to walk back into the house or apartment and set them down on the counter top or table, and sit down and work out a budget.

Everything else that comes with it? Sure. I'd like that too. I'd like this order TO GO, please. I don't want to stay here anymore.

I want all the trappings and trimmings. I want my dog. I want to turn on the TV and roll my eyes at the news, channel surf until I land on the Food Network. Then I'll hit up the internet as my ultimate How-To guide for life. I'll learn to cook with Martha Stewart forums.

I'll watch NBC on the evenings. I'll vacuum. I won't have to stand guard on the washing machine while I do laundry.

I'm not demanding that I have life on MY terms (though really, I should be!). I just want to have life on normal terms. Do you see? It probably doesn't even make sense, but the mundane and trivial, oh my god it sounds amaaaaazing. I'm excited about that. Eat balogna for a year and then finally have a steak. Same thing.

This is going to be good....

My Own Exorcist

2008-10-15T22:28:00.000-07:00

The smart thing to do is to start scheduling briefings, appointments, classes, anything and everything that ties up your time and removes you from the unit. Everything that helps you get away, everything that reminds your unit that you are very very VERY fucking temporary, that you are leaving soon, that you are vanishing.

The guys before you that got out? Yeah, slowly they were around less and less, as more appointments piled up, as their duties took them elsewhere. It was like they were fading away, disappearing, becoming ghosts of Deployment Fuckin' Past. When they were gone, you didn't even know. They were Kaizer Soze. You didn't even NOTICE that they weren't around because it was so gradual, and then one day it hits you, holy shit, Johnson isn't around anymore, he is gone for GOOD, gone but fuckin' GONE, GOOOOOOOOONE, waaaaaaay past upper-deck. It was like he was never even there in the first place. Shit, maybe you just made him up. No telling now.

And that's how you have to be. You don't brag or gloat or laugh too loud about it, you just start taking advantage of every opportunity they give you, every class, every job fair, every seminar about resume building, you take it like the greedy mosquito bastard that you are and you fucking suck it DRY and you thirst for MORE.

You let the entire IDEA of your re-enlistment become a joke, something for people to laugh at in a wicked sense of irony. But most importantly, you remain subtle, you remain respectful, you remain tactful, you do what is expected of you, you have your appointment slips ready, and you use the system that's put in place for you, and you never never EVER bite the hand that is feeding you because by now, you have only the SLIGHTEST inkling of how hard the Army can fuck you if you get cheeky.

You play by the rules and you utilize everything you can, and every day, you become more and more translucent, like a dead Jedi, until the unit is so weened off of you that no one notices you're gone until your hair is already past your ears and you've got the first goatee of your life.

Shhhhhhhhhhh.

The Range

2008-10-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

We pile on our gear, familiar as all hell except everything around us is too safe and too green, and we're boarding a school bus. Vile, raunchy conversation spews out of our mouths as Fort Lewis drags past the windows. I see one of the Strykers for the newest unit here and this time around, I'm the experienced vet and they're the new dicks. Just a few months to go, life is great.

The range isn't the usual pop-up target range. It's all on paper targets, fro 25 meters away or something. The size of the silhouette is scaled to the distance or some shit like that. So now, one has to shoot 38 out of 40 o qualify Expert. The plan is to hit that mark as soon a possible and get the hell out.

We grab two 20 round magazines from the ammo shack after our pre-range brief. Set up sandbags. Wait for the command. Slap in a mag. Wait. Flip the switch to semi.

"Fire."

I dot each target twice, nonchalantly. You can't do this shit when you stress about it. Put the red dot on the center of the silhouette and squeeze, let the rifle buck, repeat. On to the next silhouette.

We bring our targets up. My friend hit 40/40 first time. Me? 37.

"Are you fucking KIDDING ME? 37 should be expert, no doubt about it. This is bullshit. Goddammit..."

Two new magazines in my hand, I wait to fire the next iteration. Waiting for the go-ahead.

I squeeze the trigger forty times and when I bring the paper up for grading, its a 38. Awesome. Expert, so I can go now, observe that my weapon is clear and I'll just be on my wa-- Where the fuck is the bus?

My friend caught the bus back to the company area to enjoy some shamming, while I repeatedly qualified expert because we had a metric fuckton of rounds to burn off. Thanks man.

It got to the point where we buddied up in teams, one guy on a knee, the other standing, shooting at one target, going for best team out of 80 rounds. My buddy ol' pal and I won each time with a simple system. The guy on a knee shoots the smaller targets, the guy standing takes the bigger ones, and after the first magazine, we switch. All three times, we win.

When you get the command to fire, all you can really do is get slightly lost in the insanity of gunsmoke and the smell of carbon and the crack and little kick, the dirt kicked up behind the targets, the knowledge that you're spitting lead and death at a fuckload of feet per second. It's ridiculous. It should defy explanation. Good GOD, what the hell are we doing out here? Shooting shadows to prove our competency! LUNACY! HIGH FIVE!!!

We're shooting and spewing profanity and talking about each other's moms. We are demon-spawn wrapped in neo-samurai armor with Oakleys.

Oh, right, the contest. What did we win?

Well, ah...jack shit. A filthy M4 to clean I guess. Fuck it though, another day off my calendar.

Staring At The Clock

2008-10-08T08:09:00.000-07:00

Drooling down the chin, eyes glazed, catatonic facial expression. Fierce debates on the tube that for some reason I just can't bring myself to take an interest in. Ridiculous!

Food poisoned or some other strange cosmic ailment that left me out of the picture for two days, sleeping, sweating, shivering, aching, and groaning, with the constant bizarre fever dreams, the ones that aren't quite real but are more than just a dream. I wait for appointments and briefings and any and all reason to skip out, make my absence regular, ween the Army off of me.

Not today, rifle range again. They want as many of us as possible to score Expert. I get it, makes sense. Makes the company and the battalion and so on look good. That's the idea, raise a kickass unit, I fully understand. I'm under the impression that we're to stay there until we qualify expert or until the range is shut down.

Out of nowhere, I get this weird thought of adding extra rounds to my magazines, all covert-like. But no, that would be cheating, and I don't want to put my balls on the table. Never been much of a gambler. Bet low, sit at the table all day cuz All In is a motherfucker when you lose.

Jet flew overhead and I vaguely thought of the rockets pounding the FOB. But no, these were jets. The normal behavior of a jet does not include blowing us up. Then I think about how I'm getting behind on my online classes, all two of them. And I make up the excuse that I'd be doing way better if I was a full-time student. Or if I wasn't going to bed at 7 PM to make the weeks go by faster.

I started this rag with the intent of giving a grunt's-eye-view of an entire enlistment in the Army. Maybe I'll try to get back to the details again.

The Dog Goes And Gets His Own Damn Bone

2008-09-25T08:03:00.001-07:00

Myth: you cannot begin the ACAP (Army Career and Alumni Program) process until you are six months away from your ETS date (the day that you supposedly are a free man once again).

Fact: You can start the briefings as much as a year out.

I sat in an office, spilling my guts about Iraq, my sleep habits and everything else that was even potentially fucked up about me as a result of my epic and heroic service. In a babbling vomit, I spewed up everything I could get out while he nodded before steering the session to ensure that he got to lunch on time. We had a few laughs about everything I had to report. He certainly did, and at that point all you can do is follow along.

Answer all the questions honestly, they tell you, but really I don't think it matters, because they're just going to return you to normal duty. Most blokes aren't going to find the Morgan Freeman poetic passphrases that land you a Get Out Of Service Free Card.

Before he even finished asking what I was going to do when I got out, I was punching him with the word "school". That's when he mentioned ACAP and clarified exactly when one can begin.

Hit the Next Chapter button on your remote a couple times, and there I am, ordering food from a drive-thru puke vendor with a friend, body ravaged and sore from extended PT sessions, usually two per day, when I decided that we needed a morale booster.

I found my first line supervisor and told him that we had to go make an appointment and away we went. When we finally found the office we were looking for, civilians eyed us suspiciously, demanding to know what in the name of all things demonic was it that we wanted. When we told them that we were working on getting out, their defenses dropped and they mystically transformed into the warmest, kindest people you'll ever find on a military installation. Overly gushy daycare ladies aren't this kind.

We were led to another cushy office and given lots of printouts, gave our basic information, and were handed appointment slips. Hell, we even marveled at the lady's electric stapler. You laugh, but that thing was pretty fucking impressive. It's a Swingline.

Anyway, I thought it was time I threw myself a bone, so I did. I did my own thing, AND I LIKED IT. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got menial tasks to half-ass my way through, then I've got an appointment in the afternoon, guaranteed to eat up a healthy portion of the workday.

I can't get out until next spring, but good God, I just took the first step towards redemption. It's like blindly grabbing a low-hanging branch after you've become fully submerged in quicksand: there's still a chance!

Fresh Meat

2008-09-15T19:17:00.001-07:00

There's something about new guys that I like. I don't call them FNGs or cherries or any of that shit. I think it's that they aren't yet corrupted or jaded. They're like toddlers, innocent and impressionable and all that Hallmark happy horseshit.

The only serious thing I said to our new guy was, "Don't model yourself after us. We're getting out. We did our thing and now we're counting down months. They tell you to be in the right place at the right time, in the right uniform. Believe it." I couldn't think of much to elaborate on after that, and we had enough busywork to do that it didn't matter anyway.

I don't want to be responsible for someone else coming to hate the Army. Already seen one new guy go from total motivation, wanted to do it all, get that Ranger tab, and slowly become a reflection of the rest of us til the day I heard him say, "Fuck the Army man, I'm getting out."

"Dude you have like four or five years left."

I really thought that I would love the Army for the most part, but every step of the way, something was there to stomp all the hope out of it for me. Crushed it to death and left it to the point where I've had to come to terms with the Army without outright hating it. And I don't.

Someone asked this new guy, "Why'd you join the Army?"

He said, "To be an Airborne Ranger."

Congrats, dude. You're in a Stryker Brigade. You won't go to a Ranger unit, not in this life cycle. All you can do is hang on to that New Private Smell for as long as you can. Stay hungry. Don't model yourself after us.

Maybe I just want to believe that there really are people that love being in the Army, that don't just get stuck and end up as lifers. Maybe that's what I need to see for myself.

"How long did you sign up for?"

"Three years."

"Smart man. Thinking about staying in?"

"Not sure yet. I might make it a career."

Rewind the clock a few years and that was us. And thus begins the battle for this kid's soul.

Don't be like us.

Suspect Gets His Ass Thoroughly Kicked

2008-09-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

The coffin on the front made me wonder if it was a premonition, proof that this was indeed the end of something once great. But I had to know. I tore the clear plastic away and jammed the disc into the CD player and hit the road while it started spinning.

A fist shot out of the speaker closest to me and busted me right in the chops. I saw stars and I couldn't even hear the ringing in my ears because the wall of asskickery stampeding into my ears was too determined. Four instruments being thrashed and attacked so hard that my candyass was feeling the punishment. Metallica was back.

It brought me all the way back to when I bought my first CD with my own money, ...And Justice For all, and I learned first hand that music could indeed melt your face off.

Trees ripped themselves out of the ground and hurled themselves over cliffs because they just weren't worthy. I wanted to throw bottles of baby formula to everyone else on the road who wasn't feeling the storm that these dudes were unleashing. Strap a diaper to their heads and change lanes and be on my way.

In fact, I have to stand to type this, because my ass was kicked so much that there is significant bruising. That album was so manly that it has to be shaved before playing. After I heal up, I'll listen to Dragonforce's new album too, but for now I can only eat Jello.

Death Magnetic. Get.

Eye To Eye

2008-09-13T09:42:00.001-07:00

Once in a while, cosmic forces will bring polar opposites crashing violently into each other. I found myself battling for my very soul in one of the debates I knew was imminent the closer and closer I got to getting out.

"So you re-enlisting?" he asks, leaning back on a swivel chair. I give him my typical response to this question: a contorted face that says Are you serious? You gotta be kidding man. You know better.

He laughs. "You might be, just wait."

Already a little offended, I told him, "I can guarantee you with absolute certainty that I won't voluntarily extend my service."

"You say that n--" he began, at which point I sat up and interrupted.

"Since day ONE it's been a four year enlistment. The plans have never changed. Not even for a second. I've always been short. Always."

He's already got the inevitable question ready and fires away. "Why did you enlist?"

"To go to Iraq," my response is as basic as possible.

"Huh...well looks like you got that out of the way."

"Yeah, and now it's just killing time. Listen, I don't hate the Army, not by any means. In a lot of ways, yeah, it's been really cool, but you know how they always half-assed say that the Army isn't for everyone? Well it's true. And I knew it from the beginning. I fucking KNEW that I'd be out of place here and I went and did it anyway. Full knowing it was only four years."

He blinks, so I continue.

"I did it, did all I signed up to do, and now it's just a matter of fulfilling the contract, a technicality, you know? And then I can get out, and start doing what I should have been doing when I was nineteen."

"That's cool man," he offers, keeping the peace. "What are you planning on doing?"

Now it's my turn to slouch in my seat. "Depends on what day of the week it is, how I'll answer that question. Y'know, when the re-enlistment NCO comes around. I'll tell them, 'I'm going to call you while you're eating dinner and try to get you to subscribe to Parade and Vibe and US Weekly.'"

He looks at me like I'm fucking crazy and laughs. Mind you, I'm easily encouraged.

"Yeah, or you know, when I was three, I thought being a garbage man would be a good gig. Or who knows, I'll just tell them something elaborate, something they don't want to hear. I'll tell them my family owns a chain of hotels and they're giving me one to own to teach me about business and all that, get my feet wet. Or.....or I'll tell them that I already have a house lined up, got some roommates who haven't seen me in a while. Then I'll just tell it straight and say that I've decided to move back in with my parents, watch cartoons and eat cereal all night. Maybe flip burgers."

We keep this game going for a good twenty minutes, making up ridiculous answers to life after the Army. Have a few laughs, and then it hits me, and all I do is verbalize it.

"I miss the freedom. Not that Toby Keith flag-waving freedom, but I mean like personal freedom. To be able to do anything you want within reason, live anywhere, be anything. Stop being anything that isn't working. Know what I mean?"

I study him for a second to gauge his reaction. Then I prattle on some more.

"Maybe we just really get used to the way the Army does things. Hell, I noticed something the other day that I've seen a million times, but it never clicked like it first did when I was a new soldier. You know how when an NCO is smoking (forcing an enlistee to do pushups and other exercises as punishment -Ed) someone, they tend to stand there with their arms crossed, watching them? Well I was watching someone get smoked the other day, and I was like, "What the hell....at none of my other jobs would I ever have to physically degrade myself because the boss was pissed." You know what I mean? I have NEVER had to crawl through dirt and mud at any other job before. I've never given a boss so much power before."

We laughed about it for a second, because good God, it made SENSE. WEIRD!

"But yeah, it's the freedoms. Be able to do anything you want. Flip burgers and wash cars or sit in a cubicle or scan groceries or manage franchises, become a suit and set fire to Wall Street, write graffiti on the moon (someone has to have done it by now). Go to college, don't go to college. Be a bum or climb the corporate ladder, anything in between. How does that NOT sound appealing? There's endless possibilities, and at any point, you can switch gears or go in a total different direction. You don't like where you live? You can pick up roots and move somewhere new that's better suited to you. You just have to have the drive and courage to do these things, that's what I think. You can't tell yourself that you can't do it."

I stopped and thought about everything I'd just said.

"Fuck, that's what the re-enlistment guys are for. Let THEM tell you you can't."

Fucked

2008-09-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

I was driving when it hit me, full force, a thousand heavy fists hammering a point into my skull. Never in my life had I wanted anything to be over so bad. Never been so homesick and fed up and tired, just TIRED.

I changed lanes and thought and thought some more. I don't even have a battle to fight, wouldn't want to if I did. Stuck. Not sure what to do. Re-enlistment NCOs love that too. Next time he comes around though, I'll lie. Cook up a whole elaborate plan, leading all the way up to my retirement and binges on a yacht. Whatever he doesn't want to hear. Whatever sounds solid and foolproof. Whatever saves me from the "you're going nowhere, getting out without a plan and you'll be back, why not re-up and get a bonus?" lecture. A total siege on your sense of self-reliance.

Sorry chief, I can't. Not this guy. I want to have rights again. I hear stories about the barracks that other units have and I get pissed. Apparently ours are astonishingly bad. Pitiful. Prison cells. Two guys crammed into a small room and goddamn you if you can't keep that shit clean.

When you aren't at war, you're supposed to be miserable. I see dudes getting their asses chewed during PT. You aren't supposed to exercise to the point where you're in pain. It's an individual thing, but God help you if you don't keep up with flutterkicks. The Iron Fist mentality is everywhere, unnecessarily so. There's no fucking reason for it.

My friends joked the other day that I'd be the one short-timer of the group to re-enlist. Yuks and laughs. I joked right along with them, "Fuck you, die in a fire." If half of these people even knew what I've been thinking lately.

I'm in my twenties. I should be done with college already. I should be well on my way to getting my life together. I should have had atleast one apartment of my own by now. I should have credit, good or bad. I should have some sort of foundation. But I don't. I'm still in an Army that treats the single lower enlisted soldiers like fucking children.

I can't have my girlfriend in my room. I have no place to call my own. The barracks are not mine. That's just where the Army keeps me. I have no sense of identity in this fucking uniform. I have no sense of accomplishment, I still feel that I was fucked out of my war and that's probably a good thing.

I pissed away four years. Life experience be damned. It didn't make me better. It made me bitter. It made me uncomfortable around the normal world, twice over now than before we deployed. I suspect everyone of harboring violent intentions and sadistic plans. I drive with a sense of impending doom. At any moment, I'll be fucked.

I'll be late to work.
I'll say or do the wrong thing.
Murphy's Law is going to get me.
I'm going to get pulled over.
I'm going to merge the same time someone else does and get shoved under an eighteen wheeler.
Gonna get shot hanging out off post in some freak occurance at the mall.

It's all going to go downhill, and fast, and I won't even see it coming. Rock bottom is staring up at me with a shit eating grin.

So now ask again if I'm thinking about re-enlisting. Nope. My gut tells me that everything here is wrong wrong wrong and I need to get out.

But I can't. Not yet. Trapped. Serving my time. I don't even speak my mind anymore. That's how convinced I am that they're going to get me somehow.

On my own, I do fine. Better than fine. Everything is great when I'm home, feeling like a normal person again. Start the countdown. I'm going to get my life back eventually. This little relationship I have with the Army, it just isn't healthy, and I tried, I really did. It's gotta end. Got too many other things to do. It's not you, it's me. Really.

Leave the GI Bill on the dresser.

Short Timers

2008-09-05T06:49:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I was struck with childlike glee, full-on and without warning. Whatever the opposite of getting kicked in the balls is, that's what it was. It was a nonkick in the nonballs, one might say.

What is it, you ask? Short Timers.

But Most Of The Time...

2008-09-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

I don't. At all.

That's right.

Once In A While

2008-09-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

It's true what you might have heard. We do sometimes miss being deployed. It doesn't make much sense and we know it. The truth, though, is that things were usually pretty simple "downrange".

Anytime we were forced to assemble together, it was for a reason. Not formation just for the sake of formation. If there was information to put out, a huddle was good enough.

Not drinking was easy. Some dudes handle it just fine, I ended up cutting mine down to a bare minimum--drink or two. Some dudes just need to not drink. Ever.

Our safety briefings are continuously lengthier because we're all supposed to be harboring sinister, self-destructive thoughts or subconscious desires. Buying up sports cars and crotch rockets. Deliriously wasting money.

My friend and I took an ass beating a month or two ago in Seattle. I was logic-defyingly drunk and I'm pretty sure he was too. I came out of a blackout just in time to see him turn to face me and say, "Yep. We're about to get our asses kicked."

Then five or six dudes proceeded to do just that. All I could think was, "This shouldn't be happening. Wouldn't happen if I had a gun." That's about when it hit me.

We aren't worth dick if we aren't armed. Myself especially. No eye contact in public, don't cut anyone off in traffic, don't turn onto the wrong street, hope no one smashes your windows out when you go to see a movie, neurotic social terror. But put me in full kit and give me my rifle again, and I'm God.

One day you're detaining some asshole who rigged a house to explode on you and your guys, negotiating with the train tunnel sized shotgun barrel. The next, you're John Q Whogivesashit, capable of not much.

Oh yeah, I thought long and hard about spending my last year in Iraq. It sounded like a really good idea too. More money, actually doing my job. Sounded wonderful. But there's more people to consider than just me. So it's John Q Whatsit.

You get back, and everyone goes back to focusing on their own little things. Their upcoming marriage and/or divorce. Their suped Volkswagon. It isn't Us vs The World anymore. And it's a law of nature that everything eventually goes downhill. When that happens, you can either pout and live in the past, in the good ol' days, or you can move on and find something new and good, and enjoy it while it lasts. Then move on again when it's drained of awesome.

See, I don't know if I ever made this clear enough. I didn't enlist for "freedom", and I didn't enlist for college. Fuck, I didn't even THINK I'd go to college back then. Thought it "wasn't for me". [Vomit blood here]. I didn't give two shits who the President was, I didn't care who the enemy was. I've said this a million fucking times, but I did it for the dudes of my generation that were going. We could have been storming London and I still would have signed up. I signed up for dudes that I didn't even know. Some that I came to hate, some that I never knew all too well, some that were just too fucking weird not to love, and some that are the best friends I'll ever have.

That Band Of Brothers feeling is few and far between though. Only in rare moments that you don't talk about in the first place. But I've done some really STUPID things to help or bail a friend out.

The Army is where you go if you're afraid to grow up. If you have that Peter Pan Syndrome. But it isn't always the party you thought it would be. For some reason, I really thought it would be a life of excess and all things awesome. Sometimes, it is. But no one advertises the gray moments in between. I'm not against recruiting for the Army. It's actually a really good thing for most people. I just think there should be more honesty in the advertisements. But wait, that defeats the purpose.

The thing though, is that you almost have no choice but to try to plow forward. If not, all you can do is look back. And I can't do that. So I have to stay busy. Bring the new guys in, I promise not to ruin their attitudes and I'll do everything I can to teach them and look out for them, and not ruin their mindset. The Army really could use more high speed, low drag, motivated types.

My heart is just never going to be in this unless I'm in a warzone again. So it's time to move on.

Now observe while Kid Rock and Dale Earnhardt Jr take a nice long piss on my face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0yVaHKcs9E

"If you ain't gonna fight, get outta my way," he says. Practice what you preach, faggot. How stupid do they think we are? Dale drives circles around a fucking track for exhorbitant amounts of money, and no one has given a shit about Kid Rock since 1998. But he breathes red white and blue apparently. That's one hell of a way to support the troops, with endorsements. Shut the fuck up and enlist. Pull the weight. Prima Donna fuck. They go home to mansions. But they call him "warrior". That's interesting, cuz I sure don't feel like some kind of warrior. I just feel like I was in some strange place in some weird circumstances with random loud noises and things you can't quite explain, and now I'm not so sure that I was ever there, or that it was ever REALLY real, or if I just made it up. Hell, I could have been lying to all of you from the very beginning. I could have been a desk jockey, or I could have never even taken the oath, and just be some sick fiction writer, fucking with the minds of strangers.

I don't think the "war" fucked me up. Most of the time. Other times I wonder, but no. I won't accept that. I haven't seen half the shit that some of our vets have. And still I want more and I want none of it at the same time.

So yeah. I'm getting out. And no, I was never ever in the Army.

Doing Time

2008-08-24T10:23:00.001-07:00

The pile of gear that I've been putting off for days still stands out and demands attention, so I finally break down and stuff it all into buckets and a rucksack, heading to the laundry room with a scrub brush and a virgin bottle of Simple Green. Using audacious amounts of the cleaning elixir, I start attacking the pixelated pouches and whatnot, evicting as much residual Iraq filth as I can while my mind wanders.

I try to find a way to reframe the way I'm thinking, to make this stay of mine more bearable. To stop the self-pity. This low on the totem pole, a bad attitude is like termite damage and lots of it. I could let the higher elements of the totem to come down on me, but let's put pride aside for a minute. You can't fuck the Army nearly as hard as it can fuck you.

All I can think of, is "tread water". As long as you're only neck deep, you still have a chance.

Any old-timer right now would probably say, "Just do your time, quietly, and get out." Simple enough. You gotta be a yes-man almost everywhere you go.

So I guess I'll just do my time. The crime: enlistment. The sentence: 4 years, give or take a clause or two of a contract. Time remaining: less than one year, no chance of parole, may be released a month early on Good Behavior, provided the sacrifice of a Christmas.

I got four brick walls around me, painted white, housed in a federal building. Generic furnishings. Minimal personal effects that I've managed to acquire. No hollowed out Bibles, no sharpened toothbrushes. No harmonica, just a guitar (fair trade).

Gotta hang up the new calendar and start marking days. Maybe start folding paper cranes. Freedom birds. Put on the PTs, get some exercise in the yard. Put the standard issue uniform back on, be where you gotta be on time.

Wait for the warden to hand me my packet, wish me luck, and send me on my way. All the best. We got a saying though....

Too easy.

Discipline

2008-08-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

A soldier is expected to uphold standards, maintain a professional appearance and demeanor. To follow the rules and guidelines, perform expected tasks and ensure that the machine so to speak operates as smoothly as possible.

It all makes perfect sense. No reason why it shouldn't. Look good for the people you represent. Look good for your superiors so that they don't look bad in front of their superiors. Higher on up, no one worries too much about each individual Joe because there's too many of us. Bigger picture, people. But if we fuck up, it's a different story.

Not hard to grasp, right?

When you're tired or angry, fed up or sick and tired, dragged through the mud, Stop-Lossed, tour extended, recalled, or just at the end of your rope, it's not so easy. It's when you have to chew your lip. Chew it hard. Can't beat the Army by being rebellious. Can't beat the Army at all, really. This is your rock, and this is your hard place. Squeeze on in, buddy.

No one wants to hear you bitch, and if the wrong people hear you, then you're just up shit creek, and not in any way better off than had you just shut up. All for obvious and simple reasons. Fulfilling oaths and all the honorable things.

But what happens to the guys who don't get that excitement out of being a soldier anymore? The guys who aren't motivated by speeches or medals and awards, or by nothing at all? Someone asked me straight up if I was still proud to be a soldier, and I drew a blank. I'm not NOT proud. But no, I don't feel any sense of pride. I don't feel special. I don't feel heroic or important.

Just a 19 year old kid that's been in a time warp for nearly three and a half years.

Here's a biiiiig long sigh, and away we go, let me just put it out there: I don't feel emotionally scarred or somehow wronged in the greater scheme of things. I don't feel impressed by "our" accomplishments and I never once felt heroic. Every thank you, whether from someone who speaks Arabic, or someone stateside, felt closer to an odd compliment that an elderly person would give you. Not a bad thing, just weird. Weird like everything is. Weird like life is, my life, YOUR life, it's all just weird, for most of us. The ones who don't actually have it bad.

But the Army? It just isn't like the movies or the stories you hear. It can't work that way. Some of these guys claim to hate it, but they secretly love it. Some guys are on the fence. Some guys outwardly hate it, some guys just eat it all up. I've always had my qualms and disagreements with the Army, but for the most part is isn't bad. Put up with it and drive on, cash that paycheck and pass Go. The bummer is that the Monopoly board just repeats itself. Running in circles. I just don't want to do it anymore.

But until they let me go, it's Pass Go or Go To Jail. When you really narrow it down, that's all it is. I chose this game but I didn't get to choose the rules. Can't fold my hand, as much as I want to. Instead, I'm mumbling to you like I'm a quiet lunatic in a bar and you're the beer in front of me. Mumbling the same story every night.

On the plus side, I went swimming today.

Waiting For The Worms

2008-08-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

In the early throes of nicoteine withdrawal, I abandon my quest to inventory every last goddawful piece of clothing and equipment issued to me.

Inventory and account for. And clean. Spotless. Everything. Things I haven't touched in two years. Not to use, mind you, not to turn them in. Not to do anything with except to stuff em into a dark crevice and forget about em again. Let them collect dust.

My list is three pages long. Fuck my life.

Humidity, like being inside the mouth of a whale. Got a fan going at all hours of the day, to keep the stagnant air and barracks stink moving. Can't let it seep into your bones. Can't sit still for too long, can't afford to ruminate, grow angry and mouthy. Must stay preoccupied. Preoccupied and invisible. Maybe giving up vice isn't the best means of doing this.

I think about going to the gym after work. But I won't go. Can't be bothered to join the new culture of GNC supplement-gobbling weightlifting Mixed Martial Arts enthusiasts. Too many of them.

Waiting for a couple weeks before the attempt at online courses begins. Vocabulary class, and another to remain untold for now. Anything to stay busy, stay distracted, to keep my sorry ass out of trouble.

On occasion, I can feel the hounds closing in, sniffing, patrolling. Gnarled teeth dripping with acidic saliva. Fire of hell burning in their eyes. Pretty sure they're sniffing out the short-timers. Some days you can smell the stink on us from the other side of the parking lot. The shitty attitudes, I mean. God help you if the wrong higher-up catches you running your mouth. Guess that's why I'm hiding in my barracks room, scribbling incoHeresy into a diary, like that little Jewish girl, Helen Keller. If any of you know the secret to invisibility, let me know.

Afterthought:

Just caught a glimpse of something vomit-inducing on FauxNews. The soap opera "All My Dipshit Children" is having an open casting call for Iraq vets, to play the role of a wounded soldier. Fucking leeches.

Short-Timing Ain't Easy

2008-08-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

You can define "short" in at least a couple different ways. Could be someone that's very close to getting out, going on R&R leave, getting out of Iraq, getting out of the unit, out of the Army, out of that desk job, whatever.

For me though, it's a state of mind. A method of prioritizing. It's knowing that I'm not staying in. Knowing that I made good on the little oath I made on the inside, and now I'm required to make good on the oath that was put on paper.

Let me tell ya, it isn't easy being Short. On some days, it's downright painful.

The formations. Ceremonies. Details. Everything seems asinine and redundant. None of it seems like it should apply to you, because dammit, you're short. Don't these people get it?

Then you see one of your buddies walking down the sidewalk with a neat package of papers, gleefully jumping through the hoops of seperation. Turns out you aren't as short as you thought. Atleast not on the outside.

I'd never really been one to get homesick, ever. But this time around, I know I'd much rather be there than here. Home, with all the simplicity. Familiarity, predictability. Relaxed. I sure as hell belong there a lot more than I belong here, doing jack shit.

And the funny thing about this "home" thing, is that some things come full circle, some things change completely, some things you didn't understand became much more clear, and you realize that some of the people you knew are completely full of shit, and others aren't ever going to make anything of themselves.

Those awkward encounters you have with people you never cared to see again, but for some ungodly reason you both talk to each other, briefly, out of some skewed sense of obligation, even though both of you want nothing more than to get the hell out of there. And half the people you run into didn't even know you were gone, let alone staking a claim in Baghdad.

But hey, the good news? Who gives a shit in the first place? HAH!

After seeing how things changed around town, how other things remained exactly the same, and soaking it all in, knowing you have to leave, it's almost a kick in the sack to return to something that there isn't much else to gain from, when you KNOW that there are better and brighter things you could be doing. Thanks to contractual obligation, everything has to wait, still on hold.

Every day I ask myself why the hell I didn't just do a three year contract. I'd be rabbitting to and fro getting paperwork taken care of and equipment turned in, clawing my way out of this bitch.

I raise my hand in formation, like a schoolkid. "What's the earliest that one can begin the clearing process?"

Pushups. Some things don't change.

Doesn't matter though. Like I said, I've taken inventory of what matters to me and what doesn't. Garrison life in the Army is just a puppet show. Still going along to get along, but I tell ya what, I'd much rather be home, scratching my dog's ass and catching up with everyone, cuz, now, between you and me....

A MONTH ISN'T ENOUGH TIME.

But hey, no big deal, I got ten of em to go, give or take terminal leave. Fuck it.

Off Season

2008-08-06T08:01:00.000-07:00

Morning. Back on post.

My generic-looking Nikes are pounding pavement. Forehead covered in a sheen of sweat. Out of breath, plodding forward, muscles still sore from the previous day.

I have a bit of a gut from all the beer I've been drinking since being back. This is the most I've ever weighed, but at least its not the fattest I've been.

I keep running, around the airfield, feeling the need to get back in shape. Running. Swimming. Lots of cardio. Take my lazy ass to the gym, put on a little more weight.

I picture cases upon cases of Budweiser, laid to waste at my hands. Irish Car Bombs and tequila shots happily downed without a second thought. Gallons of Gatorade chasing hangovers like lethargic and disinterested guard dogs.

Vacation's over. Getting everything back in order now, making it all Army Strong-like. Trimming the fat off the vets. You know us, you can see us in movies like Stop-Loss. Digging foxholes in our underwear. Because we dug lots of foxholes in Iraq...

Idiots.

Funny you bring up Iraq though. It's almost as if...

I was never even there.

Back In Gray

2008-08-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

A couple hundred dudes who all had their own identities just a few days ago showed up to work in uniform to be in-ranks inspected and jawjack while waiting in tidy ACU uniforms and berets. After a month of not giving a single bleeding shit about anything, of boozing and partying and golfing or fishing, swimming, bowling, cruising, doing nothing or doing it all, we're back to the beginning.

Except its different now. We got that Iraq thing out of the way. Guess we were stupid enough to think that when that was over, it would all be over, even though we knew better, we probably just didn't want to accept it. So now all there is to do is go about it the same way you always did: not putting too much thought into it, going along to get along.

Choke on your complaints, choke em down and swallow hard. Smile through teeth gritted so hard that they crack.

Me? I just keep telling myself that I did what I signed up to do. Went to Iraq. Supported the troops in the fullest way. Became one of 'em. And now that that's over with, something's gotta tie me over, keep me in line, keep me from growing irritated and sick of another job, keep me from walking away, whistling and throwing the uniform on the ground.

Didja hear about the new GI Bill? Cuz I sure did.

Vacation

2008-07-03T13:31:00.000-07:00

Far far far from the unit and everyone and everything else. On vacation. Chilling, not worrying about a thing. Everything is completely awesome. This Bud's for you.

The Real Hiatus

2008-06-24T20:43:00.001-07:00

I've always appreciated all of the support more than words can say, but for the time being, a true hiatus is necessary. A drunk post here and there leads everyone to think that I/We are fucked for life and that's not my AIM.

Sure, everything is bizarre and weird and we're (some of us) trying to find the math in it all, but the truth is that too damn many people know who I am and what's going on, and I'm not comfortable sharing anything anymore. Rather than build a wall around myself, I'll find a new outlet, and as guaranteed, I'll be good as gold, but you can bet sure as shit that I'm pouring garbage out SOMEWHERE. All I ask is that there are no worries from the faithful ones, and that you have enough faith to trust that I'll be fine, although angry and confused for a bit, but I'll find my own way and all will be fine.

The blog's been greater than Awesome, but I'm camwhoring without the cam at this point, and I can't appreciate that. I'm not anonymous and I'm not no one anymore. Now that I'm home, it doesn't matter at all. This post itself has been narcissistic enough.

Thanks a billion, going under the radar til I have ALL my shit together, a-thankya-vary-much!

-Mel Brooks

Not Short Enough

2008-06-24T08:45:00.000-07:00

First and foremost, our old pal GI Kate was interviewed for a project tentatively called "Women Of The Military". She'll tell you how it is, so check it out. http://myamericaniraqlife.blogspot.com/2008/06/women-of-militarytrailer.html

Alarm goes off at six in the morning but you've been in and out of consciousness for the past half hour. Like your body just knows that it has to be up soon. It's ingrained into you, that fear of being late or not being in the right place at the right time.

Morning PT. Completely unmotivated and indifferent, just going along to get along. You don't even bother to count days or even months. Its starting to look like The Purgatorium just shifted gears. Monotorium. Nauseum. Minimum security prison. You can't even act like the whiny bitch that you want to, cuz "they" will crush your balls. Go along. Get along. Pray you don't get hit with the Stop-Loss. Crawl towards your ETS date. Shrug shit off. Groan and sigh and look at your watch.

Don't fuck up.

Just wait it out and be that upstanding soldier that you're supposed to be. The game plan for now? Eh, I'll just keep the ol' mouth shut and do a whole lot more of the going along and see how well it gets me along. As mush as I'd love to completely let go and let the bird fly and sound off with a fuck-off, it just isn't worth it. The Army can fuck your world up and it/they will if you cross them/it.

Hey, you're just serving the last year of your sentence. Your crime? Enlistment.

So be it, may the paychecks flow. Gimme that money, then gimme that GI Bill, you know, the new and improved super beefy one. Yeah, I want that. I need it. Earned it. Fork it the fuck over, Unc Sam. Gimme what you promised and don't you dare fucking start spouting off with some tiny print bullshit.

Gimme what's mine and I'll go quietly.

The Agony Of Gestation

2008-06-23T00:59:00.000-07:00

I received a lot of comments recently, all of them very profound, atleast to me.

One in particular was unapologetic and honest, sympathetic without kissing any ass or pulling any punches. It was a bitch-slap that I was happy to receive. I was relieved that someone would actually have this sort of insight that I needed. For those who hadn't found it yet:

"So, tell me, what did you expect? By now, you must realize you were sent out on a shit load of lies and fabrications. Do you expect assholes like that to possess even a shred of decency? Sorry, kid, they don't. So, no, don't expect a thank you note from Dick Cheney.

Previously, you said, "Deny it all you want, but its the truth. The second day we were back, we went right back to not meaning shit to anyone except our mothers." Which, of course, implies that you actually have mothers that give a shit. But, correctly, accepts that nobody else does. Hey, they're shopping, they're doing their duty. Leave them alone.

Welcome to it, bitch. No, they don't care. Accept it. Deal. Move on. It'll save time and heartache if you do. Oh, you'll always be pissed that a bunch of totally ungrateful fuckers put your ass, not theirs, on the line. That they profited while you suffered. And then threatened you when you objected to being treated like shit.

I mean, sure, "Thank you for your service." hugs and kisses, warm fuzzies and that shit. But you can feel it's not really there. You're dangerous now. For the rest of your life, you're potentially lethal. And, of all the stupid shit these assholes can come up with, a bunch of pogue MPs are going to threaten you with . . . what? Haji's tougher than any pogue. You got through that, didn't you?

Didja ever wonder why the 'Nam vets kept an autoloader around? Why every now and then they just go bust loose on bottles and cans? Same shit.

OK, it sucks. Man up. Deal. Get that education. Wring every cent of benefits out of the government you can. Nobody's coming around handing this shit out. You have to go get it.

Oh, yeah, good luck."

Kudos to this cat, that's all I gotta say about that. Any flavor of wakeup call, I'm glad to taste it. I'm not the type to want to feel sorry for myself. That inhibits PROGRESS. I woke up in the middle of the other night, with the first IraqMare I'd had in months.

The heaviest volume of small arms fire that I could ever fathom was coming down on me and the rest of my squad. This squad was a mix of guys from our company, strangely enough. I heard the zip/zooom/unexplainable noise of passing bullets, and the crack of the rifles firing them, and the smack of the rounds hitting the shitty poorly constructed walls around me.

I saw the tracers streak through the air, and rounds punched holes through the bagginess of my sleeves and pant legs, caught the outter-most edges of my helmet, completely OUTLINED MY BODY with bullets, and all we could do was shout to each other and blindly blast rounds back in the general direction and scramble for cover, dirt kicking up all around us, getting in our eyes, ammo pouches on my body army getting hit and fucking up my extra ammo, everything narrowly missing me, and rather than considering it all a miracle, I just realized that my luck couldn't last much longer and I had to do something to get away from it, and just as I sprinted from the half-cover of one building and tried to make it to a dirt-and-grass birm--

I woke up.

It wasn't a startle and a jump, I didn't throw punches. My eyes just opened.

I looked at my girlfriend, then I looked around the room. Tried to get my bearings. Realized where I was, for the most part. Rationalized it all for a few seconds while I rolled over and faced the window. Looked at traffic through a narrow slit though the curtains.

Different world.

I closed my eyes again and crashed.

Things are getting a lot easier, making plenty more sense now. Sure, the occasional weirdness pops up, and yeah, I won't really touch hard liquor anymore, for fear of God Knows What, but now I've got my feet on the ground.

That, and I just bought a SICK Schecter Diamond Series Damien-FR with inactive EMG pickups, and lemme tell ya, even on a tiny Fender practice amp, the sounds are astounding. That and GTA4, microbrews, and good company are seeing me through just fine.

Unarmed and Unharmed, signing out.

Hiatus

2008-06-18T10:39:00.001-07:00

It's time for one.

Lots of shrugging of the shoulders and grunts of indifference, playing along, going with the grind because the alternative just isn't worth the heartache and punishment. Cog in the system kinda thing. I got a whole lotta nothing to say. Same story over and over again: we're back, it's strange, it's pretty easy, it's odd and weird, some things are annoying as hell, but all in all, it can all fuck right off, because we're home and we aren't armed and clad in ridiculous equipment. The neighborhoods are civilized and now we are too. Honest.

Started the process of signing up for college classes, for this last year. Keep me busy. Gives me goals that I actually give a shit about. Gonna learn sum'n.

I'm gonna be just like you.

Home

2008-06-18T10:38:00.001-07:00

We're back now. Back in the states.

Back to the booze. Back to the insanity of normal living. Fresh introduction to ridiculous gas prices. Great guys coming home to disastrous situations. The most unexpected, failed marriaged, and thankya very much Uncle Sam. Seeing as ol' Unc gives such a shit about fixing these quiet problems. Cheating wives. And who can blame who? Gone for over a year, what is a human being to do?

Just don't discredit the army, and everything is ok. Fuck you, Joe. Figure it out.

The Army cares about families. Really, it does. And that's why the happiest couples are in such an interesting state. That's why a married guy is crashing in the extra space in my room. Because we're all such heroes, we're all supported oh so much. But I guess refusing the dick is a bit much to ask from married women. I guess this is just our new culture. More money for the lawyers.

Here is your shiny happy future! Repetitive briefings filled with scare tactics, to the point where you don't even want to leave your room because it is a FACT that you will fuck up and the Army will destroy you. You're back, and "thank you" and all that, but really, hardly anyone truly cares. You're not in Iraq anymore, you're just another "vet" and yawn an' fuckoff kindly. Deny it all you want, but its the truth. The second day we were back, we went right back to not meaning shit to anyone except our mothers.

When I left, phones flipped open, but made sense. Now my phone has a keyboard and a touch screen. I should need a degree from MIT to run the bastard. You can't find a normal TV, they're all flat pannel HD spreadyercheeksandcoughupthecash crazy contraptions. Now I can see all the starlets blemishes in SUPER HIGH DEFINITION.

Sure, I catch myself scanning the freeway in high def, and the strangely shaped roofs. The shops and malls and hotels and godknowswhat. All to find even less.

"Oh, you're [Father]'s son, the one that just came back from Iraq?! How was it? Was it fun???"

I couldn't make this up if I tried. I've just been holding my tongue, being on my best behavior. That is, til I ended up at a friend's house, this friend being dead, and talking to his widowed wife, drinking wine and feeling awkward. Before I know it, I'm on the porch, hiding from everyone else, and the faucet is turned on, and I'm completely losing it, trying to find logic behind everything when I know that there is none. Trying to come to grips that one of the greatest people that I'll ever meet wasn't able to come home, and now I'm a guest in his wife's house. Oh you can bet I hung my head.

And then I went back to the Consumer Binge, namely in the mall. Sure, the Arabic fellow selling lotion didn't deserve the instinctive freak-out that I gave him, or the threats of bodily harm. He didn't deserve my desire to stomp the life out of him, but what business did he have being in my homeland, freedom aside?

Half the time, it's like I'm still There. The other half of the time, it's ALMOST like I had never actually left. Maybe just slept in. But now people are "proud" of me for doing whatever it is that I did.

I asked a Vietnam Vet a few questions. He said that it took him no time at all to readjust. Once again, we were the weird ones. Step outside and hear some other unit at the range unloading rounds, and for a second, it could be another firefight in Dourah, Baghdad. But no, it's not.

You're home now. You're no one again. All thanks aside, you're just a Joe. And no one here gives a shit. Most of 'em have done it, and the ones who haven't, well those newbie bastards are heading there sooner than soon. No ticker tape parade. Just a slideshow. Powerpoint.

Just liquor. Pouring as much of it into your face as you can, just as long as you don't have to work the next morning (even then, it's debatable). Everything is explainable, but nothing makes SENSE. We got no action, we got no motion. Don't think the boy can play much anymore.

We're kinda just like the rest of you now. Trying our damndest anyway. Got another year left. Then four years inactive.

Far as anyone else is concerned, I was never there. Never once.