You’d hate to miss the turnoff and end up dead in some Iraqi village. That happened sometimes.

Sweet home Matilda

Chilling in the Persian Gulf.

We didn’t have clothes to change into. We came with what we had in our packs. This is how dirty we were. When one guy changed out of his skivvies when we got to Kuwait, the old pair stood up on its own.

Porta-PT

Net cobbled together from camo netting and ratchet straps, nasty farmer’s tans, nothing but sand in every direction. Let’s play some volleyball.

Kuwaiti Naval Base- this is going to hurt.

Watch out for sea urchins or your foot will get infected, Doc will get pissed, and you’ll sit on a table while he digs in your foot for an hour pulling out spikes.

The tower is twenty feet tall, placed on top of a ten-foot-high dirt berm. Its walls are tan, waist high steel plates, front wall fortified with sandbags on which an M240G mid-sized machine gun sits with four hundred rounds of ammunition pointing out toward a serpentine of concrete barriers on the dirt road below.
Orlovsky drops a brown pack of MRE garbage off the side of the tower and starts down the steel rebar ladder in full battle gear—desert camo covered kevlar helmet with issued green dust goggles; flak jacket with three pouches, each holding two rifle magazines of 30 rounds; two olive drab one-quart canteens; twelve-inch Ka-bar knife; first aid kit with tourniquet, bandages, adhesive tape, airway nasopharyngeal, clotting agent, and combat gauze; 1.5 liter CamelBak hydration system; assault pack with beef jerky, pack of cigarettes, tin of chew, M&Ms rat-fucked from a box of MRE’s, two bottles of water, porno mag or Maxim for “reading”; M16A2 service rifle slung over his shoulder; and two pouches for M67 fragmentation grenades, empty because we’re not in Iraq anymore, but guarding an abandoned desert camp in Kuwait, and rarely see anyone but camel herders on the horizon.
“It’s fucking gross up there man,” Orlovsky says, when he gets to the ground. “Good luck.”
It’s midday, Summer, around 125 degrees. The metal guard tower in direct sun radiates heat, but the ladder rungs, shaded by the tower platform, are lukewarm in my closed fingers. When I reach the top of the ladder, the stink of MRE wafts into my face. A pack of half-eaten spaghetti sits on the floor in a pool of sticky clear liquid leaking from a pouch of pears. The metallic sweet and rank smell—like off-brand canned spaghetti rings, orchids, and boxed red wine—tells me the food has been there awhile, maybe since the night shift. Before I even pull myself onto the tower landing, I’m peppered by the little feet of a metric shit ton of flies.
Mother Fucker! Which fucking pig left their trash? They know this shit attracts flies.
I kick the garbage out of the tower then peel off my assault pack and flak jacket. Flies throng the sweat outline left on my uniform from my combat gear.
I check the M240G, make sure it’s clean and ready to fire. I open the feed tray cover, lift the feed tray, check the bolt and rails for grit and lubrication, drop the feed tray, and slap on a belt of rounds. Flies blanket my face and the backs of my hands. I flick my hands through the air and whip my head from side to side, but there are so many, I can’t keep them off me, so I try to ignore them, slam the 240 shut and sit on an unopened MRE box in the center of the five-foot by five-foot tower floor.
It’s two hours until I rotate out of this tower. Five minutes into my shift, I go ape-shit. Flies crawl on my cheeks, lips, and earlobes, down my neck, around my throat, under my chin, up my nostrils. I snort, spit, slap, and swear. The more the flies touch me, the angrier I get. I slap my body and face so hard my fingers bruise, but the flies are too fast.
A fly lodges itself in my ear canal. It squirms inside my head, garbage and shit covered feet rubbing against my ear canal walls, wings buzzing against my eardrum. I jump up off my seat and claw at my ear. It’s laying fucking eggs in my head! I claw because I don’t know what to do. I can’t jam my finger in my ear and smash the fly. Who knows what kind of problems insect guts smooshed deep in my ear hole would cause, but clawing is worthless, so I open-palm slap the shit out of my ear hoping if I hit hard enough the fly will get rattled and leave. After a few clubs, my brain goes fuzzy, and my ear rings like a TV end-of-broadcast signal, but the fly leaves.
The fly in the ear is too much. These flies need to die.
“Alright you little mother fuckers. Let’s go!” I snatch the floppy-brimmed desert boonie cover off my head and swing wildly. My boonie snaps against the wall, the sand bags, the sticky floor, my arms, thighs, calves, and boots, but no flies die, and now that my head is uncovered, dozens burrow in my hair.
“Fucking cock slut!” I shout, tearing at my hair, sure that the guys on the ground can hear me and are laughing their asses off.
I fold my boonie in half, doubling over the brim and creasing the top to decrease wind resistance, then swing some more.
Thwaap! Miss. “Donkey cunt!” Thwaap! Miss. “Sweaty fucktard!” Thwaap! Miss. “Cock waddle anal bead shit nugget!” The boonie cuts through the air better folded up, but these flies aren’t fat slow American flies hanging out on fast food windows, these are survival of the fittest flies fighting for limited resources in a god-forsaken shithole, and it’s like they know they’re better than me. The faster I swing, the faster they get. Little diseased fly legs crawl over every patch of open skin and hair on my body, and there’s nothing I can do to stop them.
“FUUUCKK!” I yell, flailing like a monkey in a trap. Once I thrash away all my fight, I sit on the MRE box in the center of the floor, defeated, flies roaming my body like a corpse.
Slingshot. That’s what I need.
A picture flashes in my brain, surgical tube stretched behind a U frame, pebble releasing with enough velocity to knock a crow out of the air.
I need to be like a slingshot.
I grab one edge of my folded boonie in my right hand, keeping tension in my arm. With my left hand, I pull back the other edge. The fabric doesn’t stretch like surgical tubing, but as the elbow on my arm cocks, I feel increasing tension. On a section of the metal wall, four flies stand close together, idle. They’ll do. I release my left hand while snapping forward my cocked arm. THWAAP!!! Four little carcasses fall to the tower floor, and four blood specks stain the camo of my boonie.
Game on bitches.
For the next hour, I slingshot my boonie this way and bodies rain to the floor. I pause between swings only to wipe off clumps of yellow guts from particularly vicious hits. At around twenty minutes, I count blood specks on my boonie—157, and the air hasn’t begun thinning out.
In another twenty minutes, enough bodies tumble across the tower floor that they flow like waves in the breeze.
After an hour, no flies remain alive. My boonie is covered with blood and gut smears than I can count. For several minutes, I watch fly bodies swirl around the steel floor, eventually collecting in black mounds in the tower corners. This must be what victory feels like, sitting on your throne in your tower, staring down at the bodies of your enemies swirling at your feet. I look out at sand and clean blue horizon, hot breeze blowing in my face, king of nothing.
When my replacement calls up the ladder, I throw on my flak jacket and assault pack, slap my boonie against my thigh to clear it of clinging guts and put it back on my head.
When I get to the bottom of the ladder, my replacement says, “Orlovsky told me it’s fucking gross up there.”
“Nah,” I say, “It ain’t that bad.”

View from the tower. Absolutely nothing out here.

Yippee ki yay, MF

Most guys tried to take home little tabasco bottles filled with Iraqi sand as something to remember the war by. One First Sergeant tried to take home a couple dozen AKs hidden inside sealed boxes of office paper. I think he got in a lot of trouble.

Stranded in a deserted desert camp, nothing around for miles, this is inevitable.

Back to work.

To all of those that made it back, cheers and happy Veterans Day. To all of those that came back haunted or broken, you fought and fought wherever you were sent then came home and fought and fought some more. When you fell apart, it wasn’t weakness. It was fatigue. Bodies and minds aren’t meant to fight that much without relief. The world might not understand that. The people around you might not understand that. But those who have been there understand that. There is no shame in being broken. It happens. But given the space to do so, minds will heal. If you’ve been a mess for a while and don’t know where to turn, send me a message. We’ll see if we can figure it out together.

Into the viper pit.

Hunters on the ridge.

These pups have no idea what they’re getting into.

Fallujah. Soon this will be flooded with insurgents and surrounded by US forces. The streets will be filled with smoke, rubble, and Marines and Soldiers going house to house.

I’m thankful for the guys I served with. It was a mix of guys from all around the country. They were tough and capable and willing to do what needed to be done. Even with all the chaos, all the crap blowing up on the streets, all the fighting around our area every day, they never stopped working, never lost their integrity.

The power of dirt in suppressing a blast. This is a crater from incoming.

Aftermath of the counterbattery.
(Picture from 2/2 Marines, Echo Company, after receiving sniper and mortar fire from across the Euphrates)

Make sure to put on your Kevlar pants before you go out and play.

Some people did very well under the old regime. Many of them had homes in Ramadi.

IEDs started out pretty simple. The first IED I saw was a couple days into my second deployment. It was covered with dirt and had a detonation chord running out of it. They got much much more sophisticated over time.

Spacing became something we talked about constantly, how we could use space between vehicles to avoid mass casualties from IEDs. In cities, we’d tighten down because of other threats, but in open terrain, our convoys stretched a long way. Most civilians evacuated this area between Ramadi and Fallujah because it was so overrun with insurgents and Marines. The ones who didn’t soon began to understand they should keep their distance. We weren’t taking chances. We were surrounded by enemy all the time, and too many Marines and Soldiers were dying. This was still early in the war, 2004. We were trying to figure things out.

“Hydration is key, gents.”
This is like two days of water. (If our supplies didn’t get blown up on the highway 🙂).

Go condition 1.

There’s a graveyard just past this overpass. And on the other side of that graveyard, we’re going to get cut up by so many mortars and so much gunfire, I’m going to wonder why I’m still alive.

They never seemed to hit our games with rockets and mortars. That was nice.

Here’s one for the Docs. Looking good Maz.

Our unit is chopped to hell. One platoon runs a detention facility on Camp Ar Ramadi for enemy prisoners. Another couple squads help train Iraqi Police. The rest of us, about twenty Marines, run security missions out on the roads for whoever needs to get from point A to point B. I love serving with these guys. Every one of them is tough and capable, and I’ve never had faith in anyone like I have faith in these men I work with every day, but I feel how small we are. It’s clear to me every time we go out on the road.
A lot of guys in the area are losing arms and legs from hunks of shrapnel, especially turret gunners. We get sent bullshit fixes from America, Kevlar shoulder pads so chunks of shrapnel will just shatter our bones instead of slice off our arms, Kevlar thigh protectors, so at least we won’t bleed out of our femoral arteries when we get blown in half. Guys riding inside the Humvees bitch about all the stupid strap-on protections, but I know how vulnerable I am up top, and I’m not proud. I take whatever they don’t want and find an open part of my body to strap it to. As we drive down the highway, I look like a gypsy wagon, little pieces of Kevlar bullshit flapping in the breeze all over my body.
I’ve got a ritual every time we leave camp. Just before we go out the gate, I slap a belt of rounds in my 240 and say to myself, “Today you die. Just do your job.” I say it over and over until I accept it. Once I acknowledge there is no tomorrow, no home, no future life, the panic in my chest dies, and I focus where I need to: scanning roadside garbage for IEDs and looking for potential ambush sites.

As it’s always been, NCOs make the Marine Corps run.

Back-blast area clear.

Ammo issue. Screw the smoke grenades. Give me more links.

Ramadi nights.

It’s nice to have a day off.

Training will be continuous.

It’s strange how much a person can change in just a couple years when under severe pressure. My first deployment I was an incompetent kid, a liability on the battlefield. My second deployment, I was a guy other Marines counted on with their lives. For better or worse, meeting ugliness head on forces you to change.

With all the plate steel, sandbag reinforcements, Marines, weapons, and gear, this bad boy topped out at about 30 mph. An IED would have popped us like a pimple.