Life During Wartime

"Life During Wartime"

By Matthew Royall

As our convoy halted, the dust cloud it’d been creating envelopes us briefly while the dismounts’ boots touch the hard sand road. Covered in a helmet, a cigarette loosely in the lips, an automatic weapon serving as an extension of my arms I begin to wonder.

Ragtag groups of children dressed in the outfits you’d see in refugee commercials crowd us, lust for handouts in their eyes, so they could perhaps take something home and serve their family, or keep it for themselves and break the monotany of desert existence. God don’t let any of em have a bomb... “Water Mister!” A voice behind outstretched hands. “Chocolate Mister!” Different voice, same anxious palms. And the first thought that comes into my head is “What are these kids’ first words?... Mama...Papa...Mister please?”

One kid spies the cigarette dangling from my lips and raises two fingers to his. ‘Cheeky bastard!’, I think. But part of me can’t help smiling. So with one hand on my pack, and the other on my weapon, I toss a few at him, and I don’t really watch, or care if he gets them or not. I consider giving one of them my Pork Rib MRE as a joke in bad taste, since they could probably read as much of my language as I can of theirs.

I see our Battalion’s HNIC, well, SNCOIC (Staff Non Commisioned Officer in Charge) is dismounted, and the adolescents stand eye level with him while the younger one’s come up to his chest. He is the portrait of a little man in a big world. SgtMaj Reyes is walking with a bag of candy, and life’s little essentials, pandering to the sea of brown skinned black haired urchins that revere him like a god...as long as he's got goodies.

Other dismounts handed packages to the older villagers. This was winning the hearts and minds of Iraq in action. Although while we were training the motto’d been ‘Two to the chest, one to the head’... not make everytime we pass through here the reverse of halloween... the ones all dressed up giving out goodies almost door to door. It makes me wonder if the director for the Peace Corps and the Marine Corps got their documents switched up on the way to their respective meetings. And if they did.... what was the Peace Corps doing right now? I also know with great conviction, in the part of the country where someone dies today, there will be media coverage, not where things have been settled... not where people’s frowns have been broken.

Everyone returns to their vehicles, and we prepare to start the dust storm up again as engines thunder, laboriously pulling their cargo, bodies and the armor weighing them down. The desert passes by... at times its like watching the same 60 frames of looped animation, with minute differences ever 20 frames or so. This scenery combined with the sensation of flying through an oven is like hypnosis for some people and can lead to complacency... luckily I can focus on the jarring of my knees as the humvees are driving over roads that might put some in Dallas to shame... might.

The first part of our convoy set to take a different route veers off, and I imagine a Y shaped dust cloud from an ariel shot, like a pretentious car commercial. In 45 minutes I’ve managed to go through 15 smokes, not including the ones tossed at the young diaperhead. The town we head through seems deserted, and it most likely is as we have a base on the other side of it. Picture cardboard boxes with windows... the size of a normal building, most of them having a sign with arabic scrawled on them somewhere. Coat said boxes with low grit sandpaper of various colors, add a pillar around a fountain that will never see water (a momument to ‘who gives a fuck?’), and an occasional bush that looks like Michael J Fox took a match to an afro. That’s kind of what this place looked like.

Inside the base, after unloading a belt of rounds touched by the desert heat and ensuring the weapon wasn’t capable of accidentially killing anyone we got out our food in the form of MREs... Funny name... Mr.E... cause if it says its beef patty or whatever, it might be... reminds me of cafeteria lunch at schools...mystery meat... just, without old fat lunch ladies I fantasize about (hairnet, potato scoop and all) serving me, or the taste.

“Why don’t you go let him stand on your back?” Cpl Sandoval, asks me, pointing over to SgtMaj Reyes. The SgtMaj was the center of another portrait, little man and a big urinal. The urinals were PVC pipes stuck deep into the ground, waiting like a german raunch star for you to get your dick in and release. “Cause then his nuts’d’ be resting on my ribs.” I replied chuckling “You remember when Sgt Williams’ tall lanky ass came from the shower all red faced and pissed off, banging wall lockers, screaming of how unfair it was that God gave Reyes so much, but most men so little...especially taking into account their height differences... a good foot and a half between em.”

“Its like the dick version of Cain and Able...” Sandoval says through a mouthful of bread and cheese spread, continuing to watch SgtMaj do his thing... “I wonder how girls would use that thing...” He mused, and I could see in some far off place... he was really going over it in his mind. I wondered if he meant the SgtMaj’s pipe or the PVC piss tube he was tiptoeing in front of. I decided to oblige him the details from my own thoughts on the matter. “Well first, they get into like a crab walk position then another girll pulls back on th-”I was cut short by a bark, not getting to disclose the one i thought he was thinking, leaving room for both.

“SandyBawls! Get yer ass over here, the meeting’s starting.” A random voice of authority made its subject move. Sighing, he leaves his rifle with me, trudging to the shack the meeting’d be held in. Sgt Stoutmoore approached me, his left sided grin and aged steel set eyes matching my withdrawn glare and similar smirk. He claps me on the back, and I’m sure dust flies, “How is it, now that you’re not a virgin anymore shorty? Want me to hold your hand since your cherry’s been popped?” He asks grinning as I hand him a can of snuff. “You aren’t going to get all emotional on me now are you?” He jested, as since we’d been in the country, it’d been my first time off base, and first time on a mission in a foriegn country, however small this one was. “Emotional no...” cocking my head and batting my eyes at him “Clingy... yes.” I answer, mocking femininity and fluttering my wrist in the Oak Lawn gayng sign.

I watch him load his lip with a pinch of snuff, and tell me he had to join the meeting Sandyballs had just run off to. He spits, and when it lands it looks like when the coyote falls into a canyon. I walk over to center myself in a portrait complimenting SgtMaj Reyes’s...Another little man and a big urinal.

5-23-09