There are no Marines in the sands of Saudi Arabia this time, waiting four months for the theater of Kuwait to open. We hunkered near the berms, firing shots at ranges built from crumb rubber, careful not to shoot the Bedouin and their camels when they appear on the horizon. Standing in jeeps, flashing the Saudi highway, making lewd gestures with our tongues and fingers at the Saudi women sitting in the backs of Mercedes because only men can drive in that country. We fought their war for them, and their fat white business partners in Texas. We were hired guns, sleeping in pre-fabricated bunkers built years earlier for the warriors that would fill them starting August 2, 1990, the day the Ba'ath party rumbled over the oilfields into Kuwait.
I don't go this time. Saudi Arabia wouldn't have me, Turkey wouldn't have me, and Jordan says they won't have me, but secretly they do. And I'm not a Marine anymore, though you're always a Marine. I don't fit my camis; in ten years my bulk has gone soft and wide, I've gained thirty pounds, but those are still my combat ribbons, my medals of honor. Those are still my rewards. I watch the war now, instead of participating in it, on CNN and CBS and Fox. But I'm no fool; I don't believe the things they tell me. I've done my time and know why men fight and die.
It was my birthday, December 3, 1990, when I received my first letter addressed to Any Marine. Her name was Anika, and she had dropped out of Yale. She said she wanted to be part of the war. Her friends, she said, were against the war. Because the war was about oil. But her friends drove large cars and didn't carpool. They protested with signs but not with wallets. They knew how to complain, but not how to sacrifice. This is what she wrote. One of hundreds of letters addressed to Any Marine arriving in tall yellow sacks at Al-Jubayl Naval Air Facility everyday.
I wrote her back. I told her that right and wrong doesn't factor into why a Marine does. I had signed a contract, the same contract my father signed before me. Marines follow orders. I told her I had nothing against the enemy, that I was fighting to protect billionaires in Texas, and that my proudest day would be the day I scored my first kill. That day came, in the rocks and dust south of Baghdad. The ground was mottled with torn scalps and damp bits of brain, blasted fingers, skull bits, the meat and bone of human kind. Blood dried and stained like paint on the stones creating a great canvas of red and tan, awash with a sky black with oil clouds that moved as the apocalypse moves, with tanks, and armor, in the roar of planes and exploding shells. We left bodies in that field, like a death farm, the fathers of the children hiding in the cities, the fathers, some still alive, guts pouring through their knuckles, clutching intestines, the slim and shiny muscles, pink and pumping along the lines of rib. The howls of the injured, blinded, screaming into the war machine. I saw my first killings and killed again.
It was 1992. Anika moved to Boston, where she went to work in publishing. I moved home after the war, to stay with my father, who was going mad in his old age. He had been a good father, and deserved better than the life he had.
Anika said she was sorry the war was over, she missed my letters. I had made her feel like she was there and that something horrible could happen to her or she would do something horrible to someone else. During the war she wrote letters imagining herself trapped in a foxhole under missile fire so intense her eardrums burst. She had written about being caught by villagers after killing a child. Now she wrote me about the famous people she met, Noam Chomsky, Michael Curtis, David Remnick. She said she was engaged to an author. This man had written a novel and in his novel he named the main character after himself.
I wrote back to Anika. I told her that in her pictures, in a white printed dress, she looked like an angel, her breasts like teacups, hips like pillows a man could rest his head against and go to sleep. I said I had taken a job with Skill-Bosch, a manufacturer of power tools with headquarters near an expressway. I told her I'd kept her letters inside my rucksack throughout and thought of her as my scope stretched across a building two-thousand yards from the perimeter guiding the bombs as they fell.
We stopped writing. My father died following days of screaming about the government. The government, he said, was coming into his home at night, and rearranging the furniture. My father suffered from multi-infarct dementia, a disease that comes from dead brain tissue. Insanity does not run in my family.
I never asked Anika the questions I should have. Where her fascination with war came from, and my own. She's married now, I imagine. Her husband, if he's the same as the man she was engaged to, has not written any more books, a one hit wonder. I didn't like his first one. I don't respect people who think they can get by without participating in this world.
I got married as well, for a few years, 1997 to the millennium. But it didn't work out; we wanted different things.
I watch the war now and read the ticker tape along the screen edge. It's a different war, only a fool would think otherwise. My uniform hangs in my father's closet. I wish I were there sometimes, killing when my country told me to kill. Because this war will not end. I laugh at the protestors making me late for work and wait patiently for them to clear the expressway; it's too late to stop the war now. I laugh when the politicians say things are going well. The men and women of this absurd administration never having gone to war themselves, treating war as if it was a video game, urging us to spend and consume as corpses pile over burning trenches. I laugh even harder when they get upset with Arab TV for airing mutilated Americans along the road to Basra, skin ripped open, chests peeled, holes in their cheeks, eyeballs punched from their sockets. That's all war is, death, death, death. I'd rather be a player inside the game, where there is no right or wrong but there is truth. Truth is landmines and poison gas and the man driving the taxi who pulls a cord around his waist taking four American soldiers with him in the name of his country and his God. Instead of truth we're given Oscars and March Madness, the lights stay on. I'd prefer to be climbing through the gore, charred flesh burned to my helmet, clear of purpose and intent, letter to Any Marine stuck comfortably inside my vest.