We were allowed to sleep for three hours, then roused, of course, with curses and kicks, then driven up the hill behind the base and forced to run under the moon and stars on a dusty road until dawn. Two of us were ill and the redneck that had been hysterical on the bus – his name was Ken – threw up bile.
In the morning, exhausted and hungry, we talked with the chaplain. He was a captain, already elderly, with grey temples and rows of medals.
The chaplain told us that we are all now private-recruits and will be up to the end of the initial training course. If we have problems, complaints or claims, we have to address him and only him. Exceptions are cases when a soldier feels a threat to health. In this case you go to the physicians – the medical block is to the right of the gate.
The chaplain also explained that the sergeants’ and officers’ job is to turn us civil marshmallows into hardtack. They have the right to shout at us and call us any word, but for curses connected with sexual and racial identity. Sergeants are allowed to touch military personnel, but only in strictly defined places (here someone even found strength to laugh), and only during the training process.
The chaplain once again summarized our duties and what is forbidden in the military. We were required to submit to sergeants and officers in everything. Anything else, including unnecessary questions, was simply forbidden.
A fight between recruits, the chaplain emphasized, would be punished by imprisonment for up to ten years. And the sergeant in whose division there was a fight would also be punished – if his soldiers have the strength to fight, he has trained them badly.
‘From now on and for the next three months, the sergeants headed by Master Sergeant Westerhausen will become for your parents, older brothers, teachers, mentors and all other people who are above you,’ the chaplain said and added: ‘I have already spoken about claims, but I think I should tell you it has not been in the glorious traditions of our base to complain since the landing on Omaha Beach. Wimps and whiners have no place in the US marines!’
…Master Sergeant Abraham Westerhausen was six foot seven inches tall, and weighed no less than a hundred kilos. Add in Boris Karlov’s physiognomy, a closely shaven skull with the tattoo of a hornet, and pack all this into camouflage and heavy combat boots – and you get ‘Devil Hornet’, the scourge and damnation of all newcomers to the military base…
Our day began with his ear-splitting: ‘Get up, bastards! Time to air your shitty asses!’, and came to an end with at least as loud: ‘Hit the sack, shit-tards! And make it so silent that when Rear Admiral Bird farts in Fort Knox, I can hear it here!”
Why the long deceased Admiral Bird passed gas, and in Fort Knox, none of us knew, but naturally nobody ventured to ask Sergeant Hornet, as we called Westerhausen.
His favourite entertainment was to order a recruit to: ‘Turn around! Attention!’ and then kick just under their tailbone as they tried to turn on the spot. The pain is so excruciating that the recruit begins to hop. So Hornet shouts: ‘Attention!’ – and how can he stand to attention when he’s writhing and hopping? So he doesn’t obey an order from a senior and collects a punishment in which Hornet was a master. Washing toilet bowls or cleaning wheels on combat vehicles is just child’s play compared with Hornet’s favourite: ‘Hunting for a dollar’.
The hunt was like this: the master sergeant threw a dollar coin into a ten-foot deep cement pool located near the obstacle course. The guilty recruit had to dive into the pool with a compressed air hose clamped to his teeth, then come up with the dollar in his hand. That was bad enough in clean water but the pool was filled with sewage.
Altogether, I remember six guys from our platoon ‘hunting’. Three ended up in the hospital with intestinal infections and were transferred to other divisions on the base because their preparation term was increased. And two made complaints to the chaplain and were moved away altogether, and as they went to the bus with their bags they could hardly walk – the chaplain hadn’t said for nothing that they don’t love complainers in Parris Island.
Well, the sixth who went ‘hunting for a dollar’ was that fine big man El Gato who had threatened Saddam Hussein. He couldn’t find the coin in the pool and when Hornet pushed him into the shit with his foot for the third time, El Gato grabbed the master sergeant by the boot and dragged him in too.
There was a big trial, the military police came, and El Gato was convicted of attacking the master sergeant, and sent to prison in Fort Leavenworth for a year. After bathing in shit the Hornet went absolutely mad, and at every chance he told us what the jailers in Leavenworth would do with El Gato.
‘He’ll become a girl on the first evening. In a week his asshole will so be fucking big he can sit down on a bottle of apple cider and not squeal. Understood, bastards?!’ shouted Hornet before lights out.
For all that, I wouldn’t say service was difficult for me or that I felt some serious discomfort. Of course, it was heavy physically, but morally I had a rest because the shouting of the sergeants and their flow of words was so primitive and plain that it provoked no emotional reaction – some ethnographic interest, but no more.
And I also really liked the fact that in the military you don’t need to think of the future at all. It is entirely predetermined for years ahead according to the contract. Here, others think for me, following rank.
Of course, it is also interesting to any man to try cunning stuff and accessories not in the normal arsenal of a civilian.
Once we were familiar with everything we had a right to use during military operations, I remember, being rather confused when it turned out that besides field and parade uniforms there was also daily and special ‘evening’ kit. The same was true of the arsenal. I understood that marines have machine guns, grenades, pistols and bayonets, but why do only police officers have a bludgeon and non-lethal weapons such as rubber bullets, stun grenades with CS tear gas or Dazzlers?
But these questions were rhetorical. The military doesn’t like curiosity and if I ask a sergeant about the bludgeon or CS, he’d just reply ‘You’d have it if you needed it’ or ‘Fifty push-ups in the pigsty.’ That was the hunting pool by the obstacle course.
What else do I remember from that time? My relations with my companions never changed – because I never had any. We came from very different layers in our society. You know that more than fifty percent of American marines weren’t born in the USA? And the fact that half of them can’t take the hardships and privations of military service means they break off the contract and join the ranks of criminals simply because they have no place else to go? But this is just statistics, and in general those in my platoon were the typical dregs of society, human garbage, slag and scum.
On the whole, they saw the military as a chance to escape from the ‘nomadic city’ from smelly trailers and equally smelly farms, and from the colored suburbs where human life doesn’t cost a cent and people, normal people I mean, don’t want to live.
The military gave them the chance to earn money, buy status and citizenship, and after contract completion collect a pension or maybe go on to a military career – to pass exams in a non-commissioned officer’s school, for example.
I wanted to serve our great country because I saw in it the meaning of life for each normal citizen. Ok, I understand that this sounds a little pompous, but at that time, after college and my encounter with the guys from the Garage, this is how I really felt and I was ready to go to any spot on the globe to assert the right of people for true democracy and freedom.
By the way, my relationship with weapons never really developed. At home, there were several cases of guns and rifles, since Pa liked to do some shooting – all his friends too. Both Mom and Judith, by the way, quite often went with them to the National Rifle Association training ground and fired at targets or just bottles.