Kekoa Hallett

Week 5/6 Draft

Inoperative Humvees and trucks lay quietly behind barbwired chain-link fences lining the north side of a street, stretching past hundreds of quadcons all rusting and fading. A left on J road, over a few potholes, and the drill hall is nestled inconspicuously behind a parking lot. Its double doors open up into a hallway flanked by an administrative office. Cheerless, spotless, the walls are covered in trophies awarded to the unit, framed Marine Corps doctrines, plaques commemorating Marines who have received a Medal of Honor, random baubles from past wars, and dozens of loose leaf instructions for navigating military bureaucracy. The hallway ends with another pair of doors after which the building suddenly opens up. 45 feet above, a sheet metal roof catches and scatters the lowest notes of the voices below, recasting myriad conversations into one mutter. A pair of great gray ventilation ducts, as thick as redwoods, slither up the closest wall and through the stratosphere of the room. Fluorescents mingle with the mottled, gray, morning light filtering through the windowed pediment, silhouetting the ceiling’s latticed framework, bleaching the faces below. A terminal bridge runs along the entire perimeter of the cinderblock walls just above the heads of young men, wearing their desert utility uniforms, standing with arms crossed or sitting on a set of warped bleachers. They chat tiredly and nonchalantly about their disgruntlements, the injustices they endure daily, the forthcoming rewards entitled to them, Lance Coporal Flanneryrick will invariably creep up behind a circle of minglers and, nodding his head dumbly, dropping his voice an octave and wiggling his eyebrows lewdly, declare how shit-faced he was last night. I attach myself to my fellow cooks and we begin talking like back-of-the-bus yokels: “Only 48 more hours till quittin’ time, gents!” “Perkins is fucking late again.” “That pigeon-headed bitch is such fucking garbage, he’ll probably make us fucking inventory again for no fucking reason.” “Yeah, while he sits on his ass and plays on his laptop all fucking day.” The group groans simultaneously, Lance Corporal Moore has just entered the drill hall. “Holy shit, look at his fucking haircut, he has like no fade.” “At least he’s on time for once.” “I want to punch his fucking face so bad. What the fuck does he fucking have with him? Is that a fucking waffle maker?”

Indeed, it is a waffle maker; Moore walks into the drill hall with an overstuffed daypack on his back and a waffle maker in his hands. A small and wiry figure, he stands at the edge of the bleachers scanning the room briefly before sitting down on a rolled up wrestling mat, alone. His haircut is very ugly; luckily, his oversized Ray-ban eyeglasses are quite eccentric and command a great deal of attention. He pulls out his Nintendo DS and begins to play, but before long a random Staff Sergeant threatens to break it if he doesn’t put it away. Moore walks up to me and begins babbling about the new video game he’s been playing, how excited he is to make waffles this morning, and the wealth of his girlfriend’s family. He shows me his new knife, which is so absurdly large and menacing that it looks like a prop. As he talks, the Marines in our platoon continue to criticize him, but he does not seem to hear. Mercifully, somebody shouts something indistinct and we all shuffle outside to form up. In between the Motor pool and a large garage, we form up into our platoons. After a half hour of tedium, we are released to our sections.

The food service section consists of three rooms. A small office with an extremely disproportionately high ceiling, a ‘kitchen’ with no kitchen appliances except for a large two-tub sink, a few shelves, and a broken outdoor grill that functions as another shelf, and a back room used for storage and to reduce the risk of being caught napping. The junior Marines file into the kitchen and begin complaining about the NCOs, the training schedule, and the ephemeral temporality of final formation. This dingy room is where most of us will spend the lion’s share of our time at drill. Sitting on a crate, Yang remarks, “You know, I’ve been in this room for three years.” “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Sergeant Perkins enters from the office and the room tenses up. He tells us to start breaking out chow and that after we serve, we’ll be inventorying the EFK. He speaks with out self-assurance and his sentences are punctuated grotesquely by dipspit. When he finishes talking, nobody moves or makes any affirmative noises. Eyes glossing over, he leaves in a series of awkward gestures and Lukyanenko swears at the door behind him.