Kekoa Hallett
Inoperative Humvees 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 pares his fingernails with a knife, “You know, I’ve been in this room for three years” he giggles, “familiarity breeds contempt.” Sergeant Perkins enters from the office and the room tenses up. He tells us to start breaking out chow and adds that after we serve, we’ll be inventorying the EFK. He speaks without 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.
The next scene has always struck me as conspicuously demoralizing and dehumanizing in its immutability: Sergeant Perkins, as always, having given his orders to nobody in particular, left without assigning the responsibility of supervision to any of the other NCOs. This void of authority creates an arena in which one’s apathy, fear of reprisal, and confidence in one’s ability to malinger successfully must be pitted against each other in order to determine the next course of action. For my fellow Marines, this usually means a good 60 seconds of comatose deliberation during which I grab Moore by the back of his collar and covertly drag him into the back/nap-room to begin our interview.
Moore appears to be content sitting down. I take a moment to stare at him, to try and ferret out some essential quality about his face, some tiny facet of his personality that might help illustrate the whole. His eyes are half-blackened by the shadow of his brow, he raises a fist to his mouth and rolls his fingers around, he licks the inside of his cheek, yawns and smacks, the gestures of domesticated herbivores. I mutter loud enough so that he can hear, “simple bovine eyes” and stare at him gauging his response. I don’t perceive any response and so we start the interview.
“When did you know when you wanted to be part of the military?”
“Probably like nine or ten…”
“Can you trace it to an experience? When was the first realization that you wanted to wear the uniform?”
“Yeah, I don’t know, probably just movies or something… I don’t know I just wanted to wear the uniform and it’s like the stuff in the movies it’s cool, but it’s unrealistic, well back then it was now it’s…”
“…”
“…”
“Okay, so how about you give me a time line of your life leading up joining the Marines?”
“Born in Bremerton, moved to Bellevue, I’m an Aquarius, joined Marines, originally was going to join Army, went to military school, and then high priority for high school students so I was the secondary.”
“And that’s why you joined the reserves because you just wanted to get the hell out of there?”
“Yup.”
“Why did you want to leave so bad? Was it just money?”
“Yeah I only had like twenty dollars and I was living with my ex-fiancé.”
“Oh, the one you’re living with now?”
“No, no—”
“So, there’s another lady, before, the uh, Asian broad?”
“Yeah, I don’t know, I got a thing for Asians, yeah but my ex-fiancé or my almost, yeah she’s Vietnamese.”
“You tried to join the Army and ended up in the Marines. How’d that happen?”
“Well, I got rejected by the army because I had some court stuff, they wouldn’t even work with me or let me work out with them. So, when I left the Army recruiting station a Marine Recruiter was right there and he asked me a question led me to talking about Marines—”
“Do you remember the question?”
“No, I don’t know, but he got my attention and he did the whole sales person thing and I just sort of fell for it.”
“You just fell for it?”
“Uh, at first yeah, but then with the Marines I realized, that they work harder and stuff and I could even tell with the poolees and stuff, they stand out. Like, I worked out with the Navy and their workouts were just playing volleyball indoors. The only reason I even considered the Navy was cause the recruiter was pretty hot. I would have joined for her.”
“Sure, a girl worth fighting for.”
“Asian too.”
And so it goes, our unproductive tête-à-tête, searching for insight somewhere within his memory. I’m unable to get him to describe a moment in his life where he self-actualized or even just stop things from happening to him automatically. We touch on his childhood and he stands fast, concerned only with banal details: places he’s lived and which version of Pokémon he was playing while lived there. We speak about boot camp and he talks at length about the ferocity of his drill instructors. While we are commiserating about our time spent there, the door slams open and two of the Marines in our platoon, Lau and Vanderkooy, walk in.
“Oh shit! It is super official in here right now! Alright, I’ll be asking the fucking questions around here, boy… you got any questions you wanna ask him?”
“What makes you cry?”
“Movies where the dog dies… I like dogs.”
“Who cut your hair?
“Yeah, I did, and my girlfriend helped out at the end. It’s a bad haircut, I’m gonna borrow money to get it fixed.”
“What are you most proud of, Moore?”
“I got a job at secure-task in the Microsoft division, get overtime, get paid to basically sit on my ass.”
“Where do you live, Moore?
“Bellevue, Victoria”
“Who do you live with?”
“Girlfriend.”
“I thought you guys broke up.”
“We’re on the—we’re basically almost there.”
“Why, Moore?”
“We’re different, she’s upper-class, I’m not and personality is just so different.”
“Is she Asian? And you’re just white?”
“I like Asians.”
“Why?”
“He watches anime that’s why”
“You like the, the animated porn?”
“No, creeps me out.”
“Good.”
Moore describes a violent hentai that he and his friend watched when he was 15 that turned him off to the genre. Vanderkooy and Lau continue to press and he speaks a little bit about his childhood. His mother raised him and four siblings on $900 a month. Corporal Roze walks in.
“The PFCs don’t know how to make the fucking cornbread and brownies so get in there and help them.”
The motions of drill don’t change much from month to month. We, the junior Marines, grudgingly obey the inane commands of our NCOs. The greater purposes of our duties are almost completely unknown; bits of hearsay are weaved together with furtive glances at officer’s clipboards and pig-headed pessimism to form blurry figurations of the day’s schedule. The overwhelming sentiment in the cook’s platoon is one of impotent insubordination. Every order is carried out with disinterest, thinly veiled exasperation, or outright disgust. However, these discontents are quickly abated by our collective élan or by an invigorating and frequently cynical sense of humor. Through some process hitherto undescribed by science, rote tedium and insultingly valueless tasks are transformed into the foundations of impregnable friendships. I turn to my fellow Marine, currently engaged in wiping off pubic hairs inexplicably attached to the bottom of a toilet seat, and, my face assuming a gross caricature of military doggishness, snap to the position of attention. I sound off:
“Report your post!”
Diaz snaps up and responds in kind:
“Good afternoon sir, Lance Corporal Diaz reports the junior enlisted head all clear! The count on deck is four shitters, four pissers, and two garbage Marines! There is nothing unusual to report at this time, sir!”
“Very well, carry on!”
I give him a swift salute with my hand just below my waistline and about-face. Before I leave, somebody in the stall grouches:
“Will you fags shut the fuck up? I’m trying to shit.”
“As I was,” Diaz responds, “The count on deck is four shitters, four pissers, and three garbage Marines.”
“Fucking retards.”
Sometimes it is not enough to be able to bray and holler and dig one’s knuckles into somebody’s ribs, as the day wears on, and as tempers become unmanageable, Moore receives a greater amount of abuse. His actions and inactions alike are criticized harshly by all present. Whenever he leaves (and sometimes when he enters) the group mocks and mocks and mocks him until we work ourselves into a mania. At that point, one of us makes some violent gesture that draws the attention of an unsympathetic NCO who orders us to clean the head or take out the trash. As we take the garbage to the dumpster Sergeant Saga walks by us, points at Moore with all fingers extended, and says,
“Why are you so goddamned fucked Moore?”
“Aye, Sergeant!”
“Don’t ever fucking look at me, you child rapist.”
Having concluded this mentorship, Sergeant Saga walks on, leaving Moore to contemplate his role as a whipping boy.
“It’s probably my glasses,” Moore says, turning towards me, “But, I found them for free and they’re exactly my prescription.”
Something?
Moore lives with his “it’s complicated” significant other, Nicole, in Factoria. Their apartment, paid for by her father, is unassuming and clean. The large planes of unadorned white walls command most of the interior, though one corner shows evidence of pleasant human congress and the glow of habitation. An oversized flat screen television is suspended above a cubby shelf filled with the colorful titles of an immense collection of video games and consoles. As Moore and I settle around his dining room table, Nicole flips through a magazine on the couch.
“Okay, let’s talk about how people in our platoon treat you. Why do you think you get so much shit?”
“Because I’m immature and I made like a bad first impression.”
“Yeah, yeah, what do you think that impression was?”
“I’m bad with direction, pretty dumb, and that I’m lazy.”
“Do you think these are true?
“Half and half… I make dumb decisions, I’m bad with directions.”
“Do you mean directions like cardinal directions, like north south?”
“That too, you can ask me to go grab something from the refrigerator and I can’t find it.”
“That’s why we break up.” Nicole chimes in
“Yeah, she asked me where’s the closest way to my heart and I said over there, wrong direction, right?”
“Yep.”
Moore chuckles, but I don’t feel any of the tension leave him, Nicole, or myself. Throughout the day, Moore and Nicole will denounce each other like this, tackily and directly, as if they not only endorse this pettiness, but, having already settled comfortably in the atmosphere mutually assured destruction, flourish in it. Nicole will emasculate him by flirting with me or discussing the abounding finances of some dreamboat in her class and Moore will retort by mentioning some salacious detail of their sex life.
“Do you feel a sense of fraternity or camaraderie in our platoon?”
“Oh yeah, with ours, we all fuck with each other, but I think if something’s going on we’ll all help each other out. Sergeant Saga will, as much as he hates me, he’ll help me out.”
“So, you know all these things people say about you, when Lucky and Lau are talking all this shit about you, how do you deal with it?”
“In one ear out the other because they’re opinion about me is not gonna change. I can tell, I could easily be all macho like everyone else and it’s not gonna solve anything. Whatever, just get my shit done, do my MCIs and I’ll just get corporal.”
“Okay, so how do you want people to perceive you? What do you want people to say about you?”
“Damn, I’m sexy. Good looking. [To the cat] Isn’t that right? Fuck, I look good, that’ll be my quote. Cause I do look good. I’m very narcissistic about myself, looks wise. I just know I look good and I’ve noticed that. I’ve noticed myself noticing myself. Now, I’m just babbling on, wasting your time.”
“No, no, please, believe me.”
“But, my way of thinking is different than others though. Cause I don’t really have a big ego. Even with my Mom, I’m the odd one in my family. I’ve always wanted to go to Japan, and it’s really easy for me to learn Japanese, but I quit that class.
Wrapping up?