penfist

stories are the bones of everything

suicide

Spontaneous combustion

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Spontaneous combustion is a myth. But something like it does happen sometimes. With the push of a button. For a variety of reasons. People who are there one moment are gone in the next.

Here’s how I imagine it, as only a person who has been close to high explosive doing its awful work can; the truck pulls up to the outer gate. The madman pushes a button. The shockwave ripples outward too quickly for slow human minds to comprehend. The madman, who is probably only a boy really, disintegrates into wet, charred bits of flesh.

Last thoughts irrationally carrying him into the black where his false belief in a paradise that does not exist will simply end. Perhaps that is in and of itself a sort of paradise. When the only world you know is so harsh, maybe stopping the world you know is a form of heaven.

The walls of the compound blow apart a millisecond after the madman’s body flings itself into an orgiastic outward spiral of exploding truck parts. Guards on the perimeter are blown apart as the hole in things expands. This is the work of men whose dreams taste only of death. This is the language of the bomb and of impotence.

Trailers rip apart. It is 4:30 AM in Kabul, a 3,500-year-old city whose residents know the smell of death and shit intimately. The winds here are always full of decay, burning, desperation. In the blackness, fanatic followers run through the new hole and begin firing their machine guns. More of the language of death.

The residents inside this poorly named place are waking up. Some are injured, the walls they felt safe inside proving too weak to keep out conflict. A few died in the initial moments of the blast. The camp, which is a place run by a company named after a character from the movie Star Wars, is what the mavens of war call a secure compound. There is no such thing. Camp North Gate also called Camp Pinnacle, no longer has a gate and does not sit on the pinnacle of anything.

I lived in this place in 2011 and 2012 but was moved away by my superiors and then injured in a moment of banality that had nothing to do with bombs. So I am not at Camp Pinnacle when the suicide bomber pushes his button and blows a deep crater into the ground, shatters the walls, creates an opportunity for mayhem. I am not close to the bomb or the men who run in after with their fury and their guns. People I know and have come to care about are though.

I can only imagine what happened. Piece it together from news reports. Live through it in my dreams. Because I spent many months expecting any given night to be my night of blood and terror I have a deeper understanding of how those moments played out after the bomb went off than you are likely to.

I know war. I have watched mortars explode close to me. Seen rockets fly a few feet over my head and then arc downwards to explode nearby. I have woken up to find bullets that have fallen down around me while I slept.

Kabul has probably not always been a city permeated with misery. I imagine it has known times of peace and plenty. I have not been there during any of those. For me, Kabul will always be a memory of armor, insecurity, fear. For me Kabul will always be complete chaos in the form of a wedding party madly videotaping their joy while a truck full of freshly slaughtered goats careens past on its way to some open air market. Life and death superimposed side by side with the backdrop being a city of tents next to a graveyard full of war martyrs.

The world inside the walls of the place I once lived that got blown up was surreal. In the little store I remember Afghan brothers selling overpriced counterfeit Beats headphones to overpaid, underproductive armed contractors like me. Every winter jacket I bought from them fell apart because the zippers were made of brittle metal. I bought two and then switched to ordering from Amazon.com. In the capital city the winters are cold.

At Camp Pinnacle, most of the imported female workers ended up pregnant and disappeared back to Kyrgyzstan. The contractors call them war wives. No alimony payments are likely to be collected by the state on behalf of those children anytime soon. Surreal. Full body massages with happy endings for the ones willing to pay. You can fuck the Russian speaking hairdresser for $100 in U.S. currency.

Inside the compound is surreal. Outside the compound is even more surreal. At least we have running water and electricity 95% of the time. The rest of Kabul, which is also called Kabol, is not so lucky. Rich people have generators in their dusty mansions. Poor people have dung fires. In this city, the higher up the mountainside you live the poorer you are.

We didn’t have to report graft or bribes by local officials until the percentage was higher than one quarter of the total budget. So, if we gave a police colonel $1 million in computers and he distributed three quarters to his underlings and sold one quarter in the local markets to line his pockets that was OK. The compound we lived in supposedly cost

The little store inside our secured compound sold third rate Chinese electronics, Afghan carpets and for some reason I never understand was well stocked with remote controlled toy helicopters. I’m sure those blew up when that bomb went off. I saw some photos of the aftermath. The building where I lived would have been shaken but my room probably didn’t sustain any major damage. Had I been there on that morning I would have been shaken awake by the bomb blast and put on my body armor while my fight or flight response went into overdrive. My years of experience in that kind of environment would have kicked in. I would have sought those I knew in order to go into what is called a protective posture while the camp guards battled the follow on attackers.

For every misled fool who wants to rush to gain entrance into an imagined heaven that does not smell like dust, shit and misery, there are always companions. These four came in shooting. Reports vary regarding how many were killed on that morning.

What’s certain is that all four of the mad truck bomber’s companions died in a hail of return gunfire from the compound guards. It’s my speculation that the Nepali guards were the most effective at returning fire. The Afghan guards tended to be mostly useless. Collecting a paycheck and praying were their two most reliable features during my sojourn inside those walls now shattered. I was reliable at the first but not the second.

One of the strange things about war is how the statisticians love to collect their data. At the end of your life, if you have been a war mercenary as I have, you might be summarized on a tally sheet as one of any number of KIA (killed in action) or, if you are not completely ended, you could become a WIA (wounded in action). There were more than 100 WIAs from the bomb and its aftermath. There were an uncertain number of KIAs of various nationalities. One of them a Romanian. It made me wonder if he was the Romanian I used to play the video game Call of Duty with. I haven’t seen him on Xbox Live for a long time now.

The people who do the important counting necessary to manage a war often guard the numbers as if they are a holy secret. Reporting in such an environment is almost never completely factual. The statisticians are often also liars with an agenda. I’ll probably never know exactly who lived, died and bled that morning. I know that one of my friends survived uninjured that day only to be blown up inside his armored vehicle another. He suffered traumatic brain injury.

War is surreal. There you are with a rifle and a pistol and body armor. Spending days driving an armored truck through the beggars, drug addicts and religious zealots of Kabul to get from one compound full of corrupt, opportunistic people to the next and then back again. Breathing in the dusty shit air.

Spending nights playing a warrior made of pixels on a projection screen while eating pizza cooked for you by an Afghan who has never known anything but the smell of dusty shit air. Who is trying to survive like you are. Who has an agenda that stays hidden behind fatalistic eyes. And you make six figures while he struggles to make enough to feed his mother, father, sisters and an untold other number of Afghans who are not lucky enough to be a pizza boy in a secure compound.

Was it one of the pizza boys who gave the attackers details on the compound so they would know the best time to do the most damage? If I had been born an Afghan pizza boy I wonder what I would have done. One of our translators, who could easily have been an Afghan pizza boy instead, was stabbed to death in the streets of Kabul with screwdrivers because of his profession. Because he needed to make a living and didn’t want to beg on the streets like so many Afghans do. In Afghanistan warlords siphon off foreign money while the denizens of neighborhoods they control starve and freeze in the harsh winters.

I sometimes wonder what it is all for. The billions of dollars poured into a place on the other side of the world which is also the world’s largest producer of opium. One of the oldest settled places. One of the most contested places. Many empires have ground their sharp teeth into dust in this place where the sound of violence is a normal part of the fabric. But for a missed moment in time I could have become part of that dust. Little bits of me scattered into the wind of a city ringed by hard mountains that always smells of shit. Shit that also provides the sustenance from which I have seen roses growing.

It occurs to me that maybe the manboy with his finger on the button of the bomb was hoping to clear a space where roses could grow out of the shit. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

The faceless

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It’s a hot day. Not the kind of hot you know. The kind of hot only Satan could have dreamed up. The air is dry. No breeze. Everything outside is baking. Eight in the morning and the temperature is just creeping over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We’ll hit 130 in the shade later. If only heat was my biggest problem.

Today, I’m going outside the wire. To the place where all the abuse happened. They call it Abu Ghraib. A prison. A place of hopelessness. The generals want me there to show that we don’t beat and torture people there anymore. That progress is happening. A prisoner release with media coverage. That’s my job today. I’ll take pictures and sing them a happy song made of words. About how great and beneficent we are. I’ll be fascinated by the truth beneath the pastiche and hate my role as the troubador of bullshit.

We will be driving through the most violent place on earth. An occupied city called Baghdad. One of the oldest settled places on the planet, where millions are currently involved in what the leadership of the occupation calls a “low intensity civil war.” I wonder how the thousands dying in that war each month would feel about the description of their murders.

I am a coward scheduled to ride inside an armored bus they call “the Rhino.” Tons of steel and air conditioning with convenient gun ports for shooting comfortably at any attackers. The ride will be more than an hour, on roads that are swept daily for evidence of bombs. Yet I am afraid. I know from personal experience that no one is immune to the numerous types of bombs that the occupiers are constantly being attacked with. I am an occupier to most of Baghdad. The ones who don’t actively hate me are mostly indifferent to whether I live or die. They have their own survival to worry about, and none of them live inside a protected, fortified perimeter like I do.

No, the average Iraqi lives in a city full of gangs, bandits and murder squads. They are subjected to a dusk to dawn curfew where uniformed gangs roam and terrorize. Some of the gangs are trying to make things better and others are just there for revenge. Sunnis were in charge for 30 plus years. The ethnic minority, they had all the privileges. Now the Shia are in charge, and they want revenge for being oppressed. If the Americans don’t break down the door and take away all the fighting age males in your house it might be one of the other gangs. If you’re Sunni, the Shia might come and take your brother or father away. They’ll tie his hands behind his back and put a power drill up to his skull and start drilling holes in his head. Take whatever information they can and then put a bullet or six in him. Or if you’re Shia, the Sunni might blow up your car while you are on your way to work. It’s a back and forth. Both sides hate each other passionately. Both sides pay lip service to the occupiers and make bombs to attack the foreigners with.

The convoy leaves on schedule. Schedules are important to us. We are sandwiched into our armored box on wheels. In the front and in the back are Humvees with machine guns mounted in the turrets. I would hate to be one of those guys. Bullet magnets.

We drive through the maze that exits our “Green Zone” and enter the world most who were born here have to live in. We call it the Red Zone. They call it hell. Eyes take note of us. Thousands of eyes. Dark eyes. I can feel them boring into the armor and penetrating the thick glass that is designed to stop projectiles. The hate is palpable. It settles onto me like a heavy weight. My chest sinks. My heart beats faster. I wonder if today will be the day. Every day feels like it might the last day here.

These people are fatalistic about death. I am not. I do not want to die. I do not want to be torn apart by a blast. Two days ago I was knocked down by one while in the shower. The concussive force of a car bomb a mile away rattled the trailer I live in so much that it was lifted up and then slammed back down. When I got back up from that, I found myself trembling. The aftermath made it worse. A thick column of black smoke outside attended by the attack helicopters that always swarm like angry bees to watch over the rescue responders on the ground. They told me after that explosion was a targeted attack on policemen waiting to collect their monthly pay. Many of them were ripped to shreds. And I am afraid it is my turn now.

The others on this bus annoy me. Some pray. I do not believe praying will make any difference. Sometimes I do it anyhow but only because it is an old ritual. Some talk to avoid introspection. I avoid them. I do not want to make small talk to pass the time while waiting to die. I sit in the back, with the interpreters. If anyone on this bus is hated more than the occupiers, it is the people who speak for them.

One of the men talks to me. “Where are you from,” he asks? I tell him I am from everywhere. It’s true. I have lived all over the world. I claim no place as my own. He tells me about his family. How his brother, father, uncles and cousins have been killed since the occupation begins. He wants to leave Iraq. That is his only goal. To get a visa to go to Europe or the United States. He wants to get away from his city. He wants to leave his country. I understand. Not everyone here is a fatalist. He doesn’t want to die for nothing. Like all the males in his family have.

I give him my e-mail address and tell him I’ll try to help.
We arrive at the prison. Behind rusty barbed wire and chain link fences, hundreds of men are milling. They are quiet, calm and carefully watched. The air crackles with their energy. It stinks of their sweat. I see a man in a wheelchair. He has no legs. I wonder what he possibly could have done to be locked up in this sweltering hell. Hundreds of eyes watch me. Some are guarded, some are cold, but all are interested. They see my camera. Many turn their faces away, to avoid being captured in the lens.

Guards around the perimeter hassle me. “No cameras,” says one. He has a Mossberg shotgun. I show him my badge authorizing the camera. He grimaces but shuts up and walks off. I walk the fence line trying to shoot through the fences, trying to focus on the eyes of the prisoners. I am frustrated. I climb into a guard tower after making small talk with one of them. He becomes accommodating when I take his picture. There are always some like him. They want to be recognized. They are proud of the freedom they bring to foreign lands. Of the bad guys they stop.

A politician begins speaking. Then some generals. The foreign general goes first. Then the Iraqi general. I don’t know what they are saying but I know it is mostly bullshit. I take a few pictures. That is required. The commanding officer will want at least one photo of these people to make himself look good to them. I can hear him ingratiating himself now, in his deep drawl. He believes Jesus wants him here to help these ignorant people who are too stupid to manage their own country.

The gates of the prison open. The guards tense, ready for any trouble. Men begin to emerge from the pen. They stink. The temperature has risen to near 120 degrees now. I am sweating freely and drinking water non-stop. Running around with my camera. One man is clutching a Quran, his fingers spasmodic, his lips pursed in prayer. The legless man is pushed awkwardly through the double gates by a fellow prisoner. I wonder if they are friends, or if some guard just said, “Hey you, push the legless guy. Now!” I wonder if he had to wave a shotgun around to get taken seriously. I wonder what these guys did to get locked up in a sandy cage where the heat cooks them all day every day.
And I remember the pictures. Of the ones my fellow soldiers beat and tortured and made into human pyramids covered in their own excrement. I am sad, but I keep snapping the photos and taking my notes so I can write a story about how great we are now at freeing prisoners who have promised not to rabble rouse anymore.

I see haunted eyes among the faces. Other men have hopeful eyes. A few look desperate to get away from this place. Some are fighting their own urges to run to the waiting buses. I am getting dizzy from the heat. Many of them are wearing towels on their heads but I have to wear a Kevlar helmet. It’s heavy and doesn’t allow any airflow. Eventually, I am finished photographing and taking notes. Four hundred men are distributed onto buses that will take them to different parts of the city where they will meet family members and be reunited. I wonder how many of these men have no family members left.
Then my retinue is back inside our armored, air conditioned bus. The recently freed prisoners get to ride in non air-conditioned, unarmored charter buses that look like should have been put in a junkyard 20 years ago. The temperature is nearing 130 degrees. I am spent. I sit in the back of the bus again, and prepare to cross the world’s most violent city back to my bubble of unreality where we can swim in a dictator’s pool and sing karaoke at night while the life flight choppers bring the injured and dying in over our heads from all around.

I am somber. I hear a bomb go off somewhere far away. Gunfire punctuates the moments all around us. These sounds have been my normal for months. I look at Ali, the interpreter. His eyes are sad, haunted. He goes to sleep. I wonder what he will dream about. Maybe his dead uncle, whom he said was very funny. His favorite person in the whole world. Murdered with a gunshot to the back of the head and dropped off in the street in front of his house, a piece of rotting meat.

I drink water.

The bomb goes off unexpectedly, ripping the world to shreds. Dozens die in the 130 degree heat. But today is not my day. And the target is not my convoy. Instead, one of the buses full of prisoners is attacked by a suicide car bomber as it pulls into the depot where waiting family members stand. Men, women and children are blown into pieces. I see the pictures later and wonder if the legless man was on that bus or another one. I’ll never know. I see him in my dreams sometimes. His thick glasses falling down the brim of his brown nose and the scars on the nubs where his legs used to be. I sobbed for him once. And for myself.

Now, years later, all those prisoners are blurring in my mind. They are becoming faceless ghosts who haunt me everywhere I go. I wish I could tell you each of their stories, but I can only tell you mine. Sometimes I wonder if Ali the interpreter made it out alive. He never e-mailed me.

Undertow

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I remember everything about that day. The brisk wind off the ocean, the scudding clouds and that pinkish sky. Little pebbles in my shoes. They distracted me. While I have made many mistakes in my life, that day represents the worst of them. I made the easy choice, and it was the wrong one. Maybe if I’d done it different, I wouldn’t be sitting in this room again.

Susan was still asleep when I woke up. She always slept late after our nights together. I guess she felt no guilt back then. I never saw an ounce of it in her green eyes. They were shut tightly when I left around sunrise to get coffee. She was snoring softly. I didn’t want to wake her. I looked at her body. So ripe. The black lingerie she wore for me, those little bits with the see through top and bottom. I loved that set on her, so I stared at it awhile. Watched her breathe. Watched her eyes moving underneath the lids. Smelled her cigarette smoke, clinging to everything in the room.

Then I went to the lobby, and I walked downward, following the path along the cliffs that hold the ocean back. When I looked back at the hotel, with its plethora of glass eyes, I wondered which of them might be awake. Watching me. Probably very few. Like Susan, the hotel slumbered.

The weather was strange that morning. It felt like it might storm or it might turn hot. I couldn’t tell at the time. The air smelled of salt, but there was something else. A stillness in the air. It felt like solitude. The only thing moving, other than me, was the ocean. I didn’t see any other people, and I didn’t see any birds. It was strange. There were usually birds.

I kicked pebbles. Stared in amazement at the tenacious shrubs that clung to the cliff’s edges. Life has a way, at least for a while. Then it must give up its turn. The green of the shrubs contrasted nicely with the grey of the soft rock from which they grew.

We were both unhappy. Susan and I. Both in marriages that made us feel unappreciated. Somehow we found each other. It had been going on for a few months, and we were still in that fantasy where somehow we were going to love each other forever, perfectly. Human hope. It’s amazing.

She had kids, and both of us had a lot of miles on our marriages. Finding happiness isn’t easy in this psychotic world. Safety is an illusion, you can see that from watching the news. Security? Ha! Ask anyone who has been downsized what you get for your blood, sweat and tears. Try to get a politician to explain how all the money is being used. Good luck with that.

We try for it all the same. And they steal from us, those rich, conniving, soulless bastards and whores. Paying us for fealty with our own money. Training us to vote for their false security and their wars. Lining their pockets with the extract of blood and tears and ruined lives. Those fucks.

How can you stay with someone who doesn’t pay attention to your dreams? Susan and I listened to each other in that regard, while we fucked and held each other and drifted off to sleep together. I loved her big green eyes. I loved her heaving breasts and nipples that turned from pink to red when I was inside her. I loved her smell, and the taste of cigarettes in her mouth when I kissed her. I love her compliance to every demand I made in the bedroom. She was good for me, for a time.

I was thinking about Susan and sipping my coffee when I noticed the girl, down at the bottom, right up near where those waves turn big and break against the rocks. The wind tugged on me just then, and teased me with its gusting. Playing, like a true master does when he knows he can have you at anytime. I knew the wind could force me into the water if it wanted that. I looked down, in the direction of that unfulfilled promise of escape. That’s when I noticed her.  She was almost directly below me. She saw me too. I don’t know how she could. I wear neutral outfits that blend with most environments. But she did.

She was waving at me. I couldn’t see what color her eyes were, but I could tell her mouth was open. She was screaming. Her blonde hair splayed out in the water, a nimbus around her upturned face. Every wave washed over her, hiding her face and then revealing it again. I still don’t know how she got there, 40 or so feet under me. She must have been caught in an undertow. Why she was out there that early in the morning never made sense. I guess some people get up and go swimming at first light. Who the hell knows. Not me.

I’m a strong swimmer. I thought about it for a few seconds. My life was complicated enough. I decided to let her go. I thought it would be better for her. Less pain. I’ve heard drowning is an easy way to die. Peaceful once you stop fighting it.

She went under five, maybe six more times from when I first noticed her. I hadn’t totally made up my mind. If anyone else had been around, I would have gone after her. I was pretty sure I could make the jump without passing out. They taught us how to jump off the sides of ships in the Corps. I had done it dozens of times without incident. The timing was bad, that’s all. Without an audience, I can’t perform the hero role. What’s the point? I’ve seen how it usually ends for heroes.

I thought letting her go would be better for me. The movie of me dragging her back to the beach played in my head. I didn’t want to explain who I was to anyone, or why I was checked in under a fake name, with a woman who wasn’t my wife. The girl’s head went under again, and this time, it didn’t come back up. It wasn’t like in the movies. I never saw the dramatic hand come up one last time and then slide slowly under. A wave covered her face. She was gone. I never got to see her running down the beach, trapped in the false hope of youth, her breasts bouncing carelessly in an overworked bikini, her ass calling out its siren song to every man she passed.

I was spellbound. Lost in thought. I watched the ocean for a few moments. Those waves kept going, crashing mindlessly, endlessly against the cliff walls and piles of jagged rocks down there. The noise soothed me. I finished my coffee and wondered what the girl had believed in.

It rained gently for about five minutes. The drops were far enough apart. I barely got damp.

Most people believe in something. I never have. I think it just goes black and then you rot. I’ve seen death too many times to believe there in something on the other side.

Eventually, I bent down and checked the pistol I always carry on my ankle. It rested snug in its pouch, like always. Then I took off each shoe and shook out the pebbles. I retied the laces carefully.

I walked back up the path to Susan and pretended to be excited about the rest of our weekend. We made love again. Ate the room service meals. Planned our lives out, together while eating eggs. Showered. Got dressed. She in a bikini and me in my neutrally colored cargo pants and t-shirt.

I read to her from the collected stories of John Cheever, and she told me that I could be a better writer than him, that my love letters to her were the best she’d ever read. And I thought about that girl’s face going under. That open mouth in the middle of all that blonde hair. I listened to Susan telling me she loved me, and I stared at the peeling plaid patterned wallpaper on the walls.

We undressed again. Spontaneously told each other dreams, big and little, while I played with her breasts. More lovemaking, slower than before. The bed creaked and banged against the wall. Susan had more energy than I did. She did most of the work. That was fine.

The walls of the room hid us from the world, and the world from us, but only for a brief sojourn. That’s really all you ever get when it comes to good things. Out there are mostly dark spaces and black hearts and small minds. In my youth I was oblivious to them, cocooned. In my early adulthood, I thought I could escape them, and for a while, I did. Then I experienced war, and I knew the reality. The dark spaces and black hearts and small minds eat everything eventually. They will eat me too.

We ate breakfast late, and went down to the beach, following the winding paths along the cliffs. Susan swam in the ocean and I tried to write. I couldn’t. I couldn’t find the words. The birds had come back from wherever they had been hiding that morning when I let her go. The girl.

Today is the first time I have been able to write. I think about death too much. My wars changed me. It’s hard to take much seriously, except fucking and eating. Humans are too fragile and vicious and petty to make long-term plans. Death comes randomly, no matter what you want.

It turned very hot later that day. It stormed too, but only inside my head. That’s where most storms are born. In my memories. After that hot day, the dead girl showed up in my dreams. She was usually bloated. Only rarely did she appear while still fighting for her life. We all fight, but eventually, we lose. No exceptions.

Susan and I continued our affair for another year or two. She ended up getting religion, and telling me I needed to get help. She said she was going to ask for forgiveness, and that I should too. I can’t be forgiven, because there is no god. I hope Susan is happy with the one she made up.

The girl’s body washed up a week later, miles away from the cliffs where I let her drown. Some kids found her. Someone made a Youtube video, probably one of the kids. She was bloated up to several times her living size. Except what the fish had taken as tribute for the intrusion into their habitat. We eat fish. Fish eat humans.

Pieces of her were gone. Toes and fingers and eyeballs. What was left of her skin had gone gray, and her hair was coming out in patches. That water isn’t cold enough – she would have lost the hair and skin in another day or two.

When I finish this letter, I will walk out to those cliffs where I let her go, stare at the waves one last time, and then join my abandoned, hopeless girl in eternal nothing. I want whoever finds this testament to know that I am sorry. Also, you can keep my pistol. You might need a pistol one day.

I should have been a better warrior. I should have been a better husband. And I should have jumped off the cliff that day instead of finishing my coffee and going on with this charade. I’ve been a tourist in this life. I wish it had been different. The time for sightseeing has to end. I wish all of you well. Life is short, and there is nothing after. War is coming. I hope you’re ready when it gets here. I don’t have another one in me. I can’t fight anymore.