for no reason.CHAPTER 1
The other day I was dealing with a newbie who was telling me his tale of woe about how he got into hunting. Mother had been bitten by a zombie and rose. He had to kill her with a shotgun. My response was:
“Nothing says ‘I love you’ like double-aught to the face.”
He looked really shocked and hurt. One of the reasons to write these memoirs is to put that, yeah, seriously cold reply in perspective. ’Cause it’s true and I meant it from the heart.
I’ve been writing these memoirs as diaries and notes for a while so they’re going to be choppy. And I’m not sure how much to write about myself. Earl says we learn about hunting from the Hunters that came before us. I’ve read some of those old diaries and you really don’t understand the person very well. Just what happened with very little perspective.
So I’ll give you as much as I’ve learned about hunting and hopefully whoever reads this, if anyone bothers, it’ll help you out sometime. And since family shit comes into it from time to time you’re going to have to learn about my fucked up family. So here goes.
My mom and dad are academics. I’ve met some good academics over the years. And I think that academics are important. Research really does make the world a better place. But I fucking hate my family. I really, really do. The Good Book says that you should honor your father and mother. It didn’t anticipate my mother and father.
Dad’s a professor of philosophy. He finally settled down to a steady gig at the University of Kansas since his alma mater, Harvard, knew better than to hire his philandering ass. I’ve come to the conclusion that modern philosophy is entirely devoted to coming up with new excuses for cheating on your wife. I really shouldn’t bitch about my dad. God knows the apple didn’t fall far from the tree there. But at least I don’t try to cloak my aggressive womanizing in faux philosophy. I figure my life’s bound to be short. I don’t want to waste any time and I’m philosophically against leaving behind a young widow and kids who can’t even know I was a hero. Hit and run is the only reasonable choice for a Monster Hunter, in my opinion.
But the excuses finally ran out around the time I was eight. When I was ten, and whining about them getting back together, Mom gave me a way-too-age-inappropriate explanation of what it was like to walk in on your husband in bed with not one but three coeds and the suggestion that she join in.
The divorce was around the time I was holding up a homemade sign, made by me under my mother’s tutelage, reading “Give Peace a Chance!” As everyone in the Vietnam antiwar rally was chanting, “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” I was chanting “What do we want? Ice cream! When do we want it…?” I hated those rallies. Fucking unwashed hippies talking about the importance of Lenin and Marx while all I wanted was for my mom to bother fixing me a bologna sandwich. But no! What God-damned “good for you” shit was it this week?
My mother was a professor of anthropology and mythological studies. It turns out she could have been a primo source of information on monsters. I probably could have asked questions along the lines of “Okay, but how do you kill a lamia?” But that’s getting ahead of myself.
Then there’s my fucking brother, Thornton. Thornton, who had no problems with his stupid name, was the apple of my peace-loving mommy’s eye. That’s because the vicious prick kept his violent tendencies behind her back. My mom did not have eyes in the back of her head but I frequently had two black and blue ones. Thornton was as vicious a bully as you’d ever care to find. He was always big for his age, never tired of finding victims—me for choice—and, like Dad, always had an excuse. Mom knew damned well how disgusting the bastard was but she had that incredible ability found in so many minds like hers to simply ignore all the evidence in favor of her personal view of the world. And in her personal view of the world, Thornton Ainsley Gardenier could do no wrong. Thornton got straight As. Thornton’s goal was to be an academic just like Mom and Dad. Thornton was four years older than I was and firmly believed I needed a good kidney punch every day of my existence.
You’d think I’d enjoy killing him but I really didn’t.
Oliver Chadwick Gardenier, on the other hand, could do no right. Every kid at some point wants to please his mother but I gave up real young. Maybe it was trying and failing to get either parent to notice that I was being used as a punching bag by the apple of their eye on a daily basis. Maybe it was when I came home from kindergarten with a note that said I was “too advanced.” I was already reading at college level and doing algebra, and was making the other kids look bad. And my parents sat me down and told me I needed to be “socially appropriate.” God, Mom hated herself for that lecture in later years. I threw it in her face with every subsequent report card showing straight Cs.
Yes, I got straight Cs, with very few exceptions, all the way through school. Got any idea how hard that is? When you’d taught yourself Aramaic at the age of nine? Getting straight As is easy. All you have to do is a little studying and get all the answers right. Graduating every single paper and test, precisely, so as to get exactly a C? Especially papers. You gotta be able to read your teacher’s mind to get a C on every single paper.
But I was duly centered in my social peer group. Just like mommy said I should be. Fuck you, Mom, you monster-loving bitch.
She forced me to take violin lessons. It turned out that it came naturally to me. I was a virtuoso. This would come in handy later on in life. When Mom was around, I played badly on purpose.
There are lots of books and memoirs about the poor misunderstood smart kid surrounded by dumb people. I suppose I was one of those (as an IQ test later proved) but it was really more the “poor misunderstood kid who just wants to be normal.” I wanted to play football. “Too violent.” I got scolded and a three-day grounding for playing cops and robbers. “How dare I support the fascist prison state?” Then there was the time I brought home papers for JROTC and managed by the tiniest of straws to fail to give my mother a stroke. It was close. God, it was sooo close. On the other hand, that attempt to kill my mother led to the best times of my life and a new family who finally understood me.
The summer when I was twelve I rode my bike five miles to a barber’s on the other side of town ’cause I’d asked one kid, who was bitching about it, where he got his hair cut. The barber had been a soldier once, turned out he was airborne back in World War II, and had cut military hair for years at Fort Knox. I walked in with shiny blond hair down to my ass, still with some of my baby curls, and climbed into a chair.
“Sir, I hate to use foul language. My mother is a fucking hippy bitch. And I am sick and tired of this God-damned hippy hair. Would you please cut it all off? I promise not to tell.”
“Son,” he said, breaking out his clippers, “parents, as with children, are a cross we all must bear. But as long as she does not discover the source of your haircut, we have a deal. And it’s free.”
When my mother came home from another of her damned committee meetings, which meant I had to scrounge as per usual, I was waiting by the door sporting a high and tight with my formerly ass-length hair in one hand.
“Here!” I said, gleefully. “You can make a wig out of it!”
Since New Orleans I’ve shaved my head bald. Not that it matters to my mother anymore. We haven’t spoken since Thornton’s funeral nor do I ever intend to see her again.
About that time, my mom arranged for a series of psychological and learning tests through one of her “close personal friends” at the University of Kentucky. (Did I mention Mom eventually went gay?) I had become “obsessively violent” (I really wanted to play football), “sexually dangerous” (I was dating a seventh-grade cheerleader) and had “clear learning disabilities” (perfect straight-C average).
Between bouts of testing I was subjected to “therapy” which consisted primarily of ongoing militant feminists’ rants about the evil male patriarchy. The tests came back that I was:
Borderline paranoid schizophrenic, check; oppositionally defiant, at least with idiots and bitches like my parents and their friends (well, except for some of my dad’s “close personal friends” who even at the age of twelve I tried like hell to pick up); obsessive heterosexual (that means so straight you can use me to adjust lasers); and, oh yeah, that IQ test?
My bastard brother had crowed like mad when he’d tested as a 136 IQ and immediately joined MENSA. My parents were both high IQ academics, proud MENSA members with letters after their name and papers to their credit. I was the official family moron.
It was like that line in The Princess Bride.
“Have you ever heard of Aristotle? Socrates? Morons!”
Yeah. It was like that. I’d decided to just see if I was as smart as I thought I was and blasted through the test full bore.
Einstein would have gone “Whoa!”
“Figures,” I said when shown the results.
“How can you have this IQ and get straight Cs?” my mom shouted at me.
“Got any idea how hard it is to get straight Cs?” I asked. “I mean, a perfect C average? You said I needed to be ‘socially appropriate’ in my academics all the way back in kindergarten and what’s more ‘appropriate’ than absolutely in the middle of the pack?”
I’d carefully kept from her that I was already reading some of her research material, even the stuff in ancient languages. I’d figured out Latin at six, Greek at seven and Aramaic by the time I was nine. By twelve I was working on Hindi and Hittite, having already mastered Coptic and hieroglyphs.
On the JROTC thing: When I started high school, I tried every gambit to get into “normal” stuff. My mother was, in general, against all competitive sports—at least if it was a “go/no-go” situation. Football? Too violent. Baseball? Supports the concept of linear thinking. (Seriously.) She was fine with soccer which was also “go/no-go.” See the above about being able to justify anything that fit her world view. Soccer was European and thus good. So, I tried out for soccer. I’m naturally athletic, fast as hell and had been kicking a soccer ball around since I was a kid, since soccer was “appropriate.” The coach moved me straight to varsity forward. Mom even came out for the first game. I scored both goals and she happily congratulated me for I think the first time in my life.
I quit immediately. Damned if I was going to do anything my mother supported. There had to be something wrong with it. Which there is. Soccer is for pussies.
But giving her the JROTC papers was mostly an exercise in seeing if I could really get her to stroke out. She, recognizing the gambit for what it was, tore the papers up in front of me, threw them in my face and then slapped me, not for the first time. She couldn’t hit nearly as hard as Thornton, who, thank God, was safely in Stanford by that time, so I just took it, per normal, and looked at her.
“That all you got?” I asked. “You hit like a girl. And what about ‘violence never settles anything’?”
Oh, I really loved when I started getting smart and knowledgeable enough to have that argument with my “peace-loving” mommy.
“What about Hitler? Was using violence against Hitler okay? What about the Viet Cong fighting the evil right-wing tyranny of the South Vietnamese government? They used all sorts of violence. Was that okay?” Later, as my reading expanded, it was “Violence seemed to settle the question of Rome versus Carthage well enough. Cartago delenda est, right?” Which would start a lecture on “How can you discuss Rome and Carthage in depth and get a C in Ancient History?”
Pro-tip: If you’ve got that teacher who hates smart kids, use all the correct names of pharaohs on the paper. ’Cause those kinds of teachers never know how stuff should be spelled. Khufu instead of Cheops. Things like that. Which are all “wrong” from their perspective. I wrote a paper in seventh grade Social Studies that I got an F on. I later turned in the same paper, word for word, with more annotations and citations, in a senior level college Egyptian History course. Got an A.
I never ever used any form of violence against my mother. I just cannot raise my hand to a lady. Not that my mother was ever much of a lady. But the reverse was not the case. Apparently violence is all good when it’s getting your mad out at your “inappropriate” son. Or if you’re a good commie killing evil fascists. Or if you’re the Weather Underground. Et cetera.
Anything to fit the world view.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve found God since those days and I still have an issue with Christians and Catholics (including some priests of my experience) who think that Jesus is going to keep fags, prostitutes and people who sleep around out of Heaven. God would have before Jesus. Sure. Definitely. And the Old Testament isn’t entirely to fill page count. But basing all your so-called Christianity on Prophets, Isaiah and St. Paul is cherry picking like mad. It’s adjusting reality to fit your world view.
Jesus is when God started to realize he’d created something weirder than even He realized and stopped having such a mad-on at us.
I think in the old days He gave a lot of orders He didn’t realize weren’t ever going to be perfectly obeyed by ninety percent of humanity. Since He made us in His image, I suspect after Jesus died for our sins, the Savior reported in how seriously messed up we all were and why. I mean, puberty! Puberty for God’s sake! You gave us puberty! And you think masturbation is our fault? We don’t even know what it is the first few times! “Don’t commit the sin of Onan.” “What is the sin of Onan?” “To spill your seed upon the ground.” “What if I’m laying down grass seed?” “Not that kind of seed.” “What kind of seed then?” “Never mind.”
After Jesus died for our sins and carried up the full download of just how messed up it was to be stuck in a human body, God must have gone “Well, Me, I guess We’ve gotta forgive the poor saps.” These days I think you’ve gotta seriously mess up to get Hell. I’ve even got some supporting evidence.
My brother is probably in Hell and I’m sort of comfortable with that even if I’m still wrestling with how he got there. Maybe I should change my name to Cain.
Back to JROTC. I’d gotten the papers from the assistant JROTC instructor, Mr. Herman J. Brentwood. He also taught shop and, of all things, chemistry. I had his shop class (another thing to poke a sharp stick in my mother’s eye, just like as a kid I used to go around jumping up and down on every crack I could find in the sidewalk) and had picked them up there.
The next day he asked me about them.
“Did you get the papers signed?” he asked as I was trying not to cut my fingers off with a jigsaw.
“No, sir,” I said. I was polite just to piss off my mom. She hated it when I said “sir” and “ma’am” since they were “antiquated social constructs of the dominant patriarchy.” Besides, Mr. Brentwood was one of those people you just automatically tended to say “sir” to and if you didn’t you regretted it. “My mother does not approve of the military. I knew that. Truthfully, sir, I got them as much to infuriate her as to join.”
“The Good Book says that you should honor your father and mother, son,” Mr. Brentwood said. There might have been a Supreme Court ruling that prayer in school was banned. But that sort of statement wasn’t out of place in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1977.
“Sir, with respect, you don’t know my father and mother,” I said, carefully. “I cut my hair when I was twelve to get back at her. It was down to my butt.” I carefully did not say ass. “She was upset about that and thought it was great when my older brother started smoking dope. With her and her friends. She’s a member of the American Communist Party, an antiwar activist at least if it’s fighting commies, commies murdering people to support the downtrodden is all good. And my dad, who is a professor in Kansas, has never found a coed he wasn’t willing to…engage in carnal knowledge with, sir. He’s the kind of professor a cute girl can always get a good grade from for…sexual stuff, sir. Sir, I’m just counting the days until I can get out of hell.”
“Any idea what you’re going to do with your life, son?” Mr. Brentwood asked.
“So far, all I’ve got is what I’m not going to do with my life, sir. Which is anything that my parents approve of.”
Which was how I found new parents.
My mom and I were barely on speaking terms at that point and I had already found other places to be most of the time. I had friends, and their parents were often cool with couch-crashing. But the Brentwoods’ really became my new home and I finally found a mother and father I could relate to.
Mr. Brentwood looked like a straight-up stereotype. He’d joined the Marines in 1942, right after Pearl Harbor, gotten put in the infantry and proceeded to slog his way across the Pacific. When the War was over he went home, married his high school sweetheart, went to school on the GI bill and after spending some time working in the chemical industry he got a job as a teacher at Central High School and had been a fixture there ever since.
He still wore a high and tight and could still fit in his WWII uniforms.
Mrs. Martha Anne Brentwood had raised four children and had “empty nest syndrome” something fierce. From what I got from their kids, who still dropped by frequently, she’d always been the Kool-Aid mom, meaning theirs was the house all the neighborhood kids frequented. She cooked a full dinner every night. My mother considered cooking to be a relic of the evil patriarchy and also was a just horrible cook. My mother not cooking was probably the only thing she ever did to make the world a better place.
Not so Mrs. Brentwood. It was all “Southern Style,” heavy on fried, but she used more original herbs and spices than the Colonel could count. After long years of inedible health food and badly cooked Indian food or some similar…fecal matter, I just seriously pigged out. (Not that good Indian food is bad food. I’ve gotten to be pretty serious about good ethnic food. My mother burned water.)
I miss Mrs. Brentwood’s cooking. They’re still around but I’m just so fricking busy these days.
Violating virtually every rule in the book, Mr. Brentwood introduced me to shooting and gunsmithing without my mom’s consent or, fortunately, knowledge. He had a shop in his basement that we spent many an hour in working on molds, reloading and so on and so forth. The man is a virtual encyclopedia of guns and remains someone I call when I’m stuck on something. He introduced me to both the M1 Garand, his weapon of choice, and the Thompson, an unusable beast of a weapon in my opinion.
But he wasn’t just the stereotype former Marine. One incident during the battle of Tarawa had changed his view of the world. You see, he was smart and had a flexible mind. When something violated his world view, he didn’t simply dismiss it.
Given what this memoir is supposed to be about you may be thinking that’s monsters. As far as I know, and I’ve delicately sounded him out, Mr. Brentwood has never encountered any of the stuff I now kill for a living. What he did encounter on Tarawa was a banzai attack. Not his first, but the first where he came face to face, bayonet to sword, with a Jap officer. And lost.
Fortunately, his platoon leader shot the officer in the chest with his .45 before the backstroke would have ended my future foster father’s life. But it got Mr. Brentwood thinking. The platoon leader, correctly, collected the sword as a souvenir and sent it home. (His kill, his souvenir.) Later, Sergeant Brentwood managed to get his hand on one as well. And still later found someone who knew something about them. And slowly became something of an unrecognized expert on Japanese katanas.
“Anything lethal is worth paying attention to” was his reasoning.
He studied them, bought them, sold them, traded them and even had made a couple using more or less traditional techniques. In the 1950s, studying kendo was considered beyond odd, right up there with crazy. He didn’t care. “Anything lethal is worth paying attention to.” He learned Japanese specifically to understand bushido better. He didn’t buy into all of it, and seriously hated the Japanese themselves, but he was something of an American “sword saint.” He can, to this day, absolutely brutalize me at kendo and I’ve used kendo in real action against major monsters. I cut the head off a two-hundred-year-old Greater vampire in action. Not “Stake, chop” but “Slash, slash, slash, off with the head.” (And one leg and an arm.) And that old man can still kick my ass.
Pro-tip: Inside a certain distance, generally about twenty feet, a blade of some sort is generally better than a gun. There are arguments for a stubby at that range. But a blade is generally better. And there’s no better blade than a katana in my opinion. But they don’t call me Iron Hand for no reason.
Since I finally had a father figure who wasn’t, in my opinion, bug-shit crazy, I naturally had to follow in his footsteps. When he realized that I’d learned kanji in about two months’ not particularly hard study, it sort of pissed him off.
“Chad,” as he called me. “Next year, you are taking my chemistry course. And if you get anything other than an A, you’re never coming over for dinner again.”
So next year I took high school chemistry and physics in the same semester. Perfect A in chemistry.
You guessed it. Perfect F in physics.
Gotta maintain that C average.
I mean, I learned the physics. I even liked it. I’ve applied it repeatedly over the years. Especially F = ma.
But gotta maintain that C average.
I dated a lot. I hardly ever studied. (Including chemistry.) I finally got permission to do track and field. That took up some time. I spent most of my evenings (and eventually nights) at the Brentwoods’. It wasn’t like my mom cared. She’d repeatedly noted that she’d considered aborting me since I wasn’t “planned” and in retrospect had made the wrong decision. Getting me out of her life was as much her goal as mine. Feel the love.
I mowed lawns starting from about thirteen. I got slightly better jobs working mostly in construction when I turned sixteen. Generally day labor but it paid better than mowing lawns. I kept focusing on shop versus college prep. Through Mr. Brentwood, I got a part-time job as a mechanic when I turned seventeen and that was great. Good money and it gave me a chance to pick up a car cheap and get it fixed up the way I liked it. It was a 1976 Cutlass Supreme that was definitely a Monday car.
In those days, really bad vehicles were by hoary adage built on Mondays and Fridays. Monday ’cause all the workers were hung over and Friday ’cause all the senior people had called in sick or something and the assembly line was all fucked up.
Bottom line, everything was wrong with this car, which was why I got it cheap. Classic example of the height of American automotive manufacturing in the 1970s. The only thing that wasn’t badly put together was the Delta 88 engine which absolutely screamed. The tranny leaked like a sieve. The rear differential sounded like a rock crusher. The shocks were shot and it was barely three years old. The headliner was already sagging. The underbody was rusting and it had supposedly been rust-proofed at the factory. The ugly green paint job was flaking off.
I put sooo much work into Honeybear it was just silly. I don’t think, with the exception of the engine, at this point there is one original part. And I’ve rebuilt the engine twice. On the other hand, I’m still driving her.
Kendo, shooting, track and field, dating, fixing up Honeybear to better-than-new condition. There were quite a few girls in that school who were, in the parlance of the time, “easy.” It was just past the Sexual Revolution into the Sexual Evolution and pre-AIDs. Good times. And, yep, had at least a short fling with most of them. That was one area where the apple did not fall far from the tree.
Sing it with me: “Those were the best days of our lives…” I’m one of those people who fucking loved high school. Probably the only hard part was that most of my friends, and dates, really were dumb as a stump. I occasionally had to hang out with the nerds just to have something resembling intelligent conversation. Which in those days meant playing the occasional D&D game.
That came in surprisingly useful later in life. I’m pretty sure that Gary Gygax knew people, if you know what I mean.
I was born December 6th, 1962. Since celebrating birthdays, or any other similar holiday, was an antiquated notion of the social construct, the first real birthday party I had was when the Brentwoods threw one for me and my pals when I turned fifteen. On December 7th, 1980, one day after my eighteenth birthday, and the anniversary of those crafty Japs bombing Pearl Harbor, I went down to a strip mall by the old post office and entered the office of the Marine recruiter.
“Good afternoon, Staff Sergeant,” I said in my most polite voice. I was wearing a good, clean, carefully creased, button-down white shirt, carefully creased black dress slacks and a high and tight. “I would like to join the Marine Corps.”
There were things I knew about joining the Corps that most recruits didn’t really think about. One of them was the ASVAB, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. It is, still, one of the best vocational tests on the face of the planet. If you don’t try to futz with it, it will point you in the correct direction in terms of your usefulness in the military as well as a job you’re going to more or less enjoy. (In general.)
But the thing is, if I pushed it all the way, I’d end up doing signal intercept or some such shit. I wasn’t interested in listening to scritches, beeps and whistles that might be a signal for the rest of my life. That’s probably where I would have maximally supported the Marine force, yeah, but I was joining the Marines to kill commies…I wanted to be infantry.
So I got a perfect C.
Man, I studied for that fucker. There were books and books you could find about the ASVAB. I analyzed it, spindled it, folded it and mutilated it. I knew exactly the scores and answers that would make me perfect machine-gun fodder and just above perfect cook.
When I walked back into the recruiting office to talk to the staff sergeant, the first words out of his mouth were:
“Son. Have you ever thought about the infantry…?”
I kept from jumping for joy and shouting “Yes! Fucking nailed it!”
I graduated June 6th, 1981, with a vo-tech diploma. My mother didn’t attend my graduation but the Brentwoods did. Mr. Brentwood drove me to the MEPS station on June 19th. I raised my right hand and swore to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. They didn’t mention supernatural, oddly enough. I did half wonder if it gave me license to kill my mom. And I was in the Marines.
From the first night I spent at the Brentwoods’, Mr. Brentwood had ensured that I understood the standards expected of me if I was going to stay at their house. I’d always been the neat freak in my parents’ house. Mr. and Mrs. Brentwood just dialed it in a bit. Then there was the shooting training and generally “Marineness” of the whole existence.
Bottom line, with a couple of exceptions, I more or less ghosted boot camp.
Don’t get me wrong. Marine boot camp was and is hard as shit. And the sand fleas at Parris Island have to be experienced to be understood. But…
The first day we were being introduced to the M-16 rifle I made one of my minor errors. The instructor was detailing how to fieldstrip the weapon. We were sitting cross-legged in a circle. I was paying strict attention to his guidance. Such strict attention that I didn’t even notice my hands were, instinctively, stripping the weapon down as he spoke. The instructor noticed and stormed over.
“On your feet, Recruit!”
“Sir, yes, sir!” I screamed, popping to attention.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Recruit?”
“Sir, paying strict attention to your guidance, sir!”
“Was my guidance to begin stripping your weapon, Recruit?”
“Sir, no, sir!”
“Why is your weapon stripped, Recruit?”
I looked down and sort of blanched.
“Uhhhh…No excuse, sir! I just…No excuse, sir!”
The instructor at that point apparently noticed that not only was the weapon stripped down to disassembly of the bolt, it was neatly laid out. And he’d probably half noticed that I had, in fact, been watching him carefully the whole time.
“You stripped it without looking, didn’t you?” he asked in a much more casual voice.
“Sir…” I said, not sure what to say.
“You go to ROT-see or something, Recruit?”
“Sir, no, sir!” I said. I knew I had to say something. “My foster father was a World War II Marine, sir. Sergeant Herman J. Brentwood, sir. I just…When I had the weapon and it was stripping weapons, sir…Sir, no excuse, sir.”
“Put it back together?” the drill instructor asked, again almost casually.
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Blindfolded?”
I took a chance. “Blindfolded in a hurricane while making love to a beautiful woman, sir!”
He slowly reached into his pocket and pulled out a stopwatch.
“Take a cross-legged position, Recruit,” the drill instructor said. “If you do it to time, with your eyes closed, I’ll let you off on this one.”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
I assembled it in half the required time and tried never to stand out again.
But…then there was a Marine Corps tradition.
When I joined up, I tried to get the Brentwoods as my next of kin. No such luck. I had family. I therefore had to list my damned mother as next of kin. Which meant in boot camp, I had to write my mother a letter once per week.
“Dear Mother:
“I am here at Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island and loving every minute of it. Today’s training was on the proper method of bayoneting babies…”
I don’t know why I even bothered. A few weeks later I received the letter back with “Return to Sender.”
This prompted an inquiry from the same drill instructor who had been the instructor for assembly and disassembly of the M-16. This inquiry being full-on head tilt on the nose with the brim.
“I thought your foster father was a Marine, Recruit!”
“Unofficial foster father, sir! My mother is a member of the Communist Party and used to drag me to her God-damned Vietnam War peace marches, sir! When she found out I was joining the Marines, she asked how I could become a babykiller, sir! I answered ‘babies don’t dodge, so it’s easy,’ sir!”
One of the more junior drill instructors was standing by and turned away with a coughing fit at that one.
“Do you have an unofficial foster mother, Recruit?” the drill instructor barked.
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“You are hereby instructed to write to your unofficial foster mother for the remainder of training!”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
I already had been writing the Brentwoods, anyway. About a week after that a large care package arrived. Homemade peanut brittle, Momma Brentwood style.
And, yes, there was enough for the whole platoon. And a smaller package specifically for the drill instructors. That one was separately sealed. I suspect it was her famous rum balls.
Other than that, I tried like hell not to stand out other than by doing everything as perfectly as possible. I had all the regular chickenshit that bothers people down pat via Mr. Brentwood’s teachings. Folding socks and underwear? Got it. Biggest problem was he’d taught me the Old Guard way based on footlockers and we’d upgraded to pussy wall lockers. I could pack my greens in a seabag and have them come out like they’d been sent to the dry cleaners. Shining boots? I’d take firewatch most nights and get them to a glossy sheen. Bounce a quarter off the rack? You could bounce it to the moon. Cleaning weapons? Favorite part of the day. Waking up in a split second when the drill instructors entered the bay? Mr. Brentwood had even drilled me on that, much to Mrs. Brentwood’s annoyance. (She got seriously tired of that garbage can being banged at 0430 every morning for the last six months of high school.)
Boot camp still sucked but that was its purpose.
And who showed up at that graduation? Mr. and Mrs. Brentwood, of course. He wearing his First Marine Division patch on his ball cap along with his campaign ribbons, four purple hearts and two Bronze Stars.
Turned out the Sergeant Major had been one of his privates in Korea.
The POST Sergeant Major.
Mr. Brentwood had never mentioned being at the Frozen Chosin. Or Inchon. Or being somebody that Chesty Puller knew by name. The Post Commander treated him like royalty.
I had a lot to live up to.
But, truthfully, there wasn’t much available when I reached my permanent party. ’Cause welcome to the Cold War and the end of the “Hollow Military” period. We still were getting shit for training budget and most of our time was spent painting rocks.
I was, also, assigned to the Second Marine Division. First Battalion, Eighth Marines. (One-Eight.) No string-pulling involved. Kentucky recruits went east and that was Second Marine Division, where I became just another grunt at Lejeune.
And just as I’d set out to be the poster child for C average, I set out to be the poster child Marine. In this I was going to get an A+. I could shoot, move and communicate. I was always gung ho as shit. To the point it sort of annoyed some of my fellow grunts but fuck ’em. I was planning on being a Gunny in record time.
Want rocks painted? Multiple colors or pure white? I never whined or complained about the stupidest or most inane shit. Never volunteer? I volunteered for anything. I ruck-marched on weekends. I trained off-duty. Including expanding my repertoire of martial arts beyond kendo while still keeping that up. Although I didn’t make much of a thing of it. That would have put me in the “weird” category and the last thing you want is to get that categorization.
We did a couple of floats the first year. Nothing much. Most floats were out to sea, turn around, board the amtracks and run ashore at Lejeune. Doing more cost lots of money. We did one long float over to the Med and some shore leave.
Liberty on a float is what most Marines join up to do. I wanted to go ashore at Rota as much as the next guy. I volunteered to be part of the unit that stayed aboard on the first rotation. Why? ’Cause that’s hardcore, dude. You’ve been stuck on this boat for weeks and you volunteer to take the first duty so your shipmates can go ashore and get drunk? Somebody’s got to stay on watch. You grit your teeth and say “Semper Fi, Staff Sergeant. I’ll take it.”
I think most of my squad sort of half hated me and half admired me. But we got along. ’Cause I was smart enough to never, ever, intellectualize and spoke pure grunt-speak at all times. And I was clear. Didn’t care how much anyone bitched. “My goal in life is to make Gunny in record time for peacetime.”
But that float was the beginning of something else. See, on a float, you get a lot of downtime. They train and they drill and you clean compartments but there’s still more “off” time than at the barracks. There’s only so much Marines can do on a boat. Which I knew, so I’d prepared. With correspondence courses.
See, promotion is in part based on academics, even for grunts. Want to be a staff sergeant? Better have some college or college-equivalent courses. The military provided, back then, correspondence courses through the University of Maryland for a pretty nominal fee. Admittedly, you don’t make much as a private but I could still afford a few correspondence courses to take on the float for the off time. And since the Marine Corps supported it, you could even get more off time. “Staff Sergeant, permission to study my correspondence courses versus whatever made-up shit they were doing to keep us from going bugshit?”
And since my mother was no longer seeing my grades, I could let out the stops. By the time we got to Spain, I’d finished three courses. All I had to do was take the tests. When I did I got, yup, straight As.
As are easy. Perfect Cs are hard.
While in Rota I went to the US Embassy and arranged to take their Spanish Language Examination. Four hours later I was officially declared “Fluent in written and spoken Spanish,” which counted towards promotion. I got drunk as a skunk that night. That was major promotion points.
Back stateside I figured “what the hell” and took the tests for various languages I’d picked up over the years. Some of the oral ones I failed the first time through. Written, I was found fluent in: Spanish (covered), Ancient and Modern Greek, Latin, German (three dialects including Old Schwabian), Arabic and Japanese. I couldn’t find, through military or local colleges, tests in Hindi, Hittite or Hieroglyphs. It was like they hated the letter H.
Based on my gunnery sergeant’s recommendation, I was made PFC ahead of curve. ’Cause I just oozed the epitome of Marine. I went to the Marine of the Month Board and smoked it, up to the MEU level where I had a case of the flu for the PT test at Post and got beat out by one point.
Then when all the numbers were crunched at wherever the Marine Corps crunches them, I went from PFC to lance then corporal so fast people were pretty sure I was homosexual and seriously blowing someone.
I was expert in every weapon in the inventory (promotion points), proven multilingual (promotion points), had sixty credit hours of college (promotion points), not a single NJP (non-judicial punishment) and basically walked the walk and talked the talk of the perfect Marine.
I was well on my way to making sergeant my first tour. When I went home on leave (to the Brentwoods, of course), Mrs. Brentwood was proud as hell. I sort of wanted to call my mom and tell her I’d gotten promoted from Babykiller to Senior Master Babykiller but refrained. I’d just sort of tried to forget I had been birthed by that woman.
Then we got shipped to Beirut.
Those of you with some intimate knowledge of Marine history might have noticed that my unit was First of the Eighth and it was the early eighties. Those of you with some knowledge of history may see where this was going at this point. For those of you who are totally clueless as to why “Marine” and “Beirut” might have some historical issues…look it up.
A few things about the mission. First, President Ronald Reagan was, arguably, one of the top five presidents of all time. I’m not going to argue that, just saying. My memoir, my opinion. But the mission was idiotic. Probably his one major stupid in his career as president. Why?
There is no such thing as a “peacekeeping mission” in the Middle East. Period. The Middle East has been at war, literally, since the dawn of history. The first known army in the world, as we recognize armies, was Sargon’s at the beginning of written history. Sargon’s conquests practically are our first written histories. (And, to be clear, Sargon was in the Middle East. Currently where Iraq is.)
There is no keeping the peace there. It’s a myth. The only way you could keep the peace in the Middle East (and I am NOT advocating this) is kill absolutely every man, woman and child. And I do mean every single one. Kurds, Arabs, Druze, Israelis, Lebanese Christians, Iranians, Iraqis, everybody. Because every group over there has a case of the ass at every other group and not damned ONE of them can just talk it out.
Not advocating that. Just saying.
The mission reminded me of a saying down South. Some of you may not know what a yellowjacket nest is. Some places they’re called ground hornets. When it rains in the South, which is mostly red clay, the holes they dig can become slippery. Saying goes like this:
“No matter how round and slick and invitin’ it might look, don’t never stick your dick in a hornet’s nest.”
What President Reagan did was stick Uncle Sam’s dick in a hornet’s nest. God, I love the man, and his current condition makes me want to weep. But that was his one truly bonehead move. Everybody’s due one. I just wish it hadn’t been at the expense of my brothers…and me.
But this is where my story really begins.