Eventually he had an idea.
“Hey guys,” he said in the hooch one morning.
“Shoe-koo, McKoo?” replied several voices simultaneously.
“How about a talent contest?”
There were murmurs of encouragement.
“Imagine it: Camp Grizzly’s first-ever annual talent show,” said Trux. “We could turn one of the ten-tons into a stage…”
This got the Marines excited. Logistics and dates were discussed.
“All we need now,” said Trux, “are some performers.”
The men looked at each other with blank faces.
Then they looked at me.
The day before the talent show—almost a full week after I’d first arrived at Camp Grizzly—the colonel in charge of the 11th Regiment turned up in a military convoy to give the Marines a pep talk from the back of a seven-ton truck. As the sun sank into the horizon behind him and the wind blew up a tornado of dust from the desert floor, all I could make out was his uniformed silhouette.
“There’s a very good chance we’ll get the word to go in the next couple of days,” he said through the tin rattle of a loudspeaker. “On Monday or Tuesday night, the president is expected to make an address to the nation, so make sure you’ve got everything you need to go all the way to Baghdad.” The men ooh-rahed. “The indications we’re getting from over the border is that there’s not much motivation for a fight,” he continued. “Last week a bunch of Iraqis came up to the Brits and tried to surrender, but the Brits said, ‘It’s not time yet.’”
The men laughed at the thought of the Iraqi army’s 51st Mechanized Division trying to lay down their weapons before the fight even began. If the story was true, I thought, the men would probably have been executed as traitors by now. The colonel cupped a hand over his eyes and surveyed the crowd. “Your average Iraqi,” he said, “when he sees a Marine with night-vision goggles and an M-16 rolling past his house in an armored Humvee, is gonna think he’s having a close encounter of the third kind. Don’t do anything to alienate the people up there: Treat ’em with dignity and respect.” He paused, as if savoring the moment. Then he said, “We’re gonna go to Baghdad, fight the Republican Guard, take care of them, replace Saddam, and put stability operations in place. Then we’re gonna come back home.”
The men cheered, whooped, and Semper Fi’d as the colonel jumped down from the back of the truck. He waved, climbed inside the cab, and the convoy clattered off to the next camp. I hated Camp Grizzly more than I had ever hated any other place on earth. So why was the thought of leaving so unbearable?
That night, under the billowing circus-top of the hooch, I shivered in my sleeping bag and listened to the Marines talk among themselves. The lights were off, but one of the men, the corporal who had wanted me to reenact Full Metal Jacket on my first day, was reading a letter by torchlight. Others were watching DVDs. The mood seemed different, more subdued. No one was saying much.
Then the corporal announced: “Man, this letter’s depressing the hell out of me. Even my goddamn brother’s against the war.”
The roof of the tent flapped in the wind like a flag at full mast.
“No shit,” came a muffled reply.
The corporal continued: “My brother’s the kind of guy who usually says, ‘Let’s just kill the motherfuckers.’”
He paused, allowing the men to consider this important background fact. Then he said: “What’s our job here to do anyway?”
No one, it seemed, wanted to have this conversation. They were all trying to forget about the desert outside.
Then Trux said, “Our job is to kill the enemy.”
The corporal didn’t seem to be listening.
“Man, it’s gonna be just like Vietnam,” he complained. “When we get home, we’re gonna have folks throw stuff at us.”
With a heavy sigh, he switched off his torch.
In the darkness, sleeping bags rustled uncomfortably. Outside, Iraq’s El Niño was now whistling tunelessly.
Then the muffled voice said, “Nobody gonna throw nothin’ at me.”
“Good evening, er, ladies and gentlemen,” said the shy, bespectacled gunnery sergeant, squinting under a solitary floodlight. His Noël Coward impression, not convincing at the best of times, was faltering with stage fright. “Here’s a little number I tossed off recently in the Caribbean,” he continued. “It’s called ‘The Penis Song.’” A hundred or so heavily armed Marines peered up at the makeshift stage, which doubled as the back of a ten-ton flatbed tank-transporter, and gave a raucous cheer. The reflection of the floodlight in the sand made their faces glow dirty orange.
Above and around us was nothing—a cavern of black, empty desert. It was cold and the air smelled of sand, tobacco, and Porta-Johns. The gunnery sergeant—“Gunny” for short—was gripping a microphone that was plugged into a PA system designed for giving orders to Iraqi prisoners of war. To his left, a metal cage creaked in the wind. Inside it perched Speckled Ali, the 11th Regiment’s “NBC pigeon.” Ali was looking good: cheerful, almost. That meant the gas alert of five minutes ago was just a drill. We would live, at least until the end of the talent show.
I wondered what would happen if Ali came down with bird flu. Would the entire regiment be medevacked to a quarantine facility? For a brief, exhilarating moment, I contemplated poisoning Ali’s bird feed.
The Marines remained fixated on the stage.
Gunny cleared his throat, spat out a gobful of yellow dust, then began:
Isn’t it awfully nice to have a penis?
Isn’t it frightfully good to have a dong?
I recognized the ditty as a Monty Python spoof from The Meaning of Life. The rest of the audience wasn’t as appreciative. Gunny had barely reached the third line before the Marines started to unsling their M-16s and cock them with loud ka-clacks. At first it was funny. Then it started to get unnerving. Onstage, to the right of Gunny, Trux made a “shush” motion. Above his head was a homemade banner fashioned from brown ration boxes that read: “The Iraqi Republican Guard is proud to sponsor this event.” Next to it, Trux had tried to create an italicized Republican Guard motto. “We Suck Again,” it boasted.
A blast of wind sprayed the stage with sand and dirt. Gunny paused to empty another mouthful of slime and adjust his rifle’s shoulder strap. The first lieutenant wiped his eyes. I heard cursing over the low grumble of a diesel generator. Gunny’s right hand was now holding down the Velcro flap on his gas mask holster. He gripped his NBC-proof water canteen with the other.
This, I thought, would be a great time for another Scud alert.
Gunny was determined to press on:
So three cheers for your Willy or John Thomas,
Hooray for your one-eyed trouser snake…
The crowd couldn’t take it anymore. “You fuckin’ suck!” shouted a private from the crowd. There was more ka-clacking. Gunny persevered until he reached the last line. “The Penis Song,” mercifully, was only two verses long. When Gunny was finally done he gave a bow, which turned into a duck to avoid a hurled ration of peanut butter. Trux caught it, then held it up to his chest as though he were a model in a television commercial. “Let’s give a BIG thanks to our other sponsor of this evening,” he shouted, snatching the microphone from Gunny. “Delicious ‘MRE’ peanut butter spread!” The crowd roared and stomped its feet as Trux, getting into the spirit of things, began to tap-dance in his desert boots and chemical suit.