Blowing-up the Past 

Downing a full bottle of Robitussin had made the California desert stars smear like time and light distortions at the periphery of a black hole. The visual effect was beautiful but at the expense of a lingering nausea. I compartmentalized this uncomfortable element, mentally layering it beneath my awe of nature, amplified as it was by my intentional cough syrup overdose. Brooks, one of my closest friends within our platoon, sat next to me staring appreciatively at the night sky, his back against a military green shipping container. He sat loosely, his muscles slack, unconcerned about the future.

I studied him—skinny, with the same boney angularity as me. He’d fumbled out of his tent under the pretense of a midnight toilet run, as had I, fully acting the part and wearing only black rubber shower sandals and affecting puffy eyes, presenting ourselves as half-woken zombies. His standard issue olive drab t-shirt was untucked, and the shirt’s surplus material rippled in the night wind like a canvas sail improperly stowed, threatening to blow away, confounded that one so skinny had anchored it thus far. His camouflage trousers were unbloused to his ankles, as were my own, bunching at the bottoms of our feet. I may have misread his relaxation as resignation—resignation to the reality of the enlistment we’d both chosen or, in contradiction, resignation that he must escape from the Corps. I couldn’t be sure.

Straight from an Oklahoma Indian Reservation, The Res as he called it, I thought him racially ambiguous. His skin was dark albeit in a pale way that suggested sickness or a man shut away too long from the necessary revitalization of the sun. Or maybe he was made sick by his separation from his people, its tragic past and unhopeful future. His face was both that of a prisoner, starving to the point of emaciation but blazing in obstinate intensity. Though twenty years old, Brooks had a weathered look to him. One that whispered of past traumas. My mom would have said he looked as if he’d been rode hard and put up wet, though she usually reserved that chestnut when acidly sizing-up other women who were skinnier than she. His dark eyes smiled often but hinted at a wildness that contradicted the nature of the Marine Corps rank structure we both served.

Our minor rebellion was not so unique as we liked to believe. We were reaching for a form of independence that only felt available through flagrant acts of wrongdoing. Selfdestructive behaviors puffed-up into grand philosophies about the importance of selfdetermination. Hollow ideas that presented well but lacked deeper substance, much like anarchy at punk rock concerts; these philosophies could only criticize but offered no viable solutions. We dealt in a trade of witty jokes and biting cynicism. He liked to jab the air with unlit cigarettes before lipping them. He drank whiskey in multiple glugs from a bottle that made me shiver to watch, wondering if he felt compelled to maintain the cliches of his Native American heritage or if the cliches of their descent into a chaos of “white man’s fire water” were formed upon truths. Our false ennui was rapidly made more real with each passing day of service in the Corps as we saw more, did more.

My life experience to date had time-cured my concrete conviction that any friendship reaches its greatest apex when each has dirt on the other. The filthiest of shared experiences that, in the combined doing, open a two-way vulnerability of mutually assured reputational destruction. The supports of that belief had been bored deep into the bedrock of my emotional core, having revealed the worst of myself to my closest of friends and they to me, only to wake up, head-pounding, occasionally bleeding, to transform the previous night’s happenings to a joke that could be laughed off over watery diner coffee and poorly cooked eggs.

By that time, Brooks and I had taken blow together. We had fucked our respective girlfriends at the same time, in the same room. We had drunk ourselves to darkness too many times to count. This latest rebellion felt different. Quieter. Made more intimate that it was just the two of us, untethered from the complex social dynamics of group outings.

“Robbitrippin…” He said with a self-satisfied smile, trailing off, as was his manner of speaking, allowing me to fill his implied silence with any bold declaration I might choose.

Finishing each other’s sentences like an old married couple. I nodded my agreement.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Yeah, like the stars are swimming in the sky. Reminds me of back home. Driving late nights, stopping my car in the middle of nowhere in The Res, and just laying on the hood and looking up for hours.”

I felt poorly equipped to answer. My suburban Ohio past seemed to me fundamentally inadequate as a response to his experiences on sovereign Native American territory that, from the clipped stories he offered, seemed mostly unbothered by adult oversight. A lawlessness that likely formed the essence of his apparent precociousness. How then would my nights spent necking my high school girlfriend at the local drive-in movies compare? Could I really speak aloud my stories of band camp? I felt absurd, the flavor of my life until then a bland vanilla.

He was afraid of getting caught, appreciative only of his gut full of drugs and satisfied with the act of sharing that my presence allowed. He had a sense of enjoyment to him that allowed him to suck the joy from each moment, unclouded as he was by fear of getting caught or of being embarrassed, twin furies that dogged me at all times. This inclination towards joy was the aspect I most liked about him. His ability to savor. His tastefulness in identifying what was worth savoring.

We had driven dust covered Humvees with overworked cooling systems to the military base in Twenty Nine Palms, California. Alien Joshua trees dotted the horizon, content to pose in tableau positions that upset my established notions of nature as to what a tree was supposed to be. I could not reconcile the deciduous branches of my midwestern boyhood, their soft leaves gentled by rich soils and abundant water, with this bristling oddity angrily clinging to life. Its misshapen form had been warped by hardship. Ugly but undeniably strong. The Joshua Tree was Nature’s metaphor for the change being wrought upon the essence of my character by life in the Corps. My Midwestern tendency towards kindness now guarded behind a gauntlet of barbed words and spikey cynicism, always on the cusp of dying from thirst for affection, enduring the absence of kindness by hoarding acts of friendship I would have easily given away in the relaxed times of my former, civilian life.

We wanted to blow things up: this was the simple thesis statement that justified the grand expenditure of energy in meticulously convoying men and equipment to the other California— the brutish California that would watch you die with easy nonchalance in its desert hellscape, not the irrigated postcard variety that peddled falsehoods. Endangered desert tortoises would shuffle into view, halting training for long hours. Units operating in this region of baked rock could detonate vast quantities of ordnance without much thought to the consequences. Gone were the sounds of coastal traffic, the possibility of wildfires, and (most importantly) the distraction of free time.

In the field, we spent much of our time displacing from one piece of nondescript desert to another, establishing new mortar positions in manufactured haste. Barking NCOs lording over their squads as we scraped with our e-tool shovels disproportionately more than we sighted our rifles, burrowing down through layers of sand and sandstone. We marked fictitious targets with 81mm illumination mortar rounds for harrier jets or attack helicopters, the illum rounds splashing into a fiery mark upon the sand or setting timers such that a flare would emerge from the mortar round and gently descend to the ground in an arc of light. Helicopters floated aloft in an unnerving state of quiet behind rock outcroppings before elevating at the critical moment to launch Hell Fire missiles at imagined enemies. 500 pound bombs were dropped, exploding outwards in blast waves of force that jostled my guts. Harriers roared past our heads along 3dimensional egress paths that had been pre-coordinated by forward observers and coordinating fire support teams.

This particular field exercise spanned a month. The NCOs were irritable, lacking the release of liberty. As junior enlisted Marines at the absolute bottom of the fucking totem pole, we could only lay low. This was best achieved by avoiding becoming the fuck-up in a grand, memorable way that lingered in the collective platoon conscience. If we could get through each day without more than the usual quotient of verbal abuse from higher ranking Marines, it could be chalked up as a win. The game was simple: don’t become the joke.

There were different levels of base development ranging from field tents constituting a Forward Operating Base to brick and mortar infrastructure. The CAX base was something in between, an intermediary between desert and modern life. For us, this meant luxuries such as row of toilets separated by wooden palettes and grown men laughing at the noisy business of shitting as we stared at one another, horrified to a laughing hysteria by the smells assaulting our faces. A massive chow hall had been erected in a structure that seemed better suited to aircraft maintenance than feeding sweat caked Marines. The structure was all truss steel and hard plastic sheeting, blandly sand colored, assembled atop a poured concrete slab. Looking at such works, it seemed inconceivable that form had ever dared to fight function, but if those stories were true, these spare field structures made clear that function had won with ease.

We clustered at wood tables of simple construction, hunched over disposable paper cafeteria trays and shoveling food past our cracked lips.

Dickens likened spilled French wine to blood. Looking down the line of tables, I realized it was hot sauce coursing through our American veins, nothing so trumped-up and fancy as Cote du Rhone or Bordeaux. Blue collar Marine Corps blood that would be spilled on Middle Eastern desert sands instead of the streets of revolution. Our sang épicé. History will make its own classifying judgements of this blood—be it the sacrificial essence of a liberator or one tyrant’s force overtaking another. Such questions were an exercise in relativism that need not concern the warrior’s blood itself.

Hot sauce was a form of field currency, alike in that sense to cigarettes, porn, candy, and snuff. We gulped it down and so became one with its fire. We pocketed scarce bottles next to treasures of similar stature, alongside multi-tools or frayed pictures of faraway lovers. More careful Marines wrapped the bottles in oversized Ziploc baggies, folded over and cinched by a triple wrapped rubber band to catch any fallen drops they might lick out of the bag later or absorb into crumbled field crackers in need more life and color.

Collapsing hot sauce to a single broad category was an oversimplification that hid their touchstones of place if one looked closer. Each hot sauce brand was its own river, rooted and branching-out over distinct regions of the United States. Was Texas synonymous with Texas Pete just because its marketing department had strummed upon the heartstrings of state pride and incorporated the state into its product name, or could Cholula sensibly claim it primacy based on its prevalence on Lone Star family tables? Maybe homemade hot sauces spoke a more potent truth of family and tradition, carried forward through time by each generation of abuelas. Or maybe industrialization had offered its own form of diluted culture.

And who would have known hot sauce was so alike blood? Often running startingly red, at times inducing panic if there is too much. Some ran thicker. Some hotter than others. Blood types not so different from brand names. Was it not so with the blood of man?

That regional lineage is immutable, for me the identity started with childhood bowls of winter chili coupled to a few squirts of Frank’s expertly applied with precise jerks of the wrist. Then comes the stunning realization of other hot sauces beyond the borders of one’s own personal experience and, remarkably, not all of them bad. You realize that perhaps yours is not the best, after all—neither blood nor hot sauce. hat there might not be a “best” at all, just differences for its own sake.

So began our typical Marine Corps hot sauce banter.

“Tabasco? Hell nah, dawg. Hit me with some of that Texas Pete!” shouted Gerardo.

“Are you even Mexican? Get the fuck outta here with that Texas Pete trash. Tapatio all day long, motherfuckers!” Varias challenged, then performed a little jig-step. I recalled that he was originally from Chihauhau, Mexico, but didn’t trust my memory on that point.

“We’re my Texans at?” Gerardo opened it up to the table. He eyed the newly attached Comm Marines, knowing them to be Lone Star State enlistees. “Whatch y’all think. You a Texas Pete Marines, or what?”

Quiet by nature, he shook his head no and quietly said, “Crystals,” almost as if to himself.

His Comm buddy, perpetually attached to his hip, exploded. “Hell yes, Crystals! Don’t you see we black people?” The table laughed. Gerardo made a sucking noise, indicating his disapproval.

Unsatisfied with his table survey results, he probed further.

“Smith! Come on man. You enlisted out of Texas. Where you at, man?”

I nodded apologetically in advance. “We always had Frank’s in my home, growin’ up,” I said.

“In Texas?”

“In Cincinnati. I only moved to Houston for my senior year of high school, and enlisted there afterwards. I’m from Ohio.”

“Frank’s? Get that Paris Island bullshit out of here, Smith.”

“Frank’s is solid as hell, but I can also get behind some Cholula’s.” I said it, but felt comparatively disloyal, having seen the zealous banner-waving and entrenchment in a singular hot sauce view. I felt I’d identified myself as a traitor, having hedged at all. As if there could be no compromise in politics nor hot sauce, as if the hot peppers stoking the fires of our blood could exist only in mutually exclusive states. Classic Set Theory. An evolving debate over the laws of hot sauce thermodynamics.

The conversation rippled onward, down the line of seated Marines, until a muddy kind of quorum emerged, overwhelmingly based on geography. The primary agreement was that Tabasco was literally the worst of things. The man, head-scratchingly ever present when so many other options seemed more worthy. This required no more proof than was offered in the humble MRE which issued tiny, doll-sized bottles of Tabasco sauce as part of the standard seasoning kit. Watery sauce. Unremarkable blood. Something else to spit and talk about in the desert while we exploded all manner of imaginary enemies.

Away from our makeshift base, in the true field—or, at the very least, the best purity that might be realized without deploying behind enemy lines— training distilled itself to its barest essence. We practiced maneuvers within our Humvees in off-road, desert conditions, focused on maintaining our spacing, staggering the vehicles when stopping, and optimizing our gear packing approach. Once halted, Marines would storm out of each Humvee carrying elements of the 81 mm mortar system atop of their assigned rifles or light machine guns. NCOs shouted them onward, berating them like stubborn draft horses chafing at the harness.

We wrestled sand colored camouflage netting into place, hoisting it above our vehicles using stackable plastic raisers affixed with spreaders that looked like oversized, plastic flower petals. Properly setup, the netting greatly reduced aerial visibility of our forest green vehicles at distance, and broke-up their geometry. We tensioned the netting with taunt cord tied-off to ground stakes. There was no excess material, so the arrangement had to be performed to perfection, often requiring an extra burst of effort in sinking the poles into shallow sandstone divots or packing filled sandbags around each base. Depending on the mood of the moment, we might laugh as a man got tangled in a mess of gear and netting, hopelessly stuck in a spider’s web of his own creation. Small unit leaders might just as easily use it as an opportunity to bark insults at working Marines.

In those times, the Marine Corps favored ratchet straps that seemed custom made to confound young Marines. The premise was simple enough: tightening a 4 inch wide canvas strap such that it compressed our loose gear to our Humvees, sandwiching it tightly against the hood or sides of our vehicles. The elusive element was the variability of the device: you could not simply replicate what had been done before, rinse and repeat, and move on. One had to judge precisely how much slack needed to be fed through the center feed slit such that the untightened strap was already reasonable tight. Only then could it be ratcheted to the desire level of tension without overstuffing the center coil. Threading too much slack through the lineal eyelet wouldn’t allow enough play to surround the materials; threading too little slack meant the ratchet would overfill the center with material and cease to work without securing our gear tightly. This was a hard enough endeavor to perform in times of leisure, requiring educated guess work comparable to tying a tie if one’s neck were to spontaneously change sizes each day. As a young Marine, an NCO would scream curses at you if the ridiculous strap maneuver wasn’t executed to perfection. God forbid you might guess incorrectly how much dead slack ought to have been fed through the ratchet mechanism, requiring you to unspool it and try again. Spit was sprayed upon my face along with shouted insults. Amusingly, the NCOs would hold-out as long as they could in avoiding actually doing the work, knowing as they did that it wasn’t an exact science and that they too might be just as easily criticized should they take the reins and attempt the work on their own. When such scenarios arose, the criticisms that were so free-flowing to the young Marine would magically cease and the NCO would perform the activity in a respectful silence amid offers to help. Such behaviors are how men manufacture differences in rank and standing where no meaningful differences exists. The playing field forever unlevel, as it always has been.

As day turned dusk and the sun conceded parts of itself to the ridgeline of the mountains, we became more stationary as the units we supported preferred to engage in live, combined fires training in the coolness of the evening and the transition to nightfall. The visibility of marked targets increased with diminishing daylight, the loss of day presented another opportunity to train at operating under the cover of darkness, and the heat rapidly dissipated.

We filled endless sand bags, gouging hidey-holes in the sandstone, already pockmarked by thousands of past explosions that came before our own. We gave our bodies over to the work.

My Kevlar flak jacket constantly worried at my neckline. We began operating by red lens flashlights which were said to have less of a visual signature than white line, at night, reducing the chance of being spotted by the pretend enemy. The sporadic red light lent mortar systems and men’s faces an air of otherworldliness, as if they might be at a club or just as likely an outlying territory of hell itself.

As the fire missions lessoned, with the helicopters and jets emptied of ordinance and the overseeing officers satisfied that we could legitimately coordinate a variety of types of fire without killing each other in the chaos, our minds were given over to thought. To remembrances. To questions of what had brought us to this strange place so far removed from the concerns of normal, civilian life. That’s when the healing began.

We blew-up our regrets by writing them on mortars. Sharpies became our therapists, allowing us to give form to the memories that haunted us most before sending them down range to meet a fiery and, we hoped, definitive end. A catharsis born of composition B and shrapnel.

An exploding of a past we had all chosen to run from, in some form or another.

We applied salves of alcohol and sex to our inner hurts, but not exclusively so. The field allowed one to pause non-military life, creating a time-space through which we could examine our emotional knicks and bruises, catalogue them, and let the passage of time do its necessary healing. We made jokes at our own expense, asserting definitively that our women back home were fucking some guy, if only to mentally prepare ourselves for the hurt of it through the safer confines of jokes. Or we spoke boldly of our futures, hoping to speak future exploits into existence and give them substance through our outwardly projected confidence that such triumphs would come to pass, recoloring the failures of our past as necessary hurts that enabled a better future.

“What about you, Smith?” Corporal V. asked, extending a black marker towards me. His question was the nearest thing to kindness he’d ever offered me, the Sharpie an implied olive branch from fiery squad leader to eager, unproven Marine. In this way, he was asking about my past with the fewest words possible, perhaps wanting to know me better as a human being and simultaneously offering me a means of proven self-repair. I intuited that to shrug-away his question would be seen as a jarring rebuff, so I took the offered marker with a thankful nod of my helmet.

“I left my girlfriend to be here. ‘Signed-up without even discussing it with her. Our relationship was pretty much over from that moment on, only she knew it before I did. I suppose I had thought she might stay with me, but the truth is, I hadn’t really thought it through at all.” He listened with his eyes locked upon mine, a disarmingly present listener like a zealous priest weighing every word spoken in confession to gauge its density of sin. The squad around me fidgeted, feeling the emotional charge in the air around them, made uncomfortable by this revealing talk but silently respectful, just the same. “It’s more complicated than that.” I admitted. “She was taking anti-depressant medication, which she had kept hidden from me. I had found a prescription laying about the apartment, one morning, and asked her about it. Confronted her, really. For a while, things hadn’t been good. I worried I was the source of our problems, that I hadn’t been good enough. I didn’t really understand depression. Why she was often so tired and occasionally distant. It sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but I thought she was just the type of person who hated mornings and was slow to get going. She even wore her bathrobe until late afternoon, some days. I didn’t understand why she’d kept it from me. Her decision to hold that back felt like a kind of lie. An intentional omission, at least.” I shifted my weight, unsure if more needed to be said. “After this—my discovery of the anti-depressants and my enlistment in the Marine Corps—everything slowly died. We were both working as baristas at Starbucks. She was transferred to a new store, given we had disclosed our relationship to management, and one night, when I was closing, a guy called looking for her at the store.” Some of the men nodded, understanding the trajectory of the coming blow. “I played dumb, asking him if he was her boyfriend or if this was a work thing and offered to pass along a message if that was the case. He told me he wasn’t her boyfriend, but that they were ‘definitely talking’. He ended by asking me why? Why had I asked? I said, “Because I’m her boyfriend, you fuck!” and hung-up the phone. I threw off my apron,” I said, caught-up in the telling, using dramatic hand-gestures to compliment my words, “and stormed out of the store. I peel-out of the parking lot, and sped over to her new store about a mile away, and pounded on the door until the shift supervisor unlocked the door to chase me off. She told him it was okay and came outside to face me. To face my anger. She had this resigned look on her face, like she already knew it was coming. I just spoke his name, asking it like a question. That’s all it took know. I could see from her face that it was true. One word. One name. She was already dating someone else, even while we shared the same bed.” I took a deep breath, shrugging it away. “I packed up all my shit and drove away and left forever. I still think about her though, you know?” I asked, worrying at a piece of sandstone with the toe of my boot.

“Here,” he said, hefting an 81 mm mortar towards me. “Write her name on this. When this explodes…boom!” he said, opening his fist in a spray of fingers. “All that ex-girlfriend hang-up is gone. You’ve blown it up. I don’t ever fuckin’ want to hear about it again.”

I nodded as if to acknowledge the wisdom of this. “Aye, Corporal.”

“Switch-out to the A-gunner position,” he ordered. “Only you can send this one down range.”

A fire mission was relayed via radio in the customary monotone. I deftly adjusted the legs of the mortar such that only fine adjustment was required to get the gunsight bubbles in alignment, ensuring our rounds would hit their intended target. Corporal V looked over our setup and ordered me load the mortar. I inserted it tail fins first such that the primer would hit the firing pin at the base of the mortar barrel, but held it at the mouth of the barrel, waiting for the order to fire.

“Fire!” Corporal V shouted.

I released the mortar round and continued a sweeping motion down to my boot to ensure my hand cleared well out of the trajectory of the mortar, ducking my head protectively down and away. The mortar round—the memory— exploded forth, deafening in close proximity. My eyes looked out into the new evening darkness, and fire balls bloomed in the distance as the collective rounds of our eight mortar systems converged in a parallel sheaf. I looked at Corporal V. He fiercely held my eyes. The symbol complete. The ceremony done.

Returned from the raw field to the semi-developed base, Brooks dragged me along to the base PX where he showed me boxes of Robitussin lining the shelf.

“It has to be DM,” he said. “That’s the kind that’ll get us where we need to be.”

I had no knowledge of drugs and certainly not of Dextromethorphan and so allowed myself to be led. Symptoms, among many other things, included hallucinations and blurred vision.

“That’s what we’re doing tonight?”

“Yer goddamn right it is.”

We downed our a full bottle apiece, Brooks knowingly timing the ingestion to impact duration, chugging it down with awful grimaces, the flavor seizing the whole of our mouths and throats in a thick syrup and artificial flavoring.

This was how we coped. This and blowing shit up. When the higher-ups brought us to this stretch of desert to train, they didn’t realize we’d also be blowing-up our emotions. Our regrets. Our choking resentment. Our pain. Our hateful memories. We did it together, unsure if it was the Corps that was responsible for our collective list of grievances, or if we’d had them all along and brought them along with us. Baggage that couldn’t be stowed away in a footlocker, but which we hoped could be dosed into submission and blasted from our minds.

I looked up and the stars were swimming, and we among them, reborn in some way that felt spiritual though I was loathe to use the language of belief. It’s likely that we weren’t cleansed at all by our shade tree drugs nor our gunfire, and more probable still that we’d only managed to stun ourselves into enduring another day. In the end, that’s all we were really after.

---

KYLE ABBOTT SMITH served in the U.S. Marine Corps infantry from 2001-2005, participating in two combat tours within Iraq and attaining the rank of Corporal, a Non-Commissioned Officer. Beyond this piece in The Southeast Review, his short stories have been accepted for publication in the North Carolina Literary Review, the North Dakota Quarterly, and The Wrath-Bearing Tree. After an initial career as a project manager and business consultant, Kyle completed his PhD in Engineering Science. He splits time between the United States and Switzerland where he lives with his wife and sons. His focus is now on his lifelong passions of research, teaching, and writing. He hopes to publish the memoir from which this piece was drawn.

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