JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
Let me tell you a tale, young private, of my time after the service. Back in civilian land, a stranger to my own people. I got drunk for the better part of a decade. You think you want this life, listen up, because there's a price to pay for those stories.
When you're a drunk, your social circle is mostly in bars. I had my local. It wasn't the nicest or the grubbiest, it wasn't a meat market. It was a quiet, steady bar with a slightly older clientele. Dark inside, even darker booths. Stamped copper ceiling, left over from a wealthier time. A bullet hole over the bar that the owner claims happened during Prohibition, but I heard was from a drive-by in 1996.
This is the Nasty, and it's right on the strip. Hamilton Street. Five blocks of bars, restaurants and coffee shops with assorted tattoo parlors, barbers, bike shops and bail offices. Just across the river, the East side. One of the worst square miles in the US. Perennial murder capital contender, desperately poor, the abandoned urban underclass in the wake of de-industrialization. There were once over a hundred factories in Saginaw. Now there's three.
That's one three hundred yard bridge away from Hamilton Street, and it's the meeting place for the three sides of town. To the south, the Mexican quarter, to the west, the Township. The business owners on Hamilton are young and old. Some old proprietors hanging on for dear life. Some new ones filled with vision and ambition. All of them with more hope than sense. The town is dying.
I'd only been in town about four years at the time, fresh out the service and living with my younger brother, also just back from Iraq. It was a rough town, but we'd come from rougher.
Down to the pub, I like to think I was an excellent patron. Quiet, polite, my tab got paid in full, the staff got tipped every time, and well. A good pub can take years to get “in” to, but it's faster if you don't stiff the staff. You join the community. Learn the rules. Follow the code. The regulars and the semi-regulars. You start to learn about people slowly, over time.
John, an ever-so-slightly aged queen holds magnificent court with his coterie of fag-hags. It's always a fun time when they're in. Dom is rich or something and is forever buying rounds. Regulars stalk him. Neil, the manager, is forty and dating a different twenty-year-old every week. Nan, the heroically ugly and cantankerous bartender. She once threatened to “slap the dipshit out of your [my] face” for calling her “ma'am”. I wasn't going to try her.
But this story is about another regular. Name of Cowboy. He only comes in early in the day or late at night. A bit shorter than average, rail thin, all corded muscle, bad ink and long scraggly goattee. Works second shift, and hustles afterward. He makes the rounds at the bars late at night, sells beef jerky. Looks sketchy as hell, comes in a ziplock bag, but it is excellent. Kind of like Cowboy.
Now, Cowboy likes a drink, and I like drinks and beef jerky and we can both smell blood on the other. He's wizened, old before his time. Hard living, no doubt. He has full dentures, teeth knocked out in a prison fight. He's been in three times, he rides for the Outlaws, has the badges, has the ink. He's on parole for another ten years. I still don't know the details.
We bond over telling scar stories, every old soldier's favorite game. The stories start funny and get dark. There's some things you can't discuss with someone who can't directly relate, and when you find someone like that, there's a context to it. You don't understand now, you may later. It takes a while. You don't kiss on the first date with a guy like that. You gotta feel it out, get comfortable. Here we were, relative nobodies to the rest of the world, a broke-dick soldier and a lifelong criminal. But within our respective tiny subcultures, we were powerful and respected elders. The reason you're listening to my stories, young private.
Three terms, three deployments, three war zones.
Let me tell you son, my stories got nothing on old Cowboy's! I mean, mine might be crazier, and happen in a more exotic location, but his were so much more traumatic. It's one thing to go into battle with the might and money of a world superpower at your back, and another to have nothing and no one but yourself, and no win but more prison time with your opponents at the other end. Dude was a hard, hard man.
Generally kept my nose clean, by infantry standards. A bit of jail here and there for fighting, public drunkenness, stealing the flags off a golf course once...nothing serious.
So anyway, back to the story. The bar. The community.
I've been drinking in this bar for four years. I'm on my third set of owners. I've been here before most of the bartenders started. Now, one of the benefits of being a trusted regular is the lock-in.
So the boys hold a lock-in without us one night, lo and behold the cash is all gone in the morning. The whole night's takings. And half the liquor. None of this is discovered until Neil opens in the afternoon, and my brother and I wander in not ten minutes later.
The place is a bit of a mess, we help clean up and start figuring out what happened. Neil checks the security footage, and there it is, plain as day. The night bartender left the keys with one of his friends to lock up, and the guy cleaned the place out. We know this guy. We know his address. Nobody can think of his name right off, but who gives a shit?
The cops are no help, they'll take a statement but don't have time to waste on a few thousand in loose cash. This is bad for the bar, but it's really bad for those of us who like lock-ins.
Cowboy turns up, we brief him on what happened and he has a suggestion. For ten percent of the lost cash, he'll go over to the kids house with a couple of his Outlaw boys, put a bit of a fright into him, get him to give back the stuff. Way faster and cheaper than the cops!
Neil calls the owner, he says handle it. Cowboy goes outside to clear it with his boss in the MC. Comes back with bad news, the club won't sanction its guys for debt collection, and apparently this counts. Plan B.
What are the odds this popped-collar fuckwit knows what a proper Outlaw cut looks like? Are we outsmarting ourselves? Dan rides, he has a cut from a veteran MC. I used to ride, but sold my bike in Cali. We get on the phone.
Raoul is sixty-four, single, alcoholic. Looks like hispanic Colonel Sanders. I think he's been drunk since the seventies. He had a tough tour in Vietnam, I met him at the Purple Heart meetings. Sweet guy, a quiet and melancholy drunk, but good humored when roused. An inveterate poon-hound. He's a good dude, and hooks us up with a bike and a convincing-looking vest.
Cowboy has to work, so Dan and I do a basic recce. Walk the street, check the alley, count the exits. Windows are small and mostly high up, he's not gonna crawl out through those most likely. Three doors, one to the garage.
Back to our apartment. We talk over the plan, the scope. We leave weapons at home, pepper spray only. We're in sketchy legal area here. We aren't committing a crime, but we're going to be on his property and not necessarily friendly. If things go sideways, we don't want to escalate any more than necessary to break contact. We can always come back with more hardware, or men.
Cowboy turns up at midnight, and we roll out into the damp, dark night. Loud. This isn't a sneak operation, this is about intimidation. The whole neighborhood is going to peek out at this little show.
Fuck, I nearly forgot how much fun motorcycles are. And how incredibly scary they are when you ride with maniacs. I'm a highway cruiser, Dan has a death wish, and Cowboy was born on a bike or something. We come down that quiet cul-de-sac like thunder, line all three bikes up with the headlights pointed at the front door. My adrenaline is off the charts, I am not that good on a bike.
Dan splits off to the back, the garage is to our right, but the external door is closed. Cowboy mounts the steps to the porch, I stay one step back and to his left. The cut is a bit loose, Raoul is a lot thicker. Three loud raps at the door. Just enough to bounce the hinges a bit, you know? Take note, young private. Your knock should loosen a screw or two. Makes a good first impression.
Fuckwit comes stumbling to the door, must have slept the day. Queasy looking. Comes out of the door! Ok, we got this, this dude is not going to be a problem. If he barricaded, we might have had a time. He's quite a bit bigger than any of us, but that won't matter now.
He's disoriented, blinded by the lights behind us. He looks for a long moment at Cowboy, then at me. He's outside, the door is behind him. He's wearing sweatpants and flip flops. We're both within four feet of him. He knows us, but not by name, and not with biker gear on. We're both holding our helmets. He turns to go back through the door, and he can see straight down the hallway through the back sliding glass door, to where Dan is standing on his patio.
Cowboy puts his hand softly on Fuckwit's shoulder.
“Put everything back in your car, and take it back to the pub. We'll follow you.”
Fuckwit looks back at me. I give him my best evil grin.
He packs his car. People are looking. It's nearly one AM now, and suddenly people are wandering up and down the sidewalks, cell phones in hand. Whatever, Nasty PD ain't crossing the river for a noise complaint. It takes an uncomfortable amount of time though. That was a lot of hooch.
The escort is a good excuse for me to fall back and tail Fuckwit's ancient Buick. Dan and Cowboy are blasting up and down the wet, empty streets, popping wheelies, Charlie Mike. We take the scenic route through the neighborhood. It's last call when we roll back into the pub.
Neil boots the stragglers, makes Fuckwit restock the liquor and bans him from the bar. The whole of Hamilton Street already knows. Cowboy gets his ten percent, Dan and I get what turns out to be quite a lot of free drinks, and a special reward. We call Raoul to come down to pick up his bike and join us for a lock-in.
And that, ladies and gentle privates, is how I got a seat at the bar.
They've torn the place down now, but somewhere there is a small brass plaque that used to be nailed in front of the back corner stool of the pub.
Excuse me, but that's my seat. Is my name on it? Yes, yes it is. Would you like to speak to the manager?
Coda:
Cowboy died last year. Mid fifties,god knows of what. My brother rode up from North Carolina for the funeral. Six hundred people joined his wake. I had to borrow a bike. Older now, softer and relatively sober. I gave up the seat for a wife and a quiet life in the Nasty burbs. Dan has two kids and travels for work. Raoul is dead, years ago. There were no women at his funeral. I still see Neil from time to time. He's still dating twenty-year-olds and managing a bar. I never saw Fuckwit again. Still don't know his name.
I sometimes go back to the old neighborhood and walk its mountainous sidewalks, check in on old neighbors. Maybe have a drink at Neil's new place. Remind the streets. We're only old, we ain't dead yet.
The hardest part of telling any story is getting started. The beginning is as good a time as any.
How does a man wind up in a war? The same way he winds up in Carnegie Hall.
I lost this fight at six.
No shit, there I was. Laying in the dust of my mother's garden with ants on my dick, and Sam Meck kicking me in the ribs.
I'd been climbing high up in a tree when the other kids came home from school. They made a beeline. A couple of them found long sticks and poked me until I fell. Eighteen years later, a doctor in Baghdad would tell me my left arm had been broken that day. But since an X-ray would have made Jesus sad, all I knew then was I had a useless arm, and a lot of pain. Didn't make it past the garden before they caught me.
Most of the boys hadn't touched me yet. Sam and his little henchman Guerrito were the instigators, the leaders. They'd gotten the sticks. The rest of them just fanned out and seemed happy to spectate. The pom squad of trash society, drifting along within the group opinion, cheering for the good guys, cheering against the bad guys, so certain they know which is which. I hated them most of all. How pathetic and vile, to be cruel and also cowardly. Sam was a different, more immediate problem.
I was a weird kid with a weird family. We were in a faith healing cult, warned against interacting too much with “the world”. We'd always be a target and as the oldest I was going to be the first to deal with it. Already the neighbor kids had begun tormenting me and my retarded younger brother. And what was my skinny ass gonna do? I was a theology nerd; sensitive, intellectual, thin and uncoordinated. Sam was still kicking me. I needed a plan.
My options were limited. Parents were strict pacifists. Foxe's Book of Martyrs was very much required reading. Involvement in any conflict would result in punishment. There were no justifications for violence, so the only thing I was allowed to do was take the beating. And then turn the other cheek or some shit. God's will was for Sam to keep kicking, and for me to forgive him when he got done.
Weird to notice. The ants were crawling on me immediately when I fell. Must have landed right on the mound, shorts were a bad idea. Tick- tock motherfucker, this is the logic of violence. You get to figure it out in pain, with limited time before your ability to resist is gone. My arm really hurt.
Short answer, I'm screwed. Nothing I could have done would stop the beating. But long term, what's the play? Already thinking about tomorrow. Got to have a plan.
I could hide, but can't do that forever. We live next door.
I could stay inside with three infant siblings and an increasingly insane mother. Not a great option.
We'd played baseball a few months before and Sam got hit in the face with the ball and he bled everywhere and started screaming like a bitch. Mom said to play careful with him because he was a hemo-something..... a kick landed on my bad arm. There was blood and dirt in my mouth, snot and tears streaming in thick ropes.
The reality was that people are mostly cowards. The four boys ranged around watching a kid beat another kid. I remember neither their faces nor their names. They hound after the misfit, the outcast, the different, but only when it costs them little. All I had to do was raise the price and maybe they would drop out. It wouldn't stop the beating now, and it would mean getting punished by my parents later. But they'd know that picking on me wasn't free. The next time, maybe there would only be four. I was an optimist then.
I rolled into Sam's post foot the next kick, curling my bruised stomach into his sneaker as it struck, capturing his legs together at the ankles. Shrieking, I pulled him down. He fell badly. I threw a leg over, sat tall on his chest and hit him with a big rock I'd been laying on for the last thirty seconds. Then again. With each swing, his face opened wide, white skin over red flesh over white bone. Blood was flying everywhere, spattering my arms, shirt and the bean plants. My own bloody, muddy mucus hanging from my chin in long strings, dripped onto the little green alligator on Sam's shirt. Strange the things you focus on at times like this.
Guerrito piled into me, followed by all the other boys. Small fists rained down as I tried to cover my injured arm and rolled to the fetal position. I was giggling and sobbing and dry heaving and spitting dirt. Crazed, wounded. Sam was crying and saying he had to go home. The boys were pushing off of me, and then.... The sun was warm, the roto-tilled earth soft, the ants still mobile, tickling. I lay there a long time, trying to get hold of myself. It was time to pay the bill.
A long walk fifty yards or so to the house. Mom cleaned me up, told me to stop crying like a baby and wrapped my arm in an Ace bandage. Then she paddled my ass with a wooden spatula and sent me to my room to wait for dad to get home, when I'd get the proper whuppin.
I wasn't scared of a belt any more. It wasn't going to hurt more than what had already happened. The dread that a kid normally has when they must wait for a punishment was gone. Only rage, self-pity, and a sense of betrayal remained. I'd been sent out into the world with “turn the other cheek” as my only tool. That would never happen again. A promise, and with it, strange elation.
I could see Sam's face when I had come off the ground. His eyes were dumb and confused at first. When I hit him the second time, he was scared, frantic. In that instant, the tables turned, briefly and forever. That feeling stayed with me the rest of my life. It's the tiny black radioactive core that powers me, warms me, resolves me. This was what I was born for, this was what I was meant to do. No theological argument or academic interest would ever hold a candle to that sort of pain and power.
In time, this decision would cost me and a great many people a great many things. But I was six at the time, and learning my first life lesson. No matter the odds, the outcome, the rules, the commandments from on high, I could make the world bleed.
No gods, no masters.
Just us and these rocks, sunshine.
To offset the more serious post, I thought I'd throw in something a bit more narrative and fun. These stories are true, but composite. It didn't all happen the same day, not with all the people mentioned, and not in the same units and places. That said:
It's midnight on a Tuesday. I'm pleasantly drunk in a VFW, arguing politics with Doc and Malo. They're the only people in the unit who would rather do that than chase girls and fight the locals. Doc short, confident, prematurely bald and ugly as a gnome. Hilarious dude, a Napoleon of dick jokes. Malo black and huge, his big dumb face concealing a keen intellect and a first rate education. He speaks the Queen's English with a slight african accent and an aristocratic tone. Me rail-skinny, argumentative and mean. We're a strange looking group, but our military IDs buy us a quiet corner where we close it down, then start collecting our other guys. Pasco and Healy have struck out at the bars, and Po is hiding behind a gas station near the highway. He got in a fight and the cops are looking for him. We pick him up on our way out of Victorville. It's almost two hours back to base, and morning formation is at 0430. Our team leaders will kill us if we're not there by 0415, so we have barely enough time to get back.
I get about an hour of sleep on the ride. Malo drives, he's a bad muslim but doesn't drink. The gate guard wakes me up with his flashlight, checking the long line of cars snaking into the base in the dark early morning. We awkwardly change into our PT uniforms, lots of butts in faces if you want to imagine six drunk dudes getting changed in a moving Chevy Tahoe. Lots of commentary and propositioning. Ahh, the infantry. Gayest pack of straight dudes in the world.
Parked, we stagger out into the company area where the NCOs are already forming us up. We jog to our spot in the formation, our little group splitting. Doc to Headquarters, Malo to first squad, Pasco and Healy to Second and Po and I to Third. New guy, B team, Third squad, Third platoon (Dirty Third!). I'm at the end of the line, farthest from the NCOs. Po is one slot from the squad leader. I look down the line, and I see we weren't the only ones out on the town. The whole squad is swaying forward and back, everyone trying hard not to look as hammered as they are. The First Sergeant is walking out, but I can hear Sgt. Mac's vicious hiss: “I can smell you motherfuckers”.
We're all technically drunk on duty, a court martial offense. We're relying on the informal rule, which is that if we can gut out the morning PT, they won't breathalyze us. There's a thought to sharpen your mind on a cold desert morning. Fall out, and you'll be in the brig by lunch. And first Sar is looking pissed. He's not going to make it easy for us. Yup, he's leading PT personally, and we're running. Fuck my life.
At least I'm a strong runner. No weight to slow me down. I can run this company into the ground drunk or sober. If I'm in the brig, I won't be alone. I wonder if that would warm the guys up to me?
Three miles outside of base, I have a new problem. Somehow, I've hit the perfect level of intoxication, and am feeling no pain on this run. I do need to shit though, and that greasy bar food is not going to wait for this run to end. I spot my chance as we pass over a large culvert where the road crosses a wadi. I dive off the side, slide down the embankment. I can hear my team leader's startled yell behind me, but I'm already down to the culvert. It's dark, I crawl in and paint the walls brown.
No TP, no vegetation, and with this run, I'll probably need my socks. I rip the bottom off my PT shirt to wipe myself with, leaving me with a very fetching crop-top. The unit is hundreds of yards ahead now. I start making up the time, closing the distance. I come upon Healy who has fallen out and is struggling. He looks at me in surprise, “I thought you fell out?”. I grin as I come along side him, pointing to my midriff. “Needed a shit”. He laughs and quickens his pace a bit. We catch up the unit just before it's light enough for people to see us. Hernandez, my TL, is relieved, but I'll still probably catch some smoke later. There's much giggling, whistling and shit talk about my new fashion statement. For now, we're five miles from base, and we still have to run back. Six miles. Seven. Jesus, is first Sar gonna run us twenty miles? At seven and a half we turn back. Fifteen miles and I am flying. A third of the unit drops out, but they're all the family guys who weren't at the bars last night. The rest of us have to finish.
We form back up on the company area. First sergeant stares us down for a long minute before he releases us. I don't know if that's good or bad. From there, it's a sprint back to the barracks, quick shower, uniform of the day, then off to the chow hall, packed this time of the morning. I wolf down two quite good omelets, four very bad biscuits, and something they passed off as sausage gravy. Got fifty bucks says no pigs were harmed in the making of that product.
Back to formation, where we are sent to “PMCS the vehicles”, standard infantry code for “we don't have shit for you to do today, so check the oil on the lieutenant's vehicle for the eighth time this month”. But there are benefits. A pair of boots sticking out from under a vehicle won't raise suspicion, so I get a nice nap on the cool concrete as the outside temperature spikes. Supposed to hit a hundred and ten today, but it's barely hundred in the shade! Fuck Fort Irwin.
Hernandez kicks me awake, and gives me a perfunctory smoke session for dropping out of formation and damaging government property (my PT shirt). His heart's not in it, he doesn't care, but he has to be able to tell Mac that he did it so Mac can tell his boss, and so I do ten minutes of pushups. If that's all the worse I come out of this, it will be a fucking miracle. “Good job on the run” he says “go to lunch”. He can't come down on me too hard for drinking, I buy him beer. He's still only twenty.
For lunch I go back to my room and catch another nap. My roommate isn't there, but I can see the ants crawling under his bedroom door. Filthy fucker. How does he keep getting away with it? I get my room inspected weekly, Lacava has never been inspected. And he's supposedly in a strict company. I've put in for a different barracks room three times already, but they say nothing is available. This motherfucker has pizza stuck to the ceiling, rotting food and dirty clothes everywhere, his room stinks. You can smell it from the sidewalk. I should probably just kick his ass until he puts in for a transfer, but he's the only guy around smaller than me. Not a good look. And I'm new, no leverage, no real friends, no idea of the lay of the land. Might have to ruminate on that one.
Back to the motor pool. We're a light unit, so our platoon only has one vehicle. The PMCS took fifteen minutes back in the morning, but if we go back to the company, they'll find something even dumber for us to do. There's fifteen guys laying around, playing spades, napping, bullshitting. It's a great afternoon. The glories of the previous night are dissected in detail, lies are told, bullshit is called. I come in for a good bit of comedy about my shit-shirt that morning. I play it off, call them fags for getting all excited at a man's belly button. My timing is off, the jokes are flat. But soon enough it's someone else, Pasco getting grilled about that totally hot chick who supposedly blew him in the bathroom that no one else can remember seeing.
1600 the other units are leaving the motor pool, but Hernandez keeps us there. Our formation will be late today, he says, and he wants to see if we can steal some gear from other units' trucks. We find an unlocked victor two lines behind ours from some other unit and strip it bare. Seat cushions, pioneer gear, a donkey dick (long funnel) etc. We'll outfit our PL's vehicle and trade the surplus to other trucks, maybe even the guys we stole it all from. There's only one thief in the Army, the rest of us are just getting our shit back the saying goes....
Formation finally happens around seven, after several more hours of sitting around not doing shit. Infantry in garrison rarely have much to do. Our general work cycle is two weeks in the field doing training, then two short weeks in garrison punctuated by a three-day and a four-day weekend. Then back out to the field, ranges, gunnery etc. Once we get out of the field and get all our gear cleaned and turned in, it's bullshit details and “PMCS” to try to keep all those joes busy. For our part, we learn to stretch every job out as long as possible, because they're only going to find something else when you're done. The stories about hand-painting the gravel are true. When everything conceivable has been cleaned, mopped, polished and checked it's time to get creative.
The infantryman considers garrison to be basically one big weekend, which is why we've been drinking every night. This is not our job, this is the bullshit period before our job. There's nothing important to do, so we try to stay out of the way and enjoy ourselves as much as possible. We'll be sleeping in the dirt again soon enough. There will be no bars, no girls, not even the indifferent but at least hot chow hall slop. I'm gonna miss those omelets.
I get pulled aside at formation, everyone else goes home. Hernandez, Mac and I have to report to the First Sergeant. Just for scale, I'm a boot PFC, Hernandez is my team leader, my daily boss. His boss is Mac, the squad leader. Mac is the Hand of God, and the First Sergeant is his bosses' boss. Literally the Almighty Himself. I do not want to be here, this will not be good. I'm worried about jail, but it turns out someone has finally complained about my roommate. Which means they complained about me. Mac and Hernandez get interrogated about how often they inspect my room. Because Lacava isn't their soldier, they can't touch him, so they say nothing about that part. They do hedge a bit because I've built a recording studio in my closet. I checked the regs and it's technically legal, but first Sar needs a reason to be angry and that's it. He's getting complaints that his soldiers have dirty rooms, so someone is gonna suffer and that someone is apparently me.
The three of them march me over to the barracks and wait outside while I pull every scrap out of my room and lay it out on the sidewalk. Bed, cabinet, clothes, everything. It takes hours. I have to disassemble the bed and cabinet, reassemble them outside, clean the room. The boys are headed back out, they're clowning me, asking if I want to pop down to San Bernardino for a quick one. I give them both fingers and keep working. The cleaning is easy because my room was already clean. My only consolation is Lacava doing the same thing a few yards away. His NCOs ain't saying shit. Now that we're all here, it's pretty obvious who has the problem, and who is just a weirdo. I re-disassemble the furniture, and move back into my own barracks room. It's midnight by the time I finish, twenty-four hours in the life of an infantryman.
Mac and Hernandez have had to sit there and watch me all night. They didn't get to go home, have dinner, see their families. They'll be pissed about that, but hopefully they understand.
In the morning, I'm going to kick Lacava's ass.
We live in a country of 350 million people. At any given time, around 1.2 million people serve in the military, or about a third of a percent of the general population. Of that third of a percent, the "tooth to tail" ratio is 8:1 (150k), but "tooth" is combat arms which includes artillery, tankers, cav, engineers etc. Even within the Infantry there are mortarmen, mechanized, anti-tank squads etc. It's hard to say for certain, but the number of dudes in the military whose job it is to kick the doors and shoot the faces is likely no more than 50k at a given time. Of that, only a minority will deploy and a minority of those see combat. In the twenty years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has awarded right about 77k CIBs and 47k Purple Hearts out of 2-3 million total deployed over that time. Obviously, there is some overlap between those awards.
For the uninitiated, the Combat Infantryman Badge is intended to identify those members of the infantry who have actually "close(d) with and destroy the enemy with direct fires.", and the PH is known colloquially as the Enemy Marksmanship Badge. But there are some caveats. For reasons I will explain, the numbers we pull from awards like this are likely a high-end estimate, rather than a minimum, but counting the Marine 0300s and whoever all else could push the numbers up a bit.
The CIB is awarded at the company level, and only in the Army. This means if one dude in an infantry company (~100 men) gets in a firefight, the whole company gets their CIB. Much of the fighting these days is very small unit engagements, so it is quite common for only a few squads or teams in a CIB company to have actually seen the combat. OTOH, more people than infantry get into shooting scrapes, I know a couple cooks with multiple engagements just because they used to volunteer to fill out patrols that were short on people. Given the nature of the conflict, a lot of people who weren't infantry, or even combat arms have seen combat. However, if they do, it's usually because of bad luck or the military ran out of infantry to do that job. It's impossible to say definitively given the data available to me at the moment, but I very much doubt the total number exceeds the number of infantrymen with CIBs. Lots of cav guys saw action as route security, lots of random MOS people got blown up en route or pressed into some role they weren't trained for. But the guys who do the job day in and day out of locating, fixing and killing the enemy is a rather select group.
So too the Purple Heart has gone to a lot of people who don't do that sort of job. Mortars dropped into a FOB can hit anyone, and roadside IEDs don't care if you're on the road to take water to an outpost or heading out on a raid. But they are more common among the people who are in the most dangerous situations more regularly.
Let's bring it all those numbers and assumptions together for a moment, because I'm describing a group of people who are very, very abnormal, and very far out on the distribution tail of the violence bell curve. Let's round up to make the math easy and account for POGs and Marines and call it a hundred thousand men over twenty years (and yes, to the closest approximation, it is all men). It's three ten thousandths of one percent of the general population. That's the high estimate, the real number could be significantly lower still. And the number who deploy multiple times is much, much lower.
When American foreign policy decides some poor dirt farmers on the other side of the globe need some freedom in their lives, maybe one ten thousandth of one percent of the population is who gets sent to do the actual violence of empire. I am one of those men. I have a CIB and a purple heart. Within the rarified community of professional actual soldiers, I am a small fish in a tiny pond. I was not special forces (or, technically I was briefly, but not really). I was a reasonably high-speed infantryman with a penchant for guns who worked himself into a sniper platoon in a fairly trash unit. I made sergeant, ate an IED and got med-boarded out of the military. A short, somewhat spicy but relatively unremarkable military career for an infantryman.
Much of what the general public hears about combat, even "first hand accounts" is not from people who actually do this job. As I have hopefully established, this is a very small, very highly selected and very abnormal group of people. Most of what you read ore hear in war accounts is from the middle classes, which in the military means officers. Officers are not soldiers. They are managers of soldiers. During conscription, it was at least possible for a southern gentleman of letters like Eugene Sledge or a Junker scion like Junger to write an account of actual enlisted combat, if unlikely. In today's volunteer military, this is almost never the case. The venn diagram of actual front-line soldiers and people who can write competently in an educated manner for general consumption is essentially two separate circles. These are not generally guys with college degrees, because if they had one they'd be an officer. There are exceptions, but we'll perhaps get into that at another time.
This hopefully will go some way to explaining my arrogance in writing about the topic. IQ and violent tendencies tend to be negatively correlated, and I am way out on the right tail of of the distribution on both. If that seems self-aggrandizing, rest assured that neither has done me any good.
So who are these men? Who carries the torch of empire into the barbarian wastes of the Korangel? Who sits behind the machine gun of a HMMWV? Who donkey-kicks the doors off their hinges and plunges into the black interior following the blinding light of his Surefire? Who sits in a ditch for three days waiting to shoot a retarded teenager whose dad got paid $200 to have him drop an IED in a pothole?
In short, they're degens. Poor and working class kids, half of which aren't old enough to buy beer. Mostly rural whites and hispanics. Roughly a quarter are from Texas alone. The South more generally provides well over half, maybe two thirds of the total. Most of the rest are from the Midwest and West. They self select. These are guys who asked to be in the Infantry, and survived the training and indoc. Nobody winds up on the pointy end of the spear by accident. It's the worst job in the military, so the people who volunteer for it are driven by very different considerations to most. It's also the highest status within the violence hierarchy.
It's a weird group. There's a lot of immigrants, not all of them hispanic. A surprising number of professional soldiers from other countries come to the US just for the action. If you're just itching for a fight but are born somewhere too peaceful, coming to the US will greatly increase your likelihood of getting into the shit. I've met British Marines, African princes, a German seminarian who dropped out to join the US infantry. There's some tiny minority communities that are heavily overrepresented though still small in total numbers, like Native Americans, the Samoans, the Hmong and the Sikhs. East asians are rare, and black Americans, while overrepresented in the military generally, are underrepresented in this part but still common.
We are united by a few characteristics, most generally the privileging of suffering as a badge of honor, physical violence, and a death wish. One does not join the Infantry to live a quiet life to a ripe old age. Mostly, I think we want to fuck around and find out. Like the movie says, how much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight? I had a lot of reasons for joining up, but I think the most basic was a desire to test myself and find out if I had what it took to face another man in mortal combat. To "see the elephant", or any of the other thousand euphemisms we use for fighting and killing our fellow men. To take the ultimate risk.
A recruit can get all the benefits of military service in a safer and more sustainable career. The infantry chews up men, minds and bodies, training alone eliminates hundreds of thousands. A twenty-five year old infantryman is probably middle management, a thirty-year old is probably out of the field as a platoon sergeant. The incessant road marching ruins feet, ankles and knees. The heavy packs wreck spines and shoulders. The heat, cold, wet and sleep deprivation cull the sensitive and the civilized. The social aggression removes the timid and the hazing removes the bitches.
There's an old glib saying that captures the esprit of the group. "The cowards never started and the weak quit along the way. That just leaves us.".
As a composite character, I give you the US infantryman. He is nineteen or twenty years old, grew up in a trailer park, has a kid or two with women he's not married to, is married to a woman with kids that are not his. He'll be divorced in a year. His family are construction workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail workers, garbage collectors, heavy machine operators, drug dealers, petty criminals, major criminals. He is dumber than average, hated school, has never read a book not assigned in class. He's been in jail multiple times, and probably will be again, mostly for low level stuff like underage drinking, vandalism and fighting. He binge drinks and smokes when in garrison, dips in the field. He gets in fistfights on a regular but extended basis with members of his own unit, in group conflict with other units, or with civilians on liberty. His politics, if he has any, are somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan. He drives a pickup truck, a Mustang, or a heavily riced-out import and is dead broke most of the time. He is, in short, perilously close to the underclass of our society, and there's a lot of crossover. His life is boredom, fear, pain and the brotherhood of those who live in fear and pain. His values are foreign, rude and frightening to those not of his group.
He is the world elite of the violent class. The modern equivalent of a knight, loaded down with many years' wages' worth of technology, weapons and armor. Far better trained, supplied and equipped than his adversaries. The big stick that the world hegemon swings in the anarchic world of international politics. The very tip of the spear. The point of empire.
In our modern peaceful society, that point has become very fine indeed.
A couple people had expressed interest in this topic, and I have a bit of extra time for a couple days, so here goes:
Bona fides: I am a former infantry NCO and sniper, hunter, competitive shooter, reloader, hobby gunsmith, sometimes firearms trainer and currently work in a gun shop, mostly on the paperwork/compliance side. Back in the day, was a qualified expert with every standard small arm in the US inventory circa 2003 (M2, 4, 9, 16, 19, 249, 240B, 21, 24, 82 etc.), and today hang around the 75th percentile of USPSA classifications. I've shot Cap-and-Ball, Trap and Sporting Clays badly; Bullseye and PRS somewhat better and IDPA/USPSA/UML/Two-gun with some local success. Been active in the 2A community since the mid-90s, got my first instructor cert in high school, and have held a CPL for almost twenty years now.
I certainly don't claim to be an expert in every aspect of firearms, there's huge areas that escape my knowledge base, but if you've got questions I'll do my best to answer.
Technical questions
Gun control proposals for feasibility
Industry
Training
Wacky opinions
General geekery
Some competition links (not my own) just for the interested.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=U5IhsWamaLY&t=173
https://youtube.com/watch?v=93nEEINflXE
https://youtube.com/watch?v=utcky0zq10E