War Machine

**Authors Note**
This was written in 2005 over a many glasses of whiskey on napkins at the end of an old wooden bar. I was angry and bitter when this was written. I am transcribing word from the front and back of seven bar napkins. It was written as an open letter to the government and as a tool to decipher the source of this unquenchable anger that plagued my life had sprouted.

The great parasites of the American Spirit are the black hole of bureaucratic minds. They are identity theft professionals. In nine short weeks you can be reborn into a certified killer. Nine weeks can kill.

The amazing war machine, champions of Romanist capitalist driven manifest destiny. Who have we become? Who have I become? When do you lose your identity as a killer? You can’t shed your will/urge to kill so simply when you leave the AO. Every day you are barraged with images of people and places that should suffer the same fate as I witnessed, jaw to floor, as million dollar bombs rained on Fallujah. Is it wrong to want to fly to a place like Darfur armed to the teeth unleashing the instilled pre-programmed fury a once innocent, pacifistic young man would have frowned upon a matter of years ago? A boy who never trusted the government becomes a tool for destruction, a reaper of death. Awarded and Forgotten. A machine left to rot by it’s programmers. A pit bull trained to kill now chained to a fence. I was not to suffer the loss of life or limb, I was to suffer the loss of innocence.

Smell these burning bodies? Well you should, Fuck You! The killer instinct doesn’t quite leave you, it broods, it multiplies and is an addiction. You become that person you see in movies, glazed eyes, desensitized. You hate yourself for it, but the urge doesn’t leave. I am a killer of men. I used to be someone else. I am still someone else, but like vampires you taste blood and it is yours, you own it. I went to war at 24. I left at 40…13 months later.

When I arrived in Tikrit at FOB Danger we were first attached to the Alabama National Guardto provide communications support. My third day there I got my first combat experience. We were attacked for a week straight with rockets and mortars. Later, as the First Infantry Division began to take more of a combat role in the territory I was tasked to ride in a Humvee turret with a .762 M240B machine gun that sprayed bullets faster than water from a hose. My first patrol outside the wire the Humvee close to a half click in front of me was struck by a 125 meter shell. To my knowledge the driver and the passenger behind the driver were killed instantaneously. In an immense cloud of smoke, dust and debris my Humvee struck the back of what was left of their incapacitated truck. My head jolted forward upon impact forcing my head into the turret with such force that I have a hard time recalling the brief ensuing firefight. I recall letting off three to five bursts with the mounted machine gun. I don’t know what or who we were firing at I just followed the tracers from the other soldier’s weapons, but I prayed that each bullet fired found the soft skin of a human being. When we had finally received Stryker support from a nearby firebase all a perimeter was secured and the casualties were cas-evaced (casualty evacuated by chopper), the First Sergeant from the 101st Army Intelligence who we happened to be escorting debriefed us. When we safely returned to base I remember him saying “welcome to the circus.” This 64 year old, old army, hard as nails top sarge, was a rat hole grunt in Vietnam, The real fucking deal. He survived two tours of scurrying trenches and killing whatever crawled out of those holes with a 9mm in his hand and a knife in his teeth. When I lay in my cot in the CSH or CASH (combat support hospital) I thought to myself “He still has that urge in his blood at 64, I was 24. I certainly felt like part of the circus.

“What makes the grass grow?” they would ask, “BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD,” we would respond. We’d yell this over and over in training…and the grass certainly grew but not in the shrub and sandy desert where we were fighting. Weeds sprouted and my heart became wrapped with red thorny vines. Those thorns sting and those thorns hate. Those thorns aren’t removed easily. They stick to your heart and drain your blood, drain your humanity and pump hate through your body, pump oil through to your country. At month eight I was pumping pure ice though my extremities. If it’s a possible threat, in anybody’s anger clouded mind kill. Make the grass grow.
So what’s my future? Will I be that 64 year old booney rat still ringside at the circus? Admittedly, there is a strong draw to be in it ringside. I sit awake at night sometimes and dream of going back over M240B locked and loaded waiting to unleash my war machine on those who don’t believe our imperialistic faux democratic society is God’s will. Not their God but ours is the best. Fucking kill for money, we’re mercenaries in a supposed “war”. Trained killers used for the expansion of western beliefs, we are the champions of humanity killing kids for a Starbucks in downtown Baghdad.

For every innocent woman and child who were bombed into bloody stinking masses of flesh I can put a dollar in my gas tank. Thanks Bush, thanks Cheney, Rumsfeld, Halliburton… Keep up the good work. Keep teaching our children the world is their oyster and if they don’t like oysters then take the pearls and toss the shell. Stick to your fucking guns!
We are the dominant war machine, we will take what’s yours and they will own our minds. I will dream of blood, picking up arms and legs til my deathbed. I will taste that blood on my gritty rotting teeth until I cant remember, until I do myself in. I want back in… What d’ya say, does the war machine got room?

In the end will there be a winner? There is such a sickness in this humanity, an incurable infection, that threatens to decimate all that is good, all that is pure. We are all losers here. We’ve made the compromise there is no going back. There is an old talking blues song by Bob Dylan “Talking World War Three”, that was over forty years ago and, damnit, were still talking World War III. Its just now, the stakes have raised. Dylan didn’t know the nuclear threat that would arise or the emergence of a new breed of killer raised on video games designed to desensitize and train our youth. A new breed of volunteer mercenaries grounded in belief that the United States still stood for all that was good and righteous in this decaying world. I bought in too.

I joined before the war started. I was in Korea in 2003. One month after my transfer stateside I was told to gear up. I was fucking pumped. Like a lawyer whose just passed the bar after six years of school and gets to try his first case. The fucking big show! I was ready to practice my art even if that art was putting a thousand rounds per minute down range. Any man is intrigued by the chance to test his manhood. If he is not then he is scared to be a man. But is killing the making of a man or a machine?

**The next napkin is written heavy handed and heatedly and concluded the thoughts of the night**

FUCK WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY! YOU DON’T KNOW SHIT! Smell a burning child, beyond dead, eyes burnt out of skull, feel the crackle of burnt skin and bone through your gloves as you toss the small frame in an OD green body bag. Then tell me you understand!

Breaking a man down is hard
Buillding him back up is easier
I remain broken
A soul blackened
Searching for light
Looking for the white
In a sea of black

Post Script 06JUN10:
It’s been five years since I wrote this and though my anger and frustration have somewhat quelled, simply writing these same words that I wrote in that bar brings back surges of frustration and confusion. Would I do it all over again? I can’t answer that yet, but I do know myself more intimately and I know the senseless depravity in the soul of man.

Chuck Ragan

Simple back beats seem to sooth me
If I could hold them I would let sing take some rest as if not wicked
walk around enjoying silence
A world away, elders gather
begin their tongues and hardly falter
Words of fun, joy and grievance
Simple songs, work and penance

Drowning like a stone
or a path overgrown n
ever lie away
so for goodness sake

down the road deer are crossing
the grass is greener where they're walking
rattling beast and heavy movement
mark them now son before we lose
them bear your arms ever so wisely
burn them all if you have no need
dress to kill but kill so kindly
hollow hearts to weak and weary

Drowning like a stone
or a path overgrown
never lie away so for goodness sake

now call me crazy
but all the old ways of living simple are simply fading
and all we buy is time before we die
lay on down sense of how

A wise old friend recently told me
"An idle mind is the devils playpen"
Mind the gaps and watch them closely
Spread the love but choose your friends wisely
Love yourself to love your family
And find the difference between wants and needs
Be sure to stop and count your blessings
Smell the roses and fight for something

To drawn hate like a stone
And walk the path overgrown
Never to lay awake
And if so for goodness sake
Now call me crazy but all the old ways
Of living simple are simply fading
All we buy is time before we di
And lay on down desensitized.