All Hail Willy! That Bastard! pt. 2 (of 3?)

I came to school early on Monday. As students started to show up, the buzz began. "Oh my heck! Do you have one of these in your locker? Read this part!" By the time everyone was there, minutes before the bell for the first class was to ring, the school was in a state of complete pandemonium. Like an amorous pyromaniac admiring his work, I walked up and down the halls and took it all in. A few teachers were running up and down the halls, trying to collect as many of the illicit newspapers as possible. There was shock and disgust, there was laughter, there was speculation on the identities of the authors. (I go back and read the original copy of The Muckraker every few years and just so you know, it was utter crap. Words I wish I would have known when I wrote "Happy Harry Hard-On's Horny Horoscope": copulation, fellatio, cunnilingus, tribadism, Gräfenberg.)

I only made it through the first fifteen or twenty minutes of first period before I was pulled out by the vice principal who was the attendance enforcer and the butt of most the jokes in the newspaper. His name was Mr. Long, a man ironically named, I surmised publicly. He was former Army and a total stress case. He made it very clear to me, once we were alone, at our most excellent moment together, that he wanted desperately to kick the living shit outta me and that Mrs. Long could attest to the fact that his name was not an oxymoron. I later found out that he would mow his lawn every single day to relieve his tension. Apparently it didn't work because he died of a stress-related heart attack a few years later. He was not old. I wish I could have a beer with him now.

So how did they catch us? I covered every base. Except one. Or maybe two. No matter the lengths I went to to hide our identities, I couldn't disguise my writing style. The English department most likely sang in unison like a Greek chorus, "JASON DID IT!" Once they determined that it was me, and therefore Heather as well, they took us both separately and told us that the other one already admitted to the deed. Heather took the bait, and just said, "Yeah, I did do it and I'm glad I did! Fuck you!" I held out for about an hour, but now that Heather really did admit it, and the fact that the lady who ran the computer lab could corroborate that she had seen me print out one of the pages (drat! foiled!), I knew I was screwed. (I had to go to her to retrieve a page I printed and she looked offended by its content. I remember explaining to her that I was writing an essay for an "adult" magazine. I was eighteen! I was an adult! It's possible I could have been a contributor to an adult publication, right? It was a pathetic explanation.) So I folded and admitted to it.

The fallout from The Muckraker was pretty extensive. I think I had anticipated the general reaction at the school fairly accurately. I was condemned by one of my English teachers for not putting my name to my work, calling it a cowardly thing to do. In a sense, she was correct, but like I said before, I wanted to be heard, the way a suicide bomber wants to be heard, and this approach worked far better than any other. Besides, it was much funnier and a lot more exciting to go the route of typewriter terrorist. The seminary teachers advised their students to not read it. You know you've hit the big time when local religious leaders devote time to speaking out against your work. I egotistically imagined that it was a spiritual triage situation for them. A lot of people thought it was funny, a lot of people thought it was in collossally bad taste. I think they were both basically right. My mom, in a state of anguish, wrote a letter to my biological father in New York, essentially blaming him for my transgression. She sent him a copy of the paper, as if to show him the product of all the bad parts of his genetic contribution to his wayward son.

The one thing that I didn't plan on was the reaction the students' parents would have. That's where things got complicated. I really didn't plan on any of the chaos leaving the school. In addition to the newspaper mess, I had recently been arrested on two counts of criminal mischief for exploding two mailboxes with dry ice bombs. My dad, Jim, had opened a letter he found in our mailbox that I had written to George, my dad in New York, where I bragged about the deeds, so he ratted me out to the cops. One mailbox was a random act of violence and the other belonged to Heather's ex-boyfriend, my ex-best friend. When the detective came to my house and read me my rights, I couldn't help but giggle. One more thing I could scratch off my list of archetypically lurid things to do before I died: being Mirandized.

I don't mean to get sidetracked with more stories about me behaving badly, so let me just establish that because of this dry-ice bomb thing I had already become fairly well acquainted with the attorney for Murray city.

When my court date came, the city attorney and I were waiting outside the courtroom and he told me he had heard about the Muckraker. This sorta shocked me, that it had gotten as far as him. He tried to argue how my characterizing the attendance policy as the love-child of Hitler and Stalin was inaccurate in terms of political theory. I used the pseudonym Holden Caulfield for some of the articles and he argued how he thought Franny and Zooey was better than Catcher in the Rye and would have been more appropriate to reference. He wanted to articulate how he thought my message was flawed. But what I couldn't get across to him was that there wasn't really a rational message, just the simple fact that it blowed up real good. (Ha! Heavy-handed metaphor!)

But then he told me that there were four separate parties who were putting "political pressure" on the city to prosecute me for various things like libel and lewdness or whatever. He told me he didn't think it was much of a case, that if someone wanted to sue me they would do it themselves and not ask the city to do it, and he said outright that he didn't want to pursue any of it. But he told me I could discuss this with the judge. I was preplexed and a bit overwhelmed. Sue me? Discuss it with the judge? Jesus, I never thought it would go this far.

Judge Burton happened to be one of my classmate's father and was part of the local Stake High Council. In Mormon-speak, this meant that he was part of the church leadership in my area. He knew my dad and thought well of him. (note: I refer to both my dads as "my dad", but I address Jim of Salt Lake as "dad" and George of New York as "George".) My case number was called and I stood before the man. We discussed what I did and I pretty much spilled my guts about it. I never had a chance to get my story straight with Heather or the others involved before the detective questioned us, so I let the truth set me free. So to speak. Then the judge brought up the Muckraker incident. I wasn't sure that this was appropriate, but who was I to say anything? He basically repeated what the city attorney had already told me. At some point I think I explained that I needed to resolve my current legal problems and get a high school diploma so I could leave for Infantry school. Then the judge asked me about my dad, I guess to be friendly. I told him we didn't get along. I had to be honest, I mean, I was under oath, right? He asked me why. I said, "We have a difference of religion. He thinks he's god and I disagree." I didn't come up with that joke up, but the judge thought it was hilarious. My dad's religious zeal was well known. That was when the judge told me something I'll never forget. He said, "I like you, Jason. So we'll make you a deal. The city will agree to dismiss the charges against you and not pursue any further charges in regards to the newspaper incident, if you agree to leave town." Leave town??? WTF? Are you kidding me? That's all? I wasn't sure how any of this was appropriate or even legal, but I loved the Old West feel to it. Leave town. Classic. The judge spit on his palm, and I spit on mine, and we shook. Then I saddled up, lit a cigarette, gave him and the city attorney an acknowledging tip of my hat and I rode off into the Utah desert sunset, the town mortician wringing his hands.

I took a geography class through an adult education center which got me residency in another school district. The superintendent of this district said he would back me up if I wanted to go the whole ACLU route and fight to get my diploma through my own district, but by this time I just wanted to take the path of least resistance, Heather even moreso because this wasn't really her fight to begin with. This could have been a sensational battle, but my priority was the Army and Heather's priority was college. I paid the fine, got a letter from Granite school district stating that I would "graduate" through Hunter High School with the class of '93, and a few months later I was on my way to Fort Benning, Georgia.

The End.

The whole reason I've shared this story with you now is because I recently recounted it (in a more abbreviated format) to Cesar, the newest member of my team, along with the story about how our commander made me take this blog off the internet. I figured he'd be able to identify with it and I wanted him to know that I could empathize with his current situation intimately.

Before I explain Cesar's little imbroglio and how he came to join my team, I think it's time that I got you up to speed in regards to my squad.

When we originally deployed, our squad leader was Chris, a New York cop and an outgoing former Army Ranger. I've said this before, but Chris is like a blonde with big tits-- he's like the hottest girl in school and pretty much acts as our idol. I know this sounds like a grotesque amount of ass-kissing, but it's the best way to explain it. He's just a really good soldier with a lot of experience and training under his belt. When he was our squad leader, we were the best squad in the company. In reality our squad was completely average, he just made us look really good. He's long since left the squad to lead the company's sniper section. He's in a position now where he arguably is more of an asset to the company than he ever could have been with a regular squad, but truth be told, our squad never survived his departure.

Our new squad leader is Stan, or "Whiskey" as we call him, a really easy going guy. Whiskey is a very decent squad leader, but he's not part of the inner conclave of the platoon leadership, so he's commonly out of the loop on information and planning. This sucks because this means the squad team leaders, myself and Kirk, are usually left out of the loop as well. Whiskey's capacity for sleep is unrivaled and he spends most his free waking time watching the same DVDs over and over again. He's literally turned this deployment into an extended vacation for himself, it's remarkable. But don't get me wrong, he's not complacent, he plays by the rules and is a hard worker and his amiable attitude makes for a much less stressful work environment, it's just that our platoon is run by an unspoken social structure that he is not a part of. I can't say I blame him, I'm not a part of that structure either, but he was doomed from the get-go, having to fill Chris' shoes.

Since Chris' exodus, our squad has become a revolving door for soldiers. Take alpha team: Joel, one of our original members, left when he became the company medic. Cola, the guy who replaced Joel, later joined the sniper section with Chris. Cola was then replaced by J.O.B., a big Irish lug of a guy who, unfortunately, is now the butt of most the squad's jokes, some of which he deserves, some of which he doesn't. The other two members of alpha team are Anthony and Juan, two soldiers from my original company who I've known for years. They are led by Kirk, an excitable firefighter from the Bronx, who uses the term "big titties" at least five times a day. Kirk has attention deficit disorder so badly that it's virtually impossible to have a conversation with him about anything for more than six seconds, unless it's about sex, preferably including the phrase "big titties" at least every other sentence. Here's a fictitious but plausible conversation:

--"Hey, J, who's that package you got from?"
--"Just from a friend of mine, this girl I know in New Paltz."
--"Oh yeah? Were you fuckin' her? Does she have big titties?"
--"What? Dude, she's married and I'm friends with her husb--"
--"Oh yeah? I love big titties. I was chatting with this girl online last night-- damn, she had", he then pauses for a split-second to reflect, "BIG TITTIES! They were like," he bites his lower lip and cups his hands out in front of his chest in mock mammalia, "bam! OUT there, and shit! I was like, YEAH!"

Kirk is like the unapologetically two-dimensional co-starring character from your typical romantic comedy who acts as foil to the protagonist. As human beings go, he's a study done during God's drunken ham-fisted chiaroscuro period. On one side, he's incredibly caustic: he's rude as hell to all Iraqis and won't hesitate to put a barrel in the face of anyone with a name he can't pronounce, he loves to yell for yelling's sake and becomes legendarily ecstatic with assumed rage anytime he finds any garbage or clutter in our living area, and he generally treats lower-ranked troops with totally unwarranted disdain and contempt. His preoccupations with sex, big titties, and homophobia are near-pathological. But the other side of this prurient and churlish brute is he has a very genuine nature and can be unassumingly affectionate, friendly, and inclusive. With Kirk you always know what you're getting. He's completely free of guile and utterly upfront with everyone. His loyalty and forthrightness are like that of a dog you've had since you were five (who seems to never get tired of viciously barking at everything one moment, then the next, chasing his own tail and humping all your friends' legs).

Originally, bravo team, the team I lead, had as the SAW gunner a young kid named Eric. He had a bad reputation with his original company for being a bit of a shitbag. He seemed to me to be somewhat unfairly picked on and I believed I could easily rehabilitate him. He was egotistical and self-assured and ultimately turned out to be a defeatist shitbag. Somehow he managed to catch hemophilia during training and get tagged as non-deployable. Before you tell me how hemophilia is not contagious, understand that he was borderline enough to enlist but was able to use his condition as an out when it suited him. I tried really hard with this kid and he made an ass of me. I tried to be understanding but all it did was give me a reputation for being soft. Throughout training he was having trouble with his unfaithful teenage fiancé and wanted nothing more than to not deploy. But the song he sang was all about how badly he wanted to go into combat with his team and never let us down. Everyone told me I was wasting my time trying to help him and I hate that they proved me right. He was completely salvageable and could have been an excellent soldier, but his priorities were elsewhere. Note to future soldiers: get your priorities straight before you join the Army. Your job is to fight, usually far away from your nubile girlfriend, and if that doesn't work for you, don't fucking enlist. Oh, and don't count on her being faithful either. You won't be, so why do you expect her to be?

Eric was replaced by Orlando, another guy I've known for years. Orlando has been in the Army for over twenty years and is one of these guys who always seems to be in a good mood. I love this guy. He likes to watch I Love Lucy DVDs and has a collection of animated Disney and Disney-esque DVDs that would make your kids jealous. He's also a guy you can always count on to bring porn to the field. He's not the most articulate guy, but his heart is in the right place, something that goes a long way with me. The thing that most guys don't know about Orlando is how he used to be a real badass back in his days growing up in the Lower East Side. Orlando has been in the Army for over twenty years now and was recently promoted to Sergeant. Normally, you need to be in a Sergeant slot to get the promotion, but his promotion was one of the kind where you just get promoted because you've been in the military for so long, or something like that. I have no idea how this is possible, but regardless, my SAW gunner is the same rank as me.

One of my riflemen is Matt. He looks a lot like me, tall and thin, brown hair and eyes, and he is a paramedic in Poughkeepsie in real life. (I am not a paramedic in real life. But I have played doctor a few times.) Matt is intelligent and level-headed and his medical skills are an invaluable (and comforting) asset. But he's former Air Force and has a real penchant for doing his own thing while flaunting his disdain for military regulations, particularly about the wear of the uniform (such as having the pockets removed from the front of his blouse and sewn onto the arms like some fucking Delta Force operative). I'd say that Matt is an exceptional soldier other than the fact that he doesn't know his place. He has single-handedly made a good part of this deployment utterly miserable for me with his condescending self-importance and self-righteousness. I've tried reasoning with him and I've tried smoking him. But he still manages to act like he's a five-star general by always having his hands in everything: he attends op-orders, he automatically makes himself the platoon spokesman any time we meet other units while out on missions, the way he wears his uniform and gear make him look like he's in the Special Forces insofar that he's even managed to con the First Sergeant into giving him his 9mm Beretta. And he gets away with it because he's part of the good ole boy club where people like the Platoon Sergeant are referred to as "Mike". In this regard, he's a team leader's nightmare. But despite how much his attitude infuriates me and how much he undermines my authority and the chain of command in general, I really can't see the point in spending much energy to make him stop trying to be an effective soldier. If I really wanted to, I could squash this behavior altogether (at least that's what I tell myself), but I'd rather have my energy and his energy spent with more productive activities than infighting, so I permit most of it, despite how much he sometimes makes me want to pull all my hair out.

Up until a few weeks ago, Dan was a rifleman on my team, but he has since been promoted to Sergeant and is now a team leader in another squad. Eric and I used to mockingly but affectionately refer to Dan as the "infantry wizard" because of how much knowledge he has about being an infantryman. But he was accustomed to acting as a team leader and resented that he had to be led by someone less experienced than him. This made my job very difficult because he is one of the grumpiest people I've ever known. He would tend to make it his job to show me up or correct me publicly whenever possible. In the Army they call this "sharpshooting". He and I had a talk about this early on at Fort Drum and he slowly got better about it. Now that he's finally an NCO, his demeanor is remarkably more amiable. He strikes me as a bit bipolar. When he's in a good mood, he's one of my favorite people to be around. He's a bit of a geek about things, like I am, and he loves to tinker and figure stuff out and we've had a lot of really good conversations. He's incredibly observant and resourceful and has a natural talent for soldiering. But when he's grumpy, he's like a troll. The fact that he's short with a really broad build only adds to his trollness. His gait is even a bit Cro-Magnonal. Were it a few hundred years ago, he would most likely carry a battle axe and have a long braided beard.

I'm not going to bother telling you about me, the oh-so-glorious bravo team leader, because you if don't already know me better than most your own family, you haven't really been reading a single word I've written.

And this brings us to Cesar. Cesar's always reminded me of the chicken in the Loony Toon cartoons who insisted he was a chicken hawk. ("I'm not a chicken! I'm a chicken hawk!") He's a diminutive Dominican firecracker who walks with his elbows back and chest puffed like a red-breasted robin trying to attract a mate. When he first came to our unit in the city, he was barely seventeen and had an arrogance and bravado that only the Napoleonic can achieve. He made his distaste for Caucasians readily known and directed a lot of his contempt toward me. (This was back when Willy and I were the only white soldiers in our company.) He was an E-1 at the time and I was an E-4. The first time I ever had to pull rank and put a soldier in his place was with Cesar. But that was a long time ago and he's since grown immeasurably, due largely in part to having Willy as his team leader.

Up until the point where Cesar joined my team, he's been in third platoon as Willy's SAW gunner and protégé. Cesar's development has been rapid and noticeable. All the hard work and tough love of turning him into a soldier from the unruly little fucker that he was less than a year ago is something that I think Willy can be really proud of. I'm stoked as hell to finally have a soldier who is both worth a damn and can follow instructions. I don't really deserve him, I'm just riding Willy's coat tails on having developed a good troop.

Willy's and Cesar's Platoon Sergeant was also our Platoon Sergeant back in our home unit in the city. He's a Black city cop with an Italian first name and an Irish last name whose best talent is his ability to employ his argumentative and combative nature to get what he wants through coercion. Think Denzel Washington's character in Training Day, but played by someone who looks like Wesley Snipes. His resemblence to Snipes is so uncanny in fact that we've taken to calling him "Daywalker" behind his back. His bullheadedness is unrivaled only to Willy's. Between Willy's bull head, my smart mouth, and our utter inseparability, Willy and I were Public Enemies Number One with Daywalker back in the city. Before we deployed, a drill never went by where we weren't being disciplined for some pedestrian offense by this guy, usually in the form of him publicly pulling us aside or into his office for a private ass-chewing. There was a point while I was living in the city where my life had turned into a formulaically bad sitcom and a major component of it was being like a duo of cavalier cops with the stereotypical Black police chief who was always yelling at us, "GET IN MY OFFICE YOU TWO! I WANNA HAVE A TALK WITH YOU NOW!".

Daywalker's grudge against Willy didn't diminish a bit just because I wasn't with him anymore. And once chicken hawk Cesar got added to the mix, things really started to simmer in their platoon. Willy has already gotten four counseling statements since the deployment began, not to mention countless verbal confrontations. And the attitudes are not just Willy's and Cesar's. Almost everyone in their platoon now has an ax or two to grind with the guy. But Cesar had had enough and decided to put his manuscript where his mouth is.

On the Third Platoon white board Daywalker found taped a letter addressed to him from "a soldier". In it was a list of his deficiencies that read like a cargo manifest. After two hand-written pages of being slapped in the face with the journalistic equivalent of John Holmes' cock, the real stinger was the last line, a reminder that we all know his original MOS and that at his core he'll always be a pogue, probably the most subtle but egregious of insults against a grunt: "To us, you'll always be Supply."

This of course warranted a witch hunt in Third Platoon. Daywalker interviewed each soldier individually. Cesar eventually admitted to it without too much arm-twisting. My guess is he really wanted him to know he did it, in that Jack-Nicholson-in-A-Few-Good-Men kind of way. ("Did you order the code red!" "YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!!!")

Justice was swift. An Article 15 judgment (which includes a one-time loss of pay) and a one-way ticket out of Third Platoon. There was fear that Cesar would be demoted because of his transgression. The commander was involved at this point and could have been a lot more harsh in his punishment, but I suspect he secretly cheered in agreement when he read that letter.

The irony about the timing of the Article 15 is that Cesar, while on a raid only a few days earlier, had distinguished himself while under fire and arguably saved Willy's life. But we'll get to this next time.


Cesar and Willy

Bruce Campbell is Muslim???

I know I have a story to finish, and I know that I made a lot of people mad for leaving things hanging the way I did after being rudely interrupted by a camel spider, and I know that people who are new to all this are really confused why a soldier in Iraq would go off on his life story and use so much profanity to do it rather than talk about Iraq and Army stuff like they would expect, but I'll be doing Quick Reaction Force (QRF) duties for the next few days and won't be able to send email, so in the mean time here's a super short photo essay about an Iraqi man who failed out of the Iraq National Guard for drug use, started running with a bad crowd, then was stupid enough to store some illegal weapons and improvised explosives at his home. We call him Crackhead Bob. Someone ratted him out and we did a soft raid of his house, meaning we knocked on the door rather than kicked it in. The Iraqi Police did a lot of the work on this one, much to their credit. But we'll discuss all that later. Here's a few quick photos of Crackhead Bob, his naughty items, and some of the beautiful artwork in his home.

http://www.justanothersoldier.com/blog040705.htm


Random photo of Iraqi kids. They look cute, but in reality they are terribly, terribly evil. I especially dig how the guy on the left accessorized his man dress with a blazer.

All Hail Willy! That Bastard! pt. 1

Heather and I were expelled from high school less than a week before graduation. This is because the First Amendment does not protect suburban Utah high school students. Our parents were heartbroken and wouldn't speak to us and we became pariahs in our own town. But these were the least of my worries. Heather was already accepted to Utah State University in Logan, and they would never be the wiser that the girl who they would eventually graduate with honors in psychology and sociology never technically finished high school. But this created a serious problem for me because I couldn't leave for Infantry School until I had a diploma. And I wasn't just expelled from my high school, I was expelled from the whole goddamned school district, something that I think was unprecedented. I tried to get my diploma through the alternative high school, the one where the criminal, sociopathic, drug-addicted, and pregnant students went, but they wouldn't take me in. I made an appeal to the superintendent of Murray school district. He was the first government administrator I ever met who could talk and talk and talk and never actually say anything. "Something must be done. We are going to have to decide what should be done. Something will have to be done.", he droned on, ad nauseum. I've since met a million people like him, but he was my first. There was a special meeting of the school board to determine my fate. That's when they decided to boot me from the district and, according to the superintendent, to actively pursue barring me from transferring to any district in the state of Utah. When he broke the news to me, I had called his office from my work, a telemarketing job, an unfortunate trade I acquired that would help me pay my way through college, hone my verbal communication skills, and eventually cause me to develop a love for New Yorkers. That day at work, after all his blathersome circumlocution and bush-beating, he finally gave me the verdict. "After much deliberation, blah blah blah, the school board and I, blah blah blah, regret to inform you, blah blah blah...". I then told him, as professionally as I could, to go fuck himself. "Sir, Heather and I would like to cordially invite you and the school board to go have sex with yourselves."

To give you a proper background, I feel impelled to tell you my entire goddamned life story and all that David Copperfield crap, but nothing is quite so boring as having to endure an autobiography. It's like looking at the personal photographs that cubicle-dwellers put up next to their computers or deployed soldiers put up around their bunks. You don't know the people in the photographs and you don't know the stories in them. It's totally abstract. And if you're like me, you couldn't care less. For example, I have two photos on the bookshelf next to my bunk. One is of me laying on a bed in an apartment in New Paltz with two girls-- Wazina and Rachel. The girls are spooning and looking at me. I'm looking at them. We had just finished our first performance of the Vagina Monologues for the weekend. I had performed the only male monologue that is allowed when universities do the show-- original material on the subject of What The World Would Be Like Without Violence. (I started my monologue with a joke about how Michael Bolton would never have to worry about getting his ass kicked in bars, but no one laughed.) The other photo is of another pair of girls-- Erin and Kristin, my roommates in New Paltz. I stole the photo out of one of their albums from our apartment when I realized before I deployed that I didn't have any of them. These photos, or rather the memory captured by each photo, mean volumes to me. To you they mean absolutely nothing. (Unless, of course, you are Wazina, Rachel, Erin, or Kristin.) It's like trying to explain a dream where the emotions are intense and poignant and you want so badly to try and get these feelings across to whomever is your unfortunate audience, but trying to explain the cheese spaceship and the bazooka that burps out sloppy joes, really kinda kills the delivery.

Despite the inherent risks of trying to explain feelings and personal histories, here's the flashcard summary of my life: I'm born in Provo, Utah to George and Linda. My mom would later describe George to me as a "chiseled Greek god". The marriage ends after I'm a few months old. My mom and I move to San Leandro, California to live with my grandparents. My grandfather, a retired Navy officer, becomes my father figure. At the age of four, my penchant for large words and all things fecal has already developed. Jim starts courting my mom despite her having a child who has a predilection for running around the yard, stark naked and with a yellow ribbon wedged between his little baby buttocks yelling, "DIARRHEA!!! DIARRHEA!!! DIARRHEA!!!" (There are photos of the infamous yellow ribbon.) Jim and Linda wed and move into a small house with shag carpet next to a cow pasture in the hick town of Spanish Fork, Utah. Small backwards working class town + community of religion-induced sexual repression and perversion = a five-year-old Jason being sexually molested by twelve-year-old boy across the street-- "Let's pretend we're tied up..." One Sunday morning following a day of playing in the sprinklers and getting my first sunburn, I get spanked by my new father for watching Mr. Rogers-- you can't keep the Sabbath day holy by indulging in entertainment, ya know! I would be spanked more times that I can count over the years. Oddly, I'm also taught that one should never fight, but to "turn the other cheek", a fucking retarded philosophy that would haunt me during my childhood and later shape my adolescence as I shed it. I start having terrifying recurring nightmares about a dragon and a mustachioed man who dwell in the foundation of an unfinished house and force me to choose a different method of death each night-- "So what's it gonna be kid? Cut apart by the dragon's claws, or crushed to death under his feet?" My dad tells me to chant the phrase "Kook-a-munga rickety-rack, mean old dragon never come back!" to make them go away. (I have no idea where he got this absurd phrase from.) It doesn't work. I finally learn to simply refuse to comply with the sinister man's Sophie's Choice bullshit by just letting him know that he and his dragon can go fuck themselves. I never have the nightmare again. It finally dawns on my parents that Spanish Fork is fucked up and we move into a new rambler style house in Murray, Utah, fifteen minutes from downtown Salt Lake City, where I make many friends and have a happy childhood, despite being sheltered and repressed. Things start getting a little sketchy between me and my father once my critical reasoning skills start to kick in around age twelve. I learn to play the piano. I become an Eagle Scout. By the time I am fourteen, I am well on my way to becoming a very difficult and rebellious teenager. I learn that I love to write, but my parents find troubling what I write. I will have incredibly good English teachers in Utah for ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade who, simply put, will have a bigger positive influence on who I am today than anyone aside from my mom. At fifteen I meet a transfer student with perfect skin and a Germanic face named Lori who teaches me how to skateboard, that Scotchgard can be used as a recreational drug, and introduces me to the whole self-destructive bad-poetry-writing Winona-Ryder-in-Edward-Scissorshands smoking-clove-cigarettes thing. I go to my first concert with her-- Oingo Boingo at the Salt Palace during the Boingo Alive tour-- against the express instructions of my parents to not do so (girls: bad; rock-n-roll: bad; combinations of the two: total and utter damnation). I sleep at a friend's house the night after the show. After years of dealing with a their 'troubled' teenage son, my parents decide they've had enough. The following day, I am picked-up from school by my mom who is dressed like she is on her way to church. We meet my dad at a place called Benchmark, a mental institution north of Salt Lake. The crowd I run with, being institutionalized is a badge of honor. ("Put me in an institution / Said it was the only solution / Said I needed professional help / So I could cope with the enemy in myself") But 'mods'-- what goths were called in Utah before the word 'goth' was coined-- tend to go to the Western Institute of Neuropsychiatry, or 'WIN', at the University of Utah, while stoners and rockers go to Benchmark. I am torn. The dilemma is immaterial because the insurance company refuses to pay for the cost of institutionalizing a non-crazy basically-drug-free kid who simply didn't get along with his dad. I start seeing a therapist who diagnoses me as having an atypical anxiety disorder-- bullshit psychobabble for 'pissed-off at his dad'. The therapist is Mormon. My whole issue is the religion shit. As a compromise, I move in with my aunt Cheryl and uncle Lauren for the second half of my tenth grade year in Alamo, California, a wealthy bedroom community on the east side of the bay. Another huge Mormon family, except they are eccentric, wild, and fun, like something out of a John Irving novel. At San Ramon Valley High School I see students treated like adults. The school newspaper is remarkably good. In it I read an editorial about the death of Jim Henson ("It's not easy being green") that I will remember for years. The kids here are being prepared for adulthood and it makes me feel empowered. I fail both quarters of English, however. The teacher fails all my unconventionally written essays. I write short stories to fulfill the requirements instead of normal essays. She is short in stature and somewhat pugnacious and ugly as hell with greasy, pock-marked skin, thinning wiry hair, and a green tongue. (She would use her tongue to scratch her chin! Blech!) We get along fairly well and I like her. I return to Utah. Public education in Utah is excellent, but students are not treated like adults. My citizenship grades in school are horrible. I am chronically tardy and absent. Each unsatisfactory citizenship grade has x number of community service hours attached to it to rectify the grade. I have hundreds of hours to do. I move out of my parents' house and begin living in an apartment with my friend, Russell. The best part about living on your own while in high school? Qualifying for free lunch tickets-- technically, I am utterly poverty-stricken. I guess there can be free lunch after all!

And this brings us to the point of my eventual expulsion from high school. I was a decent student-- my grades were good, I had gotten a 29 on the ACT, I had Advanced Placement credits in English and Chemistry, I was part of the literary magazine staff. But I was overwhelmed by these infernal service hours. I did janitorial work at the school to fulfill them. I also worked at the local firehouse, washing the same sparkling clean fire truck, day after day. I forged numerous hours for myself. I still could not work or forge fast enough.

Then I saw the movie, "Pump Up The Volume", a wonderfully 80's flick about pirate radio starring Christian Slater. I was inspired. The previous year, a senior at school printed an underground newspaper. He harped on how bad our school newspaper was (it was horrible) and he wrote some innocuously funny things. He got in a bit of trouble, however, for writing that Mr. Such-and-such, one of the teachers, should have a tie with "I'm a mean old bastard, aren't I?" printed on it.

A light went on in my head. I would publish an underground newspaper! I had two months before the end of the school year, so I had to get to work. I should tell you that I had renewed my faith in the Mormon church (religion recidivism!) after returning from California and after going to Basic Training with the Army following my Junior year. At the beginning of the school year, I was made the president of my seminary class. In Utah you are allowed to take a period of seminary each day. At the beginning of every class I made some sort of military analogy to teach a religious principle. (Mohammed Jason Al Sadr!) But by the middle of the school year I had found a new religion. Her name was Heather. Heather, Heather, Heather. We were inseparable, we were each other's evil twin cum guardian angel, we were partners in crime, like a pair of dragons soaring through the medieval night sky in search of villages to lay to waste. Though I have dark brown hair and brown eyes, and she has blonde hair and blue eyes, eyes I would drown in everytime I looked into them, we looked a lot alike and were commonly mistaken for brother and sister. (Big forehead, toothy grin, general air of mischief.) An uncommon familiarity showed, I suppose, because we felt and acted as though we had been friends for millennia, spanning countless lives, and we were probably right. I have a feeling that we built cities together, fought wars together, raised children, created nations, wrote epics, and chased demons. She was incredible. She made me feel like I could do anything. And I could, so long as I could do it with her. But when you have a sense of self-worth based through someone else and not first through yourself, your insecurities will inevitably get the better of you. I learned this the hard way. Eventually I would ruin everything I had with Heather and our relationship would spiral into an abominable co-dependency. But I suppose character is built based on what you have lost more so than what you have. I love who I am today, but I hate what I had to lose to learn to know myself. But right now you and I aren't concerned with broken hearts and contrite spirits. We're concerned with underground newspapers and how I found time to write one during the hour each day when I was supposed to be spiritually leading my seminary class. (There were a lot of student who told me I was the best seminary president they ever had and how much of an influence I had been for them-- I was a pretty charismatic religious nut, if I do say so myself-- and to this day I still feel guilt for 'betraying' them when I unleashed the powers of print media on my high school.)

At first my intentions were mature and adult. I knew that anyone could criticize something they didn't like, so I wanted to offer feasible solutions along with my criticism. I wanted to present a rational argument against the current citizenship grading policy. There were also a few other issues I wanted to provide intelligent alternatives to. Then I smartened up. Students were treated like children at my school and their opinions were not given any credence. This became apparent to me when a committee of students and teachers were formed to discuss an issue. I forget what the topic was exactly, but I remember that after all the hullabaloo, the decision reached was the same as it would have been if there were no committee. It was a farce, a front. Something they could say was done to come to a decision that took into account the desires of the administration, the faculty, and the student body. I now know that this is simply how the world is run, most everything is bullshit, like make-up on a corpse, like China calling itself a republic. But at the time, my idealistic eighteen-year-old mind could not reconcile this affront on reason and democracy. My voice, the voice of the student, in this case the voices of a few student representatives on the committee, were summarily ignored.

I hate to be ignored. I hate to be ignored.

So I scrapped all my ideas and started over. That's when the Murray High Muckraker was born. We took on a scorched earth policy. ("We'll use their guts to grease the treads of our tanks!") I berated the fascist citizenship policy. I wrote a tastelessly vulgar horoscope and an article on how the word 'fuck' can be used for all parts of speech. (Did you know that 'fucking' is one of the only infixes in the English language? Prefixes and suffixes are ubiquitous in English, as most languages, but not many words can be used like this: "Absofuckinglutely".) Heather went off on how physical education for girls was useless sexist hogwash. She made an unspeakably sacrilegious Mormon trivia crossword puzzle. We wrote all manner of offensive material. But the real coup de grace was indiscriminately venting my spleen on every single administrator, even those of whom I was fond, all in the name of libel fairness. It was nothing less than an act of terrorism. We used multiple pseudonyms to make it appear as though there were a small army of revolutionaries hell bent on burning the school to the ground. The staff photos were fun-- my armpit, my ass, my crotch, Heather in her underwear, our friend Cindy's feet.

It was all a secret. We told no one. I figured the way to do something and not get caught was to simply not tell anyone, not even friends. Heather and I brought Cindy in at the eleventh hour when it came time to make copies. We couldn't afford to print hundreds of copies of an eight-page paper at Kinkos (not to mention the security risk), so late one night we stole the keys to Cindy's dad's place of employment, which incidentally was a Veteran Affairs office-- Cindy's dad was a counselor for victims of post traumatic-stress disorder. It almost didn't happen because the photocopy machines needed a code to be entered into them to work. I searched every workspace in the office until I found where someone had written it down-- a trick I learned from Matthew Broderick in the movie "War Games". (Thanks again American pop culture!) If I remember right, we made 500 copies, double-sided. Collating and stapling them all was a chore. Once we finally left, as the sun was about to come up, we locked up and walked out, passing a VA employee coming in to work. Had we left ten seconds later, we would have been in a world of hurt.

I was very proud of myself. I planned everything very meticulously. I mapped out where all the lockers were in the school and how many there were in each section. I broke it down by class-- seniors, my target audience, would get the majority, one for every other locker, while juniors would get one for every third locker. The actual distribution was another coup I was proud of. Being that I now had intimate knowledge of the janitors' schedules at the school (thanks community service hours!), I knew that there was a thirty-minute window each Saturday when the school was completely devoid of any adult supervision. Why this lapse in security, is beyond me. So I recruited a gaggle of losers who would party at my apartment and who didn't go my school, gave them each a bundle of newspapers folded length-wise, and instructed each one on which row of lockers was their responsibility. The newspapers were slipped through the horizontal vents of the lockers. It took us less then fifteen minutes to inseminate the school with our demon seed. There was no turning back.

(interlude while I shit my pants)

Time out! Holy jesus god! A camel spider just crawled between my feet! I stomped it. It's 3am right now. I'm the only one awake because this is the only time it's quiet enough for me to get any writing done. The entire place is dark as death, aside from the lamp over my laptop right now. The fucking thing is laying, squished, between my feet as I type. I have to say that this was creepier than last week when a mouse crawled down my bare shoulder while I lay in bed. I wasn't sure what it was at first, but when I felt that it was furry, I grabbed that little beastie and flung it across the bunker. I've since become the top mouse killer in the bunker. But this? The skin won't stop crawling on the back of my neck. I'll never get to sleep now. Where do these fucking things come from? And how do they grow so big? And this one is small! Fucking hell! What the fuck is the deal with Iraq! They reported yesterday that there have been two cases of malaria at my base. Fucking great. I live in a swamp. I haven't been taking my malaria pills because I felt dizzy once, thinking it was the pills, which are known for causing dizziness. Assault rifles and vertigo didn't seem to be a good combination. But I'd take a bad LSD trip while on a raid if I thought it would stave off malarial brain damage.

I have to take a break. Stay tuned for part two. There's a stress-related fatal heart attack, an old-west courtroom ultimatum, a tale of combat-induced retard strength, two soldiers who pull the trigger and one who doesn't, a yet-to-be-concluded story of a soldier whose poison pen is turned against him (and his rank), and one soldier's vainglorious photo album. Oh, and one story, maybe two, where I actually do shit my pants for real.


From the left: Mike, me, Willy, Ernesto, and our last day of freedom in America.