Excerpt: The Strong Man: Confessions of a Bacon Smuggler
available from Final State Press in Fall 2008


     On the day of the deadline, January 15th, 1991, we waited through the morning for word that Iraq had withdrawn from Kuwait. I thought it was most likely that Saddam Hussein would figure something out to avert war and save face as he had during the build up of forces in the fall. This was a distant speculation like predicting a Superbowl when I didn’t even know the names of the teams. Despite being in country, the events around me became even more mysterious than they’d been in Seattle where I had access to news unfiltered by the King’s Minister of Information. It seemed a forgone conclusion Saddam would do something to prevent war. The flow of bombers headed north into Iraq left contrails across the blue sky. The deployed divisions had emptied the barracks leaving the mess hall empty except for the sound of the Armed Forces radio reporting on George Bush’s last minute entreaties and the troops assembling on the starting line.
     We had thought through all of the things Iraq could do in response to our attack. Maybe Saddam had atomic bombs and would erase the American Army from the Arabian Desert? Maybe he would shoot a long-range missile into Israel, in turn they would nuke Baghdad and then the Islamic countries of the world would unite against the United States and Israel. Iraq had long-range missiles named Scuds. No one knew how accurate the missiles might be or if the missiles were only armed with conventional bombs or had nuclear or chemical warheads. The news relentlessly talked about the Scuds. Soon, everyone was calling them Scuds, which somehow made them seem less fearsome. Maybe they would be duds? When a scud did fall later that night into an Israeli cherry orchard we waited until Tel Aviv assured reporters they wouldn’t nuke anyone in retaliation for their lost trees.
     My general hospital had drawn me out of my peacetime job, packed me, and sent me to this point, the shift from Operation Desert Shield to Desert Storm. “We are a storm,” Spizak said. “A fierce sand storm. We will cause eye and upper respiratory irritation until they buckle.”
     The Saudis at the hospital seemed both afraid of Iraq and hopeful that they would slaughter us all--even if that meant their own death--because at least we too would be dead. During the afternoon tea break, the head of the Saudi pathology lab announced to a room full of American soldiers, “You do not have a chance against Hussein’s armies. You are soft. You have never been to war. Iraq will string your skulls to Mecca.” Maybe she said this to get a rise out of us. Clueless, we had occupied her country and filled her hospital with women wearing make-up and pants, with fundamentalist soldiers who did not know how to speak without speaking of Christ, atheist solders who made fun of them out loud for believing in mythology, and a babble of other American contradictions.
     The pathologist had no context for us. We just arrived. And we had no context for her. A month before, we had been on a Madigan ward, and a month before that, I had been serving tables at Red Robin and napping through lectures on photosynthesis. Now, I was wearing hospital whites with a King Fahd Military Hospital logo on the pocket. This head of pathology had a PhD. from Cambridge (the real one, the one in England) and a degree from the Sorbonne. She had worked at the hospital for a decade. She had deep brown skin flecked with metallic colored moles. As she talked to us in her precise British accent, she kept her eyes on the ceiling. She would not look at us. When she finished her speech she left, and we finished eating our biscuits and tea. The every hour tea break was the biggest cultural event in the hospital, and this wasn’t Arabian, but a hold over from the British.
     Later, Mice explained her diplomas to Cameron and me in great detail because he said people like us should understand why we would never be like people like her. We were people from the suburban wilderness on the banks of the Green River, known only for our serial killers, computer software, and airplanes. We could never understand a citizen of the world like her. We should not judge her as if she were some drunk at the Rolling Hills bowling alley.
     “I want to point out two things,” Cameron said, “One: She did say she’d like to see our sun-bleached skulls strung from here to Mecca--along the driest stretch of desert on the planet. Two: she is, I will point out, not lying in her teeth in the back alley like she would if she had said that in the Rolling Hills Bowl.”
     At dusk, the war began. Sonic booms shook the sky. The entire horizon lit as bombers streaked overhead toward Iraq. Cameron and I huddled in our room, the radio turned to CNN as it broadcast from Baghdad. As the 4th of July hyperbole became too much--the oohs and ahs narrating tracer fire rising from the city and streaks of bomb falling into the city--we turned it off.
     “Look man,” Cameron said looking at me huddled in the corner, “I thought this was why you were excited to come out here? You’re missing the war. You should turn it back on. You’ll regret it later. Come on, man. Turn it on so you have something to tell your grandkids.”
     At the moment, all I knew was they were flying at me. This wasn’t what I had in mind.
     There were loud explosions over Riyadh--distant booms and then ones that shook our barracks. I couldn’t tell if they were sonic booms. I heard a vibrating sound, a churning metallic whir, and then the building shuddered. The concrete and marble and steel jiggled. I could hear the metallic clanging of the chemical alarm. A patrol came down the hall in full MOP IV shuffling in their boot covers.
     This was a war-like experience. I was aware it was. I kept telling myself: I had made it finally to the war. It felt routine even though I told myself, “I could die. This is war! A rocket could smash into the side of the building and the entire structure would slide down into bone-crushing rubble. Or a nuclear-armed warhead could detonate and send searing sheets of radiation through the building. My body would find itself x-rayed onto a wall.” But it was not what I had imagined my grandfather meant. He had talked about the sound of the enemy. Their cries and grunts and the odd silence between his platoon’s noise and the noise of the enemy as they moved through the jungle and then the sudden deafening roar as both sides began to meet in the trees.
     “You aren’t even aware of what is going on, but are scared as an entire state of being,” he said. “Who would not be scared? And when it is over, you may be dead, or they may be dead--you don’t have anything against them personally just as they don’t have anything against you personally, but they are the enemy; you are the enemy. It becomes as simple as this. Put a bullet in their head, a knife in their stomach or they will do the same to you.” And this brutality is what my father objected to--the endless training to inflict this barbarism on other people and on themselves. I suspected, too, that my father knew he was not up to the work of killing other people. If faced with this type of labor, he would die.
     I doubted, now, working as a medic, as a laboratory technician, that I would find myself with a rifle running across any battlefields. Neither my grandfather nor father, I think, could imagine that I would suffer an endless earthquake before I died. My life was at risk in a geological way. If I died, I would die because I was in the wrong blast zone on the wrong tactical map at the wrong time. Nothing I did personally had anything to do with my survival or death. Just as nothing I did personally had anything to do with the enemy’s survival or death. I operated my machine--a urine analysis machine. My comrades operated their machines--a Bradley Tank, an F-14, a B52, and so this didn’t feel like an experience of war so much as shift work. The fear didn’t feel immediate. It was on the order of a bad fast food meal, like indigestion. Some vague and still very possible death was implied by the clanging chemical alarms, the sonic booms of bombers scraping against the sound barrier, the tumble of Scuds dropping into the desert around Riyadh, but no one said to me, “Fire when you see the whites of their eyes.”
     The MOP uniforms in basic training were worn and tattered, almost empty of charcoal, but the ones we had now came in sealed bundles. They were new when issued to us. Now, they were wrinkled from being carried around in our rucksacks. When we took them out of our rucksacks, they left behind a trail of black powder. I pulled my chemical pants over my BDUs. They were very warm and made a crisp noise. I yanked them all the way up. I buttoned the pants and then pulled the jacket on. The equipment had a shoddy, paper bag feeling to it, but at the same time I was wrapped in carbon. The boots were strange contraptions; like big rubber socks, they slipped over my existing boots. I had practiced with the boots enough times that I didn’t really have to think as I did the tricky lacing and I pulled them tight. They provided wide flaps to keep the chemicals away from my pants. I put on my gas mask and felt as if I had my head under the covers at least. The gas mask cut down my field of vision, so that I couldn’t see the rest of my body, it just provided portals out. I was wrapped in layers of plastic and charcoal. The hood fell down behind my back and it smelled like rubber inside my mask. The straps tangled in my short hair. The heavy charcoal-filled cloth left a smell like graphite through my clothes. It was very warm.
     No one knew if the chemical gear really worked. The only war where contemporary chemical weapons had been used was the Iran-Iraq war when Iraq used the chemical weapons provided by the US. We expected them to use them again. I got mad because I wanted to fight and now I was wrapped up sitting in my room hoping someone didn’t enter my coordinates.
     The NBC patrol passed down our hall again. The alarms turned off and we looked out over the street. There wasn’t any traffic outside. It was just the streetlight and a faint dust blowing through their halos.
     Mice came by with a case. He wore his full gear and tablets to dispense from his gas mask case like the hot dog guy at the baseball stadium. “Are you interested in any anti-chemical agent?”
     We were told that those might be dangerous.”
     “Man, how dangerous do you think a full chemical strike is going to be?”
     “I’m more worried about the bugs,” Cameron said. “Got anything for biological?”
     “No. Just nerve agent,” Mice said.
     “How much?”
     “Fifty dollars.”
     “That’s not bad,” Cameron said. “You could charge a lot more than that. That is a good price point.”
     “How many packets do you require?”
     “I’m not eating that shit,” Cameron said. “Only FDA approved anti-nerve agents are going down
this throat.”

     Colonel Sam walked down the hallway. She didn’t have on her gas mask. Her hair that she had kept dark brown, almost black, at Fort Lewis had already started to turn gray in long streaks. She looked into the room. She seemed anomalous, almost causal, with her human head sticking out of the body wrap of the NBC uniform. “What are you doing?” Cameron asked her. He added, “Ma’am?”
     “I’m checking on everyone to make sure you keep your heads.”
     “It’s MOP IV,” Cameron said.
     “It isn’t really,” she said. “They are just trying to keep us afraid while they launch the attack. We’ll know. You’d have time to go from naked to wrapping yourself in these things before a chemical agent billowed up here. And I don’t think these are really protection against a biological agent. They’ll work all right against radiation, provided we don’t get blown up, or the building doesn’t collapse on us, or we don’t get caught in a fire from the flash.”
     “Thanks. Your speech is a real boost,” Cameron said.
     “I don’t want you fall into the trap.”
     “What trap?”
     “Being afraid. We are right now in as much danger as we will probably be--unless some fringe Saudi sect decided to start throwing grenades at us from overpasses.”
     “You aren’t helping,” Cameron said.
     “If we are going to get blown up, these suits aren’t going to do anything,” Colonel Sam said. “I just came by to tell you that the danger was about the same as it was yesterday and the day before that. The most dangerous part of the trip, flying in the jet over here, is over. Well, except we have to get back home when all of this over.”
     Something boomed in the sky. Glass broke outside. The chemical alarms started to clack again.
     “That’s a sonic boom,” she said.
     “Isn’t there anything we can do?”
     “Don’t inject yourself with the anti-agent. Don’t take pills. Don’t be afraid. Be nervous instead,” she said. “Anxiety is good. Panic is bad.” She walked down the hallway and, for a while, we only felt nervous, but then we began to panic.
     We weren’t allowed to have the lights on that night, and so we sat in the dark and listened to music. Sonic booms shook the building. I was trying to listen Zeppelin II. Cameron said, “Look man, this is the war. I thought this was why you were excited to come out here? So shut it off.”
     I turned it off and then we could hear the metallic clanging coming from the air-alarms indicating that we were at MOP I, so we put on our suits and shortly the patrol came by to make sure we had our suits on and said we were at MOP I and get ready for MOP II, because they are shooting Scuds with Patriot anti-missile missiles. They knocked most of them out of the sky, but a few landed in Riyadh.
     The Eskan Village street was deserted except for the street light shining down and I imagined that it would be very easy for gas to be there. An explosion actually shook the building. I wanted to go up to the roof to see, but we just sat and listened to the booming of the planes and the incoming missiles. Cameron’s radio faintly narrated the destruction in Iraq. There was the sound of metal outside and breaking things and we went to MOP IV again and I thought maybe gas or something had finally been released.
     I slept in MOP IV that night, breathing slowly in and out in my gas mask. When we did our training for triaging chemical casualties, we brought in faux-contaminated soldiers. We cut off the MOP suite, exposing the soldier’s normal uniform, which was also cut off and then they carted the soldier through a series of showers.
     We woke in the middle of the night. The whole building shook and rocked. Soldiers screamed on the floors above us. The chemical alarms clacked outside. For a long while, we waited in the room, breathing in and out in our masks. Cameron didn’t look at me. I checked to make sure the seal was solid. The memory of the tear gas I think, permeated my idea of what a military gas might be like, heavy and warm and distorting things in its heat wave. I imagined I saw this distortion when I checked the view out the window. I lay still and finally, I slipped back into sleep.
     We woke in the middle of the night. The whole building shook and rocked. Soldiers screamed on the floors above us. The chemical alarms clacked outside. For a long while, we waited in the room, breathing in and out in our masks. Cameron didn’t look at me. I checked to make sure the seal was solid. The memory of the tear gas I think, permeated my idea of what a military gas might be like, heavy and warm and distorting things in its heat wave. I imagined I saw this distortion when I checked the view out the window. I lay still and finally, I slipped back into sleep.
     We survived the night. In muster we learned that a number of soldiers had injected themselves with atropine during the loudest of the explosions and sonic booms. Dozens of soldiers had taken the pills and now they were worried. They were nervous. They had muscle twitching and woke through the night with cramps. Nothing had been hit on base, and, in fact, nothing had been in hit in the city, either.
     The war had begun and I realized I could actually die. I would probably receive no warning. A distant event, someone launching a missile, a cloud of gas released upwind, would kill me. The danger expressed itself as an anxiety--hardly any more intense than the anxiety I had already experienced in Washington State, where I had rent to meet, highways to drive, where danger existed too in an accidental relationship to my own actions. A car could flip mine into the median. A serial killer could hog tie me and drop my corpse into a stand of second growth fir trees. I was already used to this--something bad could happen. It would happen without any warning whatsoever. I didn’t have to leave home to find this out.