10/18/10 Fleet Week 3
I can think of few deeper ironies
Last weekend, after seeing the Blue Angels practice above the city in preparation of Fleet Week, I decided I’d go explore the event. On the first day I went to board a naval ship. As I approached it I saw someone wearing an 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit t-shirt. My gut turned and chills ran up my spine. This was my old Marine Corps unit. I sailed around the world with this unit, on a boat just like this. It’s been 7 years now, all the people I knew are gone, but walking onto the ship was like walking back into 2003. I think my face turned pale white. The smells, the textures, it all came back. I remembered that time I got a concussion on the tarmac after someone leg-sweeped me too hard. And the time I got hazed in the storage den after I earned my blood stripes. And the time I snuck out onto a gun turret at night to smoke cigarettes and stare at Hawaii as we approached it in the dark. I remember the shooting drills, the fast-roping, the anthrax shots, the constant moaning and swaying of the ship. I remember the heat and stink and the possibility of never coming home. And that peculiar feeling of seeing ocean in every direction. It was all the same way I left it. And I found it hard to take pictures. I felt ill.
I soon became overwhelmed by the civilians, the parents with their children, they were everywhere. Kids climbing tanks, playing with guns, sitting in cockpits. The irony was almost intolerable. It was an unsettling experience, and I couldn’t concentrate enough to take pictures. Feeling that this was something I had to capture, I came back another day, more prepared.
The mothers giggling and taking pictures. Their boys and girls posing with automatic weapons, imitating the sounds of machine gun fire. I could not comprehend or shake it from my mind. “This is too much,” I told myself. These people seemed to be oblivious to the fact these weapons just returned from war. Either that or they found that to be a good thing. I wonder though, did they stop to think about the possibility that the 240 Golf they were posing with might have killed a child? Did they understand what that Mk-19, the one their child was playing with, can do? I invaded Iraq with this Unit. I have disassembled, carried and fired these weapons. They are not toys. They are tools for war. They are for killing.
Watching the Marines, who had recently returned from Afghanistan, I could see in there pursed lips and restrained behavior how they really felt, “These people have no idea.”
This entry was written by , posted on October 18, 2010 at 3:38 pm, filed under Americans, Personal and tagged Fleet Week, Guns, Marine Corps, Military, San Francisco, War. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
10/18/10 Fleet Week 1
This entry was written by , posted on at 1:51 pm, filed under Americans and tagged Fleet Week, Jets, Liberty, Marine Corps, Military, Navy, Ship, War. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
2/12/09 East Timor
I’m still scanning and archiving and editing old photos. It’s turned into a larger task than I expected. These images are from an operation in East Timor back in 2002 when I was in the Marines. It’s strange looking at them, they don’t feel like pictures from 7 years ago but pictures from a past life altogether. East Timor was both exotic and barren, my brief time there made for some of my best memories while in the Corps. We traveled to several different villages, some in better shape than others. Many people we came across appeared to be incredibly peaceful despite the fact they struggled to survive. It was an experience that altered my view of both modern and Western culture. You spend your whole life taking certain things for granted, and you hear about how worse it is for some. Then the Marine Corps slaps you around a bit and you wake the fuck up, but in the end you’re still an American with a sense of security. Destitution doesn’t really sink in until you’re standing next to the people that are stuck in it. And I’m sure you can’t truly understand it until you become it.
I felt like an alien in East Timor. The security team that I was a part of was there to protect a team of doctors that was giving much needed care to the people in the villages. The team and I were geared up in case some shit went down, which was unlikely. I remember walking a patrol though the village, a lot of the structures were partially made from palm tree leaves and looked like they could just blow away. A young boy, maybe 4 or 5 turned a corner in front of us, like he probably had a thousand times before we ever showed up. But there we were, a couple of American 19 year-olds in camouflage uniforms, ammunition strapped to our bodies, throat mics around our necks, assault rifles in hand. The boy froze like Satan him-fucking-self just burst from hell spewing the souls of his dead ancestors. Poor kid just burst into tears, turned the other way and ran for his life. I remember, before laughing it off with my fellow Marines, feeling like I did something terrible without even wanting to. Later on I attempted a good deed by handing chocolate out to some of the kids. By the time I gave it to them, It had melted in the wrappers from the heat. It literally felt like I was handing them shit. I eventually scared another kid into tears without trying and made some of the elders really nervous. It felt like no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t do any good for those people. But, when I left that island I felt like I had received one of the greatest gifts of my life.
This entry was written by , posted on February 13, 2009 at 1:45 am, filed under Personal, Politics, Travels and tagged 2002, East Timor, Humanitarian Aid, Island, Marine Corps, Military, USMC. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.