Checking Out: On Céline and Learning to Hate the War

In the weeks before Ernst Jünger arrived at the Champagne front, a young Frenchman was wounded near Ypres. Before the first events of Storm of Steel were hastily jotted in Jünger’s diary, Louis-Ferdinand Céline was done with the war. While still technically in the service, he was checked out. He had seen enough.

After making his way to the rear echelon for treatment of his injuries and rehabilitation (handjobs from a necrophiliac nurse), Céline was awarded the Médaille Militaire, a French decoration for valor. On paper, he was a patriot. To his doctors, nurses, and a few rambling priests, he was a poor soul, “one of our boys,” France’s own. He was an accomplice, a wingman, and a drinking buddy to the men he convalesced with. All these titles and roles attributed to him were just that, attributed. Had you asked him, he would have told you he was simply a man waiting for death to catch up.

As a society, we champion heroism. Our nation’s story began with acts of heroism; its chapters are filled with legends and ordinary men alike who stood in and took the hits when we needed them to. Our movie screens are filled with pictures of it, and our bookshelves sag under the weight of a thousand hero’s journies. Captain America, American Sniper, Lone Survivor, Navy Seals biographies…you get the picture. Heroism is admirable, but this Hollywood version doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s pretty disingenuous.

I served as an Infantry Marine on two combat deployments to Afghanistan. I had never heard of Céline before BAP started mentioning him on Caribbean Rhythms (number one sexy show). I picked up a copy of Journey to the End of the Night, widely considered his best work, and fell in love. Here was a man who was not ashamed to state that he was afraid. A soldier awarded for bravery who could express the sentiment that ‘maybe we ought not to be killing each other.’ I immediately respected that.

Céline’s musings on WWI from the gutter of Paris touched on the nature of man and human emotions before, during, and after the war. Like Céline, I feel that a man’s mental relationship with war should be a mixed bag of emotions. It should be passionately honest and reflect a high degree of self-awareness. It should be a love/hate relationship. In short, it should be utterly complicated, like an ex-girlfriend you just can’t stop fucking.

It was the easiest sell the Marine Corps has ever had. In my junior year, I walked into the recruiting office and told the guy I wanted to be an Infantry Marine. A kid hopped up on punk rock who fell asleep watching Full Metal Jacket and Black Hawk Down; I knew what I wanted. I hated school and wanted to get out there and get some. Education could wait! There was a war to win!

I was shipped off to Parris Island 13 days after graduating High School. I was a piece of chewed bubblegum, but they made me a Marine. After several months of training at the School of Infantry at Camp Geiger, I was ready for the fleet. I processed in with a Grunt unit at Camp Lejeune and spent the next year trying to avoid getting hazed. The Infantry barracks are a godless place.

Fast-forward a year, and we were on our way to Afghanistan. Finally, I was going to get out there and be the hero. I was going to be the main character on patrol. I would make some memories with the boys and see what being a man at war meant. I was going to get my Combat Action Ribbon.

The following details my first 48 hours at war:

We ripped out with the artillery unit holding a tiny patrol base on the outskirts of a city we were destined to push. Our leaders sat with their leaders, and we got the readout that any patrols going north would catch contact. I smiled when the LT said my squad would be part of the first patrol heading out in the morning. I couldn’t sleep.

We woke up and set out into the unknown. We walked miles through poppy fields and past seemingly abandoned compounds. No one was around. Hours passed, and we were about to head back when we got some ICOM chatter from a few shitheads who were coordinating an attack on us. I listened in as the details of the pending attack were relayed throughout the patrol. We set up in a defensive position and waited.

The first shots rang out. I had no idea where they came from. The guys with a deployment already under their belt instinctively sprung into action. We hustled into a compound. Another boot and I went to clear a room in the far corner. I kicked the door open and rushed in. The room was dark, and I couldn’t see a thing due to my sunglasses shading out what little light was coming in from behind me. I laughed. Had there been someone in there, I would have been cooked. I looked like an idiot. You joke about these things with your squad when you all make it back.

The firefight was raging. We had guys climbing the walls to get a shot off and get some. I couldn’t find a wall or an opening to even look in the direction of the enemy. I was missing out! Our salty Sgt, who had stomped through Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times, called for volunteers to push the next compound up. I instinctively raised my hand. This was it! This was the type of thing I’d dreamed about while watching Saving Private Ryan and Platoon back on the block.

The Sgt wrangled a few of us up, and we stepped outside the compound. One by one, The Sgt slapped a Marine on the back and told him to go. My heart was pounding. I watched the guy in front of me take off in a sprint. It was my turn. I stepped up, and the Sgt said, “Hook right off the corner of this wall, and you’ll see the compound straight ahead.” I smiled like a moron, and he looked at me and said, “You’re an idiot.”

He shoved my back, and I sprinted around the corner. I’ll never forget how far that compound was. In my head, I thought this was going to be a short 10-second run. It took me probably 45 seconds to reach my destination. I remember all the excitement draining from my body and being replaced with adrenaline and fear. I didn’t look anywhere but at the Marine in front of me. In my peripheral, I saw dust kicking up from where the enemy was shooting at us. I told myself I would catch one in the leg at any moment, but I didn’t. I made it to the wall and would dread running under fire for the rest of the deployment.

We took up positions in the new compound and joined the fray. I still didn’t see the enemy or have anyone to shoot at the entire day. Eventually, we got the call to return to base. Our little detail walked back to sporadic pop shots. We were exhausted but happy.

When we got back to base, we were ecstatic. We ribbed the other boots that now we were salty, having been in the shit before them. We heard thermal had caught the enemy removing bodies from the firefight scene throughout the night. I was so jazzed up I couldn’t even eat. Before bed, the LT came and told my squad we were going out again the following morning and that we’d be taking the squad who missed out on the fun. Somehow, I drifted off to sleep.

We stepped off at 0300 into the cold, black night of Afghanistan. You’ll never understand how the galaxy looks in a place like that. A trillion stars that had all been dancing with you your entire life, but you’re seeing them for the first time in this primal place without light pollution. I shoved my NVGs into my drop pouch and looked at the heavens as I stumbled along with the patrol.

I’d been told we would push further north than anyone ever had. That sounded great in the comfort of the patrol base, but as the call to prayer started eerily in the distance, I wasn’t so sure. The sun came up, and we stuck out like a sore thumb. All of the Afghans just stood at the threshold of their homes and watched us in silence. Everyone on the patrol wanted to bug out and phase back home.

We started retrograding back in a bounding motion. One squad would push up and establish security, and the other would run through them and do the same. My squad pushed to the edge of a field across from a compound. As the other squad ran through our position and began to cross the field, we spotted someone on a berm observing our patrol. We didn’t have a clean look at the guy and were unsure. I heard the LT’s call on the radio to take the compound ahead and regroup.

The point man of that squad kicked in the compound door and stepped on a pressure plate. He was instantly turned into a double amputee. I’ll never forget the visual of the explosion. I’ll never forget the initial sound or the sound of mud hut construction hitting the ground for a few seconds after. I’ll never forget the smell of the dirt before me as I lay on the ground. I’ll never forget the screams of the Marines in the compound or the sickening feeling of not knowing who or how many were wasted in there.

Marines are trained to act. I looked at the guy next to me, and we both agreed that we had to get up and get in there. Without permission from the squad leader, we both got up and jogged across the open field. We made it about halfway across before we took a burst of accurate fire from our left. We dove into the dirt and started scanning while loosely returning fire. I didn’t see anyone.

As my squad moved to join us, a secondary explosion went off in the compound. While rendering care to the wounded, someone had stepped on a secondary IED, which made that Marine a triple amputee and killed the previously wounded point man. My squad eventually made it up to the compound and established security. We heard the names of those who had been wasted come over the radio as they called in the medevac. I remember instantly and uncontrollably crying. It was hard to choke it back. I looked over at one of my squad mates, and he nodded at me with a tear in his eye.

While waiting for the medevac, we started taking fire from a second direction. I wiped my tears and shakingly asked where it was coming from. The guy next to me pointed to the northeast. I didn’t see anyone. I asked where, and he shouted back, “Compound about 200m that way! Two dudes are popping out from the opening in the wall. Just wait a minute, and you’ll see them!” I loaded a m203 into the tube attached to my m16 and waited. I saw them. I finally saw someone. I double-checked the dope on the M203 sight and let one rip. It fell short. “Aim higher!” yelled the guy next to me. I waited for the shooters to appear again and sent it. A smoke cloud accompanied by a distant thud appeared directly where they had been firing from. “You got ‘em,” my neighbor said. We never got shot from that direction again.

The medevac arrived, and I watched them pull two body bags out of the compound. Two more wounded went bumping on a stretcher out of the main door and into the helicopters. We all stood up and lurched back towards the patrol base when the birds were out of sight. We were still being shot at sporadically as we moped along.

That’s Afghanistan for you. There is never any closure. The fights begin but seemingly never end. It’s just day after day of beige landscapes and sweat-drenched shirts—hours of shuffling through poppy fields and jumping over wadis (creeks, rivers). The gunshots never stop in the distance; you don’t care who they are aimed at as long as it isn’t you.

As soon as we crossed the threshold into the patrol base, everyone lost their shit. Everyone found a corner to cry in. I remember finding an unoccupied corner and crying uncontrollably. I’m teared up writing this. That’s the power of war; a decade and a half later, the events of that day still have authority over my waterworks. You can dwell on it, or you can shove it way down where you think it won’t ever be found, but it doesn’t matter. For better or worse, we are warring creatures, and these events stay with us.

I can’t imagine the existential dread that Céline faced as he convalesced. He was bedridden at times, forced to lay there with his thoughts and nothing else. He didn’t want to get better because better meant a one-way ticket back to the front and his certain death. So, he lay there. His physical wounds slowly healed while the demons inside of his head multiplied and pinned him to his hospital bed.

As for me, I was on the move. We all had revenge on our minds and enough anger to suppress the harsh reality of our losses. The feeling of invincibility I had on the first day never returned. I had come crashing down to the naked truth of war, but my heart was still in it, even after the madness of that second patrol.

A few weeks later, we pushed the city and caught lots of contact. We cleared our objective and were routed to help another company finish theirs. We arrived at a large, empty bazaar. Our mission was to clear the entire thing and check for contraband. We set up a squad on the perimeter to hold security, and the EOD fellas gave it the first look.

Thank God for the process. The EOD techs found 17 pieces of ordinance daisy-chained throughout the main road. We were told it was the largest daisy chain found in Afghanistan to date. It took them two days to dig it all out. We maintained a squad on the flank to hold security and received sniper fire shortly after we began clearing operations.

The company we had moved up to help had lost two Marines to sniper fire in the week prior to our arrival on the scene. For two or three days, Marines from our platoon laid face down in the dirt, holding security on the bazaar while this sniper took pop shots at them. When he got tired of trying to find a prone Marine, he would shoot through the gaps in the bazaar buildings at Marines performing clearing duties. We had a general direction we thought he was shooting from, but other than that we were lost.

On about the third or fourth day of dealing with this sniper, we had whipped out the maps and narrowed the shooting position down to just a few buildings. As the sun set, the handhelds clicked to life with a status report from the squad on the perimeter. They thought they had figured it out. They presented their evidence, and nearly everyone in the platoon lay prone and waited for the next shot to see if it seemed feasible.

A shot rang past a Marine on the ground, and head nods turned into the loading of a SMAW rocket into its tube. The first rocket disintegrated the compound wall, and every Marine on the firing line unleashed hell. It was like every Marine was shooting to get back the two we had just lost. Marines were shooting just to shoot. Another rocket pounded the main structure of the compound. The call for a ceasefire came down the line. The sun dipped below the horizon.

We lay there in the fading dusk in silence. The smoke dissipated into the coming Afghan night, and we heard screams. We looked at one another and cheered. Marines up and down the line were high-fiving and celebrating the end of incoming fire. We figured that the enemy was seriously wounded in the compound and that the screams were his. We were wrong.

A lantern emerged from the compound wall. We all froze and sighted in. An old man was frantically running back and forth into his compound, and he was covered in blood. From where I stood, I squinted and watched him emerge from the rubble with a wheelbarrow. In it, there was an approximately fourteen-year-old girl holding her head.

As the wheelbarrow neared our position, I was told to stand by to call in a civilian medevac. Flashlights from Marines came to life one by one as the sound of the wheelbarrow tire bumping over uneven terrain drew near. I looked through a gaggle of Marines to see the Corpsman shine a light on the face of the girl. Her head had been split down the middle, and her brains were sliding down the side of her face. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life, and in the chaos of Marines and the old man’s screams, I lost myself.

I was told to wait to call the medevac because more were coming. The old man made trip after trip to his compound, returning with brutalized familial cargo he’d dump at our feet. There was a three-year-old boy who was placed at my feet. He was instantly covered with one of those aluminum space blankets and pronounced dead by the Corpsman. I never saw his face, but in my dreams, I wonder. I stared down at the crumpled aluminum blanket and saw a gnarled amputated leg hanging out. The leg was dripping blood that stained the dirt under it, but it was hard to make out in the newly arrived night.

An elderly woman came next, and then an infant with shrapnel on its face. I couldn’t tell you the total count or recall any of the information I called in on the medevac that night. I didn’t know where or who I was, but I knew at that moment I was done with the war. I’d seen enough, and I was spiritually checked out.

I’d go on to keep patrolling, fighting, and existing through the rest of that deployment. When we touched back down in the U.S., I never felt safe. I knew no matter how good the pussy or the food, the hot showers, and the cold beer were; I had another deployment looming in the not-so-distant future. I felt the dread and I could see it on the other Marine’s faces as we adjusted back into garrison life.

I guess you could say I got what I wanted. On my first day of patrolling, I was awarded the Combat Action Ribbon. My unit was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, and we walked as gods around Lejuene until alcoholism and first-rate degeneracy dulled our unit’s shine. Don’t worry; I did my part there, too.

If you had asked me at that point what I wanted next, I would have told you just to be left alone. I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life trying to get some damn peace and quiet. It’s enough to get a good bite to eat, a sweet piece of ass here and there, and enjoy what’s left of a life turned dull. I feel like I’m one of the lucky ones. My loved ones never had to get a folded flag for death in combat. They never had to walk in on me hanging from the garage rafters or overdosed or find my lifeless body in the bathroom with a gun lying at my side. There have been too many damn suicides from the guys who made it out of there alive. If you’re reading this and considering, don’t.

I don’t watch war movies. I don’t stand up when they ask on Veteran’s Day. Hell, I don’t even tell people I was a Marine unless it comes up naturally. Why bother? There are enough glory hounds and grifters out there to last a lifetime.

Hollywood heroics and recruiting propaganda do a bang-up job of sinking their teeth into young men looking to leave home and find comradery and adventure. They never tell you the other side of it, though. They leave that up to you. You have to get out there and figure it out yourself—as Céline, myself, and millions of other men throughout history have.

You have to watch young men die in a pointless fucking forever war with no realistic political or military objective outcome. You have to talk to that point man one night after Firewatch about him marrying his high school sweetheart before shipping out, then watch him get carried out of a compound in a body bag two weeks later. You have to stumble over the crumpled, amputated body of a small child while you’re trying to call in the medevac for a bunch of people you really didn’t mean to kill. You have to push yourself off the dirt and run to cover under fire again and again and again.

There are plenty of other stories, but I’ll save those for another time. If I could reach out and tell every Veteran something, I’d say read Céline. It’s okay to feel scared and at odds with war. It’s human nature.

Until next time,

-MH