Revolution (25 page)

“I am addicted to comfort,” I thought as I tumbled into the wood chips.

I have become divorced from nature; I don’t know what the names of the trees and birds are. I don’t know what berries to eat or which stars will guide me home. I don’t know how to sleep outside in a wood or skin a rabbit.

We have become like living cutlets, sanitized into cellular ineptitude. They say that supermarkets have three days’ worth of food. That if there was a power cut, in three days the food would spoil. That if cash machines stopped working, if cars couldn’t be filled with fuel, if homes were denied warmth, within three days we’d be roaming the streets like pampered savages, like urban zebras with nowhere to graze. The comfort has become a prison; we’ve allowed them to turn us into waddling pipkins.

What is civilization but dependency? Now, I’m not suggesting we need to become supermen; that solution has been averred before and did not end well. Prisoners of comfort, we dread the Apocalypse. What will we do without our pre-packed meals and cozy jails and soporific glowing screens rocking us comatose?

The Apocalypse may not arrive in a bright white instant; it may creep into the present like a fog. All about us we may see the shipwrecked harbingers foraging in the midsts of our excess. What have we become that we can tolerate adjacent destitution? That we can amble by ragged despair at every corner? We have allowed them to sever us from God, and until we take our brothers by the hand we will find no peace.

My mate Mark Stone worked for Ford. When we left school, my eyes were trained on the glimmer of far-off hills—one word, block high across the sky. Mark became an apprentice at Ford’s in Aveley, nearby. I never told him that I thought his pride gauche. That when he spoke of “our place,” meaning the factory where cars were assembled, that to me that sounded odd. He felt connected to his work and proud as a man who loved speed and cars that he knew how to make them. We’d bomb about in Essex lanes in his customized van—Ford, of course—and smoke draw. Mark was content, well paid, connected. I was signing on and fraught. Desperate, feeling
only what I didn’t have, that I was subject to some terrible injustice. That Olympus had erred and given me the wrong life. It was okay for Mark to work as skilled labor and listen to hip-hop and do nights on doors in clubs in Dagenham and have rows and pull birds. I am fated for better things. Better things.

I got a grant to go to drama school, I got a habit, I got a cool jacket and cool friends. Mark would come up and visit me in London, still talking of “our place.” He’d drop me off a bit of gear and indulge my fantasies of fame. “I’ll be your bodyguard, Russ,” he’d say, but we both knew he loved it at Ford’s, with his mates, making things.

When Mark died on a motorbike at twenty-nine, I didn’t cry. I didn’t go to the funeral. I was too busy making it to grieve for a mate who lived for making things. I was a junkie by then. Now I know what Mark meant by “our place” and his easy pride in what he made. He knew himself, and in his heart that factory was his; it didn’t matter where the profits went. I wanted power. Mark already had it.

They closed Ford’s down, of course. They put their factory somewhere else, where people work for less. The system they deploy doesn’t measure pride or connection; it measures only profit. They talk to us all friendly, use our language, whispering in seductively avuncular vernacular, in their slogans, in their ads. They use our labor while it suits them, till it doesn’t, then they’re gone. Like Dracula on a jugular, they kill the thing they feed upon.

Where is this connection that Mark felt at his place? That I looked for in fame? That these Marines appear to have as they skip by like this assault course is a poppy field, whilst I spit out the wood chips?

I feel embarrassed by their insistent encouragement. They treat me like I’m one of them, and I’ve always found that hard. Like I might leak lachrymose gratitude, like the Elephant Man or a blind boy in a story from my nan.

Up I get, though, and the course that beneath their stomped ballet rolls with them like an airport walkway, with me rises and undulates and slaps me about the face, a belated chastisement for missing games. They’re nice about it, though, and as I accept their consolations
I silently thank God for making me famous. “Thank you for the gleaming bandages, the glamorous mummification, that I can die quietly here, behind the walls of my marvelous tomb.”

I sought ways on the camp to reassert my identity, which I was hoping extended beyond back-combed hair and lacquered-on pants. I spied a nesting robin travailing at an air vent but stopped short of eulogizing on this neat emblem of tenderness and nature, in case the rest of the battalion thought it a bit poncey.

We went to the Mess, which was actually quite tidy and organized, to eat what passes for vegetarian food in the Marines—I imagine that Marines who don’t eat meat are a small demographic. I then chatted to a few lads. Mostly they were working-class boys who were always destined to end up in a violent gang of some description and had sensibly joined a very well-funded one.

We went back to the dorms to do more Marine things—time has blessedly relieved me of the details. I do recall, though, just before bedtime being sat in my pants with the other lads around a podium while a senior Marine read accounts of, what in my mind seemed to be, a daily round-up of marine acts of heroism around the world.

As I surveyed the faces of the sleepy adolescents, now dressed in combat pajamas—which are much less intimidating than the daytime getup—I recognized that what was in effect happening was that we were being read a bedtime story.

This was to soothe us before we clambered into our thin sponge bunks. Instead, though, of a tale of courageous rabbits or mischievous wizards, it was a harrowing logbook of violence and assaults; but to those lads, it was a lullaby.

As I watched these lost boys cocooned in their military cradle and concocted excuses not to fulfill my obligation to stay for three days but to weasel my way out, by any means necessary, I remembered what I’d heard about madrassas. Those are the schools in some Muslim regions—Pakistan for example—that are often funded by Saudis. Some I’m sure are legit and just teaching theology or whatever, but apparently there are extreme versions. In these more off-book and antagonistic establishments, young lads are taken from their village (it could be a city, what do I know) and indoctrinated
into fundamentalism to become hard-core soldiers. Or terrorists, depending on which side of Dick Cheney you’re on. The lads are immersively indoctrinated into a militant ideology, which must seem all the more appealing if received in total isolation. Apparently they never meet women, are amped up on hatred, and only receive affection from the fellas that run the place, who will one day make their approval contingent on acts of homicidal or even suicidal valor.

This is how the perpetrators of the 2008 attacks in Mumbai were likely raised—their only access to love from handlers who groomed them into terror.

I watched a documentary about them, and the conversations between the lads doing the bombing and shooting in India and their superiors in Pakistan were perversely touching: “You’re doing well, brother. Now torch the room, in God’s name.”

Me and an ex-girlfriend watched this documentary,
Terror in Mumbai
, whilst in the Taj Hotel, the location of considerable carnage that day. Hostages were killed there; one wing was set ablaze. She insisted we snuggle down in the darkness of a room where the atrocities took place and watch the harrowing affair unfold on film.

It was eerie to see the corridor outside our room in grainy CCTV, with armed young men bustling through and kicking down doors.

Most disturbing of all is the innocence and humanity of the killers as they nervously conduct the execution of hostages. One lad tentatively negotiates with his handler to see if there’s any way he can avoid killing them, by now infected with the inevitable empathy that we feel even when powerfully conditioned against it.

The mundanity too is striking; he sounds like a schoolboy trying to get out of sports day, rebutted by an austere mum.

“Do I have to kill them, brother?”

“Yes,” replies his impatient superior, “just get on with it in God’s name.”

I imagined the killer as a seven-year-old boy with no route to affection but via these bellicose uncles. How severely behavior can be shaped by environment; as surely as we learn language, we have our compass set in the amoral abyss by our early inculcators.

You hear a muffled gunshot, and the lad shakily returns to the phone for his approval. “Well done, brother.”

When they arrive at the opulent and then easily penetrable Taj Hotel, you hear when they report back to base their utter amazement at the consumer treasures within:

“Brother, you won’t believe the size of the TVs in this place.”

“Don’t get distracted, in God’s name, brother,” replies the irked handler as if dealing with a wayward Cub Scout enchanted by a lily.

The Marines, after their bedtime story, have a kind of final head count, I guess to check that no one’s absconded. We stood by our beds, the seventy of us, and each had to sequentially shout the corresponding ascending number, to ensure we still totaled seventy. I was the penultimate Marine—well, not quite Marine, something less than that, a sub-Marine. I watched with dreadful certainty as, like upward-tumbling dominoes, each lad hollered his number. “Sixty-five, sixty-six …” It’s getting closer. “Sixty-seven, sixty-eight …” Why, yes, of course, now it’s my turn, and in my underpants in a room full of Marines I chant, “Sixty-nine,” like Kenneth Williams. It’s all I can do to stop myself winking.

We then settle into our brittle sponge beds for the night—individually, as I remember; I think gayness was still frowned upon in the military at that time—for what seemed to be barely a teaspoon of sleep before being awoken at 3:00 a.m. to participate in a rehearsal for Armageddon.

Out in the floodlit concrete expanse, battalions moved in inhuman harmony. Clichéd sounds all about me—unified boots on hard floor, rifles twirled and hugged in a murderous tango. They sang those call-and-response songs that they do in
Full Metal Jacket
or
Platoon
that are mostly incongruously misogynistic limericks, speculating on the likely characteristics of different nationalities of vagina. Eskimos—cold; Indian—spicy; Vietnamese—initially appealing but ultimately an unruly quagmire that leads to humiliation. I made the last one up. In fact, I may’ve made the whole thing up, but it was that kind of mood, a bit nationalistic and blokey, as I imagine one might expect from a nocturnal drill in the U.S. Marine Corps.

I suspect you’d be given short shrift if you complained on the basis that you were finding the whole experience a bit sexist or too tough. I think within minutes you’d find yourself the subject of a hurtful ditty, and that’s just for starters.

It felt like the end of the world. I get prophetic flashes. There, I’ve said it. There are times when I see reality unfurl—not like the future is revealed, more like the past, or the present, like I can see the projector from which the spectacle is emitted. In the moment I feel dread. I watched them—maybe it’s my own cultural indoctrination, I’ve watched a lot of films and gone on a lot of conspiratorial websites, so my mind too has been narrativized; I’m not free from tales and agendas. I saw the earth crack open and yawn belligerent fire and the sea take back her bounty. The animals in nightmarish calm know the end is nigh and move to high lands. The unduly unfurled flags are lashed by rain and untethered from their masts by lightning.

All nature converges; the purple sky bears down on the cleaved soil as Earth roars. The furious ocean envelops her lover, as long-somnolent beasts rise up from the deep. Things don’t fall apart; they move suddenly inward, in vengeful implosion. Alone in this dark reverie, I stagger through the sepulchral ballet, as men move as dead men do, in dumb harmony.

The rhythm of my own two feet silences my dreaming. Now I am them, and the dawn rises. We march through verdant and dusty Californian hills. I look at the others and try to stay in the middle. Some of them are so strong and young—athletes. These men are training; for me this rehearsal does not lead to a performance; it leads to a swift and grateful departure and a wry reminiscence. For them it leads to death.

They’re so young. Once in a while they pass and sometimes vary in color. Mostly, though, they are indistinguishable and young as they march past. Sometimes one will be wearing glasses and, like in a lazy movie, this is a placeholder for character, for individuality, vulnerability.

Senior Marines marshal the pups; they have thicker necks and more-certain voices, even the fog on their breath is more forthright,
molecularly tighter. Drilled exhalations, their breath no longer theirs to give.

My mates are filming me and offering encouraging looks and sweet smiles, but I swear, twerp that I am, I have already Stockholmed myself into deep fraternity with the troops.

“You pansies,” I hear myself think of my former friends from yesterday on Civvy Street, “you don’t know what it means to be a Marine.”

There are deep codes awoken here as we march in unison, our metronomically beating feet hypnotizing away individualistic need. Lurking at the bottom of the pond of my mind among the weeds is a slumbering thing not nurtured by MTV or Pfizer or Coke or our other neon-pagan deities. It jolts in the dirge at the ancient siren.

At the end of the 10k hike, I feel all proud and misty-eyed, choked on camaraderie. The commander of Camp Pendleton gives me the lid of a wooden ammo box with a brass plaque on the top that says I’m brave. I inwardly flood. It is the kind of engraving you’d have at the bottom of a pub-darts trophy—any sports trophy. I’ve never had a trophy, so I am especially susceptible. Like all these fatherless boys, in Pendleton or Pakistan or Birmingham or Compton or Cardiff, any token of belonging is embraced.

I truly felt, ultimate objective aside, that the Marines had something beautiful about them. Fraternity, initiation, mentoring, honor, valor, duty—beautiful male attributes in a society in which masculinity is maligned. I can get a bit like that, a bit D. H. Lawrence, a bit jazzed on unexamined humanity. When I chatted on camera to a pair of perfectly assembled teen Marines who sat handsomely in their fatigues, rifles pristine and bolt upright at their sides, I was overwhelmed by the salvation that the military offers to boys that may otherwise have fallen through the cracks.