“This War Is Gay!”
Re the sexual orientation of war. April 3, 2003:
We crossed the Euphrates around noon. I was asleep in the back and missed it. Another brigade, bounding ahead of us, was responsible for all the wreckage around the bridge.
Baxter was bored and annoyed that someone else was getting all this action. He began bitching about the failure of the Iraqis to put up sufficient resistance.
“This war is gay!” Baxter said.
…
Baxter kept up his running monologue about the war’s sexual orientation. We egged him on: “So, how gay is this war?”Baxter: “Well, it’s so gay …”Baxter was still doing it, in increasingly pornographic detail, when we finally had contact late in the afternoon.
LT: “What the fuck! Something just blew up right in front of me!”
…
We heard more explosions and automatic weapons fire outside, but still no fire from our own vehicle. Baxter and I both keyed our mikes:
“C’mon! Light up the fucking woods!”
Up in the turret, we could hear Sgt. Will and the LT muttering to each other, something about not being able to see the target.
BOOM!
Baxter and I were yelling into our mikes now, exasperated by our vehicle’s silence as the RPGs kept flying out of the woods and exploding around us. We begged:
“Just light up the fucking woods!”
“Make them put their heads down!”
“Just do it!”
…
Sgt. Will started pumping 25 mm cannon rounds and spraying 7.62 co-ax rounds into the woods. The Bradley began rocking and filling with gunsmoke. The afternoon sunlight angling through of the rear periscope blocks cut shafts of light through the blue wisps of smoke … The Red tanks fired four times in rapid succession. Nothing came out of the woods after that.
…
“This war ain’t so gay anymore,” Baxter observed.
Whole thing, as Memory Lane meanders through the Euphrates Valley.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:30 pm Comments (0) on Friday, April 3, 2009
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