Chasing the Pinkmist
Sometimes you wish you didn’t care
so much about pinkmist, but when you’re melting on an adobe rooftop in Iraq,
you can only be quenched by it.
The sweat beads, drips, and drops
off your brow— and the water hangs from your 6 day beard after your drink from
the plastic canteen, your thoughts soar to the white Hawaiian beach you sank
into after an hour of getting beat up by the surf— a condensated cup of Maui in
your hand and your lover in the other. You overlooked her cracked and chipped
white nail polish and you notice the bed sheets are the same pure white as you
run your fingers through her sun bleached blond hair, which forces her into a
half smile that makes you laugh from happiness.
Your thought segues to the scene
you came home to last year. You find it sweet and sexy and innocent how her
clothes trailed off in the hallway with the Indie falsetto singer cooing from
her record player. Maybe you’ll jump in the shower with her, but you find her
with another guy. A stranger that you’ve noticed before, he lives down the
street. You know this is clichéd.
You’re
forced to shake the thought, and with a lighted cigarette cupped in your hand,
it helps. You exhale the smoke in short puffs, trying to conceal your perfectly
perched position as best as you can. You wait and wish and want the next taste
of pinkmist.
You think
of home again, this time about your three nephews. How old are they now? You think to yourself.
“What?”
Says your spotter.
“What?”
“How
old is who?” He says.
“I
dunno.”
He shakes his head and goes back to
his binoculars. You notice a tiny bug crawling on your glove, which keeps your
attention long enough to have a weird conversation with some kind of sensitive
conscience you have. You slowly put a finger on the tiny creature and kill it.
You feel bad, kind of. The nephews… you backtrack. God, they’re dating and
driving now. Far too young to drink in the horridly sweet taste.
Even the other guys in your unit
stay connected with the bit of humanity left in this country, but they don’t
have a clue as to how thirsty you are for a drink of the mist. No one does. No
one gets how you simply crave the taste day in and day out. It’s your 5th
deployment and every mission can’t come quickly enough for you. You just want
to feel the metal trigger squeeze. You want to hear the ringing in your ears
after a shot goes out. You want to smell the carbon from the burnt gunpowder.
The pinkmist is the icing though. The cigarette afterwards is a close second.
Sniper instructors say a shooter only
needs to be on the scope for an hour at a time. You have been on the scope for three
hours, far too long. You have been on your over watch mission for six days now,
it might be seven. You don’t really know or care. The last time you had a taste
was two hours and fifty minutes ago, and you spilled it on a window of a glass
blower’s front door. His wife and kids had to clean it up. You watched with a
cigarette cupped and a thought comparing sex and what you’re feeling now, both
messy.
Finally, you see a teenage male
round the corner of an alleyway that connects the main road you are over
watching. The road is a hotbed for IEDs and it’s your job to prevent more being
planted. The kid is followed by three more and they all are caring boxes, one
has a shovel. The one with the spade begins digging a hole as the others look
anxiously around. It’s like they know you’re watching them, but they are just
too stupid… or motivated.
“Spotter ready.”
“Shooter ready”
“Shooter ready”
“Range, 500 plus 1” Whispers your
spotter.
“Wind, left to right 5 “He
continues.
“Send it” Your spotter commands.
“On the way.”
The natural squeeze of your finger
parallels with your breathing and the recoil of your fired weapon sends a chill
to the soles of your feet. As your hand ejects the spent casing with the bolt
action lever, your eye stays glued to the scope. It was a perfect kill shot,
just below the tip of his nose and above his upper lip. This is ideal for a one
shot, one kill, as the bullet will travel through the head and sever the
cerebral cord. The other two teens start to run.
“Send it”
“Send it”
“On the
way”
Another blast rings out and catches
the shorter teenage boy just shy of center mass, to the left of the spine in
the meaty part of his back behind his shoulder. You know the part that always
gets knots in the muscle tissue? He drops.
The third teen has hidden himself
behind a car. You know you could shoot through the car, but you don’t want to
just injure him, allowing for a getaway. You wait, he waits. You scan the area
around the car, anticipating any avenues of retreats he may decide to pick.
There is really only one logical one, back through the alley they came from.
Water begins running from the tire of the car.
“He’s fucking pissed himself!” Your spotter exclaims with a sick kind of desperation in his laugh.
“He’s fucking pissed himself!” Your spotter exclaims with a sick kind of desperation in his laugh.
You decide the waiting is bullshit
and you want to fully fill your pinkmist cup. You tell the spotter to get you
the .50 cal sniper. He doesn’t hesitate and moves with a sense of urgency.
Maybe he needs the mist in his life as well. You give the scope three clicks
and put your crosshair just to the right of the left taillight of the orange
and white Opel with piss coming from the tire.
“Send it”
“On the
way”
The 50 gives its best recoil as the bullet the size of a
gorilla’s middle finger spirals to its target.An explosion of metal and flesh
ensue. It is horridly magnificent. Everything is gray, except for the pink that
sprays and leaks from the dead man’s body. With a bullet that size, if it hit
his head, there would be nothing left. Especially after mushrooming through the
car’s metal. You can’t go and observe your artwork, but your mind fills in the
gaps and it’s spectacular.
You gladly
endure your 15 month deployment. You soak in the death and destruction and
desire to kill. Your home is not only physically far, but mentally as well. You
wonder if your family will be able to recognize your actions and thoughts and
thoughts that become actions and thoughts and actions that become spoken words.
You wonder how fucked up you really have become. You dream and see the faces
you have taken the life from. You dream with crosshairs. Your everyday life is
consumed with crosshairs. You are met in the airport by your family with banners
and tears but not a single one from you. You examine every passing face in the
airport and every possible sniper nest and ballistic loophole. You are in
America, but you’re situational awareness level is Ludacris Paranoid. You break
out in sweats when strangers are within 5 feet of you, hordes of strangers
looking at you. Your uniform still has dried blood on it, but it’s the cleanest
one you had. You smell like Iraqi sand and shit. You feel filthy. No amount of
showers can smooth this dirty feeling of your skin. You start to think it’s
deeper than that. You start to think it might be a mental thing.
The drive
home isn’t any easier. Every little mound of dirt or pothole or piece of trash
makes you flinch. You tell yourself there is no IED that can get you here, but
you know that’s not entirely true.
You want your dad to drive in the middle of the lane, but this isn’t a combat
zone. You can’t do whatever you want here. The laws are enforced here. Cars
speed past you, and the whole time they were approaching you had an eye on them
in the mirror. You wish you were on a patrol, sweating in a Humvee that is
bound to blow up. You wish it was post-explosion, the ringing in your ears
silencing the voices screaming of lost limbs and those in your head that were thirsting
for pinkmist.
You are
pretty quiet through your welcome home barbeque. There’s nothing to say so you
stay silent. You scan the houses around you and count the windows that you
would shoot yourself from if that were the case. You feel hunted. You feel the
predator constantly creeping over you. You sweat out of anxiety and try to
drown it with whiskey and Xanax and weed. You sleep in thirty minute
increments; sometimes you get lucky and get a full hour, you always see faces
in dreams though. There is always crosshairs on them. You have become the
unsuspecting victim counting tallies on a back wall in a morgue. You start to
think you are one of the weak-minded, and you don’t dare tell a soul of the
thoughts you have.
You watch
the 24/7 news channels, switching back and forth between MSNBC and FOX. Your
thoughts seem to fight you even more, but your cellphone tings at you with a
message from your high school friends, are
you coming tonight?
It’s your high school reunion and
you find it hard to believe it’s been 10 years since you’ve last seen this
group of people. Facebook helped bridge a certain type of gap, but they’ll
never picture you as you. So, you go and drink a few beers and make them look
bad at pool. You shoot more whiskey than they could ever handle. You drink and
you smoke and you curse, and they love you for it. The girls ask about all
you’ve seen and you tell them PG stories. Your class president won’t leave you
alone, though she never looked at you back then. You have meaningless sex with
her in the bathroom at the local country club and she slaps you after you
notice her chipped pink nail polish and asked her why the husband didn’t get
her a manicure. You get too drunk and tell everyone you didn’t like them 10
years ago and they’re just as annoying now.
You start walking home but a girl
from the reunion picks you up 3 blocks down the road. Jarren, you think her
name is. She remembered you in high school as the funny guy. You stare out the window of her moving car,
completely hopeless and empty. She tries to make small talk but you just ask
her what music she listens to.
“I hope to god you don’t say
‘everything’” You make your little finger quotations.
“For just once, I would love for a female to
actually have an opinion on this subject.”
“Actually I do like everything, my
playlist ranges from-“
“Tupac to Kings of Leon to Conway
Twitty? Yeah, I’ve heard that shit before.”
“You know what, just get the fuck
out.”
She swerves the car hard to the
side of the road, nearly throwing you out of your seat.
“Oh come on, I was just joking.”
“You’re an asshole, get out!”
“I am a fucking asshole!”
“I am a fucking asshole!”
You trudge the rest of the way home
and the neighbor is sitting on a lawn chair in your driveway, 2 bottles of Jack
Daniels next to him. One of which is halfway empty. A CCR song is playing…
something about rain. There are no words said, he just opens the other and
hands it to you as you fall to a chair. Swigging the sour mash sends a warm
sensation through your veins that you hadn’t felt in a long time. Without a
word or a second thought he lights a joint and passes it to you, followed by 4
blue pills and . You recognize these. These are Ambient. You recall a time you
hallucinated on these same pills coming back from your first deployment. The AC
window unit turned into a monster and started laughing at you. Recalling the
terrible experience you downed them with the whiskey anyways. I mean, you can
only hallucinate if you fight the urge to sleep, these pills give you the urge
to sleep… to coma, rather.
“Your ole man says you just got
back.”
“Yeah”
“Did I ever tell you I was in
Vietnam?” He finally said.
“No” You manage to say as you hold
in a coughing session from the pot.
“3 deployments man, 3 fucking
deployments into that jungle and I swear to god I can still hear those gooks
talking at night, like they were having a nice get together and mocking us at
the same time, like they had night vision eyes. They knew right where we were,
all the time. The weird thing is, I knew we shouldn’t have been there, but I
had this overwhelming feeling dedicated to the uniform I was wearing. And when
I would come home, I would be called terrible names and spit on and protestors
banging the car window and hood. I never felt so degraded and ashamed wearing
that uniform. To this day I still see the first kid I killed, actually not even
the kid, it was what I assumed was his mom. Staring right at me with no tears
in her face, just staring… right at me with her son lying there, dead, with
half of his face torn off. That’s the shit I’ll never forget.”
He gets up from his chair and puts
a hand on your shoulder. There are no more words said, but definitely a
connection was sent and received. Combat veterans have this sort of thing, when
there has been so much destruction seen, heard, and smelled the brain has to
process these things in one way or another. It’s like this emotional process
can be relieved from one to another, knowing there has always been terrible
shit for the grunts to see and do.
Before you know it he is gone and
you are now the one sitting alone with a bottle of jack and a joint in your
hand. Bob Dylan’s voice comes from the radio,
“You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy”
Like it's your little toy”
You accept that you are just a toy,
a pawn, being used as cannon fodder for a small group of elites that want
nothing but more money to sit on. You become disgusted with yourself, mirrors
become your enemy. You try to show no signs that you were military, but others
that are can tell without even talking to you. There’s a certain demeanor about
a combat veteran. You count days left in your contract. You think of ways to
get out of it. You fight voices in your head and the triggers that spark them.
Flashes, crowds, unsuspecting thuds from your dad moving things in the attic,
everything from everywhere collapses your ability to function normally. You eat
pills that make you fuzzy and everything cloudy. You stop eating pills and hear
the voices again. You drink to pass out, but it does nothing but cause
dependence and in reality there is no sleep. You learn the neighbor has passed
away, an Agent Orange assassination. Cannon fodder. You feel no one around you
understands, no one can connect. There is only one way to cope, so you become
pinkmist.
