Grunge (ARC) Read online

  I miss Mrs. Brentwood’s cooking. They’re still around but I’m just so fricking busy these days.

  Violating virtually every rule in the book, Mr. Brentwood introduced me to shooting and gunsmithing without my mom’s consent or, fortunately, knowledge. He had a shop in his basement that we spent many an hour in working on molds, reloading and so on and so forth. The man is a virtual encyclopedia of guns and remains someone I call when I’m stuck on something. He introduced me to both the M1 Garand, his weapon of choice, and the Thompson, an unusable beast of a weapon in my opinion.

  But he wasn’t just the stereotype former Marine. One incident during the battle of Tarawa had changed his view of the world. You see, he was smart and had a flexible mind. When something violated his world view, he didn’t simply dismiss it.

  Given what this memoir is supposed to be about you may be thinking that’s monsters. As far as I know, and I’ve delicately sounded him out, Mr. Brentwood has never encountered any of the stuff I now kill for a living. What he did encounter on Tarawa was a banzai attack. Not his first, but the first where he came face to face, bayonet to sword, with a Jap officer. And lost.

  Fortunately, his platoon leader shot the officer in the chest with his .45 before the backstroke would have ended my future foster father’s life. But it got Mr. Brentwood thinking. The platoon leader, correctly, collected the sword as a souvenir and sent it home. (His kill, his souvenir.) Later, Sergeant Brentwood managed to get his hand on one as well. And still later found someone who knew something about them. And slowly became something of an unrecognized expert on Japanese katanas.

  “Anything lethal is worth paying attention to” was his reasoning.

  He studied them, bought them, sold them, traded them and even had made a couple using more or less traditional techniques. In the 1950s, studying kendo was considered beyond odd, right up there with crazy. He didn’t care. “Anything lethal is worth paying attention to.” He learned Japanese specifically to understand bushido better. He didn’t buy into all of it, and seriously hated the Japanese themselves, but he was something of an American “sword saint.” He can, to this day, absolutely brutalize me at kendo and I’ve use kendo in real action against major monsters. I cut the head off a two-hundred-year-old Greater vampire in action. Not “Stake, chop” but “Slash, slash, slash, off with the head.” (And one leg and an arm.) And that old man can still kick my ass.

  Pro-tip: Inside a certain distance, generally about twenty feet, a blade of some sort is generally better than a gun. There are arguments for a stubby at that range. But a blade is generally better. And there’s no better blade than a katana in my opinion. But they don’t call me Iron Hand () for no reason.

  Since I finally had a father figure who wasn’t, in my opinion, bug-shit crazy, I naturally had to follow in his footsteps. When he realized that I’d learned kanji in about two months’ not particularly hard study, it sort of pissed him off.

  “Chad,” as he called me. “Next year, you are taking my chemistry course. And if you get anything other than an A, you’re never coming over for dinner again.”

  So next year I took high school chemistry and physics in the same semester. Perfect A in chemistry.

  You guessed it. Perfect F in physics.

  Gotta maintain that C average.

  I mean, I learned the physics. I even liked it. I’ve applied it repeatedly over the years. Especially F=ma.

  But gotta maintain that C average.

  I dated a lot. I hardly ever studied. (Including chemistry.) I finally got permission to do track and field. That took up some time. I spent most of my evenings (and eventually nights) at the Brentwoods. It wasn’t like my mom cared. She’d repeatedly noted that she’d considered aborting me since I wasn’t “planned” and in retrospect had made the wrong decision. Getting me out of her life was as much her goal as mine. Feel the love.

  I mowed lawns starting from about thirteen. I got slightly better jobs working mostly in construction when I turned sixteen. Generally day labor but it paid better than mowing lawns. I kept focusing on shop versus college prep. Through Mr. Brentwood, I got a part-time job as a mechanic when I turned seventeen and that was great. Good money and it gave me a chance to pick up a car cheap and get it fixed up the way I liked it. It was a 1976 Cutlass Supreme that was definitely a Monday car.

  In those days, really bad vehicles were by hoary adage built on Mondays and Fridays. Monday ’cause all the workers were hung over and Friday ’cause all the senior people had called in sick or something and the assembly line was all fucked up.

  Bottom line, everything was wrong with this car, which was why I got it cheap. Classic example of the height of American automotive manufacturing in the 1970s. The only thing that wasn’t badly put together was the Delta 88 engine which absolutely screamed. The tranny leaked like a sieve. The rear differential sounded like a rock crusher. The shocks were shot and it was barely three years old. The headliner was already sagging. The underbody was rusting and it had supposedly been rust-proofed at the factory. The ugly green paint job was flecking off.

  I put sooo much work into Honeybear it was just silly. I don’t think, with the exception of the engine, at this point there is one original part. And I’ve rebuilt the engine twice. On the other hand, I’m still driving her.

  Kendo, shooting, track and field, dating, fixing up Honeybear to better-than-new condition. There were quite a few girls in that school who were, in the parlance of the time, “easy.” It was just past the Sexual Revolution into the Sexual Evolution and pre-AIDs. Good times. And, yep, had at least a short fling with most of them. That was one area where the apple did not fall far from the tree.

  Sing it with me: “Those were the best days of our lives…” I’m one of those people who fucking loved high school. Probably the only hard part was that most of my friends, and dates, really were dumb as a stump. I occasionally had to hang out with the nerds just to have something resembling intelligent conversation. Which in those days meant playing the occasional D&D game.

  That came in surprisingly useful later in life. I’m pretty sure that Gary Gygax knew people, if you know what I mean.

  I was born December 6th, 1962. Since celebrating birthdays, or any other similar holiday, was an antiquated notion of the social construct, the first real birthday party I had was when the Brentwoods threw one for me and my pals when I turned fifteen. On December 7th, 1980, one day after my eighteenth birthday, and the anniversary of those crafty Japs bombing Pearl Harbor, I went down to a strip mall by the old post office and entered the office of the Marine recruiter.

  “Good afternoon, Staff Sergeant,” I said in my most polite voice. I was wearing a good, clean, carefully creased, button-down white shirt, carefully creased black dress slacks and a high and tight. “I would like to join the Marine Corps.”

  There were things I knew about joining the Corps that most recruits didn’t really think about. One of them was the ASVAB, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. It is, still, one of the best vocational tests on the face of the planet. If you don’t try to futz with it, it will point you in the correct direction in terms of your usefulness in the military as well as a job you’re going to more or less enjoy. (In general.)

  But the thing is, if I pushed it all the way, I’d end up doing signal intercept or some such shit. I wasn’t interested in listening to scritches, beeps and whistles that might be a signal for the rest of my life. That’s probably where I would have maximally supported the Marine force, yeah, but I was joining the Marines to kill commies…I wanted to be infantry.

  So I got a perfect C.

  Man, I studied for that fucker. There were books and books you could find about the ASVAB. I analyzed it, spindled it, folded it and mutilated it. I knew exactly the scores and answers that would make me perfect machine-gun fodder and just above perfect cook.

  When I walked back into the recruiting office to talk to the staff sergeant, the first words out of his mouth were:


  “Son. Have you ever thought about the infantry…?”

  I kept from jumping for joy and shouting “Yes! Fucking nailed it!”

  I graduated June 6th, 1981, with a vo-tech diploma. My mother didn’t attend my graduation but the Brentwoods did. Mr. Brentwood drove me to the MEPS station on June 19th. I raised my right hand and swore to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. They didn’t mention supernatural, oddly enough. I did half wonder if it gave me license to kill my mom. And I was in the Marines.

  From the first night I spent at the Brentwoods, Mr. Brentwood had ensured that I understood the standards expected of me if I was going to stay at their house. I’d always been the neat freak in my parents’ house. Mr. and Mrs. Brentwood just dialed it in a bit. Then there was the shooting training and generally “Marineness” of the whole existence.

  Bottom line, with a couple of exceptions, I more or less ghosted Basic.

  Don’t get me wrong. Marine Basic was and is hard as shit. And the sand flies at Parris Island have to be experienced to be understood. But…

  The first day we were being introduced to the M-16 rifle I made one of my minor errors. The instructor was detailing how to fieldstrip the weapon. We were sitting cross-legged in a circle. I was paying strict attention to his guidance. Such strict attention that I didn’t even notice my hands were, instinctively, stripping the weapon down as he spoke. The instructor noticed and stormed over.

  “On your feet, Recruit!”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” I screamed, popping to attention.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Recruit?”

  “Sir, paying strict attention to your guidance, sir!”

  “Was my guidance to begin stripping your weapon, Recruit?”

  “Sir, no, sir!”

  “Why is your weapon stripped, Recruit?”

  I looked down and sort of blanched.

  “Uhhhh…No excuse, sir! I just…No excuse, sir!”

  The instructor at that point apparently noticed that not only was the weapon stripped down to disassembly of the bolt, it was neatly laid out. And he’d probably half noticed that I had, in fact, been watching him carefully the whole time.

  “You stripped it without looking, didn’t you?” he asked in a much more casual voice.

  “Sir…” I said, not sure what to say.

  “You go to ROT-see or something, Recruit?”

  “Sir, no, sir!” I said. I knew I had to say something. “My foster father was a World War II Marine, sir. Sergeant Herman J. Brentwood, sir. I just…When I had the weapon and it was stripping weapons, sir…Sir, no excuse, sir.”

  “Put it back together?” the drill instructor asked, again almost casually.

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “Blindfolded?”

  I took a chance. “Blindfolded in a hurricane while making love to a beautiful woman, sir!”

  He slowly reached into his pocket and pulled out a stopwatch.

  “Take a cross-legged position, Recruit,” the drill instructor said. “If you do it to time, with your eyes closed, I’ll let you off on this one.”

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  I assembled it in half the required time and tried never to stand out again.

  But…then there was a Marine Corps tradition.

  When I joined up, I tried to get the Brentwoods as my next of kin. No such luck. I had family. I therefore had to list my damned mother as next of kin. Which meant in Basic, I had to write my mother a letter once per week.

  “Dear Mother:

  “I am here at Marine Corps Basic Training in Parris Island and loving every minute of it. Today’s training was on the proper method of bayoneting babies…”

  I don’t know why I even bothered. A few weeks later I received the letter back with “Return to Sender.”

  This prompted an inquiry from the same drill instructor who had been the instructor for assembly and disassembly of the M-16. This inquiry being full-on head tilt on the nose with the brim.

  “I thought your foster father was a Marine, Recruit!”

  “Unofficial foster father, sir! My mother is a member of the Communist Party and used to drag me to her God-damned Vietnam War peace marches, sir! When she found out I was joining the Marines, she asked how I could become a babykiller, sir! I answered babies don’t dodge so it’s easy, sir!”

  One of the more junior drill instructors was standing by and turned away with a coughing fit at that one.

  “Do you have an unofficial foster mother, Recruit?” the drill instructor barked.

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “You are hereby instructed to write to your unofficial foster mother for the remainder of training!”

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  I already had been writing the Brentwoods, anyway. About a week after that a large care package arrived. Homemade peanut brittle, Momma Brentwood style.

  And, yes, there was enough for the whole platoon. And a smaller package specifically for the drill instructors. That one was separately sealed. I suspect it was her famous rum balls.

  Other than that, I tried like hell not to stand out other than by doing everything as perfectly as possible. I had all the regular chickenshit that bothers people down pat via Mr. Brentwood’s teachings. Folding socks and underwear? Got it. Biggest problem was he’d taught me the Old Guard way based on footlockers and we’d upgraded to pussy wall lockers. I could pack my greens in a seabag and have them come out like they’d been sent to the dry cleaners. Shining boots? I’d take firewatch most nights and get them to a glossy sheen. Bounce a quarter off the rack? You could bounce it to the moon. Cleaning weapons? Favorite part of the day. Waking up in a split second when the drill instructors entered the bay? Mr. Brentwood had even drilled me on that, much to Mrs. Brentwood’s annoyance. (She got seriously tired of that garbage can being banged at 0430 every morning for the last six months of high school.)

  Basic still sucked but that was its purpose.

  And who showed up at that graduation? Mr. and Mrs. Brentwood, of course. He wearing his First Marine Division patch on his ball cap along with his campaign ribbons, four purple hearts and two Bronze Stars.

  Turned out the Sergeant Major had been one of his privates in Korea.

  The POST Sergeant Major.

  Mr. Brentwood had never mentioned being at the Frozen Chosin. Or Inchon. Or being somebody that Chesty Puller knew by name. The Post Commander treated him like royalty.

  I had a lot to live up to.

  But, truthfully, there wasn’t much available when I reached my permanent party. ’Cause welcome to the Cold War and the end of the “Hollow Military” period. We still were getting shit for training budget and most of our time was spent painting rocks.

  I was, also, assigned to the First Marine Division. First Battalion, Eight Marines. (One-Eight.) No string-pulling involved. Kentucky recruits went east and that was First Marine Division, where I became just another grunt at Lejeune.

  And just as I’d set out to be the poster child for C average, I set out to be the poster child Marine. In this I was going to get an A+. I could shoot, move and communicate. I was always gung ho as shit. To the point it sort of annoyed some of my fellow grunts but fuck ’em. I was planning on being a Gunny in record time.

  Want rocks painted? Multiple colors or pure white? I never whined or complained about the stupidest or most inane shit. Never volunteer? I volunteered for anything. I ruck-marched on weekends. I trained off-duty. Including expanding my repertoire of martial arts beyond kendo while still keeping that up. Although I didn’t make much of a thing of it. That would have put me in the “weird” category and the last thing you want is to get that categorization.

  We did a couple of floats the first year. Nothing much. Most floats were out to sea, turn around, board the amtracs and run ashore at Lejeune. Doing more cost lots of money. We did one long float over to the Med and some shore leave.

  Liberty on a float is what most Ma
rines join up to do. I wanted to go ashore at Rota as much as the next guy. I volunteered to be part of the unit that stayed aboard on the first rotation. Why? ’Cause that’s hardcore, dude. You’ve been stuck on this boat for weeks and you volunteer to take the first duty so your shipmates can go ashore and get drunk? Somebody’s got to stay on watch. You grit your teeth and say “Semper Fi, Staff Sergeant. I’ll take it.”

  I think most of my squad sort of half hated me and half admired me. But we got along. ’Cause I was smart enough to never, ever, intellectualize and spoke pure grunt-speak at all times. And I was clear. Didn’t care how much anyone bitched. “My goal in life is to make Gunny in record time for peacetime.”

  But that float was the beginning of something else. See, on a float, you get a lot of downtime. They train and they drill and you clean compartments but there’s still more “off” time than at the barracks. There’s only so much Marines can do on a boat. Which I knew, so I’d prepared. With correspondence courses.

  See, promotion is in part based on academics, even for grunts. Want to be a staff sergeant? Better have some college or college-equivalent courses. The military provided, back then, correspondence courses through the University of Maryland for a pretty nominal fee. Admittedly, you don’t make much as a private but I could still afford a few correspondence courses to take on the float for the off time. And since the Marine Corps supported it, you could even get more off time. “Staff Sergeant, permission to study my correspondence courses versus whatever made-up shit they were doing to keep us from going bugshit?”

  And since my mother was no longer seeing my grades, I could let out the stops. By the time we got to Spain, I’d finished three courses. All I had to do was take the tests. When I did I got, yup, straight As.

  As are easy. Perfect Cs are hard.