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    One Confirmed Kill
    One Confirmed Kill
    One Confirmed Kill
    Ebook65 pages1 hour

    One Confirmed Kill

    By Peter Johnston

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    About this ebook

    A Marine infantryman deploys to Iraq while dealing with abusive and clueless leadership, misguided comrades and his own doubts about the war, all while coming to terms with the value of human life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeter Johnston
    Release dateMar 30, 2012
    ISBN9781476415772
    One Confirmed Kill

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      Book preview

      One Confirmed Kill - Peter Johnston

      One Confirmed Kill

      By Peter Johnston

      Published by Peter Johnston at Smashwords

      Copyright 2012 Peter Johnston

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      The following is not fiction. The characters and events described are closely based on real life, and any resemblance to real persons, organizations and events is purely intentional, and should be construed in the most negative light the text will support. Some names have been changed to protect the author from violent reprisals from the real people thus depicted, in the unlikely event that any of them have learned to read.

      One Confirmed Kill

      I closed the toilet lid and sat down on it, leaving my belt cinched and my pants up. Much would be said about me, starting very soon: Some would call me a fool, and they might be right. Some might call me a coward, and maybe they would be right, too. If this little gambit of mine worked, certain people would almost definitely call me a traitor, but that’s really just a matter of perspective. Whatever anyone says about me in the future, I want to make it very clear that I did not die with my pants around my ankles.

      Four months we’d been in Iraq. For six months before that we’d been in training. Ten months in all, with at least four more to go, away from our jobs, families, and permanent buildings with real toilets, and for all this we had nothing to show.

      I’m complaining, of course. I do that. You might say it’s my job now, seeing as I’m an ocean and two continents away from my real job, and without a chance of ever getting to do my military job.

      I’m a combat infantryman, but when there’s no combat, my role becomes somewhat fuzzy. Mostly I complain, because it feels necessary, and to entertain my squadmates. But there’s no combat. This country’s at peace.

      Which is not to say I never see the enemy. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve seen the enemy just about every day.

      ###

      It started in Kuwait, on several levels. Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked war of aggression against that country in 1990, and the U.S.A.’s thorough thrashing of him the next year, arguably played a part in my later decision to join the Marine Corps; it was later the jumping-off point for America’s own unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq; and it was my own personal last stop before I got into my sad little corner of the non-action. It was also where I finally realized that the whole thing had been a mistake.

      Not that I hadn’t suspected it before. Most civilians don’t know this, or don’t want to, but almost all of military life is nonsense. On our training base in California, we typically spent more time each day cleaning our rooms, listening to asinine lectures about new policies, primping to look pretty for whatever high-ranking people we would probably never see, listening to asinine lectures about what slobs we were, listening to asinine lectures about how irresponsible we were to have allowed some guy we’d never met from a sister unit we’d never heard of to violate the new policy that was cancelled three new policies ago, playing video games, and listening to asinine lectures about how our lack of focus was going to get us all killed, than we did training, preparing for training, or even thinking about training. On the rare occasions when we did train, we spent about five percent of our time training, and the rest just sitting around. It was all most ridiculous, but I figured that all that foolishness and inefficiency was permitted because no one had anything better to do. In the combat zone, it comforted me to think, things would be different. No time for asinine lectures because we’d be too busy fighting. No time for cleaning, or primping, or standing perfectly still for the duration of the National Anthem at morning and evening colors, because anything that doesn’t directly contribute to survival and/or victory is simply disposable. And so I looked forward to shipping out. Until we got to Kuwait.

      We landed in Kuwait City and took buses to a tent-city base somewhere in a vast expanse of sand. There we received our first asinine lecture on foreign soil, and there I began to give up hope. I lost most of the rest of it minutes later as we transferred our gear from the air-conditioned, state-of-the-art luxury buses to the air-conditioned, state-of-the-art luxury tents:

      Hurry up! Do you want to get us killed? The speaker (screamer, really) is Staff Sergeant Hannigan, my platoon sergeant. He and I were the only New Englanders in a company full of Utards and Las Vegas desert rats, so I had liked him at first, but that was beginning to feel like a long time ago.

      The movements of the various men playing as pack animals sped up a fraction for a moment, then slowed back down as Hannigan moved to

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