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version="5.0">

<info>

<title>The Wax Bullet War</title>

<!-- the title repeats twice, for full and half title page -->

<subtitle>Chronicles of a Soldier &amp; Artist</subtitle>

<author>Sean Davis</author>

<imagedata fileref="OoliganHook.LANDSCAPE.2011.eps" />

<title>The Wax Bullet War: Chronicles of a Soldier &amp; Artist</title>

© 2014 Sean Davis

All images© 2014 Sean Davis

ISBN: 978-1-932010-70-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Ooligan Press

Department of English

Portland State University

P.O. Box 751, Portland, Oregon 97207

503.725.9410;fax 503.725.3561

ooligan@ooliganpress.pdx.edu

www.ooligan.pdx.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

[info to come]

Cover Design by Gina Fox

Interior Design by Paul Dudley</info>

<dedication>For Eric and the amazing men of Bravo Company 2/162, Infantry</dedication>

<dedication>And for Mag—thank you for showing me that each word is just as important as each
idea.</dedication>

<part><title>Table of Contents</title>

<toc>

<tocentry>Preface</tocentry>

<tocentry>1. Holes</tocentry>

<tocentry>2. The Big Game</tocentry>

<tocentry>3. Robots Love Car Bombs</tocentry>

<tocentry>4. Trained Stupid</tocentry>

<tocentry>5. The Part Where I Have Drunken Sex With a Cowgirl and Later Eat Lunch With the President
of the United States of America</tocentry>

<tocentry>6. Twenty-Five-Dollar Whores, Victorian Literature, and Humane Killing Machines</tocentry>

<tocentry>7. Starving in the Belly of a Whale</tocentry>

<tocentry>8. The Kid</tocentry>

<tocentry>9. The Cradle of Civilization</tocentry>

<tocentry>10. Be Polite, Be Professional, and Be Prepared to Kill Everyone You Meet</tocentry>

<tocentry>11. Painting Daisies in Valhalla</tocentry>

<tocentry>12. The Shit Sandwich</tocentry>

<tocentry>13. Tea at the Baghdad Zoo</tocentry>

<tocentry>14. Chicken Coops and Movie Stars</tocentry>

<tocentry>15. The Worst of It</tocentry>

<tocentry>16. In the Fade</tocentry>

<tocentry>17. The Punch Line</tocentry>

<tocentry>18. I Flew Over 2,000 Miles Completely Naked</tocentry>

<tocentry>19. Purgatory Looked a Lot Like Texas</tocentry>

<tocentry>20. Attempted Murder</tocentry>

<tocentry>21. Army Ants</tocentry>

<tocentry>22. The Blast Supper</tocentry>

<tocentry>23. The Life of the Party</tocentry>

<tocentry>24. A Bright, Shining Star is Born, Then Fades Out Completely</tocentry>

<tocentry>25. Half of <emphasis>60 Minutes</emphasis></tocentry>

<tocentry>26. Committed</tocentry>

<tocentry>27. Dying the Hemingway</tocentry>

<tocentry>28. Pearls Before Swine</tocentry>

<tocentry>29. The End of Staff Sergeant Sean Davis</tocentry>

<tocentry>30. Captain Intenso Rides Again</tocentry>

<tocentry>31. The Boys Make It Home</tocentry>

<tocentry>32. Still Taking Orders</tocentry>

<tocentry>33. The Einherjar</tocentry>

<tocentry>34. Break Glass in Case of War</tocentry>

<tocentry>35. Flying Sharks and Zombie Squirrels</tocentry>

<tocentry>36. Whole</tocentry>

<tocentry>Terminology: All Those Things a Person Needs to Know to Be a Good Infantry

Soldier</tocentry></toc></part>
<chapter><title>Preface</title>

<first_para>Ten years ago a good friend of mine was killed in an explosion that put me in the hospital for
a couple months. Another friend of mine was critically injured that day. In all, four men in my company
were killed during our tour in Iraq: Eric McKinley, Kenny Leisten, Ben Isenberg, and Dave Weisenburg. I
hope to hell this book honors these men.</first_para>

<para>After coming back hell-broke and feeling ruined I fell into a place I didn’t think I could get out of.
Not even the people closest to me knew how bad it was. I thought about taking my own life and many
times wished I had died in combat. But this book isn’t a complaint or a long list of the ways I think the
war messed me up. I am proud of what my unit did over there. The men in my company were
exceptional and I hope to show this, but I have two reasons for writing this book: I want to give the
family members of combat veterans a glimpse of what their soldiers went through and I want to let
other soldiers in that dark place know they’re not alone. They can get through it and lead successful
lives.</para>

<para>Most things in this book are true. I changed the names because everyone remembers traumatic
events differently, and not everyone can be at their best all the time, especially when they don’t know
someone is going to write about them. Hundreds of people in uniform and out became huge parts of my
life during the period of time contained in this story. I wish I could have listed them all, but it became
clear early on in this project that I would need to merge some of them and not mention many others. A
few events were changed, but the war stuff is true: we were shot at or mortared every day, many
people died, and we helped who we could.</para>

<epigraph><emphasis>“Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,

Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.

‘Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs

That march now from the mountain to the sea;

‘Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,

Loving not, hating not, just choosing so."

<attribution>Caliban Upon Setebos</attribution>

<attribution>Robert Browning</attribution></emphasis></epigraph></chapter>

<chapter><title>1. Holes</title>

<section><first_para>The morning Simon Scott was killed he sat in the back of our Humvee with his
elbows on his knees and told me his theory on life. He said he’d figured it all out. Everything we take in
or put out goes through a hole. It didn’t matter if a person fought in a war, drank himself to death,
chased girls, or risked his life to be a hero; every action was made to fill one hole or another. We
laughed and threw rocks at stray dogs while waiting in the Iraqi heat for our final combat mission, the
mission that would take his life and send me home on a stretcher, bone-broke, bruised, and soul-
wrecked. I skipped right over what he was trying to tell me that day and didn’t think about it for a couple
months after the ambush, but now I think about it all the time. When I remember each decision I made
leading up to that one afternoon, I think about the hole I was trying to fill.</first_para></section>

<section><para>September 11, 2001: I was twenty-eight years old and had been a civilian for two and a
half years since leaving the army after a six-year hitch. In all that time, I had never once thought about
reenlisting, but the next day I jumped in my beat-up white Toyota and drove off to join the Oregon
National Guard. The recruiter’s office was a chaotic sea of college kids who had changed their minds
about joining up now that the threat of war was on every channel, every station. I cut right through
them, walked up to the desk, and told an old sergeant I wanted to do my part and reenlist. I remember
him turning to another soldier and saying, “There’s still hope for the republic after all.”</para>

<para>Those words made me proud of my decision, gave me a sense of heroism. From then on,
whenever people talked about that horrible moment in our history, I was able to say I reenlisted the
next day.</para>

<para>Where I grew up, in the poor trailer parks of Western Oregon, the kids didn’t see much of a
future for themselves. The best we could hope for was a manager position at Les Schwab or Safeway, or
maybe leaving for a season to be a fisherman in Alaska, but most ended up as loggers like their fathers. I
wanted to create beautiful art and stories, to get people’s attention and approval. Looking back at this I
can see Simon was right; I was only trying to fill a hole.</para>

<para>Because of her pregnancy with me, my mother left high school during her sophomore year, never
to finish. Dad stuck around long enough to have two more sons, and by the time my mom was twenty
years old she had three children and no husband. She didn’t make it two years before she gave up her
sons to be raised in the green mountains of Oregon by our paternal grandparents. After a few years, our
grandparents realized they were too old to raise boys and forced our father to come back, to marry, to
raise his sons.</para>

<para>My brothers and I ended up in the Cascade Mountain Range, in a poor logging town made to stop
logging because someone decided the spotted owl was an endangered species and needed miles of
untouched forest to breed. Between jobs, Dad sold most of our food stamps for half their worth in cash
so he could buy liquor. He worked hard when he was employed and drank hard at home. At school,
children were cruel to my two brothers and me for being poor, and at home we were beaten for trivial
things like not cleaning our plates, not bringing in the firewood, or forgetting to feed the dogs.</para>

<para>I used art as an escape and read books about uncompromising heroes. I was an odd child who
wanted to be Cyrano de Bergerac, Jean Valjean, a Musketeer. Many times the books were too smart for
me, but I read through the <emphasis>Divine Comedy</emphasis> and <emphasis>Paradise
Lost</emphasis>, and I’d memorize a line I liked even if the bigger story was too difficult for me to
understand. This didn’t make me smart, just weird, an outcast. I only saw one way out of that small,
mountain town life, and when I was old enough I raised my hand, said the oath, and left.</para>
<para>The US Army Infantry sent me around the world. I lived in Hawaii, New York, and Germany; I
deployed to real-world situations with a rifle in my hand. During my first three years as a private, I
learned that the human body can withstand ten times the amount of punishment the mind thinks it can.
I ran marathons in Hawaii, went through cold-weather training in thirty degrees below zero in upstate
New York. During the second three years I was sent on real-world deployments in some very poor
countries where I discovered much of the world doesn’t have the same respect for human life that we
do in the United States.</para>

<para>I read or scribbled pictures during my downtime, and eventually the other soldiers in whatever
unit I was stationed with would figure out I was an artist. The commander would always task me with
painting the company murals. Dozens of my eagles still fly on giant rocks in training areas around the
world. My skulls loom in the halls of my old company CQ rooms and common areas. My bulldogs, too.
But my biggest piece, the one I am most proud of, filled the walls of an entire room in upstate New
York.</para>

<para>I painted an ocean of sharks in a weight room at Fort Drum, paying special attention to this mural
because I saw the similarities between sharks and infantrymen. A shark is nature’s perfect killing
machine; if a shark stops swimming, it can’t breathe, it dies. Infantrymen never stop training to be
killers. I sat for hours in the small room breathing in the paint fumes, suffering the headaches, going
days over my deadline in order to get it right. With plastic on the ground and the walls and ceiling
painted like the ocean, I spent hours on each shark until I was almost covered with the same blue shade,
just one more shark in the aquarium.</para>

<para>At the end of my second tour I left the army. My last duty station was at a small military
intelligence base in the Bavarian countryside of Germany. I had been away from the United States for
two years without watching US television, reading US news, or even visiting. When the end of my tour
came I decided to get to know my country again. I flew into Pensacola, Florida, and rented a truck to
drive across America all the way to Los Angeles with the hopes of becoming a famous artist like Chuck
Close, Roy Lichtenstein, or Franz Kline.</para>

<para>Driving through the main arteries of the United States filled my chest and mind with colors and
feeling: southern hospitality, New Orleans jazz, endless Texas sky, lightning storms over a New Mexican
valley—every place had a unique type of person living there, so many types I felt maybe the world
wouldn’t mind one more. But it only took a couple of weeks in LA for me to realize that I needed to go
home.</para>

<para>The Pacific Northwest was where I belonged. I settled in a place on Southeast Hawthorne
Boulevard in Portland, Oregon, and used the GI Bill to enroll in art school. Finally I was an artist. I had
the charcoals and canvases and paints and brushes to prove it. My experiences in Third World countries
gave me a perspective the other students didn’t have. My worldliness gave me an advantage. The
faculty knew me to be gifted, and soon I had made friends with a tight group of artists, including a small
man of Spanish descent named Francisco Cabra. He was from New Mexico and had long, curly hair and
earlobes stretched from plugs. We had a number of classes together and went to the same parties. I met
Jaime through Francisco.</para></section>

<section><para>She spoke about going into graphic arts so she could get a job after graduation. My
degree would be in fine arts, and when someone would ask what I would do with that degree, I always
said, “Be an artist.”</para>

<para>I was all in, and she admired that. She loved my work and my crazy lifestyle, but more than that
she believed in me. She was my first beautiful thing, my first beautiful thing to feel deeply about. We
laughed and drank wine, and she would pose nude for me by candlelight in my little apartment so I
could draw her with charcoal. Her long, dark curls were natural, and even when she didn’t smile the
traces of her dimples made her look serene. She had a strong jawline with beautifully defined neck
muscles that the light danced along. Yoga and biking gave her a compact, muscular-but-feminine frame.
Her vision of my future was even greater than mine, and after months of being together I couldn’t see a
future without her.</para>

<para>At the end of winter term we went a week or so without seeing each other. It was finals so I
didn’t think too much of it, but when she grabbed my hands with her fingerless gloves and sat me down
in the common room of the art college I knew something was about to go wrong. She told me she had
met a drummer in an Elliott Smith cover band. In an even and honest voice she told me I would be great
one day, and she very much enjoyed the time we had together, but it was over.</para></section>

<section><para>A year later, I was living in a shitty little town seventy-five miles south of Portland. I had
left school and found a state job on the Internet. After reviewing the military experience on my résumé,
the managers at the Oregon Department of Transportation hired me on for a new position called an
incident responder.</para>

<para>I spent most shifts driving in three-hundred-mile circles on state highways and didn’t see or talk
to another person all day. I learned that a pitchfork, not a shovel, was the best tool for getting rid of
raccoon, opossum, or nutria carcasses. The flat blade of a shovel caught the sticky intestines and I’d
have to spray it off, while the sharp points of the pitchfork rolled the animal into a ditch or culvert
nicely. The morning was the best time to scrape them, too, because the heat of the afternoon hadn’t yet
caused their stomachs to bloat.</para>

<para>But even with all the roadkill, this was a government job with sick days and good benefits—the
type of job people I grew up with would kill for. My boss wasn’t that bad; he was just an incredibly lazy
and gluttonous man whoppered down in his youth. A fifteen-minute conversation would wind him, so
we didn’t talk much. I drove to work, jumped in the incident response truck, and drove in big circles on
the state highways for ten hours a day. On my least busy days, I dealt with a dead raccoon or the carcass
of a deer; on the busiest days, I helped the police reconstructionist control traffic and clean up fatal car
accidents. At the end of these shifts, I strapped a five-gallon jug to my back and sprayed bleach over the
asphalt to dilute the blood and wash the car fluids from the road. Then I returned to the garage, jumped
in my shitty, beat-up car, and drove to my shitty, cluttered duplex. I never painted, never drew pictures,
and never read anymore. Eleven months. For eleven months I gave up on art, beauty, and trying to
become that person I’d imagined myself to be.</para></section>

<section><para>I slept in the day the towers fell. We all remember the moment we heard the news of
the attacks, and I was in my underwear with my house phone cradled against the side of my face, my
mom telling me to turn on the television.</para>

<para>On September 12th, 2001, I signed a six-year contract to serve Bravo Company 2/162, Infantry, in
the Oregon National Guard.</para></section>

<section><para>The armory was twenty miles west in the college town of Corvallis. National Guard
soldiers reported to their armory one weekend a month and two full weeks out of the year. I had to wait
until October for my first drill, and by that time every yard and porch displayed flags showing their wind-
whipped American pride under a sky that refused to be blue. Every radio and television outlet played
the worst of 9/11 on heavy rotation, and in the couple of weeks since it happened many reporters had
the time to focus on one horrible, tear-jerking story of bravery or death, each one meant to break your
heart.</para>

<para>On the day of my first drill I showed up early, parked in front of the one-story brick building, and
sat in my car questioning my decision and staring at the armory for at least twenty minutes. I could
hardly take my eyes off the red brick walls or the row of small, curtained windows. A couple of college
kids rolled down the sidewalk on skateboards and I envied them so much. I wanted to be them. I wanted
not to have a care in the world.</para>

<para>In one sudden and violent movement, I sat forward, turned my car off, flung the door open,
popped out, and walked with purpose toward the armory. The building sat like an island in a field of
freshly cut, bright green grass. A cement path framed with small, colorful flowers led from the sidewalk
to a set of blue metal doors. Some landscaper had planted rosebushes on each side of the main
entrance, probably in the hopes of making it more beautiful and inviting, but the tangles of bare, thorny
branches appeared to be slowly dying, and they had the exact opposite effect. Halfway down the
cement path stood a soldiers’ memorial made of three black marble slabs about four feet high, arranged
in a C shape. A metal pipe with a saucer on top like the Space Needle shot out of a block of concrete
behind the marble slabs. I stopped to read some of the names. They were dead Oregon soldiers from
past wars etched into the black marble. I forgot the names as fast as I read them.</para>

<para>The blue metal door scraped against the concrete landing, and the horrible sound made me
jump; it was a sound I imagined the gates of the City of Dis would make in Dante’s
<emphasis>Inferno</emphasis>. I turned to see a man in forest-green battle dress uniform walking
toward me, lighting his cigarette with a Zippo lighter. He walked with such a determined look on his face
I thought I had done something wrong, but when he got closer I found I wasn’t the focus of his
attention. He walked right up to the metal pipe, puffing on his cigarette, making the cherry nice and hot
before climbing up on one of the black marble slabs and holding the end of his cigarette over a hole in
the middle of the metal saucer. With a smile he said, “The goddamn eternal flame went out
again.”</para>
<para>The gas flowing from the hole ignited and he hopped down.</para>

<para>I looked at my steel-toed work boots and then back at him, knowing I should say something. He
probably guessed that, too, and made it easy on me by introducing himself. Staff Sergeant Danny
Addison was the first person I met there, and he had an easy way about him. Danny always had raised
eyebrows, but this didn’t make him look confused, just friendly like he was open to whatever a person
had to say. When he spoke, his hands never stopped moving, and his eyes were the color of a worn
brass handle. He told me right off that he was one of two full-time National Guard soldiers who staffed
the Corvallis Armory. I shook his hand and started to ramble nervously, telling him my whole
story.</para>

<para>Danny smoked another cigarette and listened to me talk about my job, my prior service, the
places I had lived. When that was done, I told him about my favorite artists, and I was going on without
thinking about it this turned into a story about Jaime and how she was the one that got away. This, out
of everything I said, made his face light up. He stuck his cigarette between his teeth, unbuttoned his
uniform top, and pulled his right arm out of its sleeve to show me a tattoo of a pinup girl with the words
“man’s ruin” underneath. His eyes didn’t leave the tat when he said, “Women: the only trouble worth
getting into.”</para>

<para>Small drops of rain sizzled as they hit the hot metal saucer near the flame. I smiled and asked him
who I needed to report to, it being my first day in the company and all.</para>

<para>“Oh, shit. You’re Sergeant Davis.” He stuck out his right hand.</para>

<para>I shook it and gave him a nod.</para>

<para>“Fucking glad to meet you. Let’s get you a uniform.”</para></section>

<section><para>The first night back in the army was awkward and clumsy. The lower enlisted wouldn’t
talk to me, afraid I was an asshole. Soldiers my rank wanted to know how full of shit I was and quizzed
me on my prior duty stations. They asked what restaurants were in the food court in Fort Drum’s Post
Exchange or what the biggest gulch was nicknamed in Schofield Barracks’ training range. I didn’t talk to
the higher enlisted, afraid they might be assholes. I ended up passing most of the night reading.</para>

<para>I was issued uniforms, a gas mask, field equipment, and my rifle. The unit had different rifles than
I was used to. During my first stint in the army we had the old M16s, but Bravo Company had the
updated, lighter M4s: new and improved teeth for the shark.</para></section></chapter>

<image></image>

<caption>Sean Davis and the soldiers of Double Deuce training at Fort Hood, Texas.</caption>