yustyoking

A year from today…

MAGA! Magnificent Army Glorifying America. I’m stationed on the front line of the battlespace. We warfighters have a life expectancy of 15 minutes, but what do the statisticians know? They’d sign our death certificates without learning to spell our names. I’m in a Skyscraper Battalion. We use laser-guided slingshots to shoot down munitions-bearing drones before they can drop their dirty bombs on our primo targets. Fun in the sun!

The attack on the homeland sucked, as did our response: War, glorious war! Personally, I never had much use for San Diego. It was pretty, but also pretty useless. Tragedy beyond repair, a wall won’t stop this brand of wiolence. Troops, yeah. A wall? Not so much. The Atomic Age fanatics who blew away San Diego never even crossed the border.

So here we are. In the 1980’s, a punk band named D.O.A. sang the lyrics “Mesopotamia soup / Old meat pie / Middle East stew / I don’t wanna die.” C’est nous. That’s us. Dead On Arrival.             

Shifting inland, we deploy in urban jungles where “Search and Destroy” means winging enemy soldiers. Next, we kill the wounded, douse their bodies in crude oil and use our butane lighters to light ’em up. A million miles from the Geneva Convention, burning the bodies is a standing order that takes up three full pages in the Soldier’s Handbook and includes color illustrations that look like they were drawn in crayon by a six year old. Brutality. Shades of Vietnam, I’m told. As the Sec State said to the Gen Assembly at the UN, “We’ll uphold Geneva next time we fight a war in Switzerland.” The bonfires are our version of Hindu funeral pyres: Cleanse the soul in fire, release it from the body and facilitate its journey to the afterlife. Which isn’t at all what the President and Vice President had in mind. Too bad. The billowing plumes of inky black smoke look totally awesome. Tip: Stand upwind and wear a gasmask.

Pill-popping madmen, the “emeny” is zonked out on the underground drug Captagon-C, “the Sword of Jihad.” Holy war. Their amphetamine of choice, Cappy makes them feel superhuman, but that’s mostly an illusion. It’s actually weaker than Adderall. There’s a huge black market in the multi-colored pills. Some say these secret labs hidden away on back streets generate revenue three times greater than the Mexican cartels, but the drug is so addictive, we steer clear, burying the pills in the sand when we come across them. There’s no quicker way to the brig than dealing drugs.

When not busy killing the enemy, we practice “Shop ’till You Drop” mercantilism. Clutching fistloads of the almighty dollareem, we purchase leisure wear in wholesale lots at the border— mostly Dnipro Brand sweatsuits and Floating Lotus Brand sneakers— which middlemen sell at retail prices around the souks. It’s “free money” in the sense that we don’t report our profits or pay any taxes. And nobody gets hurt, which you can’t say about the arms trade or drug pushers. “Sure beats working!” writes my mom, but her only experience of combat is when my dad worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He hated every minute of it and fought with my mom all the time. Our family life consisted of domestic combat, the stuff of daytime television soaps. Dead of a heart attack, daddy-o was a total loser. When he died, all I got was a lousy plaque.

“Loose lips sink ships!” they say, and that’s on a good day. Living in a statolatry, everyone worships the state.

Patriotic and a sucker for bling, I’d like to buy a Presidential Victory Watch, but I’m not payin’ $6,000. Sink that! I also find it amusing that when I go online and search “presidential signature watches,” I find thousand of people are unloading their used watch. War time austerity, aka poverty, is interesting that way.

Now that we have a centrally planned economy, a perpetual State of Emergency, military parades up the kazoo and mandatory enlistment, there is only a single luxury coupon on the last page of each red, white and blue ration book. Three inches by five inches, printed on pulp paper, it looks like it was ripped from the Sunday funny papers. My mom uses her monthly coupon to buy eggs.

I just got back from home leave and haven’t completed rotation, so I’m sitting in a “repple depple,” a resupply depot, waiting for transport back to my unit. Command may blackhawk me outta here at any moment. I am told that I’m a Holden Caulfield, but I don’t feel it. An inveterate diarist with diarrhea of the brain, I do want to put something into my laptop. Folks can read it aloud at my funeral: “He harbored a young man’s ambition. He dreamed the impossible dream. He wanted to have sex with J.K. Rowling.”

I bought my mom a porcelain nude filched from a sheikh’s palace by some sticky-fingered non-com and for sale at the black market in the poor end of town. Eight inches high, it’s a pearly white figurine of a spectacularly flat-chested lass reclining against a tree stump, satisfying her primal urges with a vibrator. War is known for unearthing the most peculiar vestiges of human behavior and this confab is no exception. I also bought her a 10-pack of boxed Swedish Safety Matches manufactured under contract in Nablus in the West Bank. She can use them to light the evening candles when the power goes out.

Four days travel and three days Stateside, there went my week’s leave. Anybody who knows me knows I had to come thousands of miles, crossing endless time zones, to visit Pollyanne, my hopeless love object. Bottle green eyes and chestnut hair, a face full of freckles and a Tennessee accent, her laugh sends shivers up my spine and dings my dong. A walking, talking clinical definition of an abusive relationship, she plays boys for idiots every day of the week. This has been going on ever since Middle School and she and I aren’t getting any younger. Also, I could die tomorrow. Having come halfway around the globe, I wasn’t surprised that Polly’s first reaction was to stand me up.

“Shit,” she said over the phone. “I got about a hundred of your text messages and emails while you were in transit and I thought, ‘What a funny bunny.’ I couldn’t wait to see you, but see, my gynecologist called and said I have a cyst, so I’m gonna have an operation and I’ll be laid up the whole time you’re visiting.” Giggle, giggle.

“Fuck!” I groan.

“Don’t swear,” she commands.

Why does this scenario feel so familiar? Life with Pollyanne is like looking for cracks in a tarnished mirror. She cares, but she only cares about herself. “What am I supposed to do?” I ask. “I brought you a tiara from one of King Hussein’s palaces. Should I come by and leave it with your mom?”

“A TIARA???” she guffaws, intrigued. “C’mon over, silly!”

So I get to sit on the floor at her feet while she curls up on the couch and fingers the silver tiara. A classic cockteaser, she laughs, wrinkles her nose, bounces her foot in my face, pokes fun at me and checks every few minutes to be sure I am thoroughly aroused. “I’d make out with you,” she simpers, confiding in a whisper, “but my mom is in the kitchen and she might think we’re being gross.”

“I’m sure your mom has seen plenty of teenagers make out,” I object.

Looking thoroughly cross-eyed, Polly replies, “But we’re not teenagers!”

Did I mention that she is 100% MAGA and mans a cash register at a checkout line at a local grocery? This girl gets around! At rallies, she is one of the cupcakes that T’s television people sit just behind the Prez to make it look on the TV screen as if his Supporters’ Club is composed almost entirely of 20-year-old mall chicks. There are wideos on TikTok of her glaring at the camera. Classmates claim that she wears tinted contacts, but I know for a fact that she’s naturally endowed. Her mama told me so and I’ve examined Polly’s eyeballs from the side and up close. And once she fastens those bottle green eyes on you, game over, you can’t look anywhere else!

“I’ll visit your grave,” she promises, “when they bury you in Area 51.”

“It’s Section 61 of Arlington Cemetery,” I correct her, only too aware that she’ll never make an appearance. My cock has swollen up like five pounds of salami.

Regional politics is not my specialty, I’m a grunt like everybody else, but I’ve picked up enough of the lingo to know that we are never going to win this war. 

“I do love you,” she breathes, pulling me tight against her pointy little breasts as she French kisses me, her tongue down my throat, while ushering me out the front door. Was it worth the trip? Damn if I know.

I don’t feel lust in battle, mostly annoyance that they are trying to kill me while I try to kill them. We live in a cock-up world. Our commanding officer has a theory: “This war is nature’s way to cull the population now that climate change makes the planet more and more unlivable,” he claims. “This war is Gaza on a grand scale.”

With new wars popping up all over the planet, he may be right. We’ll see.