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CounterPunch
October
18, 2002
The Base
by CHRIS FLOYD
NSA Echelon 33, CentComm: Email monitored
10/22/04. Dispatched DC
Yo, Ed! I'm looking out the window of Watchtower 19
in Force Zone Seven. They're loading up the dead wagon. Three
friendlies, two uncardeds, the usual collateral--and one bug.
We zapped the market before the bug got his hard-on-- another
one of those Czech AK-47 knock-offs that our friendly neighborhood
warlord keeps bringing in. He says he doesn't know how the bugs
get hold of them--they drop down from heaven, I guess.
Last night Chrome and Dietrich got clipped
by two bugged-up pseudo-friendlies outside the Halliburton whorehouse.
They'd just finished three weeks on kyptonite duty, guarding
the perimeter where those baby-nuke bunkerbusters went in. It's
still space-suit city over there, your wang wired up to the piss-bag
for ten hours while you watch the Pentagon geek squad calibrating
the kill ratio and the Guatanamorons in their plastic chains,
suitless and bootless, bagging up body parts.
Chrome was telling us how some bug hacker
got into the helmet frequency one day and flooded their gourds
with Donny Osmond songs. Four hours of it. What could you do?
You couldn't take the helmet off or you'd over-geiger like the
morons. Nearly drove them crazy. "And they call it puppy
love." Chrome was crooning, laughing, riding high. He'd
just bagged Laila, the one who used to be on TV here--half a
week's pay, but they said get her now because some wheel at CentComm
was about to privatize her. Then he stepped outside with Dietrich
and was gone.
Four more guys got shipped out this week
for going burqa. Bent their knee to the bug god. It's the damnedest
thing. Officially, it's not happening and there's no punishment
for it either. The Press Office gave us soundbite cards on it
for media days: "Faith and freedom go together; each makes
the other stronger. The Forces of Liberation welcome all faiths
within our ranks." Non-denial denial. But everybody knows
it's spreading like the clap, and they'll rotate you back to
Homeland or Eurodisney the first time you step inside a mosque.
I guess I can understand it. I mean,
personally, I don't see the point of trading one load of lies
and fairy tales for another. But we're all wading through a cesspit
here, you feel it on your skin all the time. You can't wash it
off, you can't buy it off, you can't drink it away. For some
guys, the bug-god bull looks new, pure. However hokey it is,
it's not the same thing that led them into this stinking mire.
So they snap, they turn--they shut off their brains and submit.
Hell, isn't that what they teach us to do in basic training?
But I feel sorry for the suckers. It's gonna go hard for them
when they realize the bug god is just like all the others: one
big rotting empty skull, staring down at you with those black
holes, those no-eyes that see nothing and give back nothing.
I tried talking about it with Captain
Davis the other night; he's about the only officer who doesn't
strut around here like a Wal-Mart floor manager among the peons.
I'd just come off night patrol in Deep-City Zone, hardcore bugland,
backing up some Special Ops doing a Guantanamo run on terrorperp
suspects. Banging down doors, barrel in the face of some shrieking
bug-woman in her black bag, children scuttling in the dark like
rats, the perp calling down an airstrike from Allah on our heads.
You know the drill. You know the jangle. Not even the new meds
can keep you blanked out completely.
So there's always the overstep somewhere.
Woman's cheekbone cracking from a backhand, some kid stomped
or booted out of the way. Some perp putting his hand in one of
those damned dresses they wear, going for who knows what--Koran?
Mosquito bite? Scimitar? Czech special?--and you open up. More
shrieking, more screaming--and then the splatter on the wall.
Is this what we're here for? I said to
Davis. These bulging eyeballs, these reeking guts, this splatter?
And the deals, the grease: the trade in whores, the pipeline
siphons, the warlord bribes, CentComm and DefSec and BigVeep
cutting their buddies a slice of the pie? Mr. Homeland Headboy
talks about Jesus and Jefferson all the time--is this what Jesus
really wants us to do? Is this what Jefferson had in mind?
Davis shook his head. Don't go all Gandhi
on us, Jim, he says. Ideals are fine, but you've got to make
an accomodation with reality. You can't have civilization without
power. Nothing will hold together if you can't back it up with
force. That splatter--those guts--that dead girl in the ditch
over there, with the flies and the dogs-- that's what power is.
That's the foundation, the base, of civilization. It ain't pretty,
but I just have to believe that we're a special nation, and now
that we hold this dreadful power, we'll use it wisely, so that
one day we'll make those ideals real. I've got to believe
that-- because otherwise, Jim, it's just nothing but crap. Crap,
chaos, murder and noise. And what the hell can you build on that?
So that's the answer then. We're special.
Our grease is special. Our bunkerbusters are special. Our pissbags
are special. Our splatter is the most special thing of all.
May No-Eyes have mercy on us all.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
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