Peacekeeping

by Terry DeHart

We were drinking at the 24 Area Enlisted Club at Camp Pendleton, and Tulley and Cox were about to fight. They were friends of mine, but they'd been getting on each other's nerves since about our third pitcher of beer. There wasn't much of a reason for them to fight, really, and I didn't want it to happen. I'd read statistics that said more of us would die in the months after we returned Stateside than had died while we were in the sandbox. But Tulley and Cox were about to fight, and their stupid pissing contest was driving me crazy.

We'd just come back from Iraq, where we'd been targets and hunters and vulnerable little history-makers with stories that will probably never be told. We'd arrived in force and cleaned out the cities and towns that the army bypassed. We'd shit-canned Saddam. We'd taken rounds and put out rounds. We'd seen the crowded mass graves and the empty torture chambers that made the war seem necessary, most of the time, but we'd lost people, too. Good people. Friends. And it could've been us who were killed. Hanley, Parcel, MacDonald, Rodrigues. All gone, daddy-o. Some of us were buried in hometown cemeteries. The rest of us couldn't seem to drink enough beer.

I was buying the pitchers because I'd been getting flight pay along with our combat pay. I was a crew chief on a Huey, the best damned door gunner in my group. The pilots liked to have me on the minigun. They gave me the call sign "Ventilator" because I could make that minigun part of myself. Some dudes pointed it like a hose or a shotgun and then walked the tracers to the target, but I could see where the rounds would go and I could put them there. Right there. I could snipe with that bitch. The minigun has two triggers. Pull the right one for slow fire, 4,000 rounds per minute. Or pull them both for 6,000. I usually shot it at the slow speed so I could shoot longer before I burned through my ammo. I liked having enough firepower to make things happen. To help good people live another day. To blow the haters right out of the world.

And I didn't want Tulley and Cox to fight. They both knew plenty of close quarters battle tricks, of course. We were all trained to kill. No shortage of that, here. And Tulley was a boxer, and Cox was a wrestler. The fight would be ugly, I could see. I had some good Kempo training, myself, but I didn't want to get stuck in the middle of that fur ball.

So I made them an offer. We were shit-faced on a base crawling with MPs and hordes of bored jarheads standing guard duty, most of them hoping that somebody would violate an article of the Uniform Code of Military Justice so they could put their night sticks to work or, hope above hope, lock and load their pistols and shotguns. It was just about the worst place in the world to get into a fight, so I offered to take Tulley and Cox for a ride in my car.

I was lucky that they were both car nuts. Tulley was building a turbo Civic that looked like it would be very fast, and Cox was an autocrosser with a Mazda RX-7 that cornered so hard it just about made my brains come out my ears. They'd both ragged on me for owning an American car. Overweight piece of junk, they said, but they had to respect the numbers I could put down. I had an old Buick Grand National that ran 10's in the quarter. To say it was turbocharged was an understatement. So I stood up and said, "Hey, let's say we take my old American boat out for a little patrol. You still want to fight after that, I won't get in the way."

I positioned myself so I was exactly the same distance from each of them. Tulley saw that I had my hands up. Cox looked at the way I'd positioned my feet. The other jarheads in the place were expecting some fun. The club was about to explode. We'd survived combat but we still remembered old scores and new scores and that stupid thing where you just wonder and wonder whether or not you can take someone until it drives you nuts and then you get drunk and try it out.

So I said, "What's the hurry? You've both got another year of active duty. Plenty of time to tear each other up, later. Let's go for a ride." I maintained the "relaxed ready" stance that my old, ex-cop sensei had taught me before the war. I got myself ready to get into a fight that wasn't necessarily mine. Story of my life. Tulley and Cox looked at me and then at each other. They couldn't tell which of them I planned to fight, and I wasn't quite sure either, so their calculations were all thrown off. It was clear that the man who started something would immediately be engaged by the other two.

"I've always wondered what that antique of yours can do," Tulley said. Cox said, "It's gotta handle like a shitter on wheels, but it might be fun on the straightaways." They nodded. It wasn't an armistice, but only a cease-fire. That was fine with me. We put on our flight jackets. The other jarheads looked disappointed when we left.

It was a winter night in SoCal. The palms were quiet, and the air was thick and cool. It was perfect weather for turbochargers. Cox called shotgun and Tulley said, "What the hell. If he wrecks us, I'd rather be in the back seat, anyway." I made them buckle up and then I fired the bitch up. It had a full exhaust system so the MPs would let me drive it on base. At idle, it was very quiet, but I knew it was like having a minigun locked and loaded. Power at my disposal.

I let the motor idle just long enough to get the oil warm. I didn't turn on the stereo because we weren't taking an ordinary joyride. I backed out of my space and took us out of the lot. I glided past the MP post at the entrance to 24 Area. I turned onto the main drag and let the bitch carefully out of her cage. I didn't mash the throttle, but I rolled deeply into it. The car squatted on its haunches and the hood pointed at stars. Wicked turbo hiss and a rush of speed that could change a person's priorities. Night. Marine Corps Base, Camp Penis. Right then, we owned the motherfucker. I took us up to 150 MPH and the wind roared at hurricane force. I stood on the brakes and we hung from our seatbelts. We stopped in the middle of the road. Tulley said "God damn." Cox said "God bless America." I watched the gauges work their way back to safer levels and then I hit it again. This time I gave the bitch everything she had. The drag radials bit hard and we were accelerating faster than our buzzed minds could comprehend. We made another run to 150, the boxy old Buick pounding its way through the rich, sea level air.

Tulley and Cox were laughing. I could see their laughter, but I couldn't hear it. I slowed to fifty and pitched us sideways, drifting at the most extreme angle I could hold. I spun the car on purpose at a wide spot in the road and then I took us back, stopping every now and then to do burnouts and smoky broadies—sideshows, like those Oakland dudes do. I took a good hundred bucks out of the life of my tires and burned up a few gallons of race gas, but when we cruised back to 24 Area, Tulley and Cox were cool.

We smelled like burned rubber when we walked back into the Enlisted Club. We were grinning like idiots. It was last call for alcohol. Tulley and Cox pooled their money to buy another pitcher, and we continued to test the premise that we were still alive.

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