Brass and Skittles

I saw more profound things in the world from ages eighteen to twenty-two than any other point in my life. I watched Stanley Kubrick’s Full-Metal Jacket at far too young an age. R Lee Ermey’s twenty-minute expletive laden rant was enough to get me to sign the papers. I enlisted in the Marine Corps right after high school and found myself on the yellow foot prints of Paris island, South Carolina. Three months grueling training and I became a Marine. The experience merits a story in its own right, but what stays with me more clearly years later, is what I saw in Africa while deployed.

I deployed in 2011 on what’s called a MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit, pronounced “M-You”) to assist the people of Libya as they over threw Muammar Gaddafi. As a Marine, this means a lot of sitting in a muggy well-deck of a Navy ship, waiting to be pointed in a direction and told what to destroy. What was scheduled to be a 6-month deployment, turned into a year long one, bouncing from one Mediterranean country and port to the next all in support of the no-fly zone the US imposed.

Marines on board a ship don’t have much to do, other than worry about the Navy not hitting a mine. This is no Carnival cruise with our own state rooms however. We all lived in what’s called the berthing. Narrow rooms with coffin racks stacked 3 high, and low hanging pipes jutting in and out of everywhere. Privacy is soon a distant memory. Air circulation was poor, so smells lingered. Not exactly 5-star accommodations. Needless to say, when your trapped in an environment like that for months on end you lose a bit of your sanity. About halfway through our deployment we got a little respite from the bowels of the ship. We learned from command that the Marines would be doing a training exercise in Djibouti Africa for a month.

Djibouti? Never heard of it. Is it on dry land? Check. Is it off of this ship? Check. What are we waiting for?

We ended up flying off the ship on helicopters to reach the training area. My first impression looking out of the helicopter was basically a shoulder shrug. It’s a desert country sparsely populated. But not desert like you would think of the Sahara; more mountainous and rockier desert. No huge cities or infrastructure. Our base camp was literally concertina wire spread around a football sized area in the middle of a clearing. No man-made structures for miles. We spent the day setting up our camp, checking our gear, and going over the plan of attack for the following morning. We slept in sleeping bags on the ground under the stars.

One thing was very apparent when we woke up; we had guests. All along the outside of our C-wire was indigenous people hanging about. Men, women, and children all apparently waiting for us. All of them were dark skinned, and looked extremely impoverished. Their clothes all looked like thin patch work quilts sewn together haphazardly. The men and women were trying to barter for food, while the kids ran around playing hoop rolling. What we soon found out is that the whole community based its entire existence off collecting the brass casings left behind from various training exercises and reselling the metal.

This is not an unusual practice. Gun ranges the world over collect empty brass casings and sell them. But its more of an afterthought, something you do at the end of the month for spare change. What these people were doing was far different. Picture your average military style firing line. Straight line with marked positions every 3 or 4 feet with spots for marksman to fire from. The brass usually just collects in piles a few feet away where it is ejected, and picked up later. Now let’s picture it Djibouti style. Same straight line with positions, except we have kids as young as 10 jockeying for position to catch the brass as it flies out of your rifle. And when I say jockeying, I mean fighting tooth and nail to get the brass first. Not only is this unorthodox, its downright dangerous to have people screwing around on a live fire range.

I remember thinking afterwards how bizarre it was for someone to treat what I associated as trash, as a treasure worth fighting over. Those tiny bits of metal that probably make him two cents a pound could be turned into bread on his family’s table at night. Each pull of the trigger contributing in a small way to his well-being. It makes you reevaluate your own circumstances. Is my life difficult as a Marine? Sure. Do I have to fight for a meal at the end of the day?

A few days later I saw something else I’ve never been able to really quantify. We were all sitting around eating our dinner on top of our packs. Dinner was a plastic bag meal-ready-to-eat. If memory serves me it was a particularly disgusting number entitled “Dehydrated Pork Patty”. After taking a sip of my “Powdered Drink Mix, Fruit” I heard some Marines laughing raucously. Me and a couple members of my platoon walked over to see what was happening. Some guys were throwing candy to the kids over the barrier. But this wasn’t your Band of Brothers moment when a paratrooper hands a boy a bar of chocolate after liberating France. This was being done for sadistic amusement.

The Kids were beating each other over individual skittles. Not a whole bag, just the couple skittles the guys were throwing over the C-wire. While I don’t condone what was being done, I can’t be too hard on my colleagues. Everyone copes with the misery that is the Corps in different ways. The kids fighting each other was bad, but it wasn’t over yet. The adult individuals who had been a good distance away seemed to finally realize the Americans were throwing food over the wire. And that’s when I saw the strangest thing of my life. An obviously pregnant woman sprinting towards the group of kids screaming her head off. At first, I thought it was because she didn’t want the kids taking food from us, but then I realized it was because she wanted the food for herself. When she reached the group, she kicked a small boy full in the chest like a spartan and took the one skittle he had been about to eat. Most of the people around me laughed, but still more of us found it disturbing.

I’m not sure why I remember the event so clearly nearly 5 years later. Sometimes I think it was the savage pleasure derived from some of the people throwing the food that sticks with me. At other times I think it serves as a reminder to me that circumstances are different the world over. The comfortable lives most people live in the United States are far removed from a no-where country like Djibouti. I saw firsthand what real desperation and poverty looks like.