Poem
Poem
Poem
Prose
Prose
Prose
The Light Bulb Man
By Sean Parrish, Marines
Writing Type: Prose
By
Sean Parrish
I am a U.S. Marine Corps veteran. I served nine
years of active duty service from 2008 to 2017. I wrote something akin to what
I believe is a decent novel after my third overseas deployment.
I first deployed as a foreign security force advisor way up in the mountains of
Helmand Province, Afghanistan. There, our band of advisors made a valiant
attempt to teach the allied Afghan forces war fighting skills ranging from
hand-to-hand combat to the defeat of improvised explosive devices and more. Due
to cultural and language barriers, these lessons didn’t always “take.”
Moreover, we conducted numerous battlefield missions together, such as
partnered foot patrols, long-range vehicle convoys and combat operations. Those
didn’t always go well, either.
But if the Afghans were not showing up late to our training classes high on
hashish and opium, they were out digging up IEDs and bringing them back to our
cramped living quarters, which was not only NOT what we taught them but also
just plain bad. They acted much like a cat that, having just killed a mouse, prances
gleefully back home to its owner holding its prized kill in its mouth. You
really couldn’t be mad at them. But you could run the other direction (highly
recommended). Those IED’s often exploded in their faces due to cleverly
installed anti-tampering devices which those crafty Taliban hid inside. I know
because I often helped to pick up body parts afterward. Those poor Afghans,
while often uneducated and ignorant, simply seemed to make a concerted effort
to die in truly needless ways. I, on the other hand, typically endeavored to
stay alive by avoiding those poor souls.
I survived that harrowing trip, only to return a few months later for another
fun-filled deathcapade in my second helping of Helmand. Round Two in these
hinterlands was a continuation of that first harrowing experience, but
different in the way that I felt more like a highly confused teenager than a
highly trained combat expert. The root of the confusion lied in what was known
as U.S. foreign policy at the time. I’ve got other names for this policy in one
of my other writings.
On this next little-big adventure, I served as an intelligence chief. I led our
group of Marines in tactical site exploitation, detainee handling, battlefield
evidence collection and biometrics, among others. Here, the rules of engagement
would change on an almost hourly basis. And as you may imagine, it was highly
confusing to us men and women who were the ones holding the guns on the
battlefield.
We might as well have fought the Taliban dressed like clowns, slowly advancing
in a Gettysburg-like fashion to the thump of our monkey-like leaders behind us
clashing cymbals as we juggled exploding bowling pins. But the most frightening
part was that occasional pause in the middle of those tactical advances. This occurred
when some officer would change the rules, or at least tell us to change the rules
of engagement. Yes, this did get some of our people killed. As for being an
effective way to kill the enemy, let’s just say I do think those pauses scared
them more than it put us in danger - usually.
Allow me to explain. When we would shoot at them non-stop, it was very obvious we
were trying to kill them as fast as possible. But look at it from their
perspective: if we shot at them, then paused for a while, then started shooting
again, then paused, then shot, then started, then stopped, and all of a sudden
just disappeared. It’s like some ghost who snuck into your house and didn’t
know whether it was going to kill you like a malignant spirit or just play some
cruel game and then run away.
That is really scary. And possibly worse than death. The Taliban must have thought
we Marines didn’t want to actually kill them, but instead just constantly
torture them with the thought of death. All in all, it was certainly not a
tactic I believe we chose (it was the higher ups, I guess), but those of us who
were actually on the ground executing these orders would have conversations
with each other about whether that was a real, purposeful tactic or not.
We still don’t really know. And it hurts to think about it.
But after surviving these misadventures, I found myself questioning my own
sanity again and again. Yes, I was a Marine who followed orders with instant,
loyal obedience, taking the fight to the enemy with ferocious violence. But there
was just all this other stuff mixed in that was harder to explain.
After the fog of war had lifted, I could feel these aftershocks slowly
separating in my mind like oil and water, with describable ones becoming ink on
paper. The scariest things I saw and felt would be internalized, but those odd
and almost magical ironies I witnessed that made me chuckle uncontrollably were
destined for externalization via writing.
Originally, I sought for my writing to be a personal form of journalistic
therapy, one that would keep me away
from things that combat veterans often do to cope with extreme levels of
non-stop trauma, like excessive drinking, heavy drug use, driving super-fast,
fighting, hitting things in general, occasionally lighting something on fire
and more creative ones which probably wouldn’t be appropriate to describe here.
Like non-stop masturbation while you’re crying. See what I mean?
So, I often locked myself in my own version of my own padded room and began my
own self-imposed writing therapy. More than just my own type of therapy, though;
it became a novel undertaking which sparked the actual undertaking of a real
novel. Here in my safe-ish space, I could express the inexpressible, free from
the immediate and often terse judgement of others, and relay these thoughts to
readers in a poignant and unassuming way. I even created my own special genre--“True
Fiction.”
The writing process blunted the bleeding of my wounded mind and distracted me
from the horrible events of the past, allowing me to focus on the reality of
the day at hand and finding the humor in between that past and this future.
This therapy helped me so much that I made it into a ritual, more than just an
occasional thing I did.
Since I had already endured two incredibly harsh back-to-back combat
deployments in austere hell holes, I opted to make a career shift within the Corps
by veering onto a vocational trajectory, the “intelligence” discipline.
I trained as an intelligence agent, and after some ridiculously insane and
difficult training that I failed multiple times but managed to eventually pass,
it was off to Central America, where I faced a very different, unusual and
ambiguous type of mission: using humans to collect information instead of
killing them.
After returning from Central America, I requested 30 days of military leave and
began my own writing therapy in earnest. I went home to my lonely kitchen and
put three things down - my pen, my paper, and my water glass. I forced myself
to sit down at this very spot for 30 days straight and write a work which came
to be titled “The Light Bulb Man.”
While I always appreciate and enjoy a great military story, I chose to write
this work in a way that allows just about any human the opportunity to see a unique
side of the world and possibly understand the raw human condition contained
therein. No politics, no societal issues, no censorship, just a firsthand
account of a newly minted, highly unsupported and extremely under-budgeted
government employee sent off on a wayward, poorly directed mission to an Alice
in Wonderland kind of place.
After 30 days in that somewhat uncomfortable kitchen chair averaging around 2,500
words per day, I finally finished what I thought was the final chapter. Sitting
back with an initial sense of satisfaction, I read the work in its entirety.
Then I went to bed. I woke up the next morning and re-read it, thought about
it, and went back to bed that night. The next morning, I awoke and instead of
reading it for a third time, I poured myself a glass of whiskey and stared
intently, then said to myself “This is some crazy shit, and if anyone reads
what I wrote, I will likely be forced into a mental institution.”
But instead of burning it in my back yard, I put it in my filing cabinet next
to all my other bad ideas. It remained hidden away for seven years until I
remembered recently that I had even written such a thing. Or maybe I had just
sobered up enough to remember things I did as a sober person. Or maybe it was
because I was moving my belongings out of my now ex-girlfriend’s house. Or
whatever. In short, I can’t remember what triggered finding this old manuscript
just like I can’t remember what led to the breaking up of that relationship.
Upon reading this novel for the third time, I had a really bad idea: let other
people read it too.
I decided this one could be an interesting aside to what most people are used
to reading and/or seeing in movies, which are usually stories about
super-spies, covert operatives, missing nuclear bombs and saving the world.
Instead, this was an honest attempt to share my observations, display my own
human fragility and gleefully showcase the kind of dumb shit that happens when
you mix real world intelligence assignments with crazy people, guns and my
absolute favorite – U.S. foreign policy.
Everything in those jungles never went according to any kind of plan. But maybe
that was the plan all along, because in the jungle I was no longer the clown marching
to the beat of the monkeys. I was hunting the monkeys with the clowns I had
created. And so, who was I? What were my actual orders? I didn’t always know.
One day at lunch, my friend Chris told me that if anyone asked who I was, I
could always say I was just the guy who went down there to change the light
bulbs. Boom! This book title was born.
No one was harmed too severely in this novel, but then again no one involved
expected anyone on that mission to actually write a novel, much less publish it.
There were a lot of pissed-off people down there already, including the
dangerous cartels, violent street gangs and even radicalized extremists. But
worst of all were the ones translating U.S. foreign policy into action based on
their own seriously unique and wildly entertaining but hardly moral or correct
interpretations.
Some people in my field call it “business as usual” to just go along with what
you’re told to do. Me, on the other hand. I’d rather turn the light on and let
you decide whether it is right, wrong or just totally f….d up. In any case,
that’s your decision and not mine.
Notes: This particular piece is meant to encourage fellow Veterans to share their stories. Because it took me (7) years to work up the courage to do it myself, I decided it would be just about time to share mine. The raw and unedited language should be censored, of course, for your audience - but make no mistake that our younger generation of OIF and OEF Veterans have a unique language and should feel free to use the language of their generation, because that is how we communicate with one another quite often! Thank You for what you do for Veterans - I have many more submissions in that dark old filing cabinet…