By Phillip Thompson

Moonpie was laughing his ass off as we bounced all over the Pacific sky while our C-5 refueled from another plane. Guys were puking all over the place, and the guys who weren’t were as green as St. Patrick’s Day.

I was sitting next to Moonpie, jammed up against the tiny frostcovered window, trying to keep my feet from going to sleep. Across the aisle from us, a new guy, I think it was Webster, flopped over in his seat and barfed up the two MREs the sergeant had told him not to eat.

MREs—Meals, Ready to Eat to civilians and Meals Rejected by Everyone to us hardass Marines—were nasty before you chewed them up and choked them down. They were a hell of a lot nastier when you power booted them across your boots.

The splash of the puke sounded like a bucketful of water hitting hot concrete, and then the plane rolled over to our side, and all the slime came our way. We lifted our boots. “Oh yeah, these guys’ll scare the shit out of the Eye-rackees,” Moonpie yelled through my earplugs as we watched Webster hurl all over the boots of the guy jammed into the seat beside him.

We agreed that what we’d heard was probably just a rumor.

It was.

That’s the thing about rumors.

Drill instructors tell you that rumors can get you killed in a combat zone. And you believe it—but only because you believe anything those sadistic assholes say, from the time they scream at you on the bus and spray their Altoid breath all over your face on the first day of boot camp to the day they crush your hand with their own and call you a Marine for the first time.

But as soon as you step off the parade deck on graduation day, you forget that lesson. By the time you get to infantry school, you’re a full-fledged member of the Rumor Mill.

Me and Moonpie Jones laughed about this on our way to the Saudi.

We were on a humongous cargo plane with the rest of our battalion, a helicopter, tons of gear and a few humvees. We were on our way to kick Saddam’s ass. Or so we thought. Actually, we sat around on our own asses for six months in the hottest fucking sandbox on planet Earth. But Rumor had it that we would be dodging bullets coming into the airport at Jubayl. And that’s what got Moonpie to laughing.

Moonpie was a huge machine gunner from some kudzu county in Alabama. He was always getting these boxes of moon pies from his mother back home in Dogpatch, or wherever. That’s why we called him Moonpie. He’d laugh when we’d bust his ass about it, then share the moonpies with us.

He looked the part of a Marine. He was way over six feet tall, musclebound, eyes the color of a laser beam, and he looked like a mean motherfucker with the M-60 machine gun around his neck. But he loved to party, too, so nobody was really intimidated by him. Which was really funny, because when it came to me and Moonpie, you couldn’t have asked for a better study in opposites. He was this big country boy—an All-State linebacker and an honor student—and I was a loser from Long Beach who cut class to go surfing and smoke dope. He could have bent me like a twig, but he thought I was cool, some sort of mystic like that surfing sailor in Apocalypse Now. Of course, I never argued with Moonpie, and I kind of liked being a mystic, so I rolled with it, and me and Moonpie became pretty good friends at Camp Pendleton, our base about an hour south of my hometown.

We spent a lot of nights in Oceanside and San Diego, trolling the strip joints on payday Fridays, and taking walking tours of the old mission on days when we didn’t have any money. I taught Moonpie how to surf at San Onofre Beach, and he taught me that all that stuff that happened two hundred years ago means something today.

Once we were on the ground, we moved into these monster-size warehouses that were even hotter than the sand, and about a thousand times more humid. All we did was sit around and sweat on our cots, which is not a good thing for grunts to be doing. And when you put that many jarheads together doing nothing but sweating, drinking water, pissing, and sweating, rumors become a way of life. And we heard them all. Saudis were going through our mail before we got it. Saddam was going to attack us. We were going to attack Saddam. Female Marines were giving blow-jobs in the shitters for five bucks. I happen to know that last one is true, but that’s not the point.

I was able to laugh off most of these wild tales, but not Moonpie. He had to check out every one. And I have to say that, after a few months in 54 that sorry-ass desert, it was a lot easier to just humor the big guy than try to argue with him, which I never liked doing, as I’ve already mentioned. Besides, it gave us something to do. It’s not like we were fighting EyeRackees. And whenever Moonpie came around calling, I knew I’d spend the next few hours trying to find out if Iranians had really just nervegassed us, which was better than just sitting around sweating and pissing.

But of all the wild rumors we heard when we were in the Saudi, nothing beat the Booze Rumor. Nothing.

I should have headed that one off as soon as I heard it. But it was New Year’s Eve, and we’d been in the fucking desert for four fucking months and we’d had enough of the Saudi bullshit. I mean, we’d suffered enough. By then, I hadn’t seen a woman the whole time I’d been there— hell, we weren’t even allowed to see a picture of a naked woman because all of our skin mags were confiscated. So, forget about a cold beer. No way.

So, I knew the Booze Rumor was bullshit, and I told Moonpie that. But I guess part of me wanted this particular rumor to be true, because I didn’t put up a lot of resistance. After all, I really wanted to get buzz on. By then, we had become pretty tight, especially after he covered for me when our company commander, Captain Richards, caught me sleeping one night on guard duty outside our warehouse not too long after we’d come ashore.

Richards had me dead to rights that night. Snuck up on me and there I was, leaned up against the metal sides of the warehouse, snoring my ass off. He yelled my name, and I jumped about four feet high and came down locked and loaded, muzzle not an inch from his sweaty chipmunk face.

“Goddamnit, Wilson, I could have you court-martialed for this,” he said around the muzzle of my M-16. “In fact, I think I will.”

I was forming the words, “Fuck you,” in my mind when out of 55 the thick air came Moonpie, in a soaked green T-shirt and camouflage trousers. Barefoot like Li’l Abner.

“Uh, sir,” he says, very casual, very cool. “Sir?”

Richards peeled his glare off me and stared at the big man. “Yes, Jones?”

“Sir, this is my bust.” “What?” Richards said. I’m just looking at Moonpie, too scared to say anything.

“Sir, I was supposed to relieve Wilson here about twenty minutes ago. I overslept. So this really ain’t his fault.”

Richards started to say something, then clapped his jaws shut. He swiveled his head back to me, but I kept my steely-eyed glare fixed over my rifle like I’m still contemplating blowing his head off. Which was easy, because I was.

Richards shook his head, then stepped off to the side. “Next time, Wilson, your ass is mine.”

“No sweat, sir,” Moonpie said. “My man here is not to blame. I shoulda been here, and I’ll take the hit.”

Richards was already walking back into the warehouse. He threw up a hand either in disgust or resignation, I was never sure which.

Once he’d disappeared, I lowered my weapon and jacked the round out of the chamber. “Goddamn,” I said. Then to Moonpie, “Thanks, Dude.”

Moonpie shrugged. “No problem, man. We all got to watch out for each other. That’s what keeps us alive.”

Anyway, The Booze Rumor went like this: the regimental radio operators were living in a cluster of humvees we called the “ant farm”— short for antenna farm, where all the radios were set up. They had been brewing up their own hooch from peaches, sugar and yeast and had made up a pretty good batch of booze.

Yeah, it was illegal as hell. But, it was New Year’s Eve, and we hadn’t had a cold one in months.

“We gotta check that shit out,” Moonpie said one night after chow. We were sitting on cots in our tents, a few miles south of the Kuwaiti border.

I just grinned and kept cleaning my rifle. “Come on, man, that ain’t nothing but trouble.”

“Flip, this is a sure thing.”

I always hated it when he called me that. My last name is Wilson, and Moonpie thought it was funny as shit to call a white guy Flip Wilson. My real name is Robert, but he forgot that about as soon as I forgot that his first name was Higdon, which I always thought was a weird name for a guy, white or black.

Now like I said, Moonpie loved to party, and I knew this, and I knew he was going to get his ass on over to the ant farm with or without me. The dude was my best friend in the company, and I knew that if he went over there, I was going to need to be around.

Besides, as I said, I was ready for some partying myself.

We got a humvee from the anti-tank guys and drove to the regimental HQ. We didn’t drive straight there—it was dark as hell and neither of us was real sure of where Regiment was located. But a Marine pulling road-guard duty hooked us up and pointed us in the right direction, and pretty soon we found the radio guys.

The ant farm was a collection of tents and humvees, with a whole bunch of antennas sticking up in the air. The poor bastards that ran the place always had to set up a long way from the rest of the regiment because all those antennas and radio transmissions made them a missile magnet. So, basically, nobody wanted to be near the radio weenies when the missiles started flying. Personally, I didn’t care much for radio weenies when the missiles weren’t flying.

They did this so that, in case of a missile attack, the ant farm would get blown up, but not the rest of the headquarters where all the officers hung out playing spades and writing letters to their beautiful wives. No wonder these guys were making hooch. It’s not like people were hanging around them for pleasant conversation after dinner.

We stopped next to the humvees and scoped the place out. The moon was out, and the desert looked like the bottom of swimming pool on a bright summer day. You see everything like it was daylight, bright and blue and fuzzy.

Moonpie got out to do the negotiating while I stayed with the humvee. Now, here again, I had time to head this thing off, but I was Caught Up In The Moment. I just kept my eyes peeled for officers who would bust our asses if they found out what we were up to. After about five minutes, Moonpie came out with this mile-wide grin on his face and waved me out of the truck. I killed the engine and climbed out just as he started telling me everything’s cool.

“We hit it big, Flip,” he said.

I nodded and followed him back inside the tent next to the radio humvees. I knocked the green plastic flap back and stepped inside. The light blinded me at first. The radio operators had some Coleman lanterns burning, and when I looked around I could see why Moonpie was so stoked. Four or five Marines sat around a field desk with canteen cups, obviously grooving on a buzz. Their faces looked yellow from the light and their eyes looked like burned-out holes. It was like looking a bunch of jack-o’-lanterns, but that’s not what caught my attention. It was the chick sitting on the tailgate of the humvee. She was this grungy-looking little thing with short blonde hair, kinda cute in a I’m A Marine But I Got Tits sort of way, but certainly nothing to get excited about, even after not seeing a woman in months. But she was a woman, and she was sitting there in a tight green T-shirt and camouflage trousers.

And Moonpie, he was a pussy hound. He had a girlfriend back in Alabama, and he talked about her a lot, but mostly he talked about pussy. Like the rest of us, but only more so. And Moonpie homed in on this girl. She was a private, and she looked real young, even with a tired face and dirty hands. She smiled at me, but her smoky gray eyes were on the big man, the Machine Gun God that was Moonpie.

“Folks,” Moonpie said as he waved a big paw at me, “this here’s Flip Wilson and he can drop a 203 round into a fucking helmet at three hundred yards.”

That wasn’t really true. I was what the Corps calls a grenadier, so I carried the M203 grenade launcher, which looks like a regular rifle with a big shotgun barrel underneath for the 40-millimeter grenade. At Camp Pendleton, I shot a grenade into a 55-gallon trash can once at a hundred and fifty yards, but Moonpie liked to tell stories. The radio weenies looked goddamned impressed, so I rolled with it.

“The Eye-Rackees don’t stand a chance against my man from California here, so give this warrior a drink,” Moonpie said. A little guy with one eyebrow stood up and walked to the tailgate where the chick sat. He reached behind her and pulled out a water bottle wrapped up in the green rag we all had in our first aid kits. He smiled at me, and I yanked out my canteen cup. He poured this piss-yellow liquid into my cup. I said to myself no fucking way am I going to drink this shit and go blind, but Moonpie must have seen my face, because he said, “Peach, boy. That there is peach liquor.”

Eyebrow nodded. “We made it from peaches,” he said.

I was like, yeah right, peaches my ass. But I drank it anyway. It was like gasoline. I mean that stuff hit me like a baseball bat between the eyes, and by the time I finished it off, Moonpie was ten feet tall and laughing like a maniac.

We chilled with the radio guys and the radio chick for a while and talked about the war, such as it was. These radio guys were basically 59 rear-echelon types who couldn’t care less about taking it to the enemy. And me and Moonpie were trained killers. I could tell this bothered Moonpie, but I was feeling good and let it ride. No sense in killing the buzz, especially when it’s New Years’ Eve and you haven’t had a buzz in months.

But it got to Moonpie after a while, these guys saying they couldn’t figure out why we were all going to die over a bunch of oil.

“You stupid fucks,” Moonpie said all of a sudden. “This ain’t about oil. We ain’t a bunch of hired killers. We’re here to free the Kuwaitis.”

He was kind of wobbly at this point, and I didn’t want to bring up the fact that the Kuwaitis—and the Saudis for that matter—were a bunch of fat cat dictators who really didn’t give a goddamn whether we got killed or not as long as they got to keep their money and their oil.

But Moonpie’s statement on the American involvement killed the mood. His radio chick even started frowning, and I knew things were going bad, and that maybe we should head on back to our unit.

“Hell fucking no,” Moonpie yelled when I suggested that. He stood there weaving, all ten feet of him, his face red and his eyes crazy.

“We’re going to get some tonight.”

I’d never seen him so mad or so intimidating. Even without his machine gun—it was out in the humvee—Moonpie was a pretty impressive dude. He towered over the radio guys, and his war gear hung off him like Clint Eastwood in those Westerns. The same flak jacket that made me look puny made Moonpie look like the linebacker he used to be. So the radio guys were pretty enthralled by the whole thing.

But the radio chick and I were thinking the same thing, because she jumped off the tailgate, and I moved between her and Moonpie. Best friend or not, I wasn’t going let him rape some chick just because he had a good buzz going.

“We’re going to get some Eye-rackees tonight,” Moonpie said.

Now, I was pretty shitfaced, but I wasn’t that shitfaced. “Moonpie,” I said, “you’re talking crazy. Let’s go on back to battalion.”

He just looked at me and took another pull from his canteen cup. “Hell no. We’re going to the border.”

Everything got dead quiet in that tent for a solid two minutes. Even the lanterns seemed to stop hissing. The radio guys were all cutting their eyes at each other then over at us, as if they only now realized we were two crazy drunk combat Marines. Eyebrow looked up at Moonpie and said, “Chill out, man. Have a drink.”

Moonpie looked like he was about to kill the guy. I eased over to him, hoping to calm him down. He looked back at me and said, “Let’s go, man.”

I nodded. I was thinking absolutely fucking right, but I just nodded and followed Moonpie out into the darkness.

He jumped behind the wheel of our ride before I could, so I crawled in on the other side. I was glad to be away from the radio guys. Moonpie threw the humvee into gear and shot away from the ant farm like a jet off a carrier deck.

I was still buzzing, so it took me a few minutes to realize that Moonpie was headed the wrong direction. He was going north toward the border, toward the Iraqis. I tried to tell him this, but he glared at me through the dark and the dust and kept driving toward that huge blackness that was Kuwait.

Oh shit, I thought, we gotta put a stop to this.

“Hey, Moonpie,” I said.

“Shut up, Flip. I was serious.”

“Yeah, I know, but maybe we ought to wait until we can at least see the border before we go across it.”

He gave me this mean grin. The jack-o’-lantern look again. We bounced over a huge dune, and he jammed on the brakes so hard I slammed into the windshield.

I was rubbing my forehead when he said, “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.”

I looked through the windshield and there it was. The border. The Saudis had built this huge sand berm years ago that ran damn near the length of the Kuwaiti border, and in the moonlight it looked like a long pile of sugar. Off to the left, somebody had cut a hole wide enough to drive a humvee through.

“Don’t,” I said, but Moonpie had already hit the accelerator and in ten seconds we were behind enemy lines. My buzz was totally gone by now, and I was scared shitless. On instinct, I looked around the back of the humvee. The .50 caliber machine gun in the turret between us was loaded. I jumped up to check it out. With my upper body out of the humvee, I could totally feel and hear the emptiness of the desert. And that scared me even more. Moonpie thought I was being a Gung Ho Marine and said, “Get some.”

That was the Iraqis opened up on us.

I never have been sure where they fired from. One second I was working the charging handle on the .50 cal and the next the windshield was exploding. I laid on the machine gun and went through half a belt of ammo, just spraying in all directions. I yelled at Moonpie to back the fuck up so we could get out of there.

When he didn’t, I leaned down into the cab of the humvee. Moonpie was sitting with both hands on the wheel, but his head was leaning off to one side. I could hear him breathing. Then I saw the hole in his chest.

Christ, I could have put my fist in that hole. He was covered in blood, but he was still breathing, so I ducked back into the cab and pulled him out of the seat. I was close to panicking because the Iraqis were still firing, and I could hear them yelling in Arabic.

He tumbled over into the passenger seat, groaning and wheezing, and I got behind the wheel. More bullets tore through the cab, but I got 62 the damn thing in gear and floored it in reverse. I didn’t care where we were going as long as it was backward, back where we belonged. We bounced all over the place, but I kept my foot on the gas until we shot past the berm back into Saudi Arabia. I guess the Iraqis knew their night was over, because the shooting stopped.

I spun the humvee around and stopped. Moonpie was in bad shape, gurgling and wheezing and bleeding all over the place. The noise seemed to drift across the sand forever, now that it was quiet again, as quiet as it had been with the radio guys when Moonpie had lost it. I crawled over to him and tried to find something to stuff in the hole.

“Flip, I got a son,” he said.

“Shut up asshole,” I said.

“Just be quiet and let me get you back to the rear.”

“I got a son,” he said again.

Then he died.

Just like that.

I sat there staring at him for a long time. I don’t know how long I sat in there in the dark desert, but it was long time. I just kept thinking that he never told me he had a son.

When I got back to battalion around sunrise, Captain Richards was waiting, with that look on his face that most of us hated.

I didn’t know what to say, but what the fuck can you say when you go AWOL to get drunk and your best friend gets blown away? Captain Richards said something about a court-martial but I really didn’t hear him. I just kept staring at Moonpie laying there on the sand. He didn’t even notice all of Moonpie’s blood on my hands and face and clothes. He just shook his head and stomped off.

A couple of minutes—or it could have been a couple of hours—a corpsman came by and shoved him in a body bag, and I never saw him again. Two asshole clerks with rifles marched me back to the company headquarters and took away my rifle. One of them, a skinny guy with a big 63 Adam’s apple, told me I was being charged with going AWOL, drinking on duty, and a whole bunch of other shit I just tuned out.

I spent the rest of the war in the back of a humvee with my wrists flexicuffed together, watching piles of dead bodies and smashed equipment fall away into the black clouds of the burning oil fields. Dead Iraqis were everywhere, gray against the brown smudge of the sky, like felled trees waiting to be collected for firewood. On one stop, I saw a guy crumpled up in the dirt, his trousers down around his ankles and his eyes wide open. His face was frozen in this what the fuck? look. Poor bastard had been out taking a dump and had gotten wasted by one of our bombs. I still see that guy on those nights when I wake up with the sweats.

After the war was over and we were back in the Saudi, Captain Richards said the command had decided not to court-martial me on account of the fact that we had just won the war and it wouldn’t do any good to go airing the Corps’ dirty laundry about two dumbasses who fucked up. But he busted me down from lance corporal to private, and I was discharged the day I got back to Camp Pendleton.

A few months later, I went to see Melissa down in Alabama. Moonpie’s son was two at the time. I don’t know why, but I go back every year. Kevin is a lot older now, and every year he asks me how his daddy died in the war. And every year, I tell him the same lie.