Tuesday, June 21, 2005
A Monologue
“My girlfriend freaked out when I showed her my genuine Iraqi ear. Her eyes got all big as silver dollars, her arms started shaking, and she opened her mouth to scream, but all she could say was ‘eee-eee’ over and over. ‘Eee-eee.’ It was kind of funny, actually.”
“Of course, I didn’t laugh in her face. I’ve been trained well. I never crack a smile if the situation don’t call for it. Pressure is nothing when you’re trained to jump out of a moving airplane in a second’s notice in a hostile zone.”
“Like when I got pulled over last Friday night with half a bottle of Jim Bean in me. A little less than I usually drink but more than most of the average civilian type people can put down. When the lights and sirens were flashing and blinking I began to feel a little bit envious. I miss that kind of excitement but I’m afraid of what I might do if I walked around armed in residential zones especially when I’m all lighted up. Last Friday, the patrolman asked me if I had imbibed anything and I wanted to respond, ‘No, officer, I’m too freaking drunk to do any imbibing.’”
“It turned out that the cop was a Gulf War Vet too, so he let me off without even a hint of a warning. My girlfriend, on the other hand, still hasn’t let me off the meat hook. And I didn’t even laugh at her. Didn’t come close to ridiculing her. You could say I was quite the gentleman about the whole situation.”
“Some people just can’t take the sight of a real-life though harmless human ear, but I imagine an Iraqi’s head minus the ear would be far more gruesome. The ear’s the only real souvenir that I kept from my tour of duty. Other guys got tongues and penises but only the ear appealed to me."
"Reminds me of one of those seashells that you hold to your ear so you can hear the sound of the sea. Except I use this a little differently. Sometimes I speak to the ear and it feels like I’m talking to the Iraqi before he lost it. I tell him that if he lays down his arms and quits being a force for evil Saddam things might turn out okay and some lucky GI won’t come home with his ear. Of course, I know it ain’t really listening. For one thing, I don’t speak no Arabic.”
“My girlfriend thinks I’m kind of a loon for holding on to my ear but I don’t see things her way. It’s not like I killed the man and chopped off his ear. I just bought it off an Iraqi boy, after most of the fighting ended, for a couple slugs out of my canteen. The truth is that I have no proof my ear even once belonged to an Iraqi. It could be the ear of a dead Kuwaiti or Kurd.”
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