The Wayward: Pat the SEAL

The Wayward

There are only three M’s who travel to Asia. Missionaries, Mercenaries, and Malcontents. These are their stories.

‘Nick’, he says.
‘The thing about seventies porn was it looked like dang old every chick had Don King in a leglock’.

He tilts his head back, laughing a rapid fire laugh at his own joke. Punctuating his punchline with a last sip of beer, his shaky hand lands the empty glass on my bar with a thud.

‘Bush, man. Bush.’ he says, holding his arms out wide.

I laugh, having heard that one once or twice, but I always laugh – it’s a barman’s job. Everyone’s interesting, everyone’s funny – till your shifts over.

In a few hours when I knock off, crawling sleepily into my soggy bedding, Pat, the middle-aged American sitting across from me, will not be funny. He’s just not, really. After all the bad jokes are through, he will however, still be interesting.

There’s something I’ve noticed. If you go far away enough, as far into the deserts or jungles as you can go, to the absolute fringes – a strange thing happens. The only people around at the end of the day, standing at that edge, are the ones as crazy, or crazier, than you.

The first thing I noticed about him when he sauntered in one afternoon were his shorts – bright, neon blue, nut-huggers. They looked lifted from his Ukrainian trophy-wife’s workout clothes, and perhaps they were. As I’d come to find out, this man at this point in his life cared little for the opinions of others.

The second thing I noticed, being shirtless, were the twin badges of a Cold Warrior – a ‘Hammer & Sickle’ tattoo, and a large, spidered scar above his heart, the size of an AK-47 round.

The third thing I noticed, as he got closer, were his eyes. Cool blue. Focused, like a hawk. Constantly scanning, assessing, dismissing. Weaknesses, vulnerabilities – threats, all seemed laid bare to him. Yet behind their pale calculations they seemed to hold a thousand sights, etched deep by the clarity of a snipers scope, too vivid to ever un-see.

A twenty-year veteran of Seal Team 4, he had done his time ‘dick in the dirt, behind the rifle’, as he called it, leaving jagged pieces of himself across every clandestine battlefield from the jungles of Nicaragua, to the deserts of Iraq.

He seemed to be looking for the same thing as many who come here – peace. I’d dare say he’d earned it. Probably more than the twenty-something wanderers that populate the fringes of the world here.

To be near the ocean. To be in a place of relative innocence. He seemed contented now to blur the sharp memories into a haze over a few watered-down beers and bar talk.

The sacrifices he had made, his body, his health, he claimed not to have made upon some alter of patriotism. But by his own admission placed himself in harms way to such wild extents because it offered the most reward financially for the least time. He likened the SEALS to a finely tuned Ferrari – brought out of the garage for the occasional race, then carefully retuned and held safe until the next. Plus it was fun, he said.

Yet even with the impressive financial rewards the cost seems very high. The bullet in his shoulder, the most obvious of his numerous scars, seems to be the one that ended his field career. A longtime sniper, always able to blend in and melt with his surroundings, finally taken down by a wayward round, hip fired from some rusted old rifle.

Faced with a desk or retirement, he chose retirement, wanting no more of the battle between good and evil as he saw it.

He happily left the Navy with a blown out shoulder, a replacement ‘government-issue, Teflon-coated, size 3, left-testicle’, and unbeknownst to him, the beginnings of the debilitating neurological disorder Parkinson’s.

The tremors, generally slight, are only noticeable when he sips his beer. But sometimes, when worked up, he can do a pretty convincing ‘Night at the Roxbury’.

When he began exhibition symptoms, the Veteran’s doctors asked if he drank much well-water.

Recent studies have linked common pesticides, used by farmers in both developed and undeveloped countries, to Parkinson’s. The runoff from these farms slowly leaches toxins into the aquifer, poisoning nearby wells.

This is not only a Somalia thing, or a Nicaragua thing, it’s a California thing. The pesticides are so common, and the trace elements needed to contaminate the aquifer so small, the numbers are really becoming alarming.

SEAL Teams can operate independently, that is without returning to base, for years at a time. Years. The commitment is staggering, and the need to live off the land an absolute; fishing, hunting, and most vitally – drinking local water.

So despite all the technology, training, and micron UV-straw filters, this multi-million dollar weapon of war, this man who committed so much – is scrapped. ‘Decommissioned’ – like flipping the lights off in an abandoned building. The finely tuned muscle memory, honed to a razors edge over years, left to wither away – the root of which goes unacknowledged by the country that sent him.

Yet for all he would have cause to rage against, he doesn’t, and if not to the barman then who? As a Russian-specialist he gets on well with his blonde Ukrainian wife, yet in my experience anger and ecstasy often only speak mother tongues.

‘Would you ever go back?’, I ask.
‘Hell no. They wouldn’t even want me back. Fifty year old mother-fucker with one nut doing the shimmy behind the scope. Hell no. I like it here.’

He peppers the general ‘weather-local news-babe report’ with war-stories, rarely specific. Torn between a lifetime of secrecy and a crowd of fascinated peaceniks; the most militant of whom, might have once been near someone who was pepper-sprayed whilst occupying a Starbucks.

A sniper peers at the world through a magnifying glass. His enemies are not faceless shapes on some faroff ridge, they are bright and clear, and human. You can notice things you would not normally notice. Did he shave? Is he an old man or a young boy? Does he wear a wedding band. These things must be processed and dismissed without breathing. To hear it from him, it seems as taxing mentally as it was physically.

So you understand when the little tics remain.

I once offered him some of my lunch; fried fish from a street vendor. His reaction to the smell was so instantaneous and repulsed, I asked what he had against fish, arguably Cambodia’s main protein. He then proceeded to recount a tale ripped from the best Tom Clancy-Jack Ryan techno-thriller.

Suffice it to say that if I spent two whole years in the jungle hunting Panamanian drug lords, eating only canned SPAM dropped by helicopter and greasy Perch I caught with my hands, I probably wouldn’t be popping round McD’s for a Filet’O’Fish anytime soon.

A lot of ex-military have passed through my bars in the last few years. Full of braggadocio and inuendo about their secretive exploits, they are, more often than not, embellishments. (And no one seems to know what color the boathouse at Hereford is )

One particular young con-artist, a rakish Scot named Liam, even went so far as to claim he was ex-British SAS. Down on his luck and suffering from PTSD, this particular sob story netted him thousands in unpaid tabs and willing women seeking to ‘heal the broken man’ – that is until their purse went missing.

Liam was a cheap con-man, it read in his eyes instantly. Pat’s eye’s are different – hunters eyes. Even as the Parkinson’s racks his body, simultaneously paralyzing and inflaming his every nerve ending, his eyes, those cool blue eyes, are steady, focused.

A true warrior, simply retired from the fight.

On ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle:

‘Kyle used to always win the ‘bring the fattest date to the bar’ competition.’