Dear Dirty America

DDA

The Second Bat Guano War: the Dissent Suppression Unit

November 28
12:00 2012
J.M. PORUP

(get a free copy of the book here)

I was in the Rat’s Nest trying to pick a fight with a pacifist fucking general in the Marine Corps. I’d heard an aircraft carrier was in harbor down at Callao, and I went looking for the biggest, meanest-looking grunt I could find.

I believed in America. Its ideals. But those ideals had become so warped and mangled that nothing was left of them but hypocrisy and lies. The mere thought of living in America again made me sick to my stomach. Better an honest hellhole like Lima than the plastic smile and the knife in the back you’ll get at home. Don’t you tread on me, motherfucker.
“You oughtta be ashamed of yourself,” I told him. “Killing innocent women and children for a living.” I spat on his uniform.
He wiped the loogie from his jacket and stood up. “I’ve met your kind before,” he sneered. “Traitors like you in every port in the world. Not good enough for your own country.” He turned to go. “You’re not worth the time it takes to piss on.”
“Well God bless America and pass the apple pie,” I said, and took a swing at him.
He blocked the blow easily, and sent a devastating punch my way. I closed my eyes and waited for impact, savoring in advance the coming stars. They never came. I peeked. His fist hovered in midair inches from my nose.
A crunching sound of broken bone. The man howled in pain. His forearm bent over the bar at an unnatural angle.
“Bye-bye,” a new voice said, and a man took the general’s barstool. He looked far too young and blond and happy to be sitting there in that filthy bar, chuckling to himself as the marine limped from the room, clutching his broken arm to his chest.
“The fuck are you doing?” I shouted over the noise of the bar.
“Saving your ass by the looks of things,” he said. “Name’s Pitt. Buy you a drink?” To the barman: “Dos cervezas, por favor.”
“Make mine a bottle of pisco,” I hollered. “And who are you to get involved?”
Pitt cracked his knuckles. “That guy was going to beat you up.”
“Yes. I know. That was the point?”
The pisco came. Pitt poured me a shot. I took the bottle and drained it in one long swallow.
“Thirsty,” he said, and rested his chin on his fist. “You want another or should I just tape a ‘Rob Me’ sign to your forehead?”
“Fuck off, will you?” I said. “You’ve already ruined my evening.” I looked around the room. None of the other crew off the USS Asswipe seemed incline to brawl. Not with Pitt at my side. I slid off my barstool, feeling unsteady. “Now I’ll have to go somewhere else to get beaten up.”
Pitt drank his beer and laughed. “You are weird, dude. Why on earth do you want to get beaten up?”
My liquor tolerance was pretty high but even I was struggling to process an entire bottle of pisco. The stuff was raw local brandy, as nasty as it gets. I held on to the bar to steady myself. “Because I deserve it,” I said to a puddle of beer on the bar. I sat down and covered my face with my hands.
He slapped me on the back. “What can you possibly have done to deserve that?”
So I told him. I tell everyone. I love to watch their faces change. The horror when they hear what I have done.
When I was finished, he just laughed. “Dude,” he said, “that’s nothing. Don’t be such a fucking wuss. How can you feel guilty about something as stupid as that?”
The world was spinning now. “Wouldn’t you?” I managed to croak. I reached for my soap dish to righten the good ship Horsie.
“I do that kind of shit before breakfast sometimes,” he said. “And I sleep like a baby. Um, sorry,” he said, catching my expression of pain. “You know what I mean.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, snorting cocaine up my nose until my septum bled. “Tell me all about your pre-breakfast guilt-free ways.”
“I’m CIA,” he said breezily. “An enforcer. Part of the Dissent Suppression Unit.”
“And I’m the King of Spain. I dub thee, Sir Stranger Who Must Now Fuck Off.” And I collapsed into giggles.
He pinched my neck. A sharp pain shot down my spine. “I kill people for a living, dickwad,” he said. “You hear about the murders in Iquitos last week?”
I squawked an affirmative, his hand still on my neck.
“That was me. Strangled three dissidents with their own intestines. Roasted their nuts over an open fire. They were tasty.” His smacked his lips close to mine. “Fucking villagers didn’t want us drilling for oil. Thought it might ruin their precious fucking habitat. Guess what?” He laughed beer smell in my face. “We run this country. We don’t put up with that shit from nobody. You get in our way, you object to our policy, you protest our raping your country for money? Dead. Tortured. Disappeared.”
He let go of my neck, and I sat back, rubbing my spine.
“Decapitate dissent,” he said. “That’s what I do. Literally. Kill the leaders, and the sheep will follow.” He ticked off on his fingers. “Union organizers. Indigenous leaders. Hoity-toity academics who can’t be blackmailed or bullied. Artists. Writers. Opposition politicians. We make them go away.” He thumped his chest. “And I am a one-man disappearing team. I will kill, torture, maim, rape, sodomize, cannibalize and terrorize until you fucking obey, you stupid fucking Peruvians.” He leaned back in his chair with a smile. He drank his beer, then held it to his cheek and grinned broadly. “But after a hard day’s work, it’s time for an ice-cold Bud. Don’t you agree?”

To read the rest of The Second Bat Guano War, get your free copy here. To read an excerpt from Porup’s satire about America, click here.

Former Lonely Planet author J.M. Porup now writes satire. American by birth, Australian by choice, Colombian by marriage and Canadian by accident, he escaped from the US in 1999 and plans to renounce his citizenship. His first editor — way back in the mid-90s — called him aloose cannon. Ever since, Porup has done his best to live up to that high standard.

copyright (c) J.M. Porup. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission of author.

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