three rules for living in an apocalypse

by Sean Davis Originally published in sneaker wave magazine on October 24, 2024

#1: Don’t expect things to make sense

IN 1994, WHEN I WAS A YOUNG US Army Infantry Private, I flew to Haiti to take part in Operation Uphold Democracy. The lawfully elected President of Haiti had been dislodged in a military coup, and we were going in there to kick this new undemocratic military regime to the curb and reinstall the real Haitian President, whose name I didn’t know at the time. 

We landed in Port-au-Prince and walked off the plane into the hottest, most humid, most burning-trash-stinking day of our lives—or at least my life—and loaded onto giant trucks called five tons. My squad leader told me I had to be what he called an “air guard,” which meant while everyone else sat in two rows in the uncovered backs of the big trucks, I had to stand behind the cab and look for any suspicious or dubious characters who might have ill will against the US Army and possibly intend harm on our persons.

“Yes, Sergeant,” I said. “But none of us have any bullets.” 

We had flown with our M16A2s, but there’s no way in hell they’d risk giving a battalion's worth of young infantrymen loaded weapons while flying, not even into a war zone.

“No bullets until we get to Camp Warrior,” the Sergeant said. He sounded tired and annoyed and was sweating heavily and looking miserable in the heat, and I was, too. 

I said, “I’m sorry, Sergeant, but if I don’t have no bullets, what am I supposed to do if I identify any suspicious or dubious characters?”

“Goddammit, Davis. Get your ass up there and keep a fucking look out.”

The day was so hot that the street shimmered into a colorful haze of busy people in vibrant clothes that stood out even more against their dark, dark skin. Women carried impossible loads on their heads: woven baskets or burlap bags full of fruit or rice. Past every block or two of stores or markets, a pile of garbage and debris burned, and the odor of burning rubber and trash mixed with frying foods I’d never smelled growing up in trailers in and around the town of Blue River, on the McKenzie River in Central Oregon. I’d never been in a war zone before. I’d never seen this many black people before. Nor had I seen people just stop walking and step into an alley and squat to take shit like it was the most natural thing in the world and then go on walking again. No one gave the truckloads of armed American soldiers more than a glance. The fact that no one seemed to care about strangers from a foreign government with state-of-the-art weaponry driving through their town unnerved me at best.

It was probably a good thing I didn’t have any bullets.

The army said they sent us to Haiti on a peacekeeping mission, but from the moment we landed, every military leader in my chain of command wanted us to get shot at. Since the end of the Vietnam War, all these hard-charging, steely-eyed warriors had been suffering through the longest span of peace in modern memory, and consequently, they were chomping at the bit to prove themselves great leaders of men in a “real world situation.” The army loved this term: “real world situation.” In practice, this meant all the officers had Combat Boners. They wanted to get shot at. They needed to get shot at. How in the hell else, other than by participating in “real violence,” would they earn those little pins and badges and medals to prove they were soldiers of true merit? 

My company commander had gone to Texas A&M on a football scholarship, taking Agriculture classes with names like Meat and Beef Science, and he had no enthusiasm for letting us get settled into Camp Warrior. We marched so far into the hills that somehow we went one or maybe two hundred years back in time, where no one had electricity, cars, or even glass for the windows of their houses. In fact, from what I could see, people made houses out of whatever junk they could find. I saw an entire shack made of one-gallon cans of Napoleon’s Italian Olive Oil and metal guard rails from the highway, Route Nationale 2.

The patrol went on for hours, well into the night, and we might still be marching out there to this day if we hadn’t have heard dozens of people screaming and chanting in a village close by. We sprinted through the darkness with all that weight on our backs. I remember running until my throat was sandpaper from breathing so hard. When we finally got there, every person in the village was jumping up and down in unison and screaming something in a language I did not understand.

The captain found out that someone had tried to steal the village television set, so the villagers curb-stomped him.

The medic called me over to help apply pressure to one of the man’s several compound fractures. I’d never seen anything like this broken man covered in his own shit, piss, blood, puss, and vomit. The mob had, very obviously, broken each of his limbs in different places. Most of his fingers, too. A huge gash in his forehead showed the yellow bone of his skull. His eyes wouldn’t stop rolling in their sockets, and every time he tried to breathe he made a coarse gasping sound.

“What the fuck?” I said.

“Agonal breathing,” the medic said.

I had never heard the term before, but I’ve never forgotten it.

“His brain isn’t getting oxygen.”

The captain stood over us and asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

The medic said, “Multiple compound fractures, internal bleeding, he’s probably stroked out or had multiple cardiac arrests. What’s not wrong with him? In fact, he’s dead, sir.”

Another gasp for air.

“He seems to be breathing,” the captain said.

“Trust me. He’s dead,” the medic said, “but he doesn’t know it yet.”

I finally unfurled my field dressing and tried to decide what wound to stick it on.

The commander called for a Humvee from Camp Warrior, so we waited in the village for hours. This guy would not fucking die. The whole time, we had to listen to his agonal breathing. Every time he did it, I jumped.

When the Humvee finally arrived, I got selected to help load up the broken man—I guess because I was already covered in his bodily fluids. I sat over him in the bed of the truck as we drove down the dirt roads; the broken man gasped, cried, and oozed at every single bump and hole.

The captain said we had a great opportunity to win hearts and minds if we helped save this man’s life. And the whole time all I wanted to do is put my boot on his neck and press down so he’d stop that damned agonal breathing.

We tried the main hospital and two small clinics. None of them had power, but that really didn’t matter since they were all looted and the whole staff had been chased off or killed weeks ago. We ended up dropping the body of the broken man off at a police station with a character who looked very suspicious and dubious and who might have had ill will against the US Army and possibly intended to harm our persons.

#2: Keep your humanity during inhumane situations  

I was happy after I left the Army in January of 1999. I enrolled in art school, but I reenlisted again the day after 9/11. For years after the Iraq War, I told people I signed back up out of pure, 100%, throat-punching patriotism, but the reality of it is, I was bored and still young enough to have some of that Viking gene in me that causes humans to do dumb shit like jump in a small ship with sails to find the end of the world or sign up for a war that only existed out of some messed-up need for revenge on people from a totally different country who are hiding out in an unrelated third country.

Our company received our first Purple Heart within an hour of arriving at Camp Taji, when insurgents mortared us while we waited to be told where to put our stuff and sleep. We were playing cards and listening to The Best of Frank Sinatra when the attack started. One of our guys was hit in the shoulder with shrapnel.

There’s something strange about realizing for the first time that people you never met before were actively trying to kill you. You really can’t help taking it personally.

A few days later, helicopters dropped us off at around 3 am at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Baghdad. The helicopters touched down for less than a minute—just enough time for each of us to scramble out, run ten feet, and throw ourselves into the prone position. The rotor wash pounded us, and we could hear nothing else until the helicopters bounced back up into the black sky and were gone. We stayed there, pulling security while waiting for the asshole in charge to tell us to move out. It seemed like way too long. I started to get pissed off at whoever was going to lead this mission, and then I realized it was me. I was the asshole in charge.

We marched in the dark. In your night vision device, the whole world turns monochromatic green. Forget depth perception or detail; the night vision goggles enhanced the light reflecting off the moon just enough to let me see the ground ten feet in front of me and not much else. I think it had to be around 4:30 in the morning when there was enough light to see our surroundings. We could barely make out dark figures around us.

At first, I halted the squad, and we all raised our weapons at the shapes. Then speakers mounted on buildings cracked to life all around us. They started playing the early morning call to prayer. A woman’s nasally voice sang haunted melodies.

I almost opened fire at the dark figures, but I remembered Rule #1: Don’t expect things to make sense.

So I took a very unsure step forward. Then another. As the sun came up, I saw that these figures were large cartoon animals with big googly eyes, toothy smiles, and dozens of bullet holes. We stood face to face with a shot-up Merry-Go-Round. Our patrol area was Baghdad’s version of an amusement park.

About ten minutes later we came to this small hill. The sun had come up a little more, but we saw some light dancing. It was obvious that someone on the other side of this hill had a campfire going. We crawled up our side of the hill with the Squad Automatic weapons on at each end of the line. When we got to the top, we peeked over to see five men standing and squatting around a fire. They all had AK-47s either slung or leaning up against rocks or something. 

I swallowed hard. It’s such a weird feeling staring at people that you know you’re going to have to kill. Two men squatted by the fire, where a teapot sat on a small metal grate. Two others stood and smoked, and the fifth man spoke to all of them—maybe telling a joke, maybe giving orders.

Finally Corporal Zedwick leaned over. “Sergeant?”

I almost dropped my finger. In another second I would have, but one thing caught my eye that didn’t make sense: they all were wearing black slacks and blue shirts. The enemy in this war didn’t wear uniforms. Was that enough?

I turned to PFC Matier and whispered, “Z and I are going to talk to them.”

“What?” Matier asked.

“What?” Zedwick asked too.

They didn’t see us until we were ten feet away, but when they did they all went for their weapons. My eyes widened, and I leveled my rifle at them. I knew without doubt that our machine guns would open up at any second. I thought, They are all going to die, and there is nothing I can do.

The only thing I could think was to scream the word for “stop” in Arabic—a word I read in the little language pamphlets the Army gave us. I screamed, “Awgaf! Awgaf! Awgaf te-ra ar-mee!”

And a miracle happened. They stopped. They all stopped. They all stared at me. Then they smiled, big silly smiles. The machine guns didn’t open up, and no one screamed in pain. The oldest man there put his hands out and walked toward me. He told me in broken English that they were zoo security. They had taken it upon themselves to help the U.S. Army, which they admired so much. They were only going for their weapons because they didn’t want us to think they were slacking. He shook my cold, numb hand and asked if I wanted a cup of tea.

I said yes. Yes, I did want a cup of tea.

Two weeks later, a violent ambush critically injured me. The only time in my life when I’ve been critically injured. I don’t know the criteria for being injured in a critical way, but it sounded bad and it fucking hurt like hell for a long time. When all my bones healed and bruises faded, one of the largest hurricanes in US history hit New Orleans, and I volunteered to go.

#3: Take time to laugh

In September of 2006, we had been in New Orleans for a couple weeks. Whoever was in charge of the whole mess did not supply us with Humvees, so we used city buses as our patrol vehicles. No one knew how to drive one, but everything was wrecked so we learned as we went along. Accidentally smashing into a car or building wasn’t that big of a deal. It was more like a learning curve. I stood in the front next to our driver with one foot on the change collector like a pirate captain directing my ship.

The dead body retrieval teams were understaffed and incredibly busy. They’d buzz around on small boats and find dead bodies floating in the flood waters, so they’d tie the body to something solid by the belt or shoestrings of the corpse. This way they could call in an eight-digit grid of where they secured the corpse. When we walked through the town after the water receded, we’d find a dead body hanging upside down or in some very undignified position every couple of blocks.

For the first week or so, it was horrifying, but I found that being horrified for more than a day or so was pretty fucking exhausting. After a while, I shrugged it off, dealt with it, and tried to find things to laugh about.

One day, we found a shark on an overpass. One of my guys cut the stomach open, and an Ohio license plate and a single deer antler spilled out with a wave of rotted fish. We made up a story about how they got there and laughed.

During one patrol, the higher-ups assigned a media team to us. We were so proud and thought we’d all be on CNN or something, but after an hour of them following us around we found out they were Dutch and none of them spoke English. We laughed about that.

Then at the end of the week we found a suicide. The guy boarded all his windows up and tried to wait out the storm. When we found him, he was wearing nothing but tighty-whities with a piece of note-paper plastic wrapped around his left thigh. He had written his name, date of birth, and Social Security Number on the paper and shot himself in the right temple with a pistol. There was nothing funny about this scene, but afterward, while waiting for the body retrieval team, we laughed. We had to. It was the only way to release all that pressure.

I left the military after coming back from New Orleans. I just couldn’t be Infantry Sergeant Davis anymore. Plus, I was tired of all these apocalypses. The world seemed to end for me every couple of years, and I guess I was good at dealing with it, but that’s not a skillset anyone voluntarily wants, no one sane, anyway.

In the years following my exit from the service, I’ve done a lot of cool things because I use these three rules every day.

Not expecting things to make sense really helped when I got into politics. I ran for mayor of Portland. I came in fourth and got to be on all the televised debates. Keeping my humanity during inhumane times helped me turn an American Legion post into a homeless shelter for a few weeks in the winter of 2016. Taking time to find the humor in life helps me maintain most of my sanity on a daily basis.

After leaving Portland in 2018, my family and I moved back to where I grew up in the Cascade Mountains of Central Oregon, and in 2020, The Holiday Farm Fire burned 106,000 acres, our entire town, and 400 homes and over 200 businesses.

This was my fourth apocalypse, but I used my rules, and we got through it.

Today, I live in Astoria, Oregon. It’s a storybook-like place with deer that roam the neighborhoods, pinball and arcades everywhere, and six amazing breweries. Giant cargo ships run up and down the Columbia River, and bald eagles and pelicans soar over herds of elk on the forested beaches. As I write the ending to this little story from the second-floor library of Clatsop Community College, I keep a weather eye on the horizon because the world never stops ending, but I’m okay with that.

About the author:

Sean Davis is the author of The Wax Bullet War. He is a Purple Heart Iraq War veteran, the 2015 winner of the Legionnaire of the Year Award from the American Legion, and the 2016 recipient of the Emily Gottfried Emerging Leader, Human Rights Award. In the same year, he was knighted by Portland’s Royal Rosarians. His stories, essays, and articles have appeared in the Ted Talk Book The Misfit’s Manifesto (Simon and Schuster), City of Weird, Sixty Minutes, Story Corps, Flaunt Magazine, The Big Smoke, Human the movie, and other publications. He lives with his family in Astoria, Oregon, where he leads the Stormy River Writers group and spends his time writing, drawing, painting, and enjoying life with Kelly, Jackie, and his two giant dogs, Luna and Bombur.