by Keith Kopp
In the suburbs of Fort Columbia, Washington, in 2002 there was little entertainment for a fourteen-year-old kid. My friends and I mostly came from a working-class background. We were boys who had little understanding of the opposite sex and none of us played organized sports. With no money, we created our own fun by playing war in a local rock quarry. First, we got kitted out in surplus army gear. Jack, our short and confident friend, donned a bulky olive flak vest from yesteryear. My brother, Matt, had a baby face, which may suit him now in middle age, but juxtaposed with tattered U.S. Army woodland camo made him look like a child soldier. And I, the tall and goofy representative in the group, wore a mixture of obscure European camouflage patterns of the Swiss and Belgian militaries, which often failed in its purpose and acted as a beacon of attention. A revolving door of other friends joined us, and we offered them the dregs of our father’s kit left from the 80s Marine Corps. We looked like a ridiculous hodgepodge of Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts or an improvised liberation army in the developing world.
Most evenings we started by hiding in the woodland overlooking the big pit. It was an enormous landscape, at least the size of a few football stadiums. This space was completely encircled by highways and streets of pill-boxed homes, but once you entered the quarry you could have been in the deep country. At night we would sneak down into the gorge. Everything was a shade of black unless it was illuminated by the bright industrial lights. I was not particularly strong, but my mental image of myself was of an invincible youth ready to take on the masses of insert a number of cliched enemies here. This image was in contrast to my life in high school, where I tried to stand out but melted into the masses who all thought they were original. We had to walk down the incline, which in certain parts of the pit was a hundred feet or more to the bottom. On more than one occasion I misplaced my footing and tumbled the rest of the way down, loose gravel and rock falling down after me. The fear that grabbed me in these moments never seemed to diminish my desire to continue. In the center of the pit three metallic refinery buildings shot out of the ground, angled with visible worn paint. They were so different from the rest of the natural surroundings. I always thought it was odd that this place was so close to a large suburban neighborhood. Anything could have happened down here, and no one would be the wiser. My squad and I explored the moonscape with a story playing in our mind, and in my version, we were heroes, the kings of Fort Columbia.
In the late afternoon, the games started with us shooting each other with pellet guns. The non-lethal rifles that sting like a mother if you got shot with one. We split off in teams of two or three and then tried to outflank one another or wait until the unsuspecting individual walked into our line of sight and then bang. False death, a real high. Jack and a few of the guys thought they were snipers and would wait patiently for their victim to make a noise. I just wanted to shoot and run. If hit, I had a black and purple bruise for a couple weeks, my temporary battle scar that I wore with honor. My parents would ask how it happened, and I created a variety of excuses. We always feared for our eyes as if we hit them there was a good chance of permanent blindness. Yet, it still took a few close calls for any of us to get a hold of eye protection.
Phrases that were uttered in this make-believe land have echoed in the years since, a satisfying way to torment our friends for their past transgressions. Our friend Leslie wore Vietnamese-style jungle boots on a drenched Pacific Northwest night and uttered the fatal words “My feet are cold.” These mistakes or glimpses into our child-like nature have been retold many times since. The worst of all which was uttered by me. Matt and I were patrolling a section of the woodland on the ridgeline. This evening started off rather dull, only a couple of quarrymen in the pit and the biting cold made us think about calling it quits. When Jack said he couldn’t make it, I forgot about the possibility of him showing up. I let my guard down and later Jack decided to surprise us. I walked right past him. Out of the blackened bushes his hand grabbed my shoulder, and he whispered, “Make one fucking step and I’ll kill you.” It may be a cliche but those hairs at the back of my neck stood up. I was scared shitless and within a second, I shouted in a high pitch voice, “Run, motherfuckers, we are going to fucking die!” My quote is said every time we see each other. It has taken me a while to see the humor. Though this overreaction had a reason behind it. We annoyed the hell out of the workers in this rock quarry and we thought one day they would seek us out.
Once nightfall descended, we got bored. We crawled down into the flat part of the quarry—at certain points, the decline was more forgiving. This was the section where the workers operated, and we “patrolled.” Often, we walked and then hid in the shadows where the humming orange glow of the lamps did not shine. We gave hand signals that would have made Audie Murphy proud. I never thought about how dangerous this was or perhaps I did and my final decision on the risk assessment was fun over safety. The workers were busy getting on with their tasks, so we played “chicken” time and time again by getting closer to where they were and then retreating back into the darkness behind the safety of the brushes and boulders. Usually, we only waved at them or gave a dance of defiance before our retreat, but this was often a red rag to a bull. A worker would run after us for a hundred meters. We booked it. The middle-aged man soon realized how futile running into the dark was and caught his breath as we shouted taunts in the shadowland that was ours. Success in the pit bred hubris.
Growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s you were bombarded with a mixture of fantasy and Global War on Terror (GWOT) war films. The imagery of Lord of the Rings and the repetition of the World Trade Center buildings falling, quests and national tragedy created an emotional tone. These images bred a type of young person seeking out an imagined injustice in their minds. Kids, many just like Jack, Matt, and me. Most of us came from blue collar homes, parents working their fingers to bone, better off than their parents, but barely. If the adults were going insane over these events of the time, why shouldn’t we? We inherited these wars, which then were fresh. It was my generation who would fight kids like the ones in this rock quarry. These thoughts were unconscious environmental factors but wore heavy in the atmosphere of the time.
One night, the war turned real. There were only four of us. Other friends told us they had to stay with their families for dinner. It was Friday night and Jack, Matt, Derrick, and I were armed with a two liter of Mountain Dew and balls that barely allowed us to walk straight. Derrick was another friend from our high school, the most academic of this lot and always standing around thinking with a cheeky smile. We came down the hill, following one of our normal paths. We knew about five ways to get into the valley but only two were relatively quick to get back up. I noticed when we reached the bottom that night there were more quarrymen than normal, but I did not think anything more of it. With all of our ventures to this place we were none the wiser what their actual work entailed: just gruff men moving trucks, lining up tools, and talking to each other. They had their work, and we had ours.
We normally had a plan before going. Jack often saw himself as the leader and then the rest of us went along with it, until the chaos within me seemed funnier and we would have to adapt. The most important element of the plans was where to fall back and meet up again. Splitting off in smaller groups meant they couldn’t catch us all at once. The patrols lasted between two and six hours, broken up with making fun of each other, eating tons of sugar, and trying to look hard ass. This night “the flail” took hold of me. Matt coined the term, which meant my impulses were going to do something spontaneous or dumb or most likely both. The flail was coming. The four of us got to the edge of where the illumination was, the threshold. I crouched down and watched the industrious work next to my squad. For a while nothing happened. I had a slug of soda, the sweet elixir of my youth, and passed it on. Then we decided by consensus to get closer. I high crawled with the rest of them to the back of the largest building, a massive maintenance bay where they fixed their trucks. Then I spotted it. A workman’s lunch box. You know the type. Sturdy black plastic with a shape with a half circle lid that hasn’t changed in fifty years. At this point Jack and Derrick split off and Matt and I continued on closer to the buildings. That lunchbox was screaming to me in the way Spanish doubloons speak to the hearts of pirates. A truck drove behind Matt and I and we ducked behind a gas pump. The smells in this land are strong: gas, industrial chemicals, and dust. I was praying the driver did not see us. He didn’t. Matt and I smiled at each other like mad fools. I saw Jack on the cusp of the shadows, and he was signaling, fall back, but the flail started to get the best of me. My brother must have sensed it before I knew what was happening because Matt whispered, “No!” Without a thought in my head my body started moving towards the lunchbox at a fast pace. All I could think of was turning back to Matt with a big grin on my face and then the same grin shown to Jack. Both of whom gave me the familiar face of “it’s hard to be your friend sometimes” as I ran into the center of the maintenance bay. Once I picked it up the question of what next came to me. This was an escalation, and a dickhead move. Do I take it, or do I leave it?
“Hey, you dumbfuck, put that down!” A burly man with a long beard in overalls shouted at me from under a truck. Exposed. I froze. Before I knew it, an alarm went off. This was new. I had never heard that before. I started to move, but where should I go? The building was in the middle of their compound. I looked for my friends and I saw they held their ground and didn’t move. Their resolve was apparent. We had little physical wealth in this life, but we owned the night. The bearded beast lifted himself out of the inspection pit. When I rushed towards my friends, a few of the quarryman trucks were screeching in our direction. This started to feel like they knew we were coming. Our outdated garish camo and pellet guns were not going to help us with this threat. I started to run in the most direct path with the cumbersome lunchbox still in my hand. One of the trucks came at such a speed that it separated Derrick from the rest of our squad. I ran to that truck and threw the lunchbox at the vehicle. A sad ham sandwich and apple rolled out of the container onto gravel. This did not help Derrick. He managed to find an escape route and later he said that we left him behind. That’s not how I remember it, but if we did, I knew he had a couple years of Tae Kwando, which at the time meant he was a certified killer.
The three of us who remained ran in the other direction but now the trucks were solely on our tail, and one of them turned on a beam from a fixed spotlight as they followed. They were playing with us. They had control and we were just kids who were losing at playing war. One of the men was in the flatbed of the truck and he pulled out a shotgun and aimed at us. He was shouting, “How does it feel?” The sound of the trucks spinning and weaving the gravel was so loud he could have said something else. All I knew is that stopping and speaking with these men was not an option. We pissed them off for too long to expect compassion. Until now they were well justified for scaring us, but at this moment it felt like we may have reached the end of our immature lives. We came close to the point where trucks could not pass over the large boulders and craigs. They wanted us to stop. No way.
The man fired the shotgun above our heads, releasing two or three rounds. These sounds echoed loudly above the truck noises and throughout the whole quarry. I was sweating my sins away on that run. We finally reached the boulders. One of the trucks made an emergency stop and drifted right in front of us. They obviously thought they had us, but they left a gap in the trucks, and we dived into the brush. We ran, like quicksilver, like boys who tasted death in the clutches of a hungry dog, then followed one of the paths to the top of the ridgeline into the forest that was our domain. We made it safely to the top of the pit where no quarrymen followed, all of us breathing the fastest we ever had before.
I would like to tell you that after this failed patrol in the quarry that we concluded our expeditions but that would be a lie. What can I say? Buffy the Vampire Slayer was not on every night and the Internet was less interesting back then. If we had money, we may have been at the mall or doing what other kids were doing, but we would have missed out on the bond these nights created. My parents worried about me doing drugs, listening to rap, and having premarital sex. In the end we found our own vice. The following year I was busy with high school theater and some years later I went off to the Army. It’s odd the duality of my personality back then, a kid who was so sensitive and desired to do well and this other side, a reckless pull to action and impulsiveness. Casting my eye to the past, I saw these naive kids thinking they were living in Black Hawk Down or Platoon. What a bunch of dweebs we were who knew nothing of the real costs of conflict. Where sometimes you have to face intense situations where the outcomes can cost lives, where you have to learn to accept some things that are out of your control, and finally to realize heroes are made in Hollywood and the survival of you and your friends in itself is a pretty solid goal.
A few years ago, I met up with Jack, Derrick, and my brother Matt in a pub in Orchards. Most of us were veterans of real wars, all in our late thirties. I was in the infantry. Jack and my brother served in the Marines. Derrick never joined but willingly suffered our stories with good humor. All of us now with the experience and lasting hangover from tours in the Forever Wars. When the conversation went quiet, I suggested going back to that quarry. It was a joke but the kind of joke that might turn into another expedition. There was a moment of silence as IPA was sipped and then as we looked at each other, there was a resounding “No.” I guess they grew up.
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Keith Kopp is a writer and filmmaker, from Washington state. He served as an infantryman in the US Army 3rd Stryker BDE, 2nd Inf Div from 2004-08, with a deployment to Northern Iraq. He is currently working on a collection of short stories based on his military experiences. Keith’s debut feature film about mental health and romance Translations had a UK theatrical cinema release in 2023 and has received positive reviews. Keith also lectures in film and television production at Bath Spa University. You can find more about his work at kwkopp.com.
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