My asshole is bleeding. Not in some metaphorical sense—just the raw experience of blood dripping from it. It has a tendency to present at particularly trying times in a humiliating display of life’s dark, degrading humor.
It initially occurred the morning after the first time I did cocaine. I was 21, and on New Year’s Day, my ass began secreting blood. Panic ensued as I attempted to recall every anti-drug PSA I’d seen. I didn’t remember one in which someone does coke and then proceeds to die by bleeding out of their rectum, but I went to the hospital just to be safe. I didn’t want to be the first.
I dragged my moist, tender ass onto the subway and to the Emergency Room where some poor intern stuck her barely lubed finger up it. I winced as she shoved it in and muttered about how I was wasting hospital resources. She wrapped up the exam, rolled her eyes and said, “It’s just hemorrhoids. Buy a cream at any Duane-Reade, and stop reading WebMD ”.
I ignored it like most medical advice I got in my 20s—I didn’t have insurance anyway. Since then, I’ve been plagued by this modern affliction, born from our anal-retentive compulsion to doomscroll while taking a shit. I’d occasionally bleed out of my ass, but it was just a minor indignity.
That is, until I traveled to the Middle East and it became an international humiliation.
On November 18th, 2018, I was in a Syrian oil field outside Hajin, holed up in a defensive encampment as a foreign volunteer in a local militia (YPG). The day before, after several hours of fighting, we’d repelled a counteroffensive until they faded back into the fog. We knew a larger attack was coming, and I was up most of the night on guard duty. In the early morning, the fog thickened, and we stumbled around in the dark, unable to see beyond our own fumbling hands.
I crouched out of sight, shivering in the damp cold as I cupped my cigarette to hide the burning ember. These are the moments when everything slows down, and reality finally sets in. All I could think about was how I’d brought my stupid ass to Syria, spent months pressuring the Hevals1 to send me to the front—and now I was going to die out here.
Gunfire rang out, breaking my thoughts and flooding my body with adrenaline. The grip on my rifle eased as I realized it was just the commander, firing into the air in an attempt to motivate a reluctant Heval. Some of them refused to do watch. Earlier, during the fighting, I saw a few hiding in the garbage pit—as if closing their eyes would make it all go away. A lot of them were just kids, and even more afraid than me.
After spending the longest four hours of my life sitting in the complete dark with nothing but my anxiety of what was about to come in the morning, I managed a short nap—only to be jolted awake by a new fear, that of being killed while still having to shit. Not only would it be painfully uncomfortable up until my death, but your muscles relax, and everything vacates the bowels. The corpse of an International covered in their own feces would be too good of a propaganda photo for ISIS to pass up. More likely, it would be the image of a headless American, which might actually be preferable; at least then I’d be an anonymous, excrement-caked corpse. But they’d probably just have kept my head for good measure.
Propelled by the fear of ending up in some scatological jihadist snuff film, I knew it was now or never. Rifle and wet wipes in hand, my asshole resolutely clenched, I jumped the berm separating our defensive position from the open desert and made my way to the designated minefield of human feces just in time. I squatted, and as I defiled the sand, I noticed a fine mist of bright red blood speckling the runny brown film that I had become accustomed to expelling after weeks of eating dry, tasteless chicken and smashed hard-boiled eggs delivered in plastic bags.
The panic set in further as I frantically dabbed my ass with the wipes in a futile attempt to subdue the flow. Not only was I outside the defensive perimeter, pants down around my ankles while an attack was imminent, but my rectum was expelling blood. It’s difficult not to see the humor. When I needed every drop in case I was shot, the cowardly hemoglobin deserted me. Now I only had four pints to spare.
As the flow became a trickle, I remembered what had seemingly become the unofficial motto of the war: “What can you do sometimes?” The answer was almost always—not much, other than to embrace the absurdity of it all. If you can no longer find humor in your fragile fate—when the fantasy fades and only the naked reality remains—then you’ll never make it. You’ll end up hiding in the garbage pit. Bartering with God, trying to convince yourself that it isn’t happening. But it is.
I ran a final wipe over the tender protrusions, confirming that the bleeding had stopped. I pulled up my fatigues and, still clutching the rifle that I had yet to let go of, climbed back over the berm. A few minutes later, an RPG fired from too far away exploded overhead, followed by the sharp whizz of incoming rounds. I removed the electrical tape from around one of my grenades, just in case we were surrounded.This is what I get for bringing my dumb ass to Syria, I thought—at least I won’t shit myself.
Notes:
1. Heval means comrade and refers to anyone in the military structure but in this case I’m talking about higher up commanders.