David Brunotte

     “It’s kind of weird. My dad was a sailor in Pensacola. My mom was a 15 year old girl, and they got married. He was 20, she was 15. They had my sister at 16 and me at 17, but I was given up for adoption. I got passed around and somehow ended up in Ohio. When I was 7 years old, some guy showed up and they said, ‘This is your dad.’ His name was on the birth certificate so that was good enough for me. My dad was a bit of a dick. Really sarcastic. I was sniveling about wanting to meet my mom and he said, ‘Alright, I’ll take you to meet her.’ The first time I met her I was 7. He took me to meet her at her job. She called herself an exotic dancer, but it was just a titty bar. The best thing I ever did in my life, when I turned 18, I joined the Marine Corps. I got some stability. I was very hungry, hadn’t eaten, didn’t really have any place to live. It saved my ass really.”

     “When I joined, I was going to be a LAAD, Low Altitude Air Defense. Then, they said I was colorblind and couldn’t fulfill the contract. I knew how to type, so they made me a typist in the analysis section at Wing Headquarters. That was kind of a shock. Christmas Eve of ’77, drinking 151 in somebody else’s room, we all got busted with weed. They made me a PFC and weren’t really happy with me at the Wing Headquarters any more. I volunteered to go a gun squadron and ended up with VMA-211. They were working up in ’78, and in ’79 we went over to Iwakuni, Japan for 13 months. I guess the Marine Corps forgave me because by the time I came back, I was a Sergeant. I got a message saying we like what you do, you’ve proven yourself, blah blah blah, and if you reenlist we’ll give you a slot with a brand new aircraft in a joint Navy-Marine Corps squadron. The squadron was VFA-125 flying the F-18 out of Lenmore, CA. It was a very high profile squadron.”

     “Me and Staff Sergeant Bryan Houtz were doing some carpentry work on a dairy farm out in Hanford. I was trying to build up some equity for a house downpayment by working for a realtor. We didn’t make much money under Jimmy Carter… We were in a small barn replacing roofing and doing a bunch of work. The family on the farm was Portuguese. I didn’t understand a word they said. There was like a 90-year-old lady that came out of a doublewide trailer on the property shouting. I looked out the barn window and saw smoke. She was hollering that the kitchen had caught on fire. Bryan and I ran out towards her. Now, this was Central Valley California. By 8:30, 9:00 in the morning, it was already in the mid 90’s. I had my shirt off, wasn’t wearing anything except a pair of blue jeans. I moved the old lady out of the way and went in. The whole kitchen was on fire. The ceiling had flashed over. I tried to find an extinguisher, but couldn’t find anything. I tore a small window curtain off the door and draped it over my head. I heard Bryan yell for me to come back out and he handed me a garden hose. I went back in and started working on the fire trying to knock it down. The place had filled with smoke.  It was probably 8 or 900 degrees if you stood up, but if you got down low it wasn’t so bad. Plastic runners lined the ceiling between the particle board. It was so hot the plastic was on fire and that shit started dripping on my skin. I just hosed myself down and kept trying to fight the fire.”

     “The front door of the trailer had been blocked from the inside for some reason. The only way in or out was through the kitchen. While I’m fighting the fire, all of the sudden, here comes Bryan inside with the father or grandfather. There was a whole clan of people that lived there. Turns out, there was a 3-week-old baby, a 2-year-old, a 5-year-old, and a 16-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, all asleep in the back of the house. They couldn’t get through. I got down real low and just kept fighting the fire with the garden hose. I hosed down Bryan and the father, then they crawled through. Finally, they came back. Moving real low to the ground, both of them carried a kid under each arm. When I saw them, I hosed them down some more and they made it back through. I stayed in there and kept fighting the fire until I got it out. About the time I got it done, the fire department showed up.”

     “They did a bunch of paperwork and reports I never knew about until later. They said $10k damage done to the doublewide trailer, and this was back in ’81. Jesse Silva was the name of the family there, out on Hanford Armona Road. I mean these people, only the youngest kids could speak some English. But they hugged us and they loved us, ‘Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!’”

     “I’ve never had anybody be so damn grateful to me, ok?”

     “I got little burns on my shoulders where the plastic dripped on me, but that’s about the only thing that happened. I didn’t whine about that or nothing. I was interviewed by the base paper. All I could say was the smoke was so thick it was hard to breathe. You could hardly see. A couple months later, I get called in and they said the Secretary of the Navy was coming and wanted to meet me. It was pretty cool. That was my 15 minutes of fame. I got a Navy Commendation Medal for heroic achievement. They said it was the highest award you could get at the time. Bryan got the same thing. It was pretty neat because there weren’t very many Marines at NAS Lenmore. You know how cocky Marines are. We thought we were the best thing on two feet. I remember going through boot camp. Everybody had a chest full of medals from Vietnam. Hell, now me walking around with a Good Conduct Medal, Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, and oh, wow, a Navy Commendation Medal? At that time, nobody got anything. The Marine Corps is kinda tight with a lot of stuff.”

     “I got out in October of ’82. I screwed up and got out a Private. I was a cocky little fucker and thought I could do whatever I wanted. After I got my medal, one of my friends told me about this girl to meet. Well, she turned out the be the daughter of the Command Master Chief of the base. I started going out with her. That's when they came after me. I got the Command Master Chief’s daughter pregnant. The thing is, she was already married to a Marine that went AWOL, and by California law, I never had to claim to be the baby’s father. But, she was my daughter, and well, I paid 18 years of child support.”

     “They were out to get me, ok? They set my ass up with a big-chested sailorette. She asked me to get her some weed, and I got her some. They busted me for possession, transfer, and introduction onto a military establishment of 6 grams of marijuana. They gave me a special court martial. You know how screwed up the Marine Corps is? They scheduled the court martial on my birthday. Are you kidding me? You guys have to do that? I was 24. They threw me in Treasure Island brig for 6 months. I was the only Marine in the brig with a couple hundred sailors. I was in there with freaking murderers and rapists and kidnappers- are you fucking kidding me? I’m here for 6 lousy grams of weed! I finally wrote a letter to the Commandant saying that I knew they were going to kick me out, so why don’t we just do this- I’ll go my way and you guys go yours, just get me out of the brig and I’ll sign your paperwork. He said ok. It was a General Under Honorable Discharge. I paid my price and got out.”

     “I was supposed to have gotten the Life Saving award from President Regan. After I got in trouble, I just said fuck it. I’m getting out. I’ve got a life to live. Brian got his, from what I heard. They weren’t concerned about giving it to me. You know, it didn’t look good for the Marine Corps, so I kept my mouth shut. While I was in the brig, my daughter was born. I didn’t get to see her until she was 3 weeks old. I got out with nothing but travel pay as a Private, which is not much. I kicked around a couple years and eventually got a job with the Post Office in Seattle. Eventually, my dad got really sick and I came back to Ohio to take care of him.”

     “I just tried to live my life. I got the job at the Post Office. Got good health insurance. I found a wonderful person, and we’ve been married 30 years. We have a daughter. We lived the life. I was on top of my world. One day, I was group leader at the Post Office, I directed labor on day shift. Everyone answered to me. I was the one they had to go to. Then, all of the sudden, five years ago I got a call one day from my older sister. She had a CT scan and it showed her having lung cancer. It had metastasized in her head as brain cancer. I went out to visit her and saw her before she passed away. Her doctor said the cancer was genetic, and I should get checked too. Well, my doctor ran some tests and did a CT scan on me. Three days later, they did a biopsy. I had a totally different type of lung cancer. My sister had Non-Small Cell. I had a malignant carcinoma in the bronchial tubes of my lower and middle right lung lobes. We had a younger half-sister too, and I told her to get checked. She had the Non-Small Cell too. So within 6 months, all three of us were diagnosed with lung cancer, but mine was different. They wouldn’t say what it was caused by. I probably breathed some really nasty shit in the smoke from the doublewide. That’s where I figured I got the cancer from.”

     “I went into the hospital 10 days after the biopsy and they removed my middle and lower right lung lobes. Well, the doctor fucked that up. The next morning, I woke up and I knew something wasn’t right. They did an x-ray and next thing I know, I had nurses and doctors surrounding me. I was leaking blood into my chest and was struggling to stay alive. They put another port right in the bend of my leg on the back side and started squeezing bags of blood and saline, trying to get shit in my veins. I ended up leaking 7 units of blood into my chest cavity. They did an emergency surgery. Well, this time when I woke up they were not as nice to me as the day before. I guess the day before, I was fighting them while coming out of anesthesia. When I woke up this time, they had strapped my hands to the side of the bed. There was a tube down my throat blocking off the hole to the lung they removed. The damn tube had gone cockeyed and I couldn’t breathe. I had about an inch and a half of room to move my hands where they were tied and I kept hitting the side of the bed as hard as I could. I broke bones in my hand trying to get these fuckers’ attention. I kept thinking, ‘I’m going to give up, I can’t breathe.’ I kept hearing a voice telling me, ‘You’ll be alright. Don’t stop breathing, don’t stop trying.’ I thought it was my daughter with me in the room. Someone finally came in and cut my hands loose. I pulled that tube out of my throat and finally got some oxygen. I told my wife later that day, if it wouldn’t have been for our daughter being in there, I would have given up. She just said, ‘There was nobody in here, David, you were by yourself.’ My sister and my daughter sound a lot the same. She died a month before I had my surgery. I truly believe with all my heart, that my sister was there telling me not to give up.”

     “The next morning, I woke up and all the blood that leaked into my chest had settled on my left side. Have you ever seen a corpse that laid there for 8 or 10 hours and all the blood settled into one nasty looking bruise? Well, that’s what I had. I had a sucking chest wound out my back for the next two weeks. They went in with suction and tried to get all the blood out. They didn’t get everything. The doctor told me I was a walking blood clot. Every 8 hours, they took a 4 inch needle and stuck it in my gut with anticoagulant. When I got out of there I had 68 scabs on my lower gut from the injections because they weren’t healing. Next, my upper right lung collapsed. That damn doctor had a thing that looked like a turkey thermometer with a tube coming off of it. He says, ‘Don’t move!’ and jams the fucking spike through my chest. Then, he said he missed and had to do it again! Christ, are you kidding me? They sucked a box full of stuff out. Then the doctor wanted to remove the rest of my right lung. I told him if it didn’t have cancer, then hell no. Instead, they took a slurry of talc and something else in a big ass syringe and stuck that in my chest. They said, ‘this is going to hurt.’ Whenever they said that, they pretty much told the truth. Turns out the slurry, when it met with oxygen in the hole that was leaking, seared the lung lobe to my chest wall. That was a whole new experience in pain.”

     “After 21 days in that damn place, I started going crazy. I’m one of the luckiest people you’ll ever talk to, just to be alive, ok?”

     “You want to hear the shittiest part of all of this? I’ve had all this medical care through my surgery and everything, but one day, my doctor says, ‘Dave, you’re old enough. You should get tested for Hepatitis.’ Ok, whatever. Well, a week later he called me and told me I need to come in. He said they made arrangements for me to see a specialist because I had Hepatitis C. Really? Apparently, I’ve had it over 30 years! I only have 30% of my liver function left. So, that’s what that pain in my back has been as I load and unload trucks for the postal service. They actually put me on a list for a liver transplant. I was like, ‘Where the hell did I get it?’ He said it was probably from my time in the military. I always figured it was when I stood there with about 315 other guys and they gave me a shot in each arm with those old air gun injectors, then I stepped forward and they gave me another shot in each arm, then I stepped forward and they hit me again! But nobody will take responsibility for it. Well, then again, I can remember one good story. I used to go to this one biker bar in Red Hills, California called Sitting Bull’s. I got in a fight with a pretty big guy there one time and he was just kicking my ass. The fucker got me in a bear hug, ok? He’s squeezing the shit out of me, literally! The only thing I could think to do was to grab ahold of the fat part of his cheek and I bite into it. I just kept biting into that until he let me go. I probably bit about a 50 cent-size hunk out of his face. It bled like nobody’s fucking business. I had a mouth full of blood. He let me go and I got the fuck out of there. Funny thing is, I went back after about 3 or 4 days. No one came and arrested me on base, so I figured it was ok. I went in and heard some people laughing. They said, ‘Don’t fuck with him, he’ll eat your face!’ Kind of gave me a reputation I guess. Good times, aye?”

     “I’m celebrating 5 years since my surgery this September 30th. I haven’t spit up blood in a year. You know what they told me? ‘If you weren’t in the shape you were in, you would have died.’ I walk a lot, I always worked out. Even though I only got a little bit of lungs left, I’m still cocky as fuck.”

Author's Note: The quotations that make up this article were taken from a series of interviews conducted with David Brunotte. All photos featured are courtesy of David.