The stories being recollected from another time, an era I was too young too know about in this place I call a job, seem to scratch like a vinyl unattended on a turn table. It's the same old song and dance, but with a little more of the dance I think now. I question, how long has this place been in disrepair? and whether or not it can be fixed. I'm sure I'm not the first one to think that it surely needs to, that it must to survive. But like a sickly being, it's learned, adapted to what it is and may never be able to go back, or go forward for that matter. It stops itself from changing, and keeps itself from staying the same. Probably no different than any other large organization.
I dive in the dirt and scramble carefully close to the ground. Weight shifts easily in the wet cold sand, and I make hand gestures that most American's wouldn't understand, but the few behind me do. I point my laser to and fro and listen to the symphony of heavy metal chamber it's explosion after explosion. This is the place to be, nothing better than this at the moment. I watch the fireworks fizzle through the air in the green hue through my night optics. It's as beautiful as any Rembrandt, and awe striking in it's destruction. Beauty in the eye of the beholder, but every beholder would certainly be in awe. I control it, and though it's only my third or fourth time doing so, I pull my experience together and use past examples to help make the right decisions. Lethality is a word I would never associate with beauty, but this symphony of death is a painted picture of perfection that would make Charles see and Beethoven hear.
It can't get any better in this moment. It's such an easy thing in the moment, but in the every other aspect of this job, we are failing. This won't last forever, and the struggle within has to recognize it's purpose. War is sometimes a necessary evil, but one that I hope we don't have to necessarily use. Only ignorant people who haven't gotten out of this bubble of a world globalization pushing America thinks that there could be no war. The best Army is a prepared one, prepare to go to the lengths necessary to destroy the evils that threaten our very way of life. We can't continue to allow public influence to make decisions in our military, because the 1% of people willing to die for this country, to go that distance and do the unthinkable do exactly that. The unthinkable, the unimaginable, the undesirables that are necessary to kill.
I see the uproar of a video, that we're supposed to be better than our enemies- and we are, but the judgement placed upon these men who have probably no doubt lost a friend or buddy, fellow American to an unseen explosive device that they could then only pick up pieces of him to send home to his family- the get ostracized for urinating on men responsible for that. Those Marine's, who are constantly getting in trouble for being a little less than what our society says is normal, should be getting praise. Praise for doing a job that so many of the rest of this America is not willing to do. How dare you have an opinion on the matter when you can't even cast a stone, let alone live in your glass house. You wouldn't even have a glass house to live in if it weren't for those men over there, losing brothers in arms to these Muslims who act only out of jealousy and shame of a better way of life.
I'm told a story of a man of faith, spending a year in Afghanistan giving aid to the men women and children there. A year dedicated to helping out a nation that we have been at war with, that we have done much for infrastructure and the freedom of those people. He said after a year there, he returned to the states, and all of his efforts, he felt that they were not appreciated, that the people there were a form of evil, a form of human being that could not be classified as recognizable for what we know. A people that are stuck in a time and a value system that doesn't apply to the rest of the world, that can't relate, can't fit into our world so much that the only thing they care about is tearing down the rest of the world to their level, starting with out nation. That man joins the Army, becomes an Infantry officer so that he may go back to Afghanistan and kill the very people that he had tried to help for a year.
This makes me proud. Proud that an outsider realizes that whatever we do, however we are judged by our own society, that those judgements are hollow. They hold no water, and that if the people of America would just allow us to do our damn job and not worry about how we accomplish our mission, just that we accomplish it. Unfortunately the years of public and political opinions in the military have led to us needing serious reform. A microcosm of the United States in general, we must reverse our trends and work to preserve what we have. If you can't see that the end of the US is close, than you're not looking, you're just living and seemingly just for yourself.
One shot, one kill
