Whatever our reasons for being here may have been, we were ultimately stuck on this trip together, we were all just ships passing in obliviously in the night. Each of us wide eyed and bushy tailed, looking for our next mission. As I’ve said previously, and numerously, a lot of the people who went through this experience with me were younger than me, some where mere teenagers, 17 being the youngest. I often thought, what would drive these young men to join at such a young age. Could life have been so impossible and disheartening for them that this was their only solace? Were they like me and using this for a learning experience? Were they just lost and needed some guidance?
I don’t know why anyone else had joined and I’m sure most had lied about their initial intentions of joining. In the beginning I had merely stated that I had done it for school, but as you know by now I in fact didn’t do it for school. In fact I had been out of school for more than a year, sure I wanted to go back eventually, but it wasn’t my top priority. Until recently I didn’t understand my reason for joining, I thought maybe boredom but that wasn’t it. Maybe it was a part of it, this culmination of numerous variables that had led me to this particular moment in my life. Looking back I was an adult playing with a bunch of children, even the few who were older than me seemed to act like children. I never participated in the petty arguments that every one else got into simply because I never felt passionately about anything. In the beginning I was neutral, meaning that I could careless about anything. I was just there, almost robotic and nonsensical, I didn’t try to charm or to really stand out, even among my fellow soldiers. Somehow this didn’t last, towards the end I started to stick out like a sore thumb.
My first real period of contention was with the eating schedule, the fact that we were expected to eat an entire meal in mere minutes. This didn’t phase me in the beginning but in the long run I was starting to feel weary of the fact that I wasn’t really eating. In the field it was a completely different story because I had the opportunity to eat as long as I wanted, although I didn’t because they rarely had anything that I could eat (for some reason it seemed like we were having beef with almost everything that was served; beef and noodles or various types, was what was almost always served). One time that comes in mind was when I was given mere minutes to eat, I had not sat down for a minute when one of our leaders (not to be confused with our Drill Sergeants) had demanded that I get up and dump my tray. Angry and conflicted I defiantly refused, I’ll be damed if the first time I was going to enjoy a real meal in a week I was going to toss it all in the trash. No what I wanted was to eat, so I ate and was therefore punished for so doing. Punishment was swift and weak, I was expected to write a 500 word essay on respect. Yawn, did they expect that to phase someone like me, with such a vast vocabulary and enough free time to do so, I completed it in a few hours. I basically put that I had been disrespected, thereby turning something that was meant to be about something else on its head.
There was a lot of ego in training, at first I didn’t let it get to me, but after a sleep deprived month every little thing began to irritate me, my “battle buddy” had become incessantly annoying and the fact that he had perfected the art of laziness was another factor that I couldn’t cope with. I had began to show my disdain for him by looking down on him and switching to different “battle buddies.” I am not going to sit here and say that I hated him cause I honestly didn’t, I respected him as a person, I just didn’t like his actions. Pretty soon, I could see that some other people wouldn’t like my actions, I had started to become a shrewd person, I knew it and everyone else was starting to see.
The Long Road 