Yay, freedom.

Then, later you're probably gonna get fucked over by Uncle Sam. They'll discharge you without any sort of exit counciling, and you'll be happy to get the hell out without it, because you know that if you stick around for any length of time they'll just redeploy you. Maybe you'll be into redeployment (my dad was), but eventually you'll get your third purple heart and they'll let you go (do they still do that?). Then they'll either lose or misfile your GI bill shit and you'll have to twist a lot of arms to get that. What else. You will make friends in the Marine Corps that are better friends to you than anyone you'll have known before or since. If any of them die, you'll get to carry that around with you, along with the PTSD from being in combat, and the ghosts of all the people you kill. You'll get to keep that forever. By the time you're 65 (my dad is 65), you will maybe finally be getting military disability for all the purple hearts and the PTSD, and you'll feel like a shitheel for taking that money, but you'll probably take it because they'll probably owe it to you anyway. What else. Oh. Your kids will be supremely fucked up by your PTSD. They will have miserable fucking childhoods due to your innate emotional instability after having killed a few, a dozen, dozens, or hundreds of people with an assault rifle, grenades, or a fucking knife. Yeah. Semper fucking Fi.

Hmm. Oh, I have one good friend who was in the Marines for 8 years. He was a sniper. He's recently back from a couple of tours in Iraq. He is one of the sweetest, nicest people I know. He has killed a lot of people, and he got to bury his best friend and take the flag over to the kid's parents and break the news to the fiance. He is pretty shell shocked, but he functions okay. Just a lonely hermit now. Like my dad, really pissed off at all the soft, chubby, spoiled, ignorant, unappreciative people in this country who take every fucking luxury for granted. The Corps tried pretty hard to deny my friend's GI bill money, but his dad knew someone who knew someone, so he ended up getting it. Yeah. Semper fucking Fi.

You will kill people. You will have to live with that, and even if you are a hero, down the line, you won't feel like one.

But the grunts are the shit, and there's no sarcasm in that statement. Infantry and special forces have a bond like nothing else a human can attain. I've only witnessed it from the sidelines, but I've seen it a lot. Sad thing is once its over and a few years pass and the guilt finally sets in. Around the same number of people who died in Viet Nam killed themselves once they got back to the States. 63,000. My dad used to mention that from time to time when I was a kid. He decided not to do it, but I know he came pretty close.

Sorry to the people I just pissed off. Just my experience as vet offspring.