I'm bringing Xanga back - drop a comment if you're with me!

    I was at neighbor's pool party today and I was sitting in their hot tub.  I noticed a chain the guy sitting across from me was wearing.  It was a gold chain with a globe, eagle, and anchor piece on it, which immediately got my attention.  I told him I liked his chain and asked him if he was enlisted or commisioned.  He told me he was enlisted, and that he dropped out of college in the early sixties after seeing a John Wayne movie and joined up.  I then asked him what he did in the Corps.  He told me he was Force Recon and he served THREE tours in 'Nam.  I was dumbfounded.  He told me about how he still can't talk about a lot of things he did and how he buried many of his friends.  He spent all of 1965, 1966, and 1967 in that miserable Southeast Asian country.  He told me all about Tet and how he dealth with that.  On his 3rd tour, he got four purple hearts and from that, realized the he wouldn't come home from a fourth tour.  And after everything he told me, all the pain he endured, all the nightmares he had after that, all the friends he buried, all the separation from his family, all the readjustment back to civilian life, all his secrets the world will never know, and all the tears he shed (even the ones he shed telling me his story), he would not trade a day of it; the seven years that he gave to the Corps and his country would never be traded by him for anything.  He would do it all over again if he had the chance.  As I listened to him I realized: this is what it is all about.  This is why I want to serve my country.  I am willing to bear the crushing burdens, to watch friends die, to do things others cannot stomach, to make sacrifices so great that my life could never be the same, to endure perpetual emotional and physical pain, and to do all these things without anybody else knowing, without ever asking for thanks or help or gratitude. I am willing to sacrifice and suffer so others don't have to.  That is the true spirit of a serviceman; one that I can only hope to fufill.

So begins the Senior year...  what is in the future for me? chasing Cubans off of floats?  storm the beach and then I die?  Hoyas? Bulldogs? berets? white shoes? Marine greens?  who knows... but we will see soon enough...
Hoo-rah



Semper Fidelis