In the seventeen years I spent in uniform for the United States of America, and her corporate owners, I've seen and done a fair number of things. I've flown as a door-gunner over the ruins of Samara and crossed the Tigris on a pontoon bridge. I've felt an explosion lift a fully-laden 10-ton truck underneath me and read a letter by the light of an oil-well fire. I've spent weeks in smoke from a sulfur fire so large it was visible from space and watched dogs fight over a human foot. I've stood in the shadows of the walls of Nineveh, the Great Ziggurat of Ur and the ruins of Hatra.
I've made fire from only wood and muscle and fished with nothing but a machete and a key on a string. I've lived off the land for weeks in a jungle, eating things that would get a Japanese game show canceled. I've watched a man cut another man's ear off in a whorehouse lobby, after an argument in a language I don't understand.
I've frisked a former President and returned another to office after he'd been deposed in a coup. I helped to topple a third. I've stopped rapes and murders and fed widows and orphans. I've sewn a woman's foot back together and acted as part of a country's temporary police force. I've run through gunfire, *toward* the barrels pointed at me, alone but too angry and indignant to remember to be afraid. I walked the streets of a foreign capital with the power to decide life or death and was responsible for the lives of eight other men under my command, all while I was still too young to shave every day.
I've walked through the clouds and slept between two volcanoes, resting my head on ground where the lunar rover was tested. I've spent a few nights in a pink hospital with a possible broken back and humped a 60lb ruck through nearly 75 miles of tropical mountains in three days. I've stood in a tunnel more than 300 meters underground and looked through a tiny window at a man I'd never met, but who would have killed me without hesitating had he been given the chance. And I would have done the same to him.
I've known horror and awe. I've felt terror and triumph. I've been both invincible and only inches from death, but I'm not a man yet. I've never drank pretentious booze. Fuck Glenlivet.
