it's flight tale time again.
so i was waiting for my flight back to shanghai at LAX... a young caucasian boy struck a conversation with me. he looked about 18, was of very fair complexion and had ultrablue eyes. he asked me why my power cord was wound up in a horrible mess and i replied that i had finals the whole of the that week and didn't have time to unwind my cord. as i was was undoing the knot, he asked me where i went to school. "i just came out of high school", he said. and he took out a yearbook.
-- i was trained to be a marine. a marine. no, not a soldier, a marine. soldiers are from the army. i am a marine. this is my school. this is the book that we got from our school when we left. (pointing to a photo between the pages,) this is my wife. see, this is the rifle we had. you have to clean it and assemble in 5 mins. that's PT. they keep making us do it. everyday. everyday. it's tough. pull-ups. push-ups. this is tear-gas training. you'd think that with the gas mask you'd be fine. oh no. they make you go into the room full of tear gas with the mask on, and then they make you take it off and spell your name aloud. you could vomit from that. so strong. this is obstacle course. see this pond? there are alligators in there. really. before we went in, they had to go poke with a stick to scare them away. and we went in. this is the medal you get for shooting 190-200, this one for 200-225. but if you are like me, and shoot between 225-250, you get this. the highest score possible is 250. oh yah, there are women too. but we are not allowed to see females. when the females came over to our platoon for something the commander will make us move the other way. we are not allowed to see females. yup here's the family day. that one day we get to see our family. look, this is our graduation. yah we are looking serious and all that. yeah. cos it's our graduation. once you get out of this place, you're a marine. and you never ever want to come back here again. we all live together, my company. 90 men. living together. look these are the photos of all the men. 1, 2, 3, .... we all live in one room. we are like brothers. we are the best. if there's a base, we take over the whole damn city. oh yeah, i'm going to iraq in a month's time. and yeah, USMC.. is the united states marine corp. --
the whole time that kid was talking to me, the father looked away. couldn't quite describe his expression as indifference. maybe impatience. i don't know. the mother kept smiling at me apologetically.
7 comments:
maybe you can talk about the time you drew your hotel's name in three different colored crayons. it's lighter.
this stuff's too complex for me.
=)
yeah, when I talked to a few of them when I was at 29 Palms, the USMC base, their mentality is just so different. they're really really proud to go to iraq and all. it's just amazing.
jessica, i thought you were fighting for social justice.
gerald, it's sad.
haha, of course i'm for social justice. esp now that i'm in taiwan and people are so racist. (it makes me very disappointed in humanity.)
i just didn't want to post some depressing comment. or analyze the marine's views in depth. there's a lot of complex issues in the post.
how's... summer session?
He sounds like a psycho to me. There's pride, and sympathy. That's the way it is.
he's not a psycho. he's just an american high sch kid. as jessica has said, the social complexity in kids like these is astounding.
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