CHPT 1 | A Warm Awakening

As I lie awake, consumed by the darkness and the mere ambiance from my red fluorescent sleeping bag, rain pelting on the buttons of my jean jacket, I wonder, when will this end, Would I be able to come home? As I hear from the distance, propellers whirring in the dead of night, men and women, all clambering in on one another like a tightly packed tin of sardines. I looked to my left, then to my right, And then I thought briefly, why am I here? 

Although my jean jacket was soiled from the early morning's rain I persisted, trudging through the murky waters, hoping to find any feasible answers to why I had enlisted, to be on the front lines, defending my country with all my might and strength.

I grabbed a journal from my pocket, which I had from deployment 13 years ago. In it, I wrote, "It's November 17th, the wind, brisk. I missed my family, but the thing I missed most was a home-cooked meal". I opened the fortune cookie I had gotten from my MRE, proceeding to mumble to myself about how they had added a cookie with a note inside, to me thinking about the better days. I snapped it in half and flipped it over, it read, "Sharing in the joys of life will make friends smile", and I began laughing to myself. "Why did I do this?", I asked myself for an answer, but I didn't have one, not yet at least.

The unevenly placed tiles on the floor made me question their architectural skills, yet I kept my head held high. Being my first week in Iran, this was less chaotic in America. Government housing isn't all the best in a time of war. Finding some foliage to block out the brightness from the sun's rays we grabbed our sleeping bags, "taking an afternoon nap seems quite childish; although it's much-needed" Luitenant Karlson said, speaking softly, yet you could hear the pain in his voice, realizing that so many troops sacrificed their lives amid war in Afghanistan.

I was on the battlefield, it was now or never, I crawled through the hand-dug trenches, gunfire blazing in the night, and all that was visible were the oddly placed spotlights. I tried to reach for my glasses that were crushed under the flying debris but I couldn't reach them, I was pinned under an elaborate drawbridge built for the soldiers to have a better viewpoint than being down in the stinky, rotten, waterlogged trenches. My breathing, halted after I heard a man say something in a foreign language that I had yet to understand. I thought to myself, "If only Ryker and Jayden were here", Then, I returned to reality, remembering the task at hand.

Me and Lieutenant Karlson's crawling came to a standstill as we reached the end of the two-and-a-half-mile-long trench.

Luitenant Karlson spoke softly, "U.S. Marines, we don't often go into their waters, trudging 'round, looking for belonging as we do our part in society by making our mark on this so-called constitution, the "American Dream" ".