You Sit, In The Sun...

I know that you do, and your gloved palms press into your eyes...gloves that smell like brass and gunsmoke and chaw...

You are surrounded by a sea of spent brass, and you smell hot blood and scorched metal and dirt and human shit and hear chopper blades and radio squawks and scared men beginning to yell and your friend screaming as he dies...

The smoke and the sand swirls, and the snot runs unnoticed down your chin, onto your clamshell, and dries as quick as it hits, as if on a skillet...

And you look up, and all you see are men and boys in dresses, and black eyeballs, bugged out in hatred. Hatred for you...

You stand, rising up like an old man, though you just graduated high school not long ago, and your hands fall naturally to the grip and the charging handle of your M240G, and your left hand gives the box a slap, and you know you're full, and you can kill each and every motherfucking thing within a mile of you, and there is not a motherfucking thing that can stop you...in fact, your bro's will swing the .50's around and blow the world to hell and the Grunts will pump 203's into windows and rip up everything with staccato bursts of copper-steel death and...

Discipline takes hold. No matter what those faggots back home say, you are a man, and you have been beaten like steel, and you, yourself are a weapon, and weapons DO NOT go off until ordered to do so. Motherfucker.

The animals with their black eyes, making monkey noises, have no idea how close they have come to devastation.

Your best friends hand flops over the side of the stretcher as they slam him into the helo...

Tears dry as quickly as sweat...

Don't they?


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