Scarred

I have had four decades in which to think about this particular subject and for some reason or another it seems to weigh heavily on my mind this morning.

As a seventeen-year-old kid I joined the United States Marine Corps went through basic etc, etc, etc and then volunteered for an elite school of combat. That took another years training, then I went off to South Vietnam, did two tours and volunteered for a third (see my profile).

Friends, barrack-mates etc. told me I was crazy to volunteer to go again. Did I listen? Well ... NO! 

I was caught up in the euphoria of being what I had always wanted to be, a warrior that loved war, but upon my return to the world, and in subsequent years I realized that the things I had done had taken away from my humanity.

Allow me to elaborate, please! At seventeen I was a callow, arrogant, narcissist little street punk that in all actuality needed to be locked away for a very long time, but the judge gave me an option and I figured that four years in a green uniform was better than ten years behind bars, but I got caught up in the rhetoric and the brainwashing, I believed it every time I was told I was the best, I was a killer that prayed for war, I was a well oiled killing machine.

As sick as you may find this, I enjoyed one on one combat, I enjoyed it when my forays into the jungles brought me face to face with my enemy, I enjoyed it when my combat knife blade bit deep and severed the carotid and jugular of my adversary, I enjoyed feeling his warm blood spray on my face, I reveled in the sounds of my enemy choking and gurgling on his own blood, and as he would slip from my grasp, I would look with contempt upon his lifeless body as it leaked the last of it’s vital life giving fluid into the jungle floor.