Penny For Your Thoughts, Part 2 by J. Scott

Walking becomes a difficult task. It requires you to concentrate on going from point A to point B without thinking about all the vantage points an enemy sniper might take advantage of before he sends a tumbling 7.62 through you sinus cavity, or key-holes your forehead, or stings your clavicle with cauterizing tracers. And then there are the defilades, the many defilades giving way to ambush: rising knolls and sparkling fountain heads impossible to see past, impossible to ignore, especially for the grateful enemy who will make you bleed from many holes with simple pull of trigger...
Gha-cunk, Gha-cunk, Gha-cunk

A healthy three round burst sending a volley of AK-fire throughout your body…and do you see him? This enemy dressed like the rest, the crouching enemy lying in wait for the moment of attack, waiting for the next moment he can call, call to talk, talk to you and elect send to make IED.
If you can get past all the ways you might die in walking to class, or anywhere really, you have to switch gears because sooner or later you’ll be stepping into the classroom seated with students and not Hodgies or Marines, or even the USO. And here (in lecture) one must engage the professor in worthwhile discussion, observe what they have to say because it is important, as important as it was in Division Schools, or SOI, or in the process of interrogation, or when not to drive down streets named RPG Alley, or over bridges rigged with 155s waiting in due time to explode so violently into a head-numbing orb of rage that your bladder will pop before your skull cracks.
I present to you the ever evolving IED, set off by the same cells phones fellow students text with in class.
WTF?

But I do enjoy walking around campus, my lovely campus, and I look forward to autumn when the leaves change colors and the water fountains ice over and begin to stop smelling like the men’s restroom. But before that, when it’s that unbearably hot, when you feel sweat trickle out of your armpits and run down the side of your torso and drip onto hot parched brick, all of this again reminding you of the hiking and the patrolling and the…the urge to go back again, yes! to go back over there because you’ve not yet found that same type of disgruntled camaraderie in the civilian-sector, the same type of hateful love one Marine has for another, the same kind of “fuck the Corps eat the Apple” mantra that spawns from the disgusting lifestyle an 03 lives.
And you may never.