Hope Despite Circumstance Part 1 of more
I’m going to be completely honest with you. Things were looking pretty awful there for awhile, but frankly I’ve stupidly stumbled upon something everyone else in the known universe is thinking is blindingly obvious… These medications, and oddly enough my western diet, are the majority of the problem with my health. Here’s my story….
After getting extremely frustrated with again spending the day trying to stay out of bed for the billionth day in a row, I thought that does it. This path I’ve been on for way too long simply is not getting me where I need to be going. Maybe I should stop and rethink this whole life thing through before I find myself somewhere really regrettable.
The Great Reset, covid-mania, Trumpaphobia, and the concerted efforts to reshape society globally regardless of anyone’s opinion, let alone constitution, are staring me in the face, and here’s me peeking over my covers utterly helpless to do anything about it. On the few occasions where I’ve mustered the energy to do something meaningful in the face of tyranny, something deep inside finally catches fire and thaws out whatever it is, and I break out of the stupor I’ve been living under for a short time. Well, break out seems a bit excessive. The clouds part momentarily. Ok… I manage to make limited but real change.
This situation seemed, well, awful. The country I’ve put my life on the line (literally) to protect is being targeted by our own treasonous citizenry to bring about the changes they want to see, a utopian society which cannot be real yet the useful idiots indoctrinated using my tax dollars are vociferously, and violently demanding be implemented, all of my possessions taken, etc… This utopia will be hell on earth, and sadly we have the history to prove it outright if anyone would but listen. Listening is violence now, so fat chance.
I’m not going to pretend like I’m planning to feast on the entrails of my enemies. Nope. It’s simply not going to happen, nor do I want it to. Rather, I have found a better way, and I hope you, dear reader, find it too.
A long time ago, I found myself in the Marine Corps Infantry, and frankly I hated it. I hated it because I knew I was meant for other things than carrying sand-bag filled backpacks and training to kill people. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it’d be great fun, but it wasn’t. What I found was that I didn’t like who I had become, and worse, I hated the people I was around. I resented being just an infantryman, but that’s what I signed up for. Sort of.
Anyway, I was a liar, had a terrible temper, had actually practiced punching people after dropping my school books before they hit the floor. Thought it was torture to attend school, and was a general problem for everyone around me until they released me.
No, I didn’t graduate high school, not officially. I did manage to get into the Marine Corps though, and after that, nobody cared, and I didn’t tell. I even managed to attend college for a few years without a HS diploma or a GED. Had I known about the GED when I was a teen, I would have dropped out of HS much younger… But that’s another story.
Anyway, so I had a lieutenant, my first in my platoon. Lt. Paz. He was short, and whatever. I was enlisted, so we didn’t hang out or anything, but he seemed fine. I really didn’t give it another thought until one day I got called into his office. I hadn’t noticed, but he apparently had gotten injured and couldn’t be an infantry officer, so he took over in the S-4 office of our battalion. I should have noticed a new officer in charge of us, but like I said, I wasn’t exactly known for paying attention.
S-4 is the logistics office. Beans, Bullets, and Bad-Guys. I don’t know what the bad-guys part was, but they were responsible for food and ammo, and bad guys or something. Anyway, I report to my first Lt. Now, I’m not what you’d call a go-getter, but somehow I got the notion that the solution to my being absolutely miserable in the infantry would be to upgrade to force recon, the closest thing to special forces in the Marine Corps. I was dead serious about it too. I would drink all night before our weekly 9-mile 65 pound sandbag run because I wanted to see if I could do it. And I did, albeit with quite a bit of barfing. This is why I often marvel that I lived as long as I have…
Anyway, here I am, practically a member of force recon, and this lieutenant tells me that he’s decided that I’m going to be the ammo tech for the battalion. I begged him to please, please, for the love of God, please don’t make me the ammo tech. But, 2 weeks later, I was the ammo tech. Such is life in the Marine Corps.
Now I know my 1st Sargent is the reason I ended up as the ammo tech, and boy did I hate that guy. Obviously he hated me more because he made me the ammo tech and I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy… Anyway, I accepted my fate and moved over to ammo tech. There were benefits, like I no longer needed to exercise like a maniac and I avoided that 1st Sargent, which was nice. But the downside was that I was alone, like completely alone. On top of that, I managed to cause some issues on the S-4 computer accidently. I’d worked with Apple IIE’s in HS, but frankly I was clueless. But I lied about how great I was at it because that’s what I did back then. Well, somehow, I managed to remove something important from something and lost access to a whole partition which happened to house some important information for one of the muscle-bound Marines who also happened to be in S-4. I broke it and he said I had 3 days to fix it or he would take it out of my hide. I didn’t like the sound of that, so I quickly became a computer technician. I managed to fix it, and shortly after that became the IT guy for my battalion. That guy wasn’t impressed, but he focused his rather intense ire upon some other poor sot and I lived peacefully ever after. Well, let’s just say I lived. But there’s more.
