Asymmetric Military

I went to Camp Pendleton Marine base this weekend with my reserve unit for weapons qualification. I shot my Beretta M9 pretty well, with about thirty of the forty 9mm rounds they gave me finding their target.

I called my commander, "Mission accomplished, sir."

"Go back on the 11:30 bus."

I must have been playing on my Blackberry because I missed the bus. I'm glad I did.

I went over to the supply truck, sat in the front seat, and started reading Watchmen. I read the part where the protagonist in the comic within, Tales of the Black Freighter, straps his dead comrades onto a raft and heads out to sea. Hunger forces him to lure seagulls close to his raft, catch them, and eat them.

I love my fellow soldiers: The diversity of experience is genuinely fascinating and the general level of honor amongst them is very high. I went to the back of the truck for a cola. I say "cola" because the sergeant only buys generic colas- Sam's Club, etc. We teased her about it. I made up a story about her being traumatized by a Coca Cola accident as a kid. She turned to me with her thick Vietnamese accent, which is relevant because in Watchmen's alternative 1985, Dr. Manhattan wins the Vietnamese war (something we could have done without a naked super dude, by the way) for the United States after being asked to intervene by Richard Nixon. Author Alan Moore suggests that an actual American victory in Vietnam would have been a bad thing.

She tells me, "That's a good story" (it wasn't, really).

Then, after being prompted by somebody else, she started telling me how she escaped from Vietnam:

In 1976, because of her father's association with C.I.A. and the general horror inflicted upon South Vietnam by the North- re-education camps, confiscation, execution- she fled from Vietnam on a raft. Everybody had to stand on the tiny hand-made freedom square as there was no room to lie down. When hunger set in, people died. The survivors sliced off pieces of those who weren't and ate them.

The survivors eventually landed in Malaysia and burned the raft. The Malaysian authorities found them and separated the men from the women. The policemen stripped the men and boys of their clothes and beat them with fish skeletons. The Malaysians asked the survivors if they worked with pigs (Malaysia is a Muslim country). The raft survivors quickly learned to say "no" after the authorities punished those who had.

The Vietnamese refugees contacted the American embassy and arrived in the United States a few weeks later. That little girl is now serving our country in the military.

Her uncle wasn't so lucky. The North Vietnamese captured and placed him in a prison where they fed him tablespoons of soup a day. Twenty-five years later, he reunited with his faithful wife. The sergeant said that her aunt was afraid of him for years after because he'd get up at night and "go crazy."

By the end of the sergeant's short story, I had alternately felt gratitude, pride, and humility, although for brief moments I may have felt all at the same time.

Anyways, isn't it funny how the most unrelated things tie together?