And nowhere in America are you going to drive around and all of a sudden you see a leg

in the middle of the road that is cut off from like the knee down.

Just blown off.

There's just a leg there and I can see the hairs on the leg down to the ankle.

So sometimes when I'm putting on my socks in the morning I think about a fucking dismembered

leg sitting in the middle of the road that I drove by one day in Iraq from some poor guy

that decided to freak in getting in front of us.

Violence is a necessary part of combat and that is something every marine understands

when they step foot on the yellow footprints that first day of boot camp.

Few people crave it outright but they all accept the very real dangers and damage to service,

even when they join during peacetime.

Once the war is on though it becomes necessary to embrace the danger and violence and lose

your sense of self for the greater good.

But really, accepting your mortality is on some level the easiest part, acknowledging

the mortality of your brothers and sisters is another thing altogether.

After all, protecting yourself is only valuable in so far as it helps protect others.

Right?

I started smelling those hellfire missiles.

You would just smell, it smelled like barbecued something but it wasn't nothing you've

ever smelled before.

And then you hear the gunfire in the nighttime and then you hear explosions happening going

all over the place and you just know that now we're in the thick of something.

...