“Does Noah have to suffer your Dear Abby musings?” Noah Jackson and Bo were my kind of Marines. They fought hard and didn’t complain, but they knew how to have a good time when we weren’t busy picking sand out of our asses.
Noah was the more serious of the two and I’d thought he would have made a career of the military, but his ambitions were different. He wanted to build an empire and you couldn’t do that on a military salary—no matter how much combat pay you received. We’d both signed up for every possible tour we could in all the most dangerous places. My burning ambition was to have as much adventure as possible. Unlike Noah, I didn’t need to own the world to be happy. These days, though…I wasn’t exactly sure what I needed.
When I was ten, Pops had given me a knife engraved with Semper Fidelis on the blade. He’d retired after thirty years in the Corps, and my father had made it to twenty. But neither of my two older brothers were interested, and so it had fallen to me to carry out the tradition. After years of hearing whispered stories of bravery and honor and brotherhood, I couldn’t wait to wear the dress blues and the white gloves and carry that damn sword. Because I enlisted during war time, I got to do things that had meaning.
Since the troop drawdown, though, I’d felt…unmoored, to borrow a Navy term, as if I was standing on ever-shifting sand. People I’d known for a long time were changing. All around me, guys were settling down, picking out furniture, and going to flea markets on the weekends. They did couples things, like couples’ showers and shit like that, and while I didn’t want to go to those damn things, I felt like everyone else was moving on and that I was just stuck, spinning my wheels like I was some stupid groundhog that should be put out of my misery.
I don’t know what it was, but every time I had gone to sign those re-enlistment papers, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. On one side, I had my pops and my commanding officer, Captain Billings, warning me about how boat space was shrinking and that even for an exemplary Marine like myself I could be squeezed out if I didn’t hurry my ass up. On the other side sat my dad, who sang an entirely different tune—that I should get out now while I still had time to go to college, find a job, settle down.
Then there were the men in my platoon. Good men who would place their lives in my hands. I wasn’t just making sure that my weapon was ready now but that theirs were too, and that was a responsibility you didn’t take lightly.
“Nah, you know Noah doesn’t speak unless it is absolutely necessary,” Bo said, answering my earlier question. “His frozen yogurt palace is always stuffed full of estrogen. We could swing by and scope out the women there.”
“I thought you’d said that the only females in Noah’s shop were a mess of teenage girls and soccer moms.”
“So? They’re still females.”
“My choices are to be a pedo bear or cougar bait?”
“Better go cougar. They’re in their sexual prime. They could teach you something.”
“Let’s just head to your place.” Upon arriving, I pulled my gear out of the trunk and followed Bo into the home he shared with Noah and three other guys—one complete with full floor to ceiling plate glass windows at the rear that overlooked a pool. The weather was great here. I'd missed the beach back in San Diego, but I needed to get away. The more distance I put between the base and me, the better I felt. Right then, I wanted to pound some beer, ogle some women, and relax.
A loud noise like a gunshot echoed, and I immediately ducked down to my knees, throwing my bag in front of me. I looked for Bo, but he was propped against the counter, crying with laughter.
"I'm so sorry." AnnMarie leaned over me—her long dark hair nearly touching my face. "We just popped the champagne."
I looked around and saw a group of people with shocked faces and a few girls in front holding a sign that said "Welcome, Grunt." One of Bo's roommates (whose name I didn't remember) stood frozen with the bottle in question, champagne dribbling from the open neck like he was pissing all over the floor. Noah broke from the group and pulled me to my feet because Bo—the asshole—was still laughing.
"Sorry, we weren't thinking." Noah tried to look repentant, but I could see he was fighting a big-ass grin too. The crowd had recovered, and he started introducing me around.
"You fuckers." I laughed, because it was funny. You could take the Marine grunt off the base, but you couldn’t eliminate his reaction to close-quarters fire. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you planned that."