A Week In Comments

1.) Would have been epic were it a headshot.

2.) Did he get teabagged?

3.) Can I have his stuff?

4.) Did he drop any rares?

5.) Someone call a shaman.

“Ohh baby I’m so wet right now!”

“Yeah girl I can’t wait to f-“

SSSSSSSssssssssssssss..

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First, thanks to those of you who’re enthusiastically supporting these guys’ method of blowing off some steam. I’m sorry to see that some readers felt the need to turn this clearly innocent act of fun into an opportunity to accuse them of being wasteful and not doing their job.

Yes, these bullets were bought by your tax dollars, but I assure you… it’s nothing you can’t live without. It’s nothing to get your panties in a bunch over either. To give you all some perspective, look at the flight suits they’re wearing; hence it’s sometime between 2005-2008. That was a time when Marines were told to push further west into places like Ramadi, Fallujah, Haditha, Hit, Kharma, and others. My fellow Kotaku lovers, you have no idea how chaotic these cities were back then… it was literally like the wild wild west. Al Qaeda ruled the streets, fighters from Chechnya and Jordan were flocking in, and Syrian snipers and ordnance experts were secretly teaching insurgents how to make headshots and build advanced IEDs. I think the numbers back in 2006 were that more than 50% of combat incidents in Iraq each day were occuring in the city of Ramadi alone. Therefore I think we can forgive these guys for “wasting” about $50 worth of bullets in order to goof off a little.

A lot of people here are making snarky comments about how immature (even “monkey”-like) these Marines are. For those of you making these comments, I’d encourage you to take a closer look at who exactly joins the Marines (I can’t speak for the other services). I think you’ll be surprised and I hope you’d change your views.

First, I was at an Ivy League college when 9/11 happened and took a leave of absence to enlist in the Marines. During my time in, I befriended a ton of well-off folks who had decided to join due to their desire to serve (students from Yale, UCLA, Harvard, UChicago, NYU; investment bankers; and yes, Muslims too). I also befriended a ton of folks who didn’t grow up in the same upper middle class environment as I did – these guys had grown up on the streets of New York, Chicago, Compton, Baltimore, etc. They never had wifi, let alone a laptop. They had crappy generic mp3 players (compared to my snazzy iPod Nano) and prepaid Boost Mobile cellphones (compared to my hipster iPhone). And yet we all became friends and trusted one another.

After my time in, I went back to my nice and secluded Ivy League university and finished my bachelors. I don’t know why the rest of the country thinks that those who go to college right after high school are better than those who decide to do other things beforehand because I felt like my fellow classmates were little children, both in action and in thought. I know I matured 500% faster in the Marines than I would have at college. Most of the students on campus did not have what 99% of my platoon had: a desire to learn, a desire to be challenged, an indomitable spirit to overcome that challenge, wisdom (different from book smarts :), and a passion that gave 110% in their endeavors.

You see, contrary to populist thought, the Marine Corps did not make me an automoton. I didn’t just learn about weapons and bombs every day. The Marine Corps (and in particular, those senior Marines who took it upon themselves to mentor me and others) taught me how to discern between enemy and civilian (not so easy over there). How to determine between a hostile act and hostile intent. How to have the moral courage to not pull the trigger when a man is firing an RPG at you with a child in front of him. How to have the moral courage to grab your senior sergeant and pull him away when he gets too aggressive with the prisoner who killed one of his men the day prior. How to swallow your fears and kick in a door after another fireteam got blown up doing the same exact thing just 20min prior at the previous house. How to put down your weapon and pick up a child that was just maimed by an insurgent’s RPG and use your own medkit to aid her rather than save it for yourself or your buddy.

I could go on and on about how the Marines matured me and how the high-pressure situations I faced in Iraq (2004-2007) and Afghanistan (2008) could not compare to the “monkey”-like frat parties and socials that go on on college campuses stateside.

So to all those armchair generals who are commenting at home without the background to know these things, I hope this gives you a second opinion about our military. The challenges faced by our troops on the modern battlefield means 19 and 20yr old Marines need to know how to engage in firefights, peacekeeping, and humanitarian aid all within a split second. That’s not something you can simulate on COD or MOH. Let’s give them some slack on shooting up an xbox. I’m pretty sure most of the readers here would enjoy doing it too. I’m sad to see that some had to turn this into a political thing.