Enemies

April 6, 2010
Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan
18:28

Today I was thinking about who the enemies are right now, or at least who my enemies are. I realized that I dislike my own command and leadership and feel more at odds with them than I do with the Taliban. Isn't that unfortunate? That's not something you would've expected a U.S. service member to say, is it? It's unfortunately a reality. The truth is, every day I spend here I feel less like an American fighting for his country and more like a fifth wheel that has no place in the world.

I had this idea a while back called Tan Belt Sergeant Major which I'm still interested in pursuing. It's a comical thing about the Marine Corps that's either going to be some kind of cartoonish episodic video thing or probably a comic series, though I'd rather make a video and use my own voice for all the character voices. It's be something like The Professor Brothers, and I'm not expecting anyone to know what that is. The idea being that one of the central characters is a Sergeant Major who only has a tan belt in the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. If you're not in the Marine Corps or associated with it, that might not sound as funny as I think it is.

The other Marine Corps related project I'm planning on is going to probably be called The Death of the United States Marine Corps and it will be a collection of probably around 15 short stories. I'll take the approach that Tim O'Brien took with The Things They Carried and use fiction, or fictional adaptation, to convey more truth than a nonfiction story would. Each story is going to be based on my own person experiences, hearsay, or something I've seen. The overall theme is the fact that the military (or at least the USMC) has totally lost the point of its existence, or has at least lost the point of what the U.S. taxpayer expects. It'll be an eye opener for those who don't know much about the military and how it operates in the rear, and probably some deployment situations.

Of course, the project I'm working on now, which I think I'm going to call One Way Glass (though I don't have a title for it), will be finished before I start the second project. If I can start work on a couple short scripts, probably about ten pages in length, I'd like to start the Sergeant Major one and have it be an ongoing thing.

What do you think?