Carton of Cigarettes

Have you ever been in a situation that you conceived as completely unbearable? A situation where taking your next breath is an actual task; it takes determined thought to inhale and exhale? The world has collapsed upon on you like a rickety roof, and you have no idea what to do. You want to rip the skin from your body like a superhero in a phone booth. 

This is what it feels like being in the Shit. Soldiers handle it in different ways. Some shoot themselves in the foot hoping for a free ticket home, only to find out that they are not going anywhere, you are needed on the line, can’t lose another gun. Some become hysterical and cry uncontrollably only to have their Kevlar (helmet) knocked off by the butt of a rifle. Some just become very distant as if they have checked out and their actions are being controlled by some sort of a puppet master. You recognize these Grunts immediately; they have the 1,000 yard stare: just dead eyes with no emotion, only reaction. We might be sitting and eating chow and they laugh out of nowhere for no reason, like an inside joke who they are the only one privy to. No one questions his laughter because we all know where he is. He doesn’t look around embarrassed as a result of his uncalled for laughter, because he has reached a place where social etiquette is totally foreign. You can only hope that when it’s all over he can come back to us. But for now it is to everyone’s benefit for him to remain in this state. This is what we signed up for after all.

When you get your gear list to invade another country there are a couple of necessities that are not included on that list: cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and coffee. So what you do is, you leave out an extra pair of socks or skivvies from the list and use that extra space to stuff a carton of Newports and/or a log of chewing tobacco (you need chewing tobacco if you are a smoker because you can’t smoke at night as it will give away your position when the enemy sees a cig cherry glowing like a jack o lantern). So I did both. 

I hit that point that I have been describing shortly after my carton of smokes ran out. I wasn’t in a state of hysteria but I was in a state of despair. In my mind no cigarettes meant the death of me; obviously an irrational reaction, but my reaction none the less. At that point rationality did not exist. We reached an area where we were given permission to remove our Kevlar and our flak jackets for a couple of hours. I ripped off my Kevlar and flak jacket as if it were restricting oxygen from my body and took off sprinting. I hid under a Humvee for a good while and tried to catch my breath.

We got our first mail drop since leaving Kuwait that day. I got a package that contained a carton of cigarettes.