“Eh, maybe. Or maybe you would’ve taken a personal day.”
* * *
When I met Will for lunch at Hangar One Grill House, he was sitting with someone I recognized but had to do a double take to make sure I was really seeing who I thought I was seeing. That was the thing about the Marine Corps. You’d meet someone in one part of the world, only to see them pasted into another part like it was totally normal.
“Chase Mitchell,” I said, holding my hand out for him to shake, “you’re a long way from home, my friend.”
The young Marine nodded and grinned, returning my handshake with a firm one of his own. “Yes, Sergeant.”
I’d first met Chase when he was a seventeen-year-old local boy in Hawaii who wanted to join the Marine Corps but couldn’t get his dad to get on board and sign the parental consent form. My buddy and fellow recruiter, Hunter Wilson, had gone to bat for him. He’d even borrowed his friend’s boat and chased the dad into Kaneohe Bay so he could get the form signed, all so Chase wouldn’t lose the military specialty he’d wanted in on.
Now, having since gone through boot camp, combat training, and MOS school, he was finally at his first duty station. “Of all the bases, it’s crazy you got South Carolina as your first. Big change from Hawaii.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” he agreed with a nervous chuckle.
I grinned at him as I took a seat at the table with him and Will. “You don’t have to keep calling me Sergeant when we’re just chatting. Relax. It’s good to see you, man.”
“You too,” he replied.
“So, how do you guys know each other?” I asked Will.
Will chewed the bite of the buffalo chicken wrap in front of him, reminding me that I should probably start eating mine. I was running late due to an issue with a parachute pack, so I’d asked Will to order for me so I didn’t waste time in line. I dug in while I waited for him to finish his mouthful.
Will took a sip of Coke and patted Chase on the arm. “He’s the new boot in my shop. Just got here last week, and we’ve already got him hating life. Right, boot?”
“Right,” Chase agreed.
To an outsider, that might sound like a bad thing. But not in here. And judging by the familiar look in Chase’s eye, I knew he was good. Chase had a rough backstory, and one of the reasons he’d joined the Marines was to get that brotherhood—that pride of belonging—that came with the uniform.
For me, it had boiled down to being pretty directionless. I was eighteen, graduated by the skin of my teeth thanks to too much ditching and not enough studying, and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The only thing I was sure of was that I was secretly in love with my best friend, and she saw me as a buddy, a pal, a chum. As family. Dare I say without visibly shuddering into my buffalo wrap, as abrother.
It was no wonder the idea of the Marine Corps had seemed so appealing when Will described it to me. I could see the world. Meet new people. Get out of Bluffton and figure out what I wanted to do. Then the recruiters convinced me the rest of the way by telling me it didn’t have to be a life sentence. They said I could commit to four years just to get some life experience, and then come back in a better position with some cool stuff on my resume. Didn’t seem that risky when they put it like that, so off I went to see the world and put some distance between Shelby and me. Because obviously, I was very mature at the time.
Then, when the four years were nearing their end and it was time to decide if I wanted to stay in, I found that I actually loved my job. I loved my life as a Marine. I was in a really cool occupational specialty, getting to travel and work with important air deliveries of personnel and supplies, and occasionally getting to jump from planes. Which sparked a love of recreational skydiving. All while maintaining a long-distance friendship with Shelby, which was about a million times easier than being face-to-face with her all the time.
So I signed up again. And then again. Now I was closing out my eleventh year in the Marine Corps, about to reenlist for yet another four-year term. The only problem was, things with Shelby weren’t as chill as they had been for the first half of my career. What would they be like going forward?
I brushed away the thought as I ate my food. I’d just returned to South Carolina, which meant I had three years before I needed to worry about saying goodbye to her again. That was a problem forfutureme.Currentme needed to figure out if I should listen to Will and let Shelby know how I felt or if I should hope things went back to normal since I hadn’t explicitly told her that she was what I wanted but couldn’t have.
Looking for a distraction, I wiped my hands on my napkin and pulled out my phone. “Come here, Chase. Let’s send a pic to Wilson.”
Chase leaned in as I held the phone out in front of us. We smiled for the first one, then I hooked an arm around the kid’s head and tucked my wrist firmly under his chin for the second pic. Releasing him, I sent the second one to Wilson with the caption,Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of your boy out here.
My phone buzzed with his reply almost immediately, and I grinned as I flipped it around to show Chase.
Wilson: Easy, he’s one of the good ones. Let him live to get his blood stripe.
Chase smiled. “Someday.”
Will and I chuckled, and I patted him on the back. “Ah, don’t worry, you’ll pick up corporal sooner than you think. You know about the traditions that go with the blood stripes, right?”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Nope.”
“It’s the red stripe that goes down your pants, right?” I asked. We were all wearing cammies today, but I gestured down my thigh in the spot where the red strip of fabric would be sewn onto the royal-blue pants of our dress uniform.
“Right,” Chase confirmed.
“It commemorates those Marines killed while storming the castle at Chapultepec, Mexico in…” I trailed off, blanking on the year.
Will supplied, “1847,” with a finger gun.
“Thank you—1847,” I continued. It had been a long time since I’d talked about this particular bit of Marine Corps lore. And there was a lot of it. We had symbolism on symbolism to give props to our brothers who lived and died as United States Marines, and we took it all very seriously. “So, after your promotion ceremony from lance corporal to corporal, all of the NCOs in your shop—and me, of course, because I’ll be there to cheer you on—will knee you in the side of the thigh where your blood stripe will run. You know, like an initiation into the NCO world.”
Chase gulped. “Sweet.”
“It is,” I agreed, leaning back in my chair.
“Unfortunately for you, we have a pretty big shop,” Will said with a laugh. “Ordnance kind of runs this squadron.”
I rolled my eyes. Ordies thought they were the coolest things since sliced bread in an F-18 squadron. Although, I guess it kind of made sense since the F-18 carried a bunch of different kinds of weapons and the pilot’s whole job was to shoot them off. So yeah, the maintainers of said weaponry would be pretty special. But to those of us in the air wing who didn’t have anything to do with ordnance, we liked to give them crap for how loud and showy they were. They even had their own theme song that they shouted at the ball. It was a sight. But, all of that also meant that Chase was definitely stepping into a family within the family of the Marine Corps, and I was genuinely happy for him. Archaic dead-legging rituals and all.