Team Love

I wish I could explain exactly what happened a few night ago in our hooch. It was just one of those weird moments you know you'll remember for the rest of your life. All the enlisted guys were lying around killing time. It was two days until the junior guys were due to leave Sangin for good.

I was sitting on my cot cleaning my M4 sort of half-assed. I wasn't getting much carbon off the bolt, but the sound of bore brush's constant scraping relaxed me - put me in a reflective mood, I guess. I looked up and slowly gazed around at my team.

Buddha sleeps to my left. He had a white sheet hung up between us, and I could see his fuzzy silhouette as he fiddled around with his laptop. He's always messing around with it because everyone picks up viruses when they share movies on external hard drives. Buddha, though, never accepts degraded performance from his machine; he diligently dissembles the computer, diagnoses the problem, and fixes it. This process sometimes takes days, and we all give him shit for being such a stereotypical Asian.

Dominicano lay on his cot across the walkway watching a movie. His boonie cover rested low on his head and was pulled down, almost completely covering his face. With his earphones in, I don't think he was aware of anything but a bootleg action movie with russian subtitles.

Mumbles had moved over from his normal spot down to the left. Instead he sat on a stool on Dominicano's near side so he could watch Creole play Plants & Zombies. This is a very popular (and incredibly stupid) video game played by 90% of the junior enlisted Marines. The volume was turned up, so the sound effects blasted out of the computer speakers. This ceased bothering me after month #2 or so - I tuned it out completely.

To my immediate right, Big Daddy was also enjoying some electronic entertainment. He had discovered the HBO Series "True Blood" the day before and was already an addict. I'm pretty sure he watches seven or eight hours a day right now. In any case, his attention was absorbed in the dramatic lives of vampires with bad southern accents constantly trying to sleep with each other.

In other words, the team was together and happy. We had finished almost all of our RIP (relief in place) with the new team and had nothing to do but enjoy each other's company. I looked from one guy to the next, lingering a little on each face as memories of the deployment swirled around in my head.

I don't know what to call the emotion I felt. Love, maybe. Affection, probably. Kinship, definitely. These were my guys and we'd been through a lot both separately and together.

Creole must have felt me staring at him - we locked eyes.
"Hey Sarn't T."
"Yeah?"
"Quit being gay."
"Shut up."
"Roger that."

Yup, my team.