 Dear Sean, there is no honor or glory in the primary occupation of the soldier. There are only long stretches of interminable boredom punctuated by brief flurries of pure terror. There is no winning. Ask anyone who has sat benumbed in the aftermath of battle surrounded by stinking ragged wet bodies of comrades hastily covered with ponchos assailed by the unearthly screaming of the maimed. You talk about glory and I suppose you mean heroism and all the accolades that adorn it. I've known some real heroes in my time, but pitifully few of them were the type to jump out of the foxhole and shout, follow me. Take Ramon Escobedo. He was in the LERP team with your dad, Storm Shadow Stalker and me. One day he got a letter from home. His mom said that his kid brother just graduated from basic training and got 11B20 as his M.O.S. Infantry. Ramon's tour in NAM was due to be up in three months. He was a two-digit midget, Bukku short timer. That meant that his kid brother would be eligible to ship out to NAM. Ramon wanted to go home to East L.A. more than anything in the world, but he re-upped and extended his tour so that Uncle Shure couldn't send his brother to NAM and violate the D.O.D. rule against two members of the same family, serving simultaneously in a war zone. Two weeks later, we all walked into that stinking valley where Ramon and Dickie got wasted. Ramon didn't look all that heroic when he died. He just looked surprised. Dickie Saperstein was a short timer too. He had less than two months to go before he rotated home. His letter came from his mom. Dickie's dad was in the hospital and needed an operation. They didn't have the bucks. Uncle Sugar was offering a cash-re-up bonus back then. He signed up for a burst of four and Sam would give you a down payment on a brand new Camaro or a heart valve dilation in this case. Dickie was kind of burnt by then. He had the dreads before every mission and puked his guts out. He did his job. We all knew he would never let the team down. So Dickie signed up and got his bonuses and extended his tour and his dad died on the operating table. His mom went sort of nuts after that, now with her only son being stuck in a combat zone for another year. We all knew Dickie could have got a compassionate, but he felt like he had made a deal and he was going to stick to it. He had this sense of honor, you see. He was doing his job, running to outflank Charlie and blew frags on his head when he ran into that mine. Stalker didn't sign up for glory, honor or adventure. He was looking to get away from the mean streets of Detroit. The streets that had already killed his two older brothers. He was determined that his mom would not worry about him and he went to elaborate means to deceive her. He had a cousin in the engineers in Darmstadt, Germany. Stalker had him take out a post office box there for him and all his mother's letters went to Germany, where she thought her last son had a safe job in a personnel office. The cousin rerouted all the mail to Vietnam and back. We used to sit around the hooch with him and help him make up this whole fairy tale about taking leaves to go see Munich at Oktoberfest and hiking in the Tannis Mountains. He couldn't understand how some other guys could stand to write their own mothers and tell them what it was like over there. He couldn't understand how anyone could come to Vietnam thinking it would be a great adventure. To him, a great adventure would have been to tool around Germany tasting the local beers. Storm Shadow wasn't out for glory or adventure either. He came from a whole family of ninjas. They looked at a real shooting war as a sort of graduate school for their prized pupil. It was more like a doctorate. Long Range Recon is the Harvard University of sneak and peak. You get real good at creeping through the bush without making any noise. You get real careful. You get real paranoid. Up there in the stinking bush, not enough sleep, itching, aching guts and constant upheaval, perpetually in a state of quasi-hallucination, you start thinking you're some sort of phantom, an invisible wraith slithering between the fronds. That's what you do if you survive long enough. You get through it on sheer badness and if you don't slide right off the other end into a permanent stare, you get real good at appearing normal to everyone else back in the world. But inside, you're still a big bad ninja killing machine, slithering through the endless triple canopy jungle of the rest of the world. You are one crazy, tightly wound, ultra-wacko psycho killer who desperately needs the strict discipline of a martial arts environment to cool you out and keep the devils in check. And me. I'm still searching for my reasons. I came home from the war and everything I had was gone. People spat at me on the street and called me a baby killer. I tried making a new start in the family business of my best friend. It was a disaster. I went to lose myself in the mountains just brooding and thinking too much, mostly about myself, which is a subject that always leads to trouble. It tends to put the center of the universe in the wrong place. Hawk and Stalker came and found me and took me back into the fold. On one of our first missions in the Middle East, I got caught in the blast from an exploding helicopter. There wasn't much they could do for my appearance after that. I had to get used to the fact that people tend to stare fixedly at the top button on my shirt when they talk to me. My voice… well, I could never carry a tune anyway. I still wake up in a cold sweat on Tuesday mornings. Tuesdays was deep riding day at the Army Hospital burn unit where I recovered. There was never any way to shut out the screams of the burn victims as dead tissue was flayed off them. Me? I couldn't have screamed if I had wanted to. I was relatively lucky. I still had most of my face. I met some guys who didn't have ears, nose, lips, or eyelids. One of them, his name was Travis, kept begging me to smother him with a pillow. You know, I never got a welcome party or a parade or anything when I came back from some horrible place, stinking of burnt smoking powder, JP4, bug juice, and sweat. It's just as well. I tend to make people uncomfortable. If you're going to be a soldier, don't expect to be appreciated. Don't expect a nation to be grateful. Don't expect a pension you can live on without food stamps. Expect to see the worst humanity has to offer. Bastiness to the nth degree, vileness, meanness, total despicable cruelty, and unspeakable in humanity. Expect to see the best humanity has to offer. Selfless bravery, compassion, honor, and dignity in the face of sure death. After all this discouragement, do I have any regrets about having been a soldier? Not a one. I had the privilege and honor of serving with men and women whom I could depend on utterly. I have had comrades lay down their lives for me and I would have gladly laid down mine for them. How many other occupations engender such camaraderie? But then this bearing of arms in defense of the Constitution of the United States of America is not really a profession, per se. It's a trust. A letter from Snake Eyes in G.I. Joe, a real American hero, issue number 155, written by Larry Hama.