When I was younger I was never that interested in school. My attitude was always to play first and study second. I can always do better next quarter. I can always buckle down when I graduate and get a job. This was my attitude six years ago.

            For the last six years I have served in the United States Marine Corps. I joined up right after high school. After graduation I was sent down to boot camp in San Diego for three months, followed by seven months of additional combat and job training. After this training I was shipped back to Washington to be stationed at Fort Lewis. I was happy to get the assignment because it brought me close to my family and I would be able to get some college done in my home state. I enrolled in Central Washington University because I had some friends who lived out there. I finished two quarters showing only mediocre performance when I got the phone call telling me to drop school and report to Fort Lewis because we were being shipped out to Iraq. Two months later we were given the order to stand down and resume our lives because the deployment had been delayed. So I enrolled in my third quarter at Central knowing a deployment would be somewhere on the horizon. Two more quarters of school completed and we got the news. We would be going into the most war torn parts of Iraq, Fallujah and Ramadi. So again midway through a school term I was forced to drop out and head to Fort Lewis. We flew to North Carolina for two months of training only weeks later. After our training we were all ready to get over there, sometimes the Marine Corps can be worse than heading to war. So in early January we flew into Kuwait and jumped in trucks to convoy up north to Fallujah. The next nine months were some of the most memorable, most fun, and most traumatic of my life. Finally around Christmas we made it home; There is no better feeling than stepping off that plane, seeing your family and knowing that it’s over. We got home halfway through Central Washington’s winter term so I was happy to have a couple months off before I had to go back. In these months I had a romance that would end up changing my life.