Little White Lies
When I graduated from High School, I had no plans for my future, so I decided to join the military. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were going on and I really didn't want to get killed, so I joined the Navy. The recruiter talked me into becoming a Hospital Corpsman. I asked him what it entailed, and he told me I would be working in hospitals, hanging out with beautiful nurses. It sounded good to me, so I signed the papers. Six months later, I was at Camp Pendleton, training to be a combat medic. One more in a string of bad decisions I had made during my life. My unit was deployed to Irag where we were involved in some really heavy shit. Not to brag, but emergency medical care came to me like a duck to water. I saved the lives of many of the Marines in my unit, and they started calling me "Doc", an honor not bestowed on every corpsman. The next tour was much of the same. I don't know how, but I got through it unscathed even though I had to expose myself numerous times to enemy fire to get to the side of a wounded Marine. The second tour ended, and we went back to Camp Pendleton, and I was assigned to work in the hospital while my unit was being refit and new Marines integrated to replace those who had been killed or injured.
One day, I was told to report to Personnel. I thought the nurse I had seduced ratted on me and I was going to brought up on fraternization charges. During the interview, the officer mentioned some things that I had done in the past. It seems they had been talking to some of my high school acquaintances, some of them in jail, regarding some of the shenanigans I had done, but never been caught. He asked why I had never mentioned these things before, in my initial recruitment process, or to my buddies in my previous units. I just said the past is the past and there are things that no one has the need to know. He told me some of the Marines in my last deployment had actually been assigned there to feel out candidates for a new unit being formed to do "things" the government wanted to keep under the table, and I had been tapped for consideration. They had tried to get me to talk about things I may had done as a youth, but I never said anything about the car thefts, my gang affiliations and other crimes I committed as a teenager. After the interview, I was told to go back to work and not discuss anything we talked about. A couple weeks went by and I hadn't heard anything so I thought I had been rejected. Then after my shift at the hospital one day, I came back to my barracks room to find it cleaned out and two Marine military policemen waiting for me. They handcuffed me and put me in their cruiser. I was driven to a very secluded part of the base where I found out I had been selected to try out for the new unit.
For the next six months, we trained hard and partied harder. The unit, a ten man team, would be working behind the lines, performing assignments such as assassinations or kidnappings of high value targets, demolitions including boobytraps and other counter insurgency activities. We were eventually deployed to the theater and began carrying out our assignments. The other Marines on our base thought we were a logistical unit since they never knew what we were doing. We would load up a couple trucks with supplies as if we going to deliver them to another base, but after a couple miles driving through the desert, we would stop, load up in helicopters and execute our latest mission. We were very successful and no one, even the enemy, ever saw us. Someone would just disappear or get killed, something would blow up or one of their vehicles would explode by setting off a boobytrap.
Then one day, it happened.......we were spotted by a civilian who ran to warn the local militia, and a firefight ensued. During the battle, I was shot in the thigh, my femur shattered. We managed to disengage and evade to a rendezvous with a evac helicopter and I was sent to a hospital in Germany where I was issued some new titanium hardware in my leg, then flown back to the states for rehabilitation. Since I was now unable to work with the unit anymore, I was processed for a medical discharge.
