4 Days A Solider | Teen Ink

4 Days A Solider

January 27, 2014
By Anonymous

As I lay there in my bunk I look up only to see stiff cold mattress springs. I soon come to terms that not only am I the youngest soldier in my unit but we ship out for South America tomorrow. It’s actually kind of gut wrenching if you think about it. My platoon has gotten direct orders from the president to find WMD (weapons of mass destruction) deep in the heart of Brazil.
Our Intel suggest that we will find what were looking for there, we also have reason to that the rebellion is planning to overthrow the empire. Let me start from day one, ever since I can remember as a child I knew I was going to join the armed forces. Not because the way the video games portrayed them, or the way the movies made it seem courageous, but because that’s what my father did and his father did. The way I looked at my father is the way a fan would look at Michael Jordan or a kid would look at Superman and I want my future child to look at me the same respect as I did my father. By my sophomore year of high school I knew school was not for me, I mean I’m not stupid but I hate wasting my time on pointless material that has nothing to do with the real world, and god forbid I transfer to a trade school so I can pick up a dead end job and make measly amount of money.
But there was always one class that kept me wanting to go to school and that was JROTC I can honestly say that was the class that kept me out of trouble and off the streets the instructors were my mentors. Even though I had an amazing father it was like having two more great father figures, those three men really motivated me to pursue my dreams of making it to the armed forces and joining a special operations team. Enough about the past let’s talk about my current situation in life right now and that would be as Sergeant First class Johnson squad leader of 2nd squad 1st platoon Bravo Company 665th regiment for the United States army as an airborne ranger. Our first assignment was to clear out some villages on the outskirts of favela in Brazil which is a fairly simple assignment considering we do not have to fire our weapons just a simple evacuation drill no blood shed no bullet shed. At least so we thought were about halfway down with the third and final village when one of my squad members notice something a little strange (for those of you who don’t know the a military evacuation drill happens is there is no room for mistake we do everything by the book nothing less nothing more and for one squad mate to have a strange feeling we all should be feeling the same way.) when Army does evacuation drills we normally go to door to door stating who we are and what we’re doing, and when PFC Jones knocked we didn’t hear a sound or anything so we knocked one last time before we burst through the door with our barrels aimed and ready for fire.
The house seemed completely empty when we checked the last one only to find the family of four executed and explosive strapped to their cold lifeless bodies. I signaled for our explosive expert to disarm the bombs as I made my way out of the room with my arm covering my nose shielding it from the foul stench. After the explosive specialist made sure that the bombs were disarmed we examined the bodies for anything that would tell us why someone would do this, after an hour of searching we discovered in the bathroom “infidels leave for your presence his not wanted in this place” written in blood on the wall. I rallied up my squad and called the situation in to HQ as we were leaving the area a group of rebels sprang from the jungle brush and opened fire on me and my squad. I watched three of my soldiers fall to the ground before I fired my weapon. We were pinned down with no way out and my squad knew that we all fought until our ammunition ran dry and our blades ran dull. Seemed like this firefight lasted 3 years actually only lasted 4 days and after 4 days of fighting I was the only one left out of 20 soldiers they left me alive to live with it to carry on their legacy.



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