As the sweat trickled down my face, I clinched my standard-issue M16A4 rifle. We were told that it'd suck, that we'd learn to hate it. Being a Marine ain't easy, but sitting in the blistering one hundred ten degree weather wasn't included in my contract (like I read it anyway). Iraq is a nasty place but more so if you are sitting there taking it all in while on guard duty for five hours at a time.

My buddy, Leonard, is sitting with his legs crossed but one leg sticking out. I noticed he was staring down into his lap as he picked something up that had rolled down his shirt. A crumb from an expired MRE breadstick. I gagged a little and stared back into the wasteland of a country we were stuck in. As I looked at the mosques and palaces in the close distance, I began reminiscing to when I was signing the dotted line.
"We can't guarantee you anything that isn't in your contract," seemed to be a popular phrase used by the Military Entrance Processing Station (or MEPS) staff. "Then get me the contract I want," I'd think in my head. For some, choosing a Military Occupational Specialty (also called an MOS) happened RIGHT when you signed your life away for eight years. For the other not-so-lucky souls (me), we had to wait a few weeks to pick. Except, "a few weeks" turned into a few months. And by then, the contract with the MOS I oh so desired was taken by someone who probably got it taken from them anyways due to a drug related incident or injury.
After months of agony, i was told that my MOS would be 0311, which was "Rifleman." If only I knew that "Rifleman" was just another way of saying "bored out of your mind." Before I knew it, I was shot through Boot Camp and other training schools and eventually deployed to the land of rag heads.
The mosques and palaces in the distance began to look closer and closer as I suddenly came to. I noticed my throat was dryer than the desert we were in and leaned down for a sip out of my canteen. It tasted of fecal matter and iron, but that was normal here. "How do these people drink this junk?," I said to Leonard in a rant about the lack of purified water. Before I heard his response I thought to myself, "Was clean water in my contract?"