Alright, so you haven’t seen any new entries because why? Because I’ve been out in the field, getting training that I’ll probably not use because I’ll be out of the Marine Corps when this MEU ( fast deploying Marine Corps unit ) gets deployed to anywhere special.

Now you’d think being grown men and women, we’d be able to conduct ourselves in an appropriate manner when we have time off, but nope. This battalion that I am in has been having a wave of bad, bad incidents and it has caused us to be in the current state of discipline that we are in now, Lockdown. We are unable to leave base and we are unable to consume any alcohol. The unit commander has taken extra measures to ensure we are ’safe’ and are mission capable meaning he has enforced eyes everywhere in the barracks. We can’t leave without seeing 4 or 5 people that will ask us what we are doing out of our room. In a way, its a good thing, but now this disables me from seeing Hiromi on the weekends, which is the only time I can see her without an interruption. She isn’t too happy about this and all I can do is say, Sorry, I’m a Marine in Okinawa.

Since the dawn of time, our presense on Okinawa is known by the drunken Marine incidents and the fighting, bar-crashing, taxi-robbing, indecent behavior with Okinawan women, and of course the aircraft-crashing. We’ve made quite a name for ourselves here and one can’t help but feel shame when you hear your fellow brothers causing so much trouble in such a small island. I know we hear alot of propaganda problems caused by the public in Okinawa, but that is just incidental to the carnage of our military Machine. I know that if a Marine saves a life, its put in the papers in a small 3×5 section in the 5th page, but if an American fights a native, its drawn up on the front page with color ink. Nice, but expected.

Anyhow, Hiromi dislikes the fact that we are always getting in some sort of trouble and it is causing us from spending more time together. I always bend the rules to my favor but this time, I am helpless to do anything. I can’t risk getting in trouble and getting my section, unit and command in trouble by disobeying a direct order. Damn it. So, I’ll have to wait til we get off of this restriction. I think it will last all the way until we get on ship, and then depending on how much times we get into trouble there, we’ll see if we can get off of it when we get back. Fuck man, this is why I hate being a Marine, we get treated like kids just because of one fuck up! Just 5 more months….thats what I keep telling myself…just 5 more months and I’ll be with her.