Everyone else was off doing something amazing with their life and I was stuck in Iraq; surrounded by barbed wire in a place where people wanted to kill me.
A dust storm had just lifted after clouding our post in Husaybah next to the Syrian border for the last week; I was able to get on the internet for the first time since the storm began. I went onto Facebook and wasted an entire hour looking at photographs of people I had known in high school who were now in college. They looked happy and excited, whether these pictures were of them belting out some karaoke or climbing a mountain. College was supposed to be the best four years of people’s lives and I was completely missing out on it. I couldn’t wait to go to college and spent hours daydreaming about sitting in the grass somewhere reading Nietzsche or playing ultimate Frisbee on a care-free afternoon.
But when I started college a month ago and felt that I really hadn’t missed out on much. College so far doesn’t seem too removed from the high school I graduated from 5 years ago. There are classes to attend, notes to be taken, papers to write, and for the most part I am extremely ambivalent it all. College in my idealized form seemed like nonstop fun and parties and so far it has been a lot of work. I’m not quite sure what all the fuss is about or what the big deal is anymore.
I thought maybe it was just because I moved back home to Bend, isolated from everything by three hours and a whole lot of mountains. But when I visited Eugene on Halloween, I still felt disenchanted and felt no more connected to the world of college I had seen idealized.
My accomplice and fellow veteran, Mat, began wandering the streets of Eugene in search of trouble and the college life. Today was game day, and there were dude bros everywhere, decked out in Oregon t-shirts three sizes too small, aviator sunglasses worn oh so ironically, and a baseball cap cocked in just the right direction. We decided to duck into a bar and sit out the rest of the afternoon until evening struck.
By 10 o’clock, the bars were full of dude bros, sucking down Coor’s Light and shouting about the game that finished four hours ago. They were pushing and elbowing their way around the bar, talking about how drunk they were and how much they kicked the shit out of USC earlier that day. After hearing one dude order one Jaeger bomb too many, we left and started walking down the street.
The street was loud and boisterous; groups of students milled everywhere, laughing, and running into traffic. We followed one of these groups that approached a house that was packed to the brim. We walked up to the door guarded by a little 19-year-old woman who was trying to turn us away, saying we didn’t know anyone here. We agreed with her but walked in anyway, a woman half my size should never be a bouncer. There was nowhere to move to and we tried to part the sea of people as best we could. There seemed to be plenty of Keystone light going around and a thick cloud of an illegal substance hovered in the air. There was a girl stumbling around, barely able to stand up, who was going to be spending the night at the hospital for alcohol poisoning and a group of bro dudes who were more than willing to help her.
I was disgusted and wandered from room to room. They looked like they had just passed the flush of pubescence and hadn’t done much with their lives beside spend the parent’s money. Mat tried asking where the smell was coming from but only received evasive answers. Mat, fully bearded and wearing a flannel shirt, after asking 3 people and still not getting hooked up realized it wasn’t just because they were being selfish; everyone thought he looked like a narc. Who else but a narc would show up with a beard and be five years older than everyone else at the party?
We left that party and wandered around Eugene some more but realized that we had lost something those last 5 years we had been in the marine corps. The “best years of our life” were now gone and we had missed out on them. We were now the creepy old dudes at parties and the parties themselves seemed like a huge waste of time; 19 year olds having the first taste of an adulthood we’ve already had for a while. Being gone for five years disconnects you from society in an odd way and changes your paradigm. Some pop culture references escape me: I have never seen “High School Musical,” don’t have an I-Phone and dislike texting. I wish I could relate sometimes but then I realize that it doesn’t matter and all those cool parties and unforgettable nights that I used to think about missing weren’t that much to begin with.
