Veterans of the Middle East, did yall ever see something that you couldn't explain?

Yeah ugly arse DFAC ladies getting dick down.

Yes desert queens. 10 in the desert, 4 in the states.

Saw a few newly married women quickly latch onto a man, a desert “boo.”

Right before leaving for deployment, had a young airman marry a stripper he’d known for two weeks. It ended like you’d expect.

Nothing i couldn’t explain, but going to sleep listening to the muslin call the prayer is creepy AF.

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In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.

In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling.

I heard this one, for example, from Mitchell Sanders. It was near dusk and we were sitting at my foxhole along a wide muddy river north of Quang Ngai City...

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keep reading below for one of my absolute favorite chapters in military literature:

Telling a True War Story

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Yeah ugly arse DFAC ladies getting dick down.

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I don’t know how it is now, especially with females serving in combat arms units. But I can tell you for a fact that after so many weeks of being totally isolated from the female half of our species, your standards of what is or isn’t good looking when it comes to women goes out the window. Even when I was still in OSUT at Ft. Knox, it only took about 5-6 weeks for the little old Korean ladies working in the mess hall to start looking pretty damn good. I think if one had come by and so much as rubbed my cheek I probably would have Forrest Gumped in my BDU trousers.