Steve (24 min)
Steve is married to a friend of mine. It was at their house that Mark and George and the gang were playing naked beer pong 2 weeks back. When he heard how much fun we like to have running around naked out in the desert, naturally he wanted to join in the fun. So we packed my Mossberg in the Jeep and headed out to the desert for a little target practice.
Now despite his fair features Steve is a country boy who likes to have fun the traditional American way, out in the country on his bike or quad huntin' fishin' and the like. And like any good red-blooded American Marine he knows how to disassemble and field-strip a weapon, which is good because Mossy has been getting a fair bit of use recently and had jammed up pretty good. I love my shottie but Steve wasn't of the same opinion, as it was a complicated gun to disassemble; he kept proclaiming that his own was so much easier to work with that I asked him what kind he had, and turns out he has a Remington. Then I ask him what his favorite weapon in the Corps was, and that's an M-4 which if you don't know is basically like an M-16 with a collapsable butt stock (this is to say that it basically folds in half). His favorite weapon ever is a 50cal sniper rifle, which is something close to a small pice of artillery and not to be fucked with. He says that's the reason he's half deaf now, which I can believe.
However when we got out to my usual spot it was full of people, so we continued on a little further down the line. The camera mic doesn't pick it up but you can hear me commenting on how loud whatever they're shooting is, at one point one of their reports echoed off the hills like a small thunderclap. Despite his boyish looks Steve is actually 22 years old. He's been in the USMC for 4 years and has 1 more year to go, apparently he had a really convincing (or maybe conniving) recruiter. He's been to Afghanistan once but not Iraq, but saw all the action he needed to on his one deployment having been "shot at, blowed up" and had rockets fired at him. He claims he likes being shot at because he's an adrenaline junkie, to which I reply he's found the right line of work.