When the cops arrived, it was the typical bar fight process. Eric was arrested and booked. Once in the jail, he waited to get picked up. While waiting, he pondered the night and his own stupidity. The egregious nature of his own action led him to remember a conversation he had with his grandfather when Eric was seven years old. "Eric, men like us have more power than those around us. We are not normal." At the time, everyone had treated the old mans rantings like the drivel an old man sprouts on their death bed, but Eric couldn't help but wonder if there was some truth to what the old man had said. When Eric had punched Jonny's lights out, he had moved the length of the pool table faster than a human should have been able to move. As he was pondering what the old man could have meant, Eric was interrupted in his thoughts by an officer approaching him. The officer looked at Eric and called out "Are you Eric Dryer?" To which Eric responded: "yes sir." The officer nods to him. "You're free to go. We got a call from the bar and they said that they are not pressing charges against you."
The next morning, Eric was woken up by an annoying ringing. He groaned out loud as he suddenly jolted up, looking at the phone screen. "FUCK!" He had missed PT. He then realized that it was Saturday. "EH…?" Momentary confusion aside, he answered the phone groggily. "Hello?"
First sergeant Hammond didn't bother to say hi.
"YOU STUPID FUCK! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO REST, NOT GET INTO A BAR FIGHT!!!"
Eric held the phone away from his ear as the ceaseless line of profanities continued to wreck his ears. All he could say was "Roger" A bunch of times to the tirade while trying not to laugh.
Once the First Sergeant was done unloading, he sighs like a disappointed father. "You are lucky the charges were dropped. If they weren't, you'd be living on Staff Duty." He didn't wait for Eric to respond before the line went dead. Eric stared blankly at the phone for a few seconds before deciding to get up and stretch. He couldn't go back to sleep after the verbal reaming he had just had, so he decided to go to the one constant he had in his life: the gym. Women cheat, dogs die, and beer gets warm, but the gym would always be there.
When Eric arrived at the gym, he could tell something was terribly wrong. Everyone in the gym was looking at one TV. There, on the screen, was shown a horrifying scene coming from Iraq. "According to our preliminary reports, this attack was premeditated." The news reporter says as the camera pans to the background. Off in the distance, piles of steel and what used to be buildings were twisted up and meshed together in an unrecognizable pile. Every TV showed a chilling sight: A US base had been leveled to the ground. Fires burned on the scene as smoke rises into the sky, an almost grim reminder of the tragedies that unfold with armed conflict. Each news station had a different take on the situation, but they all broadcasted the same scene. No one in the gym moved as they watched the scene change from the grisly site of a base destroyed, to the president standing at a podium. "As of 1800 cst, it has been confirmed that the base near Shamia alzar in Iraq has been completely destroyed. More than 3500 American soldiers have been killed, with another 1000 civilian casualties…" As the man droned on about responding to the attack, Eric felt the deep hatred he had for the animals called humans in the middle east rising to the surface once more. He knew that not all the people who lived in those countries followed the way of life the insurgents did, and even had great love for the innocents… but the insurgents?... those that take innocent lives? Those fuckers deserved everything coming for them. "Get ready, you mongrels. I will make sure that the end of your lives will not be easy." Eric growls as he heads back home. War was coming, and he was going to do his best to ensure him and his platoon would stay alive while taking the lives of those animals in human skin.
After the attack, there was a lot of pressure on the US military to respond. In the coming weeks, mobilization orders were pushed out. The US military was going back to war.
Motorpool Monday. The two most hated terms in any line unit anywhere in the united states Army. Especially in the midst of preparing for a major mobilization. Eric and the other platoon sergeants had their joes gearing up and packing connexes for the better part of the last two weeks after the attack. Tensions were rising between the soldiers as they knew that in a full scale armed conflict, some of them were not going to come home. On one particularly fateful Monday, Eric and his platoon had finished lining up the vehicles in preparation for departure to the DRFF (Deployment Ready Forward Force), and they were ready to pack up for Close Of Business (COB). COB usually hit at 1700(5pm), but today they were running late because a few members of the platoon were having trouble learning their left from their right. Eric had had to step in twice in order to stop two accidents in the span of ten minutes. After the second near accident, Eric had looked up at the sky and asked "Why me?"
At 1758 Eric recieves a call with a grimace. "If he is calling me, he does not have good news."
Answering the phone, Eric grimaces "What's up Top?" He says in a groaning voice. He listens to the other end of the line before hanging up in silence. Huffing out in frustation, he turns to his soldiers. "Well, guess we're staying longer. We have to move everything out of connex 1 and put those items in connex 2, while putting everything in connex 2 into connex1."