Imagine being forced to sleep on a wooden plank in a bullet hole filled, three-story, run down house in the middle of Ramadi, Iraq.
The toilet was a plastic bag filled with water that had to be re-filled constantly and the meals were government made. Showers were far and few in-between with constant sleep deprivation.
Work while in Iraq was a consistent 6-hour shift from midnight to six a.m. every three days standing outside base with your eyes peeled on the foreign terrain. Walkie-talkies became ways for soldiers to stay awake while they covered shifts and a pack of cigarettes a shift became commonplace.
This was the reality for Joey Isaac.
Joey Isaac, now 23, enlisted in the Marine Corps on October 24, 2004 where he was trained at a 13-week boot camp to be a machine gunner. At boot camp, Isaac became a shadow of his former self.
Every morning he woke up at 5:30 a.m. to clean, and he had less then 10 seconds to shave his face and less then five minutes to eat breakfast, which consisted of one meat, one fruit and one vegetable, repeated three times a day. Then came training, where Issac swam, hiked, propelled, shot weapons and trained in martial arts, all while his drill sergeants tried to make him fail.
“Boot camp is 13 weeks of hell,’ Issac explained to College News. “The devil comes up from the ground and grabs you and takes you down to hell or 13 weeks. That’s what it felt like.”
This “hell” was run by drill sergeants would scream and yell commands, breaking Issac down, forcing him to fall apart and repeatedly do pointless tasks to prove their power.
Once the drill sergeant even punched him for not taking his cleaning supplies out of his pocket.
As Issac explains, their job was to treat you like crap and break you down so they could build you up. Numerous amounts of push-ups were done for simple miss-conducts and if one person in the platoon failed everyone suffered.
“These guys are constantly like bull dogs. 24/7, always in your face, calling you a piece of crap. In the swimming pool, they would push our heads down to try to make us swim under pressure. At night, they would randomly make people get out of bed and run around in the dark in both directions, sometimes making the guys run into each other.”
This practice was continued even after hours in the Barracks. Joey was stationed at Camp Pendleton in Southern California ,where the senior marines ruled the barracks.
After hours on workdays, they would sometimes make the new marines do a Chinese fire drill, which consisted of taking out all the furniture from their barracks and scrubbing it from top to bottom. If any dust was found they would have to re-scrub the room for another two hours--forcing Issac and the other members of his group to go to bed around 3 a.m. on some nights.
And, of course, after the mental and physical break down of boot camp comes war. The war in Iraq has been an on going battle since the invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces in 2003. Joey was deployed March 2007 for seven months, during which he changed dramatically as a person.
“Iraq was the reason I’m always angry in life,” Joey stated. “Because we went to this country with all these people who don’t put effort into helping themselves…life in Iraq let me see a new culture…and now I have all this knowledge and I come back to America and everyone thinks they know everything when they don’t. I’m always so angry. Now, I’m trying to transition back to civilian life and its tough because the marine core way [of life] has taken over [my life].”
Living in Iraq, Isaac saw first hand what a impoverished country looks like. The streets covered in mud with dead goats lying around and bullet holes through every building. Food was cooked outside, in unsanitary conditions, with flies swarming over everything and children running around unsupervised.
Issac told College News that, in Iraq, you’re living day to day with no guarantees of seeing tomorrow. He would go on missions to capture weapon caches and wouldn’t know if it would be his last mission or not. Life becomes a valuable possession in war with the death toll for U.S. soldiers at 4,351, according to iCasualties.
Each experience is different. But when it comes to life changing experiences, no one can come back from war the same way they left. Not even Joey Issac.
