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My favorite part of the VA discussion tonight is that not even five months ago I watched one of my Marines rapidly develop and get destroyed by rectal cancer that was linked to swimming in burn pits. He was one of several guys from that deployment that died that way almost twenty years later. Me and the boys are all pretty much waiting our turn at this stage. We had a company Gunnery Sergeant that was an absolute piece of shit on my first deployment. His hobbies included eating all of the Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, and finding menial and pointless tasks for the Marines to do when they could instead be sleeping. One of his favorite ways to pass the time was to sit on the hood of his gator inside of FOB Omar while the React Marines police called the burn pit looking for “non-burnables.” You see, the cool thing about a burn pit is that after a while they just stay on fire, like pretty much forever. They get real soupy in the less hot parts, and you can walk on top of the plastic soup. Sometimes, lazy Marines will throw pen flares, lithium batteries, SAW drums full of 5.56, and other random fun things in there instead of disposing of them properly. It was easier to toss the shit than it was to deal with Gunny interrogating you on why you needed to get rid of a dead battery. Most of the time, those things just pop on their own anyways. It’s no big deal, since it’s all just trash and it’s usually sequestered away from sleeping areas. For Gunny Diaz though, this was unsightly. You could see the “non-burnables” in the burn pit. What if the Battalion Commander, or someone from higher up the chain of command were on the OP when one of those things popped, or worse, what if they saw a radio battery!? Well, that would bring Gunny Diaz’s reputation as a Company Gunnery Sergeant into question. Can’t have that. His solution was pretty simple. Take the Marines from react, whenever they weren’t busy escorting Iraqis into the OP to get free money from “Captain Tom,” and have them wade into the burn pit to pick out the non-burnables. Easy. Gunny got a Navy Commendation Medal. We all get to have cancer twenty years later. Fuck you Gunny Diaz. You were and always will be a useless fat piece of shit, undeserving of the 0369 MOS and title of Company Guns. It wasn’t a very kinetic deployment. It wasn’t just us infantrymen that got to swim in the burning plastics. The cooks got a turn. The comm guys got a turn. The mechanics got a turn. Everyone got a bit of cancer swimming in. Great fun for everyone. Kevin died in November. He left behind a family who was entirely abandoned by the VA once he passed. They haven’t received any of the help his widow was promised. But yeah, financial Jerry Springer really do be doing the hard hitting investigative journalism on the massive VA fraud numbers.