Dressed in full camouflage, covered in yellow and pink paint, with welts all over his body, Eric Hsia bursts into laughter. “I have uniform inspection tomorrow!” he wailed. As the rest of us peeled off our coveralls after a solid day of paintball, Eric was trying to figure out what to do. He could have spent the $40 for coveralls like the rest of us, but why let fully functional camo go to waste? This was my first memory of Private First Class Hsia, a U.S. Marine.
Eric and I grew up in Monmouth County, New Jersey, right off the notorious Jersey shore. We have 16 Facebook friends in common, all of whom I’ve known for at least eight years. Eric and I went to the same prom and once we even had a chance encounter at a hot-air balloon show.
Eric’s always been a goofy kid, although now he’s not the same guy I knew back in high school. He still plays video games, but there’s something intangibly different about him. He’s been in the military as long as I’ve known him, following in his parents’ footsteps. He started in Junior Navy ROTC in 2002. (The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, for those not familiar, is a voluntary program in the U.S. for young people interested in getting involved in the military.) He joined the U.S. Air Force Civil Air Patrol in 2005, did Navy ROTC Marine Option in university—though he didn’t finish—and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in March 2008. When I call him up two days before he ships out, he’s laughing. “Woo! It’s exciting being interviewed!”
Eric deployed for Afghanistan on Valentine’s Day. When asked what he named his rifle, he tells me, “The current one, I just named Helen. There’s this girl Helen that if I wasn’t deploying, I can pretty much one hundred per cent say we’d be together—no pressure on her … She’s a keeper. I’ll be thinking about her while I’m away.”
I ask Eric what he would have done if he hadn’t pursued the military, but the truth is that it wasn’t an option. “Well, prior to joining the Marines, I attended SUNY Maritimes College in New York, and I would have been pursuing a degree in merchant shipping with the Merchant Marines and doing ROTC,” he explains. “My degree was like a business degree for imports and exports. But then I enlisted. Either way, I was ending up in the military, either enlisted or as an officer.”
In the end, university wasn’t for him, but he values the college experience. “College students are people that make huge changes in the world. They’re young and they’re in an environment where their brainwaves are moving. Anti-war protests in the ‘60s and ‘70s, even if I didn’t agree with them, are part of our history; they changed the world. I really think students are a reflection of what’s going on in our world. If they’re riled up and really care about something, you feel it. If something’s going on and they can’t be bothered to care, it means it just doesn’t matter in the culture.”
Eric would have become an officer, a higher rank than Private First Class when he enlisted, but he didn’t submit his transcript. “It was the timeframe: I had to drive all the way to the Bronx. I would have had to pick up the transcript in person from my university and then deliver it in person.”
As for why he enlisted, Eric explains that he wasn’t doing well in university. All his focus was on the military component of his life. “I realized if I had the itch that bad, it was time to go be a Marine.”
Eric’s wanted to be a marine since 2000. He blames the movie Top Gun and an experience in Grade 8. “I was in Barnes and Noble and picked up this book and read it from cover to cover. The title of the book was Marines. So since I was 12 years old, that was my dream, just to be a Marine. The elitism, the sense of camaradery. Giving yourself to a cause greater than yourself. People say you don’t truly appreciate freedom until you’ve sacrificed it, and as cheesy and cliché as it is, I really believe that.”
Yet, he’s still not sure if he’ll make a career out of Marine life. He doesn’t know how the experiences ahead will shape him, but says that what has happened so far has definitely changed his outlook.
Basic training was not what Eric expected. “The whole time they tried to teach you to know what a Marine really is. I mean, I never really knew what the word ‘sacrifice’ meant until I ended up there. You really don’t until you get into situations like that. All three months you’re yelling from the minute you wake up until you go to sleep, and sometimes in your sleep. There are really guys who go to bed and sort of sleepwalk, going through the motions and ‘sleep dress,’ standing next to their rack all night long.
“It’s such a culture shock. You truly meet people who have been shielded their whole life. People from Spanish-speaking countries who can barely speak English. Guys who are really meeting the first black person they’ve ever met. I mean, you go in knowing that you’re going to meet guys from every part of the country but you don’t realize that until you’re there.”
Eventually, Eric and I start talking about the past, back when the Iraq War started. It was a big deal for us back then. I still remember everyone sitting in the library, huddled around the TV during lunch. The Iraq War affected us all, but war has now affected Eric’s life much more drastically: “For me, I had to try to write a will.”
As for his civilian friends, “they are very supportive—even the ones that aren’t pro-war.” But Eric’s not “pro-war” either, nor is he anti-war. “I really agree with Plato on ‘only the dead have seen the end of war.’ Human conflicts and politics are all on the basis of war. Having gone to college, I got to see both sides of things.”
Even though Eric is deploying within 36 hours of our phone call, it’s way later than he thought he’d be out there. “I’ve been waiting to leave since November. We’ve been under a lot of stress, with things like delays and last-minute gear issue. But overall it’s like, wow, we’re really doing this, seeing what it’s like to make a difference.”
He adds that one thing the public just doesn’t seem to grasp is the stress that delays cause for the troops. “Politicians change what they want and don’t want from us: where they want us to be, how many of us they want to send. It’s stressful on the individuals when you’re put on standby so long. I just want to say, ‘Make up your damn mind!’”
According to Eric, another point of contention that escapes public discourse is that of how much the troops get paid. “Private defense contractors, basically mercenaries, make $140,000 and on our first deployment, we make $12-14,000. I mean, come on, a factor of 10? We’re risking our lives here.”
I ask Eric how being a Marine has changed his opinion of what it’s like to be an American. He responds: “Not to say that people who aren’t successful in life aren’t good Americans, but I think being a citizen of any country is all about being a productive individual. That’s what being a citizen is, being productive, trying to better yourself, even if its for your own selfish reasons. It’s the freedom to pursue happiness. I don’t care if you’re pro-war, anti-war, as long as you’re pursuing your goals and trying to better yourself. College kids, they’re there because they want to. I feel pretty damn smug knowing they get to do that because they don’t have to do what I’m doing.”
“I’d say anyone can do what we’re doing in terms of being in the military and the Marines. It’s all a mindset. Most people in their lives don’t get a chance to push themselves one hundred per cent to their limits. In training you really have to push yourself. No matter what type of person, you don’t have to be reckless, but push yourself as hard as you can mentally and physically to discover a new side of yourself. That’s what being a Marine is really about. I think everyone could benefit from that. The minute you quit on yourself, that’s when you’ve lost. You need to find something that really matters to you.”
Eric Hsia was deployed on February 14, 2010. The U.S. Marine Corps currently leads an offensive of 30,000 U.S. and NATO troops against the Taliban stronghold in Marjah.
