Starbucks got your mocha all wrong. Your 8 dollar cup of fancy coffee spilled all over your favorite outfit. Your pen leaked in the pocket of your favorite shirt. You spent a whole extra 30 minutes in traffic. The wasted youth with a zinc stud in his tongue, nose and eyebrow messed up your order at the drive-in window. When you got home from your exhausting 8 hour day, you find your dog chewing on your favorite pair of shoes. At this point you probably are thinking that you’re having a really bad day. It is time to sit back and relax on the recliner or take a hot soothing bath. Maybe you can read a bedtime story to the kids and slide into your soft cozy bed and let all go away.. It is time to put things into perspective.
Look carefully at this photo before you go any further and consider how this young Soldier or Marine’s day went. He probably has not had a shower in at least a week. He has been eating his meal out of a plastic freezed dried bag at the most once a day. The "best if used by" date expired about the same time as cassette players. His coffee came to him in a small red single issue packet if he had time to make any at all. His pen did not leak on his favorite shirt. No, that is something quite different on his face and clothes. It is the sweat, blood and grime of combat.
He was not stuck in traffic for an entire 30 minutes. No, he has had a little different morning than you and me. While you were on your morning commute, spilling your coffee and stuck in traffic, he had not even been to sleep yet from the previous day's fighting. As you crawl into your cozy warm bed tonight try and remember that He most likely has not slept in the last three days. As you play Call of Duty Modern Warfare or Black Ops on your X-box with your kids or watch the History Channel in the comfort of your living room, try and remember he is living the things you are doing for entertainment. There are no off buttons when it gets boring, no re-spawns, no save points, and Game over really is Game over. He has not seen his wife or kids in for the last nine months, not even a hug or a kiss, much less read them a bed time story.
So if you think for one minute that you had a really bad day, aside from the loss of a loved one, all things considered it probably wasn’t really all that bad. You will have forgotten all about it by the end of the week. Within ten our twenty years you will not even remember where you were and what you were doing when you had such a bad day. I assure you that this anonymous young Soldier or Marine will remember his “bad day” for the rest of his life. He probably has several of them that will haunt him forever in some form or another.
What you should consider the most when you look into the shaken eyes and the thousand yard stare of this combat veteran, is that HE volunteered to have all those “bad days”, so that YOUR bad days would look nothing at all like his.
Respectful I Remain,
Christopher S. Watson Sgt, (ret)
Combat Veteran, 2005 Anbar Province, Iraq
Christopher S. Watson, retired military after 18 years of service and 3 combat tours. However, I have never forgotten my oath. I tip my hat to all those who serve or have served before me and more especially so towards those who gave the last full measure for Freedom. 
