All I want is an easy breakfast. No waking up face-down in the mud, no running after a shadowy enemy, chasing him through the underbrush, firing my M-16 with abandon. Just a plate of ham and eggs and a large OJ.
I've been down here, fighting for Uncle Sam for three years, going after drug kingpins in their black Suburbans, chain-smoking stale cigarettes, giving out cheap trinkets to kids so they'll tell me where the daddy is so I can go burn down his coca farm. You didn't know about me, did you? And I don't know about you and your job at the insurance company, so we're all even. Only difference between me and you is that I eat chewing tobacco for breakfast. You have pancakes, with your choice of syrup.
In honor of the meal I'm searching for, I named my patrol boat the "Easy Breakfast." I motor her slowly up and down the smelly rivers of this god-forsaken cesspool, chewing on a stick, naked but for my sunglasses. I ride up front in the boat, one foot on the bow, watching the shore, watching, watching, for coke runners and savages and methamphetamine labs. If I spot something, I have my gunner and second-in-command open fire, liberally. Nine times out of ten these scumbags have already moved on. But there's that sweet one in ten, where we blow the melon of some no-good so-and-so and his dog, too. One time we nailed the biggest big fish in the area right in his outhouse, reading a Spanish-language People Magazine.
And some of this stuff makes a difference. That guy on the toilet had kidnapped a whole crew of French dwarves. He had them working in a real short-ceilinged drug lab. He thought he was outsmarting us and the government down there, making it so we'd have a hard time seeing into or getting into their lab. But after we'd shot him off the toilet, we came with a chopper and pulled the roof right off. Those French dwarves jumped up and down, cheered, threw their arms in the air. "Oui, oui!! Ici!" They shouted. The chopper, which we also used to put out fires the kingpins sometimes start in the bush to slow us down, "accidentally" dropped about 1,000 gallons of water on those little guys. But you couldn't dampen their spirits. No, sir, not them. We got them out of there and chartered them a plane back to France , back to whatever it is severely short people do over there.
So, there's some satisfaction, as you can see. And I know I'm doing right by the school-kids back in Cincinnati , Des Moines , Virginia Beach, making it a little harder for them to get their hands on drugs. Come to think of it, from a mental health perspective, I'm helping all Americans. But that doesn't make the whole no-easy-breakfast thing any less difficult on me. I mean, yesterday, just for example, I ate a fish we caught on the river. For breakfast. Now, I don't know if you go to Denny's, but I dare you to find me fish on their breakfast menu. Unless you're Japanese, which you're not, fish for breakfast is like wetting your bed in middle age; it's just something you don't do. It's not natural.
God how I love waffles. With butter. Sweet Lord.
And the meals ready to eat that we get from the U.S. military just don't do the trick. We use those for target practice--the M-16 really takes the ham and egg omelette apart like a pro.
So you enjoy your hometown, your safe streets, your non-heroin-addicted child. I'll stay down here, swatting mosquitoes the size of Life Savers and eating stale crackers at 5:30 am.