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On this episode of Risk Reacts. Marines boy. Oh damn the damn Marines. Hello folks. This is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. This is another Risk Reacts video episode where it's usually Kevin Allison listening to a story for the first time and giving you his instant reactions. But this time Risk invited me on instead. Ray Christian, the source of all black knowledge. I don't know why me? But I guess we're all going to find out together. Now, if you're hearing this on the Wrist Podcast feed and you'd rather watch this episode where you'll see both me and the storyteller, well, there's a link to that in the show notes, but all of Wrist Audio episodes going back over 16 years are all at risk-show.com or anywhere you get podcasts. So let's get started. There is a storytelling show out in San Diego and LA called so say we all and they sent us a story by a guy named Brian Simpson. This story was on their podcast back in 2018 on an episode called Uncle Sam's Misguided Children. Now I've never heard this story before, but John La Sala from Risk heard it and thought we have to show this story to Ray Christian. So I guess that's what's about to happen. So after this quick break, we'll hear Brian Simpson on so say We All. We'll be right back.

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So say we are.

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I hate gas masks. It was pretty early into my first 18 years spent shuttle between five of Maryland's foster and group homes that I understood what it meant to be seen as a number instead of a human being. It motivated the biggest decision of my life to date. If I was just going to be another number, there should at least be some purpose behind it. So I joined the Marine Corps and for all of us. Testosterone. It was the least violent and most stable environment I'd known. The Marine Corps gave me my first opportunity to be around white people who weren't in a position of authority. No social workers no cops, just ordinary people like me. A lot of whom unintentionally helped me realize I wasn't nearly as dumb as I'd grown up thinking I was. At least by comparison. Upon completion of boot camp, I was all in. The Corps was a place where nobody could become somebody. A meritocracy where the smart, fast and strong rose to the top. No worthless test that lacked obvious relevance to your life. This was going to be the beginning of my climb to the top. I loved the Marine Corps and the Marine Corps loved me. My first time in the Middle east was March of 2003 and began somewhere in the middle of Kuwait. At the time, no one was sure if we were actually going to invade Iraq or not. No other group of people debated the topic more heavily than the Marines of Max 1 EWC. No Marine in the EWC debated the topic more heavily than Lance Corporal Simpson. That's me, who has several hundred bucks riding on the issue. The EWC stands for Early Warning and Control. Our job was to man an awesome state of the art radar system that could see some classified distance away. The first to detect planes and missiles launched by an enemy. My personal responsibility was to maintain an advanced radar interface. Most of the stuff never breaks, so most of the time was spent playing spades and board games. Our mandate was to assume that any missile that was launched contained some sort of biological weapon and to alert the entire camp right away. Of course, none of this really mattered to me at the time because we weren't actually at war with anyone yet. And as I mentioned before, I had several hundred bucks riding on the issue every single day of every single week for the two months we've been in country. We had biological weapon drills five to seven times a day to to prepare for the very likely scenario that we were attacked by a biological weapon, contingent upon the very unlikely scenario that we would actually go to war. By now I've been in the Marine Corps long enough to find nothing strange about preparing for a threat that was either unlikely, outdated or completely non existent. This is the military way of life. The means by which it justifies its outrageous budget and ego. By week three we had so many drills that we'd broken our military issued nuclear, biological and chemical alarm and had to use a modified 7 ton truck horn in its place through a jury rig process involving high voltage cabling, an industrial generator and Satan. The result was a noise that sounded like the opening ceremony of the apocalypse. Or as I like to imagine it, an elephant. If you were to set its nuts on fire and Roll it down a bumpy hill. When you heard the alarm, you had to stop what you were doing, scream gas, gas, gas. While you were finding and putting on your mask and hazmat suit, then running to the nearest trench or bunker and waiting to be given the all clear. Wearing a gas mask when it's 90 degrees outside with 0% humidity is comparable to putting a condom on your face and then manning a barbecue grill. Being made to do so countless times for what always ended up being a drill resulted in almost everyone becoming complacent. Long before we created the old truck horn, we'd be sitting in the bunker playing cards, joking around, hating life when someone mumbling obscenities through their carbon filters. And because you had to stop and run to the closest bunker to you, the people you ended up in the bunker with were often totally random. At times I found a bunker that contained only my friends. And on one of these occasions I decided it would be a good idea to cheat, loosen my straps and put my headphones in. It turned out that my lieutenant looked a lot like my buddy Tom when he had a gas master. The lieutenant was clearly not pleased with my music listening. It could have been me, or it could have been that he didn't feel that $0.50 get rich or Die Trying was a classic. But either way, my punishment was to make a 1 to 100 scale replica of the Great Wall of China out of sandbags. Sandbags that I had to fill while wearing my gas mask. Again, I hate gas masks. I won't even smoke weed out of. On March 17, 2003, I've been in Kuwait for a couple of months. I found myself fresh off my shift and right in the middle of a heated game of Trivial Pursuit. I don't remember anything else about the night except the card I drew on what may or may not have been my winning turn. The question on the card was in 1996, the US military tested all their gas masks for for defects. What percentage were found to be defective? I lost the game because I guessed 10%. The answer was 50. 50%. I reflected on all those trust building exercises that we'd done before we left. They showed us a video of a goat being vaporized by a gas that Saddam was most assuredly in possession of. When we were still in America, we'd all went to the gas chamber to test our equipment against tear gas. Since we were assigned specific individual masks, the exercise was supposed to help us build confidence in our equipment. But because we ended up being a few masks short of the gas Chamber. A handful of Marines in my platoon, myself included, ended up not even being able to test the mask we would ultimately end up deploying with. I told every single Marine I passed on the way back to my tent that night, hey, did you know that your gas mask might not work? It's a 5050 shot. They made us do all those drills, and that damn thing doesn't even work. 50% of the time. I was like a manic Paul Revere running through tent city. I knew it. I knew it. We're nothing but a number to them. Agent Orange in Vietnam, LSD in World War II, Gulf War Syndrome, and now this. I mean, if the people that made Trivial Pursuit knew about this, then how the hell could the military not? Unless they did. I had my whole situation pegged all wrong. The military isn't a race to the top. It's a struggle to stay in the middle. A contest to see how far the system can fail before it's forced to admit that it needs change. Here I was, trying so desperately to escape the fate of staying a nobody, I didn't see the alternative I'd chosen. In the Marine Corps, you're not nobody. You're anybody. You're just another cog of the machine. Replaceable, expendable, a number on some colonel spreadsheet. No one took my rants seriously because not only had we grown complacent about the NBC drills, we'd also grown complacent about the possibility of going to war with Iraq. I was putting my revolutionary complex on full display out of outrage, but not fear. Because the truth was I slept like a baby, confident that what I learned about my gas mask would never matter because it would never be tested, never bet against a bush going to war. The very next morning we woke up, were called into formation and informed that the war had already started in the middle of the night. From this moment forward, there will be no more drills. Any alarm sounded is the real deal. Almost immediately after we were dismissed, just as I was starting to think about all the money I lost on that stupid bet, the alarm sounded. In an instant, the complacency of the past few months was exposed as suicidal behavior. All the Marines move like madmen, scrambling to get the little bits and pieces of equipment we come to take for granted, trying desperately to remember all the procedures that might save our lives. So now I find myself sitting in a ditch in the desert, facing death with a good portion of the people I care about all around me, and all I can think about is that goddamn Trivial Pursuit card And that goddamn goat. I can't stop visualizing how the goat evaporated, its skin falling to the ground like there were no bones or organs inside. I can hear the instructor's voice so clearly describing the symptoms of being infected by this gas. I'm not imagining this. It's happening to me. I'm dying. Deep pools of sweat building up around the rubber seals on my forehead. My cheeks and on the back of my neck will start to burn at any moment right before I lose control of my bowels and my soul and evaporate into nothing. Like the victim of some Mortal Kombat finishing move. I fear for my life before, but I always believed that I could at least affect the situation in some way. Now I'm at the mercy of the numbers. It all comes down to two coin flips. 50, 50 chance the incoming missile contains bioweapons. And a 5050 chance that my mask will work. If it did, I am supremely aware of every single sensation. Every single nerve ending in my body was vying for my attention. While my mind disassociated, I scanned the trench lined with almost smugness, thinking to myself these poor bastards don't even know how close we are to death right now. So confident in their protection. I'm slowly losing my mind here. I'm imagining how awesome it would be to not be about to die. What I would do for just one more breath of fresh air. It would feel like being born again. I want that breath of fresh air so bad. I couldn't stand it. The feel of the cool breeze on my face and the refreshing non poisonous air filling up my lungs. Like being released from a hostage situation into a sauna and afterwards running right into a walk in freezer made of valerian steel and York peppermint patties. I've already made my mind up. I'd rather go out like Private pal than that fucking goat. I click my M16 from safe to unsafe. I put the business in under my chin, put my finger on the trigger and wait for the gas to affect my nervous system and the resulting twitch to finally make me literally the no. 1 I'd never wanted to be. And that's when I heard the two sweetest words in the English language echo from the distance. All clear.