Ryan’s reaction wasn’t all that unusual. I noticed it when my brothers came home from boot camp, too. It’s a certain look you get from people—a mixture of admiration and apprehension. In one moment they’re thinking, “Man, this guy has put in some work.” In the next: “Man, I wouldn’t fuck with this guy.” Now it was happening to me, and it was weird, because when you’re in the military, you don’t really see your body changing that much. You’re too busy being tired and getting yelled at to notice. And besides, every other dude looks like you, so nothing you see in the mirror seems all that impressive. It’s not until you step away from it and you’re back in civilian life that you have the opportunity to look around and notice, “Holy shit, I could probably kill everyone in this bar.”
It’s a nice feeling.
Where I really felt the change wasn’t in my physique as much as in my attitude. That was my real problem in high school. I tried so hard to get laid when I wasn’t flipping botany burgers or slapping bass that I acted like a total pussy around girls. My utter lack of self-confidence made me terrified of saying the wrong thing or doing anything that might overtly sabotage my chances. Little did I realize that all my worrying was the biggest cock-block of them all. No girl wants to fuck a guy who can’t make a command decision. Now I didn’t care one way or the other. I just wanted to have fun.
Two minutes into my conversation with my touchy-feely friend, one of the hottest girls from my graduating class, this smoke show named Anna, came up to say hello. I knew Anna enough to pick her out of a lineup, but back in the day our interactions never went much beyond a “hello” from me and a nice cold shoulder from her. It was time to repay the favor.
“Hey, didn’t we go to high school together?” she asked.
“I don’t know, maybe,” I said as I turned back to Ryan.
“You’re from here, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, almost annoyed.
“Well, there’s really only one high school in our town, so we had to have gone to high school together.”
“Oh, cool. Then yeah, I guess we did. Small world or some shit.” Sick burn. In my head, I was lecturing Anna like this was a public shaming on Twitter. Two hundred eighty characters of fuck you. How does it feel to have the shoe on the other foot for once, huh Anna? You’re not in control of my happiness anymore. It was like an awkward class reunion, except I was third-grade Billy Madison after failing to spell Rizzuto in cursive: I hate cursive and I hate all of you! I’m never coming back to school! Never!
“Do you want to get out of here?” she asked, interrupting my train of thought.
Excuse me, what was that? Did this girl who iced me out all through high school just walk up to me out of nowhere and ask me to leave with her? But…why? The “cool guy” Mat Best façade dropped and the navel-gazer on the inside started to pick his head up. I almost didn’t know what to do.
I took a sip of my beer and attempted to regain my composure.
“Where do you want to go?” Great question, Mat. Why don’t you just ask her which hole the pee comes out of while you’re at it?
“I literally could not give one single fuck,” she said without missing a beat. “Wherever you’re going, I’m going, so you get to decide.”
Now that is patriotism.
The one thing Ranger Battalion drills into your head more than anything else is putting your thoughts and feelings aside in order to get the job done. This girl had just given me a mission. Screw tasks, conditions, and standards; I just needed to go hard on the “objective.” It was time to execute. I chugged the rest of my beer, took her by the hand, and walked her right out of the party and into my car. No goodbyes, no fist bumps with old friends, there was no time for any of those pleasantries. There was only one objective now.
Within five minutes, we were driving down the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) in the old family Buick in search of the perfect place to park and stare up at the moon and the stars over the vast Pacific Ocean. And to get naked. But first, that awkward stop