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We had a soldier who was the one there is in every unit who says: “if they attack us, I will shoot up in the air, I do not want to kill anyone”. This dolt even managed to obtain information , however, from terrorist prisoners by giving them candy bars and even his straight razor knife so they could trim their beards for Allah. So I guess he became useful playing the good cop part for the commander, ironically in spite of his stunt of giving a head cutting straight razor to a war prisoner. Go figure.

However if that was not enough, he was a loud mouth too, and he kept annoying me one day with his preaching about how I should be more like him, gangster tough yet not giving a care and being lazy all the time. I got up to his face really angry because everyone was always doing all the work and he always tried to avoid helping lift missiles, and that day he had walked the other way when I recovered a helicopter that had been shot up, and I screamed to his face: “I am going to order boxing gloves and you and I will meet in the back of the house and have a little talk when I get them, and we will see if your stories of being such a tough thug are true.”

Someone heard that conversation and all of a sudden in a matter of minutes everyone was talking about how there was going to be a fight and they were all betting this piece of crp was going to get shagged by myself. To not lose face he kept taunting asking me where my gloves were at and that I was a coward, pretending to wait for them being delivered as a way to avoid fighting him. Turns out the task force commander had 2 sets of gloves and handed them to me and I threw a pair at the feet of this idiot, daring him to pick them up. He went white as a ghost and everyone started to taunt him. So he finally picked them up and we had a fight. He was stronger and younger than me, but I had much more of a fight than he did and proceeded to jump at him pummeled him a good deal. He managed to land a couple hard punches himself that got me nearly knocked out as we were in the mountains at very high altitude, but in the end he only managed to put himself in a defensive position not able to do anything but succumb to the onslaught of my repeated attacks without any initiative. He looked quite desperate. At the end we were both dancing with fists up like two drunks, him because I had shaken his brains up and me because I was gasping for the rarefied air, exhausted, with tunnel vision and gagging and puking from all the beating I had done on him.

The squad leader declared me winner of the fight and from this day on out no one ever believed this mythomaniac with his stories of being a thug back at home or being tired or sick as a way to avoid work.

It is the difficult thing in the combat zone, as you fight both the enemy, but also the demons of demoralization that can creep within the unit or within oneself. I am glad I had watched movies like Platoon or read books of the Soviet Army by Suvorov before joining, because it kind of prepared me for this eventual challenge. I was not surprised by it, I expected it and was ready. And boy did that improve the morale of the troops and my own after this fight, channeling the cynical attacks of these bad spirits into glorious moments. It was epic and it still is can be epic because a bad situation and bad actors can always be used to our advantage eventually.