2025-11-14 Freewrite

The start of it all was the end. When McCreary was gone, the whole thing fell apart. Tyson had nobody else to talk to, I don’t think, and his cigarette breaks got longer and longer. Sometimes he was out there for hours on end, must’ve been going through whole packs of them in one sitting. The rations didn’t have nearly enough for that, so he must’ve been trading others for them. You couldn’t buy extra packs from the base in thsoe days, shipments were just too sparse to spare any extra space. He was trading for his life, I guess. You’ll see.

He was out there for hours, like I said, and sometimes I saw him there way late into the night. And this wasn’t just at the base, yeah, ‘cause Dimes told me he was smoking on patrols and things too. But the real problem was that even when things got hot he’d keep something cooking.

His seargent had to cook his ass for it, I heard, when he was smoking in line one day. “Do you really need a smoke,” the seargent crooned. “Need to suck at the teet?” McCreary had nothing to say. The seargant ripped the butt out of his mouth and threw it on the ground, stamped it out like he was curbstomping that towelhead from the last raid, the blood from the OG still staining his boots. The seargant had hardly made it out of the room before McCreary’s lighter was back out.

And so anyways this wouldn’t be a problem or nothing – plenty of boys light up around the clock, and not just cigarettes – ‘cept that the brass had had to cut the rations down to two packs a week, and they didn’t have enough concern for the man to give any fair warning. Half the damn base suddenly got the shakes, and not from something cool like you see in the movies, but from their own goddamn habits.

McCreary didn’t go gentle into that good night, no. He was out there haggling the villagers to bring him whatever they had, was smoking the raw shit the kids brought him for spare change and baseball cards. The guy didn’t speak a lick of Farsi and just took whatever the hell those kids brought him. Worked for a while too, I gotta hand it to him. Took care of the shakes, for sure, until it took care of them permamently. We never figured out quite what got him (some brass hated that fucker, told his family it was a hemorrhage and I guess they never looked at the papers) and I didn’t care to know. We had enough sense to keep our head on a swivel, and McCreary should have too. You don’t just go around taking whatever’s given to you, do you now?