Unlike these Marines, I haven’t spent the last few years of my life in wars or training exercises with bombs going off, jumping out of airplanes and helicopters. In my civilian world at home in Los Angeles, half the people I know are on antidepressants or anti–panic attack drugs because they can’t handle the stress of a mean boss or a crowd at the 7-Eleven when buying a Slurpee. That’s my world, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if, thrust into this one, in the first moments of what we all believe to be a real gas attack, I’d just flipped out and started autoinjecting myself with Valium.
