It all started when I met Charlie Balczak at Mess. Who’s he? An E4 grunt I’d bunked with. A short, wiry guy from Ohio, he could drink guys twice his size under the table and then hold his own in the fights that followed. Oh, he was alright for a Marine. Not quite as crazy as most of them, but he did have his moments. And this was one of those moments. We were assigned to a demolition unit at Ft. Bliss and had just gotten our deployment orders. Yippee. We get to do our jobs for real and get out of this Godforsaken desert. Still a desert, just not this one. This was my first deployment and Charlie’s third. He had warned me that fun was not allowed over there, so we drew overnight passes to get our kicks out before we left. A good thing was there were no girl friends or wives to answer to. And for what we were planning, that was a very good thing. Butterbar told us Juarez was off limits again, but we’d been 86’d out of every bar in El Paso and Las Cruces was a dump. We h...
