The Lucky One (Louis Tomlinson Fan Fic)

Chapter 4- Tomlinson

Chapter 4- Tomlinson

In some ways, Okinawa seemed more like home than Colorado, and though his Japanese was a bit rusty, he figured a week spent in Tokyo would rekindle the fluency he’d once known. Like his dad, he figured he’d end up retiring from the corps, but unlike his dad, he intended to live long enough afterward to enjoy it. His dad had died of a heart attack only two years after he’d slipped his dress blues onto the hangar for the last time, a massive infarction that came out of the blue. One minute he was shoveling snow from the driveway, and the next minute he was gone. That was thirteen years ago. Tomlinson had been fifteen years old at the time.

That day and the funeral that followed were the most vivid memories of his life prior to joining the marines. Being raised as a military brat has a way of making things blur together, simply because of how often you have to move. Friends come and go, clothing is packed and unpacked, households are continually purged of unnecessary items, and as a result, not much sticks. It’s hard at times, but it makes a kid strong in ways that most people can’t understand. Teaches them that even though people are left behind, new ones will inevitably take their places; that every place has something good—and bad—to offer. It makes a kid grow up fast.

Even his college years were hazy, but that chapter of his life had its own routine. Studying during the week, enjoying the weekends, cramming for finals, crappy dorm food, and two girlfriends, one of whom lasted a little more than a year. Everyone who ever went to college had the same stories to tell, few of which had lasting impact. In the end, only his education remained. In truth, he felt like his life hasn’t really started until he’d arrived on Paris Island for basic training.

As soon as he’d hopped off the bus, the drill sergeant started shouting in his ear. There’s nothing like a drill sergeant to make a person believe that nothing in his life had really mattered to that point. You were theirs now, and that was that. Good at sports? Give me fifty push-ups, Mr. Point Guard. College educated? Assemble this rifle, Einstein. Father was in the marines? Clean the crapper like your old man once did. Same old clichés. Run, march, stand at attention, crawl through the mud, scale the wall: There was nothing in basic training he hadn’t expected.

He had to admit that the drill mostly worked. It broke people down, beat them down even further, and eventually molded them into marines. Or that’s what they said, anyway. He didn’t break down. He went through the motions, kept his head low, did as he was ordered, and remained the same man he’d been before. He became a marine anyway.

He ended up with the First Battalion, Fifth Marines, based out of Camp Pendleton. San Diego was his kind of town, with great weather, gorgeous beaches, and even more beautiful women. But it was not to last. In January 2003. Right after he turned twenty-three, he deployed to Kuwait as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Camp Doha, in an industrial part of Kuwait City, had been in use since the First Gulf War ad was pretty much a town unto itself.

There was a gym and a computer center, a PX, places to eat, and tents spread as far as the horizon. Busy place made much busier by the impending invasion, and things were chaotic from the start. His days were an unbroken sequence of hours-long meetings, backbreaking drills, and rehearsals of ever changing attack plans. He must have practice donning his chemical war protection suit a hundred times. There were endless rumors, too. The worst part was trying to figure out which one might be true. Everyone knew of someone who knew someone who’d heard the real story.

One day they were going in imminently; next day they’d hear that they were holding off. First, they were coming in from the north and south; then just from the south, and maybe not even that. They heard he enemy had chemical weapons and intended to use them; next day they heard they wouldn’t use them because they believed that the United States would respond with nukes (a/n short for nuclear weapons).