I have a dream...

So... back in June, Congress finally passed the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which my main man Jim Webb co-sponsored back in 2006. I won't lie, I took notice. I had been vaguely hearing a thing or two about this for a while now, and as a guy who paid in his $1200 for the Montgomery GI Bill way back in the day, I was somewhat interested. Not paying close attention, mind you... just vaguely registering a change on my radar.

I won't lie, I've been going through some major changes lately. What SSgt Sykes would call "some pretty heavy dope". But eventually, I pulled my head out of my ass and figured something out: this is a lifelong dream that's essentially plopped in my lap, screaming "TAKE ME! Carpe Diem, you big retard!"

The MGIB pretty much sucked, no doubt. It gave you something like "$28,000 towards college", which ain't a lot of return for a four- to thirty-four year investment by a guy like me who joined the Marine Corps. Granted, I never once for a moment made that decision because of the college money - belive me, a million times please believe me, when I say that. I'm just sayin', if you enlist at all, it's a minimum eight years of your life you've put on the line. And, yet again, I digress.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill is a HUGE improvement. If I ever meet Jim Webb, I'll probably give him a hug - but not in that gay way. I just owe him one, because the new GI Bill offers:

• Full tuition price paid for four years at the highest-priced public university in each state
• $500 per semester for books, etc.
  
• BAH at the rate of an E-5 with no dependents - per month!

After vaguely kinda-sorta thinking about it for a while (again, I was distracted from June until this week), I realized that I could finish my current assignment next June, pop smoke, and move to Athens to get my Bachelor's as a full-time student while doing reserve drills - probably as a Gunnery Sergeant very soon - thereby maintaining my line on a military retirement, with 10 years already vested.

Let me tell you a thing or two about the University of Georgia. I was born in Dalton, as were my mom, dad, and sister. Mom's got four sisters, five brothers, and each of them have at least two kids. I can't swing a dead cat in North Georgia without hittin' someone who's kin. Seriously, I have stories to back that up.

And nobody in my family has ever enrolled at UGA, much less graduated from there.

To me, this is kind of like realizing you just won the goddamn lottery two or three months after the fact. I can get my stupid degree paper from a pretty damn good school while maintaining my status as a United States Marine. Once that's done, I have two options:

1) Go out into The World and get a civilian job making big fat stacks of paper, or

2) Head back into the Corps, active duty, likely approaching the zone for promotion to Master Sergeant (with my degree), and get back into the fight.

Because yes, folks, if I forego the whole "big money civilian job" thing to come back to the Corps... I want to go to Afghanistan and do some Marine Shit there. If I didn't want to do things like that, I'd have joined the friggin' Air National Guard.

Remind me next time, I'll have to spout off about The 'Stan. For now, though, I'm just thrilled (and stunned) that one year from now I'll be in Athens smoking all of those 18-year-old freshmen in anything they can try academically. I'm so focused on this dream, I can't think of anything else until I get there.

Well, maybe a new car. But again, I save that for later.



Quotation of the moment: "Sober thoughts become drunk words." - My Neighbor

Song of the moment: "Whiskey Without Women", Drive-By Truckers.

More specifically, the line "Think I'm gonna tell her that I'm gonna go away for a while,
'Til I can get this demon out"