2004 Election.

It was right around election time…Bush vs. Kerry, any kid in the Army with some sense wanted Kerry to win even if they didn’t like him. Everyone in my unit was given an absentee ballot and told to vote. My friends and I all voted for Kerry. I personally didn’t care for him but who was I going to vote for? Some asshole who takes 10 minutes to spit out a sentence and wanted to send me to war? No thank you. We held onto our ballots for about a week or so. We thought the higher ups would collect them and mail them out as a unit. We were wrong. After training one night, we were all watching Black Hawk Down and one of our Sergeant Majors came in and asked, “Did you mail in your ballots? Did you vote?”. A bunch of us sat there confused…some of us even had the ballots in our pockets…but we were too late. The Sergeant Major told us they had to be in the mail that afternoon. Do you know what that’s like? The whole time I was thinking…this ballot is my ticket out of war…Kerry just needs to win…maybe we won’t get sent over or if we do maybe we’ll leave early. But no…I was late…a lot of us were. Our hope was thrown out the window. We ripped up the ballots and prayed America would be smart enough not to reelect Bush. I guess they weren’t.