Old friends greet each other and new fish are doing ritual acts of but sniffing. Lejune? Hell, I qualified third round at Moab, two tours at Antwerp.

I am a safety officer par excellance, friends, no need to see my credentials.

Its hard to stomach all this excitement as I make my way to my berth.

We are going to fight. We are going to kill. Some of us are going to die. Some of us are going to come back horribly scarred, some will just come back with scarring of the mind. We will return to late sleepless nights and nightmares and pills to control the nightmares and liquor to contribute to the blackness and kill the pain of the empty house we drove the wife and kids from.

Today should be less like the first day of camp and more funerary.

Our stateroom is busy, a flurry of activity so unlike our return where only five of us were in a room designed for twenty.

All greenhorns now, loud and pugilistic. I say nothing to them, exist on the periphery.

There is no one I know here now. My bunk is the same and that only makes it worse.

I retreat to the head, figure I can snag a good locker before anybody realizes that was what they should be doing with their time rather than fooling around.

Get squared away on the very first day and the voyage will be the month of May. So said Harris until he became inorexibly merged with his fuselage.

The head seems empty and I'm glad for the distance if not the solitude it provides from the melee behind me.

In the corner hidden behind a hanging towel lurks the shade of a shipmate.

I peer around the corner to find Kira, head down, fists balled at her side looking like she's contemplating decking the hull or perhaps the first person to bother her. She's been hiding out too. I can understand. These moments are awkward and while there's nobody more competent, without her act established she's got nothing to do.

I grab her wrist and she snaps around menacingly before her eyes register me ever wideningly.

There is nothing to say. We hug and in that moment communicate far more than we could ever possibly say -- the mutual loss, the alienation of the moment, the awkwardness of homecoming, the shameful pride in being alive to go through this all again.

God, the safety of that moment. More than two arms wrapped around me but a shell.

It is perhaps impossible to describe if you have not experienced it.

We disengage and she looks up at me. "Its awful, isn't it?"

"Yeah," I reply, "but we should be quiet," gesturing to the opening above the high glass wall. "We wouldn't want to say anything to offend THESE FUCKING PUBES!"

Her eyes twinkle with amusement as this aryan bohemoth visualizes on the other side of the door, hands clenching and unclenching, veins popping out.

He's decided that he's going to be head of the roost and he's a lot bigger than I am.

Presumably he's had the same training as I've had and maybe the difference is instinctual. For all his size and menace, he's not more dangerous than I am, just stronger.

Knowing this is my edge, that he expects to beat me with strength.

It only takes three shots to immobilize him, the fourth is gratiuitous, to make him think about ever pulling anything in the future. To remind him of his place ultimately on the Darwinian scale of things. "My forefathers ate your forefathers, and if you've forgotten that in your ancestral memory, remember that it was the first blow that crippled you, let me have my way with you. It is only through my benevolent grace that you will survive your pubedom."

I glance back to Kira who is now ear-to-ear with enjoyment. She will have to go through her own hell, proving that she is not ship meat and I certainly never thought of her that way.

Predators acknowledge their own.