I, and my squad,have set foot on the soils of Europe. This is my first time here, and though we are miles or hundreds and thousands of miles away from the carnage, I can already smell gunpowder in the air and taste victory on the tip of my tongue. Our designated role was reinforcement to the First Division, which arrived earlier in June this year; they started fighting earlier in October.

All the Europeans were happy to see us as we marched through the city. In my spare time, I had my team train in hand-to-hand combat. We cannot enter the fray yet, our machine guns and rifles will arrive about two days later, and then we need to train marksmanship again before we are sent into combat (we barely got any firearm training in our boot camp, it was all pushups and stamina and “discipline”). Dave was designated to be our machine gunner, and rightfully so, because how a machine gunner needs to carry that hunk of a death machine all day. Meanwhile, Matthew volunteered to haul our ammunition and supplies because he refused to partake in the killing.

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Besides talking to my team and training, there is barely anything else to do here. We also had our first taste of the “trench ration” here: corned beef, salted sardines, salmon (that tastes somewhat concerning), sugar, salt, coffee, and even a few sticks of tobacco. Also, I may take this journal into the front lines; it is not like I plan to keep this journal in pristine condition and present it to someone a century away from now. Plus, I barely wrote anything in the journal over the years.