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"I hate Korea, I hate this fucken place," Waldron says. " We're not really appreciated here by the nationals. We don't want to be here and they don't want us here but yet the military wants us here." Waldron, who says, "The majority of Korea that I've seen was the inside or the outside of a Budweiser beer can," just lost a rank for coming on post a few minutes after curfew and said he's been getting "hammered" every night because he just had his drinking privileges reinstated.

"They look to fuck you any way they can," Waldron says of the Army.

"That's why I'm getting out, they don't care about us, we're as disposable as fuck to them," Pruitt says. They all complain about not having equipment or having shoddy equipment, about training accidents like the tank that rolled down a hill a few months ago, crushing a barracks and killing a soldier sleeping in his room. "Everybody thinks, 'Oh, the Army's the nation's fucken security system,' and shit - - it's a fucken joke," Pruitt says.

"When you wait for nine months for a part to come in, to get your weapon, vehicle or anything off of deadline status and you're supposed to use this thing in a war... then when you get the part, half the time it's the wrong fucken part," says Matt Czaja a 22 year old infantryman.

Czaja is not the typical disgruntled soldier. He and his twin brother Mike, joined six months apart. Matt says he joined the Army to make his father proud, because he was patriotic and to repay a debt. "My father was in, my grandfather was in. When I was growing up someone was doing what I'm doing now," he says.

Matt says his first roommate at Fort Lewis was a self described Neo-Nazi with an SS tattoo who talked about killing the chairman of the North Carolina NAACP. The soldier's friends would come to the room ( "white males, hate-because-of -reverse-discrimination" types, Matt says) to drink beer and watch Neo-Nazi propaganda videos.

Mike says when he was stationed at Ft. Stewart in Georgia he was assigned to parking lot patrol because soldiers were breaking into cars and stealing radios. One night four or five M.P. cars pulled up and ordered him to get out of the area because there was some GI running around in boxer shorts and shower shoes, wielding two nine millimeters.

This wasn't the Army they expected and Mike, who originally joined for a career, realized the military life wasn't for him and is getting out, as is his brother. They rarely drink, don't get into fights and avoid going Downrange. Mike says that in his year and a half in Korea he's only had two positive experiences: One, when an old man stood up and saluted a vehicle he was driving in and the other when he was at the zoo and an old man came up to him, shook his hand and walked off.

"These are the only two experiences that I've had here in Korea that made me actually feel like, whoa, some people actually do care for the fact that I'm wasting a year and a half of my life...these two guys were the only ones who seemed like they actually gave a fuck." he says.

He finally reduces all the political and cultural issues surrounding the experience of the GI overseas to what it often comes down to, the personal: "Koreans think we're good enough to fight their war, they think we're good enough to die for their country, but we're not good enough to date their women."

When he told a sergeant that he wasn't reenlisting the sergeant asked him mockingly, "What are you gonna' do when you get out, go work at McDonalds?" And Mike Czaja, the good American boy who loves his country, who joined the Army for all the reasons described in the brochures, who even bought his own tools for his track-vehicle and is leaving them so the next soldier will have them, responded with what he probably had no intention of ever saying before he joined, "When I get out, if I was flipping burgers at McDonalds at least I'd be wearing a uniform I was proud of."

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