Disavowed Read Free

overlooking the bustling bazaar below for the night, if that long. The cracked plastic blinds let in a filtered yellow light from the street lamps that only served to cast the room in a more depressive pallor.
    Despite his repeated attempts to quit his two pack a day habit, Isnard puffed away like a man possessed. It’s what he’d always done in the field. Habit, plain and simple. Like breathing.
    Isnard had the hard look of a man who’d seen and done things that others might condemn. His features placed him somewhere between early thirties and mid-fifties. A forgettable face covered in salt and pepper stubble. His short hair matched his beard. To strangers, Isnard’s gray eyes might look bored, but they hid the fact that the man possessed mental faculties that were always on high alert. He knew every exit in the three story complex despite only checking in an hour before. Thorough.
    In his youth, he’d thrown off attempts by his overbearing mother and bitter electrician father to corral his free spirit. What do you do with a kid who’s kicked out of every school in a ten mile radius?
    As an only child, Isnard had ample time to observe his parents. Early on, young Richie, as his mother called him, figured out that his parents were losers. They were the type of people who complained about their circumstances instead of doing something about them. His father constantly griped about non-paying clients and freeloading employees despite the fact that he rarely got anywhere on time and almost never paid his people when he was supposed to.
    His mother, the basket case, got fatter and fatter as the years creaked by, more content with bitching about the high price of milk than giving her only son anything nutritious to eat, let alone motherly love.
    Rich Isnard left home at the age of seventeen after a particularly bitter fight with his father. Time had erased the reason for the argument, but the high school dropout ended up at the office of the Marine recruiter he’d met at his last high school. The young sergeant was pretty cool, even letting him bum a cigarette when they bumped into each other in the parking lot.
    Much to Isnard’s dismay, Sgt. Austin told him that at the time he didn’t have any slots for kids without high school diplomas. He went on to explain that Isnard had to wait until he was eighteen to go to boot camp.
    None of that deterred Rich Isnard. He convinced Sgt. Austin to let him sleep on his couch, promising to keep the Marine’s apartment spotless in exchange for food and a place to crash. Austin agreed and set Isnard up. Isnard was true to his word. They shared the bachelor pad for two months. Time ticked by until Isnard turned eighteen. Meanwhile he took and passed the GED exam without studying.
    Sgt. Austin was surprised. “How come you were failing out of school?”
    Isnard grinned and replied, “I was bored.”
    Soon after, he got a perfect score on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), which basically gave him his pick of any military occupational specialty (MOS). He’d surprised Sgt. Austin again by choosing infantry.
    “Most smart kids like you want intel. You wanna be cannon fodder?” asked Sgt. Austin, who himself was an artilleryman.
    Isnard shrugged. “If I’m gonna be a Marine, I’m gonna be a real Marine.”
    So two months after leaving home, Recruit Rich Isnard stood on the yellow footprints at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island.
    Despite his small stature (his initial boot camp physical measured him in at 5 feet 5 inches tall and a scrawny 120 lbs), Isnard showed his fellow recruits and the staff that he had more than enough scrap to go around. There wasn’t much he couldn’t do, from scoring “expert” on the rifle range and acing his academic tests, to besting his entire class on the obstacle course. He’d finally found a place where he could excel and be rewarded for it.
    It was a theme that would replay wherever he went in the Marine Corps.