Thanks to another poster and his stories of ‘Squirrel,’ I was reminded of a kid we’ll call ‘Creek.’ This is another story of the intel schools. This is short, but more may follow later.

We had just hit our mos school a few months back. He had properly gone and spent a significant portion of his boot camp money on a brand new gaming laptop for his down time. This kid was in the room 3 doors down from mine in the barracks.

One day, no more than a few weeks after he got his new laptop, my roommate and I were chilling in our room listening to music. Remembering my roommate, it was probably Authority Zero or NWA. We heard a loud plastic crashing sound and a shout with the clear tone of a wirey champion.

We, and others from our corner of the barracks, rushed toward the sound of chaos as our patron saint would desire. The door to Creek’s room was open and his roommate was laughing in shock. We asked him and he pointed to Creek who was wearing a look of satisfaction next to his newly demolished laptop. It took a moment to realize what was going on before we asked Creek what had happened.

Creek told us the story, he’d been surfing the web and a pop up window told him he had a virus and it was stealing his information ‘Pay now to prevent your loss’. (Now, we all know these pop ups. The ones that have a fake close button and a real one that are just pop ups that you close and ignore.) Creek told us the harrowing tale of how he had seen this message and, in a fit of bravery, decided that he was an intelligence Marine and wouldn’t stand for his data being stolen. So he did the only reasonable thing, he took his ridiculously oversized knife from the PX and repeatedly stabbed his brand new gaming laptop until all the bits were safe and secure.