DamienWrit340

     Picture this in your mind. You are a soldier, and you’re in a squad with eight other soldiers. You only have a rifle, seven magazines with 30 rounds meant to take out another human, and two of your squadmates have grenades. You are patrolling through a forest, but just as you almost make it out of the clear, your squad leader pulls you back with sweaty palms. What you didn’t realize among the cracking branches and brushing leaves were the sounds of tracks and squeaking. You peek and see a metal behemoth with treads spun beneath the turning wheels with the main gun that is capable of sending out projectiles that can turn you into fine red mist out of its gargantuan barrel. You and your squad would have been wiped out had the enemy tank spotted you. Coming face to face with what is known as one of the most dangerous machines of war is considered an instant death sentence. Tanks, since their creation, have always been a subject of fear and deadly force, but in recent ye...

Picture this in your mind. You are a soldier, and you’re in a squad with eight other soldiers. You only have a rifle, seven magazines with 30 rounds meant to take out another human, and two of your squadmates have grenades. You are patrolling through a forest, but just as you almost make it out of the clear, your squad leader pulls you back with sweaty palms. What you didn’t realize among the cracking branches and brushing leaves were the sounds of tracks and squeaking. You peek and see a metal behemoth with treads spun by wheels with a main gun that is capable of sending out projectiles that can turn you into fine red mist out of its gargantuan barrel. You and your squad would have been wiped out had the enemy tank spotted you. Coming face to face with what is known as one of the most dangerous machines of war is considered an instant death sentence. Tanks, since their creation, have always been a subject of fear and deadly force, but in recent years, the countermeasures to dealing wi...

 I chose to read Gloria Steinem’s My Life on the Road from Writ 340’s selection of autobiographical memoirs. Looking through the list, I think the title appealed to me the most. Reading about someone’s experience while traveling across the world and meeting different people sounds like something I will do as I prepare to join the army, with the possibility of deployment one day. From reading this book, I am hoping to learn about how interactions with different people around the world can shape a person’s views and how they live life. The first chapter emphasizes on the idea of exploring the vast unknown of our lives. Steinem seemed to have her own image of stereotypes before taking her road trip as she gets hyperconscious upon seeing bikers. However, she realizes that even the group of bikers had life lessons to share when they were able to get to know each other. The idea that everyone “has a bike” in their hearts is something that stuck out to me. This bike is our desire to dis...

  I had an internship with KP Environmental in the summer of 2023. KP Environmental, one can guess from its name, is an environmentalist group/business that “specialize in understanding natural, cultural and physical environments, state and federal regulatory requirements, and agency and client needs resulting in focused, responsive, cost effective service” (KP Environmental). The project that I had the pleasure to work on for that summer was finding a suitable site for a solar panel farm in Tehachapi.  While I might have joined in the latter half of the project, it was no less of an arduous task. The task for the field team, which I was part of, was to count the amount of Joshua trees per cluster. The purpose of the field survey was to help a solar panel farm company decide where to emplace their solar farms as removing a Joshua Tree over 5 meters would cost around $300-$500. These clusters were marked on a map using GIS. Not only were we counting the amount of trees per clus...