Only in Miami Stories from The Miami Creation Myth

My parents were shocked when they saw me remerge from the barracks. I was pallid, rail-thin, and wobbly.

The Army takes everything you loved as a child and makes it awful. That's how it turns hiking into its dirty, brutish cousin: rucking.

And we’ve come to starvation. Healthy, athletic male college freshmen in industrialized countries tend not to weigh 113 pounds.

Forget whatever bullshit frat boy version of hazing you have in your head. West Point hazing circa 2005 was a creature completely apart.

“You’re not starving to death,” explained the 22-year-old medic gripping my ankle. “You’re just starving.”

When a Cuban immigrant was kidnapped and separated from her nursing child, her community rose in righteous anger to do absolutely nothing.

When they go low, we satirists must wantonly slam our heads into the ground until we tunnel to the other side of the planet. 

I made it, everyone! The Dirty Thirty. The Double Quinceañera. 30,000 pounds of trash.

Even when injured, dehydrated, moments from heat stroke, one wish kept me from collapsing into the mud forever: selling shirts to papi chulos.

“I’m the Secretary of State!” yelled a short, tubby man with a Miami accent. He shook his bars as the dozen other people in his cell grinned.