Poetry. Christian Benedetto Jr. is a decorated combat veteran, having served in the U.S. Marine Corps in the early to mid 1990's with, among other units, the twenty-fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit - Special Operations Capable. At a time when well-written poetry by soldiers is in high demand, this first book of poems details legends and good old-fashioned "sea stories," as well as offering the reader a haunting first-hand experience of the psychological, physical and emotional toll inflicted by and on one soldier during the first Gulf War.