Eastridge says that the Army flipped a switch inside him that he could not turn off alone.
"It's like they try to brainwash you in basic training, and that's really what they do," Eastridge says. "Like during bayonet training, we'll be stabbing a big dummy and they'll say, 'What makes the grass grow?' and we would say, 'Blood! Blood! Blood!' as we're stabbing the dummy ... They just pound it into your head and pound it into your head and pound it into your head to kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, and they take you over there and they turn you loose and you kill and kill and kill and kill and kill, and they bring you back here and you're supposed to turn it off for a year?"
And at some point between his first deployment and his second, Eastridge got some tattoos. One is in memory of a buddy who died in Iraq. Another is far scarier. It appears to be a Nazi-style "SS" design, although Eastridge insists it's not. It's just another tattoo, he says: "It's anti-establishment." He seems confused about its meaning. Despite saying on his MySpace page that he wants to meet Hitler (and Jesus, and "just you whatever"), and apparently giving a white supremacist salute on his MySpace page, Eastridge tries to tell Salon that the twin lightning bolts are "Russian."
He says he killed "lots" of Iraqi insurgents but can't remember how many.
"My only job skills are military," he says.
