Great write-up @blockurator.
After a firefight in Iraq my Marines and I would wait for the first chance where we could stand around together, light up cigarettes and talk about what we'd experienced.
As I'm sure you know from protocol, sometimes we might have to wait days or weeks until such an opportunity arrived but it felt so damn good when it did.
It wouldn't matter that we were hungry, sleep deprived, smelled like shit and were probably hours away from going right back into action, those short smoke breaks took us to another place and made us feel like we could laugh in the face of death.
That feeling from smoking has stuck with me over 10 years later although I'm starting to look for other ways to recapture it that are less health adverse.
That's actually one of the themes in my recent artwork I posted "carousel of mortality"