Two Women. One Marine Corps.
Zero Give-A-F…
From boot camp chaos to Desert Storm madness — just another day in paradise.
Meet Mya
Mya Russell joined the Marine Corps because it offered something her home never did: safety. At eighteen, the structure and distance felt like a way out—and a way forward. When Desert Storm begins, the life she’s carefully built is tested in ways she never imagined.
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Living the Dream
Mya Russell didn’t join the Marine Corps to wave a flag—she joined to escape her mother and put distance between herself and the life she grew up in. By eighteen, the Corps offers what home never did: structure, belonging, and the promise of control.
Two years later, Mya has found a fragile sense of stability at Camp Lejeune. She has a desk job, friends she trusts, and even love. Brooklyn feels far enough away to stop chasing her. For the first time, she believes she might be settled.
Then comes Desert Storm.
Sent to the Persian Gulf alongside her best friend, her estranged ex–best friend, and a plane full of Marines—only a handful of them women—Mya arrives in Saudi Arabia to an environment defined by danger, isolation, and constant scrutiny. Old tensions among the women follow them overseas, but in a combat zone, survival demands alliance. Forced into close quarters and impossible circumstances, they must learn to rely on one another as the lines between loyalty, love, and betrayal blur.
Raw, uncompromising, and darkly funny, Living the Dream is a coming-of-age novel about a young Black woman navigating war on multiple fronts—against the enemy, within her unit, and inside herself. It’s a story about what it costs to survive the dream you signed up for, and what it takes to make it home whole.
Meet Tiffany
After the violent loss of her brother, Tiffany Addison enlists in the Marine Corps trying to outrun anger. Boot camp gives her structure, exhaustion, and a place to put the rage.
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Water, Motrin, and a Change of Socks
Tiffany Addison has always been a fighter—first on the streets of Brooklyn, then in the barracks of the United States Marine Corps. After the violent loss of her brother Twon, Tiffany enlists not out of patriotism, but out of grief, rage, and the desperate need for control. The Corps promises order, discipline, and survival—but it also delivers betrayal, desire, and the constant threat of being broken all over again.
From the crackling tension of Bed-Stuy nights to the punishing rituals of Parris Island, Tiffany learns to navigate a world that demands toughness while punishing vulnerability. Along the way she collides with lovers, liars, fellow warriors, and ghosts of her past, each encounter sharpening her edges.
Raw, unflinching, and laced with sharp wit, Water, Motrin, and a Change of Socks is not a flag-waving war story. It’s a coming-of-age memoir in fiction form: about a young Black woman finding her fire in a system built to burn her out, about the cost of resilience, and about how survival isn’t the same thing as healing.