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thedailywhat:

Best Summer Vacation Story Ever of the Day: Meet Chris Jeon: A 21-year-old UCLA math major who flew to Libya to fight alongside the rebels on a whim.

“At spring break I told my friends a ‘sick’ vacation would be to come here and fight with the rebels,” he told Christian Science Monitor correspondent Kristen Chick.

Jeon says he purchased an $800 one-way ticket to Cairo, then snuck across the border into Libya. Because he doesn’t speak a lick of Arabic, Jeon has relied on sign language and broken Italian to communicate with his new-found brothers-in-arms.

As for the rebels, they’ve welcomed the foreigner with open arms, even conferring upon Jeon an honorary Libyan name, Ahmed El Maghrabi Saidi Barga.

The Orange County native, who calls the Libyan Uprising “one of the few real revolutions,” plans to return home soon enough, but not before helping the rebels take the loyalist stronghold of Sirte.

Chick reports that Jeon was not worried about the upcoming battle. “I believe in destiny,” he told her. His mother and father, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter.

“Whatever you do, don’t tell my parents,” he begged The National’s Bradley Hope. “They don’t know I’m here.”

[csmonitor / thenational / theatlantic.]