It's the story of a man. A man who went to war. And then went to college. And then decked a godless shithead professor. It's a feel-good story! And it went viral among God-fearing Murkans. And then Twitter got hold of it. And then it got really good.

That pic above tells the apocryphal story of Marine Todd, as he's now being called in your dad's email threads, just before the forwarded recipe for grandmom's leinenkugel:

A Marine was taking college classes between his deployments to Afghanistan. One of his courses had a professor that was an atheist and a member of the ACLU. One day the professor shocked everyone by walking into class, looking up and stating "God, if you are real, I want you to come down and knock me off this platform, I will give you 15 minutes. Several minutes tick by in silence, when the 15 min. time almost expired the Marine gets up from his seat, approaches the professor and punched him in the face knocking him off the platform and out cold. The Marine simply went back to his seat. The professor came to, visibly shaken and asked the Marine, "What the heck did you do that for?!" The Marine said, "God was busy protecting America's military who are out protecting your right to say stupid shit like that, so he sent me to fill in."

It's perfect, really. The ACLU prof who speaks in run-on sentences. The mixed tenses. The lack of grammatical commas. The violence in the service of holy patriotic virtue. It's the story of us!

Is there any chance it's a true story? Not unless there was a sailor in the class to tell the Marine how to tally up the 15 minutes after he ran out of fingers to count on.

Some version of this story, I know, has been going around since I was a military school pup in the mid-'90s. Our conservative Christian battalion commander with the Harvard business-school degree sent it around, in between his inspirational missives about mysterious footprints in beach sand and forwarded rants about the feyness of Bill Clinton's attempts at military saluting.

But it's older and deeper and more primordial than that. Noah was probably a Marine—he's an expert in amphibious disembarkations, after all!—and the flood was probably God's revenge on an atheistic metal-working Tubal-Cain who made Noah's kids read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye in metal-working class. Or, if you prefer evolution, the first time a paramecium ever turned on another ciliate protozoan, consumed it, and crawled out of the sludge to become a bipedal, oxygen-breathing Lean Green Killing Machine, Marine Todd's DNA was probably in that magnificent unicellular sunofabitch.

Whatever his provenance, Marine Todd can't stand up to the snarky lefties of Weird Twitter, who began to embellish his exploits ad absurdum. Technology Tell's Stephen Silver traces the parodies back to this lovely gem on March 22:

Follow-up to an earlier report on Marine Todd. Please share if you know a warrior pic.twitter.com/B2vDxDAznJ — Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) March 29, 2014

Apres Marine Todd, le deluge:

Where does it end? It doesn't. Ever. Make your own tales up in the comments. If not for Gawker, do it for your country. Because, you see, America, Marine Todd is not a bitch: Marine Todd is you.