Let me paint you a picture, a dark yet vivid one, of what war is like. Close your eyes and imagine a smoke filled sky, a helicopter buzzes above you and its rotor blades let sunlight through to your face intermittently. You can feel the glow of the sun through your closed eyelids. You open them and look at your friend’s greasy, dirty face and right into his dark black pupils. What you see in them is what you two have been through together; through thin and thinner. There’s the imprint of a raging fire in his eyes, the napalm that burned his heart and scorched his soul – a metaphor for the searing pain of war.
The pain of seeing friends, family, and even strangers suffer before his eyes. The acid of hate and revenge that dissolved his hope for humanity. The death and carnage and hurt that he’s fighting to stop yet he has no grasp over it. The conflict within him of using violence as a means to end violence. With fighting comes death, and with death comes vengeance and the propagation of war. Battling both the enemy and the conflict within himself, he either dies in war or lives to suffer the consequences of it. Then he wonders what he has to gain: nothing, but a mind void of life and a bare soul as if it was poisoned by Agent Orange.
You too, are torn between your cause and your country’s cause – if there’s a cause at all. Are you fighting for freedom in a fight with means that deprives others of their right to life and freedom to live in peace? Are you fighting for a superior ideology that justifies its expansion through violent means? Are you fighting to retaliate because you have been a victim yourself? Or are you simply fighting for the men next to you to stay alive in a confusing and tumultuous war? You don’t know, you really don’t know –
While all this is going through your head you’re foraging through the thick of the battle getting lost in the smoke of war. Nobody in their right mind wants to die, so everyone tries to stay hidden while searching for the enemy. As a result, most of your time spent on patrol is just hiking around the jungle in silence. On occasion, a sniper round hits someone or a landmine goes off, but those that die never knew what hit them. They’ll get a full military burial, while you know it’s just collateral damage.
If you’re lucky, you’ll sometimes get to kill someone else. You spot something moving between the branches in the distance. You pick up your rife, aim, and as you pull the trigger your mind goes blank; all you’re thinking of is if you can kill him before he kills you. Bang! The blast of a single gunshot echoes in your ear. Thud! The target falls dead on the ground. You walk up to the lifeless body and see him lying in a pool of his own blood, his olive green shirt soaked to a shade of scarlet. You take his watch, rummage though his pockets to try and find enemy intel, but fail to gather anything useful.
Instead, through the course of emptying his pockets you find a set of identification papers, a picture of his wife and two children, and a letter from his parents. You stare at his opaque eyes, that void in your mind when you pulled the trigger is now filled by a moral dilemma. He’s just like you, somebody’s husband, somebody’s father, somebody’s son, somebody’s friend. There’s no time to stop and think though, you have to move on. You carefully walk around the body and report back to your fireteam to continue the patrol.
You’re tired, but you keep going, only four more hours till a truck picks you up and takes you back to base. Then suddenly, a forceful blast goes off on your left hand side, your ears ring in the deafening blow, and you feel an acute pain in your left shoulder – at least you can still feel it. You look to your left to see that your mate with the greasy, dirty face is lying motionless in the mud. His traumatized, bloodshot eyes are lifeless and remain open in shock.
His legs have been dismembered and his arms are mangled in the carnage. You’ve been around long enough to know that you can’t sow legs back on or use adrenaline shots to being people back to life. Your shoulder hurts, it’s nothing you can’t handle, but it doesn’t hurt as much as the pain in your heart. Still, you decide to give yourself a shot of morphine, not to get away from the pain, but to get away from reality. The sergeant calls a helicopter for evacuation as you clean up the blood that is trickling down your arm.
Yes, your patrol ends four hours early, but at what cost? The helicopter buzzes as it lands to pick you up and you’re given a week’s leave to go home for your injuries. You get to fly home in a jumpsuit while your mate flies in a coffin – or parts of him at least. Poor soul can’t even have an open burial. When you meet his parents you don’t know what to say; why was it him and not you that died? Sometimes, you wish you were the one that died just to get away from it all – but still, one week later, you keep on fighting – waiting for your turn to die.
