“It’s nothing like you think it is,” I said in an argumentative voice, “the only stories I’ve told you were from when we were off-duty.”I want to serve my country, who are you to tell me I can’t? You did.” He replied, with a tinge of immaturity.
“And I regret it every day of my life. I’m telling you Randy, you’re making the mistake of your lifetime. The military isn’t as honorable as people think it is.”
“Well, John, I’m joining the army anyways, it’s my life, and if I want to fight for my country I will.” He said, as he threw away my advice, even though he knew I was right.
He walked away from me, without any glance back.
***
The shotgun fires and he feels the recoil as he wakes up in a cold sweat. Five years and two tours of duty later.
Randy gets up, wide awake now, a troubled veteran, alone in this world. He walks out of his bedroom, and sits down, bottle in hand, at the table in the kitchen of his small apartment.
All of his pictures are gone, a futile attempt to forget his past, when he thought he had honor. What was once a young, charismatic, clean-shaven man geared for adventure, is now a grimy veteran with whiskey on his breath. His regret flows through him as easily as the whiskey runs down his throat. His windows are coated in grime; his neglect brings him the privacy he’s so used to.
His locks collect dust, as he leaves only when he has emptied his bottles, and even then, it’s only two blocks to the nearest store with liquor.
He serves no purpose anymore, simply a pathetic man, alone with his alcohol and his memories. He makes no attempt to live, a punishment for his crime against himself.
***
“Randy!” I called, as he paid the waitress and proceeded to leave the diner.
We had been sitting in a diner in our hometown, its streets filled with our childhood memories, our days when we were two young children, a pair of inseparable brothers.
The irony of it was that he had asked me. He had asked me for my opinion, and neglected it at the point of conflict.
“Wait.” I said as he opened the door.
“Just promise me one thing: Promise me that you’ll come back.”
A simple nod of his head, and he had walked out silently.
***
He walks to his cupboard, in search of another bottle, so he can sleep tonight. It hadn’t taken Randy long to discover that whiskey was the only thing that could get him through the night; it was also the only thing that could get him through the day. His answer for everything was to drown it out with more whiskey, his emotions, thoughts, memories, his guilt.
He’d drink until he’d black out, and if he awoke in the night, he had not had enough to drink.
He no longer thinks or feels, he just drinks it away, sitting at his kitchen table in his undecorated apartment. His walls are bare, decorated only with the cracks that age brings. Any pictures he had once covered the cracks with, simply remind him of times he’d just as soon forget.
***
I had seen active duty in Iraq at the start of the war. I had seen people die, and what for?
I was the only person in my squad that had survived the tour of duty. I had been assigned to a squad of soldiers just like me, convinced that it was honorable to fight for your country, to die for the supposed freedoms of America.
I was the one honoring the last wishes of my brothers in arms. I was the one who saw families torn apart when I delivered the personal effects of soldiers, whom had given their last words to their families, their husbands, wives, brothers sisters, parents, children.
I was the messenger.
Seeing my friends die, people I had loved was hard enough. To tell their loved ones of their deaths was worse. But it made me realize the destruction war brings. The lives, the people destroyed by it.
I realized the ugly truth of it. We were fighting for nothing, dying for nothing. What good was war, if all it brought us was death?
That was what convinced me.
I was once a patriot, but no longer would I believe the things I was told. America became nothing more than an idea, a goal. It became something to strive for, an imagined utopia.
The America that did still exist showed its true colors. They were colors that represented blood, death, poverty, crime, arrogance, and ignorance. The colors of soldiers sent flying in an explosion, their limbs all shooting in separate directions, their bodies ripped into fiery pieces, their camouflage uniforms burnt into their skin, their guns firing bullets due to the heat, aimed at everything and nothing.
***
Randy stands up on shaking legs, stumbling through his apartment, with his empty bottle in hand. He tosses it into a trash can, filled with other empty bottles, and heads for his small, cot-like bed in his room, as small as a closet. With no personal belongings, or anything, the room seems to be miles of empty space. He soon falls into a drunken slumber, his hazy mind confusing dreams and memories.
***
Randy stood on the stage, one of many men in uniforms, all privately hired, specifically for this event. He held his black gun across his arms in a military-like position, as the expression on his face remained blank. He was equipped with an earpiece and a radio, for the security team needed quick communication with each other. There was nothing separating him from the rest of his coworkers.
He stood looking over the crowd, with an absent look escaping from his eyes. One of many drones, paid to defend, to control, not to think. The crowd was a multitude of people - men, women, and children, all individuals. They watched with the threat of organization in their eyes, with the threat of unity – and the power that comes with it.
The speakers had begun to reveal their positions on every political issue. Their goals were to convince, but advertised as if they were merely trying to inform their people. They were competing with each other, each believing that their opinion was right, that their cause was the most important.
It became a game, where the orators became pitchers, their words were the baseballs. The audience was the batter. The concepts and ideas became the bases, and their persuasion was what determined how many bases were run. They would score purely by how well they were able to convince the crowd that they were right.
They didn’t care whether were actually right, whether they could have possibly been misinformed. They assumed they were right, and whether they really were or not was not the issue.
Randy continued to stand, as the crowd became angry, as if somehow, the orators had broken the rules. He knew from experience, people aren’t very easily persuaded. If they were, they wouldn’t start wars. The crowd’s reaction was that of the batter running up to the pitcher, and beating him down, leaving him bleeding on his precious pitcher’s mound, supposedly safely outside of the path.
They swarmed the stage, men climbing onto the stage, after the protesters had begun to induce a riot, to form a mob. Men threw stones and punches, some women joined them, but most hung back, appalled and scared by the scene. Mothers held their children back, as the security tried to break it up, first by using their own bodies as barriers, and when that failed they tried to fight back with their fists.
Randy was the first to fire. He fired a warning shot into the sky, and everyone heard the loud blast of a double barrel shotgun. The mob stopped for a moment, the weaker, less confident members running away. The more confident ones were staying and fighting. They were fighting both their enemies, and the sensible people who were trying to stop it.
Randy cocked his gun, and fired again. This time it was less of an alarm, until the commanding officer yelled into one of the microphones at the top of his lungs. His message was this: “If this does not stop, we will open fire. The governor has granted us permission to deal with a riot however we see fit.”
He had more to say, but a burly man had managed to climb his way onto the stage, and quickly threw a punch at him, hitting him right in the middle of the face. The force knocked the commander to the ground, and the man stood towering over him. He would have seemed more threatening if the commander had not been holding his own semi-automatic gun. It was loaded.
An itchy trigger finger has its own desires, after years of combat, it feels like nothing to pull a trigger and take a life. This time, it was not on foreign soil, however.
The commander fired at the man, the bullets flew out of the gun. Memories flooded back to all of the veterans there, the sound of a gun was too familiar, and it reminded them of their time in combat.
***
Randy held his gun up over the barricade, the black gun barely visible against the burn remnants of the wall he was crouched behind. They had burnt down a hostile town, which had been housing many of the Iraqis, who were fighting for their own freedom, just as America had once done.
He fired blindly, a technique that was taught to every soldier in basic combat training. He heard the bullets ricochet off rocks and metal, while others lodged themselves inside walls, and inside the rarely visible flesh of the enemies.
But they were not his enemies. To them, he may have been their enemy, simply because of the uniform he wore, but to Randy, they were not his enemies. They had not done anything to hurt him personally. Nor had he done anything but serve his country, as they were serving theirs.
He heard the cries of wounded soldiers, people he was hurting, but his choices were very limited. Kill or be killed. He fired again, in the directions of the cries, as an attempt to be merciful.
A sound came from behind him. It was the small clattering noise of something metal hitting the ground, hissing, ready to explode. Randy jumped over the burnt wall that was his only defense, and quickly jumped into an empty house.
The flames lit up the dusk sky, and for a moment, it seemed as if it were midday. A second explosion sounded, and it became brighter for a split second. The flames died, and the sun was blocked by a shadow temporarily. The camouflaged army jeep had turned mostly black, as it crashed into the dirt, still on fire. But still Randy fired, again and again. The sounds of the night were gunfire and explosions, if there was any wind whistling through trees or crickets chirping, they couldn’t be heard.
***
Just as gunfire had put him into a daze, it snapped him out of it. His comrades were firing openly, at anyone who dared to resist. He began to aim at the approaching target. His eyes and mind recognized the familiar figure, with blond hair ruffled like it had been throughout childhood. His hands and fingers however, did not. The blast of the gun forced me back and the blood soaked through my trademark leather jacket. The blood began to dye my brown, cracked jacket a dark, deep red.
I fell backwards; the sensation of the impact was enough to blast me down. The feeling of it was that of a gentle shove compared to the betrayal of a brother. My life passed in front of my eyes, most of it spent in the military, or working against their useless wars.
***
The gunfire started suddenly. We were a squad of brothers, walking through a city that would be described as a ghost town soon. We had already lost many of our brothers, and even though we gained new soldiers, they were never replaced. It was near the end of our enlistment. None of us wanted to be walking down the streets of this city. The women and children ran in fear, hiding in their homes. The men ran for their weapons. We were ordered to shoot anyone who got in our way.
I didn’t believe in unnecessary casualties; neither did anyone else. The men ran up to us with any weapons they could find, scared beyond belief for their families. The dusty roads that we walked on were not paved. We walked on the desert sand, which was compacted into dirt roads through the use they had gotten over the years. Our supposed opponents would run toward us, with hoes, shovels, brooms, or anything they could find as weapons.
Once they got close enough to us, they backed off. They realized that none of us had our guns out; they were holstered the entire time.
Our bearded faces were worn and showed signs of mercy. We had no desire to kill anymore; and they could see that in our eyes. We knew our mission, and none of us wanted to complete it, but at the same time, we had wanted to finish it as soon as we could. It was our very last mission, and none of us were re-enlisting.
As soon as we had effectively, and peacefully, eliminated one enemy, another had taken its place. The screams to my comrades of “look out!” was ineffective as the grenade landed in the middle of our group. A few of us had seen it flying towards us, and we had jumped, ducked, and rolled out of its range.
It split our forces in half. The four of us were left to take on a small organization of terrorists, and the outcome began to look bleak and hopeless.
As we entered the three-story building, which was remarkably tall for the area, we were greeted by gunfire. Two of us fell.
I was still standing, unharmed, and returned fire, climbing the stairs, enraged. My last remaining comrade was by my side, and had my back. We stormed through their defenses, our superior training helping us to avoid getting shot.
He kicked down the door to where our target was. He was dressed from head to foot in traditional Iraqi garb, and the only skin you could see was around his eyes. The fabric split ever so slightly, leading to his cold, apathetic, green eyes. They told us a story, a story of hardship, troubles, death, and in the midst of all that, patriotism.
He was serving his country, and so were we. We were both entitled to our own ways, but we had our orders. He was staring at my partner, whose eyes were fixed, unmoving. The target had had the same effect on him as a medusa. Before he could do anything, the target drew a pistol out of his robes, and fired twice. The gunshot sounded like death, a sound that was so familiar to my ears, but a sound that I knew I would never get used to.
My trigger finger had a mind of its own; it had instincts like an animal. It fired several rounds, emptying the clip. It killed him.
He was dead, and my final friend was dying. He was on the ground bleeding; his mouth uttered his final words to me, before he went limp. I knew I couldn’t save him.
***
My final thoughts were of all the times I had stood or knelt over my comrades, my brothers, watching soldiers bleed. Randy jumped off the stage, and knelt down, his tears streaming from his eyes, as he realized what he had done. He held my head as I attempted to sit up, my blood draining out of me, with no chance of survival, and little time left on this earth. My final words were of the same point as what I had said to him years ago, as he left that diner. “At least you came back.”
