It didn't rain.
It was seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and it didn't rain. I remember wishing it would, just a drop. I dreamt of rain. I dreamt of rivers and oceans; I fantasised of that sweet dew that hung on the leaves in the cold mornings at home. But this wasn't home.
This was far from home.
There was a dryness that hung in the air. It made your tongue swell and your shirt cling, skin slick with sweat. The heat was nauseating. Constant. Until the harsh cold of night settled in. Surrounded by men, a family, but it was shatteringly lonely.
I think that now, but then, in the moment, it was a brotherhood. It was screaming and writhing and bleeding and it was brotherhood. An oblivion; lost, and so complete.
War takes good men and turns them into dogs.
It doesn't matter how well-trained you are; how skilled or smart or strong or brave – whether you live or die is all down to luck. If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, even a stray bullet could send you to your maker. I think it was the first time we were in actual conflict with the enemy that we realised that fact. A shared thought, a mass understanding; that we were all equals here. Laid out before God, putting our fates in the men around us and the enemy before us.
It's humbling, to stare in the face of the man you were sent to kill. A man you've never met before, with a life and a family you'll never know about. To stare in his eyes and know that you were trained to be here, that every second of your life before now had built to this moment – and here was someone taught to hate you in the same way you were bred to hate them. It was humbling to recognise that same fear and hatred and misplaced devotion in his eyes, despite culture and language and every other barrier placed between you and this stranger. His expression reflected in yours. This moment something he and I would share. Humbling to see the life flow out of him in a final shuddering breath. Did he know it would be his last?
We both knew, it could be.
And you can't help but look at him and think: that could have been me.
A man can't afford to think like that in such a situation. We are told to think 'it's him, or me'. We are told, and therefore we do. Bad men, good soldiers. We are taught to use our basic survival instincts for the better of ourselves, our men, our country.
We walk through another man's land, knowing that the things we're doing in the name of England or Ireland or America… these are things that at home, in the real world, would put our names in the papers. My face in the harsh black and white grain, murderer, serial killer, butcher, slaughterer of my fellow man, littered around me. The words, like the bodies. The media twisting me into a harsh, cold monster. How was I really any different? How am I really any different?
Why is it that when it's 'for my country', I'm doing you proud? Why are words like 'hero' attached to me and my brothers; but in the real world, I'm a vile, putrid being. Scum of the Earth. A plague.
If I kill for honour, I'm valiant. If I kill for money, I'm filth.
Butt of the gun against my cheek and shoulder, breathing in, breathing out; squeezing the trigger; another heart stops. The weight of every soul clawing at my back. Dark little thoughts starting to cluster in my mind, growing and breeding, letting darkness spread.
Tell me, where is darkness bred; in the heart or in the head? How is it created , how is it fed? With every man stricken dead? Under my wrathful fist, each body crushed because I am seeing red? Where is the fairness in that; why should I be burdened with the ability to judge these men for their sins? Because I was given a gun, I am the almighty?
Better for money, than for country. Better that I be selfish than supreme.
Better to be numb.
It takes a while, but eventually every soldier will numb or die trying. Some get used to it faster than others. It becomes a reaction, like catching a ball or just breathing. It's natural. Killer instinct, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the term. It's the reason it's so hard to come back to life, to walk down a street and realise that you don't need to look at everyone as if they're a potential target or a threat. Things like that dull, but never disappear. Not when you've felt the fear and the adrenaline from being in the middle of it all. Always feeling like someone's pointing a gun at your back. Never feeling safe. Not without the weight of that metal pressed against your flesh.
After that, you yearn for normality, for a haven, a home. Some comfort blanket, safety. Security. And yet somehow, parallel to that, you wish to be back there. In the heat. Without rain. With shouts and cries and whizzing bullets that come just a little too close. Everyday life is monotony. It's too quiet, too normal.
Only feeling alive when you take the life of another? What sort of existence is that?
Especially when every life you take is another riding on your back, on your soul.
War takes good men, gives them everything and before they realise it, everything is gone.
It wipes up everything you once were and leaves behind a shell, covered in scars and filled with regret.
I am not a man burdened with decision; I was once a man, now burdened with regret.