Disclaimer: Not mine, no infringement intended.
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Everyman's War
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There is a war behind his eyes. There is blood and the sound of choppers, and
he longs for the bitter taste of alcohol that could strip paint, not an olive
in sight. There is blood in his nose and on the back of his tongue, drying on
his wrists.
The people he used to know are a little intimidated. Always sardonic, now his
humour has an edge of hysteria that wasn't there before. He knows this. What
was fine and normal in the swamp with BJ or Trapper is not okay now. It's mania
or madness.
Sometimes he doesn't bathe, just to get back that grimy, sweaty sensation that
never left him there. His world was finite – hot, cold, alive, dead. He
couldn't do anything about hot and cold, and sometimes he couldn't do anything
about alive either.
Dead. He had let death roll over him until time became immeasurable, and he and
the corpses were playing poker with poison from the still and setting fire to
the chips on the table. His hands burned. The corpses leered. If he looked in
the mirror he would be dead too, but there's no time because he wakes up. He
always wakes up.
Home is where all your sanity is supposed to be waiting for you. Wrapped up in
Thanksgiving dinners and snow falling and sparkling Christmas trees and smiling
friends and family, and dear lord why wasn't it perfect? Why couldn't he get it
back?
He hadn't lost something in Korea, he'd brought something home. A parasite. A
leech that was sitting inside his brain and telling him that fireworks on the
fourth of July was gunfire or shells and get down, dammit, get down!
Wait for the choppers. If only Radar were here.
And he'd realise where he was pinning some blonde to the ground, some pretty
thing he might have thought was a nurse but really thought was Hotlips. And he'd
stand up and apologise and try to remember who he was, where he was, over the
droning in his ears.
Being revered as a war hero makes him spit – he wanted to show those socialites
who simper and fawn and who were never too tired to wash away the blood what
war really is. He's no hero. He made no difference. In an avalanche of the dead
and wounded, all he ever did was let the blood sluice to one side. Patch up
soldiers so they could go die at the front, and drink it all away.
In his mind, the death and the sex and the booze and the fear all roll into
that scabby little parasite clinging to the edge of his brain.
Sometimes he think he died there, but he can't be sure.
He eases into old age ungracefully, and the war behind his eyes dulls but never
fades. The exuberance of youth dies, and he is just as disillusioned as the day
he set foot back on American soil.
Soldiers are drafted, and the country's name is Vietnam, not Korea, but he
knows the fight will be the same, the agony, the stench and the blood, the very
futility of pitting one human against another.
When he closes his eyes at night, the war that plays has no name, no time or
date, no place on a map. It is just war, no matter who is fighting, and it
belongs to every man.
--fin