After the war, it gets tiring. People ask you about the experience, asking you about the war, asking you how many enemies you killed. But there, you’re just silent. Too struck by survivor’s guilt, every night you wet your bed, asking yourself, "why did I come home?” of all the men that died—your brothers in arms with a common debt, of all of them; why were you among the unfortunate ones that lived to see the end of the war without any marks or battle scars. You can’t explain it. You even wet your bed most times out of fear. The doctor calls it a fancy name. He says it’s Enuresis. They say it is normal, and it happens to most of us who have seen combat. I don’t believe it. I feel something has been let loose in my body. It’s my way of atoning for my sins—for being alive and well while my brothers went and died.
We were all young and foolish and didn’t understand why or what we gave our lives for. Instead, we all wanted to make a difference. We wanted to prove a point, that we had balls and we were capable of being called Men. War is a terrible thing, and only the dead are saved. I’ve seen and done things that would haunt me for the rest of my life. At least I had my mind. I was sane. Other guys weren’t. A few weeks after we got back, many guys tried to kill themselves. Others lost their minds. I wouldn’t consider myself lucky because the memories of war and battle had terribly scarred my mind. I couldn’t even cut a bulb of onions for the first few years after I got back. I feared that I might use the knife to do something unforgiving to myself. If there was anything that drove me insane by everyone was when they asked the question, "what now?” I felt infuriated. Didn’t we already do enough? What more was expected of us? We gave everything, including our lives. What else were they expecting?
I stopped believing in humans the day I saw the horrors of what we do to each other under the guise of ideology. The first day I saw a dead body, I almost choked on my vomit. The veteran guys in the platoon laughed at me and told me I’d get used to it. I tried, but I never got used to it, including looking at the bodies of those I killed. There’s something about death. Something that always lingered on you after; a stench, maggot, or memory. You’re genuinely never free. I once saw a dying mother, her chest tore open, put her child’s mouth in her breast. She must've thought that even if she died, the least she could’ve done was give him a filled belly to survive a day or two without her. War taught me about how difficult it is to kill a human being.
I’ve seen all sorts of horrors and things to believe that there’s no good left in humanity if it’s not inhumane. We’ve got creative in killing each other that nothing else matters, but what I keep asking myself is, "for what?” It’s all silence. Then the moment we stopped killing ourselves, nature begins its killing. Sometimes it’s the rain. It’s either too much or the sun is too hot. Mosquitoes killed more men than shrapnel. Imagine going to war, not to be killed by bullets or bombs but from a bite of a mosquito. How do you even explain that? What will they write on your tombstone? Suppose it’s "Fought gallantly but died from malaria.” Does that even make any sense?
If nothing made sense, then there was only one thing that did, and it was Alcohol. Plenty of it. And there was only one place that I could get it, and it was at "Promise Bar.”
It is the "fought gallantly but died from malaria" for me😂😂. You dropped a lovely piece again🤗.
War is a terrible thing to experience. Even reading about it makes me feel somehow. This piece is 👌🏽