War is the state of perpetual night. It is a triumph for the demons... the darkness that abides deep within men's souls. It has been the realm of the Night Gods since the beginning of time. It was they that directed Cain's hand as he slew his brother Abel. It was they, not Helen, that launched a thousand ships against Troy. They danced with glee at the Crucifixion of our Lord and revelled in the persecution of the Martyrs. So it has been and so it shall ever be.
When it became my time to go to war, I learned a very important truth... good people come home in flag-draped boxes. People who learn to embrace the darkness come home. I don't mean that the darkness becomes everything...only that while in combat it becomes a useful tool, something temporary. This, of course, is not the purview of the demons- they seek only to possess. In the darkness of my soul they would come to me, without making me aware of their presence. War, you see, is not about winning or losing- that realm belongs to politicians- it's about staying alive at any cost. I became the night and the night became me.
Young men become old, you can see it in their eyes... witnesses to the triumphs of the Night Gods. After seeing the things that no man should see, day after day, erodes the soul. Numbness sets in replacing empathy. Tragedy becomes commonplace. We all had, and many still have, the eyes of the dead. And the Night Gods rejoiced at our horror. You could almost see them in the night, dancing among the trees awaiting the next day's catch, like perverted fishermen adrift on a sea of gore and despair. Yes, you could almost see their black eyes glistening with delight in the fires of every burning corpse...the stench of burning flesh the perfume in their nostrils. How they fed on the despair.
There were queues of people from burned out villages along the roads, soot covered faces, streaked with tears over loved ones lost to the carnage. Their meager belongings on their backs, or carried on their heads. Babies and children, witnesses to bloated corpses lying in the roadside ditches. Babies seeing things no man should ever see. We drove by with faces of stone....like the demons themselves in this carnival of horror. There was something eerily surreal about it...as though it wasn't really there. It couldn't be, it was too terrifying, yet real it was. It was almost like a landscape from Hell.
The horror to which we returned was almost worse than the one from which we had just escaped. Nobody wanted us here at home...The land of the free and the home of the brave. It seemed like light would never penetrate the blackness that had come to pervade my soul. The Night Gods were pleased... they wanted me. I still had no idea, I'm not certain that I do now. All I wanted was to forget. To forget the horrors, the nightmare that had been my life for over two years. I was already dead, yet somehow still alive. Adrift in a reality that wasn't real. I got drunk.