Just a Matter of Time

We were eager to go off to war. Mostly eager for Protecting Home and Country with God on Our Side and Kick Some Ass, why not? That is how it usually starts. Then you have your first mortar round, which was not that bad -- BTW. Boom! War is hell! Ha ha ha. What if I did get killed that day? Nah, then see your friends get shot -- a finger shot off say, or shot in the face, or shot in the groin & head -- or you see a few people get disemboweled on a rum tumm tummy day by high explosives. Laying dead on the roadside, sunny blood black in the dust with a dead goat and a few dead birds. ("They eat their own...", you said almost inaudibly about 300 or 400 times, keeping the mental tires on the concrete of your brain.) Later, you get that sentence out of your head by listening to the "Little Drummer Boy" -- as a joke going back to elementary school. One morning you wake up and turn around the points of the compass, messmates laughing. You know it so sure, you know it's nature now so purely, you will not speak it. It isn't a Great Adventure, this isn't really a War, but a Place where eventually you'll be Dead, too. And the Kicker of all Kickers -- Dead or Alive, you're coming outta this one Dead. And when you know that, what do you do? You write long emails, and you know for sure -- it is just a matter of time.