SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror

And so you get harder. You shove that idealism down into the dark, you turn the dials on passion down because you don’t want to draw the shooter’s aim. It casts you into a kind of darkness. A predatory darkness. In those shadows you change from someone defending the weak – the prey – to someone who is as much a predator as the enemy.

Your motives and justifications may be better, cleaner, but your methods are not. But while fighting monsters you risk becoming one. Nietzsche warned about that, too.

And yet…

And yet.

There is a line in the psychological sand that any person fears to cross, yet which pulls us toward it.

Loss.

Grief.

Call it what you want.

On this side of the line, you feel the full horror of a love lost. A friend, a brother in arms, a son or daughter. A lover. Someone who means the world to you. You will burn down heaven to protect them. You believe – truly believe – that you would march into hell to keep them safe. No matter what happens to you.

You take those risks because you believe that after all of the gun-smoke clears, and if you’re still alive, then you and the person you love will have a life together afterward. Both of you the same as you were before. You believe that even while the world and the war try to make you a monster.

But when the person you love is taken and the war goes on.

Damn.

That’s where the real monsters are made. When you have nothing left to love and the enemy still stands before you, grinning at your pain, feeding on your loss. In those moments, the grief can kill you. It can drive you to a final act of passion in which you throw everything away. You attack without skill or art, merely with fury. And you die without balancing any cosmic scales, without inflicting punishment.

Maybe you spend the rest of eternity in your own private hell, feeling your loss and realising your defeat.

Or…

Or you don’t give into the passion of hate.

Instead you let that hate grow cold, and in the secret dark places of your soul you crouch over that unsavory meal and feed on it. You become a monster dining on the manna of the pit. On cold, cold hate. Knowing that with each bite you are less of the person who once loved. You are less of the person who, had you and your love survived, would have reclaimed joy and innocence and optimism.

That version of you wouldn’t know this dark and rapacious thing.

But it is the monster that survives.

It’s the monster that can survive.

I loved twice in my life. Really loved.

The first time was Helen. My first love, when I was fourteen and the world was filled with light and magic. Four older teenage boys trapped us in a deserted field and taught us about darkness and their own brand of sorcery. They beat me nearly to death, and while I lay there, bleeding and almost dead, I saw what they did to Helen.

Her heart continued to beat after that, after hospitals and surgeries and counseling. But she was dead. Years later when I found her at her place, the empty bottle of drain cleaner lying where it had fallen from her hand, I felt the darkness begin to take root in the soil of my soul. Flowers of hate have blossomed since.

Then last year I fell in love again. A woman named Grace Courtland. A fellow soldier, a fellow warrior against real darkness. A woman who saved the world. The actual world.

And died doing it.

I held her as she left me. I breathed in her last breath as all of the heat left her through a hole an assassin’s bullet had punched into the world.

My friends and colleagues tell me that I’ve made a great recovery since then. That I’m my old self again. That I look happy.

Which is all the proof I’d ever need of that philosophic belief that we each exist in our own reality, each separated inside an envelope of a completely separate dream.

I will never be my old self again.

Can’t be. That ship has sailed and it hit an iceberg.

And happy?

Sure, I can laugh. So do hyenas, and it means about as much.

My enemies don’t think I’m a happy guy. When they look into my eyes they see the truth that my friends can’t see.

They see what I’ve really become.

I know this because I see the fear in their eyes when I kill them.

I used to be a nice man.

The world used to be a place of sunshine and magic.

Monsters, though, don’t thrive in the light.

-2-

My boss, Mr Church, called me into his office on a May Tuesday. It was one of those days that seem tailor-made for baseball, hotdogs and cold beer, and I was taking a half-day to see if the Orioles could earn their paychecks. I had on new jeans and an ancient team jersey, sneakers and a pair of Wayfarers up on my head.

As I entered the office, Church slid a file folder across the desk toward me. It was a blue folder with a red seal. It looked official.

I said, “No way. I have tickets for a double-header, and as far as all of our billions of dollars of intelligence surveillance equipment says, it’s a slow day for the bad guys.”

“Captain…”

“Get someone else.”