Soldier

Battlefield

We arrived at the battlefield, where my fellow comrade's bodies laid. They opened the car and threw me out. I could hear the sounds of air rifles, bullets piercing through brave soldiers as I stood helplessly, my heart was being punctured with innocent cries of pain. One of our great soldiers was heavily wounded; he was bleeding internally, the deathly bullet plundered deep through his lungs. You could hear him gasping for air, for life. He was drowning in his own thick gloopy blood. Blood poured mercilessly out of his deep wounded chest. The blood gushed out from his deformed mouth, his pupils started to fade with his determination to stay alive. As he took his last, final breath he fled from this world.

Suddenly, someone grabbed me and held a torrential pistol to my head. He was forcing me to betray my native country, repeatedly I refused and out of nowhere the man collapses. The pistol fell out of his grip. Blood was gushing out of his head. My eyes grew wide with fear. Was this what I was destined to become? A fellow comrade appears, he picks up the gun and hands it to me. I stumble backwards due to the brute force. "You'll need as much ammo as you can, follow me back to base."

War is hell.

As you venture further into hell the screams and shouts from nearby soldiers in pure agony gets progressively louder. I can still remember the fight some soldiers still had in their eyes. They knew they were on the brink of death yet they still fight. Each man had something different to fight for. Some men had little daughters or sons waiting for their daddy to pick them up and hug them one last time, others had wives or boyfriends they wanted to hold and tell them they love them one last time. Not all were able to survive. They died and selfishly took with them their loved one's happiness.

I was deployed quite late into the Afghanistan War. After the 9/11 attacks the United States invaded the country. When the war started a lot of people were being recruited so I knew my National Guard unit wouldn't be called up for a while.

I grew up in a very small town in Minnesota. By small, I mean no supermarkets and no stop lights. In the 2nd grade, my class wrote to soldiers who were in the Operation Desert Storm. My pen-pal and I quickly formed a friendship through our letters. When he returned home, he even came to my classroom to visit us. From that time on I became fascinated with the military and knew that was what I wanted to do.

I enlisted in the National Guard right after I turned 17. I knew that I wanted to be an Active Duty soldier but this was the quickest way for me to enlist in the military because I was still a junior in high school. I attended Basic Combat Training the summer between my junior and senior years. The following summer, I completed my Advanced Individual Training to be a field artillery cannon crew member. I started college the same month and I ended my advanced training. I still always knew that I would go Active Duty but had told my mum that I would give college a try. About 2 weeks after school began the attacks on 9/11 took place. 

I walked in to the recruiters that week and started the process of transferring over to serve with my Active Duty brothers. I saw the images on TV of soldiers preparing to head to war but I knew that it was slim that my National Guard unit would be called up. Finally, in January of 2002, I was headed over to Germany for my first duty assignment. My military occupational specialty dealt with howitzer cannons, however; the unit I was assigned to was a multiple launch rocket systems Brigade. Six months after arriving in Germany, I was reassigned to the historic 173rd Airborne Brigade out of Vicenza, Italy. I re-enlisted twice throughout my career and decided to change to the United States Army Rangers in 2003.

After my dishonorable discharge, I moved to Illinois. I didn't want to face people I knew. I didn't want to see my mother's eyes filled to the brim of disappointed tears.

My mother was born in October in California, she moved to a small town in Minnesota because she liked the idea of a small friendly town. Her skin is an autumnal gold and brown colour, her eyes are a livid green. She is a very expressive woman. She has a frugal nature, or perhaps it is out of her respect for my father who had to earn his living the hard way. I have gotten my looks from her. I am very grateful for that, she was a very attractive woman even in her late fifties.

My father died whilst I was fighting overseas. He was diagnosed with coronary heart disease in 2003. It was suspected he had this disease due to stress and stress eating. He was a very hard working man and he didn't want me to enlist into the military. He wanted me to take after him. After he died, my mother got very lonely and developed depression. She sent me letters every day when I was fighting and when I was discharged I wrote to her for the first time in a while telling her where I was moving to. She now sends me letters to that address every so often. Even though she probably doesn't like the idea of my discharge she wants, no, she needs someone to express her feelings to. The whole small friendly town ordeal did not work out for my mother. She was a very timid woman. My father was the extroverted one. He made friends the easiest. When he died, my mother didn't have any visitors or any letters because no one knew her well.

When I got situated in Illinois, I started to show signs of PTSD. A person may develop PTSD after he/she has been exposed to one or more traumatic events. The symptoms include; disturbing reoccurring flashbacks or numbing of memories of the event, and hyper arousal, this continues for more than a month after the traumatic event. My definition is, Psychological Training for Superior Discipline. In shrinker speak it means, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That D at the end sure sounds a lot like disease to me though.

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