7065 words
War without End
By
Joseph Grant
Every Fourth of July, the war would come back to him. It came back to him in sniping bursts of firecrackers, echoes of long ago battles. While others were out enjoying the sunshine camping, at the beach or a family barbeque, he could not.
For night would descend cruelly upon his mind, a blackened sky without stars or moonlight and all around him and all above him would explode inside his head, erupting in a tide of blood red, ghostly white and bruised blue.
When all would finally grow still beneath his alley window, the lingering tinge of trace gunpowder would still be there, brought in by a gentle breeze.
He despised the view from his bedroom window. It looked out onto the alley, green garbage dumpster and his neighbor’s bedroom window. Windows, he thought, should look out onto a view, not in on him.
He was not as fortunate as most, he thought, for he had survived the war. Rather, he had survived the battles that made up his war, for no one ever truly survives a war. Inconceivably, he made it through the entire war without so much as a scratch. His Navy buddies said he was lucky, blessed even. When it was all over, however, he found his mind had been a latent casualty of the war that waged around him.
Each day of peace he survived, the more the war killed him inside. The question of why he had survived and the others had not tore him up internally. He did not consider himself lucky at all. He wished there was a war he could go to now.
War was what Stonewall Jackson said before he had been killed by his own troops and what every soldier said before or since; war was man’s version of Hell on earth. All great men made that transition of going to Hell and back, Cochise, Ikkaosai, Lee, Sherman, Cornwallis & Davis were the names that came to his mind when he thought of great, fearless leaders.
Many famous men had been tested under fire for better or worse. From Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Washington, Arnold, Patton, Ike, Tojo, Hitler, MacArthur and all the way back to Sun Tsu again. It was what they had learned and had done with their existence thereafter that defined them as heroic, tragic or damned. Hemingway had done it too and look where that got him. Shotgun lobotomy.
Conversely, the war had taught him how to survive. It was something he had accomplished in the most meager of existences. As a former Navy diver, he had no skills and the underwater salvage company he owned had gone bust two years before and that he had not yet sold off was gathering rust in a storage shack at the Navy Yard across town. Whereas the underwater salvage business had sustained him for a number of years, his disability check and veteran’s pay were the only reason nowadays he could keep his head above that same water.
“Charles Fetter.” He heard his name called by the clerk at the Administration Desk of the Veteran’s Administration.
Charles stood and straightened his shirt and walked dejectedly over to the morbidly obese woman sitting at the circular counter.
“I’m Charles Fetter.”
“You have to fill out the correct form for disbursement of savings. Last time you filled out Form K, you should have filled out Form G.”
“What?” Fetter asked, dumbfounded.
“I said…oh god….” The obese woman muttered under her breath. “What you need to do is fill out Form G. You filled out Form K. You filled out the wrong form.” She spoke down to him as a child.
