The Collection: Short Stories, Misfits, and One-shots

The Agency: The New Frontier

War creates and destroys, it wasn't a matter of philosophical discussion, but of honest to goodness truth.  Every person he had ever met in university seemed prone to debating this fact as a problem of fiction, forgetting or glancing over the irrefutable evidence that sat in front of them.  For them the war was a distant and costly thing, something that was there and yet not.  

But how could they know how close it was?  All they saw were the soldiers in their uniforms or the bulletproof vehicles and armed checkpoints.  It was a government still governed by military might and power with a future in what was hoped to be Democracy.  Military power was still largely the only way to stay alive, and yet things were changing for the better, at least on the surface. 

The war though had recently taken a new approach, one that didn't necessarily have to leave the borders of his friend's domestic and comfortable world.  Shadows had become a new and deadly currency for a new breed of soldier; a battleground of secrets, negotiations, and espionage, all within spitting distance of his partying friends.  To them he was the same boy who had partied and drank with more zeal than all of them combined, but they had also never questioned his absence over the last year or so.  They were just as happy with their group's image, whether he was there or not.

Sam smiled as one caught him staring, and raised his glass, a motion that received an equally enthusiastic smile, Vaughn taking a gulp of his own liquor with fervor.  What had changed in him?  What hadn't in them?  He wasn't opposed to a good drink, but something in all this was different, and it had nothing to do with his occupation, and perhaps everything to do with this war.