Suicide Lane Cafe

and so it goes on

I used to know their names. 

Four, five, six of them, hiding, ducking, shooting - 

Shit shit motherfucker's aiming for us shit why won't he die already? Gotta get down shit shit shit take cover why are you still alive how are you still running please stop stop stop shooting at us. Oh fuck did he just get shot? Oh fuck he's not moving dude please get up get up get up

Get up! 

Their names are blurred now, a kaleidoscope of nightmarish faces and voices swirling and dissolving and haunting. Five dead in Afghanistan, six dead when a helo crashed, two dead from an IED. So many friends so many so many they won't stop asking me why

why

why 

Why did I leave them? 

Why am I alive? 

Why aren't they? 

The war on terror, they called it. 

It's easy for them, isn't it? Ruling paper kingdoms moving paper armies across paper theatres killing paper enemies. But sometimes the division grows a little too small and the files grow faces and names and hopes and dreams and ambitions and fears. The names have families as well as dossiers, and sad little human motives to explain their sad little human anger at make-believe sins. 

The war on terror.

I remember only gunshots and hunger and weeks of boredom interpersed with bombs and snipers and friends going home in lifesized boxes. I remember the stench of burning tyres and the screams of a helicopter going down. 

I remember the face of the kid I killed, a twelve year old, running towards me with an AK in his tiny arms. Rules of Engagement said it was okay to kill him, he was going to shoot me, it was kill or be killed, that it didn't matter his father had died two years ago because we'd killed him, that from birth he'd been told we killed his family it was our fault don't you want to make your baba proud don't you want vengeance - 

So when you see me

when you see a combat vet

please

don't ask

have you killed anyone?

and get offended when we don't answer. Because it's not that we don't remember - 

it's that we remember all too well.