Short, Short Story (Other) – VA 2017
There was once a soldier returning to his homeland. The war he just left was one they shouldn’t have waged. Suspicious as he was of this, and his comrades-in-arms were as well, confirmation only came too late. Trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and untold injuries on all sides directed at the wrong target(s). It’s a heavy burden to place on men, and women, now broken well beyond their years. Even worse was the welcome that awaited them.
They returned to a land wherein a vocal segment of the population wanted to, and did, repress women. They just left a place where their enemy was demonized for their treatment of women! They returned to a land wherein equal rights to their fellow citizens was being resisted tooth-and-nail simply due to a sexual-orientation or a gender identity. What was it they were fighting for? Was it actually oil and a father’s legacy?
These warriors distributed humanitarian rations, blankets, and medicine to those less fortunate. They returned to a rich land where the moneyed interests get richer but somewhere between one-fifth and one-fourth of all children go to bed hungry. These veterans didn’t always have clear answers to what they were doing, and what it was for, but it sure as hell wasn’t to come home to see their kind on the streets homeless! Oligopolies squeeze us for all they can, line the pockets of the powers that be, and the disparities get worse with each passing quarter. Is it any wonder veterans kill themselves in record numbers?
Each of these men and women are taught to ‘never leave a (wo)man behind!’ What do they find when they come home from the latest overseas fight? Precisely this! We are being left behind: In healthcare, in education, in our crumbling infrastructure, in our investments into ourselves! It is the veteran who understands the power of teamwork more than most, if not everyone else. People make people happy, the veteran knows this dearly. The veteran has given and received loss on scales no one else can truly comprehend.
This story is my story, the story of an OIF/OEF Veteran. I came home from the wrong war to find the greater war is here at home. A greatly divided country so focused on the trivial, the tragic passes us by. As a young man, I never imaged that all the real monsters in the real world would be us and so many of them are here at home. As a young soldier, I never imagined that the longer fight would be here, and I would be estranged in the place for which I almost died.