Soldier

What do you think when someone says “soldier”? Survivor, protector, role-model, regal, strong, pure, righteous, good, hero. Well, we try. We fight for what we believe, for the ones we love, for the ones we don’t know, for those who suffer, for those who need us. Children want to be like us, to save peoples’ lives, to earn the respect of the people, and to live the life of a hero. But the life of a “hero” isn’t what people imagine. When you go into the army, you’re expecting to be handed a gun and told to help your comrades “out on the field”. No, you have to earn your way to that; so, you do everything possible to get promoted. You perfect the drills, you beat the training course faster than everyone else, you perfect a chosen weapon skill, and you never screw up. Finally, you get promoted. You’re thrilled; you get to use your skill to help others! For a while you’re content. Then, you start thinking about the people you kill. The men and women with families and children who will be told by army officials that their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers won’t be coming home, that they’ll never be coming home again. You start to think about the children that’ll never know their lost parent, the people that will starve because you killed the one who fed them.
The problem is you can’t stop thinking once you’ve started.  So with every person you kill, the hole in your being gets bigger and bigger until you can’t fill it with drinking anymore. You try other things to fill the hole with because you need to make the pain stop, to quiet the voices in your head. No one else can hear your silent screams, no one else knows the hell you live in, and they all ask if you’re ok, but you can’t give in to your own self-loathing so you shut it away and ignore the deep feeling of “what am I doing”. You continue to kill people, accept this time, you don’t feel guilt. You feel pleasure. You have the power and skill to dispatch people like civilians would swat a fly. You fill the hole in your soul with the satisfaction of ending an enemy’s life. You relish in the fact that you can snuff out a life like a candle. The, now miniscule, voice in your head occasionally manages to remind you that once you blow out that candle, you can’t re-light it, but you shove it deeper and deeper until you can’t feel anything anymore. People begin notice you. The more they notice you, the more they fear you. At first, you don’t understand why they look at you with such un-rivaled terror; but then, one day, you look up at your reflection in the mirror and instead of seeing the powerful man that could surpass god, you see what’s actually there: A monster. You see the dark circles under your cold, lifeless eyes and when you try to smile, all you can achieve is a mirthless grin of a man who embraced the monster within.
You finally see what everyone else sees and, like everyone else, you fear the man you’ve become. The man that has killed countless people with no remorse, the man that laughed at the suffering of others. The self-loathing comes back, but you see it differently now. It isn’t self-loathing, its self-realization. You look back on everything you’ve done and you feel the crushing pain of remorse and you remember the fear in the faces of the people whose last image was of your demented grin. You feel like your chest is caving in, like the gravity of what you’ve done is already condemning you, like you’ve killed millions of people without even touching them.