>>5542892https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb7Uu6Bz_wM> “You’re probably expecting to hear about something inspirational, that we did shit like dig wells, build schools, or make life better over there. And yeah, that happened sometimes. But most of the time it was just long stretches of boredom until the shooting started. And more often than not, it didn’t go the way I hoped.”Your voice begins to audibly crack at points, a by-product resulting from the sheer strength of your long-repressed emotions.
In a manner that indicates you’re a thousand miles away, you give Marina a terse synopsis of the worst day of your life; your ill-fated excursion into the Devil’s Corridor.
> “That was the day that my life changed forever; where my men were the sacrificial lambs at the altar of politics.”You spit the word like it it were the vilest of swears.
You can tell without a doubt that this has stopped being cathartic and has instead morphed into something more dangerous, but you can’t bring yourself to care about anything besides the swirling vortex of loss and hate bubbling deep within.
> “Sometimes I wonder, y’know? Maybe I didn’t make it out of that valley. Maybe I got crushed by a boulder, or I caught a stray round. And everything after is just the fleeting gasps of a fevered mind kicked into overdrive by its imminent demise.”A more rational part of you is practically screaming that you need to shut up and bury these feelings back in their hole.
Those frantic pleas do nothing to stem the flood of angry vitriol spewing from the bitterest recesses of your psyche.
> “But’s how it’s always been. Guys like me get fed the party line before getting shuffled into the meatgrinder. And for what? So that some warhawk shitheel that sat in the rear with the gear can improve his chances of re-election? They make the executive decision to send me thousands of miles away from home, and then tie my hands behind my back so that nothing actually gets done. In one breath, they’ll wax poetic about how important the war is to our national security. And in the next, they’ll justify raking us over the coals to even-out the bottom line.”The bone-deep weariness ignites and becomes a righteous inferno. The sheer injustice of it all burns through your veins like lava as your voice begins to change. Before, your voice was packed tightly with emotion, the words of a man barely capable of forcing them out.
But now, there’s a chilling detachment between the ironclad force of your words and the unnatural tranquility of your delivery.
> “Win or lose, they don’t care. It’s not their son getting shipped back home in a pine box, it’s not their family that gets torn into pieces, it’s not their children who cry themselves to sleep because they’ll never see their father again. If you’re lucky, they’ll erect a memorial or two and then move on to the next conflict.” 