EVERYTHING PALES IN COMPARISON
.
Like gorging on food, an adrenaline appetite becomes lethal when overindulged, except in the theater of war it isn't just you you're destroying.
.
Sometimes you can't sleep, because you can't wait to go back out on that rapid. Like the blood moon rising, it flows through your veins until you are once again unstoppable. You are so done, everything pales in comparison and you know it. You know that without intervention it doesn't recede, the 'experience' is part of your DNA now, in the forefront of everything and everyone you love. It takes a nano second for the Band-Aid you keep applying to your gaping hole to come off. You're choking behind your desk. You need to be there ... in theater.
.
I listened intently to someone who served in the first Gulf War. Although he sits at a desk now, he dreams of theater. He doesn't realize his shoulders jerk and he catches his breath when he talks about it. I feel guilty like I've started something, made him stop what he was doing, get all glassy-eyed. I feel responsible for his 'nostalgia.' I don't know him well enough to participate in the dialog and I don't want to.
.
WAR ZONE DIARY on MSNBC shows a clip of a soldier who cannot contain his excitement. "It's been a good day," he says, "for killing insurgents." I think what he really means to say is, it's been a good day for killing, period.
.
You see, everything pales in comparison.
.
Its the rush of extermination of 'the other' expendable human beings, chinks, gooks, rag-heads, Shia, Sunni, insurgents, women, children, babies, pets; anything moving; bigger guns, tanks, bombs, war planes, nerve agents, torture, kill.
.
Nightmares and dreams aside, if 'warriors' can't get back to 'theater,' then America's pawns, walking, living, breathing, mother's sons, husbands, fathers, downloaded human cluster bombs are not sitting by the side of the road. They're strangers within family, strangers at work and play when
flashbacks come, from remorse? or more sinister, because everything pales in comparison.
