Fortunes Of War
There wasn’t much left of the small town after the shelling it took. The big guns laid down a wall of destruction that
finally caused the village itself to collapse under it’s weight. Then in we came; the infantry creeping along beside building high tanks to complete the devastation of what remained.
As horrible as it all was, we all knew just how necessary it was too. There was no sense at all to doing the job half way. I saw with my own eyes what happened when we withdrew too early, allowing the enemy to return, to occupy again. The citizens didn’t have a chance to recover, not much chance at all. The enemy usually wiped them out most willing to assume their loyalties were with our side and that they were all members of the underground that caused their route and defeat. So off they went to work camps, death camps actually, that’s if they weren’t shot on the spot; no excuses needed like, traitor, spy or whatever.
Upon entering the village the first thing you noticed was the blunted smell of burning flesh. Some say it smelled like a ham baking. The other odor, and you don’t often hear about this, is the waste that is eliminated from a body when death takes over. The bladder and sphincter muscles relax, let go and sorry but, all the crap and urine run freely. It’s really a mess. Really a shame. The battle ground is littered with death and it’s disgusting remains. So much for the glory of victory, the fortunes of war. It’s not the movies that’s for sure.
I was one of the “lucky” ones. I made it home. I escaped death for a while longer and left the field of battle, the field of carnage, under my own power. The important thing I guess was that I left. Many others didn’t. They remained; even though their bodies, what was left of them, were removed, a good part of their blood, their life force seeped into the ground to wait and wait for the next battle which would surely come. They always did.
I left, then, I wept.
When Synapses Go Bad 
The horrors of war!
And we keep doing it!
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