Of Pens and Swords

He doesn’t know whether or not to be mad or sad anymore. I said it was probably a mix of both.

That’s something that those who have never served can’t define either. Joe or Jill hippy, the ones who like to beat up soldiers verbally and in public, they’re just the ordinary person, no different. If they lose a loved one, a mother or father, brother or sister, a good friend that they feel are family, the loss can take years to overcome. They feel it everytime they see something that reminds them of that person.

For a soldier, it’s no different with the feelings. The difference is that instead of losing a family member every 10 years, we lose someone we consider a brother or sister every few months. It’s a fact. One never gets over being sad or mad, but eventually it just all blurs into life.

Here’s the difference though. Here’s why we can usually cope with it better than the average Joe out there; We have a reason. We don’t have to ask some mystical god why someone died, we don’t have to just assume that it was the will of a cruel god that teaches lessons by killing people. We know that we had a reason behind our death. We know that our friend, our brother, that was killed in action was doing what he could to both protect those that can’t do it for themselves, to hopefully give them a better life, and to also hopefully remove those people who wish to take that away from the people under our care. We can cope because we know that our friends and brothers died with a purpose. We don’t have to wonder why, or wonder about the senselessness of it all.

It doesn’t take the pain away, it doesn’t make us smile at their funerals. It does answer the questions though, allowing us to move on more quickly.

We have to move more quickly, because unfortunately the odds that it’s going to happen again to one of us are high, and we can’t be weighed down by the loss of our friends, else we’ll too become the casualty.

It doesn’t make it easier.