War Crimes

War Crimes

Mark Coleman

  They’re going to take you to war. Remove your arms so you can never hold your children again. Reaching out with phantom limbs. Trying so hard to touch a future that doesn’t exist for you. 

  You’ll speak to friends who are not there. They left their brains on the battlefield. Letters to girlfriends back home soaked in blood from their head wounds.

  You’re going to spend your days at the VA hospital. Spend your every waking hour reliving atrocities they forced you to commit. Some of the soldiers wouldn’t stop shooting civilians. Some of the soldiers tried to stop them. You were one of those soldiers.

  Broken, you’ll wake up drenched in sweat. Weep uncontrollably. Board buses by the wheelchair ramp. The street will become your home. People will scream at you to get a job. Throw change at your face. Others will thank you for service you did not want.

  There will be nothing other than nightmares. Horrible terrors. Your wife will hold your shaking body. Trying to comfort you. Trying to understand.

  Eventually, she won’t be able to take it and will leave you. Take the kids to her parents. In-laws who once beamed at you in your uniform. She did too. Thought it was sexy. Your lovemaking had never been more passionate.

  You will cry countless tears into the pillow of an empty bed. That’s before you roll up to soup kitchen counters for bowls that will not fill you. Accompanied by those who unsuccessfully enrolled to escape homelessness. Some will also be in wheelchairs. Or on crutches. Wearing eyepatches. Full of shrapnel. Tortured by untreated PTSD.

  It will become too much. You will become a botched suicide. End up in crisis centers. Stays that will seem like vacations. Other than the fact you can’t smoke. But they have Nicorette and the food’s good. You will dread the day you’re released back to your sleeping bag in the park.

  Heroin will become your best friend. Your drinking will no longer be the carefree, joyful drinking of youth. They’ll throw flea circus masks on your problems. But it’s better than nothing at all.

  You will feel like you’re falling night after night. Vertigo will get its awful claws into you and not let go. Everyone will abandon you. Make you feel small. Like nothing. A piece of dirt. 

  You won’t even be able to work up the energy to be angry. To scream out in rage at what they had done to you. You’ll just accept it as your lot, and try to sleep through the freezing winter nights. Nights that never end. Nights that swallow you whole. That will fill you with their inescapable darkness.