Honor

CATEGORY

just different

I’m troubled for I struggle with the reasons why I’m here choking gulps of dust filled air down while directed by high-back chaired clowns.Enforcing policies my politics don’t even agree with, and sometimes committing atrocities I believe are needless.

Exhausted, my nights spent sleepless wrestling with this P-T-S-D sh!t. Always questioning “why” in the back of my head. Wishing I could just rub my eyes and erase the sight of the dead friends and comrades who could just as easily been me if I went left instead of right and got ripped apart by an I-E-D.

Y’all don’t understand the toll my duty takes upon my soul. One hundred and ten degrees in the shade but I still feel the cold when I’m out on patrol. Chilled to the bone by the frigid glare of eyes that follow me contemptuously because they don’t want me here. I sympathize with their resentful cries, but I can’t let ‘em know I care, if I want to survive these challenges that I’m facing.

Don’t ever question my love for my nation! I fight shoulder to shoulder in Humvees with great men who signed on the line for a free education thinking the risk of war was remote! We all lost that coin toss, but not our hopes for a better tomorrow – praying we’re not living on valuable time borrowed and coming due today. That solemn thought can burrow into your soul and move even atheists to pray. So don’t get it twisted, although I enlisted to fight for your rights and our national interests, I do this more to secure the lives of those on this tour with me, because we’d all rather make it home alive and whole than make history.

We do what we do so that you don’t have to. So save me your platitudes and your insincere gratitude. Thank me for my service with good healthcare and good jobs, and therapy to aid in managing my deeply traumatic scars. Support the widow(er)s and children of these brave women and men. Honor me by never sending me to unjust war again.

- HymnAgen

(We ask waaaayy too much of our warriors...thank you)