May 15, 2024
COURAGE
(I wrote this years ago )
I sometimes go deep in my mind remembering one day how I felt riding in a chopper with men who had just died in battle. This one soldier’s head was turned in my direction, and I could see into his eyes. I couldn’t stop staring and thinking about his parents and or wife. They had no idea that he had just been killed. They could be sitting at the supper table praying for the young man, who is gone. The thought this could be me at some time, stacked on the floor of a chopper headed to eternity. As an 18-year-old man, death became something I wasn’t afraid of, which frightened me. In some feelings, death stopped the fear. This man had no more fear, and I realized that I was crying inside, not for myself but for a man I didn’t even know. I wiped my eyes and told myself I was weak; this is war, and men die. It seems as if I am trying to lie to myself. My thoughts seem to all come together as we land on top; I help to unload the brave men onto stretchers of death when the man I had been looking at before was again facing me. I lost all control, and my tears were now flowing without end. The men on the pad believed it was a dear friend of mine, and all tried to console me, not knowing he was just a man. Courage lives and dies in each man.
The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.