CHAPTER 3: SMALL REVELATIONS

3. Devon

“Stetson!” Devon screamed at his comrade, “Watch out!”

A grenade was making a beeline in their direction. Seasoned warrior that he was, Stetson, who was thirty-four that year, reacted immediately, pushing Devon aside in the process. The grenade fell some twenty-odd feet away from them, exploding on impact. Despite them wearing protection plugs in their ears, some of the sound still managed to get through and make the ringing inside their skulls intense.

The danger was not over yet, so the two soldiers crawled over to the place that they deemed safe. They intended to take cover in a dilapidated building, which was almost within their reach.

“What are our snipers doing not shooting when they’re supposed to?” Stetson was mumbling under his breath as he was crawling on the ground beside Devon.

“Beats me,” Devon said, “but they’re supposed to be in this building, so once we’re clear, we can investigate.” Stetson grunted in agreement as they were approaching the building.

Dirt. Dirt was everywhere. All over his face and neck; all over his hands and under the nails, forming a thick crusted layer, encircling the nails in black. Had he not been known as a soldier, people would have mistaken him for a hard-working farmer. His palms were calloused and new callouses were forming on top of the existing ones. His skin was hard and thick and barely recognizable. The dirt had gone underneath his uniform as well. He couldn’t remember when he’d last changed his underwear, as he had not been able to get back to the camp for a while now, having been constantly under the rapid fire from the enemy. And the only thing that toned down the reek of his loins was the terrible smell of sweat that had accumulated on his skin. But being on constant alert, trying to preserve his life and the lives of the people in his unit, made him easily forget the state of his own body.

It was both funny and interesting how one could easily forget the bodily suffering they were undergoing, and how easily the mind would take over in times of great peril. Devon had experienced this many times in his life before, but under less threatening circumstances.

For example, that one exam period where he had been straining his body to stay awake and keep on studying. His heart would start skipping beats and going into tachycardia. His adrenaline would skyrocket to keep the vessel that was his body afloat as much as possible.

At such times, he had never asked himself—or rather, he had never dared to ask himself—in what consequences could such bodily strain result, and would just tell himself he had to keep on moving? He was doing that now, but out of the sheer desperate need to survive. He was able to cast everything aside and be ‘in the zone,’ completely concentrated on what his life currently represented: those few moments until he found cover.

Stetson was older than Devon and more experienced than him, but he was still just a trooper. He was clearly not ambitious enough to advance in ranks, yet he was eager to see the battlefield and experience it firsthand. He was a man without a family and, having nothing and no one else to lose, by his definition he was free to do whatever he pleased with his life. Whereas Devon lamented over and over incessantly the opportunity to get closer to people and feel that he was needed, Stetson was quick to dismiss all of that.

Stetson was probably the only person to have gotten close to Devon. The older man would often tell him that being egotistical sometimes was not such a bad thing and that what a person should think about first and foremost was himself and no one else. According to him, many people were unhappy precisely because of that—by making other people’s needs a priority over their own. All those selfless acts were preventing a person from doing whatever they wished with the lives that they had been given, whatever that may be—be it an accomplished artist or a beggar—as long as it was their own personal choice.

“And that is your mistake, lad,” Stetson would often tell him, “that you are blessed by having people who have no expectations of you, so you can do whatever, but you don’t see it! You don’t see the opportunity in that!”

Perhaps he had been right. But what Devon wanted was to be tied and to have people to return to. He wanted that kind of “freedom.”

Stetson had often talked about this as being “restricted,” but Devon truly wanted to amount to something in the eyes of his family since his choice in career had been poor, and he knew that the worst was still yet to come. He needed someone to take control of his own life and tell him what to do—something that many other people were desperately trying to avoid. Stetson was more progressive in thought than lots of other people, but their wishes were the same as his. That was not the case with Devon, though.

As soon as they crawled into the building, they were on their feet, although not fully standing as they were assessing their surroundings. In such places, it was very easy to be ambushed, so they needed to take as much precaution as they could. They were supposed to climb several flights of stairs to reach the top of the building and check on their snipers. The building was windowless, only having holes that once harbored windows in them. Through them, the beams of sunlight illuminated the dust particles that were dancing around, as if the war was not their concern in the least. They danced gracefully, slowly falling down onto the dark floor to join their brethren.

The men had to be careful and quiet because the building was now very acoustic, due to the lack of furniture and people.

This building had been lively once, were Devon’s thoughts. This building once served a purpose and people felt safe in it. There was laughter, there were fights, there was gossip…

People were going about their business, not knowing that their workplace (since it looked like an office building to Devon) would be demolished soon. All the efforts of the ones who had built it, and the ones who’d maintained it, would go up in flames in the tiniest fraction of a second, rendering all of it useless, and making it a perfect hideout for soldiers and snipers.

Devon sighed, trying to concentrate on the task at hand. He was trying not to see the charred walls, remnants of overthrown tables, and knocked over chairs.

As they were reaching the top level of the building, Devon saw his fallen comrade—one of the snipers Stetson and he were looking for—lying dead, shot straight through the head from behind, so he was leaning over the wall, and there was no doubt he would topple over sooner or later and fall. He was barely registering what he had just seen when a bullet missed his head by an inch. He quickly grabbed his rifle and shot the man who was standing on his left, but he did so too late; Stetson had been shot in the head just a moment earlier.

Later on, wary of his surroundings, he found the other sniper dead as well, in the same manner as the first one, unsuspecting. The sniper’s life ended and he had not been aware of it at all. He was gone, just like that. Little had this attacker, who had taken three lives under Devon’s command, known that the colonel was a great shot and that he didn’t stand a chance.

The rescue convoy came to collect his squad—from which he had been separated—Stetson’s lifeless body, and himself. He was trying to look unfazed, though deep in his thoughts he was realizing how a person’s life amounted to pretty much nothing in the end, no matter if they were cherished by their family or were ‘free’ as Stetson had used to put it. In the end, it didn’t matter—all that a person had done, good or bad; all that they said, brilliant or stupid; all that they had left behind—amounted to nothing. And the line between the two was surprisingly easy to cross. The purpose of life seemed inexistent.

Stetson had not been there to fight someone’s war, Devon reasoned, he had been there to die. The question was, why?

When the day finally ended, Devon was sitting alone on a rock a little ways away from his camp, silently crying for the first time in quite a while.

3. Jade

Upon receiving Ashley’s excited call that Devon had returned, she expected to see an equally excited man. But then she thought better about it; why would he be excited? She had always thought of him as someone detached from all people surrounding him. During their many talks before he’d gone back to Iraq, she had gotten the feeling that he was not in good relations with his family, mostly because nobody understood the implications of him going to a foreign country where he could possibly die.

All of them seemed to be glorifying the idea of going to war, honorably fighting for the country, when in fact, there was nothing glorious in killing and risking one’s own life. In her opinion, even though such soldiers might have defended the ideals or rights of their country, the job was still not pretty at all, by any means. Yet everybody seemed to see it as some sort of a spectacle—something that could make their loved ones into privileged members of society that everyone should look up to.

There was nothing good about war, justified or not. That was something people in Devon’s surroundings were not able to understand. They had probably waited for him at the airport expecting to see a hero whom they...