When Heroes Cry

There’s one in every bunch. They jokester who lines up the mood at the right time. He’s a little older than others, and a little more confident, simply because he’s a little older. And maybe a little smarter.

But nobody should believe he’s a goofball, or a prankster and nothing more or less. Because when hell breaks loose all around you and you feel the bullets fly by your ear, that jokester might surprise you. Maybe even scare the hell out of you, because guys like that end up earning the call handle “Spooky…”

It’s been said that the battle field is the most honest place on earth. I can truly attest to that. I’ve visited there a few times. I’ve even made a friend there. An honest to goodness true friend.

I’ve seen him dodge bullets just to bring me extra magazines. Just like in the movies. It was awesome. I didn’t know if I should have thanked him or yelled at him for taking the risk.

One day, I had to go to my best friend’s funeral. A man who could dodge bullets. But he couldn’t dodge a drunk driver.

Rest in peace, my friend.

We’re not soldiers, really. But we do soldier stuff, sometimes more, sometimes less. Especially the stuff regular “short-haired” guys can’t do.

So we look different, yeah, we have beards, long hair, different gear and toys. We’re here because the regular guys are short handed or most of the time, their hands are tied so they can’t do the stuff that we can do.

So we come in to help out, and we help each other most of the time. It’s good that we help each other because some of the regular boys want to become one of us when they get out. They just don’t know it yet.

Because once you learn to live by the gun, there’s little else to live by.

We’ve been out here in the bug infested jungle for three days now. Not moving at all. We’ve been waiting for our objective to enter the view of my scope the whole time. At last, he’s in my crosshairs. We whisper into our radios for permission to fire. “Negative” we received. “Stand-by”, we also received.

For three days and nights we’ve been waiting here for this guy to show his face in my scope. We got bitten by a thousand bugs and hallucinating and imagining shit that’s not there. I promised myself when I get back, I’m going to stuff myself with donuts and cake and drink all the carbonated drinks I can. And most of all, use a sit down toilet.

My objective moves in and out of my line of sight. I’m ready. My breathing is synchro’d, my finger is barely touching the trigger. Just waiting for the word.

Instead, we get, “Negative, negative. Do not fire. You are not, not, I repeat, not cleared to fire”. “Hold your position until relieved. How, copy?”

“…we roger that.”

I ask myself, and why did I sign up for this?

We get paged into the debriefing room. They tell us we’re going on a job. But first, we all have to train for it.

Cool, we think. It must be heavy.

We start to train, hard.

It starts to lag on.

We get new intel, change in tactics.

We retrain, start all over.

It’s cool, it happens.

Training continues, and continues.

We keep training.

New intel.

Change in tactics, again.

Then it’s cancelled.

Then it’s back on.

We keep training.

We’re tired now.

We’re on the edge.

We start making stupid mistakes.

We start pushing and shoving.

We break up a fight.

We’re frazzled

We regroup, we’re focused again.

We’re ready to go, we’re pros, we’re big boys.

Our CO comes in and addresses us. “Gentlemen, you can all go home. The mission has been scrubbed.