Stories, Thoughts and Snippets
I wasn't like those fuck-ups. I wasn't drafted, I volunteered, same as my father had when he was my age. I wasn't afraid to do what my country needed me to do, and I didn't want to die here, but if I had to I was going to do it like a man. All I'd done since I'd been here was dig holes and stare at a hillside that no one was ever coming up. I'd applied for a transfer three times, and considering how much most of the other guys hated me I was surprised that it hadn't been granted yet. I didn't give a shit if they hated me. I hated them back, there wasn't a handful of guys in my unit that I would actually want to be by my side in a fight.
All I had to do in this country was sweat. Sweat and swat bugs and exercise, and not do what I had come here to do. I wouldn't give a shit about sweating if it were getting me somewhere. It didn't matter how much I sweat. One thing Damico and Wilson were right about was that the lieutenant was a fucking prick. He'd have us fill sandbags half the fucking day and dig foxholes the other half. Every day if he could. We'd fortified that hill to the point that we had more fortifications than we had men. We couldn't put even one man in every strong point on the hill. I don't know how I got stuck on this fucking hill, and every report that I filed got less response than the last one.
I think I hated being on that hill even more than guys like Wilson and Damico, who wanted nothing more than to just get back home. They hated the army for imposing on their pointless little lives, but I was starting to hate the army for being so fucking ineffectual. I had been raised on the war stories of my father, of brotherhood and struggle and a fighting will. This army had no will to fight. This army didn't believe in what it was doing, and I think most of it didn't even know what it was doing. It was impossible to pick out the cowards from the lazy, the weak from those that just didn't care.