Stories, Thoughts and Snippets
Sometimes other units would stop and re-supply, maybe stay a night or two. I always wished I could go with them. I petitioned officers to swap out fatigued men with me. It never happened. They'd barely even let me fire a little target practice. Waste of ammunition. It was, but if I didn't feel the kick of a rifle every once in awhile I was going to start believing the damn thing was a toy. It might as well have been. There were a few guys like Damico and Wilson who couldn't believe how lucky they were. At first they tried to convince me of how lucky I was, when they realized they weren't going to be able to do that they tried to convince me to shut the fuck up and stop trying to ruin something that was good for everyone. After awhile they started to threaten me.
I figured that at least they were supporting my applications for transfers. I couldn't figure out why they didn't transfer me. I tried volunteering for every mission there was, hoping to impress the brass, or maybe even run into something interesting on an off chance. After awhile I realized that volunteering was just getting me more sweat.
I was going to spend the rest of my life being told how lucky I was that I never had a shot fired at me, how lucky I was that I didn't have to watch anyone die, and how lucky I was that I never had to kill anyone. Eventually I began to wonder if my life wouldn't have been better as a whole if I would have gotten just a week or two of real war and then a bullet to punctuate it. My wife used to suggest that hers certainly would have been. My father taught me never to hurt a woman, but that bitch just kept pushing on me and pushing on me, it would have got to anyone. I only had to hit her a couple of times before she stopped telling me how I ruined her life. I wasn't proud of it, but I had to do something. I had to do something and there was something I could do. That was the major difference between my marriage and the war. Other than that I suppose they accomplished about the same thing.