Happening Truth
Entering the war was a tough decision. My peers pressured me into it. During the war, a lot of time was spent hanging around with my fellow soldiers, playing card games. Anything we could do to keep ourselves occupied. It was actually a very rare occurrence that we would use any of our weapons or actually see anyone from the other army. We never really knew the true meaning of war. Only one person in the entire platoon killed anybody. It was completely accidental. The poor guy was just a casualty of the war. Just wondering around one night. Some may say he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Story Truth
Entering the war was a tough decision that I had to make, but I knew that I had to do what was right for my country. I remember my friends telling me that I had to go. It was either the war or jail. Or, how I looked at it: I could be brave or I could be a coward. I considered running away, but I didn’t want to be “that guy”. You know, the guy that the town is talking about. I don’t want to be the laughingstock of the town. It seemed to be an easier option to just go and deal with it.
Throughout the entire war, we spent a lot of time on patrols keeping militants away from our camp. Everyone had to keep focused. Anything could happen at any time. Everyone in the platoon has their own stories about something that has happened to them. This is mine. We were doing a patrol one night. Next thing I knew, some armed guy runs up to us. He starts firing his weapon all around our patrol. We all drop to the ground. At that instant, I loaded a single round into my rifle. I only had one shot with my bolt-action rifle without having to reload. Making sure to take careful aim, I lined up the shot, and then pulled the trigger.
That’s all I remember from that night. I knew I had just killed the guy. It flashed back through my mind over and over again. What had I just done? I had taken the life of another person. I knew, however, that in the heat of battle, what I did was completely necessary to protect the rest of my platoon. I guess it was just luck.
The next day I went back to look at what I had done. I looked at the guy I had killed. It was just a kid. This made me feel even more ashamed of what I had done.
“He had a gun, what else could you have done?” The lieutenant would tell me.
“But he was young enough to be my son…”
“What you did saved us all” He would tell me
“ I guess so”
Then he would say “Lets just go sit down and get a drink…”
We would spend the rest of the night talking about how I saved the entire platoon; about how we all got lucky that none of our guys got killed in the firefight.
“Good thing that guy has bad aim” the lieutenant would say
We could joke about it all we want, but the truth is, that night could have gone a lot worse than it did. Through the spray of bullets he sent towards out platoon, if any of the rounds hit one of my guys, the night wouldn’t have ended with a laugh.
“Just glad we didn’t have to bury one of our soldiers tonight” the guys would sit around the table, joking, laughing
I didn’t think anything was funny about this. They could joke all they want, but it started to get to me.
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