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Carolyn Hileman | July 5, 2009
America.
Carolyn Hileman
The bombs roaring over head, mortar fire all around, dug in deep behind enemy lines, your best friend’s lifeless body lying next to you and his blood slowly trickling its way over to you. It would almost seem like the fireworks you saw as a child if it were not for the incessant screams of the men who were being hit, finally the sounds cease and all you are left with is the daunting task of burying your dead, at last you have a chance to sleep but each time you close your eyes you see that sudden flash of light and the shadow of a person running towards you and the shadow pulses backwards and falls forward as you reach out to try and save him, so you open your eyes and cautiously look around, it has to be here, somewhere it has to be here, you listen silently till you can hear it flapping in the wind and you know the flag is still there.
You have to have a reason to do this or you could never keep going and sometimes even that reason does not seem enough. You have to have something to fight for, something to push you forward when all you want to do is lay down and die. You do not just wake up one day and decide you are going to give up your life, your luxury for the wonderful experience of sleeping in dirt or mud, eating rations you wouldn’t feed your dog, and watching the man you trained next to die before your eyes, no, there has to be a reason a purpose for all of this. That purpose is back at home on that elm lined street, where the houses pretty much look the same and everyone knows everyone, the purpose is the fact that someone else along the way did exactly what you are doing today so that you could grow up on that street. The purpose is the fact that the people back home have the freedom to go to the church they wish or to sit at home and do nothing; it is freedom that you are fighting for.
There are those who would call what you have been fighting for an idea and experiment but you know that you would have never put on a uniform to fight for someone’s idea or experiment, no you fight for what you know, you fight for the little girl you saw as you boarded the plane to head over, the old man who stood at attention as you walked by and the old lady who kissed your cheek and whispered thank you in your ear. They are not experiments, they are not ideas they are one of the millions of people of whom you feel a kinship to simply because you come from the same place. There are those from other places whose way of fighting is to kill themselves in the process and you figure that is because they don’t have what you have to come home to. On those long nights when it feels as though the battle will never end and the war is all but lost, you still look for it, that symbol of freedom, that tired and worn out cloth with only three colors and some stars on it, that surely by now has holes torn clear through it and yet it still waves and beckons you home to that wonderful place of freedom and love simply called America.
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[...] America. | American Conservative Daily By Carolyn Hileman America. Carolyn Hileman The bombs roaring over head, mortar fire all around, dug in deep behind enemy lines, your best friend's lifeless body lying next to you and his blood slowly trickling its way over to you. … idea or experiment, no you fight for what you know, you fight for the little girl you saw as you boarded the plane to head over, the old man who stood at attention as you walked by and the old lady who kissed your cheek and whispered thank you in your ear. … American Conservative Daily – http://www.americanconservativedaily.com/ [...]