Kill Shot

As a soldier, a killer, I get asked “Is it hard to kill?” a lot. And the truth is, it isn’t. It’s not hard at all, the act of killing. Aim, breathe, squeeze the trigger. That’s it. You’ve killed. The bullet as found its mark. What comes after is what’s hard. The act of killing doesn’t vanish. It does not just end. It leaves a mark, a stain. Not only you and the air, but it leaves a real physical piece of evidence, a body, a shell of what you killed . In a war, you can’t really stop right then, in the middle of it all, to look at what you’ve done. You kept shooting, fighting, running, because its war and that just it. If you don’t fight you die. If you fight, you might die. You still feel it though, the weight of your kills, after. When it’s quiet, usually night time, when you're alone, you and you thoughts, it all comes back. The faces, especially. You think, in the running and the chaos and the noise and the dirt all flying up, that you wouldn’t see the, hat they’d barely register. But you can see them, later, frozen in your mind’s eye, facial nerves twitching, blinking, gasping, he body shutting down, but not without a fight. Men dying miles from home, lone but for their blood and the chaos around them. The weight is unlike anything in the world. It never leaves. it follows you homelike a shadow. Even at night, curled up in bed that seems soft as cloud after sleeping on the ground or cots, you wife breathing softly beside you, smelling like an angel after the scent of burning flesh, the voices and faces of those dead men, of those killed sits like an unwelcome visitor on the edge of the mattress. Their waiting, waiting for you to join them, because you are their brother, brother in arms and death and killing. War makes all men equal, equally empowered to kill and die when they aim and fire. They all ask about the war and the killing, all naive and faceless and similar. My wife doesn’t ask though. She knows better I think, or knows me better. She just smiles. Or maybe she feels the weight of those men on our bed, or feels the choppy waves of their breath. She says nothing, and curls closer when their chatter seems to draw too near. She is perhaps, the only brother-in-arms that I have truly loved, because her battle is that much more bitter, and though I think it is because she loves me, I cannot know why she fights. Whatever the reason, I love her more for it.