soldiers

I turned to her, my whole body hard with tiredness and regret.

Did you ever think it won__ be the undead who kill us, but ordinary people?

We are born. We die. Somewhere in between we live. And how we live is up to us. That__ it.

There__ no better way for a woman to punish a man than to make him sleep away from her.

She smiled at him like a freshman invited to the senior prom. It made my blood boil.

But I was still determined to protect her. It might be the one good thing I would ever do in my life. I wondered if God would even notice.

There__ nothing worse than delivering bad news to women. I hoped I wouldn__ get good at it.

I heard them tearing at it. It was the sound of mortality.

I don__ know how these things died without benefit of a bullet to the brain pan. They seemed to exist in an eternal twilight of longing.

Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn__ bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them. When they get home they wonder if there__ something wrong with them because they find war repugnant but also thrilling. They hate it and miss it.Many of their self-judgments go to extremes. A comrade died because he stepped on an improvised explosive device and his commander feels unrelenting guilt because he didn__ go down a different street. Insurgents used women and children as shields, and soldiers and Marines feel a totalistic black stain on themselves because of an innocent child__ face, killed in the firefight. The self-condemnation can be crippling.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

Simon stopped listening. He realised he'd had enough. Enough of the theories, enough of the mystery, enough of the bullshit. Enough of the soldiers and guns and MI5. Enough of bugs in phones and in people he cared about. Enough of not being cared about back. Enough of uncertainty and lies and civilisation, collapsing or not. Enough of is part in it, his place, his role; the character of Simon Parfitt and all the baggage it entailed.