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THE WARRIOR'S CODE OF HONOR

Combat is scary but exciting.
You never feel so alive as when being shot at without result.
You never feel so triumphant as when shooting back -- with result.
You never feel love so pure as that burned into your heart by friends willing to die to keep their word to you. And they do.
The biggest sadness of your life is to see friends falling.
The biggest surprise of your life is to survive the war.
Although still alive on the outside, you are dead inside -- shot thru the heart with nonsensical guilt for living while friends died.
The biggest lie of your life torments you that you could have done something more, different, to save them.
Their faces are the tombstones in your weeping eyes, their souls shine the true camaraderie you search for the rest of your life but never find.

You come home but a grim ghost of he who so lightheartedly went off to war.
But home no longer exists.
That world shattered like a mirror the first time you were shot at.
You live a different world now.
You always will.

Your world is about waking up night after night silently screaming, back in battle.
Your world is about your best friend bleeding to death in your arms, howling in pain for you to kill him.
Your world is about shooting so many enemies the gun turns red and jams, letting the enemy grab you.
Your world is about struggling hand-to-hand for one more breath of life.
You never speak of your world.
Those who have seen combat do not talk about it.
Those who talk about it have not seen combat.

The hurricane winds of war have hurled you as far away as Mars, and you can never go back home again, not really.
After your terrifying - but thrilling dance with death, your old world of babies, backyards and ballgames seems deadly dull.
People you knew before the war try to make contact with you.
It is useless.
Words fall like bricks between you.

Serving with warriors who died proving their word has made pre-war friends seem too untested to be trusted - thus they are now mere acquaintances.
Earning honor under fire has made you alone, a stranger in your own home town.

The only time you are not alone is when with another combat veteran. Only he understands that keeping your word, your honor, whilst standing face to face with death gives meaning and purpose to life. Only he understands that spending a mere 24 hours in the broad, sunlit uplands of battle-proven honor is more satisfying to a man than spending a whole lifetime in safe, comfortably numb civilian life.

Although you walk thru life alone, you are not lonely.
You have a constant companion from combat -- Death.
It stands close behind, a little to the left.
Death whispers in your ear: "Nothing matters outside my touch, and I have not touched you...YET!"

Death never leaves you -- it is your best friend, your most trusted advisor, your wisest teacher.
Death teaches you that every day above ground is a fine day.
Death teaches you to feel fortunate on good days, and bad days...well, they do not exist.
Death teaches you that merely seeing one more sunrise is enough to fill your cup of life to the brim -- pressed down and running over!

Down thru the dusty centuries it has always been thus.
It always will be, for what is seared into a man's soul who stands face to face with death never changes.

Dedicated to absent friends in unmarked graves.