COURAGE
“The unseen wounds of war.”

(History is a teaching lesson on what to do and what not to do, erasing history doesn’t change it)

I sometimes go deep in my mind remembering one day how I felt riding in a chopper with soldiers that had just been killed in a battle. This one soldier’s head was turned in my direction, and I could see his eyes. I couldn’t stop staring and thinking about his parents or wife had no idea that he had just died. They could be sitting at the supper table saying a prayer for the young man, and he is gone. A part of you realizes that this could be you at some time lying on the floor of a chopper headed to eternity. As an 18-year-old soldier, death became something I wasn’t afraid of, and that frightens me even now. In some deep feeling, the end stops the fear. This soldier had no more fear, and I realized that I was crying not for myself but for a man I didn’t even know. I wiped my eyes and told myself that I was weak; this is war, seen many men die, it seems as if I am trying to lie to myself. My thoughts seem to all come together as we land on tock; I help to unload the brave soldiers into stretchers of death when the man I had been looking at before was again facing me; I lost all control, my tears were now flowing without end. The men on the pad believed it was a friend of mine, and all tried to console, not knowing he was just a man. “Courage lives and dies in each man. At least his fears are over.”