Song for Night

Cowardice Is Spitting Once

A wind sets to howling in the flame tree and I shiver in fear. I know it is the wind but it might also be disembodied spirits, or ghosts, or demons. The amount of blood on my hands doesn’t grant me the luxury of complacence, and no amount of horror seems to have inured me to my own pain, or fear, or hunger, or desire. Only to that of others: war and its attendant deviance hasn’t made me braver, only more callous. If any of my men could see me now, they would spit at my feet. The sign for cowardice.

The wind is calling in a voice I remember. A man John Wayne chased down into a woman’s kitchen, a man unarmed and afraid, and John pulled him out and made him butcher his children in front of us. In that kitchen as though he would make a gory feast of them, as though he was a host and we his invited guests. And as that man chopped with the machete, blood spattering his face, I flinched from the greed in his eyes. The greed for living that made him do that, and then when he was done and panting from the effort, John Wayne put his revolver point blank to the man’s head and blew his brains across the kitchen wall.

Tonight he is howling in the wind.

But I can’t tell if it is anger, shame, or remorse.

Shit, I need to find my platoon. I cannot go on like this.