No one knew when the war had started. Some thought that the war began a long time ago; others believed that it has been there since the beginning of human history, but either way, it existed. Back home, they searched for reasons, the whys and whodunits, because they wanted to believe we had gone for a noble cause, that there could be an end result, a time when there was no more war, a time for it to end. But they were wrong. The war came out of a desire, a petty need to further one’s reach or gaze, and like so many before them who remembered the memory of the great wars and what glory of victory had once felt like when they claimed it, they let us go to war until it followed us, the distance of the past creeping up on our bodies like a five o’clock shadow. Like our grandfathers and fathers, the war would follow us, their sons and daughters, and it would live on after us, if only to see another war take its place.
At times, when we felt the war closing in on us, we tried to shut it out with more violence, but it crept into every vein pulsing with the need to kill against our skin as though it were trying to escape, but no sooner had the urge to tap the vein subsided once more than we were hurled back into the violence as though our addiction were an absence that could be measured in bullets and weighed in body bags.
And though we did not know when the war started, what name to give it, how or when it might end, or what place we should give it in our lives once we left the battlefield, we knew it well and still do, as though it is a battle buddy that we still depend on to watch our back. And what we still do not know is peace, the manner in which it is found, or how to leave such a constant friend behind because the necessary training that helped us survive the war also taught us that no one is to be left behind, and so we carry the war with us, a friendship formed through the mutual understanding that our survival is based on how violent one human can be toward another when given the bullets and the means with which to use them.
It is now more than a decade later, and still there is no peace because the war has not ended and surely never will because there is no real end to war, only the absence of it, a lull in the fighting, a time during which another generation is born for the kill.
And yet, I pray that someday this world might give us a war and no one will come.