Waging Peace

We know what happens when we're at war too long when you are a civilian but what about the soldiers, the lifers, what happens to them when it ends?

The war ended, peace sprung forth and people crept about in it as if afraid to sneeze and have it all disappear in a moment. The scary side of the split personality that a people acquires after spending too long at war slowly faded off into the background to be tucked neatly away into their collective subconscious, with a label marked do not open. People stopped racing for cover at the sound of a car backfiring and no longer did they flinch when the news was played on the screen. Civilians once again gained the right to go to bed not dreading the morning, tense with the thought that, for them, there might not be a morning. Sadly, we, the soldiers, could not make that joyful claim; nightmares came and hunted us in our beds, holding thousands of familiar yet somehow strange faces of the dead. Wounds both emotional and physical had sat festering for sometime and now, as they gained time to heal, they became scars, permanent reminders of our sins. Oh, the brass could sit there and tell us it had been for the greater good until they were blue in the face, but that little part of us inside, where we had hidden away our humanity during the war, was in agony from our actions and wouldn’t let go of the guilt and horror of the war, come hell or high water. I don’t know what the higher ups really expected to happen in the end, but we couldn’t just “adjust” to life outside of the battlefield as if it had never happened. I had grown up on the field of war, been born with blood on my hands and had never even thought that I might see the end of the carnage. And why would I have ever thought I would survive after watching friends and enemies alike fall into death’s waiting arms? I just thought one day my luck would run out. I never bought a home or the kittens that I stared at through a layer of Plexiglas. I had absolutely no attachments, I was so sure that one day I wouldn’t return to my little rented box and would join all the people who had made my life, under a stone in a picturesque meadow come glorified graveyard. I never made any plans for peace because; in my mind it would never happen. Many people said that the war began and took away their security all of their “knowns” of life; well peace did that to me. Peace shattered my carefully cultivated cold that had wrapped around to insulate my heart. It stole my certainties and left me alone in a chilly apartment waiting for the rent to run out.

Reviews

[Vincent Weathers]

Waging Peace is about the soldier returning home from the battlefield. This story gives voice to the solider who's accustomed to the battefield is forced to readjust to the peace-time in the civilian world. Little else.

As a reader, "Waging Peace" made me feel disappointed. I kept hearing the words "why should I care" in my head. I am saying this because a reader has an entirely different set of expectations than some writers realize. The reader (assuming not a war vetran) will most likely not know what the soldier has lived through. The reader doesn't know about their hardships. Even one soldier's experience from another is unique.

The story would benefit greatly by showing rather than telling. Show vs. Tell. The story would also benefit if you worked with concrete imagery instead of generalities and abstractions. Since your character is a soldier, does he/she have a name? That person has a history, some of which may have had an effect upon whether the person wanted to serve or not. Research the idea. Information on PTS might be useful for you.

Dig deeper. You'll find more than you'll realize.
I am sure of it.

[Leah Elisabeth]

This is really very well done, but again, i am looking for character development and the chracter here is developed in only one dimension. Keep up the good writing!

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Many people said that the war began and took away their security all of their "knowns" of life; well peace did that to me. Peace shattered my carefully cultivated cold that had wrapped around to insulate my heart. It stole my certainties and left me alone in a chilly apartment waiting for the rent to run out.


the end sums up the entire dilemma ..the entire agony ..very very beautifully...

reminds me of an old quote... it was something like...

nobody can solve life's on going mystery
of how priests promote wars
and soldiers peace....

it does however scare me to place myself in his shoes... of how life could be just a wait for death... still what bothers me more is that ..it actually is the truth for so many of us out there in the cold war fields...fighting for people so comfortable in their palaces that they almost forget..they're humans..not numbers dying out there...