Chapter Three

The last memory Chris retained when he came conscious a week later was being dragged away by three men, while screaming like a devil and flailing his bloodied arms. He was then held back and was struck in the head with an e-tool. His unconscious body was then dragged through the mud and simply left at the closest air field. This great patriotic man was left like a homeless vagabond. His acts of bravery and courage were simply null and void in the minds of his brothers who saw him snap. They simply did not want to believe that this was possible. Chris Davis was a priest and warfare was the religion that he spewed from the pulpit, and when he died that day his brothers died too. They took him and dumped him off in the mud to forget about him, to bury him deep within their memories so he could never come out.

Chris spent the last three months of his tour in a hospital. Life was good. He slept on a bed and received a shower everyday. The food was out of this world compared to what he was used to. However, Chris hated all these things. He hated the fake smiles that were given to him daily. He hated with the security that the nurses and doctors lived in. He hated that he was stripped of his knife and rifle. He felt naked sleeping with out his rifle by his side, or within an arm reach of a buddy. It hurt more to lay on a hospital bed than it did to sleep in a hard foxhole.

On the eighty-seventh day Chris Davis stepped out of the military hospital with discharge papers in hand. The first thought that crossed through his head was to go visit his parents. Waiting by his departure gate, he seemed apart from the normal routine. He sat straight up in the chair, observing everything that moved. His head twisted franticly side to side. His eyes darted nervously around picking up every single movement and reporting them back to his brain in nanoseconds. He knew how many people were waiting in line to board, and he knew exactly where all of the exits were, and he knew how he would walk down the cabin of his plane into his seat. He knew how to look for potential danger, and he could evaluate anybody after three words left their mouth. However, Chris Davis was just an empty shell of what he one was.

The visit to his adopted parents house was drab. He was pestered about the life he lived over there. He was asked about which side was winning. He was asked if he had seen combat, and Chris gave a curt nod and said yes with no emotion. With eyes watering, his foster mother asked him if he took anybody’s life. Chris Davis gave another calm yes, and his foster mother broke down in stifled sobs. Chris sat there, as an eye of a hurricane remains motionless, Chris sat neatly with his hands folded on his knee. He peered into his mother trying to get a sense of any feeling whatsoever, but he lost this ability a long time ago.

When he shut the door behind him, he was still trying to feel a feeling, but he still could not. He wanted to forget; he needed to forget. He idly drove around in his pristinely kept ’88 Chevy. This truck reflected Chris Davis. It’s exterior was new and shiny, but the interior was ready to fall apart at any second. One jolt would cause both of them to break down.

He didn’t need to look at the clock to know that it was 3:45 PM. He did not know where he was going. He drove trying to remember who he was before boot camp. Memories of parties, friends, and girls flowed through his brain, but from all of those memories he was unable to decipher who he was. In a last desperate attempt he drove down an old dirt road, which lead to a hill.

He sat on top of this hill, until the sun began to set. It was here where he fell in love, and it was here when his heart broken. He was seventeen, and he fell in love, or what he thought was love. Many teenagers profess to be in love, and they are not. However, Chris’s love was true. Nobody can attempt to understand how he felt, but what we do know is that what he felt was true and genuine. He had plans for the future, plans to go to college, and plans for a family. It was at the spot that he currently laid at where he had spent countless nights with his love. It was on the same night that he planned to profess his love and propose to her was the same night that she left him. They were both in love, but her love was the teenage love that is infrequent as the wind. She decided to move on; he did not. He stayed their forever. If she knew what devastating effect that this would have on him, it is probable to think that she would have loved him forever, dreading the beast he would become.

By going to this long forsaken spot, he hoped to find him-self hidden in the overgrown forest. When he finally arrived, a deluge of memories flooded back into his conscience. We must understand that these powerful memories have been suppressed for years in the deepest and darkest corners of the mind of Chris Davis. After not experiencing emotions for a long time, Chris was not sure how to handle such an onrush of sadness. For forty-seven seconds, Chris stood there, not feeling anything. He had a complete lack of emotion. After that eternity passed, Chris knelt with one hand on the ground and began to cry. These tears did not trickle down his face and fall on a flower like they would in a poetic and fake story. His tears fell down like a severe thunderstorm. Big and fat drops did not land daintily on the flowers; they destroyed them. They created havoc wherever they fell, just as they were created by the chaos in the mind of Chris Davis. Just as it would in a fake and untruthful story, it began to rain. However, there was nothing soothing or pitiful about this rain. This rain tore down everything, as well as Chris Davis. We leave Chris looking up into the rain screaming like a man who has just lost everything. He screams like this, because he just realized that he has nothing left.

Chapter Two

It was not one event that broke Chris Davis, it was a culmination of events that subconsciously collected in his mind, and eventually he could not deal with all of them. It was having to shoot a boy who pulled out an AK-47 from his house and ran out into the road firing. It was looking at the peaceful expression on his face, as he laid in the middle of the road with blood flowing in stream-lets away from his body. It was the face of a Viet Cong soldier whose only recognizable feature was his detached arm. It was the image of turning to his right, only to see his friend lying on the ground bleeding from a hole in his chest. It was being the lone man to return from a patrol and having no human resemblance. It was the constant Death that slowly eroded through him. Chris Davis’ tolerance was higher than must, but nothing could stop it; it was inevitable.

It was a normal night, nothing unlike the other thirty three months he had spent in this hell hole. He had first watch. He scanned the vast ocean of darkness in front of him. Not looking at objects straight on, but peering at a thirty degree angle to be able to see the tidal pools of the vast ocean. He heard a rustling in the dense jungle in front of him. He peered down the sights of his M 16, and breathed. It was in an identical breath to this that had marked the last moments of so many lives, but this one would mark the end of his own.

It was the last inhale, half exhale, and held breath that Chris Davis would ever do. His thumb moved to the selector switch, placing it to full auto. He blinked his right eye and looked down the iron sight. He moved his rifle, pointing it at the sound in the jungle. When it stopped, he fired. He unloaded one full clip into the jungle in front of him. Thirty rounds out of 10,000 he fired would have a disastrous impact on him. Being almost dawn and with the other brothers waking, Chris sprang out of his foxhole and jogged down to see what loot he could find. The mess he found was horrid. It was a mother water buffalo. The tongue drooped out of its mouth, the eyes were glazed over, and the head was pointed up, perhaps in an effort to grab one more dying breath. The stomach was fully exposed. The legs shot off at the joints, but the baby was still there. Making a crude whining sound, as if to bring its mother back from the dead. This should have had no effect on Chris Davis. He had killed men, children, and certainly other animals. His eyes narrowed in anger, and the rest of the platoon awoke to the spirit crushing screams, and the sound the knife made when it slid into the body. No one knew why, Chris was an excellent soldier. Maybe he had seen enough, he had reached that point. Chris Davis may as well have died that day.

With only three months left, he lost it. Some will say that he was crazy all along, others will say it wall a facade just to go home, and some will say nothing at all, because they know what happened. They know that the mind cannot justify injustices forever. Each mind has a breaking point. Chris could only justify what he did, when he knew it was for good. He could justify his men dying, because he would tell him-self that he would save ten maybe twenty other good men. He could take lives, if it would lead to a strategic victory that would end all the chaos. It was when he could find no justification for what he did that he felt it. His eyes were the same iced over glaciers, and his face always maintained the same scowl, but it did effect him. The mother water buffalo was a wasted life, and for this Chris could find no justification. Or maybe it was the pain of a lost mother that was so familiar to Chris that threw him over the edge? No one will know, but we do know that something in Chris was forever broken.

Chapter One-Part Two

It was the image of his drunk father banging down the bedroom door to only find another man occupying the bed. --How much can we blame the women? That is not for me to decide. She had not received any true love in years from the old drunk veteran that she could not understand. She needed an outlet, and it leads us to this scene.-- With mumbled curses, the old starving patriot reached into his pocket and pulled out a stiletto. He jumped onto the bed and plunged it repeatedly into the two occupants. After about the the fourth or fifth plunge the screams stopped, but he did not. He plunged the blade into their bodies until there was nothing left of their faces. As the blood began to trickle down to the floor, the father put away the stiletto and walked out of the door, but not before to stop and look at his son and pat his head and give him a truly genuine smile. The boy stood there, until the pool of blood pricked his toes. He then simply turned and walked back to this bed and went back to sleep. It is this image that is forever imprinted on the mind of Chris Davis.

If you asked Chris Davis how he constantly put his life on the line, he would simply tell you that he is lucky. We can deceive our selves and pretend that Chris Davis was fighting for our freedom and our country. When it comes down to it, he was not. He’s fighting for the man on his left, and the man on the right. He did not fight for any big ideals; he fought for survival. Not for the survival of him-self, but for the survival of his brothers. He did not kill to stop the enemy, he killed for protection. Not to protect him-self, but for the protection of the soldiers on his left and right. He did not care if he lived or died, he only cared that he was honorable. If he died protecting what he loved the most, then so be it. If he was left bleeding on an open field, he would be happy to protect what means the most to him.

Chris Davis had seen men snap. When they had seen enough atrocities, they just snapped. Something in their mind broke, there is no medical term for it, but it happened to too many good men. While on leave, he had seen fellow soldiers digging foxholes in their front yards and setting up a perimeter. He had seen soldiers hold down their wives by knife point. He had seen a man calmly take out his pistol and point it to his face and pull the trigger. All within a second. He could remember looking at he partially decapitated man, with a gun loosely held in the limp hand. Every night he would hear the screams of soldiers, not yelling, but screaming. Their souls would truly shriek and let out unheard sounds on unheard frequencies. These screams were not an annoyance, they pierced the minds and hearts of the listeners, adding to the hell that they already lived in. Chris head these screams and would try to ignore them. He never thought that they would have a great effect on them.

Chapter One-Part One

Chapter One

Chris Davis was a corporal who had spent five years serving his country. By now he should have been a sergeant, but a mishap with an officer at the local bar prevented that. He had been overseas for fifteen months, and he was ready to go home. He missed hanging out friday nights at Dave’s and playing baseball all day long, after all he was just a kid and had never learned the adult way of life. But what he most was the people, all of them, even the ones he hated. He could still picture them crisp in his mind. He remembered events as if he had never left home. At nights he would lay down and imagine what all his friends were doing back in the States. To him, the people had not changed, and we hope that he will not have to find out how things really are.

None of these feelings were ever displayed to his fellow brothers in arms. To them, he could very well kill all the people he knew and walk way from it with out blinking. He had gained this reputation from killing the most enemies in the division, but rumors were he had the most confirmed kills currently in the U.S. military. Command would not give him a break, because they needed him out there, and Chris did not mind this, because it was what his whole life was devoted to. This was his second combat tour, and he had seen it all. His old brothers in arms, all killed, blended into one dying image in his mind. However, It was not an image of the war that disturbed him the most, it was an equally as bloody murder that took place on domestic soil that bothered him.

Prologue

Grime and dirt covered his once youthful face. Each layer accounting for some gruesome scene he witnessed or took part in. He was a young man of no more than nineteen, but his eyes were those of an old-troubled man. His eyes were turbulent blue oceans, forever hardened into a sea of ice by the images that were passed through them. His combat fatigues had not been changed in months. Even though he was promised a hot meal once a week, his fingers had become accustomed too scraping off cold food from the bottom of his C-Rats. His hands had taken on red aura, and he was infamous for this. He was one tough and desensitized son-of-a-bitch, and for this he was proud. His name was Chris Davis, and he was just another tragedy of war.

He never knew the why, what, or reason. He only knew the how. How to break down his rifle in under a minute, how to pull the trigger to hit a target at 500 yards, how to take his KA-BAR and plunge it into an enemy’s chest, but most importantly he knew how to kill with no inhibition. Chris thought he was independent, but in fact he was not. He was just another soldier brainwashed to do whatever he was told. He would call him-self a patriot, while most others may call him a monster. It is men like Chris Davis that we owe our lives to, but these men get forgotten and turn into mere numbers.

Thirty-Fifth

Thirty-Fifth Entry: 5/21/10 10:04:17 PM

Life can suck. Sometimes you have to let things go; other times you have suck things up and carry on. You can’t expect things to go your way, you have to know you will fail. However, you need to be ready to stand back up again. Because one little thing, can’t stop you, and it shouldn’t. You need to be resilient. This is not the end, it’s a transition. Certain things are inevitable, and even though it might have come earlier, there was no stopping it. People just need to continue on, if placing the blame helps then place it on someone who can take it. Do what you need to do to make it through it. Even if it’s not your fault, you need to learn how to rebound, because this is not the last time something bad will happen. Honestly, many more bad things will happen, but you need to learn from each of them. Things happen for a reason.

Thirty-Fourth

Thirty-Fourth Entry: 5/12/10 7:37:52 PM

When all others falter, you have to be the one to step up.

You cannot back down.

You will stand there and take the punishment.

Why?

Because no one else can.

Nobody says it’s going to be easy,

But it’s what you have to do.

You will be bleeding and bruised,

You will be broken.

But you are a necessity,

You may think this will never happen to you,

But it will.

And will you be ready?

You will be,

Because when you can stand and take the hurt,

It cannot hurt you.

The strongest enemy is yourself.