Nights Like These

It's nights like this that I miss the war. Nights alone with to much time to think that I feel it calling to me. I miss the excitement of patrols and raids, especially the raids. Being the first man in the door, knowing you may die in the next few minutes, the next few seconds. Feeling that rush, every sense becomes sharper, vision tightens and becomes clearer like you are finally really seeing the world. Air passages open up, you no longer just breath the air you drink it in feeling your lungs turn it into energy for your body, the great machine that holds all that is you. The electricity that flows through your finger tips into your brain, touching your weapon, making it part of your arms and hands. One with your mind.
If I just look at something or someone and think die they die. The weapon fires on it's own sending the bullet to the target.

There were nights on patrol that I actually felt the city and it's people inside of me...Or maybe I was inside if it. Injected into the living organism that was Baghdad, racing through it's veins, feeling more than hearing the steady thump, thump, thump of the giant beasts heart beat. I was one with everything. All I had to do was close my eyes and feel the mood of the city. Tonight it wanted to kill us, kill me, tomorrow it was content to let us roam freely. Connected into The War, like a acolyte of Mars, the bloody remorseless god of war. Knowing when it was hungry for our blood, anybodies blood.
There was a time over there when I was completely in love with the War. With the killing and dying. The excitement, like a lover you know you shouldn't be with, knowing the lover will hurt you sooner or later but you just can't get enough, can't stop. That feeling you get just before and accident happens, the brief moment of clarity that suddenly opens up the Universe to you seconds before the cars collide. You know whats going to happen, you can see it but you are powerless to stop it.
I loved that feeling.
I wanted to eat the War, I wanted it inside me, to roll in it, wallow in the moment between Life and Death. I never wanted it to end.

Then it bit me, hard. D was killed and it became Real. All my gods turned against me, or showed their real faces. The War, Iraq it's self, and the master of them all Death. I was just one more sacrifice being lead up the temple steps where the priests with obsidian knives waited to cut out my still beating heart.
That's when I began to fear the War. To see Death for what it really is, a deal with the Devil. There is no escape, no bargains to be made. It doesn't care.

And yet, on nights like this I feel It calling to me through time and space. Wanting me back in it's arms, a long lost lover. And I want to go back. Back where things make sense, where life is lived on the razors edge, where the only thing that matters is coming back alive, not bills or work or the future. Only Now. The next breath you draw.

Nights like this I know that I broke my promise with The War to die there and It's angry with me over that. Sometimes i feel that the space I am supposed to occupy in the Universe has closed up but I'm still here. I escaped, somehow, a Cosmic mistake God over looked in the books only here, in The World, I am much harder to find, surrounded by the living.
Wondering why I lived and so many others did not.
I had nothing to lose and I wanted to die while others that wanted so desperately to live did not. It seems like a cruel joke.
I imagine God, like a black and white movie from the Fifties, white robes, white beard and flowing hair, his desk covered with scrolls and heavy bound leather books, the spines guiled in gold, ink well and feather pen as He does His work.
An angel comes in from off screen," It's that guy, Mike D, again."
"Him?" God says. "That's it! Kill him this time! He's way over due."
The angel exits, then He realises something, remembers something He forgot.
"No, wait! Not him! Kill somebody else!"

Almost a year that I have been back and I'm still searching for answers, looking for a reason to still be breathing. It was easier over there and I miss it.
I miss the War.
I still love the War, somewhere deep inside of me and I know that no matter what I do with my life, get married again, have a child, write a book, nothing else will affect me as much. Nothing else will mean as much to me as twelve months in combat ever did. The missions, the patrols, the rush.

I still miss the War.

I still love it.

And I still hate it.