After all the fighting, all they wanted was peace. Peace was something to fight for, so they’ve been told. Fight until you get the goal you seek. But peace seems too far away to even be real anymore. Yet without the fighting, peace would never come, or so they’ve been told. And it was something they ached for after all the fighting, no matter which side they were on. So fight they did, fight they would. It was the only choice, the only option. Which meant it really wasn’t a choice anymore, but a necessity. Yet peace was all they wanted.

Once, fighting had been an impetus, a means to create meaning in an otherwise meaningless life. It became a source of pride to stand to the cause. It became a call to unity when the void before rooted itself in alienation. A source of strength: alone a weakling, but now a power to be reckoned with, because now there is an “Us”, and “We” are here to vanquish you. Mobilized in the false heyday of “Us/Them” to begin the bloodshed, but numbed from the realization that there was no them. No matter what side you were on, in the end everyone was “Us”, but no one was able to stop this slow cancerous suicide of killing. Trust was long gone. Fighting was no longer glorious when it was necessary to your very survival. Most of the soldiers had crossed this threshold, where they waited too long to die with nothing left to fight for. Civil war was like that. It was hard to justify calling your brother “the other”. War was no longer a lark, no longer the adventure of valor promised them. Fools threw the dice toward brute force with gleaming eyes. Blindness silenced them. But the fight gloried its birth by giving itself new life. It was an experiment that had outwitted its master.

The battlefields of this war shifted, depending on who was allying with who on what particular day. The platoons shifted themselves, depending on who was fighting who. Sometimes, they would wait for orders to come through, and that was the worst. It would seem that a lull in the fighting was just what they would want. After all, wasn’t peace what they wanted? But a lull wasn’t actual peace. Peace was something that gave enough permanence to move around in. A lull in fighting was a kind of psychological torture. Enough soldiers had been captured to report back once rescued about the difference on an individual level. The threat of actual torture was worse than the torture itself. When the violence began, you knew what was coming. The threat was the true terror of the unknown. In the same way, a lull in fighting was its own kind of torture. As a soldier, the waiting raised the risk of giving up resolve. It became a fight against oneself, to not let yourself be taken off guard. If you did, you could let down everyone you fought for. But the waiting made it hard to remember what it was you were supposed to do. The temptation of slumber was more an enemy than the one you fired upon.

Survival was the ultimate prize here. Fighting, that would keep you alive for another day. The fact that you survived so you could do the same thing, whether waiting for death or fighting it was the ultimate test of your own nature. Fighting the demons that threatened to sink you and winning was the ultimate victory. It was the best way to show that you were greater than anything thrown at you, the soldier that could overcome all. Perhaps it was a strange way to declare freedom. But what was freedom other than declaring your personal victory. You survived, and who knew what would happen next. Wake up soldier, to a new day where you can once more fight again.