A Soldier's Life For Me
by Daniel Beadle - Thursday, September 6, 2007
Frank is in a strange land, surrounded by American soldiers caught in endless and repetitive training routines. The setting is a subtle amalgam of swamplands with jungle canopies and dirt roads.Every soldier is willingly mindless. They shout their opinions as if they were something new, something worth expressing…
“I hate the fucking towel heads.”
“A real man can survive.”
“Pain is weakness leaving the body.”
“If it ain’t raining, we ain’t trainin’.”
“Work smarter, not harder.”
“Power through.”
“Hoo rah!”
“There are no girls with good personalities.”
“When I get home, I’m gonna fuck ‘er ‘til she bleeds.”
“The only good terrorist is a dead terrorist.”
Frank feels nausea in the pit of his stomach, listening to endless spewing of racism, sexism, and nationalism. Not that these concepts are foreign to him; not much in the way of self-destruction and societal decay is. The thing that snags at his mind are how acceptable these words are, and how zombies exist before death.
Frank takes note of the decaying bodies of Muslims tucked into the swampy river that runs through the makeshift base. He watches the soldiers, dressed in their battle uniforms from the waist down, swimming in the same water.
Frank watches the reporters gather on the adjacent dock, listening to a military PR representative lie through smiling teeth, shifting focus away from the decaying state of humanity to point out how well trained all the skinhead soldiers are, and how racism on a mass scale has snuck it’s way back into the mainstream. The soldiers, the rep goes on to say, are completely mindless. They have no original thoughts, and speak nothing but a series of mantras whose meanings have long since been forgotten. He encourages the young men and women of America to join up, because in light of a failing economy, the poor white trash and millions of others living in poverty with no hope of living a legal lifestyle have no choice but to sell themselves to government service. Their lives will be signed away, and they will be turned into things that barely resemble human.
Frank immediately regrets everything he is, and everything he’s done. Humans have a propensity for self-destruction and degradation. Those men and women who will sell their souls to escape their miserable states will lose everything that they are advertised to protect.
Frank is disgusted by everything. Despair claims his heart. The human race is the king of all lost causes.
And then he wakes up.
