Who Will Listen?

My heart is heavy from carrying this story. It is a story of sad events in a sad place.  A story about violence where there is no happy ending.  Where every day life is transformed viciously into death and someone picks up the pieces - pieces of a young life. A man I had known before…another place and another time.  And I remember the smile.

     As I looked around, bullets rang out from dark places and invisible people.  The search had to stop and we were ordered to leave.  But leaving felt like abandoning my own blood, like leaving my own child in the path of evil. When we returned later, vehicles had traveled there, erasing the trail.  Vehicles tainted with the blood of my friend.  I searched until the others finally pulled me away.  They said there was nothing more; we had done all we could.

     A piece of my body was also left there as I cried.  Tears and blood spilled on grains of sand and lost forever. Later, washing down the vehicle, I wanted to capture the red water and put the pieces back in place.

     One story was worse than the rest.  This one was real, real to me.  This story was different because I knew this man.  We fought together once…stood side by side in harm’s way…laughed and cried together.  He ran out into the bullets that toppled me and pulled me to safety.  I owed this man my life and loved him as my brother.

     A year passed with time at home and simple everyday things.  I chose a different duty, one equally as honorable. And the time came to return again to this place where life blows away like the powdery dirt.  I remember jumping down once and laughing at the puffy cloud of dirt that rose up, and for a moment I felt like a child playfully jumping in a puddle.  But now the dirt seems like a huge deafening dust storm laying in wait…waiting for a moment when it will rise up again and take another life.

     Now, in this place, I thought I would be able to share some of my burden.  This one story I wanted to tell you about the sadness and to feel that you cared.  But you didn’t hear me and the story was lost. Buried deeper in my soul, I know how to smile and be strong, but this was a moment when I reached out.  This was my story and the story was me.

     So who will listen?  Someone said, “Tell your stories.”  But tell them to whom?  Who will listen and not turn away.  Who will help me carry this burden?  Who will share this sorrow?  Who will see this pain?

     I carry this story alone again now - a story that will never be heard and pain that will never be seen.  I can only write and hope that the pen will hear me cry and feel my pain.

     And I wonder…who will listen…who will write about me?

.

I will,

Corporal B.A. Dexter