When the Troops Come Home
You know that song they play when the troops come home? When the trumpets ring out loud and proud. The piccolo pierces right through the air like the last battle’s final gunshot. The drums beat fast like the rookie soldier's fluttering heart. And the voices. The voices sing out liberated and victorious just like the crowd expects.
On the side of the street though, looking on, is a hobbled old man, and he knows. He listens, and he hears the sorrowful aftertone of the false voices. He looks, and he sees the ghosts of comrades lost on their smile-plastered faces. He feels and he weeps at the poor boys, torn from their childhood and robbed of their youth.
Everyone who went to Nom died. Even if their sorry lifeless bodies managed to trudge their way back to the states, they never really returned. There was no trace if those boys left. All that remained were people, possibly not even human, with memories to forget and nights to waste away in tortured consciousness.
Soldiers.
Later those soldiers shuffle into bars, pubs, and saloons. Not to talk, not to mingle, but to try to forget, and fail ever so bitterly at it too. In a circle, they all sit without speaking, silently dying away inside, until one stands and with eyes too sore to cry and a voice too lost to crack, he utters the words, “Hail,” and then louder, “Hail the victorious dead!” One by one they take up the cry like a old forgotten, but familiar song until every onlooker quiets in honorable reverence. Life starts to creep back into the voices of the hardened men as they begin to weep with shameless tears and hope begins to arise that just maybe, things will get better.
The cry dies though. Silence envelops them, and once again the world takes its strangling yet customary place upon their shoulders. That flicker of light behind their eyes dies, and the memories
settle back in as the rejuvenating tears fade away, almost as if they had never emerged. The bodies sit.
The misunderstanding clattering of voices resurface. The dead men remain silent. They stare. They drink.
They remember. They regret. They grow old. They become hobbled. They stand on the the side of the
street and with silent screams in their beings and the most sorrowful of tears in their hearts, they watch.
They watch the next sons of America plaster smiles on their faces and march through the streets to that
same old song. The song they play when they think the troops come home.
