A Moveable Terror (Ubon Tales 3)

                                                  
   Stories supposedly tell themselves. They do not.  We only tell the story we can bear to hear, only a shadow of the real story. The real story is too filled with sound, smell, anxiety, fear. So we tell something less, something we can bear. I have had men tell me what they could of their stories, what they could bear.
   Of chasing Pancho Via then being sent to France in 1917 from the Mexican campaign; an artillery crew man in the snow of the Battle of the Bulge; another in the first column to drive into Hiroshima after the occupation. Shadows, they could bear. None of them were old men when those stories were first written in them. These things happened to us in our prime and often took our prime, as happened to Bob Eaton, machine gunned at 19 advancing on the German trenches in WW1, his arm permanently maimed. John Englehart, Battle of the Bulge artillery man, his memories blackened by the terror he endured doing his duty fighting the Germans(WW2) in the snow of that fearful winter campaign.
   The deep fearful panic of dying, of not doing your duty, of cowardice, of not fulfilling the demands the moment places on you; encircles you , a shroud of terror that you fear you will never shed. This is the common bond I've realized I share with these men and no doubt our adversaries. We were all human and our minds were set to kill each other. That, I've come to realize, is the great gloom that we all share. Our minds were set to kill each other, some of us did, but that doesn't, from my prospective, seem to matter.
   Some of us just didn't have the opportunity to engage in direct contact. For some it was to resist the frantic urge to fire at an approaching sound without identifying it's source,  sparing the life of a fellow soldier.
   Each of us must come to grips with this shadow or be destroyed by it. Coming to grips with it means that you by some means wrest your present away from it and place it in the past. Only then can you safely reflect on it and not continue to live it. Only occasionally then does it chimerically rise to torment sleep or awakeness, but as a frightful part of the past not of our present.

  War is a movable terror.