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Duty
He reaches out through the cloak of darkness that entwines them both and runs his rough, calloused fingers over the smooth curve of her hip. She always sleeps on her side and for the longest time he was convinced that she was shunning him in bed by always turning her back to him. It occurred to him one sleepless night that she was instinctively curling up into his protective embrace. When you sleep you let your guard down and your true face shows through.
He cannot sleep again. Night terrors haunt him and each time he reaches the brink of peaceful slumber he is jerked awake again. The doctor calls it a myoclonic twitch. The shrink calls it post-traumatic stress disorder. She calls it his nervous tick. He knows it is his penance, his burden to bear. Nobody would remain unscarred if they had seen and done the things that he had done in the sweltering nightmare jungles of Asia where man becomes beast and life hangs on a machete edge.
He hums a Sinatra tune to himself softly, without wanting to disturb her, and shifts his weight slightly to ease an ache in his hip the field surgeons had promised him wouldn't last long some twelve years prior. He falters on the verse and reverts back to the chorus, his troubled mind stumbling over lyrics and his humming becomes the tuneless droning of preoccupation. How many have there been?
There were the three in the hut the grenade launcher had started off and he'd finished up close and personal with his K-bar. The colonel in Indonesia and his aide and a smattering of unconfirmeds during the maneuver and evasion phase of that operation. The girl in the hotel in Rangoon where his hands shook and he took the cheap vodka with him afterwards leaving her body dangling by the sheets from the ceiling fan. Double agent? Did he really trust the intel on that one? Somewhere an analyst was sleeping peacefully unaware that his information still left doubts.
How many conventional operations had he been involved in as part of the green machine, cutting his way from village to village with three squad mates, their only link to civilization a temperamental radio connection that depended on wind and altitude, signal strength and enemy proximity. How many?
He is startled to notice that the hand he had been carefully stroking along her hip is now shaking perceptibly, his trembling fingers dancing against her moon-white skin. His sins would never leave him, they prevent him from the blissful oubliette of sleep where he could at least fight back in his dreams and now project a tangible presence into his waking life. He feels the surge in his chest, the surge of remorse, of guilt and regret. Despite years of training and conditioning, countless moral justifications that what he was doing was right in the name of freedom and democracy when he closes his eyes he can still see the ghosts of the dead and they will never leave him.
"Shush baby" she says before rolling over to stroke his brow until his eyes close and his mind empties and he finally sleeps.
Oct.18.2005