Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Once upon a time there was a land of death. We could smell it. The decay. We could hear it. The screams. We could see it. The blood. And we lived it. The hopelessness.
We knew that in all of this assault on our senses and our spirit we had to find a way to survive, to fight. Not to fight our enemy but to fight ourselves, our fear, our desire to just give up. It wasn’t like we could just go down the pub and drown our sorrows. Or wrap ourselves in the arms of a lover hoping that, if they held us long enough and hard enough, that the pain and the fear would disappear like gun-smoke in the wind.
Some days all you could do was stay alive and stay sane. And that’s where He came in. For us, Jimmy, Steve, Billy and me, He became our symbol of life and survival.
Every day became like the next. An endless stream of a bitter cocktail of boredom, fear and waiting. Waiting for the next assault, the next bomb, the next wave of death or despair.
But he changed all that when He came into our lives. As mates, we always looked after each other and had each other’s backs, kept each other warm and listened to each other when fear and pain and loneliness had to be vomited out so that it didn’t fester like a pus filled sore. But sometimes friendship wasn’t enough. We all started to live within ourselves, to withdraw from the madness.
One day he just appeared. We don’t know how he came to be in this hell or how he made it to us alive. But He did. And He changed everything. It was like we became one man with one purpose and that was to protect Him, to make sure that whatever else happened He survived. It was like the tiny slivers of hope that remained within each of us had morphed into this solid bundle of furry love and if that hope was to remain alive, He too had to survive.
Because of that we became better soldiers, we became a team, closely knit with a common goal, a sense of purpose that had deserted us. At night we’d surround him to make sure that even when hands turned blue with cold He stayed warm. If He whimpered in the night, the act of providing comfort would warm the coldest heart. A lick on the face, as weird as it sounds, was a salve for a wounded soul. And His antics brought laughter where there had been none.
And because of that, we did survive. And as dawn came, the word spread that peace had risen with the sun. As the cheers of excitement washed through the crowd, cleansing away despair and fear like a sudden rain washes away the dust, we stood and embraced each other. Friends through war, friends for life. And He just stood there, a straggly skinny stranger wagging his tail and watching us with a smile that looked so human. And then He barked, as if saying farewell, and ran off over the hill. We thought he was just having a joyous run into territory that had been denied him. And we waited.
Until finally we knew he wasn’t coming back. We saw no rhyme or reason to explain his appearance nor why he chose to leave us. We just had to accept that He would always be one of life’s mysteries, a blessing, a savior.
So to this day Jimmy, Steve, Billy and me meet each year on this day to celebrate life and salute Him, the one soldier who we believe saved our lives and our sanity. Who we only knew as Dog.