Ever since I was a child, I always looked up to the stars with wonder. And with fear. The stars were numerous, mysterious, and held the potential for nightmares that my young mind could never even imagine. A normal person likely wouldn’t think this way. A normal person likely would just wonder if there was some form of life out there, or if there was some neat little planet out there just like ours, we might be able to colonize at some point. Yet, I knew the truth. Somewhere deep inside of my core, I knew that the night sky was just a black veil covering up the real tragedies. Just beyond the day blue atmosphere was a wasteland.
My father fed this fear of mine with his stories. You see, my father was a soldier, a warrior by every standard. A wooden hanging case filled with ribbons and medals was carefully, neatly hung on the wall by the order of my mother, and at his disdain. He kept a small box beneath his bed that I had once opened, only to be quietly told to put it away by my mother when she caught me. It was a box that contained a single bullet, a number of identification tags with names of men I will never meet, pictures of faces I will never see, and a handwritten note from my mother likely when she was young, with only the words “Come Home Safe” written on it. He had no other trace of his past, and he would likely burn his medals and ribbons if my mother wouldn’t throw him into the fire pit with them. That must have been quite an argument.
But while my father kept material reminders out of sight and out of mind, he carried with him a psychological burden that would break most. My mother always told him to talk whenever he felt sad, and to share his experiences with me as a form of healing. It must have helped him, to be able to talk to his son about things he had bottled up, as he seemed to always feel a little better afterwards. It showed that he was still human behind that stone face of his. Several of his stories, though, never really matched up. My imagination filled those holes with my own fears, my own curiosities, and questions. Questions I never dared ask, lest he look at me with annoyance or sadness.
One story he told me was of a mission where he was sent to a land he could not say. It was far away and took a long time to reach. They packed light but were promised a resupply two days after their insertion. Himself and seven others were dispatched to handle a high-valued target and were told to execute the target on sight. There was no recovery and no need to interrogate the target; in and out, that’s all it was meant to be. Instead, my father said, they were met almost immediately with heavy resistance almost as if the enemy knew they were coming. The vehicle inserting them had no weapons aside from two mini guns that were light on ammunition in order to conserve fuel, and they had no supporting artillery or aerial assets in the operational area for two hours. They were on their own.
They landed hot and engaged the enemy from a ridgeline that the insert vehicle dumped them off on. Seconds after, the vehicle was shot down and crashed into the mountainside; they were now stranded. The eight men hunkered in and went to work. With no other option but to fight, they did so with everything they had. They were able to recover one of the mini guns from the crashed vehicle and got it deployed at the front of their position, but it was exposed. Using it was a courageous affair that my father said his Team Leader choose to bare. The others provided supporting fire, exterminating any distant threats or expert shooters on the other side.
For an hour, they fought from the ridgeline, holding their ground as the enemy attempted to push up the hill. Using explosives, the men were able to create a sort of death funnel by cutting off other ways up the mountain other than straight up at them. Men were getting injured and ammunition was running low, but then my father said their support came early. Four close-air-support based fighter systems entered the airspace and began to rain terror onto the enemy, while a fifth was a cargo vehicle that dropped off an additional team, ammunition, and supporting equipment. The secondary team took the ridgeline to hold a fallback position, while my father’s team pushed into the enemy base.
In tandem with the aerial units, the team swept through the base quickly and efficiently, ultimately pushing inside and down into what my father described as a “mess of silver tunnels”. He described the tunnels as long, well-lit, smooth to the touch, and symmetrical all around. There wasn’t a single bit out of place. The enemy was dug in throughout the network he nicknamed The Hive, and the number of tunnels and hallways made for a confusing layout. The team caught themselves moving in circles several times before they finally were able to get their bearings and push down further.
At the final room, they were met with an overwhelming amount of resistance. He said it would have been impossible to push into the room were it not for their speed of violence and using tossed explosives. The target was found just before the escape tunnel on the other side of the room, already executed. Yes. Executed. The target was found on its knees with half of its face missing. The escape tunnel was also sealed off, from the other side. My father’s team attempted to open the door, yet it was locked by a passcode, from the other side. It was a strange thing, but the team didn’t have a way to breach the door. The materials were too thick for their saws, and too durable for their explosives. Instead they bagged the target and headed back topside.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
The tale seemed truthful, and it fit with what I had learned to understand was his normal. However, there was something that continued to bother me. He never said he was fighting people. He never described the aircraft like he usually did, he didn’t name the place he had gone or the country he was in for just a generic identifier. The details were all glazed over, as if they weren’t things that I was meant to know. And this wasn’t his own story. There were several where he would describe battles or deployments to far off places that were never named, and that took longer than a week to reach. When we went to the beach, he would wear shirts to cover strange burn marks, and strange cuts that weren’t done by normal tools.
This was why I feared the night sky, why I shivered at the idea of going beyond the safety of our little planet’s atmosphere. Beyond that bright blue shield was a place where men died, alone, with no chance of ever returning home. At least here on the planet if I were to die, I could at least be recovered later. Out there? If I died, there was no going home. Not unless my partners could carry me out, if they were still alive to do it.
And yet, that wasn’t the only thing that made me a little bit different. As I grew up my father began to teach me things. He taught me how to live on my own, how to hunt, how to fish. He taught me how to take care of minor injuries with minimal items, and how to treat larger wounds and broken bones so that I could at least survive to reach help. Of course, I never broke a bone and treated it in such a way, but he always described it as a mental precaution should I not be able to hurry over to a hospital at the drop of a hat. I was no fool to these teachings and I learned them well. I knew why he taught me these survival tactics, why he taught me how to fire, clean, load, and adjust a weapon. I knew why he sent me off to learn how to fight and defend myself. And I also knew why he was never worried about me going to college.
Because I had the eyes he did. My fear was my drive. I feared the stars. I feared the night. That fear was a bomb in my stomach and every time it crept into my mind, I curled up and shivered. As I aged, I stopped shivering. I started to hate. I started to hate that feeling of fear and dreaded the lurching in my gut every time it crept up on me to the point that I began to embrace it. Then, I understood why I feared it.
I feared the night and the stars because they could kill me. In a blink of an eye the sky could fall on my head without warning. Without any kind of resistance, too. I would be killed before I could scream and before my father could put together some kind of defensive shell around the house. I would be killed like an insignificant bug on a windshield, and the same would happen to my family. And that right there was when my fear turned into hatred, and desire. I hated that I was weak. I hated that I wouldn’t be able to do anything to protect my family. I hated that I would be useless and nothing more than a bag of meat in the way of the grinder should those stars ever turn on our little planet.
My father fueled that fire and began to arm me with tools that I could use to enhance it. And when I turned sixteen, he sat down across from me at the dinner table. There was no dinner, as it was still the middle of the day, but there was a piece of paper. It was a government document that he and my mother had already signed. The last signature block was for me.
“I have prepared you the best I could. Now, the choice is yours,” my father said to me. His voice was steady, his eyes curious. He did not force me to think at that point, did not yell at me to move faster or to keep pushing like he did in the forests. Instead he sat and watched. Still as a stone. His face void of any expression aside from his sharp, eagle eyes watching every twitch of my body.
Beneath that hard glare, I reached for the pen. And signed.
Two days later, I had a bare minimum amount of clothes in a duffle bag, my head cleanly shaved, and a light smirk on my face. My mother, father, and little sister stood at the side of the curb beside my father’s truck as they saw me off.
“Take this.” My father gave me a small trinket I had never seen before; it was an insignia of some kind, likely some form of unit symbol. “It’ll come in handy later,” was all he said about it. My mother had looked at him strangely, but she said nothing. She only hugged me a little tighter, kissed my cheek a little harder, and smiled a little brighter.
“I love you. Be safe and stay strong.” She whispered to me when she hugged me. When she pulled away, she smiled with tears in her eyes. “Come home safe.” Words she had written to my father, she said to me. I clenched my jaw and held back an emotion that day I now keep close. All I did was nod before kneeling to my little sister. She looked at me with innocent eyes, knowing not that she wouldn’t see me again for several years. I gave her a hug, kissed the top of her head, and told her to remember me whenever some boys tried to mess with her. She didn’t understand then, but I hoped she would later.
Then, with one final look at my dad’s hard face, I turned and walked into the terminal where my plane was waiting. Six hours later, I was on a bus. An hour after that; I entered into a life that would lead me straight into those stars I feared.