The Enemy of the Mankind by Catherine Kozlova

A war, a three-letter word that
can obliterate everything. I hate it as a soldier who has lived it, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.
The war came over the horizon of our lives and country like a slow moving tank. We were anxious and scared 19-years old conscripts. Violence, once confined to the television, was playing right next to us. The war tears people apart and puts barricades between brothers. It drives people insane and turns them into the monsters. War shred strength and expose vulnerability. It tears victims apart, from the inside out.
I was sent to the city that had been destroyed by the enemy forces the most. The once smooth sandstone walls that made this town sunny are now riddled with bullet holes. There are buildings in ruins, no more than a ragged pile of rubble in the once busy street. Here we faced dusted with rock powder and the smell of the bombs still lingering in the air. I'll never forget that sound either, the explosion that rent the air in this otherwise pristine fall.
Our battalion went to the city as one, a sea of green, as if there were just one brain instead of many. The right legs moved in unison and then the left legs. With each step, the sound of the boots on the cold tarmac was like the warning thunder of a coming storm. Slung about their shoulders were rifles with bayonets. Each face was grim against the frigid wind and everyone cherish the thought about his home.
In three years of war, a khaki colored in everywhere has filled me with foreboding. Mustered ranks of soldiers, military maneuvers, rumble of artillery shells, land-mines lurking like iron teethed monsters waiting to bite a man in half. Smell of gunpowder, shrapnel wounds, rain of bullets, brutal war, dug in trenches, rumble of tanks, cries of the dying, cluster bombs, rumble of explosions were our everyday picture.
Mud and debris rained down from great fountains of dirt, battlefield like a sea of earth whipped up in a violent storm.
Now I am the war veteran with disability to move being home with my wife and growing up children, but war for the territorial integrity of my country continues. Civilians’ screaming, bloody images, the smell of gunpowder and all this khaki colored terror still come to me on bad nights. The next day brings another man dead. Another mother lost. Another son fighting. Another house destroyed. Another life amount to nothing.