There was a time when war was about territory – it was about land and the accompanying resources. It was about expansion, colonization, accumulation of wealth and power and they were all measured by earth and water and sky. Feudalism, empire, manifest destiny . . . it was all the same.

There was a time when sex was about conquest, about how many notches on his belt measured in awkward mornings and high fives. His life was ephemeral and yet all the same. The faces blurred together and it stank of alcohol.

Then war stopped being about how much land and started being about where and why and how. Territory was fixed and nations fought for power. They fought with the entire force of their civilization until their ears bled from the blare of loudspeakers and the countryside from Siberia to Berlin burned the flames of nationalism: books and bodies, all in righteous effigy.

And sex . . . he had sex with all his soul, because each fight was not just another grab for power or fleeting pleasure. It was the war to end all wars and he fought for it with all the delusions in his petty arsenal. And each conquest was to fight the numbness, the dissolution of a world ruled by meaningless trysts. He wanted to fall in love and he had sex with all the passion he could muster, because this one would be the last.

Then war became about destruction, about peace only because the alternative was far too costly. Mushroom clouds painted the landscape black and white and all people could speak of was fear of imminent destruction, while ideologies grew unchecked and uprising became the name of the game. The great war had ended, but the world still waged a righteous peace for things they called 'hearts and minds.'

And his heart and his mind were won, but not by right nor valor, but by the simple truth that they were all he had to hold onto. He believed in love because it was all there was to live for with bombs exploding around you and the guy who smiled that small innocent smile in the shower a mess of blood and dust the next day. And fear drove him to find the one thing he could share with others. But sex, like war, was always about destruction.

But the war he fought – the blood he'd shed, the men he's lost and the tears he'd cried and all the faceless that he'd sent to early graves were all in the name of freedom. War had become about liberation, about some right of people not to suffer. Since when had killing been about justice? But it was, and he did kill, because he believed in freedom and he loved to fly.

And love . . . love became the freedom of a snow-swept plain. It pinted itself in the solitude like lines etched in the snow, either frozen in place for a thousand years or melted come the dawn, but forgotten either way. But he was free to be himself an he liked it that way, even when the battle lost its significance . . . when all those he had fought for had died.

But then he stepped through the melt of a stone circle and found a world where human beings did not know war, but the knew spears and arrows and bombs and shadows that stalked through the night like the tide creeping in from the coast with painful regularity.

And now, war is about survival. There is no good nor evil. There is no competition, no progress, no ideologies other than the fact that life is desired, and one must die so that another might survive. War is about necessity.

And he needs this so much now. He hungers for flesh and sweat and transcendent blue eyes like memories of the freedom of the empty sky. And he is consumed by the want, to mark this territory as his, to claim it the way he once claimed a battlefield, all with liberation in mind. He wants to cement it here in this moment, a portrait of heavy breaths and hooded eyes and planes of muscle and cracks and dips of supple flesh, because by claiming it he can protect it . . . or so he was told in books on tactics and history of men in proud uniforms.

But his enemy does not wear uniform and it does not die and he wonders about heart and mind, and especially soul. And it is not war that he fights, because there is no territory for him to claim, and no victory. There is only those that live and those that do not, and he has been too busy fighting to know what living means.

He is a soldier. He doesn't like to admit how much it affects him, but it does. And war is the only business he knows, except that he knows that he isn't prepared for this world where he fights always for his life and the only reason he can give for why is in a face with a petulant frown and a strangely-soft nose and voice like a jet screeching overhead, announcing its own freedom, if only to join the fight.

FIN