A mercenary is a paid soldier. He doesn’t wear a uniform; he never gets exchanged for a prisoner taken by the other side. International law says a mercenary is anyone “fighting under a foreign flag.” But international law doesn’t matter in places where no flags fly. Mercenaries are paid, but that pay isn’t what drives them all. I served with men who already had more money than they could spend. Family money that had withstood everything from currency fluctuations to global conflicts. I don’t mean the long-distance men, the ones who could launch an assault with a sat-phone conversation. I mean the men who had to be on the killing ground to feel ... I don’t know. Just whatever it was that they felt once the fighting started. I was done with that. All that. I had never chosen that life–it had been the only “choice” my life had offered. A boy who is freezing to death will enter the first door that opens. Even if the Devil is standing behind that door, at least it’s warm in there. The only man who had ever called me “son” had promised that, if I walked into that Devil’s Door, the time would come when another would open. And that door would be the passage to the only thing I had ever truly wanted. If I survived five years in that furnace, I could be a person. Become a person. tinyurl/mztc8qv
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 13:51:31 +0000