All of the years of us running through the battlefields. All of the years of us trudging through trenches covered in red of the blood of allies and enemies. All of the years of us fighting forward through hills and valleys in quest of cleansing this earth of evil. All of the years tentatively moving forward through cities someone use to call home and try to decipher the innocent from the guilty.
All of these years of fighting just to lead to a standstill and for some bureaucrats to decide it is over and whoever lost the least is victorious. The side that we are on lost the least and we get declared the winner of this pointless conundrum. But, then why do we feel like we are the losers?
Winners get to stand courageously on the top and feel confident in what they did was right. We aren’t winners. The more we look at the war; the more we see we aren’t winners. Families tore apart in acts of cruelty. Soldiers tore apart in acts of misery. Countries tore apart in acts of insanity. Lines running up and down the map remind of us of the scars we tore through the continent. We simply can’t declare ourselves the winners without starting another war and putting our kin through the same living hell we made it through.
We are the losers. For every act of violence causes an equal reaction of violence because the people we hurt will not know the reason we did. Every textbook will have blank pages to describe the reasons we had to intervene in world wars. Every soldier will have words scarred in the backs of their minds to remind them we are the enemy. We won and what we won was a target on our backs.
But, no matter what we do: war never changes. Man changes and technology changes but our methods of bloodshed do not change. War is a game to inflict the highest amount of casualties and who ever quits first is the loser. The game never ends and even when we think it is the end of war we haven’t quite learned our history. The cycle will end when humanity is triumphed and all free will is conquered and honestly though it will take years to see that what we did was right. I would choose free will every time.