War

I'm cab driver since half a year. The stories you hear they change you and your worldview piece by piece. It's not about what you hear on the news but what you hear from people who have been at places for real and their simple part of a certain story. Usually you hear this story only for some minutes without any proof if it's wrong or right and who else was involved and what's their part of it. There's one story that came to my mind first when I started to write.

The guy I drove wanted to go to a bar. At one point he told me that he had been a soldier in the Afghan War back when the Soviets occupied the country and in some other warfare zones. He told me he saw cruelty people do to each other that's hard to imagine when you don't witness yourself. He told about children and women being slaughtered without any mercy and the helplessness faced with demons that won't make you any different from this. He was left with posttraumatic stress disorder - how we like to call it - or simply the fact that all these horrible pictures still wander around in his mind and torture him. I don't know if he had to kill people too or just witnessed other people being killed. And I honestly don't know if it's worse to kill somebody who would else kill others and be left on the same level or to see it happening wishing to intervene.

In the end people are sometimes left with choices where all options are terrible to take and put damage to others and oneself. And what's left is trying to live with it.