Journal…
They don’t talk about the time after The Purge, the months in an occupied school building, then struggling to survive in a run down, rat infested mansion in the woods. When they finally pull themselves out of that hellhole—past the violence, the fear, the hunger—and find themselves in the oasis of a manor house full of lavish and comfortable accommodations , he tells the woman in charge what she needs to hear so they can fight the battle that they see as theirs.
But he doesn’t tell her anything.
Not really.
Sometimes he wonders if she would have even heard him if he had tried—so enthralled as she was with the thought of 20 young soldiers willing to do her bidding.
So he tells her about their marksmanship. Their tactical skills. The way some of them can shoot with spot on accuracy—and all can issue fatal shots. But he doesn’t tell her the important stuff—the terror and fear and sheer panic that led them to those skills, to those moments, to that place.
Because they don’t talk about that time.
He wonders, sometimes, if any of them even have the words to do it. How do you talk about things like that—the things that happened to them? Instead, they keep that time in their hearts—the way they desperately clung to each other, the way they woke some mornings, convinced they were only waking up to die. The letters they wrote their families—letters of children prepared for the end.
And when their own children ask about that time, their faces full of wonder and curiosity, the best they can come up with is the words “we were in the war together.”
They hope it says enough (but sort of know it doesn’t). Because it’s thanks to them that their children don’t know the painful sting of war. So their children never really know what they mean to each other.
