[ WP ] You were born during the war , and as you grew up , you 've accepted it all as a part of your life . But a few months after your twenty-second birthday . the war ends and you suddenly find yourself in a world completely foreign to you .

I was born in the earlier years of the war, a beacon of life among fields full of death. But even something as innocent and joyful as a new person, a new life to be, new possibilities is tarnished when death surrounds you. I was soon to find that was my life, death. 
 
 I enlisted at 16, well you were forced to at 18 under new legislation, but given the choice at 16 I did n't see reason to delay the inevitable for 2 more measly years. I knew of the war, it was drilled into us from young, at the ripe age of 10 we were taught who the enemy was, at 12 we were told of gruesome war stories, enough to wreak havoc on a young child's developing mind. Most of us born during the war knew more about death by 16 than life. 
 
 From 16 through to 22 my life was the war, all I knew was the war, all I did was war. I had killed and seen others be killed, I had hid in bunkers cramped together with 20 other men, barely a centimemtre between us, waiting all night for the attrition to end only to rise alive from the thick concrete grave, and find the real grave was above us. The dead were above the ground, the alive were in the ground. That was the war, up was down, down was left, right was up, it was utter disaster and chaos, but yet it was normal. 
 
 4 months down from my 22nd birthday the call came through the radio waves, the war was ended on all fronts, for the first time in almost 25 years there was peace, for the first time in my life there was peace around me. All parties signed a peace deal a couple of days later. Except us, the generation born in war, moulded by it, made for it, there was no peace how could there be? We saw our best friends die by the grimy hands of war, forged friendships in battle based off of our mutual situation in war, from a young age we had family die from war, and all of a sudden the two certainties of our life, war and death, are no longer a certainty. 
 
 Back home walking through the town I saw kids playing, little kids innocent still, likely to never be molested by war, on the swings and the slides. The military posts scattered throughout the town all but gone, any trace of the war slowly fading into the backdrop of history, soon to be taught to children as history rather than current affairs. But the war followed me, I could n't adapt to the seeming normality around me because inside my conscious was blood stained and in tatters. Every little noise like a spoon dropping on the floor, or a door slamming too hard would startle me and shake me, yet these noises should be the noises of home. So what was this place with such foreign noises? It could n't be home, no my home had the noise of attrition sirens, guns fizzling past your head, only to hit a comrade next to you. My life was death and now I must find a life in peace. For the first time in 6 years I slept in a bed surrounded by walls and insulation, comfortable, yet eerily too quiet. 
 
 I awoke the next morning to find a brochure slipped under my door with the letters VSG printed on it. My reaction was to hide behind the wall and look through the blinds. The thought of someone at my door whilst I was sleeping shot anxiety through my body. Was this an ambush? Were they spies or scouts learning of our battle strength? Anxiety crept in as I waited for the attrition, I came to the conclusion that the enemy was scouting key positions for attrition, perhaps this brochure was a signal beacon of sorts. I came to my senses once my mum woke up. She found me under the table yelling at her to `` get the Fuck down!'' once I came to my senses I read the brochure, mum spoke to me about it. It was a group of people in the town, a mixture of veterans, psychologists and volunteers who have come together to help people like me live with what we have seen and experienced, the Veterans Support Group, the reason I am writing this, the reason I can pour my previous life of perpetual death onto a page. The reason I can find some form of peace with the war still raging on in my conscious.
