He felt his mouth try to curl into a sneer, and managed to stop it after more than twitching. "Yeah, I guess hero would describe what I did. Of course, hero has a second definition back home. Someone who gets other people killed."<br/><br/>He sighed, before glaring at his glass of alcohol, wine if he had to guess, but refrained from indulging, knowing what happened when he allowed himself just one drink. It came in about a dozen bottles. "I apologize if I don't go into enough details for you, I am not a bard or story teller, and tend to keep to the facts. Before I hit twenty, I was fairly normal, if a bit boring. Went to school, got the required education, and then putted about for a couple years before realizing I was in a rut, and needed to get out or never be anything more than a statistic. Couldn't afford a college, sorry, higher level education, so I enlisted with the military. Joined the air force, did desk work for my first three years, annotating what got exposed to who. I mean who to what.<br/><br/>My third deployment band rolled around, and this time I volunteered, figuring that, since I was in for another three years at least at that point, might as well deploy and see what the bare bases were like. Got accepted, and spent six months halfway around the world, doing my job in an environment that was a lot more spartan, and a lot more interesting. If you could call daily showers of mortars, basically exploding arrows, merely interesting. Never got hurt despite the attacks, dumb luck at it finest no doubt, and decided to extend the deployment for another six months, this time volunteering for convey duty. Most people are smarter than that, but I was a bored twenty three year old, and the combat and hazardous duty pay was enticing. That enticement was enough until the first time my convey got hit.<br/><br/>Nothing major, maybe twelve to twenty insurgents, sorry 'freedom fighters,' raked the convey with a couple mortars and RPGs, which are like ballista bolts that explode, while wasting small arms fire against the convey's armor. Got to return fire, using the vehicle mounted weapon, don't know if I or the rest of us killed or even wounded anyone, hard to hit a one hundred fifty yard distant target with a fully automatic 50cal machine gun, but no one on my side was seriously wounded. One army grunt, private Mullenburg if memory serves me right, caught some shrapnel with his cheek, but it was superficial at worst. Most of the rest of the conveys were similar, patrols to go out and show the locals we were there, and the locals thanked us with various amounts of incoming fire. Politics at its finest, no doubt.<br/><br/>The last convey, a couple weeks before I was due to ship back home, that one was different."<br/><br/>He paused, shaking his head slightly, and took a pull from his glass of water. The past was so very near and loud, and the simple act helped push it back somewhat, though he didn't continue immediately, too busy brooding over what he should or could have done to bring more of the soldiers home.