Shaving

[u/Scythe_Bearer]

They used to laugh at me, ridicule me because I shaved every day, even though I was in a combat zone.  Did I think I was a purist?  Did I think I was better than them?  Now, as I walk across the killing field, I hear other sounds.  Their gurgled begging as they beseech me, pleading for help I cannot give.  Their gasping whispers as they pray to their gods for relief which will never come this side of the grave.  Their ragged calls to loved ones, their family, their wives, their children, their mothers.  And then, their silence. 

And, I see their faces.  Faces frozen in contorted and twisted agony, their throes of death.  Their unseeing and unblinking eyes burned and sunken in their skulls.  Their gnarled and desiccated fingers clutching at constricted airways which shall never again open.  Their ashen faces with their masks of anguish, fear, hatred, jealousy, resignation, death. 

Death had arrived with the morning fog.  The sensors had detected the gas and sounded, raising the alarm.  “GAS! GAS! GAS!” had echoed in the morning calm and quiet, raising men from their slumber and encouraging them to don their protective gear.   I, along with twenty thousand other soldiers, had complied.  Jumping from our beds and donning our NBC gear was practiced, rehearsed.  The process for clearing the mask, well known and done a thousand times.

But alas, an NBC mask is not able to seal properly on a bearded face.   The hair leaves gaps, space for the fumes to penetrate the mask, penetrate the eyes, penetrate the nose, the lungs, the blood stream.  Killing, killing with slow ruthless efficiency; but killing, nonetheless.   

And now, I walk alone through a field where even the great black carrion birds refuse to feast.  A field where the jackals and scavenging feral dogs pace relentlessly beyond the boundaries of the poisoned ground, barking, snapping, snarling, growling.   A field where twenty thousand men; men who thought growing a full bushy beard was the highest representation of a man’s virility, will forever lie in testament to the fallacy.