Night thoughts.

When night falls and taps plays loudly over the speakers, the moonlight shatters into a thousand pieces in the fading notes echoing across the frosty fields, through the pine trees, rustling the fallen leaves, and slipping through the bones and the blood of the soldiers who sleep here; both in their beds and in their graves. Taps is the eternal soldiers’ lullaby, a welcome end to a long day, the abrupt end to a short life, the immortal measure of days – this is the soldier’s song.


I sit here and write while my brothers sleep around me. Snoring softly, rustling in their sheets as they dream of their wives and girlfriends left behind, sighing gently as muscles knotted and tense from the days exertion unwind in sleep. Sleep. Even now the stresses of this life that lies before us roll stealthily over us. The wracking cough that mimics the chatter of the machine gun, first at one end of the bay, and then answered in a rising crescendo…sickness here is more contagious than a yawn. Hair close cropped begins to grow anew, adding grays and silvers to the once black, brown, and blond manes of the lions sleeping here. New lines appear on young faces, but behind their tough exteriors the little boy who once dressed in his father’s fatigue’s with a pot for a helmet, and a stick for a rifle stares out through a man’s eyes.


Peace falls quickly, like summer clouds over the sun…the snores cease, the rustling quiets…even the coughing turns into the gentle breaths of innocent sleep…though around the world our brothers and sisters fight, bleed, and in suffering and sacrifice add their names to the annals of history and the tome of valor; here there is peace. Taps has played its farewell to this day, and tomorrow waits for no man.