Tukarov

Tukarov was dead,

it seemed like only yesterday we had danced

at his wedding, now his body lay quiet,

face down in the mud, a gaping hole where his chest

had once been, ripped apart by a 50 caliber shell

from a sniper’s gun;

I wondered if he had felt anything,

as the bullet ripped through his flesh,

tearing out pieces of his lungs with it,

it couldn’t have been much I thought,

he was dead before he even hit the ground,

perhaps it was better this way,

only a few months earlier he had lost Ulena

in an air strike, after that he had never

been the same;

“we must do something, we must fight back,

we must not die like sheep”, he had insisted,

convincing me to join the ‘cause’ with him,

now I could not remember what the ‘cause’ was,

only that I was cold and afraid, as I sat with the

rest of our patrol, listening to our commander

brief us on tomorrow’s raid, wondering when this

nightmare would end;

Tukarov was dead,

long live Tukarov.

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