What He Couldn't Say - John Fetto

Hawley sat in the auditorium, mouth clamped shut, as he listened to people up on a stage framed by red velvet drapes, talk about what would happened if they went to war. They were angry, righteous, not scared, they were full of venom and condemnation, not fear or guilt, talking about how they were right and the other wrong, not shaking inside to think of the deep craters there would be where there once were villages, couldn’t say that American foreign policy was flawed. It was still a kind of war dance, festive, dancing around a fire, not thinking of the youthful bodies turned bloody and black. Hawley couldn’t tell them about any of that, because it made him sick to think about it, but he couldn’t tell Gil he didn’t want to come, and now he couldn’t tell these people what they wouldn’t understand, what made him sick just thinking about. That another batch of fresh faced young men, would sign up to go to a country where they would be hated, walking like armed guards though a cemetery that grew with each day, waiting for someone to pat them on the back, and all they did was look at them in horror, knowing that wherever they went, so went death, so that even if the young men didn’t die, when they came back, they’d feel horribly old. Hawley couldn’t say any of that.