Only the Rain

by Randall Silvis

beautiful and fucking ugly the world outside can be.

Any parent who is trying to be a good parent knows that, for most of every day, their own interests have to be put on hold while the kids’ needs and interests are tended.

didn’t raise me to be the kind of person who would steal from anybody. They raised me to be responsible, and to always do what was right.

“You need to replace those wipers. They’re about as useful as tits on a rooster.”

You were the source of our faith and our strength. You held us together and kept us going. But who held you together?

You always told us every time something bad happened, whether to us or by us, you always told us to not think about it. Try not to think about it, you said. But you thought about it, Spence. I know you did. The way I’d catch you looking at us sometimes, that sadness in your eyes like you knew something we didn’t. Thing is, we knew it too. Shame. Grief. Fear. Disgust. There wasn’t one of us over there who didn’t know it and feel it every single day. Thing is, they shave our heads and dress us in the same clothes and try to make us all look alike—hood rats and farm boys and poor white trash and everything else we were before they threw us all together. Then they drill us and teach us to shoot and fight and they do their damnedest to make us despise the enemy. They program us like machines so we’ll use our weapons like the voice for our fear and anger and hatred, the only voice they let us have. The only one that will get us a word or two of congratulations from the company commander. But deep down we’re all still men. Boys, really. Deep down we all miss our homes and families and just want to get back to them in one piece. We all just want to feel loved and safe again, want to sit at the table with people glad to be with us, people who don’t hate us because of the uniforms we wear, people who don’t want to kill us. And when some of us do come back in one piece, and we take off the uniforms and let our hair grow out, and we try to look like we were never in those places and n...

“You keep sitting there with your creamy white ass hanging out, that big hairy elephant’s going to sniff you out for sure.”

Your generosity of time and experience personify the code of selflessness and sacrifice that distinguishes the men and women who serve our country.

with the noblest and purest of intentions; that they too often return to us with those intentions subverted and scarred only increases my respect for the beauty still intact deep in their hearts and souls.