The guns ceased their echoes throughout the dimly lit corridors the jungle cast across the landscape.
Peace arrived at last, its cost insurmountable, and yet it came all the same.
Erich found himself largely fulfilling paperwork. As a Colonel, he now had the duty of becoming a desk jockey when the bullets stopped flying.
The work itself was almost insulting in its mundanity. Forms stamped and restamped, casualty lists reduced to neat columns of names and serial numbers, requisitions tallied in ink as if lives could be balanced like ledgers.
He signed commendations for men who would never read them, approved replacements for platoons that no longer truly existed, and authorized transfers knowing full well the jungle would claim some of those men before the ink had time to dry.
It was a different kind of killing, quieter and far more impersonal, and in many ways it weighed heavier on him than the fighting ever had.
