I knew I was walking towards my own demise when I signed up for the army. But I did anyway.
Because there was nothing else to do.
A man does what he does when life has already turned its back on him—when the world has abandoned him to bones, starvation, and memories he does not wish to remember. You cling to anything that seems to be a means of escape. Even if it is another prison.
I could have stayed in that gutter, quietly deteriorating with the other discarded souls. I could have stayed in the piss-stinking alley that smelled of stale wine and waited for the cold to finish the job. But something within me—call it pride, call it delusion—wouldn't let me die without trying at least to do something. Without even pretending there was still a goal left to be followed. That's what I told myself, anyway. That maybe, if I died in uniform instead of in rags, it would have meant something.
It didn't.
I filled what there was to fill. A frayed satchel. A broken spoon. A piece of string I had wrapped once around my waist for a belt. Nothing to put in it, but I filled it anyway—because others notice if you don't have anything. And I followed the recruiters behind me like a sheep to the slaughter, thinking I was making a choice, while actually I was only drifting into the next kind of death.
They did not hesitate to accept me. They did not even question me.
A glance was sufficient to understand I was precisely what they were looking for-young enough to bear a gun, broken enough not to question.
It was merely a question of a second to accept me, and thirty days to "train" me.
No training was actually carried out.
They herded us together like cattle, threw uniforms over us, and yelled until our ears throbbed. We had no lessons in formation or fighting. No discipline, no practice. A single command yelled over and over: Charge. That was their strategy—send us in first. Yell and run. Die fast and die hard. Make a mess, make noise. Give the regular troops time to get it done.
We weren't recruits. We were bait.
I stood alongside hundreds of my peers, in tattered armor that fit us poorly, armed with weapons that seemed to have been dug out of graves. We were not given shields. No names. Numbers only.
And yet, I continued thinking to myself this was preferable to the streets.
That fabrication was starting to rot in my mouth.
I had thought of fleeing. Jeez, I thought about it every day. I'd look over the treeline, watch the patrols, think how far I might get before they noticed me. I'd picture disappearing in a midnight piss stop, blending in with the woods like smoke. I even sketched out plans—north, maybe east, where the forest was thick and the roads few.
I never did anything with them.
Because I'd seen what they do to fugitives.
The first one who deserted never even made it out of camp. Caught him with a sack full of bread and a tin blade, and before dawn, hanging head-down off the watchtower with his throat cut open like a second mouth. No one said a thing. Just glared. Ate our rations. Poured baleful juice in our boots. Continued on.
Fear does that. It silences you rather than shouting threats.
So I stayed.
Not because I was brave. Not because I was concerned with a mission. But because I was too afraid to run—and too empty to care.
Maybe that's how they needed us: desperate, compliant, easy to pin down.
We weren't soldiers.
We were sacrifices in plundered armor.
And I would have died—given I did not have to go back.