On the gnat infested evenings when we, the bitchers and moaners of MotorCycle Awesome, were sitting on the stoop drinking our beers while both bitching and moaning we would see your pudgy frame running on the ridges across the road from our housing complex which we lovingly called TK Plaza. We’d laugh about your dedication while we got fat and drunk. We thought you were crazy.
You wanted to be a Ranger. I never knew why. I figured you just wanted to kill people. I think now that it was more than that. I think you wanted our approval and the approval of other men. You were like us. You were one of the Garbage People trying to prove to you and everybody else that you were more than where you came from. But I couldn’t see that then.
On one afternoon when I was getting back from the Camp I met you in the road. You showed me the tattoo of the tiger on your arm and asked me all about mine. I judged you then because I thought that you were a square. A company man. A yes man. I thought you had a killer inside of you. You were just trying to make some common ground between us. You, the soldier, and me, the hapless freak. You were trying to be my friend in a place where I had none. And I pushed you away because you weren’t like me.
Later that year I was reading books in my room underneath the pornography and dinosaur stickers when I heard a great crashing of bottles against the paper thing wall which separated my room from yours and our house from your house where all the Fisters lived. I went next door to see what the score was.
You were all drunk in the middle of the day, even Sergeant Plaxton who was always a kind of compass pointing towards the true soldierly way. Scut was cooking up one of the large rodents that lived on the island on your grill and talking about how him and his dad and “tag teamed” some woman together. You, Tenasi, Plaxton and Scut had been busy throwing your empty bottles at the wall. The broken remains were stuck in the dry wall. I wanted to laugh but somehow I could only hate. Rooster and Dobber and Deuell all found the scene very funny, however.
Towards the end of our easy deployment you got this wild hair and you started talking about volunteering for this mission to Iraq. How completely crazy. This year had nearly killed me in all of the painful absense of freedom but yet you clamored for more. How was I to understand?
Back at home Christmas came and I’d more or less forgotten you and Hickox and Tenasi and all the others who had volunteered for the mission. I was home from Chicago with my girlfriend at the time, this spoiled rich girl named Laura. I was standing on the balcony of my mom’s apartment in Charlotte. Next door was a member of the unit, a sergeant, I forget his name. As I smoked on story above him he casually said:
“Did you hear about Dresky?” He was putting up Christmas lights.
I remember how the cigarette became unreal between my fingers then. “No, Sergeant. I have not.”
“They hit a bomb. He’s burned real bad. Whole body. They say it burned his face off. His eyelids. Everything.” And still he continues to put up these fucking decorations, not a hint of emotion in his words. In my own head the world had disappeared and I entered into a hallucinatory plane of terror and nightmares. I could see your burned face.
I ran into the back room of the house and crumpled on the ground sobbing under the bed. Soon my mom came to find out what had happened since her nearly happy son had left for a smoke and come back ruined. I tried to tell her but the words couldn’t come out around the tears and I pushed her away. Since then I have pushed everybody away.
You hung on for six months down in the San Antonio burn ward. We speculated on your chances at survival. They say that infection is the real killer with burn victims.
And infection did kill you. Eventually. Six months of eye-lidless pain, wrapped in gauze, forced to stare out continuously at the world without the ability to shut it off. To sleep. To dream. By now your burned face was a nightly host of my dreams. You would come to me in a burning HumVee and you stopped at my feet as flames licked out from where your eyes should be. This is Hell. Every time. You never said a word.
In July you finally died and I felt the most disgusting feeling I’d ever felt. Relief. Thank God that you had found some peace. I made the mistake of vocalizing my relief and lost the respect of everyone in the unit if I’d ever had it to begin with. How could I be happy that you were dead? How could I be happy knowing that you were burned so terribly? As always, even my concern with me and my own happiness rankled in my stomach when I knew it was you who would never again know a day of happiness. Or sadness.
We fired artillery shells from our Howitzers for you. I wrote you a poem that I have forgotten on our guns shell for you. In the moment of silence that followed the deafening thunder of our goodbye, with tears in our eyes, we held our first memorial to you, Dreasky.
Since then I have held countless memorials to you down dusty and lonely roads, on every drug I can find to kill my pain, I have memorialized your life and enshrined my few memories of you and I take them out and dust them off and I cry again to prove that I still can. I will carry you with me everywhere I go. I will live for two inside of the gloom created in your absense.
I have never been able to accept the death of young men for the government. It was a terrible decision to join the military and to meet you and to learn to respect your kind.
Sleep well Dreasky.
The Paper Trail 
This s a very emotionally charged piece Chris. I wish I could explain my grief over dead friends in the same way that you do.
With enough time your grief will explain itself to you in its own words. It is only a matter of learning how to record that process. And the only thing to make that process easier is to practice. Every day. I am sure that you have enough stories to practice with, and if not maybe you will make some more soon.