soldiers...

a few weeks ago marked the end of The Pacific series on hbo... i don't know why, but i've wanted to write about this since i watched the series. well, the series were mainly about those american marines enlisted in a war against japan during ww2... watching the series and a few more war movies like them make me want to write about these people. soldiers. marines. navy. army. whatever the term you use, they're still the same. they are soldiers. drilled and profesionally trained to kill one part of people while trying to guard and save the other.
and how do they justify what part of people to kill and what part to save? that, of course, comes from orders from the goverment they serve. they are, of course, first and foremost, goverment servants... like i am. heh...
back to soldiers. a few entries ago, i posted a lyric from greenday, 21 guns. that song was about soldiers too, i think. and put a whole new perspective on this specific line of work... because it is one hell of a job. because it comes with one hell of a price. i mean, killing people. what kind of a sick person would be proud of a job like that? jack the Ripper, maybe. but, yeah, he was a very, very sick person. i wouldn't, and i suspect not many of the soldiers would be proud either. and that's how the song described the guilt these people might have felt. still, why do they do it? patriotism? maybe. forced? maybe. family tradition? some, yeah. peer pressure? hahaha, that is a standard cause for anything bad, eh?
but then, watching the series, i came to realize at the end of the day, none of the above matters so much. at the end of the day, it is all about having your friends' back, covering them, watching over for them. at the end of day, it is all about friendship. i mean, how do you justify having to watch your friends, the one who stick with you through the mud and the dirt and the bullets, being shot in front of you? do you think you can ever imagine the grief? how do you get over that? you don't. because you just simply can't forget the friends who stick with you through thick and thin, through river and jungle. you can't simply forget friends who share their last supply of food through out the week, having a single bite and giving you the rest. you can't simply forget that.
at the end of the day, it is all about friendship. it is all about saving the life of the person besides you, or behind you, or in front of you, without even actually knowing them for long. without even knowing them at all. but they are there with you, with the same cause as you have, whatever it is, and suddenly, their lives matter more than yours.
we could really learn a lot from these stories. ignore the noises of shotguns, bazookas, cannons, machine guns, whatever. grab the messages they are trying to give. we can see the value of friendship, the deeper meaning of it in stories like these. we can see the fight is no longer about saving your own neck, but also the one belonged to those around you. soldiers, in a way, might be the most unselfish people in the world, when they go through it enough. when they have had enough. because then, their own lives don't matter as much anymore.
aside from that, we as Muslims, could learn a lot too. even in the middle of a battlefield, a few of these soldiers still bring their bible, their book with them. that's how deep their faith goes. what about us? in the middle of a fight, they still believe, they still have faith (some do, anyway). what about us? we might not see the battlefield in front of us. it's invisible, but it's there. most definitely. it's the fight against breaching of our rights as muslims, a fight against those who dare to insult our leader, a fight, much more difficult, against those who slowly but effectively maneuver their way into our community and try to lead us, subconsciously, to defy our own book, our sole guidance and our faith. it's invisible, but it's there. have been there for so long, in fact.
are we brave enough to be the real soldiers and fight these invisible evils looming so suffocatingly close around us?