Sergeant Julian “Hawk Eye” Noble lay dying in my arms, blood gushing from his every pore, pin pricks of pain stabbing his body, torn up by a hail of bullets. His head lay in my lap as I sat with my back pressed against the wall of an empty church building, crushed bricks, concrete slabs, and broken steel pieces surrounding us. We lingered silently as the sound of our enemies’ loud voices and rushing footsteps passed our hiding place and faded into the ground. He shifted his head slightly and trembled as a deadened sensation moved through him. He felt like nothing in my arms, he was thin and his ribs showed through his crimson stained uniform. “You should have let me die alone,” he whispered through clenched teeth, his downcast eyelids opened to stare into my face. His eyes revealed to me a story he played on repeat within them. It begins with a horrid scene; he lay awake in a grave, dirt filled deep inside his pupils. He’s been buried but he can feel his breath, he’s still alive…Pictures weaved in and out of his head, portraits of the ghosts of Iraqi’s he’s killed, beautiful galleries displayed in his memories museum. Malice lies beneath his flesh to keep archives of all his deadly deeds. In the distance I hear his voice start to pray, “Dear god”… it screams to the no-bodies that lay buried in a whisper close beside him. It all felt so cinematic the way he prayed so hard not to die; it was like he had rehearsed his lines all his life. The story of how a man became a monster with penciled in sketches of broken bodies left in places no person can bare to name. His confessions quietly float through his fading air and he pleads guilty in his grave, till the dirt around him is soaked in suicidal aspirations… I blinked and lost his story, the sound of his voice brought my attention back to the present. “I can’t feel my heart,” he said calmly with the knowledge of his impending death…“I wonder how long it’s been gone,” he laughed. I took in his eyes again and this time the maps of his face. Tiny golden specks of sunlight had crept through the bricks and rest upon his sunburned skin, emphasizing his skull and his dust-like bone, a man no more. “Damn…” he struggled to speak; salty blood flooded his mouth, his life poured out in a liquid. The light in his eyes flickered and blew out like a candle to a soft hush of breath…

I’ve heard this story before.