They came back,
those men of thunder and silence,
with medals pinned like rusted prayers
to their hollowed chests.
But something inside them
had remained behind—
buried in a trench,
burned in a village,
lost between the flash of gunfire
and the breath that never came again.
They brought back only their bodies.
Their laughter did not return.
Their eyes no longer knew
how to look at sunlight
without flinching.
They stood at windows
as if waiting for someone
to release them
from the unfinished scream
coiled deep in their lungs.
These were not the same boys
who danced with girls in the summer light,
who wrote poems in the margins of schoolbooks,
who promised to return
with glory, with stories,
with the flag held high.
They returned instead
with silence
as their native tongue.
The war had peeled them—
not like fruit
but like bark
torn from a tree until only
the trembling core
remained.
You could see it
in how they touched nothing,
how they slept like hunted animals,
how they turned their heads
whenever a car backfired,
how they stared
into the steaming coffee
as if it held the faces
of those who did not come back.
Some tried to build again—
houses, families,
a reason.
But even love
was too fragile
to stitch shut
the place where their soul
had bled out
quietly
under foreign skies.
And now,
years later,
they sit in the dusk
like statues without names,
alive in skin,
but not in spirit.
The war never ended for them.
It simply changed uniforms,
found new ways
to haunt their nights.
And we—
we clap them on the back,
we say,
“You made it home.”
But the truth is:
they did not.
Not entirely.
Not ever.
Broken Author 