We're Done Dishonoring Our Dead | by: E.M. Burlingame In the dim, smoke-choked haze of this campfire somewhere in the mountains of Idaho, I think. Who knows, I’ve been in the bottom of not a bottle but bottles for days. Wherever I am, I sit here, hunched over a fifty-year-old scotch strong enough to burn away the memories. But it doesn’t, won’t, can’t. The demons don’t drown—they just whisper louder, angrier, clawing at my skull, demanding to know what and why. What the fuck did they die for? Why did we bleed and break and lose everything for a system that just says, “thank you for your service,” while we’re left choking on the decaying cadavers of their lives, our civilization and world? Jeremy’s dead. Died on some commando raid, brains out, trying to drag an Air Force TAC off a road alive, PKM rounds ripping the air. Took one to the head—bam—blood speckled grey matter painting the dirt before his boys could even suppress the fire. And for what? So we could hand that shithole back to the enemy years later like it was a used hooker. Would he have done it if he knew? If he knew we’d just piss it all away? Yeah, probably. That’s the kind of solid motherfucker he was. There for his boys, not the fucking locals. The best of us. His mother and sister—they’re walking corpses since, hollowed out, crushed under a weight that’ll never lift. Dawson’s gone too. Christmas Eve, he ate a bullet. Self-inflicted, they say, like that makes it cleaner. Couldn’t take the pain—the broken back, the scrambled brain from tumbling off a cliff in the black of night on some pointless patrol. They pumped him full of pills, turned him into a junkie, but it didn’t touch the real hurt: the betrayal. Would he have signed up if he knew? If he knew the government was brewing a plague to fatten Big Pharma’s wallets, a vaccine jacking the “unexpected death rate” up, whatever the fuck that is, by 40%, while the suits in government, business and banking count their stolen trillions? Hell no! None of us who knew him will ever fill that hole he left. Good men like him don’t survive this soulless meat grinder of a world. Pepper died in some goddamn qalat, in some nowhere village that’s never mattered in the whole stinking history of man. Honestly, I don’t know much about it. What kind of fucking friend was I? I only know he took a round to the femoral artery—bled out fast, hot and red, in the hands of his 18D teammate and buddy who’s carrying that shit nightmare to this fucking day. His wife back home? She’s got nothing now but a flag and a fading memory. Why’d he enlist? Because the 2008 financial crisis—those slick Financialists pulling strings—stripped him broke which shoved him into the Army. Would he have served if he knew it was all a rigged game, a wealth grab for the rapists at the top? Maybe. Who the hell knows. He was also a quiet, solid motherfucker. Eric’s dead too. Blown into five wet chunks by an IED he was disarming to keep little local kids from getting shredded. My team had to find the parts, scrape him up, bag him, ship him home to his boys and a closed casket funeral—two little guys under seven who’ll never again see their adored dad. His EOD junior, Ken, lost an arm, his brain turned to mush in the blast, condemned to stumble through life half a man. Would Eric have left those boys if he’d known? If he knew the lunatics in charge—teachers, social workers, doctors, government freaks—might one day try to trans them, pump them full of estrogen, carve up their bodies, throwing their genitals in the fire? Hell no. He lost himself trying to save strangers’ kids. That great father sonofabitch died for a future that’s turning to poison. Three of my other boys offed themselves within ten months of one another. Few years back. Died back here in the States, not even on the battlefield. Brain injuries, career problems, divorces, courts ripping their kids away, handing them to unfit mothers while the system took half of everything they’d ever built, would ever build. Every one of them with at least two years in straight up combat. Would they have pushed so hard to be selected, to wear the beret, if they knew? If they knew their own government would flood our streets with the same enemies we fought for twenty-five years—rape gangs, murderers, human traffickers all protected by the insane, by academics, politicians, NGOs, cops and judges, while good men rot in jail for fighting back? If they’d known our intelligence agencies and law enforcement would be flooding fentanyl into our streets, killing hundreds of thousands of our own? Not in a million fucking years! What the fuck are we doing? Fighting for these bastards, these fucking antihumanist viruses. These parasites that create nothing. That do nothing but take, as the send us away to murder the innocent to collect on their debts! What the fuck are we doing guarding their accumulation of even more wealth by slaughtering humans in their sleep—their wives and kids just “getting in the way.” All so some pedophile, some predator, some Financialist Resentful can cash in on a ten-million-dollar “performance” bonus this year, while our families have barely enough to eat. What do we get for it? Millions of civilians dead, our own minds and bodies shattered, our own souls sold as if we were nothing more than cheap whores, our own friends and colleagues broken for life and dead—so they can flood our towns with drugs and poverty and slave and worse, with scum who hate us, just so landlords and the banks behind them can suck up rent paid for votes made by human garbage. Elections stolen right in front of us, dissenters calling it out locked in solitary for years, a global web of pedophiles and genocidal murderers, slavers all— entertainers, politicians, royals, bankers, bureaucrats and businessmen—running the show, and not one of them made to pay for their blatant crimes. A trillion dollars a year in trafficking, and that’s only drugs and humans. Laundered through the major banks at four and a half percent, keeping the whole racket going. The economy’s gutted, 80% of the numbers pure made up bullshit, the middle class is ash, veterans killing themselves faster than bullets ever could, more dead at their own hands than in all wars combined since WWII. Yeah, the elites are scrambling hard to patch their regime, to regain trust, to reset the contract, to make us believe in their superiority, but it’s too late. Way too fucking late, man. Something’s broken—snapped clean through. The kind where it can’t be welded and there ain’t no more spare parts. It’s all just broken and gotta be completely replaced as a whole. A reckoning that’s not coming; it’s here. A reckoning in blood and guts and gore. Twenty-five years of the most ruthless hunting and killing in every corner and community of the world. And all that knowledge is resident in tens and hundreds of thousands here at home who just don’t believe or care anymore who dies, nor how, to make it right. The elites believe we’re sitting still for this? That we’ll leave it in their hands. The very useless or abusive or predatory hands created this very problem. We’re not fucking insane. We don’t do the same thing and expect a different result. Well, not anymore. Voting ain’t getting us out of this. And we know it. Fuck it all into nothing! We’re not letting them destroy us, our families, our dead, our civilization and way of life so many of our own have died for. Not anymore. We won’t dishonor our dead any longer by doing nothing. We know what’s left: smash it, burn it all, and kill. Soon. We feel it in our bones. When exactly and how, I’ve no fucking idea, no one does, no one can. We just know, when it all goes, this reckoning that’ll wash over our homelands as purging fire, this time, it’ll be TRAITORS FIRST!