Hero
You go to a football game with your friends,
He walks through a crowd of angry terrorists.
You sleep in your warm bed at night,
He stays up all night, making sure it’s safe so that you can sleep.
You yell at your mother,
He doesn’t know when the next time will be when he gets to even use a phone.
You take your girlfriend on a date,
He doesn’t know if he’ll get to spend time with his wife again.
You complain because you have a headache and need to lie down,
He gets shot at, but still keeps going.
You sit down to eat dinner with your family,
He sits down with his comrades, wondering if this is his last meal.
You watch your favorite T.V. show,
He watches millions of his friends and innocents die before his eyes.
You throw a fit because you have to go to church,
He prays night and day to keep his comrades, family, and himself safe.
You only hear what the news want us to know about the war,
He knows firsthand the reality of fighting for freedom.
You and you friends talk about how stupid the war is,
He still fights for our country despite what you may think or say.
Remember and pray for our soldiers.
Second Place Melissa Gasser 12th Grade
A Choice for the Brave
Horror stories are plastered
Across the pages of my history books
Questioning the humanity
Of the rapists, the murderers, the demons,
Who brought this down upon a terrified people
Young men dying,
Viet Cong or South Vietnamese,
German or Russian,
Arab or American
It would be easier to say
That one life is worth more than the others
But there is no truth in that path
Son, brother
Father, lover
A life gone in one note of a bird’s cheerless song
Even survivors are never relinquished from this terror’s death grip
Haunted by the memories seared into their eyes
Produced by fateful meetings of belligerent states
Will this nation,
A revolutionary from its creation,
Learn to deny the siren’s call of war
And dare to begin the uncertain path toward peace?
Third Place Anthony Miller 12th Grade
Truth
Grains of sand move with caution; winds flow with apprehension.
Shrapnel collects like dust…
The streets deserted.
The buildings abandoned.
The air is still-afraid of what might happen next.
Adorned in sub-standard gear, four GIs patrol.
The first with a wife and two children
The second just out of high school
The next a sister who raised her siblings on her own
The last an orphan since birth.
All with patches of Old Glory on their shoulders, their only symbols of hope.
In the distance a car appears. Dust kicks up as it soars over the earth.
A woman shrieks from a third-story window; her baby screams from the wounds.
The screeching machine is suddenly two hundred yards away.
The GIs yell for it to halt, but it revs harder.
The GIs yell again.
Still air freezes time-
Woman screams
Driver yells
GIs shoot
Baby cries
It happens.
The driver detonates.
Flames engulf the GIs, as the old Buick lands twenty feet away.
Impact tears away at nearby structures.
Debris suffocates the air, thick and overpowering.
The dust settles. Not one is left standing.
The woman sobs. She knew each soldier’s story.
This is the price of freedom. Stranded families and lives unlived all for us to be free.
Short Fiction
First Place Brantley Farmer
Skydiver
“You sure I’m ready for this?” I said looking out the side of the small crop-duster airplane that my cousin had hired for us to go skydiving.
“Sure you are! Now quit being a wuss!” I heard my cousin yell, his voice clouded over with alcohol and the pat two years of smoking. He rubbed a hand on the side of his cheek, pushing up 5 o’clock shadow at nine in the morning. I was nervous; I could feel my whole body shake under the weight of the parachute on my back. Once again, my eyes gazed out over the barren fields below me. Everything seemed so small from this high up.
“When do we jump exactly?” I asked, trying to keep the fear from quaking out of my voice and exposing even worse. It was amazing to see how devastating the concept of embarrassment was at two thousand feet in the air. Through this whole ordeal, the pilot had kept quiet. His aviator sunglasses and white and green mesh trucker hat hid most of his face but from what I could tell he was your run-of-the-mill, whisky drinking, crop dusting, tack and nail breakfast sort of fellow.
I turned just in time to hear my cousin yell. I wavered there in the doorway for a moment, and then fell. As I fell, I thought about what he had said. It seemed like it was something like go or maybe move.
Now in the grand scheme of things, experts will tell you that skydiving is as close to flying that anyone will get. That it’s nothing like falling at all, that it’s some sort of glorious experience. All I could think when it happened was that I was falling and it just seemed to happen for a very long time. I spread my arms out, turning myself into a flat human X. I shifted to my right, and felt myself get pushed onto my back by a large gust of air. I sucked in a large breath of air, my eyes looking up to see my cousin falling towards me.
“I told you that you could do it!” he screamed, spread out just like he had been told in the same X pattern. He pushed my shoulder softly, sending me swimming across the air. He pulled down a pair of neon green goggles that reflected the world back with multicolored lenses. “See you at the bottom!” he said and pinned his arms and legs together shooting down in a nose dive. I watched him fly away, and at the moment could only envy the ease with which he seemed to move, how all his actions seemed so natural. I looked down, seeing the cloth of the parachute bloom out red, white, and blue stars and stripes exploding as air filled it to its proper shape. I looked down again, the land below us still barren field now save for the dot of my cousins American flag parachute.
“Here goes…” I muttered to myself and pulled the big red parachute cord. Nothing. I pulled again and then looked down this time to make sure I was pulling correctly. Yes, I told myself. You are pulling the correct cord but there’s one problem. Your parachute has failed. Suddenly, all the pictures of all the accidents I had ever seen flashed before my eyes. Horribly broken arms and necks, massive cuts all of which ended in death. The ground was getting closer, it seemed to be mocking me now, saying “come a little closer, we could be such good friends...” it hissed. Now, as I seemed to face my immediate doom I could only bring up one memory. It was of a rather distasteful joke a friend of mine had told to me in the fifth grade. It had been something about a man loving the road he walked on so much he used a motorcycle to marry it but he forgot to use a helmet and it killed him. Thinking on it now, it made me laugh a little. “I wonder if I could even get a license for this,” I muttered laughing to myself. The ground was closer now, and I opened my arms again ready to receive it. After that point I don’t really recall much of what happened. I remember the deafening thud of hitting something, a strange wetness and then blackness.
I woke up three weeks later in a hospital bed. I had only one broken leg, a myriad of bruises, a ruptured eardrum, and I can’t feel one side of my left hand. Turns out the ground hadn’t been so barren after all. I had landed in a large bale of wheat that had been left for harvesting. The wetness had been the rainwater that had soaked into the bale softening it up. The doctors said that if I hadn’t landed in it the way I did, with arms open, that I would have been driven right into the ground. “Kissing the Earth Mother” I think he had called it. My cousins had landed a few hundred feet away, and had watched me fall. It took the ambulance a half hour to get all the way out to us.
I have to say, it really is funny how those little things can pop up and just save your life. Ya know?
Yeah, I know too.
Second Place Anna Marie Rhodes 12th Grade
Ever Faithful
A seven-year-old boy looked out of the window, but instead of seeing the trees and fields and a glorious sunset, he saw a battlefield. His eyes were wide with excitement; he heard a trumpet call his name.
“Grandpa,” he questioned, “why’d ya ever wanna leave?”
His grandfather chuckled, but a painted look suddenly came into his eyes. He ruffled the boy’s hair and sighed.
“War’s not all fun and games, boy,” he said sadly. “I saw several of my buddies die, including my brother.”
The boy’s eyes widened more.
“Ya mean the enemy beat ya?”
The old man laughed; he remembered what it was like to be a boy of seven.
“War’s not really about winnin’ and losin’. We lost some, and the other army lost some. We were all the same; we just didn’t realize that until it was too late. No sir, war’s not a pretty thing.”
“But, Grandpa,” cried the child. “You fought for what ya believed in didn’t cha?”
“Of course, son.” It’s all well and good to fight for what you believe in; I just wish there had been a way to fix things without a war. War should only be an option if there’s no other way.”
The boy looked thoughtful.
“But, you always say we have to be prepared.”
“Well, yes, we can’t tell what other people are goin’ to do, so we should be prepared for war…if it comes to that.”
The boy’s blonde head cocked to one side, reminding the grandfather of someone else.
“Why are ya cryin’ Grandpa?”
“I was thinking about how much you are like your father.”
“He went to war, too,” said the child matter-of-factly.
“Yes, he did.”
“He died.”
“Yes.”
“Did you see it?”
“No. He was in a different war.”
“Did he believe in it?”
“No, but his country needed him, and he knew it was better to serve his country.”
“Better than what?”
“Well son…sometimes, whether we agree or disagree with our government, it’s best to support our nation.”
The boy looked back out the window as his grandfather said, “this is a bit over your head I’m afraid.”
Silence filled the room.
The old man leaned his head back, tears still gliding slowly down his face. He hoped that one day his grandson might feel a true patriot’s heartbeat as he had…as his own son had.
The sun finally set, leaving the lonely farm in shadow, but in the little farmhouse, two hearts beat faithfully, and two minds went over the events that had brought them to this day; two men – one young, one old – promised to remain faithful.
Third Place Jacob Long 12th Grade
Tear of Passion
A long, off in the distance whistle, rising in tone and pitch, almost as if it were in my mind more than it is heard. Kaboom! The only sense left is touch as my immobile corpse tries with the might of man to move, my fingers grasp at the soft warm sand below me. Rubble, smaller than a quarter lands on me continuously piece by piece as time slips from my mind. Reality strikes as I hear the loud crack of bullets exploding through my remaining comrade’s firearms. Dust clouds from the bomb have left me blind while all my other sense have alerted me to the fact that, I might die! A speedy slide show of those I love runs through my mind as my will to feel them in an embrace best known as a hug, takes over my pain as my legs carry my otherwise limp self away from any and all noise. My heart racing with fear now as my thoughts are wholly focused on her and my two offspring, my love and those born of love.
Running faster now than any Olympic athlete could ever train for, I must get to them. Everything ever unsaid to those three, everything that ever made her cry, or made my kids look at me with disappointment is all I can think about. My new purpose is to get to that place I call home, and haven’t been for months. I need, with every part of my weary soul, to apologize and hold tight.
Zip! I fall with the force of gravity to my eternal end. A tear is the last bit of passion pouring from my body as my slide show halts on their smiling faces, surrounded by a frame that says, “We Love You, Dad!”
