I never wanted to go to war, despite spending all of my life training to be in one. The thought of being in a life and death situation subconsciously being shrugged off as a disturbing dream. Telling myself "I'm not really going to be in a fight, not a proper one anyway."

I had convinced myself that with the level of technology humanity was currently at, with large interstellar star-ships, cold fusion reactors, advanced artificial intelligence and various other developments having been achieved, that boots on the ground style of warfare was obsolete.

"Everything will be done from a distance nowadays!" is what I would tell myself, and that the days of close-quarter combat were long gone.

Long range drones, and missiles were being used now, and the training I went through on how to correctly stab an enemy to death, was just something they told us because they to; because of tradition and rites of passage. I would tell myself these and many other lies as a coping mechanism to rationalise why I was here. To reassure myself that I'm not doomed to a grisly and painful death, just because I'm in the army. Otherwise how would I have coped with the training? It was hard enough without thinking "YOU ARE GOING TO DIE SOON." every second of every waking day.

This daily effort to keep myself sane became especially hard when I saw the division I would be posted to, the infamous Alpha Division. Even people who weren't in the military knew about Alpha Division and how it was essentially a death sentence to see your name on the Alpha recruitment list. This was because this particular division is responsible for conducting all advanced assault operations for the human coalition. The men and women who made up this group were the first into the fight, and usually the last the leave. They were the ones who broke the enemy lines and were humanity's first strike in any conflict. Unfortunately they also made up the backbone of the military, since Alpha Division was one of the largest in existence.

The day I found out that I would be part of this collection of unfortunate men and women made my coping mechanism even more important. This telling myself that most of what I was learning was just for show, was my way of not going completely insane. Within a day I had gone from a basic, undefined solider going through basic training, to a walking corpse just waiting to be deployed. Any jumped up knob-head who tells you they actively want a fight, or that they are actually looking forward to seeing a bit of action in the field is either lying, or a moron. In most cases their both. No sane person actually puts much thought into what it's really like to be in a battle. As I have said, I certainly didn't, and yet here I was.

Head down in a dirty foxhole with hell itself erupting around me.