Draft: 24 years: A Lifetime of pain

My mother was murdered. I died with her and her friend that night. My earliest memories were memories of ignorance; knowing halfway what I should have known entirely and always being on the outside looking in as it pertained to circumstances that were to have a profound impact on my childhood existence and my growth as a man. My family just wanted me to be happy even if it meant the omission of certain gory details of the past and present. I used to get mad at the thought of being misinformed. I used to get mad at my father for his drug addiction. I always thought that he should have been more of a man after my mother's murder and more of a rock for me, but as with the rest of my family how could I have known what it was to be in their position. What could I have known about being accused of my wife's murder or being the mother, sister, uncle, or grandmother to a young woman who's murder was called the worst murder mystery in the history of the city of Hillside. I remember moving around a lot as a kid, moving from ghetto to ghetto with the rest of my family trying to find a place to call home. Every time I would become settled and find new friends to get into trouble with it was time to move, I moved from Hillside, to Plainfield, to Newark, to Irvington and back to Newark in a period of five years. I remember it being 1993 and me and my family living on Chelsea avenue in Newark, N.J. My grandmother's boyfriend had a team of drug peddlers selling crack cocaine off of the porch step while my grandmother was at work. I remember cops raiding our house, and wondering at nine years old what were those little bottles with the colorful tops that I kept finding in the leaves in the backyard and crushed into broken glass along the street pavement. In the years to come I would find that the demons that hid in these little viles and in tiny slips of aluminum foil would take countless members of my community and several members of my family away from me whether it was through drug use or drug distribution from the late 1970's and on through the 1990's.

How to tell a true war story

The truth in this story is that a true war story makes a person feel something inside. If a person makes a comment about war and how devastating it is, it could not possibly compare to the person who lived through or with the experience. O'Brien states that a person can make the generalization "war is hell" and have that be a true statement, but it doesn't fully explain or give anyone an accurate account about the rigors of war.