He sighed heavily, feeling the weight already on his shoulders. He stared packing everything back into his back packe. The same things. The same backpack. He'd done it a hundred times, maybe a thousand, maybe once. It didn't really matter, it was the same backpack and the same things everytime, just one memory for every time.
He was a good soldier, serving tour after tour, going where ever he was ordered, killing whoever he was supposed to and staying alive. They ordered him to stay alive. They said "Your country needs you, it needs you alive to keep fighting, so come home alive." Home, that was sometime before he'd been issued pack.
The places he'd served changed, but never what he carried. Tools to live, tools to kill, tools to remember what home was. Those used to remind him what all the fighting was for, but that couldn't have been where he belonged, not him. Now they had their place all packed up safe, under the forest green camo pauncho, so that whenever it was all over, they'd still be there through it all and maybe the war would make sense again. When it was over.
There was one picture he looked at sometimes, of a family and a house with grass, a white picket fence, a tree with leaves and a tire swing under it, and people smiling. A boy, who looked like he must have, was there, with a proud man with a beard stood to one side, a stout smiling woman clinging to him, and two pretty little girls in sun dresses caught giggling. They all looked so happy. He new intelectually that is was his family, but he couldn't remember it quite right. Like dead eyes of a friend, the body and everything was the same, but the eyes were empty, the feelings gone.