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Wars look great in the movies

The sum of your life is a series of flashbacks.
Sometimes triumphant. Sometimes tragic.
Every day in the battlefield was a new story.
You wrote it. Played it. Sold it.
Cashed the cheque and supposedly forgot.
Except for the jokes.
Repeated in bars in the company of drunks.
Between sips of vodka and bourbon.
Beach heads charged and bunkers barged.
Guns fired and detonators wired.
Comrades killed. Graveyards filled.
Everyone knows wars look great in the movies.
You tell the tales well too. Humour helps.
A joke in every story and every story a joke.
The drunks laugh every time. None of them notice.
Your grin hides the grime.
Your scars are invisible. Skeletons buried.
It is your story. War and its glory.
You own it. You tell it.
But not all of it.
Some wounds weep in solitude.
Splayed intestines. Blood. Piles of shit.
Every night the dead come to visit.
Nostalgia and insomnia. Strange bedfellows.
The movies skip this part.
Hollywood directors know the drunks well.
No one wants a sobering tale.
Let the credits roll before the story gets real.
Everything is better bathed in sepia.
Wars look great in the movies.
In the movies.