Disposable Heroes
by Donavon L Riley
The ground upon which we all stand is soaked in the blood of countless generations. It bears witness to recent history’s unending march of disposable heroes. In the flickering moments between life and death, these modern warriors fall, not counted as men, but as clay figures having been molded by unseen hands—shaped, hardened, and ultimately shattered by forces beyond their comprehension.
We have always known war. It courses through our veins, an ancient pulse that beats in rhythm with the drums of history. Yet, something has shifted. In our modern age, the warrior has been largely stripped of his mythos, reduced to a cog in a vast, impersonal machine. No longer does he stand as a noble figure having earned society’s respect, driven by a deep sense of honor, serving a cause greater than himself. Instead, he is fashioned from the start to be expendable, an instrument in the hands of those who pull the strings from afar.
The soldier boy, born of earth, is no longer a man but a tool. He is not bred to think, to feel, to question; he is bred to kill before he can be killed. His life, meticulously planned out before his first breath, is a script written in the cold language of power and control. There is no room for deviation, no allowance for the blossoming of the soul, for belief in a higher, divine truth. His destiny is sealed the moment he takes his first step into the barracks, where the forging of his iron will begins, not with fire and anvil, but with the cold, calculated stripping away of his humanity.
In this dark alchemy, flesh becomes steel, and steel becomes flesh. The young man, who once saw the world through innocent eyes, is transformed into a hunter. His thoughts are no longer his own; they have been replaced with commands barked at him with relentless precision. The gun in his hand becomes an extension of his body, the sight of death as familiar as the rising sun. His identity dissolves in the tension, in the ebb and flow of war, leaving behind only a number, a rank, a unit.
Yet, what is this but the ultimate betrayal of the human spirit? To be bred to kill is to be robbed of the divine breath that makes us truly alive. The soldier is told he must do as he is commanded, must die when he is told to die. But who are these unseen puppeteers, who decide, as if they are gods, the fates of men? They are the faceless architects of a system that devours its own children, sending them back to the front time and time again, until there is nothing left of them but a hollowed existence.
In this relentless generational cycle of blood-letting, the glory-seekers rise, adorned with stripes and medals, while the bodies fill the fields. The slaughter never ends because it is not meant to end. It is a perpetuation of a system that profits from death, on the expendability of its heroes.
And so, the question arises: Why am I dying? This cry, born of despondency, repeats itself through the ages, reverberating off the dome of the heavens, raining down upon every battlefield, every killing field. It is a voice that reveals the truth of our times—that hell is not a place we go to, but a reality we create, brick by brick, bullet by bullet. The disposable hero is the tragic embodiment of this hell, a soul caught in the vise of a world that demands his death without ever offering him life.
In the end, what is left of the soldier boy? He is a “twenty-one, only son,” who served us well but was given nothing in return. His life, reduced to a series of orders followed and deaths witnessed, leaving him with no legacy, no remembrance. He is finished here, his purpose fulfilled, his body and soul surrendered to the void of civil life.
The disposable hero is a product of a world that has lost its way, a world that values obedience over thought, death over life. In the face of this, we must ask ourselves: What have we done? What are we doing? For every soldier boy who falls in the fields, we lose a piece of our own humanity. And in the end, it is not just the soldier who is disposable—but all of us.