It Never Gets Any Easier.

Posted on Tue Oct 27th, 2026 @ 3:42am by Colonel Jason "Jack" Frost

950 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Looking in all the wrong places.
Location: Quarters

Jack had learned over the course of his career, that there were certain things a man never quite forgot. The crack of weapons fire. The desperate urgency in a Marine's voice over a failing comm channel. The sudden, terrible silence that followed when someone who had been speaking moments earlier no longer answered.

And then there were the names.

He sat alone in his quarters staring at the casualty list spread across his desk. The light above him was too bright, the room too quiet, and the air seemed to have grown heavier with every passing hour. He had read the list until the names had begun to blur together, yet he could still recall each one he had encountered. Rank, unit, assignment. In some cases, a face. In others, a voice or a brief exchange that had seemed utterly unremarkable at the time.

That was the cruelest part of it. He had known some of these Marines well enough to recognise their mannerisms, their humour, their little habits. He had watched others prepare for deployment, checked their readiness, and given the orders that sent them into harm's way.

They had trusted him to bring them home. Frost swallowed hard and lowered his gaze. "I sent them there." He sighed.

The same thought had been following him since Velis, surfacing whenever he found a moment alone. It followed him through the reports, through the conversations with his officers, through the procedural necessities of casualty accounting and the preparations for notifying next of kin. It was there when he tried to sleep and waiting for him when he woke.

He could dress it up in the language of command if he wanted to. Operational requirements. Mission objectives. Incomplete intelligence. Unforeseen complications. The familiar catalogue of factors that commanders invoked when trying to make sense of an operation that had gone wrong.

All of those things were true. None of them changed the fact that he had been the man responsible for sending Marines into a situation from which some would never return.

He had given the orders. He had accepted the risks. He had looked at the circumstances and decided that their intervention was necessary, that they had a duty to go, that there were people who needed help and that the Marines under his command were the ones who could provide it.

He still believed those people had needed help. He still believed his Marines had been right to go. And yet, sitting there with the casualty list before him, he could not escape the awful suspicion that his belief in the necessity of the mission had made it easier to accept a price that someone else would ultimately pay.

He had not been the one lying wounded in the field. He had not been the one waiting for extraction, wondering whether the next voice on the comm would be the last one he heard. He had not been the one whose family would receive a notification that their loved one had died while serving under his command.

He had been somewhere else, making decisions.

And now he was here, alive, with the authority to sign the paperwork that would make their deaths official. His hand tightened around the stylus. "Goddammit," he muttered. The word disappeared into the empty room. Glad that his family were not here to join him in his mood.

He pushed his chair back, stood, and walked to the viewport. Beyond the glass, the stars stretched into an indifferent sea of light. Somewhere out there, the universe continued its quiet business, entirely unconcerned with the fact that a handful of Marines would never see another sunrise.

Frost pressed his palms against the edge of the viewport frame and bowed his head.

He had spent years teaching himself to carry responsibility without allowing it to cripple him. A commander who second-guessed every decision would eventually become incapable of making any decisions at all. There were times when the available choices were all bad, when every course of action carried a cost and leadership meant selecting the one that offered the best chance of achieving the objective.

He knew that. He believed it.

But there was a difference between understanding that people might die and sitting with the knowledge that people had died because you had made a choice.

He could not stop himself from replaying the moments before the deployment. The assessments, the briefings, the questions he had asked and the answers he had received. He wondered whether there had been something he had overlooked, some warning he had failed to recognise, some alternative that had seemed too costly or too impractical to pursue.

Had he pushed hard enough for better support? Had he properly weighed what he was asking of his people? Had he been so focused on the lives they might save that he had failed to consider the lives he was placing at risk?

He had no answers yet. The after-action review would come, and he would demand honesty from everyone involved, himself included. If there had been mistakes, he would find them. If there had been failures in planning or execution, he would ensure they were addressed.

But the possibility that there had been nothing more he could have done frightened him almost as much. Because if there had been no mistake to correct, no decision to revisit, no moment where he might have chosen differently, then he would have to accept that his Marines had died in an operation that was necessary and still, somehow, unbearably inadequate.

They had gone to help. They had done what they could.

And the result had been so painfully small compared to what they had lost.

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