Hatred Owned My Brother

The divide was as deep and perilous as any I’ve seen. Hatred owned my brother’s soul. He burned to make our mother pay for the pain she’d sent his way. We never knew what evil drove him to obsessively plot his revenge. On Christmas Eve, days after turning eighteen, he announced he was joining the Army and going to war. That holy night was our parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. He knew this was the perfect day for betrayal. And he was almost right; yet it paled to the anguish she felt fifteen months later meeting his flag-draped coffin at the airport.