"Rēzekne Gate" Sector FOB

Lieutenant Colonel Pham Duc Thien

"Armies prepare to fight their last war, rather than the next one." Some armchair historian like to say that as a gotcha. But really we couldn't have expected them to fall from the skies like that, so who knows what's next. But if they try to pull the same move off again we'll be more than prepared. If they get past our cannon's pointed at the sky, who ever survives will wished they had disintegrated our atmosphere

Berlin, October 2037

Anneliese Bauer

My crew? Yeah, like I said, we see each other from time to time. But less and less. Simply put, you take people from different walks of life, have them go through hell together, and there is not a lot we can talk about when we do see each other. Too many subjects of conversation we wish to avoid. Some chapters are best left written down once for other to read.

Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Andrew

You know what really messed me up during demobilization?

Some quarter master with a clip board reading things out loud; "Winter sleeping bag liner, hand grenade pouch coyote, shoulder straps Multicam."

An endless list of gear I had no idea where I'd last seen it, destroyed, lost in the field, left in another country, or already sitting on a shelf in some surplus store. And yet that bastard expected me to magically return every single piece. I ended up losing my last month's salary just paying back all the stuff the government claimed I owed them. I made only half of that pawning some of it off the month before for some powder or brown sugar

Johan Nillson, Sweden

You leave the army and join the workforce. You sign off on the equipment you're returning, and on the train ride home, you tell yourself it's over. You marry, have kids. But it never really is.

The pain in your knees when you lift your son. The flinch when firecrackers go off outside. The jolt when a car backfires. It's a time machine. Suddenly, you're not there, you're back in it. Endless marches through mud up to your shins. Dragging wounded men to safety as they claw at you, trying to hold off the inevitable. Picking up what's left of your friends and putting them in body bags. Filling magazines until your fingers bleed from cuts and blisters. The freezing nights in foxholes. The stench of diesel and cordite. The endless hunger.

Like a rabid dog, then and now, you snap at everyone and everything.

Li Wei, People's Republic of China

It's been a while, but when I see what's happening around the world, sometimes I wish the crabs we're holding in pens were more of an issue, for the world's sake of course.

Europeans in northern Africa, Americans boiling and threatening to cut each other throats, all the trouble in Asia. It's good to have that one black sheep in class sometimes you know?

Estelle Marceau, Morocco

I wonder how many of them are still around: the barrier troops, the military police who would summarily execute deserters, the mercenaries with loose triggers paid by the pound of flesh, war profiteers, from the mobster who brought up all the flour before selling it ten times the value to business men who sold faulty equipment to the army. The question sits in the hollow of my throat like a stone. The war is finished, the flags taken down and new ones hoisted. But "finished" is a dishonest word. It implies neat endings and paper receipts. Yet there are people now sitting at dinner tables surrounded by their families. I wonder what they say to them when their child asks what they did during the war. And what do they say to themselves?

Lt. Col. Mathias Lemonier, France

"You know. we tried to be heroes too. We really tried."

Nathan Côté, Canada

Just before we boarded the boat home, some brigadier general gathered us for a speech. It was the usual stuff, praising our 'glorious triumph,' talking about the long road to recovery for humanity. But I wasn't really listening. All I cared about was him being done, so I could finally get a drink and lay my aching back down on my camping mattress

Tomasz Müller, Germany

If you think we hated the crabs back then, you can't imagine how it was when we finally made it home. When I found what was left of my house, when I learned I lost two cousins to the war and my father to diabetes. Didn't even need to acces the war records, just had to notice after a year or so who hadn't moved back to the old neighbourhood, or what was left of it.

Undisclosed location, France

It was like when the executions started a few years back. Once the word spread that the last pockets of resistance were either crushed or cordoned off, Paris lit up again.

It began with a few odd groups assembling by 4 pm,people lighting candles and holding minutes of silence, old folks holding pictures of sons and daughters they'd lost. By 6 pm, there were fireworks and celebrations. People were singing, be it the national anthem, the "Ode to Joy," or whatever they felt like. By 7 pm, as night fell, the songs turned into slogans. The fireworks that had been fired into the night sky were now aimed at police vans.

Even after we stopped the bus, train and subway traffic, the streets kept flooding with people, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. By 9 pm, we had completely given up on protecting most of the conscription offices. They even stopped the firefighters from going in. At 10 pm, the Ministry of Defence took a beating, but a few machine-gun bursts into the sky kept the mob at bay. But before midnight, the Élysée was lost. Rioters just swarmed in. The next morning, there was nothing left of it but ashes.

Two days later, the government fell. They only resigned after securing a deal to halt most wartime limitations and grant themselves immunity.

Kato Nalubega, Italy

How many wartime promises did they ever keep? Governments promised gold reserves to some; to others, they offered visas and citizenship in exchange for cannon fodder. It was all lies.

Even the bonus salary I was supposed to get from the Europeans for fighting there was stolen by an officer. I say "poor guy" now, but only because of what happened next, when they made him watch what they did to his wife, and the lynching that finished him.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Clark O'Neil, United Arab Emirates

Yeah, the economy was supposed to fold like the tent once the war was over. Everyone thought the bottom would drop out, defense contracts drying up, factories shutting down, millions of soldiers coming home with nowhere to go. It's what happened after most big wars before this one. But somehow, it didn't.

See, what people underestimated was how much infrastructure and innovation the war had forced into existence. We'd built new industries overnight, energy grids, robotics, microchips, material sciences, and when the fighting stopped, that machinery didn't just disappear like the army contracts. Factories that used to turn out fighting vehicles, exo-suits started making industrial drones; navy shipyards converted to commercial freight; research labs pivoted from alien tech analysis to domestic applications.

And then there was the psychology of it all. After years of destruction, people wanted to build, homes, cities, lives. That's not something you can measure in GDP reports, but it drives everything. Governments poured money into reconstruction and expansion, and investors followed.

There are still a few army contracts floating around, with tens of millions of dead in africa and the Indian subcontinent there's more than enough to go around. Stabilization work, logistics protection, reconstruction oversight or just good old small arms for whatever UN recognized general that runs some shit hole somewhere. My company's got a hand in some of those. Not glamorous stuff, but necessary. Someone's got to keep the gears turning while the diplomats argue about whose fault it all is.

Could it have collapsed? Absolutely. If leadership had tried to cling to wartime economics, rationing, secrecy, command structures — we'd be telling a very different story. But the key was adaptation. It's what saved what's left of Europe.

But back home? The problems aren't economic anymore, not really. The U.S. is flush with capital, record productivity, automation running smoother than anyone dreamed. But it's ideology that's tearing at the seams now. People arguing about what the war meant, who we became because of it, what kind of world we should be building next. You've got factions calling for isolation, others for expansion, and no one willing to listen long enough to find middle ground. It's not breadlines, it's belief lines.

That's part of why I'm out here instead of back stateside. Easier to do business in a place where you don't have citizen set ablaze by riots, state capitols being shot up by lunatics

Dierick Hauwaerts, Belgium

You could see it on their faces. One day they were just fresh-faced recruits, eager and green. A few years later, you'd run into them, maybe on a base during the war, maybe years later in a supermarket, and you'd notice it right away. In their eyes, in the way they looked at you. Something had shifted. Everything had.

Emmanuel Chavez, Venezuela

Besides land mines and explosives, there's a whole list of shit people forgot about. The stuff that doesn't go off with a bang but kills you slow. You've got lungs full of microdust from collapsed cities — cement, carbon, alien particulate. Guys breathing that in for years are coughing up black sludge now. Then there's the metal poisoning — old ammo casings, crashed ships, reactor debris leaking who-knows-what into the soil. You can't grow a tomato in some of those places without it glowing under UV.

And burns, not the kind from fire, but from radiation bursts, plasma residue, exotic energy fields that nobody's written a manual for. We've got whole villages where people's skin just doesn't heal right anymore. Where kids were born with brittle bones, weak hearts, tremors before the doctors and parents rang the alarm bell and everyone moved away yet again. Doctors call it environmental syndrome, but we all know what it is: the war that didn't end.

Even the lucky ones; the ones who came back with all their limbs, they're, we're breaking down early. Knees shot, spines compressed, lungs scarred. The body keeps the score, like they say. And out here, that score never resets.

Yuri Aslanov, Russia

You never really believe you're going home until the train starts moving. For months I'd dreamed about that moment, I stopped dreaming about it just because of how much it hurted. The hum of the rails, the smell of iron and dust. When it finally happened, I didn't even sit down. I just stood by the window, watching the stations go by, the landscapes that somehow still looked the same even though everything inside me had changed. People on the platform waved at us, cheered. Someone shouted, "Kiss the rails, boys, you made it!" and we laughed, but some of us cried too. Group by group we got off. Boys from St Petersburg, Tchoudovo, Okolouvka.... One after another the train thinned.

When I got off the train, my mother was there. She looked smaller than I remembered, older too, but her eyes, they hadn't changed. She ran to me, held my face like she used to when I was a kid, then hugged me so tight I could barely breathe. My uniform was filthy, smelled like oil and smoke, speck of blood. She added her tears to it. She didn't care. She just kept saying, "You're home, my son. You're home."

Then I saw Lena. She stood a few steps back, like she didn't know if it was really me. When I called her name, she ran forward, and for a second it felt like the world went quiet. I remember thinking how wrong it was, me, in this ragged uniform, dust and blood still on my boots, holding her clean hands. But she didn't flinch. She just smiled through her tears and said, "You're alive. That's all that matters."

I didn't even unpack that night. We just sat together,my mother, Lena, my uncles, my friends who also had recently came back and me, in that small kitchen that hadn't changed at all. There was bread, soup, a bottle of cheap wine. I told them I was fine, but we all knew I wasn't. Still, for the first time in years, I felt human again. The war was behind me, or at least that's what I tried to believe.

Louiz Santos, Brazil

I didn't go straight home. They gave me a month off to visit my family before I had to head back to Europe. Six months I lasted there, longer than most of my colleagues. The work wasn't hard, not physically anyway. You just sat at your desk, your computer humming, stacks of papers piling up. From eight in the morning to six at night, there was always a line. People waiting.

"Please, my son." "My wife,I haven't heard from her in two years."

The army doesn't make mistakes. They were sent to us for a reason. But who could believe it? A letter or a uniformed officer telling them their loved one was gone, if they were lucky, that is. More often than not, all we could offer was a seat at the desk and a confirmation. Sometimes that made it easier. Sometimes not.

They'd cry, shout, beg for a different answer. Some even collapsed. The chaplain would step in, the soldiers would hold them steady, but nothing really helped. You never get used to it. You just learn to keep your voice calm, your hands still, while someone's whole world falls apart across from you.

Archie Martin, Bavarian autonomous zone

People look at the world and realize the old systems didn't save them. Governments failed, markets failed, neighbours turned on each other. When that happens, suddenly an ideology turns from theory to practice and also a lifeline.

You've got young people who've never been taken seriously before, be it young ones who joined before their conscription papers came in. Or soldiers sick of being treated like cattle. We're now running networks, building schools, organizing communities. We're not a cog in the machine, we're just ourselves. Old political arguments don't matter; what matters is survival, safety, a sense of belonging. A big crisis creates a vacuum, and human beings are wired to fill it with something that makes sense. That's why movements grow faster in a war-torn world than in peace.

And that's not just politics. That's human nature. Everyone wants meaning when everything else collapses. Ideologies are just the tools people reach for when the old map burns. Some of them stick, some of them die, but the point is, crises are fertile ground. If you can understand that, you understand why even the strangest ideas can take root so quickly when the world resets. How just a few hundrerd deserters turned a forward operating base in the mountains into a thriving anarchist community in the alps.

Emre Aslan, Turkey

I refuse to believe everyone turned against each other the moment the crabs weren't our biggest concern anymore. I saw it that day. Not during the battle, but after we landed back at our air base. Alongside us were Saudi, Israeli, Iranian, Egyptian and Jordanian jets,all parked so close to each other it was a miracle they managed to take off later. Mechanics and pilots milling around like it was just normal. And yet, somehow, it wasn't chaos.

You had Israelis handing out spare parts to Iranians who were grumbling about engine overheat damage they couldn't fix themselves. Saudis showing Turkish pilots a trick to patch avionics after a thermal strike fried sensors. Everyone was swapping tools, sharing manuals, be it wenches or water they shared.

There were jokes and a sense of malaise too. Ridiculous, bad puns in six different languages while someone was bent over a wing trying to fix shit. But under the humour, there was respect, a quiet recognition that everyone there had seen the same things, lost the same things, and earned the same nights of restless sleep. For a moment, borders and grudges didn't exist. Only engines, fuel, and a shared determination to keep each other's aircrafts running to fight another day.

Catherine Andrews, Austria

What the war didn't take in lives, it took in beauty. The buildings, the squares, the churches, all gone or gutted. You walk through Vienna now and see skeletons of structures that used to hold music, debate, centuries of history. Marble cracked, frescoes blasted away, centuries of careful craftsmanship reduced to rubble. And it's not just the famous landmarks. Private homes, workshops, libraries , stuff that wasn't in the history books but had as much of a part in preserving history as the biggest cathedrals. Lost in the same moment the bombs fell.

Kozak, Poland

I've always been a collector, even before the war, but now it feels like a small rebellion just to keep these books on my shelves. My private library is tin, maybe a few hundred volumes, but some of them are nearly impossible to find anywhere else. First editions, manuscripts, books that survived bombs and looters by some miracle. When you hold them, you feel the weight of every hand that turned the pages before you, every reader who clung to them in dark times. Holding them in my hand, they feel more fragile and heavy than a bomb.

Pzschemek, Poland

Sorry, just a second. Hey! Don't! …ah, there he goes again. Nearly put his fingers in the socket this time. Little rascal. I swear, I can't keep him out of trouble for more than five minutes. You'd think after everything I've seen, I'd be better at handling one small boy, but no , he's the real challenge. Keeps me running from dawn till dusk. Had less trouble with three teenagers in my tank than I have with him

Sometimes I look at him and think, this is why I made it out. Not for medals, not for parades, not for whatever's left of the old world, but for him, for the kids. That's the only thing that makes sense of all of it. If we don't build something they can grow up in, then what was the point of surviving?

Alessio, Belgium

He leans back in his chair, smoke curling into the summer air, and I realize something: for all the meteors, the crabs, the chaos and fire, what he carries with him isn't the fear, or even the burns. It's the memory of being alive, and of the people who survived beside him. That, he says without words, is what matters. Everything else, the gun fire, the explosions, the chaos, they fade, but the fact that someone tells the story, that someone remembers, is what keeps it real.

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