Solved Murders - True Crime Stories - The Cost of Silence A Survivor’s Truth About War, Loss, and the Darkness Within Us All #24

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

#horrorstories #reddithorrorstories #ScaryStories #creepypasta #horrortales #wartales #survivorstory #lossandgrief #darkpsychology #traumajourney  This story dives into the psychological aftermath of war through the eyes of a survivor. Battling grief and trauma, the survivor confronts the silence around their pain and exposes the dark emotional scars left behind by loss and conflict. It’s a chilling exploration of how war shapes the human soul and the fight to reclaim hope from darkness.  #horrorstories #reddithorrorstories #scarystories #horrorstory #creepypasta #horrortales #wartales #survivorstory #lossandgrief #traumastory #darkpsychology #mentalhealth #humanresilience #posttraumaticstress #wartrauma #emotionalhealing #darktruths #psychologicalhorror #innerdemons #fightforsurvival

So this has been going around my head for too long and I finally got it out, on paper, today. It's not meant to have a moral to it nor is it meant to hit you over the head with political ideology. It's just a story. I mainly just wanted to stop riding around my mind like a mosquito in the dark. I was minding my own business while eating some mediocre breakfast at a small cafe in my suburb. Everyone had opinions, yes, with a capital O, about the war. While many accepted that such things were necessary to fight off the invasion, there were a few who believed that diplomacy can solve all problems. Like the young man at the table next to me.

Now I'm ready to admit that I have preconceptions about what such people look and behave like, but this guy didn't come across like this stereotype. He was dressed smartly, his hair combed and not in dreadlocks, and he was actually quite eloquent in the way he spoke. Alas, the one thing he was doing which correlated with my idea of the peace-loving hippie concept was that he was way too loud and almost aggressive in volume. As if everyone wanted to hear his diatribe, and that he was the one to deliver the sermon. He spoke about the failures of the government of the time, and how they should have talked down the saber-rattling of the foreign warmongers, at least as a way to stay out of the conflict that was building between them and other powers, if not to act as arbitrators for the whole point

of a grievance. He spoke of how the local military and resistance forces should have stood aside when confronted in order to demonstrate their moral high ground. He spoke of the terrible repercussions that the instigator of war felt when other nations responded. He spoke of the thousands of combatants who were killed from all nations, and the millions of civilians vaporized by both conventional and nuclear weapons. He spoke of the monstrousness of those who took up arms, of those willing to mercilessly slaughter the people who were deemed an enemy. Eventually, with his energy and confidence building, this young man started to look around and address the occupants of the tables directly.

I avoided what I could of this simply by averting my gaze, but soon his boldness got the better of him and he started to place himself directly at each table, including mine. I think part of the problem was that nobody was rising to his challenges. We'd all heard this sort of thing before, and knowing that some people's minds cannot be changed, it's easier to just try and ignore it than to have a conversation that often sucks up a lot of your time. Some people will argue, but there weren't any of that cohort at the cafe today so I couldn't hide behind somebody else's argumentative nature.

He slid into the chair in front of me, a kindly grin on his face, but the sort of glint in his eye that gave away the fact that he was intent on convincing people of the error of their ways. Hello, sir, he began almost breathlessly, what do you think was the failure point that started the whole war? I just want it out. I try not to think of what happened during those short months, which felt like lifetimes, and I definitely don't want to talk to strangers about it. So I told him just that. I avoid thinking of the whole thing as much as I can, that wasn't enough for him. He told me to think of what it must have been like for the multitude of partners, parents and children who lost their dearest relatives. I answered as best as I could, but soon after I started talking I found that I couldn't stop. When the bombs first came, my wife and children were in the city. The kids had a school excursion and some of the parents had volunteered to help. I was at home working. It was all so sudden and unexpected.

I lived about 25 kilometers from the city as the crow flies. Being north, I was less than 20 kilometers from the closest army base. I heard a strange concussion of sounds outside. It was like a hundred distant cars had all backfired within moments of each other, pop, pop, popping, without pause or end. It was so strange that I had to step outside to look. While I couldn't see the city, I could see the smoke, back and acrid as a scar across the sky. Scores more tiny pinpricks were streaking their way through the air,

and it took me a moment to understand what I was looking at, munitions coming from the east and blasting their way into the concrete and flesh that used to be the city and its people. Within moments all communications and power were cut off. No internet, no phones, and the electricity went out. I saw more people along my street poke their heads out of their houses, all eventually turning to the billowing plumes of death rising from the south. I heard lots of gasps, a few screams, then shouting as their demeanor turned to panic. I don't know how long I stood out there, but it wasn't long before my neighbors were fleeing in their cars. No doubt some were racing to their own children and loved ones, and many more just getting away from the potential of harm. I don't know why,

but I was rooted to the spot, unable to divine what was happening or what to do. I must have been there for a while because I can still remember smelling the faint rancid fumes of carnage floating on the wind from the ruins in the distance. I remember seeing my street, a relatively minor one, fill with cars of people taking the opportunity to get out while they could via any route that seemed valid. I remember the police inching their way through the traffic announcing to all that they needed to evacuate. We were at war. I can't remember if it was told to me, or if it was just the atmosphere of the situation that was so fundamentally full of the declaration. The irrational part of my brain took over and demanded that I find my wife and children.

I can't even remember having conscious thoughts for a while after that, though I must have readied myself somewhat as the next thing I can recall is wearing my sturdy work trousers, steel-capped boots, and a jacket that I swear I'd never seen before. Let me be clear now, I have never been in the military. Yet somehow I'd managed to rustle up whatever stuff I could that would approximate the most analogous outfit to camo stuff that I could. I wasn't to know that there were landing parties already coming in from the coast. I do remember the first guy I killed, though, the look of fear and pain on his face as I had somehow managed to bury his own knife into his chest. I don't know how I

did it, but I do have vivid memories, and ongoing nightmares, of my hands getting covered in his blood as it gushed out from his wound. His gun clattered to the ground as he fell to his knees and the sound must have alerted some of his squadmates as shouting and the thud of boots came my way. I was in a suburban backyard at this point, his rifle landing heavily on the concrete path to the clothesline, and my conscious mind roaring to the fore as I started to understand my predicament. Luckily for me, these rifles spew bullets at an alarming rate. I found out later that the soldier I had killed was carrying it wrong, with neither the safety or single-shot mechanisms engaged. Before I knew, I was firing a

ammunition into and through the hapless folk who were coming to help their dead friend. With no targets to see any more I dropped the gun foolishly and ran like I was being chased by the devil. I climbed fences, went through side streets and barged my way through bushes. My hands were warm with the drying blood of the soldier I'd driven the knife into. I don't know how far I got, but it was far enough to be safe, evidently. In someone's now abandoned front yard I puked and wretched for an interminable amount of time. Nobody sings ballads of the blood, mud, and tears. Nobody romanticizes the pain, shit and vomit. Or the sensation of the ringing you hear in your head forever more after brutally murdering someone. It was likely in self-defense, but that makes no difference to the

unstoppable bit in your brain that screams at you about taking another person's life. Even now, a decade after the invasion, I can still hear the echoes of that beast within roaring in disgust, regret and sorrow. From there it was a slog into the city. I had to see for myself, though I knew it was folly. I knew that there would be no survivors from the desolation, but I was running on a mixture of fear, anger, and heartbreak. As I came closer first the army base, then into the city, bodies littered the streets. Fires were burning in buildings that had suffered damage from nearby explosions. The enemy army had been through finishing off anyone looking dangerous, or taking survivors to concentration camps scattered throughout the greater city area.

I managed to attain a couple of weapons during this part, though I'd rather not say how. I'd rather not remember at all, to be honest, but that time has well and truly passed. I was well on the way to becoming a monster and the brain tends to resolve terrible things in order to continue functioning. Turns out that I was very good at war. I instinctively understood how to build traps, avoid detection, and to snuff the life out of other people, often many at a time. I had no news of the outside world. I didn't know what was happening elsewhere. But I knew that I needed to stop anyone in the uniform of the invaders. And by stop, I mean in a terminal fashion. I didn't have the capacity to take hostages, nor to tend to the wounds of other people.

I performed summary justice to those who stood against me, not out of pleasure but out of necessity, revenge and national pride. I committed acts that were intolerable in any decent society, and probably a few that amounted to war crimes. I brutally murdered hundreds of these invaders through the machinations of sabotage, ambush, and sheer application of firepower. I assassinated at least a dozen of their ranking leaders in order to so fear and confusion into their plans. I fought this war for what seemed like a lifetime, but in reality, was just over a month before remnants of the local military, supported by forces of half a dozen other countries, came to restore

power. The whole story would sound like a gratuitously violent, blood-drenched and disgusting boy's own adventure version of John Marsden novels if I told it all. And I don't want to do that, I try to repress all the memories every day. I'll tell you, son, that war is a political hammer, and the nails are the soldiers who fight it. I don't hate the invading people for their part in it, because they were simply acting on the orders of the psychopaths in power. Don't hate the players, hate the game, is one way of putting it, as long as you consider the game as being the governments of the world. Most soldiers don't ask to be shot at, they don't ask to be the one who pulls the trigger and the don't ask to lose the people they stand beside.

I never wanted war. I certainly didn't want my wife and children to die. But I did what I needed to. I don't regret what I did, but I most definitely wish I had never needed to do it. With that, I pushed the remains of my half-eaten breakfast away and stood clumsily. Half of my lower left leg was missing from an unexpected granade, and my cane supported my weight where the leg could not. I didn't want to look at the young man who had dredged up my memories, but I am a stickler for manners. He had tears in his eyes and a blank look on his face as if I had just upended his whole worldview. Which I probably had. He never expected this daughtering old man to have been one of the few who had held back the

invasion of our city through the extreme application of bloodshed and violence. I'm sorry you had to hear that. I hope you can understand some of the other side of the story now. good day with that i shambled away not as a dignified and proud statesman but as a wounded and haunted old man the end