My Dream
I just woke up, and I had a very strange dream that I want to share.
I was in Iraq, back in the Marine Corps, living in a tent city with other Marines. There was another camp next to us of British. We were bored, because everything was going well, and everyone was playing around. We had gone there to defend Iraq, expecting hell and bloodshed every day, but we had not been attacked even once. Everyone was starting to get this euphoric feeling, happy, and I remember talking to this one guy. He was saying how relieved he was that everything was going so well, and happy. I told him to remember that we were at war, and in war things don’t change slowly and gradually. One minute it is all flowers and roses, and the next all hell breaks loose and people are dropping like flys everywhere. I told him not to get complacent, because he would let his guard down and stop paying attention to what was going on around him, and he would die because of that.
He got all pissed, and said I was lecturing him and preaching. I told him that I wasn’t, I was just trying to keep him alive.
After that I was dreaming that our unit was patrolling along a beach with trees on it that went right to the water’s edge. A single Iranian soldier popped up to the side, down the beach a ways, and none of us saw him. He opened fire and killed our entire unit, and none of us even had any time to react or turn and see him. And I remember thinking the war had just started.
I saw everyone in our unit getting shot multiple times, and getting ripped to shreds by the bullets. Then my view backed up, and I realized I was watching a television screen, and seeing someone in the unit get shot on the screen. It was footage of us getting ambushed that had been taken from a camera that was on one of our helmets, or some kind of high tech gadget like that.
I then looked around, and I was in a room with my unit and some military officers. Everyone in my unit was alive, but we were horribly disfigured. Our faces were covered in bruises and scabs, and we looked like we didn’t have any blood in our bodies. Our skin was greyish black. But we were perfectly normal aside from the way we looked. The way we thought was normal and we remembered everything. The officers were talking to us about the experimental program we had all volunteered for, the one that was supposed to be able to bring us back, even after we were killed. They were telling us the program had worked, but not as well as they liked, and we were all going to be horribly disfigured and look the way we did for the rest of our lives. They said we would never be able to fit in with normal society again, and were giving us the option to kill ourselves or to go back to the war and get revenge. You could tell they were really anguished with their failure, and the options they had to give us.
Apparently we had all volunteered for this program, because we knew that in war you can get caught by surprise, no matter how careful you are, and we wanted to be able to learn from our mistakes, even the ones that got us killed. And we were all kicking ourselves in the ass for not paying enough attention, and for being careless. So we all chose revenge.
I woke up right after that.
It’s one of those dreams that kind of sticks with you. Sometimes dreams say things in pictures and emotions much better than you can say things in words. So I thought I’d write this one down and share it. I hope somebody gets something from it besides some political talking point bullshit. This isn’t about power, it is about living, or dying.
Published by CoyoteDKM on May 29th, 2007 | Filed under War Commentary
October 23rd, 2007 at 2:19 pm
It’s all about living or dying. The question is, who does the living and who does the dying?