Deadribs

In January 1985, I spent 8 days with some Miskito Indians who were based in southern Honduras and sometimes raided  across the international border (the Rio Coco) into Nicaragua. They were anti-Sandinista, so were allied with the US, in this case in the form of some mercenaries hired by a Texas oilman. Most of the Miskito warriors were teenagers who were casual about where their weapons were pointed. So I looked down a lot of gun barrels that week...

   For some time after I returned from that trip, I was virtually dizzy trying to remember it all, to write it down, to process it first in my own mind, then into my article for the San Jose (CA) Mercury News. As I looked at the photographs, at my notes, and at the images in my mind, one that was among the most recurrent was that of rifle muzzles: brownskinned teenage warriors, serious yet for all the world like neighborhood kids playing war, handling their AK47s and G3 automatic rifles and M16s and M1 carbines, with their limited training, as if they were toys instead of fully loaded assault weapons. They'd climb aboard the Toyota pickups, letting the muzzles point where they would, often including in my direction. So I looked down a lot of gun barrels that week.

     A few nights after I got home, I had this dream:

Dream: Deadribs       

I am dead. I'm a skeleton. Wind blows between my ribs. I can't move; can't leave the place that is death. People who aren't dead can visit me here. My wife comes, and friends. They ask what it's like. I answer that I'm sad I can't go back with them to the place of the living, but that loneliness isn't the worst part. The worst part is not being able to move. That, and being a skeleton, with the air passing freely between my ribs, not blocked by any organs or skin, the uncaring wind blowing through me and not finding any life there, no warm barrier between my bones and the wind.

DREAM: BODIES OF WATER

                                        Dream: Bodies of Water

I am a soldier again, but not in the Marine Corps this time. It's a more irregular force. We drop from higher ground toward a village. It is somewhat familiar; it may or may not be our village. It seems deserted, but we feel other presences. As we march wearily and warily down into the village, there is an inevitability to our marching, that feeling in the body which my dream has borrowed from my Adeste Fidelis march at Camp Pendleton years before. This inevitability is a property not just of our column of dusty, sweaty men. It is a property of the very movements of our limbs, of our muscles and bones, even of our cells. We might as well be insects hatching. The air is thick with risk. Is the village deserted, or are the people (our people? people loyal to the enemy?) hidden in the rude houses behind shuttered windows? Is the danger from them, or from someone else who will come? This land could be the rocky ridges of the West Bank, say an Israeli or Palestinian settlement or village near Jerusalem and Bethlehem; or it could be an open rocky area of the Guatemalan highlands, near where the road forks between Todos Santos Cuchumatán and San Miguel Acatán, only less green; or Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where Ollie North and his cowboys built their secret airstrip for the contras. A small creek, less than three feet wide, runs through the village. The banks of the creek are lined with stones placed by human hands. Some of us kneel to drink; some look warily around, rifles ready, up and downstream. Even we who drink are looking, peering out from under our eyebrows. As I drink, the creek floats a human body beneath my face, almost touching. The creek is barely wide enough for the body to pass. The body is a dark‑haired young man. The head, shoulders, hips, feet, all bump jerkily against the creek's rocky sides as the water carries it along. The body floats face up. His hands are bound behind his back. I look upstream. Another body, another dark‑haired young man, is close behind the first. As my eyes change focus and sweep upstream, I see the creek is filled with bodies of dark‑haired young men in civilian clothes, crowded head to foot, hands bound behind, bumping between narrow rocky creekbanks propelled by a stream of clear water. They clog, jam up, bump into one another like wastage from a doll factory. But the same inevitability which infuses our movements unsticks the bodies, moves them bumpily on downstream. I look farther upstream, lowering my face until it is just above the stream of bodies and clear water. I now can see under the stone-lined culvert from which the stream emerges. In the light that comes through the tunnel, I see legs of soldiers standing on the creekbanks beyond the culvert. They are wearing blue jeans, other civilian pants, boots, tennis shoes, the odd bit of uniform. I see only their legs, and the muzzles of their rifles at the ready. Their legs look like the legs of the bodies in the creek. They also look like our legs. Or they could be the legs of the players, seen through a broken horizontal slat in the fence around any inner-city basketball court in the world. Are they the killers? Are they coming for us? Are they reinforcements for us? Or are they a fresh supply of bodies for the water?    

A VETERAN'S DREAMS

Interlude: A Veteran's Dreams

     Every veteran of ground combat has his own set of these dreams, usually for the rest of his life. Some are nightmares that are so horrible that they launch the dreamer bodily out of sleep, then clamp his mind shut, in forgetfulness, against what he just saw. Often only fragments remain. Or a dream will be repeated so often that it can't be forgotten. Sometimes, as with my dream about the wolves, it sears the brain so deeply, that one time, that it can't be forgotten.

     Since the war, my dreams have included an ongoing series of pursuit nightmares. Over the years, two things happened. I got weary of, and angry at, waking up terrified. I also realized that however scary the dreams were, they were also amazing pictures (in full color) and stories. I decided that if I had to put up with them, I should at least get some use out of them.

     I made a conscious decision to try, when I was having a nightmare in which I was being pursued, to do two things: to turn, in the dream, and confront my pursuers; and to remember the dreams instead of forgetting them. After all, I was a storyteller, and I was missing out on the use of material which was among my strongest, and for which I had paid the highest price. I began to write them down. The dreams related here are told exactly as they occurred to me, except that some have been shortened either by me or by that great editor, forgetfulness.

     In more recent years, my dreams – well, some, anyway - have become friends, except for the rare visitation of a nightmare as graphic and terrifying as the first two presented here. Along the way I learned an interesting thing: that while dreams inhabit the most fearsome recesses of the human soul, dreams themselves are brutally unafraid. They will go anywhere, reveling in deepest fears and unmentionable desires. Allowed to travel unfettered and then to haul their stories into the light of morning, they will do work - especially for a writer - which simply cannot be done by the awake mind.

         Dream: Nazi Pursuit

I am alone. A battalion of Nazi SS troopers are after me. They are focused entirely on finding and killing me. They are all big, strong men, definitely not parade‑ground troops. Their uniforms are dirty. They march with the cadence of our Adeste Fidelis column at Camp Pendleton, sweating as they march. All are armed with fully automatic weapons: submachine guns and heavier. Everything about them says: fit, experienced combat men. We are in a town that has been shot up in earlier fighting. They are near. They know the area; I do not. They spread out, searching expertly. I scurry like a rat. I duck into a dark place under a raised sidewalk, like the one I looked under in Cho Lon at the corpse of the Chinese woman. I clutch my rifle, which is a single‑shot .22 like the one I hunted rabbits with as a kid. I have one or two .22 cartridges to go against the SS battalion. Their big black boots are close enough to touch as they march past my face.

                                        Dream: Money Man Pursuit

A man, one man, is after me. He's decided I'm between him and what he wants. It has nothing to do with me personally, with who I am or with anything I've done. I try to dissuade him, but he won't listen. Only my death will clear his way. There is a long pursuit. Part of it is over the rooftops of the human community. I do good tricks to get away but he always picks up the trail again. I go through a library with all human knowledge in it, in such a way as to leave all that knowledge in the form of impediments for him. But he comes through it all, picks up my trail. Along the way, some people try to help me, but can't. Others are afraid to try. He has an AK47 which he fires at me whenever he comes within range, barely missing me. I hear the bullets snapping around my head like the bullets snapped near the well in Tho An in 1966. I meet a friend, a fellow combat vet. He says, "Remember that time...?" and recounts my telling him of our shelling and bombing a battlefield after a firefight until nothing recognizable was left but mud blasted into tortured shapes. My friend connects that story to the pursuit I'm now enduring, but I don't know why, unless just for its implacability, its inevitable movement in the direction of death. He says he'll be a lot more reluctant now, after a battle, to do his usual job of walking the ground and looking for survivors and for evidence of what happened there. I'm weary of dreaming this dream. I know I can't escape this man who pursues me. I know he'll kill me if I don't kill him. I lie in wait. I get up close. Fear and strength struggle in my body. The fear and the strength stop fighting, come to an agreement. The only way out is for me to become a more focused killer than he is. I become that. He comes. His eyes are maniacal, yet more cold than wild. Methodical. I now have a pistol. I aim carefully. A good head shot takes out one eye, goes into his brain. He keeps coming. I shoot again, take out the other eye. He will not die. I shoot and shoot, all brain shots. I'm aware of a wonderful, terrible ability to focus, like when I shot the rattlesnake on the Rogue River, or like standing in the open under fire at Tho An. This focus allows me to compartmentalize my being, putting my revulsion at killing off in a corner with my fear of death and the physical distractions of my environment and of my pursuer's movements. His head recoils crazily with each shot. Still he comes; he won't get it through his head. I grab a short sharp stick. Bullets are not enough; it has to be more personal. I thrust, put all my body's strength behind it, with the butt of the stick against my palm, and drive the point into one bloody eye socket, through his head, out the back of his skull. He finally gets the point. He dies, but not before he gets what he came for. We are in a fast food joint, behind the counter. Dying, he falls toward the cash register, grabs a wad of greenbacks the size of a large man's fist, too large to swallow, but rams it into his mouth anyway, his face a swamp of gore as he falls dead, still trying to swallow the money.