A VETERAN'S DREAMS

Earlier readers of this blog may remember some of my later dreams, like “Dance of the Arrows” and “The Last Nightmare,” that still flirted with fear and danger, but essentially ended with a sort of redemption.

    

     The two dreams here, along with their short introduction, introduce dreams into the overall narrative of the book. They are not nice. But because Rattlesnake Dreams is not just about war – it is that – but about LEARNING ABOUT WAR, these dreams give a glimpse of how far I had to travel, emotionally and spiritually, to move from terror to laughter.

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.

THE LAST NIGHTMARE

Dream: Dance of the Arrows

I'm standing alone in the center of a wide, barren plain that stretches to the horizon in every direction. The sky is clear, and sits like a hemispheric blue cap over the plain. I look at the horizon, follow it around. It is featureless... but wait: there is a solitary figure, a speck on the horizon. That figure and I are the only visual interruptions of the universe bounded by earth and sky. I'm invigorated by the feeling of spaciousness, but recognize that I must be watchful. Sure enough: the figure on the horizon is an archer. He draws a powerful bow. Alarm, my warrior's antennae say. The archer shoots an arrow into the sky. The arrow's trajectory says that it is perfectly aimed at me. The arrow disappears from sight, but I must track its flight. I do so by moving my head as though my initial observations had actually programmed the arrow's trajectory into my nervous system. I track the arrow forward, from the point where it disappears from sight in the sky until it reappears, a deadly dot in the blue, now on its way down to kill me. I jump around. I try to dodge it. But it never wavers: no matter how I move, I feel the tingle of its anticipated penetration just below my navel. The arrow swoops toward me, visually accelerating in the way I've seen machine-gun tracers appear to speed up as they come nearer, after having seemed to be moving quite slowly toward me as I observed them from a distance; or the way the ground swoops up toward a parachutist during the last seconds of fall. Just before the arrow hits me, I make one final, quick sidestep. The arrow's feathers brush my belly; it thunks into the earth. Alarm. I look up. Comes another. Again I am able to dodge it only at the last instant. Again the feathers brush my abdomen. Again the arrow stabs the ground at my feet. There is an infinite succession of them. I have figured out that the arrows, while seeming to remain perfectly aimed at my center, never waver in flight, no matter how I jump and dodge. This, I learn, is because the arrow simply knows where I will be when it arrives three and a half feet off the ground, and is aimed there. So my jumping about as the arrow descends is irrelevant. I learn that, with each shot, I am given one, and only one, chance to save my life. This is what Japanese martial artists call suki, or "opening": that tiny window in time ‑ often far less than a second ‑ when an opponent's attention is interrupted or distracted, when only an instinctive, forceful, and unhesitatingly intentional motion will be quick enough and sure enough to enter the opening. So I must watch each arrow as it leaps out of the sky to kill me, and I must wait. I must let it come. As the arrows continue to come and I tire from exertion and fear, I must force myself to relax so that in dodging one arrow I don't overexert and fail to recover in time for the next. Each time, I must wait, closing out the fear that tries like a pack of howling dogs to crowd my mind, to panic me. I must wait until the steel of the broadhead is about to puncture my belly. Then I must perfectly ‑ without protest, without excuses, without appeal to fairness or justice, without asking for help ‑ execute the one quick movement I'm allowed for dodging that arrow. Then I must forget that arrow, allowing no thought of relief or victory or pride in accomplishment, and be ready for the next. The arrows come in a perfect rhythm. So my side‑steps adopt the same rhythm, thereby becoming, of necessity, a dance. I'm never released from the mortal urgency of the situation, but it begins to strike me as funny. At the end of the dream, I'm still dodging the arrows, which never relent in accuracy or intention. But I'm laughing, as at something in a Chaplin movie, funny but urgent, as I dance my dance of survival.

                           The Last Nightmare

                                   

In my anger and confusion upon leaving Vietnam, I had promised myself to study the war, and the human condition, until I understood the workings of the monstrous situation I had just lived through. I even promised myself that I would fix it! (See earlier post “Danang,” in Archive).

     I have been engaged in that study since then, and this book is the result, so far. What I didn’t know when I made the promise was that the arc of that study would parallel the arc of the healing of my emotional wounds from the war (I was never hit by bullets or shrapnel, only narrowly missed). In fact, the arc of my personal healing was the SAME as the arc of my awareness. I began to feel the war moving from a place deep inside me to a place outside, where I could see it, and myself, for what it was – for what I was.

     I’m still angry, of course. (see posts “Townies,” “Hunger 3,” “Seminar,” 
“J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac,” in Archive)

     That’s how I moved from nightmares to laughter, or from nightmares with no relief to nightmares in which I would waken in a fit of laughter so physically intense it would hurt my gut.

     The “Rattlesnake Dream” was the pivot point in that process. In the dream, my own people were pleading with me to do their killing for them, and I was ready. I was good with weapons; I performed well in dangerous situations. But my conversation with the snake taught me the deep wrong in my warrior’s assignment from my people, as the baby boy I was holding at bayonet point had begun to teach me that April day in Tho An (see “Prologue,” in Archive).

     So I turned and walked away.

     María Patricia Fajardo Valbuena and I met on the internet in July, 2008. We were married in March, 2009, in the office of the alcalde in Cota, the town next to Chía, Colombia, where she was born and grew up.

     Before dawn one morning in 2009, my wife and I were still asleep in our apartment in Chía. I was sitting upright in the bed. She was behind me, shaking me, shouting in my ear: “Dean! Dean! Que está pasando contigo?!”( What’s happening to you?!)”

     I was shaking violently, still not awake. She thought I was having a heart attack.

     But I was laughing. I was laughing as violently as if I were having an epileptic seizure, shaking the entire bed. I was dreaming this:

 A group of rich old men have a mansion on a hill. The entire exterior is large plate glass windows. The old men stay inside, keeping company only with themselves.

But there is one other old man outside: I am scurrying about, laughing, placing large mirrors close to the mansion, one in front of each window. The old men inside see their own reflections in the mirrors, become horrified at the sight, and fire at their reflections with shotguns. Each time the old man outside places another mirror, the old men inside blast away, destroying another section of their own house. I, the old man outside, am having a high old time, placing the mirrors and cackling and howling with laughter as the rich old men destroy their own mansion.

  Finally, Patricia was able to waken me. She was terrified that something awful was happening. She was trying to get through to me, but couldn’t communicate.

     I woke up and fell back in the bed, still laughing, and told her the dream. We laughed together for a long time.