There was a period of time during the COVID lockdown when I had dreams/nightmares about my time in or with the military every night: basic training, deployment,

There was a period of time during the COVID lockdown when I had dreams/nightmares about my time in or with the military every night: basic training, deployment, etc. I wish I still had them; my dreams of normal life today are probably too boring and insignificant to remember. Surely there are a lot who suffer from PTSD. I’m not sure, but maybe the same ones that took it over the top down range, or even in training. We were getting shelled on base one night when I was working late by the flight line, and took my time getting into the bunker. Was met with a rifle in my face, screaming, hyperventilating, single-chevron. Yeah, that dude. The 1SGT’s experience in the article, that’s pretty extreme too. For a lot of us though, it was the most significant thing we’ve ever done in the world, whether we agree morally with it or not, and the dreadful reality is that we’ll never be there again, and even if we are, it won’t be the same because we are not the same, now with forced introspection and greater context, no longer passive observers of ourselves in a third-party role. The movies are great when they visit me. I admit that I don’t have nearly as much action or horror in the collection as some, but there is also comedy, drama, coming-of-age, etc. Probably irrelevant/offensive/etc, but, whatever. Oh yeah, one more stupid thing about dreams. In my last deployment, I left Stanford and a startup because I wanted to reclaim that feeling of being a warrior, and got assigned to special forces. One of my first nights on the SF base, I had one of my most vivid dreams ever, a childhood friend of mine whom I knew was no good but believed in him anyway, beat a pet cow to death right in front of me, screaming and begging and pleading for him to stop. This bothered me throughout the deployment. I could rationally accept that it was just random neurons firing, but something told me that I had to make sense of it in terms of why I was there and what I was supposed to get out of it. Maybe these things are supposed to torture us. This is the chaos monkey of our conscience and normal pattern of expectation and response, pointing out the weaknesses.