I woke at 0400 this morning. A virtual sleep-in – 0330 is the norm lately. Dreaming Bearcat causes a lot of that but It also appears that those drugs they’ve had me stop, which are causing the tremors to be more impactful, are the same ones responsible for knocking me the fuck out every night. Will I live to experience a proper balance?
Dreaming Bearcat
I said I’d share details about a recurring dream, but I still can’t – not fully. I’m trying to sort it out. I need to talk to Donnie, but I can’t, which is increasingly frustrating. I feel like I’m losing hold of it, even after coming so far. I need a phone that reads my thoughts as I have them and speaks them aloud. Oh, wait! That would be unfiltered, eh? Probably not optimal.🤔
You’d think that by now I’d be used to this process. Nope! It’s not that I haven’t been here before, because I have – many times with the accounting of that period. So many times, have I felt sure I had it all – finally. Only to start dreaming something new almost immediately after that previous “final” version resurfaced in my shattered memories. But this time it just feels different. This seems even more visceral than the incident with the children outside Bo Hoa ville. That incident occurred after Bearcat did, if this dream reflects a real day in the life, so to speak.
This is what I have, and it’s all so very clear in my mind now. But it only goes so far and stops. When it does, I wake up and I am literally shaking in my boots. Donna has been watching almost every time, prepared to wake me if it got violent, which it has. She’s use to it. The only damage I do is to myself, with violent jerks, jumping out of bed and sometimes trying to get under it – which is impossible. Have you ever tried to get under an sleep number bed?
Dreaming Bearcat
…Prince is a solid stone of alertness; the darkness is all encompassing – I only “see” him when he turns his head to me and shows his ghostly glowing eyes. They are huge with white showing all around the pupil.
The leash, though, the leash is taught with messages coming back to me in vibrations so strong my hand and arm oscillate with it. He’s stopped cold. A solid defensive curtain between me and whatever lies ahead and I can’t tell anything else. It’s dark-dark, and it’s so quiet I’m sure everyone around can hear me breathing, so I stop. I inch closer to Prince who still hasn’t budged and is vibrating increasingly as I come to a knee beside him. Releasing my breath in a rush so loud it startles me. I nervously whisper, “whatchugotboy?”
He answers with a lean – into the alert. I can feel a rumble in his chest. He’s more agitated than I, if that’s possible. That made me even more terrified. I question the wind, WTF, is going on?
Behind me a voice cuts through the miasma of uncertainty crippling me, “What’s the holdup, troop?”
Dreaming Bearcat
I almost lash out a “SHUSH!”, but catch myself.
I again present the hand signal to take cover.
The Lt gets low and advances on me. Normally Prince would already be in this guy’s face. Not this time.
“What is it, Hurder? Why are we stopped?”
I still couldn’t formulate the words, so I just pointed at Prince.
It took him a moment to see the dog, but when he did, his reaction was instant.
“Oh, shit! Which way?”
Confused still, I ask, “Towards the alert or around it?”
The Lt looked at me like I had three heads. Maybe he thought I was a coward. I don’t mind telling you, I was scared for sure. Prince never acted like this. He always tugged towards the trouble. He never stopped to question it so deeply – not with me. I think this new behavior is what made me so spooked. Nothing scared Prince. “FUCK! WTF, over?”
Prince had been in the shit before. I mean real shit. The jungle shit, far from Bien Hoa and it’s thousands of Americans. He might have been used to this, but this time even he seemed a bit overly concerned. I sure as hell wasn’t used to any of it. I might be thinking of contacting Donnie or Santi to figure out what the hell Prince was doing and why?
Imagine it.
“Hey, Lt. Can we take five so I can call tech support on this one?“
The Lt. was having none of that. He was sent to make contact if there was contact to be made, so it could be rooted out and destroyed. This was an everyday occurrence for the Bearcat crew. Not so for Shorty from Boston.
Dreaming Bearcat
At this point in the dream the strings get misty. I can’t make Prince move towards the alert. He just won’t go. I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit. Prince never refused me anything once we bonded. He may not have always been on board with my decisions, but he always did his job. This was NOT my Prince. This was all about me and my hesitance.
I don’t know what happens from there on. I’m stuck like Prince was. That’s why I think I was trying to stop someone from going forward the first few times this dream occurred. Why the other someone presented like another handler with dog, someone I didn’t recognize, is beyond me – that’s how it presented then. In the dream now, The handler is me. The dog is Prince. The other guy may have been the Lt. and I wanted him to let me lead us around the alert, like I was trained to do, while he wanted to go straight at it, like a fucking infantryman, for chrissakes.
Maybe I disgraced myself with more rabid insubordination and they really did think me a coward; which would neatly explain why I don’t want to remember it all. I’ve done that before too.
Why did the man I imagined have a dog, though? Did they call in another team to replace the coward?
Donnie has stated that he went to bearcat a few times, once with me, he thought in mid-March. The reading I’ve done reports that when the 9th infantry division moved from Bearcat in ’67, the Royal Thai Black Panther division moved in. They were supported by several American units, to include the Cav and my unit, the 34th IPSD from when we arrived on Bien Hoa in ’71. I’ve pictured Asians in my mind who were not Viets – different uniforms. I wonder if these are they, but the Thais reportedly unassed Bearcat in February of ’72. I would have been extremely green in February, so that makes more sense than anything regarding my behavior. Donnie says his first time on Bearcat was a horror show in February – maybe. We have to find a way to talk…
Anyway – still guessing some.
This dreamland symbolism gets trippy, I tell you.
Shorty sends with a question mark or two or three???
Dreaming Bearcat
Can you see it?