Poem: "Sleepstalking"

This poem was inspired and sponsored by wcg, who wrote about a stress dream common to military personnel.  Sometimes our dreams tell us truths about ourselves that we don't even realize until we wake up ...

An old soldier dreams ...

The assignment is insane,
but sometimes orders don't make sense,
and it doesn't matter: you follow them anyway.
So back he goes to basic training,
hiding himself among the new recruits,
sweating away his fears that someone
will recognize his face from the news
or find the brass stars hidden in his footlocker.

It's an old dream.  He's had it before.
This time is different, though;
this time it feels real.

Blisters burst on his feet as he marches,
marches, marches over hot sand.
Hot breath in his ear when the quarter fails to bounce.
Belly gnawing on backbone, hungry enough
to boil boot leather and eat it without salt.
March.  March.  March.
Chin tucked to chest so no one can see his face.
Still marching.

The old soldier
wrestles with the dream,
wins his way to graduation,
and then -- rewind --

The assignment is insane,
but sometimes orders don't make sense,
and it doesn't matter: you follow them anyway.
So back he goes to basic training,
hiding himself among the new recruits ...

knowing that he is dreaming,
knowing that he should have woken by now,
certain that something somewhere is FUBAR,
he lets the familiar bellow blow over him:
"Drop and gimme twenty!"
and grimly places his palms on the pavement.

The dream splinters like gun-shot glass,
spiderwebbing away into wakefulness
as the old soldier sits up in the chair.

"Congratulations, sir," says the technician,
shiny-new and young enough to be a grandson.
"You passed the test. 
We need all the cybersoldiers we can get."

The old soldier chuckles
and begins to understand why
only the oldest veterans make it into this program
to go sleepstalking for hackers in the macronet.
It's like becoming a green beret, for whom
fatigue is a way of life and not a stopping point.

To become a cybersoldier,
you must be old enough and stubborn enough
that not even nightmares can frighten you anymore.