One of the thing that became consistent after my retirement from the Army National Guard after over twenty plus years of service, is that the feeling that I’m still in the Guard crosses over in some of my dreams. I guess when someone used to do activities that occasionally disrupts life, kills relationships and put you in a situation of life and death, or potentially taking someone else’s life. It stays with you, no matter how subtle the feeling you get; I believe it is something that will never go away.

In this experience I dreamed that I was with my unit and we were doing riot duty. We were supposed to make sure the crowd does not erupt into a full scale riot. However things were escalating and the crowd became aggressive. A crowd attack members of the unit across the street from where I was. I saw a unit member who was about to be overpowered, so I aimed my M16 and shot the civilian. Then I shot another person who attempted to jump on the unit member when the first civilian I shot went down. However when I shot the civilians, the ones around me got upset and they started to attack me. I used my martial arts to defend myself and when the opportunity came I shot the civilians that were attacking me.

Then the unit was pulled out of the area. I found myself in the Armory and was told to clean and turn in my weapon. When I looked at the M16 I could not see the charging handle. When I took the weapon apart I found that there was garbage in the weapon, and the charging handle and bolt was among the garbage. I emptied the garbage from the weapon and cleaned it; when I went to put it back together, I saw that the garbage was still in the weapon…. This kept on repeating it over in a recurring loop.

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