Having emotional problems is tough for both the one suffering from the affliction, as well as their family. I know that from first-hand experience, being someone who suffers from Intermittent Explosive Disorder, which although terrifying, isn't the reason I am writing this. Just bear with me a moment longer, for this story requires a bit of back story. I apologize in advance if I ramble on, but I just recovered from a panic attack, and am still a bit jittery.
I was nineteen in 2001, working at a mill in the mid Willamette Valley, and drinking with the farmhands and other mill workers on the weekends. Life was good. Then September Eleventh came. I decided, like a few of my friends and millions of other people in America that I was going to do something about it. I joined the Army, and after taking the ASVAB, was given the MOS of 19 Kilo, or Tanker.
I was scheduled to Swear In six months after the date of my meeting with the Recruiter. I spent the summer getting as drunk and stoned as I possibly could, the feeling that I was rushing to my death enshrouding me like a wet woolen blanket. Those days were far too fleeting, and are a complete blur to me now, as one might expect. I left my home on a plane on March 14th of 2002, and spent my sixteen weeks in Hell just like everyone does when they join the Military.
Learning to operate and fire the tanks was fun, though. I also liked driving the Stryker vehicles, which were pretty new then, and had a different name, but that's irrelevant. As one would expect as soon as I completed training and shipped out to my Duty Station, and from there to Afghanistan. I hadn't been overseas more than a week before I had my first firefight and first confirmed kill to boot under my belt. I was surprised how easy it had been.
A month later I saw one of my friends die to an Insurgent bullet. That time I needed counseling and I needed to be put on Light Duty for a while, but eventually, I recovered. I finished my first tour without too much more tragedy. Once back home I felt immediately out of place and restless, even working on a busy Joint Base in the Pacific Northwest. I volunteered to go back overseas, and I was soon on a plane, back to the wasteland.
When I arrived, I was tapped for a small team that the commander of the FOB I would be going to was assembling. Something didn't seem right, but I also wasn't one to disobey orders. Those of us who had been selected were given sleeping pills before we boarded the Cessna on the thin strip of black-top that served as a runway. I wasn't complaining. I hadn't rested very well in almost eight months up to that point. Once we were in the plane we were strapped to gurneys and blindfolded. I was too tired and drugged to care but I heard a few of the others protesting.
Soon enough, I was dreaming of my home and parents. I don't know how much time passed before the rough bounce of landing roused me from my induced slumber, but I was still disoriented when we were herded off the plane and into what I assume was big bus. My wits slowly came back to me as the vehicle carried me and the others to our destination. I still wasn't quite up to snuff as I was pulled to my feet and I zombie-shuffled blindly in the direction I was being shoved.
I heard a garbled announcement through what sounded like a badly broken Public Address system. It took a moment for me to realize that the distortion in the words was a result of the same sedative that made my body feel like it was made of half set concrete. The one sense that seemed to be in working order was my sense of smell, and I caught a faint whiff of salt. I was expecting to be loaded onto another plane, but it was a ship which we were herded onto next. The rocking of the deck beneath my feet betrayed my location, even as fucked up as I was.
I felt another prick of a needle, near the first injection site, and again the world spun down into blank darkness. The next thing I knew, I was waking up on a comfortable mattress. The room around me didn't look like it belonged in any hospital or military installation I had ever been to. There was a door immediately to my left that opened onto a utilitarian toilet and sink. There was another door, and I walked toward that.
I reached out and tried the knob, though I knew it was locked in the back of my mind. I walked back to the twin sized bed and settled on the side, waiting for someone to come get me. It was round an hour later that I heard the knob unlock and turn, two men in plain green jumpsuits came through the open space, not speaking but motioning for me to follow them. I did as I was told, mind still sluggish, but quickly coming back to speed.
The hallways here were painted a soothing off-white and the light fixtures were modern and pleasing to look at. A far cry from the bare fluorescent bulbs I had been expecting. We took a couple of rather quick turns before one of the men gently pushed me into a room where a few of the other people were sitting in hard plastic chairs. “Has anybody been told what exactly we are doing?” I asked, and the men and women around me all replied in the negative.
A while later another pair of men were ushered into the room. There weren't many empty chairs left, and I felt a slight, nervous flutter in my guts. The last group to wake up was brought in about an hour and a half after I had been deposited in the room. We were all escorted to a large rest room at once, then herded to a quick lunch consisting of sandwiches. The tea that we were given was barely flavored and scented water with no sugar.
I didn't mind, as soon after I finished eating, everything felt dangerously close to coming back up, a sledgehammer of nausea impacting my stomach. I could feel sweat breaking out all over my forehead and cheeks. I inhaled deeply and slowly let the air out through my pursed lips, bending forward and placing my head between my knees. Everything got kind of sluggish and foggy between my ears again and I felt a gentle touch on the back of my arm.
When my head raised I saw the man in plain clothes. “Are you feeling okay?” he asked, his voice sounding more bored than genuinely concerned. I nodded and after about three seconds managed to speak. “I'm fine. Just a bit queasy.” I replied honestly and he nodded. “It's an unfortunate side effect of the sedative.” he explained, then walked away. I wanted to shout a snarky comment after him, but bit my tongue.
After a little while longer, the feeling eased and I felt steady enough to stand up and even walk around the small room we had eaten in, making laps around the outside of the room. My head started to clear a little more as I moved around and I caught sight of a few of the others as they fell into a line behind me, also walking laps. I had a thought, more of a flash, really to a show I had seen once about prison. The inmates exercised by walking around the outside of the day room.
I pushed that disturbing train of thought aside and made my way back to my seat, suddenly getting the feeling that we were all being watched, despite there being no obvious cameras. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up and I forced myself to sit back down, trying to look as natural as possible when I did so. The others seemed to mimic me a few minutes later, and this only amplified the creepy feeling that was plaguing me. The tension radiated off of me in almost literal waves until the door to the rear of the room opened.
All the eyes in the room moved that way, mine included. The man in plain clothes who had yet to introduce himself entered and three of the men in green jumpsuits followed. We were again herded into the hallway. We turned in a new direction when we came to a T-intersection, weaving our way to a stairwell where the man in plain clothes held the door open for us to file through. I shivered and thought about trying to bolt.
I managed to keep marching down into the Earth as did the others in front of and behind me. We finally came to a large, empty room. There was no paint on the walls, ceiling or floor here, the concrete smooth and gray and cold. One by one we were pushed through the door, and I again felt a spike of fear and adrenaline. When it was my turn I gave a bit of resistance, although it did me no good. I was sprayed in the face by pressurized liquid that smelled of soap a foot past the door.
The fluid stung small places on my body that I hadn't even known had been cut until that moment. I stepped forward, through an open doorway into a pretty impressive looking laboratory where the men and women in front of me were being assigned seats. I was also assigned a place to sit, next to a rather pretty, green-eyed brunette. It was then that the man who had been overseeing things appeared from behind us, pulling a small television on a cart behind him.
The device below it was almost so old, I couldn't believe it was sitting there. I hadn't seen a VCR in at least seven years, and that was when my family's ages old machine had died. The man didn't speak and simply started the tape, walking back the way he had come. He also turned off the lights, and it seemed perfectly rehearsed as the footage started as soon as the room went dark. I'm not going to describe the whole spiel the distinguished-looking man gave here.
I will say that the thing was the weirdest orientation tape I had ever seen. Some of the things the man said made little sense to me at the time of my seeing the tape. The backdrop behind the figure was wrong somehow, though I can't really explain what that means. There were odd stutters and distortions in the film, and I felt slightly sick after a few of these. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead and on my upper lip.
My palms and under arms were clammy with sweat by the end of the thing, and I felt extremely dizzy. The others around me seemed to be suffering from similar symptoms as myself. One of the women started vomiting as we were ushered out of the room and back to our comfortable suite-like rooms. I practically collapsed onto the cloud-soft mattress, and fell asleep fully clothed. I had dreams of my childhood that night, but it was the worst parts that surfaced.
I woke up rapidly, my breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps. The unpleasant dreams seemed to cling to me even as I got out of the bed and moved to the wall. My fingers found the switch, turning on the dim, recessed lights. I walked to the small bathroom, using the sink to splash cold water on my face, washing away the clammy sweat. I walked from there to the small kitchen to get myself a bottle of water from the refrigerator.
I sat on the edge of the comfortable bed, opening the bottle and taking a drink of the crisp, cold liquid. My body was hot and sticky, and the cold drink was doing nothing to soothe the feeling. My breathing or heartbeat weren't normalizing either, and I was starting to panic. This was the first time that the men in the jumpsuits entered the room as if they had been watching me. I lashed out at one of them, connecting with a solid right hand that staggered the slightly stockier man, but didn't knock him on the ground.
The other man caught me in a full nelson, and the one I had struck produced an extendable baton. The man struck me once, precisely above the bridge of my nose and between my eyes. The world went completely black and silent. The next time I woke up, I was in a restraint chair. For the first time since my arrival at the facility, I saw who I assumed to be a doctor. The man in the lab coat was seriously old, his back was beginning to hunch forward slightly, and his skin was frail-looking.
A pair of thick, black-framed glasses obscured his eyes, not due to any tinting, but the sheer thickness of the old-style lenses. “How are you feeling?' the old man asked in a near-whisper. Again, no introduction. “Not great.” I said, honestly, though to my surprise, and slight delight there was a bitter, angry edge in my voice. I had been afraid I was too weak to even manage snark. He gave me a bemused smile and nodded slowly.
I heard the door to my left open and turned my head to see the younger, movie-star looking man walking in, again flanked by men in green jumpsuits. “You can go, doctor.” He said simply, and the old man in the white coat shuffled away. The man's dark eyes turned to me and I felt like throwing up. “Get him some water.” the man said. One of the men in green filled a small paper cup from the faucet and walked it over to me, lifting the rim to my lips.
I allowed the man to pour some of the fluid over my parched tongue, and it seemed to cool me off this time. After we had repeated the ritual a couple of times the man waved him off. “Feeling better?” he asked. I nodded my head and managed not to get dizzy. “Much, thank you, sir.” I said, without realizing that I was speaking at first. The chair started to raise upward and tilt back at a forty-five degree angle. “We're going to have a look at you.” he said calmly.
They attached a heart monitor to my chest, and inserted an intravenous stint in my right arm. I smelled and tasted salt as the saline flowed through my system. My temperature seemed to regulate a little bit more with the addition of the frigid saltwater running through my veins. I heard the anonymous man speaking again, but couldn't hear exactly what he was saying over the machinery that I was tethered to. His tone was measured, smooth and calm, almost soothing.
My vision was obscured after a few more minutes by a pair of dark lenses, leaving me in the dark. The sound of my heart and my own breathing became very loud suddenly. After a few disorienting seconds I realized they had placed headphones over my ears. I felt a spike of panic and then a literal glimmer in the induced darkness formed, a soft yellowish light. Soft tones began to filter into my left ear as well. At first they seemed like test tones, and then they stopped.
The same sequence started in my other ear, and the light flashed again before splitting into two, small identical orbs. The lights disappeared when the noises stopped and again I was in the silent abyss once more. That was when I smelled and tasted something new, though there was no pain from the IV that I noticed. I had almost forgotten that the stint was there. The lights appeared again, and began to multiply rapidly.
The colors began to shift and morph, joining together before switching shades, from orange to purple, or from blue to pink. Soft, almost purely atmospheric noise started in the headphones. The sounds slowly became a gentle, slow drumbeat. The lights were back, flickering and dancing in time with the beat in my ears. The music seemed to flow into and through my body, every cell in every bit of my being vibrating and jumping in unison with the rhythm. I lost awareness of time and space. It was as if I were awake and asleep at once; in stasis.
That was when I felt an agonizingly icy feeling spreading from my right arm throughout my body. The music and the light show changed again. There was a oft chant woven through the atmospheric noise filtering into my ears. That was when I had what one might call an adverse reaction to whatever they had been trying to do to me. It started with a violent seizure, which is just a black gap in the events. During this, the IV was pulled free from my vein.
The shaking stopped, and it took me almost a full three minutes to break my paralysis, removing the dark head wear from my eyes. The goggles were lined internally with tiny diodes, and the outer lenses was painted black. When I looked around the room, I was surprised to see that I was alone. I removed the headphones and could hear rapidly approaching footsteps. I didn't try to fight when the men in green poured through the door.
My head was spinning and my stomach felt like it was turning itself inside out. I lost control of my emotions when one of the men grabbed my arm, trying to escort me out of the small room. I couldn't stop myself from lashing out, and struck the man in the side of the face. I scuffled with the man for a few more minutes until his colleagues were able to separate us. I felt a sting in the back of my neck, and yet again, I blacked out.
I woke up restrained, with a very restrictive mask around the lower half of my face. I could feel a hose down my throat and stints in both of my arms. Once the men in the room with me noticed that I was awake, they opened up the lines into my veins. The painful, creeping cold started easing through my body and I heard a deep thrumming sound, and felt the slack in the hose down my throat dissipate as fluid pumped into my body.
I couldn't gag or vomit, even when it felt like my stomach was going to burst. The stuff in my stomach felt slightly thick, like settled jello. I was grateful I didn't have to taste whatever it was. They placed the goggles over my eyes again, as well as the headphones. I started feeling kind of light and airy between my ears even as my body seemed to turn to stone. I barely noticed the obstruction in my throat, or the weird jelly in my gut as the lights and music started again.
Reality fell away, leaving me in a dark echo chamber, and I felt myself starting to fall asleep, though it felt more like I was being dragged into the blackness by an undertow. When I came around, I was sitting in a blank white room. There were no windows or doors in the plain white cube, but I felt as if I were being watched. There was a sudden, disorienting dizziness, accompanied by what I can only describe as a chorus of angels.
The white walls seemed to kind of melt away, disappearing as if they had never been there at all. Suddenly I was standing in the playground of the grade school I had attended as a boy. At first I embraced what I supposed to be a dream, until the feeling of being watched invaded my sense of nostalgia. There was something not quite right about the scene. The sky was too bright in places, too dark in others.
The shadows seemed stilted somehow, darkening the ground at almost impossible angles. Just as I started to walk toward the school building there was a loud, disembodied groan, the sound of metal under stress. I felt dizzy again for just a second, and just as suddenly as before, I was no longer alone. A man I should have recognized was standing beside me, giving me a slightly puzzled look. “What are you doing?” the man said, and I didn't quite understand his question for some reason. The words made sense, but at the same time, sounded vaguely foreign.
My confusion was only compounded by the fact that I saw myself stab the man, but I didn't remember having a knife. The blood that poured onto the asphalt was too bright, too real. I felt dizzy and sick again, and when the dark covers were removed from my eyes, I was back in the room with the men in Green Jumpsuits. My throat hurt, as did my stomach and lower abdomen hurt a little, but the tube was gone, thankfully.
The events of a moment before stuck in my mind, though slightly hazy, like a half remembered dream. I glanced down at my hands and they were clean. I was whisked from the room, and the man in plain clothes gave me what I understood to be my exit speech. I was discharged for a drug test that I couldn't have failed about three months later. I am fine now, but the experience has haunted me for the last few years, which is why I finally had to say something.
Lately my delusions of having fully recovered from the ordeal have been shaken. Every so often, usually when I'm alone I'll see lights flashing at the edges of my vision. Also, lately when I am just about to fall asleep, I swear I can hear a chorus of angels.
Submitted October 18, 2017 at 10:08AM by Kendersarecooler http://ift.tt/2x3glcB nosleep
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