Remembrance #2

The first few years were tough, people were adjusting to their new lives and the place had a constant undertone of defeat and survivor guilt. There was no victory in what we'd done; no vanquished enemies, no noble speeches. Just a bomb and the remnants of a devastated country. There'd been a lot of work for us to do in those early days, unrest and dissention were rife and the military became an auxiliary police and firefighting service. In retrospect, I think that's what kept us together, all the trouble and work kept us too busy to really comprehend what had happened. What we'd lost.

Something I noticed at the time, and this troubled me even then, was how quickly people stopped talking about the outside world. It was like nothing else existed. The lack of television, and the resurgence of newspapers helped this. Suddenly, our whole world existed within these walls and we just adjusted. Not consciously, but something in our brains just stopped trying to grab hold of the big picture and settled us down. After the first year, I never heard the word America again, or Australia, or Middle East. A whole world, vanished. And we just got on with our fucking lives.

Eventually the city calmed down and the memories stopped being as painful, time blurring the events until the entire thing felt like it had happened in another life, to someone else. That was probably the hardest time for people like us, military guys, I mean. We slowly just ran out of things to do; the police got on top of the policing, the fire service got on top of the fires, and we sat around twiddling our thumbs. They began downsizing the military, apparently following a pre-prepared plan. Pensioning the older ones off, and 'rehabilitating' the younger of us. Mostly this meant working menial labour or security jobs, but everyone was still grateful enough for their place that no-one grumbled too hard. Those of us left behind worked less as a military and more as a deterrent for any kind of revolutionary force, which is something the brass worried about for a while. I guess we worked, since we never heard about a revolution.

I faced certain problems at this time, a lack of direction. I hadn't had anyone before I joined the army, and I still didn't have anyone now that the world had changed. The army itself had lost focus and I spent a majority of my nights getting so drunk I'd pass out wherever I was. Looking back, I think it had a lot more to do with those last three days on the outside than I allowed myself to imagine then. Racked with a guilt I didn't understand, I began to slide further into a depression. I did my work just fine, but it was like I wasn't really inside my head anymore, like my body was a robot and my mind had fled. That's when I had the dream.

It was cold, dark and raining like hell. I was facing a statue, one of those World War II memorial things, with the marble soldier on top. Chiselled into its base were the words "Lest We Forget", I stared at them, trying to comprehend their meaning, but the rain first washed the words away, then the statue until I was left alone in the gravelled park. I began to move up the street, wind and rain battering my face as car headlights near blinded me. The rain stopped, then started again, then it became a crowd of voices, each one shouting the others down so that I could never catch a full sentence, but I knew in my heart that they were damning me, condemning me for closing that gate, for choosing my life over theirs. In another instant they were gone, and I looked up to find myself outside of a building, number 23. Pulled inside by some unseen force, I ascended thirteen stairs and entered a room. Wooden floor, wooden walls, wooden ceiling and all of a sudden I felt like an animal, caged and transported out of it's wildlife home and into a zoo, or a museum. There was a man, standing to one side of me, dressed in a general's uniform. The more I looked the more disfigured he grew, skin blackening as if from an unholy fire, features falling and rising, metling and solidifying until I couldn't look anymore. His voice boomed nowhere but between my ears as he asked a question. My reply, and the only sound I made during the entire event, was a simple yes.

I awoke, drenched in a fever sweat. Too much drink, was what I told myself, but maybe there was more to it than that as I saw the envelope laying on the floor. With shaking hands I tore the thing open and read the letter inside. "Report to HQ at 0900 tomorrow. Welcome to the circle, Soldier".