Flamethrower in Hand...

Visual aids for your amusement/terror:

About 3 minutes in.



My status update today was, "Damon O'Hanlon curses Flags of Our Fathers and it being such a good movie that it makes him dream about being the flamethrower in a platoon with Pun during WWII."

So I don't have "nightmares" very often. Not in the terrified after you wake up sense anyway. But every once in awhile I do have some sort of very intense dream that has me spazzing out in the dream itself. Pun asked in my reference to him, "was i leading a cavalry charge?" and so I feel compelled to describe this dream in further detail.

Simple answer: 'Fraid not, though it was similarly intense. We were infantry and our platoon was broken up into squads of two... (Gears of War anyone?)

Pun and I were a supposed to go from residence to residence in this neighborhood of suburban homes and high-rise apartments checking for Nazis and informing non-Nazis they had been 'liberated' and to stay in their homes. So we were basically breaking and entering armed with an Iwo Jima-style flame thrower (me) and a luger (Pun) and demanding to know who lived there. We were then making snap judgments about whether to capture, kill or leave alone these families. Frequently this was based mostly on visual cues (do they have a Nazi mantlepiece?) as neither Pun nor I really spoke German. Based on Band of Brothers I was coming up with, "Commenze here, schnell" or "Come here, now" only it took like three tries every time to get right.

We were supposed to be doing this as a lead-in to the main assault, which somehow was coming from the opposite direction, so we were kind of like paratroopers without the drop-in? Supposedly we were to be headed towards allies, but everyone in our platoon was disoriented and everyone was freaking about staying together and catching high-profile Nazis and simultaneously heading towards our allies. For some reason you and I were the only ones who seemed to be even a little on top of things.

Pun, however, had precious little ammo and I was having problems with the flamethrower—every once in awhile it seemed to shoot liquid without igniting anything. This was all during the hysterical breaking and entering that we were trying to coordinate with god knows how many other squads.

"Did you check that area?"
"Has this house already been checked?"
"Which way did Gerbil run?!"
"Check over there!"
"Damn, we're gonna have to scale this wall!"

Craziness. Meanwhile we were trying to get all this done without alerting the Germans to our presence and screwing up the main attack. That plus the fact that if we made a wrong call on a Nazi sympathizer house or if a Nazi escaped they would be calling us in, probably leading to all of our deaths as the swift hand of the Reich bled down on us. Oh, plus the knowledge that if we didn't capture them, the high-profile Holocaust-responsible SS would just get a walk in the park. Yeah—there was no stress at all.

Fun.