I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT

I am somewhere on the far side of Hong Kong in some remote area. It’s some kind of shopping complex for soldiers, like a federation of PXs, only designed like shopping malls, and all on private land rather than inside a military base.

There are soldiers everywhere of all nationalities, most of them armed. Part of the area looks like a war zone, and the soldiers occasionally fire full-auto at random, but there are tourists walking around, so I assume it’s part of the ambience, although even the tourists seem unsure whether they should be ducking for cover.

I’m wearing a helmet for some reason – passing soldiers see it and assume I’m one of them, they seem to know I served with the 3rd Infantry Division.

My bride hands me an MP3 player and tells me to listen to the file cued up on it, then walks on ahead. I press play – it sounds like an NPR piece on how people all over the world are being kidnapped and conscripted into a secret army to fight some secret global war – it's unclear against whom.

I catch up with her, and ask her if that was her voice narrating the story. She won’t say, but the implication is that all of the soldiers around us are the ones mentioned in the story – Hong Kong is serving as a secret port-of-call for soldiers fighting in that war, and that even the soldiers don’t know that the war is being kept a secret.

And then I woke up.

What the hell we fighting for,

This is dF