SOLDIER'S NIGHTMARE

Through the jungle searching, always searching
Never finding the golden ring
Looking for the ever elusive opponent of life
Finding the search empty of all those that plays deaths fife.

Our enemy is a crafty devil
Neither good nor evil and always just a beyond the horizon’s level
To find our foe would certainly bring death
For one of us would draw his last breath.

Look, listen, feel, and smell the same things as he for that is his defenses
How is the search lasting so long going through all the pretenses?
To find him would end the endless search
To worship the hunt as if in a church

Does he have the same feeling of doom?
Could he actually be feeling the same gloom?
Surely he isn’t a human with the same goal
The more we search the more we can’t find his soul.

Gloom and doom follow as we crawl over this infested hell
The more we search the more we enter our own shell
No creature of God’s design
Could be so strongly playing upon my mind.

Could this be a creature of my minds making?
This search my sanity is taking.
As I lie here in my bed
Dripping wet from the sweat of death and dread.

Yes, another dream of that time long ago
No one else can even know
How could I tell them of the sickness inside?
How could any human keep his sanity, though I’ve tried and tried?

Another day of hell lived over and over each night
Surely by now we should have the right
To forget the death and stench of fear
That only builds year by year.

This is the dreams and nightmares
The sweats and screams and mental tear
The mental image that makes you lose your very sanity
The only saving grace is the morning and its selfish vanity.

©David R. Alexander
August 26, 2002

I am a soldier, I fight where I am told, and I win where I fight. George S. Patton, General

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