I have no idea how this happened. An ordinary patrol perhaps after a nice breakfast. The lieutenant was distant because of some stupid reason that embarrassed even his loneliness.

There was a subtle beckoning from the palm groves at the end of the village. In the distance, through the heat and the softly settling dust of an Iraqi army convoy, he hears a faint clattering and chanting. He departs from his platoon and trods alone down a muddy alley way while everyone watched the back of his head. It was not uncommon for him to wander off on his own. When he turned he was sink in the shadow and the platoon was no longer visible.

Clods of fucking mud caked onto his boots. After several minutes of walking have brought the noise closer, he realizes it is the music of a grand religious procession of some kind. His suspicions are confirmed when a colorful scene bursts into the stillness of the square. In  the center of a mass of Iraqis are a royal couple, hoisted up on an elaborate double throne embossed with Arabic decor. The Iraqis are all expressionless, their eyes blank and dead as they chant and sing. Men in chanted prayer, voices in chorus in praise of God. "Allah-uu, Allah-uu, Allah_uu..."

He glances nervously around, but he is the only soldier in the square.  As the Iraqis turn to stare vacantly at him, he feels certain that he should be elsewhere. He bolts along a narrow alley way between tall buildings, the washing lines flapping high above his head as the baleful roar of the procession echoes from the square. He looks ahead and sees a pigeon on the ground without a head. Plain and dead on the ground with no head. Only a bloody neck and a pigeon head that wasn't there.

Next, he sees something worse, a lamb left lumpily in the mud with no head or legs in a gravy of blood and mud. Act brave and nothing will happen. But I know and you know: that's not true. The buildings begin to block out the light and the sun quickly seems almost a memory. Up there on a balcony, there is a man sitting and he scares the shit of him, with his waving hands and his silent empty face but not half as bad as when he realizes that the man's got stumps instead of hands.

Next, he sees something worse: a huge mosque and under the mosque arranged as if for a photo are a group of Iraqis staring at him. Most have no hands. Some have only one leg. Others have absent arms, and a few look as if they have sunk to their waists in the mud because of no legs. And they stare at him, each of them, slowly waving their stumps, trailing bandages through the air.

An almost atrophied sense tell him to turn around to see a man of knives. He has too many knives. More knives than fingers. More knives than it is possible for a man to have. He has sharp knives of all size sand he looks at the lieutenant with no expression at all. He absconds once again into another alley. He runs this way and that. His heart pounding and his face steaming with sweat. He is now lost, in a blindly unreasoning panic.

Most military operations are over.

We perfect a psychotic level of complexity around simple human activities like eating, keeping clean and moving from one place to another.

We pass the time eating, making coffee and answering oblique questions desultorily during collapsed conversations.

The weeks fall through our fingers.

An occupied building. Site of previous slayings.

Mice are being sacrificed to a nameless presence that hangs over the building, manifesting in the dust, coloring the minds of the other soldiers with whom I am forced to spend my futile daylight.

Somehow the building is filling our dreams with fear.

At last we recognize that it is the mouldering soul of the building it self that is engineering this mounting horror.

We begin, almost imperceptibly to panic.

Life had been ridiculously easy and now things are going to get worse.

Much, much worse.

We can't sleep properly for worrying that we're cursed or something.

Supernatural visions influence the psyche of other soldiers.

Everyone begins to act in conspiratorial manner and when night comes we fall to a brooding quietude, eying each other with suspicion, inventing justification for our dark feelings.

Eventually we can not enter villages without being overcome by emotions which manifest themselves as an over whelming compulsion to whirl around and shoot everything. There is something critically missing from the things around us.

Iraqis have apparently been replaced by zombie doll creatures from some long forgotten nightmare. They look the same as ever, but exude evil.

Something is dreadfully wrong.