Submitted for the April 2024 prompt: Meta-Sci-Fi

Don’t worry; this is only painful for me. It’s just memories I relive every day. I want to entertain you with them. Allow me to take you on a PTSD tour of my mind to show you what a future warrior looks like.

 

Remember that armored human warriors fought with swords on horses for five thousand years. They trained to stay on their horses in battles. But the Marine Corps didn’t care how I rode a Sea Stallion over an ocean. They cared about how to get out when it crashed.

 

Not if we crash but when. Future warriors worry about this because it happens a lot. Rocket-propelled cylinders with explosive warheads can be fired accurately at supersonic speeds over the horizon to bring us down. More commonly, the helicopter will malfunction or the pilot will make a mistake. Like I said, crashes happen a lot.

 

I’m strapped into the seat of a rotating fuselage connected to a crane holding me over a pool when the instructors explain how this isn’t torture. They say it won’t hurt. I believe them right up to the wave of water engulfing me in darkness as I turn upside down.

 

I’m grappling with my panic while I sit upright in my chair, looking at the ceiling, which is now the blue pool floor. I nearly drown while clearing the personal oxygen tank, blow the tube clear of water, and feel the bubbles go down. To get the feeling right, I’m spilling coffee on my shirt and choking on the mucky grounds to simulate the pain.

 

It’s okay because coffee tastes better than chlorine.

 

Next, I unbuckle myself from my gear — the anti-shrapnel flack jacket, my personal cannon called a rifle, and the ballistic helmet. I throw my notebooks and pens down the hallway to give myself the same feeling. My tools of war float away from me in the water while I drown in the literary nothingness of my painful recount.

 

Writing this story is disorienting. I don’t know how to get out or where to go from here. I’m breathing water, and I want to cough. I’m upside down and my eyes are closed. The exit is to my left. My mind says it's to my right. The key to disorientation is to stay calm before the pressure in your ears triggers vertigo. I’d say breathe, but I couldn’t at the time. Creep with me, inch by inch, upside down, in the darkness of my mind's water as I tell you which way is out.

 

Romantic, isn’t it? The thought of standing shoulder to shoulder with other warriors in a field. Walking up to your opponents to stab them to death is much simpler and straightforward. Instead, I worry about the water pressure killing me as I ascend.

 

But that’s not the worst part, the instructors say. Keep your hand over your head as you float up. Thrash as you breach the surface. You’ll inhale a version of Greek fire called oil. Arrows without tails will fly at supersonic speeds in your direction. As night comes, you’ll be lonely drifting alone in an ocean without a visible floor. There’s a song of bursting blood vessels that goes well with the crackling of frayed wires and twisted, burning steel. I haven’t listened to it before. The sound of storm waves is enough to cover the screaming of men burning and drowning alive.

 

The instructors say to prepare for the worst. Keep in mind, they say, that someone is still trying to kill you. Be ready to fight at the surface. You’ll be at your best once you do it another eleven times. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

 

Now, reread this story eleven more times. Hold your breath as you read. Feel the desperation as you close your eyes and orient yourself in my trauma. Float down in the water and assess my drowning as we turn upside down. Fill your sinuses with coffee. Clear the air under the water while I shed the layers of my training, one roll at a time, to rid myself of the pain.

 

Remember, this cathartic exercise is for your entertainment.

 

That was one type of training—one type of event—to prepare for modern warfare in the future. I never learned to swing a sword, ride a horse, or shoot an arrow.

 

I learned how to navigate through forests with night vision goggles to set up an ambush with guns we call machines. I learned to breathe chemicals through a gas mask while my skin peeled like a bad sunburn. I know how to keep my teeth from rattling loose in my head when standing next to howitzer cannons firing explosive projectiles. I even learned how to use quick-clot to burn my wounds close, apply tourniquets, and then keep fighting. I never had the pleasure of being tossed out of a moving airplane at ten thousand feet. I feel like I missed out.

 

The future warrior is now.

 

I went through this training. I would have killed for a sword and shield and to see my enemy eye to eye. Instead, I lived with automatic weapons and ‘lightweight’ body armor. I could be killed instantly by an explosion, a high-speed crash, or projectiles fired from space. I’m one of the lucky warriors from the past five thousand years who have endured the terror of future weapons.

 

Did you think this would be about laser beams and space suits? Do you mean automatic grenade launchers and rifles called MX7s aren’t futuristic enough? We crossed the futuristic sci-fi threshold when Marines started using jet packs for ship-to-ship boarding. Yes, that's happening. Today.

 

Swords and shields over land sound so much more relaxing. But, I guess I’ll drown myself in coffee one more time as I meticulously refine this PTSD horror story that is my memory…

 

Take a deep breath. Read this again. Drown with me in our future as you read this with the supercomputer in your hand.