Sorry, I have been up since two-thirty or so. I chose not to try to go back to sleep- my cycle of somnolence has been so screwed up with the amount of time I have spent flat on my back lately- and plowed through Town Hall and the same beloved NY Times before turning to finish the first book in Wyoming author C.J. Box’s series of mystery novels set in the Big Horn Mountains.

Box is pretty good- “Open Season” turns on the diabolic activities of pipeline concerns and the endangered (thought to be extinct) Miller’s Weasel and three murders and a couple mailings. There was a teaser chapter at the end for the beginning to “Savage Run,” which starts out with the homicidal ambush of an eco-terrorist with an exploding cow.

I gave it a try and now it is dawn, and a Monday dawn at that.

I fully intended to start the first of the Donna Leon Commissario Brunetti novels, the ones set in sinking Venice. I and had purchase a couple to go on the ubiquitous iPad that has accompanied me to bed for the last two months. My pal Jerry highly recommends them, and that was the plan, but it did not survive the first encounter with the exploding Holstein. I mean, how can you not get hooked on that?

Anyway, I know I am going to be a mess later. Regular sleep is one of those imperatives for mental hygiene. You could see it at sea, which was a regular laboratory for sleep deprived senior officers: no wonder the Flags and the Captains were all crazy. They didn’t sleep, sometimes for virtually a whole line period. Ordinary solid guys became raving maniacs- and shipboard life is too close for that to be pleasant.

I remember during the Gulf War having the same sort of feelings. I had come from Air Wing SIX to the Pentagon to work for Mikey in the J2. It was a tense time before DESERT SHIELD transitioned to the Air Campaign and then major ground combat.

During the annoying period before hostilities, there had been a report that Saddam had called his ambassadors home for consultations. We assumed there would be something awful coming back in their diplomatic pouches- maybe for our water supplies in New York, and London and Paris. We got very nervous about how vulnerable our buildings were, and that was the genesis of the full-blown paranoia we have now, focused through the lens of 9/11. I think I liked things back before we took leave of our senses, but that scarsely seems relevant to anything in particular now.

Later, after the shooting started, I worked with a very large Army Major in the Joint Intelligence Center. Rick was his name, and he must have been six-foot-four and well over two hundred pounds. Imposing guy. He had the unfortunate career distinction of having actually operated a U.S. mobile battlefield missile. Accordingly, the organization bestowed on him the preternatural ability to divine the thoughts of his opposite numbers in the Western Desert,. They gave him the job of trying to figure out what the Iraqis were doing with their SCUD missiles. He was under incredible stress, not sleeping much, and essentially a one-man show. The questions were essentially impossible to answer.

“Where are they hiding those things?” asked the policy makers.

“Are they going to use chemical warheads?” asked Mikey.

“What is the next target?” asked the J3.

This had been going on for some indeterminate number of endless days of the air campaign. I was bustling from one desk to another under the dim florescent lights in the Mezzanine Basement of the Pentagon. This was before the big rehabilitation and the plumbing would fail upstairs and things got disgusting with alarming regularity.

Rick suddenly stood from his desk and grabbed me by the arm. He leaned down to look in my eyes, close to my face, and said: “I have it figured out.” I thought it was something about hide-sites or pre-surveyed launch points that enabled the Iraqis to fire quickly and not be detected by the airplanes we had orbiting over the area. It wasn’t. It was about something much more primal.

“So when the thousand years are over,” he said. “Satan will be released from his prison and will deceive all the nations in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, and mobilize them for war. You got it? It’s the Gulf thing. And then it goes: Satan’s armies will be as many as the sands of the sea; they will come swarming over the entire country and besiege the camp of the saints, which is the city that God loves. That’s Jerusalem, see- that is what this is about. And it goes on to say that fire will come down on them from heaven and consume them. That’s the Jews, and Saddam is the devil, who misled them, will be thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet are, and their torture will not stop, day or night, forever and ever.” He relaxed his grip on my arm. “And that explains the burning lake. This burning lake is the second death; and anybody whose name could not be found written in the book of life was thrown into the burning lake. That is the burning oil on the Persian Gulf.”

When he wound down a little he seemed OK. “Thanks, Rick,” I said carefully. “I appreciate the insight. Explains a lot.”

I got away as quickly as politeness could justify. I didn’t want to catch what he had, and it looked like something worse than the flu. I found out later the passages were from Revelations 20:7 and 20:10. Stress and fatigue can do funny things to you. Rick got through the SCUD firings, and he got some sleep and he was fine. The question is sleep, though, and the size of the nightmares that await you when you get there.

I am not expecting any nightmares from this weird sleep cycle, but it does occur to me that with the Russians escorting more weapons to Syria, and the Iranians vowing to support Assad against all comers, and maybe shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and deploy their own nukes, well.

Shoot. I am glad I am old and retired now. Maybe everyone ought to just take a nice nap. It might cool things off a bit.

What do you say?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com