Every morning, and several times throughout the night, I awaken filled with dread and anxiety.

Sometimes, I have had dreams of being tortured while helplessly restrained or paralyzed. In the dreams my captors exert complete power over me. They mutilate my body in an emotionless, methodical, workman like manner. Clearly, it is all business to them, they view me as an object, not as a fellow sentient being. They address no thoughts to me beyond those of an artisan to his materials. Thus, they exacerbate my horror by removing any and all hope of pity or kindness or empathetic restraint.

At other times, more frequently, I can remember no dreams when I awaken, but I have the same fear and dread anyway, with it's cause being undefined, unnamed, vague and just barely beyond the reach of my memory. 

The times when I do not know the reason for the fear and dread and can not see it's cause in my mind are the worst. Because, at those times I deeply despair, and I also become quite angry, knowing that I am robbed forever of peace, by fear and guilt, even in my sleep.

This has continued for forty years, night after night after unrest-ed night, with no relief other than the false death of alcohol intoxication which does not really work and which in the long run only increases the fear and dread.

I think of this now because I hear "patriots" around me mouthing hateful, ethnic, religious, nationalistic rhetoric and clamoring for war and killing.Those who so clamor are not initiated in war and torture and killing. They do not know what demons it is that they are calling up.

But, I know, and so do most of my fellow combat veterans know, those with a soul, at least.

What these uninitiated patriots are blindly clamoring for is slaughter of innocents, and suffering and waste and despair and torture and hatred and terror and dehumanization, that is war.

And, they are clamoring to create even more creatures such as me,  creatures who cannot feel any emotions excepting  fear and dread and anxiety,  and who are denied, as a punishment for their sins, even sweet, simple sleep.