The Hollering Devotee at the Temple of the War Goddess

Anyone who knows me knows I have military stories for days. I served for three years. Didn’t serve in the states, so my stories aren’t flashy. I didn’t go around shooting people halfway across the world in the name of democracy. I’d say compared to the American soldier’s service, mine was tame. If you consider encountering people who want to turn you into a shish kebab before they chuck you out of a window day in and day out tame. Speaking of, the shish kebab thing happened to some poor reservist twenty years ago. I had to deal with those people every single day. Granted, nothing happened to me because I was taught how to defuse an escalating situation that could be defused. Here we value the lives of humans, even those who hate us for no reason beyond indoctrination drilled into them.

This story is different, this story is a little more mundane and far more bizarre than someone just getting shot or blown to pieces. I’m sure people have this idea in their heads “war is hell because so many people die.” That’s a misconception. War is worse than hell because innocent people get dragged into it. War is worse than hell because people learn to stop seeing other people in front of them, they see mobile targets. It becomes a situation of kill or be killed, and it weighs down on everyone involved, as long as we’re not talking about psychopaths. No one wins in wars. Everyone loses, some lose less – some lose more.

If you ask a person with military-related PTSD what broke them, chances are they’ll tell you “it wasn’t a single event.” Granted, there are cases of people who’ve seen something so fucking awful. This one single event is enough to torture them forty and fifty years later, but these are probably the rarer cases. Like this one former military medic who saw his brigadier get blown up. The guy, some forty years later, still remembers the sight of the exposed spine and gore of his commanding officers who told him to remove “the rocks from under his back.” These weren’t rocks. These were the bandages that the medic placed on his commander’s exposed insides. The poor man still hates walking on sand because it reminds him of these haunting last words of his commander. What breaks people is going from zero to three hundred miles an hour in a matter of point five seconds. The stress kills.

The stress of military life leads people into depression and suicide too. Even without the hazing and whatnot, here, especially now, it’s fairly harmless. Younger soldiers won’t get the best beds, will have the dirtier duties, and will be called military jargon names which are meant to symbolize their lack of experience. Beatings and violence aren’t so much a thing anymore. The stress drives people insane. The lack of sleep, the physical strain, the need to jump from duty to duty due to manpower shortages, the strict regiment, the shitty food, the awful living condition. All of that leads to a build-up of stress that can and will lead young men and women towards the abyss.

Anyway, a few months before my discharge, I was stationed at a military camp called Anatot (Aptly named after a war goddess; the naming was unintentional.) in Eastern Jerusalem. Due to the length of my tenure, I was used as a reserve soldier in my unit. Meaning, I didn’t have to do shit until someone was out of commission for whatever reason. I spent a few weekends being part of the security of the camp. Being the only combatant of this unit, I was placed in the most volatile section of the camp, a watchtower overlooking the nearby village. As much as the local soldiers played it up as this potentially combustible section of the camp, it was beyond quiet. It was quite frankly boring. In other words, I was getting to rest on duty. The shifts were relatively short, just four hours on duty, then eight hours of rest and four additional hours of duty from Thursday afternoon until Sunday morning. Simple, easy, refreshing.

The officer in charge of camp security would pop up every now and again to check on me, and that’s about it. I’d spend my hours there doing nothing but kicking my feet up a stool and keeping an eye on the nothing unfolding ahead of me.

One weekend I went sick on duty, feeling a bit under the weather, I got my hands on paracetamol and did my thing. The night shift rolled by and I was driven to my watchtower, which is quite the distance from the barracks. I spent the night doing the usual nothing until at about 1 AM I saw someone walking around on the road ahead. Now, someone walking on this road usually wasn’t strange. It was a rather sparsely used road, so the populous frequently walked on it. What was strange is that this person was walking around in the dead of night. Nobody seemed to walk there during the nights. The road was mostly empty during the nighttime. You’d get a few cars to pass by, but that’s about it.

I looked at that person for a few seconds before noticing that they were walking kind of strangely. Pacing only, almost stumbling, swaying side to side. What I noticed to be even stranger is that person was walking in a sort of circle. Back and forth, almost like they were unsure of what to do. That’s what we’d call a suspicious behavior, so I kept my eyes locked on that strange person, who at first seemed drunk to me. I’ve already had encounters with drunk people going where they shouldn’t. Such a case wouldn’t have been surprising.

My throat had itched, so I reached down to my bottle and gulped down some water. I took my eyes away from this person for about a second as I drank. Once I returned my gaze back to him, he was sporting a rifle. My brain went from zero to three hundred immediately, the first thing I did was load my gun. At that moment, me missing a very obvious rifle at first didn’t even seem like a strange detail. I didn’t even think about how odd it was that a rifle suddenly appeared slung over this person’s shoulder. As I switched off the safety and readied myself for this bastard to try to charge the fence. Contacting command over the radio, I made sure to keep my eyes on them. After some back and forth with the guys in the war room I was told to start the suspect arrest protocol. That is what we do here when we’re trying to arrest someone who we might suspect as a dangerous individual to civilians or military personnel.

You shout at your target to stop, warn it you will shoot a few times before actually shooting. If they become a clear and immediate danger to you or anyone else, you’re free to shoot them to incapacitate, shoot the legs. If they become a danger to someone’s life in that same moment – you’re free to shoot at the center of bodily mass. If they stop, you don't shoot them, you just arrest them, using only the necessary force in reaction to their own behavior.

I went over the protocol, and this person just ignored me. I couldn’t shoot them either because while they had a rifle, it was just slung over their shoulder. The figure wasn’t even looking at me. It was just stumbling around aimlessly. For that reason I couldn’t shoot it. We value life over here unlike other places. Now that’s a thing people don’t talk about. Not everyone has the guns to commit a murder or become a guerrilla martyr. Maybe people get cold feet once they’re faced with the armed forces. The person below just stopped at one point and stood there for a few moments. These few moments seemed to last longer than they actually were. Then the person started walking off to the south. Making sure I kept my eyes locked on this person, I notified command that they were going to the south and I’m keeping a watch over him as they move. I kept myself glued to the silhouette until it disappeared in the darkness of the night.

Ten minutes later, an officer arrived in a Hammer and questioned me. I told him about the ordeal in detail and he asked me to stay alert before returning to his Hammer and driving off. The radio went nuts with everyone trying to spot this mysterious figure. The lookouts saw someone moving along the perimeter of the camp. Forces were called in to patrol and, if possible, apprehend the armed individual. I listened to the radio attentively as the situation kept unfolding.

I started hearing a strange humming at around one-thirty o’clock. I assumed it was coming from the radio, as our equipment was old and clearly had many issues. The noise kept getting louder and louder until it became irritating. I smacked the radio out of frustration and a hoarse, almost voiceless pained scream echoed from beneath me. It came from beneath the watchtower. It was long and shrill, almost like nails digging across a board. My body tensed up and my reason shut down. The brain went on an autopilot. There were no questions to ask. Someone was crossing every line they could, and I was going to put a stop to that. I violently opened the door of the watchtower, the scream from below died down. I positioned my rifle in clear view of whoever might have been below me, just in case. Nothing happened, I yelled out but there was no response. The adrenaline kept on leading the way. I stomped my way down the stairs leading to the top of the tower and looked around, scanning the area as carefully as I could. I was alone. My mind must’ve been playing tricks on me. My illness and the stress of the previous hour must’ve been taking their toll.

Once I realized I was alone, I started calming down. The flow of adrenaline stopped and I was starting to feel the usual aches and pains that had been bothering me for the past few months. My head was starting to spin a little. Looking at my watch, I was glad my shift was about to end in a few minutes. I didn’t plan on telling anyone about the incident for two reasons, people would think I’m insane and because I breached protocol and left the tower unattended. I climbed back up to the tower and slumped against the door, clutching at my rifle. My head was turning really light, I was almost flying. Chills rocked me; I was spacing out badly.

A loud hoarse, shrill scream blasted straight through me, I felt myself shudder violently in place as my heartbeat rocketed once more. The scream was unbearably close. Painfully so. My head instinctively turned towards the source of the scream. The tower shook for a second, and I felt a blunt pulsating pain originating at the back of my head. My stomach turned, and I felt myself going out. Another scream echoed through my form as I realized what was the source of these awful vocalizations; a pallid man dressed in a military uniform was trying to claw his way into the tower through the window. His eyes pure white, teeth yellow with shades of caramel brown. Blood covered his face and uniform, blood coming from a massive opening at the top of his head. Bits of his brain were leaking from his skull.

That’s the last thing I remember before waking up in the infirmary a couple of hours later. Apparently, I was burning with a high fever. The guy replacing me found me passed out lying in the middle of the tower, sweating bullets through my uniform. I had the flu and spent the following few days rolling around in bed, not leaving the barracks.

I didn’t bother telling anyone about the ghastly whaling soldier, assuming it was just a fever hallucination or dream. The rifle-carrying individual wasn’t found either. The assumption was that they had been gripped with fear at the last moment and just left because the lookouts had spotted something too. The keyword was something. It was a movement they couldn’t really make out. Not that it mattered. I almost forgot about my feverish experience until one guy I was serving with told a local military legend of sorts. Everyone considers this a legend because nobody has the precise details about the events. Just a bullshit story that servicemen tell newcomers about a soldier who had decided to off himself in the same watchtower I was stationed at.

Apparently said soldier decided shooting himself was going to be too loud, and he didn’t want that kind of attention. So, he opted to off himself by throwing himself through the tower’s window. The hair on the back of my head stood when I heard the ending of this legend; apparently, the suicidal soldier’s head hit the legs of the tower before crashing down on the rocks below. This resulted in his skull being cracked open like a watermelon. Someone else chimed in and said his face was contorted into a pained grimace.

The guy telling the tale corrected his friend and said they actually found the soldier’s body with his mouth twisted into a scream.