BlackTime and Missing Time

"In darkness is power"--the Tao Teh Ching

After Vietnam it hit me. I was back in the States for a couple of years before the
first one, and hadn't had any serious problems readjusting to peace and civilian
life. The military was something in my past that I wanted to forget and never deal
with again, and there was no reason to expect I would have to do so.

At first it only happened at night. I'd wake up knowing something was wrong,
that a chunk of time was missing and a nearly tangible blackness had taken its
place. Usually I had no memory of what went on when I was "out." It wasn't like
being unconscious; I had the impression of having been somewhere. In a joking
way I began to wonder if I were out wandering in the night like a werewolf, but
there was no physical reason to think so.

Two or three times a year it would happen, and each time it did I'd pass it off as
nothing important. I promised myself that if it was malaria or anything else that
I'd picked up overseas, when it got worse and was obviously treatable I'd go to a
doctor. It just didn't happen enough to be a treatable illness. I added it to the list of
strange things that I dealt with, but other people did not know.

Sometimes at night I would have "flashback" dreams of events which were
impossible, places I had never been and things I had never done. The dreams were
vividly real. Sometimes they were dreams of combat, but not of anything I
remembered from real life.

Towards the end of the Carter administration I had a particularly powerful dream,
one of several that were like no other experiences I'd ever had. I was disembodied,
soaring high above a darkened desert landscape. Above a fortress like structure
surrounded by high, thick earthen ramparts I began to descend, drawn there for
reasons I couldn't express. Outside the fort, men were on guard. I drifted down
towards one of them and suddenly I was him. My spirit entered his body and took
it over.

I was wearing his body but I had none of his memories or knowledge; the rifle I
held was strange to me, looked like an old Russian military rifle, bolt action and
heavy; the uniform I wore was drab olive green and baggy, but definitely not
American. I looked around at the countryside, red barren earth studded here and
there with low growing trees, and did not recognize it. The air was warm but the
cold damp of night was building already. It wasn't like Vietnam, the smells were
different. I turned to look at the fort, the ramparts rising fifty feet from the desert,
and I had no idea where I was or why.

A crushing blow to the back of my head knocked me face down on the ground.
Blinding pain roared through my skull. Dirt and blood filled my mouth; I couldn't
move. Men rushed past me, and I heard scattered rifle shots. I managed to turn my
head as one ran past. He was American.

A man knelt beside me. I recognized lieutenant's bars on his lapels--another
American. He pulled a military 45 from its holster and placed the muzzle against
my ear. There was a flash of red light and a flood of darkness; suddenly I was back
in bed, heart pounding, pain real but fading, wondering what the hell had just
happened.

Even though this was clearly impossible, it felt too real to ignore. For a couple of
months I kept watch for news of something similar--this was during the days when
the American Embassy staff in Tehran had been taken hostage, and I wondered if I
had somehow "listened in" on a mission related to that, but nothing ever surfaced
that matched what I had experienced, except in very general terms of landscape
and prison architecture. If there were any truth to what I saw, it would have been a
black ops mission, something that never made it to public view.

The episodes of unexplained darkness continued. Sometimes, as the years went on,
they would hit me in the daytime. I'd feel a sudden chill, a weakness, a need to lie
down. If I resisted, I could still function and go about my work, but the need would
persist until finally when I was able to yield to it, I'd go immediately into that black
space, waking hours later, often covered in cold sweat and filled with an
unidentifiable horror. I told a friend about it once. Someday, I told him calmly, I'll
die of it. But there's no reason to look for medical help; doctors don't know
anything about this. I was very sure about that.

I was curious about the reasons for this problem. I didn't feel that I had been under
all that much stress during the war--certainly not enough to justify any sort of
mental disorder. I'd had a relatively easy job, one that took me to all parts of
country but rarely into areas of active combat. It wasn't a pleasant time, but it
wasn't the sort of thing that should leave permanent marks. I'd been stationed
stateside for awhile before going to Vietnam, and I felt that Vietnam was actually
easier duty than I'd had in other stations. I had hated being in the Army, but
people in the war zone played fast and loose with the rules, enough that life behind
the lines was fairly comfortable. I didn't think about it much. Most of what
happened there was a blank in my mind, and I felt fine with that.

Sometimes though, I wondered why that was. When I tried to remember what had
happened there, much of it was a blur. My strongest, most reliable memory was of
a dream I'd had while stationed in Saigon.

It was another odd thing in its own right, a dream that seemed real but in
impossible ways. I had it in my mind clearly, as a memory, one morning when I
woke up in the barracks at Tan Son Nhut, and for a few minutes as I lay there
thinking about it, I thought it had really happened. Then I realized I had been
somewhere else, and it couldn't have been real. It was disappointing.

I had been walking guard at a heliport in Saigon, a post where I did guard duty a
few times a month as part of my regular routine. About two a.m., in the middle of
my watch, a jeep pulled up to me and the lieutenant driving it told me to get in.
We left the post unmanned and he drove me off base to a building I didn't
recognize. At a rear entrance, he told me to go in, by myself, and I did.

It was a conference room, spacious enough for eight or ten gray metal tables and
matching sets of folding metal chairs. At the far side of the room, two men in
uniform waited, one standing and the other, an older man with streaks of grey in
his military haircut, seated casually on the edge of one of the tables. They had the
look of officers, but there were no insignia nor nametags on their uniforms. I was
very nervous but also very curious as to what this was about; I assumed that I was
in some sort of trouble. I marched up to the men, stood at attention, and saluted.

The younger man stared at me without expression; the older man looked me up
and down and seemed amused, but resigned to what he was about to say. "You've
been selected for a special program, soldier. This is a chance for you to do
something important for your country. Will you volunteer?"

This was the last thing I might have imagined. I didn't have to think about it more
than a second, since to actually do something important was more than I'd ever
thought possible in the military, or at least the part of it that I knew. I drew myself
taller and said, yes, sir! without even asking what might be expected of me. I was
very young, barely eighteen, and I did not know then that some decisions are
irreparable. When you are eighteen you make decisions that set the course of the
rest of your life, and you do so without the benefit of acquired wisdom. The pattern
of our lives is based upon youthful ignorance, unfounded hopes, and impractical
expectations; we spend our remaining years making the best of the consequences.

Upon waking, I set the dream aside, secretly hoping that in some way it might
have been real. The second dream came unexpectedly a few days later, and two or
three days after that, the third one. As with my dreams of the Academy, I wanted
to know more and hoped the dreams would continue, but the leak was sealed.
Years later when the black times began, now and then a memory would flash
through, like lightning slashing through a storm cloud. I have a good memory and
an eye for detail, but where these things were concerned memory failed me.
Sometimes all I remembered of Vietnam were those three dreams, as though they
were the most important things that happened there; sometimes even that was
gone, and I'd struggle to remember what was lost. I'd know there had been three
important events, but not what they were. I joked about it with my friends, that I
was the only veteran of noncombat to suffer from combat stress.

I've never felt that the usual explanations accurately describe what I experienced
regularly for most of my first 50 years, the missing pieces of life I refer to as black
time. The gaps in my memories do not act like those of a typical abductee, who by
trauma or by intent has had actual memory blocked by a cover memory. In my
case cover memories seldom emerge, and I've rarely encountered anything too
awful to perceive. In black time the essential memory is removed. At least in the
locations of my mind where memory is usually stored, the data is wiped clean. The
situation is not hopeless, however, and I do recover memories.

Under extreme stress our minds store memory differently than in normal times.
Memory segments are placed in random locations in the brain, disconnected from
one another and not readily accessible. They cannot be consciously or willfully
accessed in the same manner as ordinary memory, but return when triggered by
external stimuli or through mysterious natural processes of mental healing. Stress
induced memory is more difficult to ferret out and destroy, so these more terrible
data packets are the most likely to survive an effort to wipe a memory span clean.
The view of life which results, pieced together from flashbacks and nightmares, is
unfortunately biased strongly towards horror.

The methods that destroy memory without destroying life are not completely
effective. Time does heal. I do recover bits and pieces of the good, and I still
occasionally make contact with some of the entities and people with whom I dealt
in older and darker times, gaining new looks at the old times through them. I've
heard from other veterans of the program that it works this way for them as well.
Some of us want to know, and some don't. I would prefer to know what happened,
considering that for many years the majority of my life was lost to me, conducted
in darkness and secrecy. I have many friends out there, as well as enemies, and
however badly things did develop as the program evolved through those years, our
initial intentions and hopes were good ones.

Fortunately, black time is no longer an issue in my life. The last of it occurred in
1990: a two day episode of darkness and delirium from which I emerged suddenly
with no lasting effects beyond the weakness one would expect from having been
out for 48 hours. The things that caused black time still happened after that,
sometimes even more intensely than before, but after my shamanic awakening in
1991, memory of what happened was no longer blacked out.

I know what happens in that place now. I'm not there against my will or under the
control of others, not any more. I often find that I'm not welcome under those
terms, but it isn't a problem for me. It's a problem for those who created me.