I can imagine myself in wartime. I have worn the same olive fatigues for days now but I'm used to them. They are loose and comfortable except for the boots which are worn and need replacement. There are no insignia for me, no patches, no flag. 

This war is fought in a dreamscape, and there are no objectives beyond killing and surviving. The army is vaguely American. Our rifles are M-16s, with grenade launchers underslung and that makes us an American army. 

We fight for the hills of Monterey County, which ring my parents' house. Not far from Watsonville, California, an enemy force of vague form but rambunctious lethality is dug in among the trees and ravines of the rolling wooded knuckles that slip west into the water. 

The dream nights of the war are pocked with WHUMP WHUMP as the artillery rumbles, the 155mm howitzers pounding enemy positions in the cold dark somewhere in front of us. There is black paint under my eyes and along my forehead and cheeks to help me blend into the night like an animal but with a rifle. 

We get the order to advance, passed along the line by hand signal, and my squad rises from its crouch to move forward in a skirmish line along the narrow gravel road cutting toward the Pajaro River through a smear of forest. Our eyes are wide in the dark. Two advance as two cover, then a leapfrog, tactical advance in anticipation of fire. For a mile we advance in the skirmish line, until we reach the edge of the river and see the deep ravines along the soft clay bank and we know the enemy is in them. 

One of our mortar squads lobs a phosphorous shell and for long moments it hisses and sizzles and its piercing white arc in the sky lights up the bank over the river's edge and illuminates the huddled enemy in the ravines. Then the shells begin to impact around the enemy and as they are bombarded they shriek and begin to fire, the sharp cracking of AK-47s, crack crack crack like walnuts being split. The trees in front of us splinter and cough as the 7.62mm rounds bite into the thick trunks. 

We hit the deck, find cover behind trees and let the mortars take small pieces out of their emplacements. The mortars stop but the AK fire is still chattering, the night is cold and a thin fog is rolling in from the Pacific Ocean. We are given the order to attack. I move without hesitation, the fear an adrenalized buzzing in my blood, my heart alive and kicking in my chest as if it wants out, wants blood. I run in a skirmish line with my fire team, two men run, two men shoot from the cover of trees, shoot and scoot, until we are advancing to the low edge of the ravines, and the enemy are black human shapes in the night and their rifle fire is a white pointillist spatter from in front of us. 

I am not hit. I advance with my fire team to the mouth of the near ravine and we spill into the ravine and twenty yards from us is a clump of the enemy. I aim and squeeze off a thick cluster of shots, the enemy kick and crumple and their bodies fall into a pile at the bottom of the trench. They are dead and we have killed them. 

We charge down the length of the dug-in earthwork, firing at nothing, the position overrun and the enemy dead. I am not hit. I cease fire as a green flare is lobbed skyward indicating that I should cease fire. 

This is real if only in the dream sense. I am every bit the killer that my father was in his war. 

DANIEL MORRIS, left college during his senior year to accept a job as assistant editor of a computer gaming magazine in the Bay Area. When his day job isn't keeping him from his writing (how many magazine pros can say that?), he watches lots of movies and plays hockey.