PTSD

I have PTSD from a war I’ve never fought on a planet that doesn’t exist. Thanks, Gears of War.

Let me tell you about a dream I had this weekend. I was a military operative on a team of specialists. We were tasked with eliminating a nest of Locust spawn near Jacinto. Twenty years later, we are called to the capitol to be “honored” by Prime Minister Jinn, except it’s not really an honorary ceremony. She called us in to reprimand us for our dereliction of duty and to accuse us of being spies and traitors. Why? Our Grindlifts got stuck on the surface when everyone else was drilling down into the underground. We walked to the nearest tunnel, but then the city started to flood, so we got the hell out. We lived that day.

A successful Grindlift below Sera’s surface.

Prime Minister Jinn did not see it that way, and sicced the Guardians on us. All of us. Unarmed civilians years past our prime, no longer in fighting shape. Many of us had desk jobs and families.

The nearest sentinel stopped beeping and firing at us when we closed in on Jinn, so that’s where most of us stayed, huddled under an overhang, taking Jinn hostage.

Guardians: Flying shielded trishots that yell at you with robotic Damon Baird voices.

If you’ve never played Gears of War, none of this makes any sense. That doesn’t stop my heart from racing just thinking about it. That doesn’t keep me from looking over my shoulder now, as I write this, looking for Guardians.

Maybe all that research about video game addiction should begin to focus on PTSD and the aftermath of war-based games. This dream was too real.

You know war is bad when this awesome dude decides to kill himself rather than deal with PTSD after locust prison.