The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

only a vague visceral sensation, a gut feeling which tells them where mines and trip wires are. They know, for example, when a crossbow trap will fire and this allows them to knock away the arrows before they can hurt them. Still others receive pictures, like waking dreams, of what will happen in the next minute, hour, or day in combat. 
    “With very few exceptions, Mary, none of these individuals experienced anything like this as civilians. These episodes are the consequence of combat, of the metabolic and psychological anomalies which life-and-death conditions seem to generate.” 
    He looks at me and his voice changes now, as if on cue. He wants me to feel what he is feeling, and I do, I do. I can’t look away from him and I know this is why he is the CO. 
    “It is almost impossible to reproduce them in a laboratory, Mary, and so these remarkable talents remain mere anecdotes, events that happen once or twice within a lifetime—to a brother, a mother, a friend, a fellow soldier in a war. A boy is killed on Kwajalein in 1944. That same night his mother dreams of his death. She has never before dreamed such a dream, and the dream is too accurate to be mere coincidence. He dies. She never has a dream like it again. A reporter for a major newspaper looks out the terminal window at the Boeing 707 he is about to board. He has flown a hundred times before, enjoys air travel, and has no reason to be anxious today. As he looks through the window the plane explodes before his very eyes. He can hear the sound ringing in his ears and the sirens rising in the distance; he can feel the heat of the ignited fuel on his face. Then he blinks. The jet is as it was before—no fire, no sirens, no explosion. He is shaking—he has never experienced anything like this in his life. He does not board the plane, and the next day he hears that its fuel tanks exploded, on the ground, in another city, killing ninety. The man never has such a vision again. He enjoys air travel in the months, and years, ahead, and will die of cardiac arrest on a tennis court twenty years later. You can see the difficulty we have, Mary.” 
    “Yes,” I say quietly, moved by what he’s said. 
    “But our difficulty doesn’t mean that your dreams are any less real, Mary. It doesn’t mean that what you and the three hundred like you in this small theater of war are experiencing isn’t real.” 
    “Yes,” I say. 
    He gets up. 
    “I am going to have one of my colleagues interview you, if that’s all right. He will ask you questions about your dreams and he will record what you say. The tapes will remain in my care, so there isn’t any need to worry, Mary.” 
    I nod. 
    “I hope that you will view your stay here as deserved R & R, and as a chance to make contact with others who understand what it is like. For paperwork’s sake, I’ve assigned you to Golf Team. You met three of its members on your flight in, I believe. You may write to your parents as long as you make reference to a medevac unit in Pleiku rather than to our actual operation here. Is that clear?” 
    He smiles like a friend would, and makes his voice as gentle as he can. “I’m going to leave the rest of the Coke. And a church key. Do I have your permission?” He grins. It’s a joke, I realize. I’m supposed to smile. When I do, he smiles back and I know he knows everything, he knows himself, he knows me, what I think of him, what I’ve been thinking every minute he’s been here. 
    It scares me that he knows. 
    His name is Bucannon. 
     
    The man that came was one of the other MD types from the tent. He asked and I answered. The question that took the longest was “What were your dreams like? Be as specific as possible both about the dream content and its relationship to reality—that is, how accurate the dream was as a predictor of what happened. Describe how the dreams and their relationship to reality (i.e., their accuracy) affected you both psychologically and