The Dream Journal: The MEF mortuary

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The MEF mortuary
by Snowdog (no login)

I was down in the lower part of the MEF headquarters building with members of my unit, and we were being led through some hallways by someone taking us somewhere. The hallways were narrow and windowless. The walls were solid concrete, and the area was pretty stale and dank. We turned a corner and there was a room on the left with the door opened. Some Marines were sitting inside, and there was a plain wooden coffin with a dead body in it at the front of the room. The coffin was being carried out, and there was the low rumble of talking Marines. Someone told us what was happening – Every time a Marine was killed, before it was viewed by the family or embalmed or anything like that, it was put into one of those coffins and viewed by the Marine’s unit, presumably to drive home to the Marine’s the reality of what they were about to go face.

As they brought the body, we continued down the hall, and had to make another left, but there were people filling the narrow hallway, and we had to push through. As we did, we noticed shelves with dead bodies lying on them. Some of the bodies were covered – most were not. They were lying pretty much in piles; placed there unceremoniously for preparation, viewing and eventual embalming. Most of the dead Marines were in one piece. Some, you couldn’t even tell what had killed them. But a few looked like props you find in a typical carnival-style haunted house. I had to look away from one as I passed just a foot from it – it was actually hung to stand straight up, and it was little more than a skeleton with unrecognizable pieces of flesh still hanging from it. Looked like the person had died and then been picked mostly clean by animals. I realized that we were in the mortuary beneath the headquarters.

We continued down the hall, and finally came to the place where we were supposed to crawl out, but a lot of the unit had gotten too far ahead of us, and we couldn’t figure out which direction they went. There were a couple ways to crawl out, and I was next to go, and I couldn’t decide which way to go. One way looked way too small for people to crawl through, but the other way didn’t seem to lead anywhere. I turned around and asked the guys behind me what they thought, and they seemed to agree that the rest of the unit had gone through the very narrow opening. I told them I couldn’t believe that they had gone that way; it looked like anyone who crawled through there would get stuck once they were in there, and have to be dragged back out by their feet (it was like a small air conditioner duct). In any even, I wouldn’t be going there. So we all went the other way.

We crawled through the bigger opening and up a metal flight of stairs and found ourselves at the top of an abandoned amusement park ride. But this one had a steering wheel up front, and we knew we were supposed to go somewhere, so we tried to fire it up and drive it down the street. It was about 15 feet tall, and we were at the top of it.

Posted on Jan 15, 2007, 4:14 AM

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