Alright fellas so I don’t even know where to begin. It’s late where I’m at and I’m drunk. Cheers to y’all.

This one is lighthearted, so no trigger warnings. BANG! Just kidding.

Timeline is 2009 in central Iraq. I’m barely 18. I joined because my elder brother had joined and was over on his second tour, and I wanted to serve with him before the war was over. Jokes on me, haha only a few more years right?? College can wait, right?

Anyhow so I find myself driving this Buffalo MRAP up and down Tampa, aka IED alley, each night. 3mph, scanning from side to side, all hours until mission complete. 12B life. Our missions would typically run about 12-16 hours, as planned, but sometimes would run wayyyyy over. Like pushing 2-3 days. Now normally driving that long would push anyone to tap out and change drivers, but hell we’re only going3-4 mph so let’s keep rolling. TC will wake you up if you hit a ditch. Keep on rolling!

So anyway I discovered that after about that 50 hour mark of no sleep, the hallucinations kind of started to become real. Fire, aliens, ambushes, whatever. After seeing my first few and panicking, I’d always just look at my TC to see if their face matched what I was seeing… no panic? Well okay I guess the zombies aren’t real. Keep rolling. Same for everything else. Keep trucking.

Well there was this one thing I couldn’t stop seeing,but no one seemed to acknowledge. I started to feel crazy. All too often, I’d see these little.. rodents, scurry in front of me. I’d ask my fellow drivers after mission, “dude. Did you see anything cross the road last night?” They’d always say no man why what’d you see? My response being “oh me either. Must have been the lights or something.” Hallucinating, for some reason, was more believable than me seeing….. HAMSTERS.

Yes. Hamsters. The little pocket rockets you can buy at PetSmart for like 6 bucks.

Okay so this went on for months. At first, I wasn’t so worried. Hell, as far as hallucinations come, I guess hamsters are pretty benign. But the fact that I always saw them started to bother me. Why won’t they stop!!!!

After I talked to enough other drivers, and they all denied seeing them, I finally had to google “where do hamsters come from?”

Sure enough, they are naturally found in Iraq and Syria.

Well hot damn I was right.

Still curious about the green flaming zombies tho.