There’s a ton of scary talk right now about there being a draft if World War III starts. Thankfully, there’s a lot of pushback from Zoomers like myself (Technically, I’m a Millennial but I’m a Zoomer at heart!). War is gross and it gives me the ick. I mean, I’ll happily punch a Nazi any day but I won’t shoot folx in Gaza. I refuse to comply. What are you gonna do – arrest me?! Y’all can’t hold all of us! Even if you had an open air prison to drop us into!!

I had an extremely memorable and vivid dream last night that perfectly illustrated why Gen Z shouldn’t be drafted to fight some dumb war. It involved my friends and I attempting to survive the horrors of boot camp. As soon as I woke up, I scribbled down every little detail of my wartime nightmare in my dream journal, the contents of which are recorded for the historical anals (It’s ‘annals’, Doreen—ed):

DAY 1: MY DOG TAG SAYS ‘FURRY’

Moonbeam, Tarquin, Yiffer, and I arrive at boot camp alongside a whole fracking battalion’s worth of LGBTQIAP+ folx, where we are immediately dead named and have our right to exist taken away by our new Drill Sergeant, Vince Vaughn from the film Hacksaw Ridge. 41% of our platoon tries to pretend they are women to get kicked out. Unfortunately the new inclusive US Armed Services answer to this is genderless uniforms.

DAY 2: SURVIVAL OF THE VAXIST

Tarquin suffered an extremely mild yet ultimately fatal heart attack while climbing the first rung of the obstacle course due to the physical strain of the activity exacerbating his Long COVID. Sergeant Vaughn totally didn’t care and told Traguin to ‘have some balls.’ Which is totally unfair, because Tarquin totally does but he tucks so you can’t tell.

DAY 3: OLD YIFFER

We all have Long COVID, except Private Plague-Rat, who has been made squad leader and put in charge of helping me improve my ‘overall attitude’ and stop me from being a ‘whiny bitch’.

Yiffer has been court-martialed for smuggling in some contraband ear-buds and Funko Pops, and for asking if there were vegan options in the mess hall. They didn’t even put him on trial, they just took him out back and shot him!

DAY 4: WORSE THAN OMAHA BEACH DURING TOURIST SEASON

Shouty Sergeant Vaughn continues to break us down physically and psychologically. A lot of us are going through intense withdrawal without our phones or TikTok. Our mostly peaceful “Free Palestine” protest in the barracks was brutally shut down by the COs before we could even get out one ‘Allahu Akbar!’

DAY 5: WAR IS PROBLEMATIC

Drill Sergeant Vaughn spent the entire dream microagressing me by bombarding me with triggering language and for reals 1000% illegal hate speech. “Your job is to kill the enemy and follow orders without prejudice! You’ll never be a real soldier, you don’t have the bone structure for it!!” he barked in my face, tearing off my Rambo: First Blood licensed camo patterned N95 with the words “BORN 2 KILL” embroidered on it.

DAY 6: SECTION 8 = HATE

Everyone in our Gen Z platoon has some form of mental illness, not that that had anything to do with us all being gender-liberated leftists. It’s just a cute, quirky generational trait. We are all in complete agreement though that we know what’s best for the world and have everything figured out.

DAY 7: I LOVE THE SMELL OF NABOB IN THE MORNING 

Weapons training. Ick. During a ridiculously early morning (9 AM!) training session, Moonbeam pulled a weird little pin from a hand grenade when they got distracted by some horn sounding music coming from the mess hall. I believe it was “Hotline Bling”. Oddly, the grenade went off as they was mid-twerk, gibbing them and two of our nearby POC squad mates. I remember thinking during the dream what a wonderful TikTok that would have made if I had only had my phone. They could have gone viral, instead of into pieces!

I don’t know why we were even doing weapons training anyways as we are all super anti-gun. With the help of Chat GPT we planned a clever warzone maneuver of loudly approaching the enemy in a straight line with open arms calling for peace. We would end the war with a friendly football match in No Man’s Land, just like they did in World War One!

WAR CAMPAIGN TRENDING

The dream ended with me telling off the army recruiters for the lack of diversity present within our barracks. More Black, brown, body positive and differently abled folx were needed to enrich and strengthen our ranks. 

After writing all this down, I immediately set up a Go Fund Me to help me deal with the trauma of seeing my friend explode in front of me in a dream. Within seconds I had reached and even shot past my humble stretch goal of $1,000,000 on the platform, as inspired by other successful and totally ethical campaigns.