He's tried to remember when the feeling first crept-up on him. He remembers getting his orders.

Dear Captain Peter Ismiov (iss-me-off), that's the way it started. He was Capt. Ismiov, he knew that and he was being sent to Israel to keep the peace.
OK, first my little story:

He wasn't elated, but he also knew he couldn't fuck this up, since it was already fuckered. There was, as they say, a confederacy of dunces and dunderheads who'd gone before.

Israel, Palestine, the Gaza Strip was already a synapse-free zone.

And he liked that he got free-rein. This is how it started and he decided the time it started was irrelevant. When he arrived he observed all the anger and he looked askew at both sides training their children to be the next generation of terrorists or hate-mongers or warriors for god, depending on your perspective.

Capt. Ismiov decided after one of the countless suicide bombers took more countless souls with him/her into the great beyond, that enough was enough. He reasoned that this was over dirt and called for the holy dirt to be removed, loaded on barges and dumped in the ocean.

This would end this silliness.

Capt. Ismiov was sadly disappointed. As now these people were still killing themselves on land and drowning trying to swim out to the holy dirt in the ocean.

Some swimmers even killed other swimmers so they'd not reach the holy dirt pile.

This troubled Capt. Ismiov. Seven billion miracles alive today. At some point when there are billions of them, they are no longer miracles. He had watched many miracles blow up other miracles. This was not miraculous.

Anyway, somewhere in this mess Capt. Ismiov starting having nightmares.

In some he thought we'd screwed-the-pooch by giving the holy land to any one group.

In others he thought all things created by god should be holy, so everything was holy, if you were into the holy thing. But all the dreams were splattered with blood.

He found decorating with blood depressing... he thought life was considered precious?

He found himself snorkeling to the bottom of a lot of bottles, when he got to the bottom and looked down through the bottom he saw only his feet and he had four of them.

The doctor prescribed a lot of pills which he took with liquor, as they only warned not to drink to excess.

He had come to the conclusion there was no way to exceed the quantity necessary to dull this pain. So he tried rinsing his eyes with poblano pepper juice and shaving his head with a cheese grater. He snacked on Chex Mix fortified with shards of glass from all the glass he broke upon reading: Break Glass in case of Emergency.

Nothing dulled the pain etched on his soul. He ordered his troops to beat him about the face and head. He regularly attended his "spa" which were public stonings where he begged to be stoned and was.

He was most disappointed when a doctor gave him a clean bill of health and said his liver was like a 10 year olds. Capt. Ismiov prescribed himself turpentine, which he thought might remove the permanent marks left by this insanity.

It didn't.

***

Despair became Capt. Ismiov's constant companion. He knew in his heart that the sheer tonnage of what we don't know, if turned to shit would drown us in our own fecal matter, as would the universe.

This caused him to smirk, since he now knew something no one else knew.

He smiled at ranters, wishing they'd suffocate in their own arrogance, instead of inspiring others to murder because of their arrogance.

He composed a note, in his new heightened state of awareness, asking politely if they'd "nuke the whole fucking place planet, get yourselves while you're at it." This was denied.

His nightmares persisted. "What we humans know is little, much of what we think we know is wrong. But when we KNEW these things we fought wars over them and now we know them to be wrong, but the dead are still dead and they're dead-wrong."

In his heart he knew we needed to reboot the system, to start again. Religions would be the everlasting gobstopper of the apocalypse, of blissful ignorance eternal. He knew this, he also knew he could be wrong.

But he was unwilling to consider this as he also was intolerant of people asking to be tolerated while blowing-up others.

He finally got some good news when the doctor told him his liver was failing.

But if he cut back on the turpentine it may recover. "That bastard's sending mixed signals."

He doubled his turpentine intake and added lemon scented ammonia.

What he wanted was freedom, freedom from his conscience.

When his superiors found him, he was perched high on a hill affixing a plastic tube to his humvee's radiator.

He took a good long pull off the tube from his radiator, surveying the holy land, which amused him as it popped like popcorn with explosions.

He took another pull and found blissful ignorance. He too would let god sort this out.

He took another pull and found his suicidal utopia.

Capt. P. Ismiov was given a glorious military funeral. Many important people showed up to pay homage.

He would've been so disappointed.