In Continuum.

A similar type of story was told to us in the army, when the superiors told us about the grandmother and her grand daughter who'd go around the bunks at night to find wakeful recruits to play with. I remember something about the grandmother having no eyes or something, and the they'd be standing by the side of your bed if you are not properly asleep at that time of the night. It sounds ridiculous enough, but it works when you are a dozen miles away from home and thrown into a military camp involuntarily. Even childish ghost stories like that worked on the recruits back then, everybody treated the 10.30 p.m. lights out timing as sacred. Nobody wanted to stay up until after midnight, everybody went to bed as early as possible. Nobody met the grandmother and grand daughter, nobody complaint. The story worked, everything was happy in no man's land. 

Ellen got it right on her show the other time when she spoke of insomnia, the way three in the morning feels somewhat like a no man's land, a term used in the past on battlefields. Midnight is still rather early if you are trying to fall asleep in bed, and by two you really should be asleep because you don't want to be caught being awake at three. Two is fine though, since you know there are people who are still awake at that hour, and it just feels slightly better for those insomniacs trying to fall asleep. Five in the morning is when some people wakes up for their work, so being awake at that hour is not nearly as lonely as being awake at, say, three-thirty in the morning. It's a psychological thing, especially when you know for sure that that hour has the least number of people being awake in your time zone. Three in the morning, who wakes up at that hour anyway? Well, two men from my military camp goes to work at that hour of the morning, the two men whom I have great admiration for when I was standing guard at the gate.

Three o'clock wasn't the no man's land back then, it was a land that belonged to two men. It was not uncommon for one to assume that nobody is going to enter the camp at that kind of time, who in the right mind would anyway? Everybody preferred to do sentry duty at the front gate in the wee hours of the morning because they didn't have to open and close the gates for the soldiers booking out or the ones booking in. Second, there'd be less vehicles coming in and out of the gates during those hours, which also meant less work for the sentry guards. Of course, with less vehicles also meant that they'd have to salute on a far lesser frequency than, say, eight in the morning when the officers start to come in. That was my mentality when I volunteered for the two to four sentry duty at the front gate, I thought that nobody was going to see me break all the rules of a sentry guard. Even at that time of the night, one was expected to have the equipments prepared, the rifle properly carried, the wardrobe properly worn, and your one hundred precent attention on the job. But at that time of the night, my rifle was leaning to the wall next to my feet, the SBO unclipped, the beret taken off and folded in my pocket and an iPod plugged into my ears. Nobody was there to penalize me, nobody saw. That was until those two men appeared at the gates.

The first man is the floor manager of the cookhouse, the same man with the strange little mustache that made him look somewhat like a crook. He'd be there at the front gate at three in the morning every single day just to start up the cookhouse on time. It's amazing how this man managed to keep up his energy and enthusiasm for a job like that, but he does it on a day to day basis with no qualms whatsoever. You don't see him frowning or sulking underneath that mask of his while he served the boys breakfast at six in the morning. He was all smiles, all the time. He gets to work at three in the morning, stays there until dinner is served to everybody in camp, and then leaves for home until his day begins again at three in the morning. It needs some kind of superhuman power to accomplish something like that, and he does it so often that I started to wonder if actually enjoyed it to a certain degree.

The same can be said about the chief cook that rides in on his little red bicycle at around the same time, but usually later on in the morning. He'd be yelling at the gate for people to open it up for him, and his speech is never clear enough for you to decipher his words very well. Despite being somewhere in the vicinity of his forties, he has already most the majority of his teeth for some reason. It left behind a gaping black hole on his face with no pearly whites, and a speech impediment that left me slightly dumb-founded when spoken to. He wasn't the kind of person you'd want to look straight in the face for a long period of time because he, as George Carlin would put it, was an extreme case of appearance deficit. Still, along with the floor manager, he was one of the few people in camp who treated the soldiers as humans. Their food sucked, they really did. I have tasted some of the worst food in that cookhouse, but then it doesn't change the fact that the people they are kind people, they are a bunch of dedicated people who are enthusiastic about their job on a day to day basis. I vaguely remember writing a post about these people a little more than a year ago, the way their lives were defined by scooping up food and then dropping them in plates for the rest of their lives. Still, they showed no complaints, no dissatisfactions about their job. What gives us the right, then, to complain about ours?

At three in the morning, I sometimes think about the way those two men would appear at the front gate of the same camp, all dressed up and ready for work. It became somewhat comforting at times, to know that there are some people awake at that time of the night, getting ready for the rest of the day while you are trying to go to sleep. It's like the thought of your friend having your back in battle somehow, knowing that somebody out there has things covered even in no man's land. In the stillness of the night, the sound of their footsteps or the sound of the bicycle chain would slice through the silence, as if their mere presence was enough to rule the rest of the world. The lands are theirs at that time of the night, and rightfully so for their constant and unquestioned dedication to work. For the rest of us with desk jobs and air-conditioning, the rest of us that work from nine to five and a real life to get back to and work for, what should we protest about? Try waking up at two in the morning to get to work everyday after leaving the same workplace only four hours ago. It's not something anybody can do, and that is exactly what these two respectable men does everyday at their job.