Toxic Shadows

18

I spent two tours in Vietnam with the SEAL teams. You know who they are, what they do. I won’t go into that. Why did I join a unit like that? Late ’69 and ’70 they were beefing up the Teams because a lot of the conventional Army and Marine units were pulling out. Not just the SEALs, but other groups like Marine Force Recon and Army Special Forces. End of ’68 I was a swabby doing basic at Great Lakes in Chicago. I was eighteen. I joined the Navy because I didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to die in some foreign shithole. I thought I could avoid the draft and spend my time on a battleship, getting drunk and catching the clap in port. Towards the end of boot, the chief gave us a little chat, said they needed volunteers for the riverboat Navy, the River Rats. You’ve probably seen those guys on the Discovery Channel or something—they cruised the rivers in patrol boats, exchanging fire with the NVA and VC. Had a high casualty rate. Grunts in the bush had nothing on these guys.

Anyway, I’d heard enough about the River Rats to know that I didn’t want no part of it. The chief inferred that those that didn’t volunteer might end up with the Rats anyway. Then he gave us the pitch about the SEAL Teams. As usual, I didn’t pay too much attention. All I heard him say was “frogman.” Frogman? I thought. I got this dicked in a hard way. What could a frogman possibly do in a jungle war? I’d get out of it that way. Shows you what a naïve dipfuck I was. SEAL training lasted about a year, which was exactly what I wanted. You see, they were saying on TV and on the radio that the war would be over in a year. I had her made.

So, I volunteered.

And when I did, the chief looked at me like I had a hammer hanging out of my ass.

“You sure, Davis?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” I called out like some gung ho dumbass.

“You stupid prick, you deserve it,” was all he would say.

So, after a series of tests and what not, I made the cut. And for the next year they beat my ass bloody. Only ten percent of our class made it through. Frogman? Sure, that was part of it. The basis of everything we were, but only the basis—I was jumping out of airplanes, learning to live off the land, sniping, demolitions, counterinsurgency, reconnaissance, guerrilla warfare. Shit, I learned how to handle all kinds of weapons, how to kill people with knives and crossbows, with poisons, booby traps, even my bare hands. I learned how to speak some French and Vietnamese. They brainwashed the hell out of you, too. By the end of that year you were a gung ho, life-taking motherfucker who just wanted to kill for his country and got physically sick at the thought of communism. Kick ass and take names.

Beginning of ’70, they mobilized us and sent us to Southeast Asia. No point in going into my first tour. I did what you think guys like us do—I killed the enemy in number. I personally greased seventy that I knew about within the first four months. After that, I gave up counting. I re-upped for a second tour and this time I was attached to a team of second-and third tour vets who were handling special operations and intelligence missions for the spooks, part of the Phoenix program.

In July ’72, Naval Intelligence sent us on a search and destroy mission in the Mekong Delta. The Delta was our main area of operations, our AO. At least that’s what the buzz was. Truth being, we went everywhere and anywhere—North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, even China itself. This time, though, it was the Delta, just like our orders read. We were heading northeast, deep into the Rung Sat. The area had been heavily infiltrated by Uncle Ho’s pukes and was serious Indian Country. The Rung Sat, or “Forest of Assassins” as it was also known, was a traditional hideout for Asian bandits and smugglers and it was also home to communist insurgents. Some four-hundred square miles of mangrove swamp and thick rain forest.

Lieutenant-commander Barber was our C.O. He was an okay guy as long as you did what he told you, which you always did because after three tours, he knew exactly how to keep you alive in the boonies.

I liked Barber. He was professional and honest and had no problems tipping beers with us swabbies in Saigon or Da Nang. Our former C.O., an Annapolis squirt name of Wentz, got greased up north after we parachuted in one night to abduct an NVA colonel. We got our subject, but we left that uppity fuck behind. Wasn’t much left to him after he tripped that Russian mine, anyway.

We were to be inserted by riverboat. As we sped down river to the insertion point, everyone was quiet. Even the riverboat swabbies, the River Rats, were silent. And that was strange: they were always talking about being fucked—by each other, by the slopes, by their whores, the climate, the Navy, you name it. It made me feel uneasy. This whole thing did and I wasn’t sure why.

I was checking over my gear and the other SEALs were doing the same. I looked over at Roshland, the only guy I outranked. He was carrying his ruck, Starlight scope, and the usual shit like the rest of us. But he also had the M-60 machine gun, the kind we used with the barrels sawed-off real short. He was a big black mother, his body crisscrossed with bandoleers of ammo. Roshland was okay. He was a drummer back in the world. Claimed his band had opened for Jimi once. He was probably the only guy on the team I would have associated with outside the SEALs. The rest of ’em—maybe myself included—were all fucked-up and not in a good way. They were scary. Maybe it was just that I knew how good they were at killing people. Maybe I’d seen them peel the skin off one too many Viets with their diving knives and grin while they did it, keeping the screaming little pricks alive for hours.

So, there I was on the riverboat, the PBR, smoking and worrying, propped up against several stacked cases of C-rats, the mechanical cacophony of the twin diesels thrumming through my bones. Within an hour or so, the boat slowed to a stop before a small clearing. We slipped into the water, silent as hunting crocs, and made our way to the bank, running through waist-deep elephant grass towards the jungle.

The PBR didn’t hang around long: soon as we deployed, it swung around back up river.

And we were alone.

After we’d entered the fringe of the jungle and secured perimeter, Barber called us together.

“Okay, listen up,” he whispered. “About five clicks east there’s a suspected supply route for Charlie. We’ll just check it out, maintain surveillance and ambush any small groups we come across. Anything larger, forget it. Intel just wants numbers, weapons, organization, the usual.”

It wasn’t unusual for us to get our briefing in the jungle. Lot of the shit we did was so highly-classified we were rarely told in advance… unless it was a special op like an abduction or an assassination or something tricky like that. Then they told you beforehand and put you in quarantine until you deployed. Security.

“That’s just our first stop,” Barber said. “After that comes the vil. In the morning.”

The village.

As far as intel knew it wasn’t much more than a little hamlet. So tiny and remote it didn’t even have a name, just a couple map coordinates. It was our ultimate destination, the reason for this little trip. We were to hit it with extreme prejudice, meaning we were to kill every living thing we came across—men, women, and, yes, children, too.

Idea of that leaves you cold?

It shouldn’t. We exterminated plenty of villages in ’Nam. That’s what the Phoenix program was. Fucking government will never admit to it, of course, but then they still won’t tell the truth about Roswell and who greased JFK. Anyway, Phoenix was in full force and lots of villages were being erased because of communist ties.You probably heard of My Lai, but that was only one instance. You see all that shit on TV about the Nazis exterminating villages in Poland and Russia and that, but we did the same thing. See, Mao Tse Tung said that the guerrilla is the fish that swims in the sea of the population. Something like that. So how do you catch that fish? You net the whole lot, that’s how. If the population shields those cowardly bastards, then they go, too. Don’t get pissed off at me, it wasn’t my idea to do these things. It was your government’s, good old Uncle Sham. But having troops go in and waste some shit-nothing hamlet was messy. Too many guys traumatized, too many witnesses who might spill the beans. So the strategists in Washington got some better ideas. And you’re gonna hear all about that in a minute.

Anyway, there we were in the bush.

“What’s the situation?” Thurman asked.

Barber coughed quietly into his hand. “They were a little vague on that. Just that no one comes out of there.”

Thurman shrugged. “Just gooks. Grease ’em and get on out. Fuck ’em.”

I didn’t like it, didn’t like any of it, but I was in too deep and had too much blood on my hands by then to pull out.

I remember Barber looking at me and I swear something passed between us. He didn’t like any of this either and I could see that. There was something weird going on. He had a camouflage bandana pulled tight over his head, his face painted black and green. It was hard to say where cloth ended and flesh began.

Thurman was chuckling; he was always chuckling. “Find ’em, fix ’em, and fuck ’em,” he said, fingering the blade of his K-Bar knife.

He was this tall, blonde psychopath with a shrapnel-pitted face and a scarf of napalm burns at his neck, arms sleeved with tattoos of serpents and scorpions. Six foot four, two-hundred fifty pounds of death. I think maybe that ghoulish little laugh of his reinforced this… and the necklace of sun-dried ears. Thurman was scary. No one really liked him, but he was a badass boonierat and he was good to have around. A natural born killer.

I noticed Roshland was looking about nervously.

“What’s up, Tommy?” I asked.

He shook his head side to side very slowly, spitting a ribbon of mucus at a leaf spider. “I don’t know. I just feel strange. Something wrong about this place.”

“Charlie?”

“No, not that, man. I don’t know. Imagination. Beaucoup bad vibes.” He didn’t seem to be sure of his diagnosis. “Maybe it’s just this daylight shit.”

I had to agree with him on that.

I didn’t care for daylight insertions. We usually went out at night. But for some reason, intelligence wanted us to hit the vil in broad daylight. In fact, when Barber was briefed by the Admiral and his spooks in Saigon, they said if it was getting dark, to scrub the operation. Under no circumstances were we to approach the village in the darkness. Go figure. Those spooks were funny sometimes. Or maybe not funny at all.

In about five minutes, Barber finished with his funny papers—maps—and we moved out. I took point. The jungle was thick and swampy. Mosquitoes and biting gnats were landing on my face and neck despite all the bug juice I’d smeared on with my cammo paint. I didn’t even bother swatting at them—for each one you killed, six more would take its place. You patrolled enough jungle like I had, you didn’t waste time with the local wildlife. You just acclimated yourself. Things like insects and jungle rot became as much a part of you as your skin.

I was starting to sweat a lot, so I took a salt tab. It was very quiet. Just the way I liked it, jungle birds screeching and monkeys chattering. The day had become oppressively hotter as we approached the river, a finger of the Mekong Delta system. I kept thinking about beers in frosted mugs. The farther we went, the more an uneasy feeling began to grip me. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but it left me cold.

We reached our first target before long.

Map coordinate Q-14. Supposedly, there was a supply route running through here for the slopes. We found a few footpaths beaten through the brush, but they were mostly overgrown. We canvassed the entire sector in every direction, but found nothing worth noting. Thurman, however, picked up an old French bayonet. It was rusted to shit and had probably been there for fifteen, twenty years since the Frenchies got their asses kicked out of that neck of the woods by the Viet Minh.

Finally, we called it quits.

Back into the bush, humping through swamp and hacking through jungle. I was on point again. The Rung Sat was a large area, true, but I was still somewhat unnerved that we hadn’t come across anyone at all. Not even a band of drug smugglers. Strange.

Then, just after sunset, we came upon a small village.

Not the village, but a little clearing with a couple thatched huts and a bonfire blazing away. I moved in cautiously to take a look. Thurman and the others hung back and checked out the huts. There were seven men and one old woman around the fire. The men had AKs and black pajamas on. VC, all right. Hardcore pricks spoon fed off Uncle Ho’s bullshit wagon. They were giving the regular Army and Marine units nothing but trouble, but they were no match for us. We’d proved that again and again.

Thurman came back and told us the huts were empty. He’d found one VC sleeping and slit his throat. Barber decided we were going to waste them. Thurman and I made a sweep around camp to see if there were anymore dinks around. Fifteen minutes later we came back. Nothing. It was cool.

Barber signaled us to form a killzone.

Roshland took his sixty to a small copse directly across from them. Barber, Thurman, and I spread out. Thurman carried an AK like me, Barber had a Stoner LMG. Dinks didn’t know it yet, but they were meat. Night, night.

Barber open up first.

He took out two of them before Thurman and I even fired. Together we cut down three more before they knew what the fuck was happening. The other two gooks rolled away and tried to scramble into the jungle, but Roshland cut ’em in half with his sixty.

We slipped from the jungle and went to the fire.

I didn’t like it: standing there in the flickering light it would have been easier than shit for someone to draw a bead on us. The old woman had gotten hit in the leg and shoulder by stray rounds. She was bleeding pretty good.

She looked up at us, spoke in English. Her face was a maze of wrinkles, her eyes shiny and wet. “You go into land of dead, Joe… you don’t come back… you numba ten, you numba ten thousand…”

We all chose to ignore her meaning.

“Bitch speaks pretty good,” Thurman said. “Want me to see what I can get out of her?”

Barber shook his head. “Negative. No time.”

“Won’t take me long.”

“Intel doesn’t want that. No interrogation of unfriendlies in this area.”

And that was weird. Interrogation was pretty much SOP with a unit like ours. We’d been extensively trained in procedures of that type… nice ways and not so nice ways. We all spoke Viet and French, some better than others. Barber could speak Russian and Chinese, too.

But orders were orders.

“Well, we can’t leave the cunt,” Thurman said. He was pissed—Barber had cheated the sadist out of a good hour of cruelty.

Before Barber could answer, the old bag pulled a skinning knife out of her pants and made a lunge for him. We were all caught momentarily off-guard… except Thurman. A split-second after she pulled the knife, his boot connected swiftly with her temple, sending her sprawling senseless in the dirt.

“Crazy fucking mamma-san,” he said.

“Get moving,” Barber whispered. “Thurman, take point. Haul those bodies into the jungle and strip ’em.”

We stripped the bodies of everything they had—weapons, ammo, food, personal items—and dumped them in the bush. That way it would look like bandits got ’em and not American guerrillas. We scattered the ammo and sabotaged the AKs so they wouldn’t work. Thurman took a couple ears for his collection and some greasy photos of the soldiers’ girlfriends. He had quite an assortment of both. There was a well back near the huts and I dropped a vial of poison into it so any VC getting a drink would die a painful death. It was SOP to leave little presents like that behind. Deny the enemy the essentials of life.

Before we moved out, I looked back once and saw Barber break the old woman over his knee and stick his K-Bar into the side of her throat. I’m glad he did it. I hated doing women, particularly old ones.

Guerrilla warfare. It ain’t just a job, it’s a guilt trip.

We were all pretty deadass-tired from walking for twelve hours, so Barber decided we could bed down for a few hours. Said it would work out perfect. By the time we hit the vil next afternoon, we’d be fresh. We crawled up on a little flattened ridge that was nearly covered by a small, low thicket of bamboo and shut our eyes. Thurman took his Starlight scope and stood watch.

By the time I closed my eyes, Roshland and Barber were breathing even and regular. I always wished I could knock off that easy, but I needed to unwind a bit. Didn’t take me long, as it turned out. Last thing I saw was Thurman creeping about, setting up perimeter.

I was dreaming about an old Chevy I used to own when I felt someone shaking me. I opened my eyes and saw the dim figure of Barber hunched over me.

“Time?” I said.

“Thurman’s gone,” he said. “Get your gear together.”

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and shouldered my ruck and rifle. The night had gone dead quiet while I slept. A gentle breeze skirted the trees, but it didn’t do shit towards stopping the sweat that ran down my brow. I popped a salt tab and took a pull off my canteen.

“What time is it?” I asked Barber.

“Just after three,” he whispered.

After three? Christ, we’d been asleep for hours. We crashed out just after 2300 hours, eleven ’o clock. Thurman should’ve roused us at one.

“What happened?” I heard Roshland say.

Barber didn’t reply. He scanned the darkness with his Starlight scope.

“VC?”

“No.” Pause. “I don’t think so.”

I kept watching him. His fuzzy, black outline told me nothing. But, then, I didn’t have to be told: If it had been Cong, they would have greased us all. There’s no easier kill than a sleeping man.

I looked through the thick jungle canopy overhead. The starry sky looked down between the branches, noncommittal. Whatever it had seen, it wasn’t for us to know.

We spent the next thirty minutes or so crawling through the foliage. There were no signs of Thurman…he was just gone. Almost like he had simply walked off or just disappeared into thin air. Or gotten himself zapped by Charlie. It didn’t seem possible, though. Thurman was good, the best I’d ever seen in the jungle. I couldn’t imagine anyone expert enough to take him without a sound.

Besides, why take him and leave us?

Barber called us together. It was 0400 by then.

“We gotta get moving. Thurman will have to take care of his own ass,” he said.

Barber took point and we fell in behind him.

The further we pushed on, the worse the terrain became. The jungle grew dense with long twisting vines that coiled down like tentacles and snatched at my boonie hat and gear, snagging and tangling. It was a real pain in the ass moving through it. We had to crouch down most of the way. The ground became muddy and then turned into swamp as we passed through low-lying areas, the muck coming up to our hips sometimes. The sky was streaked with indigo blue. There were birds cawing overhead and ten-foot pythons hanging in the trees, testing the air with forked tongues. You could see them in the bluish, pre-dawn light and that was enough. Every time I got close to one, I gripped the handle of my K-Bar, ready to slash at it if it made a move towards me.

But none did.

They just hung lazily by their tails, paying us no attention as if they saw crazy, mud-encrusted humans every day. And I guess they probably did.

I never liked snakes too much, but I’d gotten used to them like everything else in that goddamn country. For some reason, harmless as they were, they were getting to me that day.

Everything was.

But it was only the beginning.

Just after first light we regrouped at the perimeter of another little village. It wasn’t the one we were looking for. There was no mention of it on the maps. We sat out there in bush, reconning it, while Barber made up his mind about whether we should bypass it or not. In general, where you’re on a specific mission—that vil we had to hit, for example—you’ll go out of your way to avoid contact with not only the enemy, but the civilian population as well. Unless you find something so sweet and easy you can’t pass it up, you know, like that other little hamlet with the gooks by the fire. They were begging for it, so we gave it to them.

“It looks deserted,” Barber finally announced.

And it did.

Like a cemetery.

It was bigger than the last one, a good eight or ten huts crowded against the encroaching jungle. A place that size, there should’ve been some kids running around, an old lady or two at a cooking fire. But there was nothing. The silence was eerie. It was a heavy, almost physical thing. My military turn of my mind told me that what we had here was one sweet ambush, all primed and ready. Slopes were hiding in the huts, the woods, just waiting for our asses.

But I didn’t believe it for a minute.

I could smell death twisting in the air—warm, pungent, but not recent. There had been killing here or mass dying maybe yesterday, maybe the day before. I knew that much because I knew death: knew its smell, its taste. And this place was full of it like a drawer in a morgue.

We walked right into it. Not exactly SOP; usually you would skirt the perimeter, check the jungle for signs of unfriendlies. But, somehow, the three of us knew this place was empty.

And it was empty, all right.

No pigs or chickens. No people. Barber and I started checking the huts while Roshland patrolled back and forth with his sixty, looking for trouble. I prodded open the door of the first hut we came to and there was nothing living inside. My guts pulled up sickly at the smell. There was a little boy in there, maybe eight or ten. His decayed body had been nailed to a post. He’d been eviscerated, his head nearly cut off. His eyes were missing. His jaws were sprung open in a scream. He wore a beard of flies.

Outside, Barber said, “Pretty sadistic even for the Cong.”

“Yes,” I said, but could say no more.

The kid smelled bad, but he didn’t account for that smell of death we encountered upon entering camp. This was localized, small. The other was huge, omnipotent. It was draped over the village.

We checked two, three other huts and didn’t find a thing.

In the last hut we found another body. An older guy, maybe fifty, crouched in the corner. He had one arm up over his eyes like he was protecting his face or didn’t want to see something. In his other hand was a small homemade knife. He’d slit his wrist. He was stained dark with old blood. Ants and beetles were all over him.

It looked like he’d cut himself open before something got at him. As if death was better than what he was facing.

I’d seen some bad shit over there. Things that could warp a sane man. Shit so ugly, so horrible, so hideous it could’ve scared a maggot off a gut wagon. But by that point, nothing bothered me much. I’d long before shut down my humanity; it was the only way to survive, to hang onto what remained of your mind. So, yeah, I was steel, I was hard, I hadn’t had a decent human emotion in months and months.

But I was scared.

Scared like a kid in a spook house.

Everything was hot and dry and you could hear the brush crisping in the morning sunlight. Hot, yes, but my skin had gone cold and something inside me had curled up in a tight ball. It was more than the kid’s body, bad as that was. And it was more than the man’s body. It was just a raw, grim feeling I had. Just a deserted village? Sure, but there was something terribly wrong about it.

Roshland broke protocol and called out to us.

We ran over and found him in a little clearing between the hootches. He was a big, black bull of a man, but at that moment he was small and weak, a stick man smothering under all that killing hardware.

We saw what he saw.

Somebody had dug a pit, scooped a hollow out of the earth. They’d dumped the bodies of fifteen or twenty villagers into it and burned them. What we were looking at was like some blackened mass grave of jutting limbs and screaming faces, bodies cremated nearly down to skeletons. And the smell… Jesus. Roasted flesh, charred bone. And something else, kerosene maybe.

Roshland looked at me, at Barber. “What the fuck, man?” he said, his voice breaking. “What the fuck is this all about?”

“Must’ve soaked ’em and lit ’em up. But why?” I said.

We turned away, each separately filing this away for future nightmares. The village was the sight of an atrocity we could only guess at. I was thinking about what that old lady said, about us going into the land of the dead and not coming back. She knew what we’d find. Maybe those VC with her had been the ones who’d done this, probably yesterday. But, for some reason, I didn’t think they had anything to do with the kid or the man. That was something else. The VC were more like… what? Damage control? Burning those bodies like plague victims, so some pestilence wouldn’t spread.

But that was crazy, right?

I started thinking about our target, the other village, wondering why the brass insisted we hit it in broad daylight. They’d even told Barber that under no circumstances were we to make contact at night. What the fuck was going on here?

“Let’s go,” Barber said, regaining his composure. “Whatever happened here, it’s not for us.”

Back into the jungle. Swamp. Hills. Insects. Brush so thick you had to crawl through it on your belly in spots. After a few hours of that, we spotted the river. The village couldn’t be too far. My back was aching from being stooped over for so long. It hadn’t been that sore since my first week of BUDS, frogman school.

We paused on the riverbank and looked around. Everything was quiet and serene. For a second there, I almost forgot where I was and what I was doing. All I could hear was the rushing of the water. It could have been a river back home in Michigan, save for the oppressive heat.

And it got hotter, too.

We crossed the river quickly, the cool water feeling great as it sluiced around my waist. I wished we could’ve submerged ourselves in there for awhile and cooled off. But that was out of the question: We had to cross it as fast as possible, just as we had been taught.

On the other side, we slipped into the jungle and paused while Barber checked out his funny papers.

“I wonder where Thurman is right now,” Roshland said. “Probably dead…all cut to shit by Charlie. We found a Lurp like that once, Davis, when you was still with Two. We were across the border on a recon patrol. Poor bastard was cut to pieces. Got himself caught in a booby trap—then they got him.”

“Laos?” I asked.

“Yeah, damn straight. Pathet Lao mothers can be wicked.”

“Quit it all ready,” I snapped. “Slopes didn’t get Thurman. He could’ve wasted a platoon of them with his fucking knife.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. A jungle cat or something.”

“Sheeeit.”

“Well, it wasn’t Charlie.”

In about five minutes, we continued on.

“How far?” I asked Barber.

“Be there soon.”

I’d heard that one before.

The terrain wasn’t bad at any rate. It was high ground, dry, without an overabundance of brush. Just enough so there was plenty of cover, but you didn’t have to hack your way through.

It was weird, though.

The closer we got, the deader things became: no animal sounds, no insects…nothing. I didn’t like it. Something was telling me we were in the shit and it was getting deeper every minute.

We pushed on.

I can’t honestly tell you what that fear was like. It was just this cold dread that made my blood feel like ice water. It was in every cell of my body, shivering. I’d known fear before, I’d lived with it day in and day out over there, but never anything remotely similar to what was in me that day.

I was ahead of Barber and Roshland by then, walking the point. Every step was worse than the last. I wasn’t worried about VC or NVA, but something else entirely. I just didn’t know what.

Ten minutes later, I stopped dead.

I motioned Barber and Roshland forward.

I wanted them to see what I saw, because I was beginning to doubt my own eyes.

They came up behind me and I just pointed.

“Shit,” Barber said.

It was hanging all over the trees and bushes —long, gooey strands of transparent slime that looked like snot. The air was pungent with its scent: sharp, acrid, like ammonia. A dirty yellow mist was steaming from the stuff, collecting along the jungle floor in patches of ground fog.

“What the fuck?” Roshland said, prodding a dripping mass with the barrel of his 60. The stuff sizzled as it contacted the metal.

“What is it?” I asked Barber. It was obvious from the drawn look on his face that he’d seen it before or at least knew what it was.

“Laughing Man,” was all he would say.

“What’s that?” Roshland said. “What the hell is that?”

“Bad shit,” I said under my breath.

Laughing Man was a defoliant.

The Air Force had high hopes for it at first, but something happened and they canceled the project. That was the official version… and the rumors took off from there. This Laughing Man shit didn’t kill the foliage like it was supposed to, at least not right away. It took a few weeks to work.

In the interim is when the nasty things happened.

The inhabitants that came into contact with it sort of went insane and killed each other off. There were all sorts of rumors concerning cannibalism and self-mutilation. What I knew was mostly hearsay and some crazy shit a Marine Recon told me at a bar in Saigon. He and about eighteen or twenty other Recons had to lead a team of Agency spooks up north to a village the Air Force had accidentally sprayed with the stuff. He told me that Laughing Man was no defoliant, but a biological contaminant. He’d heard the spooks whispering about it. A biotoxin.

When they got to the village, no one was left: the entire population was dead, about twenty-five men, women, and children. The place stunk to high heaven; all those bodies had been lying around in the summer humidity for nearly a week. Most of ’em were bloated and decomposed and some had been eaten. The spooks opened up a few cadavers and found the stomachs full of half-digested bits of human anatomy. A few had been stripped to the bone by their fellow villagers. Some of the bones had been snapped open, the marrow sucked out.

Others were just gnawed to hell.

It was like a fucking slaughterhouse, he said.

Later that night, as they headed back to the LZ, loaded down with body-bagged villagers for further testing, an NVA patrol came at them. Obviously, they had been dusted by Laughing man, too. They were wired. They didn’t have any weapons… and their eyes shined yellow in the dark. Just like Christmas bulbs, the Recon said. They were foaming at the mouths like rabid dogs. The Marines blew ’em to hell with everything they had: light machineguns, automatic rifles, SMGs, shot guns, grenades—and still the bastards came. He said he emptied a full clip into one gook and still the little fucker crawled at him like a piece of Swiss cheese. The Marines managed to hold them back long enough to get to high ground and call in an artillery strike on those crazy slopes. The gunners back at the fire station pounded the shit out of ’em with their 105s.

It turned out later they weren’t North Viets at all, but an ARVN Ranger patrol. Laughing Man turned them into killers and they didn’t give two shits what uniform you wore. Everyone was the enemy.

That’s all I knew and it was enough.

Obviously, the Air Force was still spraying the shit. I had a good idea why we were supposed to waste that village.

“Maybe we should turn back,” I said to Barber.

He shook his head as I knew he would. “I’ll take point,” he said. “Don’t touch any of that crap.”

“Goddammit, Davis, what is that shit?” Roshland demanded.

“Bad-ass defoliant,” I told him and moved out.

The jungle thinned out as we went, dry and dead. Laughing Man was sticking to the canvas of our boots like mucus. The ochre fog was everywhere. We were breathing it in. I could feel it burning my throat and nasal passages. It was too late to turn back by then; we were all contaminated.

Land of the dead? Goddamn right.

About that time, Barber and Roshland started getting to me.

I knew I was tired and possibly even messed-up on Laughing Man, but they were starting to look funny. Like they’d changed or something. They seemed thinner, their eyes never blinking. Their skin had a strange ashen hue to it. I hoped it was my imagination. I really did.

Roshland and I were following Barber single file, a good distance behind.

We could see him moving through the dead brush very cautiously. Suddenly, he stopped. He gave us a hand signal and crouched down behind a bush. Something was directly ahead and I had a pretty good idea it wasn’t the village. Roshland kept flashing me these odd grins every time I turned around. His eyes were glazed over. They were like the eyes of a dead fish on a beach. He looked like he was fucked-up on some of that nasty Cambodian shit… except worse.

Barber gave us another signal and we crept forward. It was just some freaking zipperhead with a rice-picker hat on. He was walking towards us, stumbling drunkenly.

He didn’t have any weapons that I could see. But there was something wrong with him—we all sensed that. I think maybe it was the way he walked, kind of shuffling as if he were blind, his hands clawing the air in front of him.

Barber told us to spread out, which we did, each of us crouching behind a dead bush.

The guy shambled forward and Barber stood up, waiting for him. His fingers were on the trigger of his Stoner. When the guy got within a few feet of him, we all saw what his problem was. He was blind. In fact, he didn’t have any eyes whatsoever, just two bloody sockets.

“Shiiiit,” I heard Roshland say.

Barber let go of his Stoner and snaked a hand behind him, clasping the grip of the machete he had slung on his rucksack.

The slope staggered right at him, his hands hooked into claws and waving wildly. Barber side-stepped him and the guy’s dough-white features were hooked in a manic sneer, lips pulling back from gnashing yellow teeth. It was then I noticed that his fingers were blood-stained, like maybe he’d torn out his own eyes. Maybe Laughing Man had shown him things he didn’t want to see.

Barber held the machete out in front of him.

My finger was sweating on the trigger of my AK. I had a bead drawn on the gook’s chest and I wanted to waste him, but Barber had his own ideas. He stepped into my field of fire like he knew what I was doing.

The gook made another unsuccessful lunge at him and Barber swung the machete at him. It went through the rice-picker hat with a crunch and split the crown of the head beneath like a melon. The gook went down, flopping and snapping his teeth like a mad dog. By all that I’d seen of men dying—and it was considerable—he should’ve been dead. But he wasn’t. He was on the ground, screaming and howling. Barber moved in for the kill, chopping and hacking at the guy’s head until there was nothing left above his shoulders but a few pounds of bloody meat.

When Roshland and I got there, Barber was just standing there studying the gored blade of his machete.

“Commander,” I said, “let’s go.”

Barber nodded, wiping his machete in the grass and sliding it back into its sheath. “Village should be over that next ridge,” he muttered.

Roshland was giggling.

We moved out together.

They were both fucked-up and I didn’t trust either of them, so I didn’t want them on point. And I didn’t want them behind me, so I didn’t walk point either. Barber didn’t object: he and command had parted company. I didn’t think there was any harm in us moving as a group; everything was dead.

As it turned out, Barber was right.

The village was just over the ridge. It wasn’t much. Just eight or ten hooches set up on stilts, a small stream, and a few feeble-looking paddies flanking the treeline. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. The air was still, soundless, not even the cry of a jungle bird disturbed it.

It was eerie.

And hot. Sweat was rolling off my brow and stinging my eyes. I prayed for a breeze, but none came. It wouldn’t have helped any; the heat wasn’t what was making me sweat—it was the hush, dead feeling of the place. I prayed then for normal worries. Even an ambush would’ve been welcome. After the other vil and what we’d seen since… I expected only the worst.

We emerged from a small stand of trees and set about checking out the hooches. I always hated crawling up those ladders and peering inside. Usually there was little more than a couple of children or an old woman huddled in the corner, but sometimes you found yourself staring down the barrel of a Russian rifle. That happened to me once. Whether it was fate or God or the tooth fairy, I don’t know, but the gook’s rifle jammed. I pulled him out of there and snapped his neck. I was lucky that day. Very lucky.

This time, however, they were empty.

A couple of wooden bowls and a straw mat or two were all that we found. And it was strange even finding those things. Usually, if the slopes abandoned a village for one reason or another, they’d take anything that wasn’t tied down and some things that were.

No, this was all wrong. They were around somewhere.

The knowledge of that really made me start to sweat.

After we re-grouped, Barber said, “I don’t understand this. I just don’t… know… I don’t know…”

“Bandits got ’em,” Roshland suggested.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Where are the bodies?”

He shrugged. “Out in the jungle. Who cares?”

“Let’s take another sweep around,” Barber said. “Then… then we’ll see… I guess…”

I just looked at him “Fuck that. I’m going to check the perimeter,” I told them. “Then I’m heading for the LZ with or without your sorry asses.”

Roshland shook his head. “Take it easy, bro. Everything’s cool here. Just mellow.”

“Damn yer black ass,” I said and moved off into the jungle.

There was a possibility I was freaking out, but I didn’t think so. Roshland and Barber were contaminated with Laughing Man and I was positive of that. I didn’t know how long I had until it got to me, too. I hadn’t opted to check the perimeter merely to satisfy myself that the area was safe… I had to get away from them. I couldn’t stand looking at them any longer.

They were starting to look like living dead men.

I was creeping around, moving from bush to bush, when I saw the hut. I wasn’t sure why it was set off in the jungle away from the others. Possibly, it was a weapons stash for the VC or just a food stash. I had to know either way. I approached it cautiously, my finger stroking the trigger of the AK. I checked around the door for any trip wires and went in. It was pitch black in there. Or had been. Now a shaft of sunlight sliced a path through the murk.

Thurman was in there.

He was bound around the ankles with a length of hemp rope and suspended two feet off the ground from a bamboo tripod, his hands tied behind his back. His skin looked like old cheese and his eyes were sunken in. He was dead, but I had to make sure. I prodded him a couple of times with the barrel of my rifle… and he moved. His lids snapped open and he leered at me with yellow, venomous eyes.

“Davis,” he croaked. “Cut me down, man, cut me down…”

It was then I noticed his throat was slit.

It was open beneath his chin, like a grinning, lipless mouth. I could see the tissues in there, dead and bloodless. As I aimed my rifle at him, I imagined what it must have been like for him. The slopes tied him like that, cut his throat, and fed on him like a bunch of fucking vampires. But he wasn’t allowed to die, to rest, Laughing Man had seen to that.

Clenching my teeth, I put the barrel of my AK against his forehead and emptied the clip.

I staggered back outside and threw up.

I thought about going to get Roshland and Barber, but I knew it was pointless. If my gunfire hadn’t brought them charging through the jungle, nothing would. Pulling off my boonie hat, I wiped the sweat from my face. After a good pull from my canteen and a couple of salt tabs, I felt a little better. Functional, at any rate. I dug in my breast pocket and got out my pack of Lark’s. I slipped one between my lips and sat there smoking, not thinking about a thing. When I was done, I butted it against a stone and buried it.

Then I went back into the hut.

I cut Thurman’s mangled body down and rolled him into the corner. There was a straw mat on the opposite side of the floor and I tossed it aside. I was looking down the throat of a tunnel. I dropped my pack and rifle and shotgun, took out my .45 and went down.

The walls were sticky and damp. It wasn’t made for a larger body, so I barely fit. I slithered through there until my back was sore and I was slicked with clay. All I had for a flashlight was a small penlight. Down there, it seemed pretty bright. It was hard moving, crawling through there. My head kept bumping into the low ceiling and my shoulders brushed the walls. After what seemed about an hour, I came to a room.

It wasn’t very big. Only about four feet from floor to ceiling and twice that in area.

I could smell the bodies before I saw them.

Their reek was awful. There were about three or four of them sprawled on the floor, chewed to shit. Their faces were gone, nothing but skull left. They had been VC once. I saw what was left of their black pajamas and a few AK-47s half-buried in the mud.

Then I saw the girl.

She was crouched among them, hugging herself. Her blue-black hair was tangled over her face. She looked at me. A crusty blob of snot hung from one nostril and her eyes had no pupils. She was drooling.

“You boom-boom me, numba one?” she asked.

I put two slugs between her eyes and left the dead alone to do whatever they do in the darkness.

Out in the sunlight, I headed back toward the village.

I went back to where I left Roshland and Barber, but they were gone. I was close to panicking now; it had all been just too much. I ran from hootch to hootch shouting their names. But they were gone. I found Barber’s Stoner machine gun lying at the edge of the forest, but nothing else. They’d gone through the jungle, I could see that much. Either gone or been taken. Maybe if I’d been sane, I would’ve gotten out of there right then. But all that training was too ingrained in my mind; I couldn’t leave my comrades. SEALs didn’t leave other SEALs behind. I’d dragged the bodies of fallen team members through miles of jungle more than once.

I spent the next hour looking for Barber and Roshland.

I patrolled through the jungle in an ever-widening search grid, but I didn’t find jack shit. Just more and more jungle, all dead and silent as a mortuary. I went back to the vil and made my plans. I should’ve evaded to the LZ, but Barber and Roshland, they were my friends. I couldn’t leave them. I found a ridge outside the vil that was heavy with undergrowth. I hid in there, set up a nice little OP, observation post. I told myself I’d give them until dark to show, then I was outta there.

Just after sunset, I was still there. I was watching the village with my Starlight scope, expecting something. Before too long, the villagers started showing up—singly at first, then in twos and threes, and finally in roving gangs. I could hear them down there howling and hissing and shrieking. Like animals. I saw Barber and Roshland in their company. Even in the murky green field of the Starlight it wasn’t hard to pick out a tall Caucasian and a heavy Negro amongst those small Asians. After a time, they wandered off into the jungle.

But I didn’t sleep.

I kept watch, waiting for dawn. It was the longest night of my life, just waiting and waiting for sunup so I could get out of there. The night belonged to them; there was no question of that. They were hunters. Even with all my training, all my experience, I knew I was no match for them. Off and on I could hear screams, gunfire, shouting. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Maybe some gook patrol had run into the villagers. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to know.

Just before dawn, it started to rain. Before long it was pouring, turning the landscape muddy and sloppy. At first light, I went down into the village. It was dead and empty. Thurman’s body was gone. I started patrolling through the jungle again, ankle-deep in mud, soaked to the skin, and finally I found a path beaten through the knife-grass. You had to be really paying attention to see it. I followed it for about three clicks to the top of a forested rise. In the distance, I could see other villages spread out. But I didn’t bother with them. If there were still people in them, then it was best I stay away. One heavily-armed man is still one man.

But I knew they were empty.

I figured that’s what all the commotion had been in the night, those things attacking the villages.

I followed the trail up and down through the hills until I finally found what I was looking for: a cave. It was set into the wall of a craggy, overhanging bluff. Creepers grew over the rock like ivy, they hung in knotted ropes over the entrance. I almost missed it. But when I saw it… yeah, I knew where the things, those rabids, were hiding.

I brushed aside the dangling jungle and peered inside. It was very dark, so I checked it out with my light. The slopes were real good with caves, tunnels, that sort of thing. You’ve heard about that. You give ’em a nice deep hole and pretty soon they’ve got themselves a dandy ammo dump or ordinance drop. Sneaky little fucks even ran hospitals and weapons factories, command posts and intelligence networks right out of the ground.

I was armed to the teeth, but I wondered if it was enough.

I had my pump shotgun in a sling at my side, my AK slung over my back, and Barber’s Stoner LMG. I could do a lot of killing, but I knew that eventually they’d overrun me by sheer numbers and ferocity.

It was good to be out of the rain, but it stank in there—age, mildew, a wet rotting smell. I didn’t like any of it; I knew I was wading into the shit. But I had to see, had to find out, before I killed them and maybe myself, too.

The entrance was barely five feet in height. The first hundred feet or so you had to crawl on your hands and knees, but then it opened up. It was huge. A shadowy, gigantic mausoleum. Stank like death, like blood, like things much worse. I kept my mind on the task at hand; once you got the spooks, you were done.

There were pooled columns of volcanic rock, stalagmites and stalactites, shattered slabs of stone that had fallen from above. But what you really had to watch for were the sudden chasms in the floor that dropped down farther than my light would reach. But the cave itself wasn’t really too dark: there were crevices and cracks in the rock above and fingers of sunlight filtered in, sickly beams clotted with dust. I found a natural archway at the far end and slipped through.

The smell of death was stronger now.

I was in another passage, maybe six, seven feet in height, twice that in width. It was dank and smelling. Water was dripping somewhere. I could hear things from time to time—skitterings in the darkness, clawing sounds, squeakings. Rats and bats, I figured. Such a place was perfect for them. I came upon a colony of greasy black mushrooms growing from a rent in the rock. A pool of gray slime was leaking from them. They were huge things, like footballs. I’d never seen anything like them before. I stepped over them and one brushed the back of my leg. It was oddly warm like a newborn, pulsing with life. It made my fucking skin crawl. I started wondering what else Laughing Man was mutating.

The walls were narrowing, the ceiling drooping. The air was so thick with damp it was hard to breath. There was moss growing everywhere. Although I saw no bats, there were puddles of guano I sloshed through, alive with roaches, black beetles. In places the stuff was four, five inches deep, a livid, crawling carpet of insects. But there were bones in there, too: human, animal, covered in fungi where they poked from the filth.

I came into another chamber that was huge and vaulted. The floor began to slope downward, black stinking water coming up to my knees. The surface was scummy with clots of graying mold and bat shit. Above, bats were roosting in the darkness. I could hear rats go splashing away at my approach. I played my light around and saw more bones bobbing in the water. Jawless skulls, shattered ribcages, femurs punctured with teeth marks.

I could hear a continual buzzing sound and soon saw why. Flies. Hundreds and hundreds of them lighting about the twisted forms in the water. I saw limbs, heads, gutted torsos. The remains of last night’s raid, no doubt. But bodies didn’t bother me; I’d been wading through them for nearly two years by that point.

What bothered me was that I was in a hive.

I panned my light around and I saw, yes, I saw them. I saw dozens of yellow eyes shining in the darkness, all glaring out at me with hatred. They were everywhere, the villagers. Two of them came splashing and hopping in my direction, screeching like birds of prey, their rabid jaws snapping open and close. I sprayed them down with the Stoner and they dropped into the water. But the thunder of gunfire had wakened the others. The sweating walls were honeycombed with passages, worm-holes. The rabids dragged themselves out, filthy and wild, black with dirt and dried blood. I started shooting and screaming, emptying the magazine of the Stoner quickly. There was no finesse in what I did; I popped off rounds like some cherry in his first firefight.

The water all around me (up to my hips by that point) began rippling and churning.

There were wet squealing sounds and growling noises erupting everywhere. Yes, they’d heard me coming and had been waiting for me in the water. They rose up all around me, those white faces swimming at me, fingers hooked and deadly, eyes livid with hunger. I started shooting with the AK and the shotgun, firing in a crazy arc. They would drop away, but not die. Nearly cut in half, they would not know death. I fought my way through their ranks and fell stumbling into that stinking water. I felt their white, clutching hands pulling at me.

I fought free and dragged myself out into the passage.

I saw Roshland and Barber now. Their pallid, bloodless faces were split by jagged grins. They called my name and pushed forward with the others. My skin went hot, then cold, then hot again at the sight of them. My head was thundering with noise. I pulled a pair of white phosphorus grenades from my belt, popped the pins, and threw them behind me, into the chamber. I ran maybe ten, twelve feet and then there was a heaving explosion, followed by another and the acrid stink of phosphorus. The cave was brighter than midday, fire belching in every direction, engulfing the rabids in blankets of flame. I heard them howling and mewling and it drove me nearly insane. But I only heard it for a second or two and then there was a huge, rending explosion and a wave of heat lifted me up and tossed me ten feet through the air. I crashed into the cave wall and went out cold.

I came to sometime later and all was quiet.

My head was bleeding and I was singed, much of my hair burned off… still hasn’t come back as you can plainly see.

The air was pungent with the sickening stench of cremated flesh. I figured the chamber must have been full of gases from the putrefying flesh and guano. Enough to trigger one hell of an explosion when the white phosphorus ignited. The chamber had caved-in, burying those things which men and women should never lay eyes upon. I got out of the cave, finally falling drunkenly into the morning air. The rain was still coming down and it felt so good.

I don’t remember much after that. Just running and running, night and day, sure they were behind me, whispering my name.

Somehow, they told me later, I bumped into a Lurp patrol and they got me out. The next four months I spent in a naval hospital in Hawaii.

Specifically, in the psych ward.

Nobody believed me.

Or so they said… but somehow that didn’t jibe with all the visits I got from the brass, the debriefings. And it sure as hell didn’t jibe with the visits I got from a team of doctors who I knew for a fact worked for the Agency or all the comprehensive medical exams they gave me. If I was in a psych ward being treated for battle fatigue, why all the goddamn tests? Did they really think I was fool enough to believe you treated such a problem with constant blood, skin, and bone marrow samples? What about all the antipsychotics—lithium, thorazine, phenobarbitol, other names I couldn’t even pronounce—why those specific drugs? And how about that team of Agency doctors (who, by the way, went by the sterile names of Smith, Jones, and Johnson) who pumped me full of drugs at one in the morning and dragged me away to some place that looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s wet dream and gave me brain scans for three days?

No, I’ve since talked with other vets who suffered battle fatigue and they never got the attention I got. They considered themselves lucky if a doctor stopped by every few days. Me? I had my own team of specialists.

There was this one grunt in the ward. Ramirez was his name. He knew what Laughing Man was. He said he’d heard through the grapevine that they’d quit spraying it because a handful of slopes that had been exposed went psycho and wiped out an Air Cav platoon up along the DMZ. A correspondent for the New York Times had been along on the patrol. They never did find his head.

I received an honorable discharge, the Navy Cross for reasons never made clear, and was sent home. Thirty years ago now. And that’s it, people, all I can tell you about what I saw, what haunts me to this day. Crazy? Maybe. But that don’t mean I’m wrong. Just look around you. Thirty years and half a world away.

Now it’s come home.

God bless America.