by John Shirley
The daily rain I had been cursing for weeks had saved me from a fiery death.
As I rolled onto my stomach, my eyes swept the viscous earth for my M16. There—six feet to my right, its muzzle submerged in a small pool of steaming, standing water. I dug in with my elbows and scrambled toward it until I could throw out one hand, grab its sling, and draw the rifle back into my grasp.
By then, the firefight was all over.
There had been nine of us. Now there were four. Charlie was missing at least one, but for this round, he had won the body count.
“Fucking VC bastards.” I recognized PFC Cothren’s voice, but I didn’t see him anywhere.
Behind me, a lanky silhouette tore itself from the mud beside the road. “Why the hell didn’t they finish us?”
“Listen,” came Sultan’s voice again, and then I saw him, stumbling out from behind a partially uprooted cypress tree fifteen feet away. He gazed up at an expanse of deepening purple sky, and I heard a low, distant thunder.
Heavy jet-engine sound.
Corporal Maile, our M60 machine gunner, appeared next to Van Buuren, cradling an arm. I saw blood on his shoulder. “B-52s.”
Van Buuren’s eyes flicked toward me. “You all right, Timmons?”
I nodded. “Wind knocked out of me.”
Van Buuren stumbled toward a couple of bodies lying next to the road. They were Delta, but I couldn’t make out their faces. The sergeant snatched a few ammo magazines from the bodies.
“Coming this way,” Maile said, his eyes still on the sky. “Low as hell.”
A moment later, I saw them. Three giant black birds in the sky, one after the other, barely above the treetops, heading directly toward us. They were so big, so heavy, they seemed to hang in the air, virtually motionless. I could feel the rumbling beneath the soles of my boots.
Something was wrong. The second jet’s wings were wobbling, and one dipped precariously, almost losing its lift before righting itself. Heading to Da Nang, I thought. It was the nearest airbase that could accommodate the heavy buffs. As the aircraft drew nearer, the engine noise pounded us like monstrous hammers, shattering all coherent thought. Gradually, the sound diminished, leaving my ears shrieking angry curses.
When I could hear again, Sultan was saying, “Radio’s a goner.” He held up a twisted bundle of metal and wire that I realized had been part of the PRC-25, aka the Prick, our portable radio unit. The damned thing was as tough as a tank; it must have taken a direct hit, probably from a Soviet-made SPG-9.
Which meant there was even less left of Hinkle, our Radio/Telephone Operator.
Four of us. Lost somewhere outside of Mai Loc, ten or more miles from the Demilitarized Zone. We were all that was left—as far as we knew—of 1st Platoon, Delta Company, 3/37th Infantry Regiment. October 29, 1969: our mission had been to patrol the jungle east of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Our three squads left base camp at 0600, split up at 1040 when we took small-arms fire, and then lost contact with each other. Throughout the afternoon, we had been making our way eastward, back toward LZ “Sigmund,” but the jungle, treacherous and devious, had outwitted us. Our maps worse than useless, we had only the vaguest idea where we were. So far, we hadn’t encountered any booby traps, but we knew they must be out here, lurking like lethal vipers. Our advance, of necessity, had been slow and cautious, but it had given Charlie the opportunity to gather, hit us hard, and vanish in the shadows.
We were in rugged, mountainous territory, and Charlie held the high ground.
Yeah, I was scared. More than I’d ever been. In my three months here, I’d seen some action, but nothing like this sudden, devastating ambush.
Sergeant Van Buuren had grabbed from the dead whatever gear, ammo, and water we could use. Sultan, our M79 grenadier, had bandaged Maile’s ravaged shoulder and was puzzling over our blood-and-mud spattered maps.
“This trail sure ain’t marked, but there should be a road—southeast of here. Quang Tri ought to be seven, eight miles.”
“Trail’s taking us north,” Van Buuren said, glancing westward. “We stay on this, we’re sitting ducks. Jungle’s a monster, but we’ve got to go east. We’ve got maybe an hour of daylight, so let’s use it. Timmons, take the point.”
Everything inside me screamed in protest, but I knew my duty. As we took up formation, I realized I still felt a subtle, almost subliminal rumbling beneath my feet, and it was becoming more distinct. Had the B-52s reversed course? The thundering grew louder, heavier, and a few seconds later, a single buff appeared directly above us, too low, banking too tightly. Its right wing dipped, pulling the fuselage over, and I could only watch in helpless horror as it began to spiral downward, scarcely a click to the east.
The impact threw us to the ground, and two seconds later, a terrific shock wave hammered us, toppling nearby trees and nearly rupturing my eardrums.
When the tumult inside my skull began to subside, I raised my head to see a cloud of black smoke roiling through the green canopy toward us. Then, from the distance came a silent, brilliant flash. Not fire or flames, but a blinding burst of color—purple, blue, gold, red, silver—all at once, like nothing I had ever experienced.
We lay there for untold moments, dazed and bewildered.
Corporal Maile was the first to speak. “What the hell were they carrying?”
Sergeant Van Buuren finally regained his feet, pointed toward the crash site, and then at me. “There’ll be teams crawling over that scene soon enough. Let’s be there to meet ’em.”
“What if Charlie gets there first?” Sultan asked.
Van Buuren hefted his M16. “What do you think we do? We shoot him.”
***
By the time we advanced a click through the jungle, the sun was gone, but the strange light ahead blazed like a beacon, sending misty, curling tendrils of indefinable color creeping through the trees. I kept wondering if something might be wrong with my vision, but we were all seeing the same thing: waves of shifting spectrums; coalescing masses of silver-green-violet light; strobing bursts of black energy that turned the whites of our eyes to bulging, luminous discs. I felt we were walking into a cloud of fallout from some new, unknown doomsday bomb, though if we had been radiated, it was far too late to escape its effects.
Surprisingly little fire and smoke remained now; the aircraft’s fuel tanks must have been near empty when it went down. We couldn’t yet see any wreckage, and I wondered whether the jet had mostly vaporized on impact. But a hundred meters farther on, I saw a distinctive, angular silhouette standing out against the spreading glow: the B-52’s vertical stabilizer.
The crash site was a smoldering clearing at least a hundred meters in diameter, over which the bizarre glow crawled and shimmered like living, phosphorescent liquid. Pieces of twisted wreckage littered the terrain like huge, charred tinfoil scraps. Of trees in the circle, only a few blackened stumps remained. We could see no sign of life, human or otherwise. Van Buuren directed me to move a dozen meters to my right, while Sultan went left, brandishing his M79 grenade launcher. Maile, in obvious pain from his shoulder wound, knelt next to the sergeant, who raised his M16 and started toward the edge of the open area.
“Sergeant,” Maile said, his voice low and hoarse. “Hold up. Look.” He pointed to his left, past Sultan. I saw it then: a luminous, misty mass, creeping like a ghostly centipede toward the trees. As the thing reached the standing trees, its color gradually faded from view, as if the thick foliage had somehow drained its vitality. For several moments, nothing further happened.
Then we heard a low, barely audible creaking, like an ancient wooden door swinging back and forth.
Though I felt nothing, I believed a breeze must have picked up as the uppermost branches of the trees I was facing began to sway back and forth—rhythmically, hypnotically. Then, as if in supplication, the branches, in unison, lifted themselves skyward, their leaves shivering and vibrating, their tips bending and twisting until they too pointed at the sky. A subtle tickling began in my ear
s, intensifying until it adopted a kind of cadence, giving me the impression the tree was somehow singing.
“More over there,” Van Buuren said, pointing to my right, and I saw more tongues of luminous, living mist worming into the jungle.
Within three minutes, most of the trees around us had raised their branches and begun to sing to the black night above.
Another hint of sound caught my attention, and, shortly, the deep growling of a diesel engine invaded the night like the voice of an angry tiger. However, we detected no lights or movement, and after a few moments, the engine sound shuddered into silence. From somewhere in the darkness behind me, I could hear the eerie wailing of a nightjar. Not one of us moved, spoke, or breathed.
Then, from the far side of the crash site, a dozen or more figures swept out of the jungle like giant, predatory insects, their sudden appearance as shocking to our senses as an enemy ambush. All wore uniforms we could not yet identify, each body limned by the ghostly color that oozed from the charred earth. They seemed unaffected by either the heat from the smoldering wreckage or the glow itself. None carried lights of any sort. As we watched, several of them appeared to sniff the air like curious dogs, and I realized something about the proportions of their bodies seemed off. To the man, their arms and legs appeared uncannily long and spindly, their heads oversized.
Van Buuren moved back toward me, holding one finger to his mouth. We crouched in tight balls behind the broad roots of a towering kapok tree and watched several tendrils of shimmering color waving at us as if sentient, some twenty meters away.
“ARVN uniforms,” Van Buuren said, indicating the newcomers were South Vietnamese Army. “But something doesn’t look right about them.”
I nodded my agreement. “Where the hell did they come from so fast?”
“Gotta be a road out there.” He gave a low snort. “Shows how good our maps are.”
From nearby, I heard a weak but high-pitched “treep-treep” sound: a passable, familiar imitation of a barn owl. Van Buuren and I looked toward Maile, who was pointing toward the far side of the clearing. From his pack, the sergeant produced a pair of binoculars and peered across the blasted expanse at a new arrival to the scene. A single figure, dressed in fatigues but, judging by his poised demeanor, a person of authority.
“American,” Van Buuren said. “Officer. Can’t make out his insignia. I don’t recognize him.”
The tallest of the South Vietnamese approached the Caucasian officer. One overlong arm rose and gestured with a strange arcing, twirling motion, and I could hear a gruff, querulous voice rattling across the distance, too indistinct to make out any words.
Another barn owl cry, sharp and insistent, came from my left — Sultan, trying to get our attention. A number of shimmering filaments were crawling with unmistakable deliberation toward his hiding place. The thick foliage shook and churned as he turned and beat a hasty retreat into the jungle. The weird tendrils curled and quested at the base of a huge tree before slithering beyond my line of sight.
To my right, more fingerlike projections of misty color were forming and snaking toward the underbrush, and I realized with horror that this living, sentient plasma was moving to flank us. Sick with revulsion, both Van Buuren and I backed into the surrounding clusters of ferns. I could see Maile leaning against his tree, his face a death mask in the alien glow. Blood was oozing from his shoulder again, and his knees were sagging, ready to collapse. His wound was worse than I realized.
Van Buuren started toward him, but Maile shook his head and motioned him back. I noticed now that several distant heads had turned our way, and one of the nearest figures, some sixty meters away, was pointing in Maile’s direction. They had spotted him, if not the rest of us.
Maile signaled us to stay put, and then he stumbled forward, just to the edge of the charred ground — less than a dozen meters from the nearest fingers of swirling, menacing color.
“Hey,” he called out, his voice weak. “Hey! I’m an American. I need help!”
I heard a sudden, deep rumble, like thunder, but I was certain it had come from beneath the earth. The nearest tendrils quivered and writhed. One of the distant figures disappeared into the trees, only to reappear moments later, carrying an object of some sort, which he handed to the American officer.
A megaphone.
“Stay where you are,” came a rasping, tinny voice. “Do not step into the crash area. We will come to you.”
“Shit,” Van Buuren whispered. “Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. I don’t want those bastards to know we’re here.”
“What about Maile?”
“He won’t give us away.”
A few seconds later, Sultan emerged from the darkness, his eyes brighter than flares. “God almighty,” he said, looking back the way he had come. “The trees! The trees are fucking moving.”
“We saw.”
“No,” he said, and I realized tears were streaming down his cheeks. “They’re coming out of the ground. Like … they’re walking!”
We both stared at him, disbelieving. I heard another rumble and then a series of creaks and groans, as if something huge were pushing its way through the jungle.
Our eyes reverted to Maile, who stood exposed, visibly shivering.
The amplified voice came again. “Someone will be there to help you in a few moments. Stay where you are.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a rapid movement—a shadow streaking through shadows—and a second later, Maile vanished, ripped from his place by something faster than a striking cobra. A sharp scream followed, mercifully cut short, and we heard a thudding, ripping sound as something dragged his body into the jungle. Moments later, everything went silent. Everything but the low, rhythmic creaking of trees, seemingly getting closer.
“That’s it, we’re moving out of here,” Van Buuren whispered. His face reflected the ghostly pallor of the mist creeping toward us through the plane wreckage. He jerked a thumb to his right, back to the southeast. “This way.”
Sultan and I fell in behind him, crouching low but moving at a clip, ignoring the prospect of booby traps or other hazards. However, I had barely gone a dozen paces when something snagged my left ankle and sent me sprawling. I went down hard, clenching my eyes shut, anticipating the quick, final sound of a grenade blast, or the agony of punji sticks piercing my chest. For several seconds, I lay in the cool mud, barely believing I was alive. Glancing at my feet, I realized I had stumbled over a thick, leafy vine.
I dragged myself upright, only to discover that Sultan and Van Buuren had passed out of sight. New terror hit me like a hammer blow, for despite my arduous physical and mental training, I had never truly conceived of being lost in the jungle alone. I had to quell the panic before it got the better of me. I knew Sultan and the sergeant couldn’t be more than ten paces ahead, and I could still see the leaves of the nearest vines swaying from their passing. I scrambled forward, keeping low, trying to regain my wits, intent on catching up.
Then I froze, as several meters in front of me, a pair of black shapes emerged from the foliage. Not Sultan and Van Buuren, but two of them—the uniformed strangers—as stealthy as spiders creeping up on their prey. They were not coming toward me but following the others. They had not seen me fall. My instincts screamed that these strangers had to be hostile. But rather than shoot them, I dropped to the ground and gave a loud, insistent barn owl trill. I didn’t know whether it would fool the pursuers, but it might afford Van Buuren and Sultan at least a moment’s warning.
I could only pray I hadn’t given myself away.
A second later, a single gunshot exploded in the night. A .45 pistol—Van Buuren’s, I guessed. Then I heard a scuffle, a grunt, and the crack-crunch of branches breaking.
Then only complete, baffling silence.
I wanted to scream. I’d had a split-second to open fire on the interlopers, and I had let them pass. I listened for several more seconds, heard nothing, and trilled a barn-owl query.
&nb
sp; No response.
To my left, a rustling rose amid the foliage, and then something gurgled, or growled. An animal? It couldn’t have been human, or so I thought, until I realized the guttural noises were forming syllables. Not English, and I didn’t think it was Vietnamese. But it was clearly speech, of a kind.
A second later, in English: “Bastard.” Sultan’s voice.
A deep thump and nothing more.
At least Sultan was—or had been—alive.
There was only one thing left for me to do.
***
I should have run blindly into the jungle and taken my chances. That is what I told myself. Yet, somehow, the prospect of fleeing alone through the malevolent darkness terrified me more than dying in a bitter firefight.
It was a bad choice, an awful choice, but marginally less horrifying than the alternative.
I skirted the eastern edge of the smoldering hollow, where the ghostly radiance had not yet spread. I clung to the belief that Van Buuren and Sultan were both alive, that we would all yet make it back to Mai Loc Base. Ten to one they were being interrogated even at this moment. So far, the strangers remained ignorant of my existence, and I was certain my life depended on keeping it that way.
The “road” was a narrow dirt track through the jungle, barely wide enough for a truck to pass. Fifty meters ahead, numerous points of light moved like lazy fireflies against the black backdrop. I could hear low voices, as well as occasional thumping and hammering. Behind and to my left, the alien glow continued to creep and curl like morning fog, still potent, still alive. I did not for one minute believe these strangers were a legitimate crash team, nor that they would be the sole responders. A cynical voice told me they had come to keep everyone else out—even our own military—presumably by force.
