“God knows. It could happen.” The body eased back into its original position with a creepy creaking sound, like leather. Its mouth had closed halfway. “If you want to put ‘evidence of VC torture’ in your report, your body count, I’ll initial it.”
“What do you mean by that, Captain?”
“Exactly what I said.” He kept staring at the major while he flipped a cigarette into his mouth and fired it up. Non–filter Camels; you’d think a guy who worked with corpses all day long would be less anxious to turn into one. “I’m just trying to get along.”
“You believe I want you to falsify—”
Now, “falsify” is a strange word for a last word. The enemy had set up a heavy machine gun on the other side of the clearing, and we were the closest targets. A round struck the major in the small of his back, we found on later examination. At the time, it was just an explosion of blood and guts, and he went down with his legs flopping every which way, barfing, then a loud death rattle. Frenchy was on the ground in a ball, holding his left hand, going, “Shit shit shit.” He’d lost the last joint of his little finger. Painful, but not serious enough, as it turned out, to get him back to the World.
I myself was horizontal and aspiring to be subterranean. I managed to get my pistol out and cocked, but realized I didn’t want to do anything that might draw attention to us. The machine gun was spraying back and forth over us at about knee height. Maybe they couldn’t see us; maybe they thought we were dead. I was scared shitless.
“Frenchy,” I stage–whispered, “we’ve got to get outa here.” He was trying to wrap his finger up in a standard first–aid–pack gauze bandage, much too large. “Get back to the trees.”
“After you, asshole. We wouldn’t get halfway.” He worked his pistol out of the holster, but couldn’t cock it, his left hand clamping the bandage and slippery with blood. I armed it for him and handed it back. “These are going to do a hell of a lot of good. How are you with grenades?”
“Shit. How you think I wound up in Graves?” In basic training, they’d put me on KP whenever they went out for live grenade practice. In school, I was always the last person when they chose up sides for baseball, for the same reason—though, to my knowledge, a baseball wouldn’t kill you if you couldn’t throw far enough. “I couldn’t get one halfway there.” The tree line was about sixty yards away.
“Neither could I, with this hand.” He was a lefty.
Behind us came the “poink” sound of a sixty–millimeter mortar, and in a couple of seconds, there was a gray–smoke explosion between us and the tree line. The machine gun stopped, and somebody behind us yelled, “Add twenty!”
At the tree line, we could hear some shouting in Vietnamese, and a clanking of metal. “They’re gonna bug out,” Frenchy said. “Let’s di–di.”
We got up and ran, and somebody did fire a couple of bursts at us, probably an AK–47, but he missed, and then there were a series of poinks and a series of explosions pretty close to where the gun had been.
We rushed back to the LZ and found the command group about the time the firing started up again. There was a first lieutenant in charge, and when things slowed down enough for us to tell him what had happened to the major, he expressed neither surprise nor grief. The man had been an observer from Battalion and had assumed command when their captain was killed that morning. He’d take our word for it that the guy was dead—that was one thing we were trained observers in—and not send a squad out for him until the fighting had died down and it was light again.
We inherited the major’s hole, which was nice and deep, and in his rucksack found a dozen cans and jars of real food and a flask of scotch. So, as the battle raged through the night, we munched pâté on Ritz crackers, pickled herring in sour–cream sauce, little Polish sausages on party rye with real French mustard. We drank all the scotch and saved the beer for breakfast.
For hours, the lieutenant called in for artillery and air support, but to no avail. Later, we found out that the enemy had launched coordinated attacks on all the local airfields and Special Forces camps, and every camp that held POWs. We were much lower priority.
Then, about three in the morning, Snoopy came over. Snoopy was a big C–130 cargo plane that carried nothing but ammunition and Gatling guns; they said it could fly over a football field and put a round into every square inch. Anyhow, it saturated the perimeter with fire, and the enemy stopped shooting. Frenchy and I went to sleep.
At first light, we went out to help round up the KIAs. There were only four dead, counting the major, but the major was an astounding sight, at least in context.
He looked sort of like a cadaver left over from a teaching autopsy. His shirt had been opened and his pants pulled down to his thighs, and the entire thoracic and abdominal cavities had been ripped open and emptied of everything soft, everything from esophagus to testicles, rib cage like blood–streaked fingers sticking rigid out of sagging skin, and there wasn’t a sign of any of the guts anywhere, just a lot of dried blood.
Nobody had heard anything. There was a machine–gun position not twenty yards away, and they’d been straining their ears all night. All they’d heard was flies.
Maybe an animal feeding very quietly. The body hadn’t been opened with a scalpel or a knife; the skin had been torn by teeth or claws—but seemingly systematically, throat to balls.
And the dry one was gone. Him with the pointed teeth.
There is one rational explanation. Modern warfare is partly mindfuck, and we aren’t the only ones who do it, dropping unlucky cards, invoking magic and superstition. The Vietnamese knew how squeamish Americans were, and would mutilate bodies in clever ways. They could also move very quietly. The dry one? They might have spirited him away just to fuck with us. Show what they could do under our noses.
And as for the dry one’s odd, mummified appearance, the mold, there might be an explanation. I found out that the Montagnards in that area don’t bury their dead; they put them in a coffin made from a hollowed–out log and leave them aboveground. So maybe he was just the victim of a grave robber. I thought the nearest village was miles away, like twenty miles, but I could have been wrong. Or the body could have been carried that distance for some obscure purpose—maybe the VC set it out on the trail to make the Americans stop in a good place to be ambushed.
That’s probably it. But for twenty years now, several nights a week, I wake up sweating with a terrible image in my mind. I’ve gone out with a flashlight, and there it is, the dry one, scooping steaming entrails from the major’s body, tearing them with its sharp teeth, staring into my light with black empty sockets, unconcerned. I reach for my pistol, and it’s never there. The creature stands up, shiny with blood, and takes a step toward me—for a year or so, that was it; I would wake up. Then it was two steps, and then three. After twenty years it has covered half the distance and its dripping hands are rising from its sides.
The doctor gives me tranquilizers. I don’t take them. They might help me stay asleep.
Part 1: WARTIME SYSTEMS
In the Loop
Ken Liu
WHEN KYRA WAS NINE, HER father turned into a monster.
It didn’t happen overnight. He went to work every morning, like always, and when he came in the door in the evening, Kyra would ask him to play catch with her. That used to be her favorite time of the day. But the yesses came less frequently, and then not at all.
He’d sit at the table and stare. She’d ask him questions and he wouldn’t answer. He used to always have a funny answer for everything, and she’d repeat his jokes to her friends and think he was the cleverest dad in the whole world.