We Heard Voices Under the Ground in Vietnam… Then Something Answered

We Heard Voices Under the Ground in Vietnam… Then Something Answered

The sweat wasn’t water anymore.

It had become a layer of old grease, a permanent film that lived between my skin and my soul.

I remember looking at my hands clinging to the scarred black plastic grip of my rifle and wondering if my fingers would ever actually uncurl again or if I had finally fused with the machine.

We were moving through a place we called the green throaT.

It wasn’t on any map you’d find in a library.

It was a topographical error, a vertical crease in the world where the canopy was so thick that the sun only reached the floor in jagged golden needles that seemed sharp enough to draw blood.

There were six of us or maybe seven.

By the second day of the blur, counting felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford.

The air didn’t move.

It just leaned on you.

It smelled of fermenting fruit, wet copper, and the peculiar sweet rot of things that had died a thousand years ago and were still being digested by the fernS.

“StoP.”

The man in front of me whispered.

I didn’t hear the word so much as I felt the vibration of it in the stagnant air.

He didn’t use a hand signal.

He just became a statue.

I followed suit, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

In the throat, sound was a traitor.

If you stepped on a dry twig, it didn’t just snaP.

It announced your coordinates to the entire mountain.

I looked down.

Right there, inches from his lead boot, was a silver hair.

That’s what it looked like, a single strand of a ghost’s hair stretched across the mud.

It was a tripwire, but it wasn’t connected to a grenade or a box of rusted nailS.

It disappeared into the hollow of a rotted stumP.

We stood there for what felt like an hour watching that silver hair.

The paranoia was a physical weight, a cold finger tracing the back of my neck.

In the jungle, you don’t just fear the enemy.

You fear the geometry of the treeS.

You fear that the vine hanging to your left isn’t a vine at all, but a trigger.

The man in front, we called him the weaver because he could find a path through a briar patch without disturbing a single leaf, carefully stepped over the wire.

I did the same.

My legs shaking with the effort of a slow high steP.

As I passed the stump, I peered into the hollow.

There was no explosive, just a small hand-carved wooden doll with its eyes painted shuT.

That was the first sign.

They weren’t just trying to kill uS.

They were trying to haunt uS.

The first flash happened at dusk, though dusk was just a darkening of the green gloom.

We had reached a small clearing, a place where the trees pulled back like a mouth opening for a scream.

We didn’t talk.

We just sank into the mud forming a tight circle.

I remember the taste of my own mouth, bitter, like I’d been sucking on a spent shell casing.

Then the silk ripped.

That’s the only way to describe the sound of the first volley.

It wasn’t a bang or a crack.

It was the sound of a giant invisible tapestry being torn in half right above our headS.

The muzzle flashes didn’t look like fire.

They were strobe lights flickering in the deep shadows between the ancient rootS.

They were white, violet, brief, and blinding turning the jungle into a series of frozen photographS.

Flash.

I saw a man leaning against a tree 30 yards away, his face obscured by a mask of leaveS.

Flash.

He was gone.

Flash.

A spray of dirt erupted near my elbow.

Flash.

The weaver was firing back, his heavy tool spitting rhythmic tongues of orange flame.

I pressed my cheek against the stock of my rifle.

The wood was hoT.

I started firing at the flickers, at the shapes that seemed to dissolve the moment you looked at them.

The noise was a solid wall.

It pressed into your ears until you felt a sharp stabbing pain in your brain.

“Move!”

“To the rocks!”

Someone screamed.

We scrambled.

The mud was a hungry mouth pulling at our bootS.

I felt a hot sting across my shoulder.

Not a bullet, but a splinter of bark kicked up by a round.

I didn’t feel the pain, only the heaT.

We found a cluster of moss-covered boulders that looked like the humps of buried giantS.

We crawled into the creviceS.

The flickering shapes followed.

They didn’t charge.

They danced.

They would appear for a second, a shadow against a shadow, and then vanish.

It was like fighting a fever dream.

The second day is where the blur truly began.

Time had stopped being a line and became a circle.

I remember the thirSt.

My canteen was a hollow mocking weight at my hiP.

We were pinned down in those rocks and the sun, somewhere above the canopy, was cooking the humidity into a thick suffocating steam.

The weaver was hunched over, his eyes wide and bloodshoT.

“They aren’t shooting to hit us anymore.”

He whispered.

His voice sounded like dry leaves scraping together.

“They’re shooting to keep us here.

They’re waiting for the throat to finish uS.”

I knew what he meanT.

The jungle was active.

The insects were a constant high-pitched hum that vibrated in your teeth.

Giant iridescent beetles crawled over our boots and the leecheS.

God, the leecheS.

They were silent, questing ribbons of black flesh that found every gap in our clotheS.

Every few hours, a single shot would ring ouT.

It would bounce off the rocks echoing until you couldn’t tell where it had come from.

It was a reminder.

“We see you.

We are still here.”

I started to see things in the flickerS.

I saw my mother standing under a willow tree.

I saw a dog I had when I was 10, its tail wagging in the tall grasS.

I knew they were hallucinations, the product of heat and the lack of sleep, but I welcomed them.

They were better than the reality of the gray-green walls closing in.

At one point, I looked over at the man to my lefT.

I don’t remember his name.

I only remember his eyeS.

They were fixed on a patch of fernS.

“Do you see it?”

He asked.

“See what?”

“The woman.

She’s weaving a rug out of the shadowS.”

I didn’t answer.

I just checked my magazine.

It was half empty.

I had three lefT.

We were out of food and the water in the crevices of the rocks was stagnant and filled with tiny swimming thingS.

We drank it anyway.

It tasted like old copper and earth.

The night of the second day was when the ripping silk returned with a vengeance.

It started with a whistle, a long low note that sounded almost like a bird, but with a human cadence.

Then the entire perimeter erupted.

The muzzle flashes were constant now.

It was like being inside a malfunctioning light bulb.

The shapes were everywhere.

They were crawling through the canopy, swinging on the vines, sliding through the mud.

I fired until my barrel glowed a dull angry red.

I didn’t aim at people.

I aimed at the flasheS.

I aimed at the places where the shadows seemed too thick, too intentional.

Someone next to me was screaming a long rhythmic wail that timed itself to the outgoing fire.

I realized it was me.

I was screaming at the trees, at the mud, at the flickering ghosts that refused to die.

Then a shape lunged over the top of my boulder.

It wasn’t a soldier.

It was a blur of gray cloth and a face painted with charcoal.

I didn’t think.

I swung the butt of my rifle.

I felt the impact, a sickening wet thud, and the shape tumbled back into the dark.

I didn’t look to see if it moved.

I just turned and fired into the brush until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

“Fall back, toward the stream.”

The weaver’s voice was a command from another world.

We ran.

We didn’t care about the tripwires anymore.

We didn’t care about the noise.

We were a panicked herd crashing through the undergrowth.

Branches whipped my face drawing lines of blood.

My lungs felt like they were filled with hot sand.

We hit the water, a shallow black ribbon of a stream that moved with a sluggish oily grace.

We scrambled across, the water splashing up into our faces, cold and shocking.

On the other side, the jungle changed.

The trees were thinner, the ground more jagged with volcanic rock.

We collapsed in a hollow beneath a fallen titan of a tree.

We waited for the silk to rip again, but it didn’T.

The silence that followed was worse than the noise.

It was a heavy expectant silence, like the breath before a sob.

The third day was a ghost story.

We wandered.

We had lost our bearingS.

The weaver’s compass was cracked, the needle spinning aimlessly as if the very poles of the earth had shifted.

The sun was a dull white bruise behind the cloudS.

The flickering shapes weren’t shooting anymore.

They were just there.

I’d turn my head and see a figure standing behind a trunk, only for it to turn into a cluster of hanging moss when I blinked.

We found a camp or the remains of one.

There were no tents, no fire pits, just six chairs made of woven vines arranged in a perfect circle in the middle of a trail.

In the center of the circle was a pile of our own empty brass casingS.

The kid, the youngest of us, a boy with skin the color of pale clay, started to laugh.

It was a high wheezing sound.

“They’re collecting us,” he said.

“They’re putting us in a book.”

“Shut up,” the Weaver snapped, but there was no conviction in iT.

We were walking through a dream.

I remember the smell of wood smoke, but there was no smoke.

I remember the sound of a woman singing a lullaby in a language I didn’t understand coming from the top of the canopy.

My feet didn’t feel like mine anymore.

They were just heavy weights that I had to swing forward one after the other.

I looked at my rifle.

It was covered in mud and ruSt.

I wondered if it would even fire.

I wondered if I even wanted it to.

Suddenly, the jungle opened uP.

It wasn’t a clearing.

It was a clifF.

A sheer drop into a valley filled with a white rolling mist that looked like a sea of milk.

We stood at the edge, the six or seven of us, looking out at the nothingnesS.

“Is this it?”

The kid asked.

Behind us, we heard the sound.

RiP.

A single muzzle flash, white as a star, erupted from the tree line we had just lefT.

Then another.

Then a dozen.

The silk was ripping again, but this time it was differenT.

The flashes were beautiful.

They were like sparks from a forge, lighting up the dark green wall of the throaT.

We didn’t hide.

We didn’t return fire.

We just stood there on the edge of the white sea, watching the flickering shapes move among the treeS.

They weren’t coming for uS.

They were standing at the edge of the woods, their weapons lowered, their faces invisible.

They were watching us leave.

“Go,” the Weaver said.

We stepped off the edge, not into a fall, but into the miSt.

It was thick and cool, smelling of nothing but damp earth.

I don’t remember the rescue.

I don’t remember the dragonflies with their screaming engines and their spinning bladeS.

I only remember the blur.

Sometimes, when I’m sitting in my chair at night and the power flickers, I’m back there.

I’m back in the green throat, feeling the grease on my skin and the weight of the black plastic rifle.

I see the silver hair of the tripwire.

I see the wooden doll with its eyes shuT.

The doctors told me the memory is a fracture.

They said the mind fills in the gaps with monsters when the reality is too much to carry.

They used words like trauma and dissociation.

But they weren’t there.

They didn’t see the silk riP.

They didn’t see the way the muzzle flashes turned the world into a series of static images, capturing the moment we stopped being men and started being shadowS.

I still have a scar on my shoulder from that splinter of bark.

Some days, it incheS.

And when I scratch it, I can swear I smell iT.

The fermenting fruit, the wet copper, and the peculiar sweet rot of a place that never wanted us to leave.

The shapes are still flickering in the corner of my eye.

I’ve learned not to look directly at them because I know that if I do, I’ll see that I’m still standing on that cliff, looking out at a sea of milk, waiting for the tapestry to finally finish tearing.