A Good Man Goes to War

Vietnam wasn’t as bad as everybody said it was.  Well, that’s what I thought to myself when I got to the pristine beaches and a borderline cookout was set up to greet us.  The United States Military sure as hell knew how to set up a reception party for their boys.  In my opinion, that’s what killed more FNGs than anything.  Sure, they heard the warnings from their COs and NCOs but why would something so bad have cookouts?  Come to find out, it’s the same reason why we fought guerrilla troops like they were the German infantry and made sure our boys had their ice cream rations in WWII.  They wanted to prove a point.  They wanted to flex their muscles and prove their military prowess.  Their goal was not to win, just to show off.

Regardless, my perception of Vietnam quickly changed when I got in my first firefight.  Nothing can prepare you for actual combat.  All the training in the world couldn’t prepare you for the sheer chaos.  There’s a reason why experience trumps training, because only experience can make somebody used to something like that.  And by a little bit of luck and a little bit of smarts I quickly got used to firefights.  I don’t know if it was because of being on my own after my parents died or because of some weird inherited trait, but I was always able to find my way out of trouble.  Some little tick in the back of my head telling me something was off.  It could just be that being on my own forced me to trust my own gut and nothing else.  Either way, it made for a damned good soldier.

I got plenty of medals for outstanding service, but not a single purple heart.  The worst injuries I got were generally from stupidity on my part, but never inflicted on me by somebody…or something else.  The thing with Vietnam is it was…different from the States.  Charlie had a knack for digging tunnels, Chu Chi tunnels, and ambushing us using them, but unlucky for them I had a knack for eyeing them before they got the chance.  We’d use flame throwers or white phosphorus to take them out.  The tunnels that had Vietcong in them felt fine to me after we sent in the fire, but there were some… well I had a feeling there was something still in there.

There were plenty of instances where bodies showed up without a mark on them.  The Docs always had explanations for how they died, but the bodies didn’t feel right.  Sometimes they had looks of pure terror, but other times they looked blissful.  All I knew was the explanations those quacks gave me were wrong.  Their explanations were just a way for them to not look stupid rather than a true explanation.  There comes a point where someone receives too much schooling and they become afraid to not know something.  So, they bend facts to fit a theory rather than embrace the unknown.  The things that really proved there was something wrong in Nam were the people who went missing, but nobody remembered ever having met them.

I was laying against a log, drifting into a sort of sleepy fog one day.  That happened sometimes, but in quiet times like this I liked to embrace it.  Everything in this one moment was perfect with the sun warming my face and my boys sitting around me armed to the teeth and willing to protect me with their lives, and I was willing to do the same for them.  They were all around me, all of them.  Both of them.  But there was that feeling at the back of my head.  Were they all around me?  Both of them?  No, all of them.  All three of them should be around me but there were only two of them here.

“Where’s Lew?” I asked them.  I remembered.  He went for a piss but never came back.

“Who’s Lew?” Johnson asked.

I laughed.  “Ight, stop fucking with me.  Where’s Lew.”

“You okay, Mason?” Bozzy asked.  “We don’t know a Lew.”

I was about to continue, but I bit my tongue.  That feeling in the back of my head was there telling me to shut the hell up.  I needed to laugh it off and play along.  The sad thing was the same shit happened to Bozzy a week later.  Then Johnson a week after that.  Soon, my boys were gone.  That shit hit hard, but I had a long tour left.  From now on, I had to keep numero uno safe because there was something else out there.

After about half my tour, I wound up making some new boys but I made sure not to get too close in case the same thing happened to them that happened to Lew, Bozzy, and Johnson.  I used them mainly for camouflage so I wouldn’t stand out in my company.  A man sitting by himself was an easy target whether it be dish duty from your CO, a Charlie sniper, or whatever the hell got my old boys.  There were other instances of those weird disappearances, and for whatever reason I could remember them when nobody else did.  It didn’t matter much for the war effort though.  More young men just filled the ranks that the MIA left open.

One night, our camp was ambushed.  We were holding them off okay.  I took out a couple of Charlie myself, but I was getting that same feeling in the back of my head.  There was something off here.  I had to get moving.  I started shuffling, but movement out of the corner of my eye drew my attention.  I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized it was just the tree shadows swaying with their master in the wind.  But that feeling was still there.  It was telling me to get away from the shadow.  For a rare moment, I hesitated.  Why was I feeling afraid of a shadow?  It finally dawned on me, too late unfortunately, that there was no wind to make the trees sway.  In fact, the trees weren’t swaying at all.  But just like that, the feeling left me.

The firefight ended pretty soon after that, and we rounded up our dead to ship them back to the states.  All my boys were alive and accounted for, so I was satisfied.  That morning, March 30th 1965, an Armistice was called.  Two weeks later and President LBJ signed in an end to US involvement in Vietnam.  I was going home.  When I got home, I was met with praise and adoration from the Civies.  It was like I was in a dream.  Soon, I met the love of my life, a tall woman with curly brown hair and beautifully pale skin.  Her name was Charlotte.  We got married within a year and had a baby on the way two years after that.  I didn’t think I could be happier than my wedding day, but that all changed the minute that baby boy was born.

My life was perfect.  I was pulling in good money working as a detective, raising my boy, and married to my best friend.  But there was that feeling in the back of my head.  Ever since I saw that shadow, I got the feeling everything was off.  I felt like I had unfinished business back in Vietnam.  I thought about what happened to Lew, Bozzy, and Johnson every once in a while.  I thought about all those untouched bodies popping up, both US and Charlie alike.  My life was perfect right now, but it just felt off.

One day I was walking my boy, Samson, to baseball practice after school.  He was about eight, just finishing his recovery from a chicken pox party.  His face had scratch marks from the pox, but at least he was immune to it now.  I grabbed the back of his neck, giving it an affectionate squeeze.  The missus was frying up chicken for dinner tonight, and I felt my stomach rumble at the thought.  But just like that, everything was ripped away from me.

I sat up, my entire body in pain.  Dirt covered my face and I looked down to find blood poking through my shirt.  I looked around me to find it to be nighttime.  I was behind the same barricade I was behind all those years ago.  I looked down at my hands to find them ten years younger.  I peeked over the barricade to see bodies littering the ground all around me.  Next to me, shrapnel was suspended in the air as something writhed on the ground in agony.  A shadow moved with the contortions of the suspended shrapnel.

Everything was gone.  My wife.  My boy.  My life.  I didn’t care about anything except for my family, and that was ripped away from me.  For a moment, I felt my brain melting.  Everything was gone. Everything. Everything.

Everything.

But I was pulled back to reality as a bubbling rage welled in my gut.  This creature writhing in agony from a mortar shell had taken my life from me.  It brought me back to Nam.  These disappearances, my boys, my fucking goddam family were all taken from me because of these things.  I was done with the running.  I was done with the hiding.  These fuckers were going to pay.

For the next couple of months, my rampage was biblical.  I figured out the shadow creature that had touched me was one of a whole bunch of those fuckers.  The mortar shell that killed the thing had an iron casing, so I knew iron could kill them.  At first, I thought I’d have to kill them with knives, but I found that simply touching them with a descent amount of iron would kill them.  I spent whole nights filing down gun barrels into a fine sand, then putting it all into a bucket.  Once I knew what to look for to find those shits, I would set up a ring of those buckets around me and let those fuckers surround me.  Then I’d set off the small explosives I’d put in the buckets, and it would rain iron all around me.  I found out it wasn’t just those shadow people either.  There were things disguised as deer but would run towards gun fire, things that looked like sticks but when you looked away the stick would look completely different, and even things that looked like people but didn’t act like people.  That was just scratching the surface of creatures I learned about.  Conventional weapons of war worked against those ones.  It was things like shadow people I had to get crafty with.  There were things, invisible things, that could control people.  They would lead them into the woods, and everyone would forget they ever existed.  I called those things Pied Pipers.  They were impossible to see, but they emitted a very cold aura.  In the Vietnam Jungle, it was pretty easy to locate them.  From there, a mixture of iron dust and salt would take care of it.  Salt wouldn’t kill them, but I found that it hurt them really bad if they touched it.

I found that once I started making a reputation for myself, they would band together and try to kill me.  I used that to my advantage.  I would get them to chase me, and I’d run right into a Chu Chi Tunnel I had snuck into the night before and laced with my special iron bombs.  I’d mix in shrapnel and a little napalm to take care of the tangible creatures.  The Chu Chi Tunnels weren’t too hard to sneak into so long as I was dressed like Charlie and kept my face hidden with some dirty bandages, a pinch of dirt, and a helmet.  As the creatures got distracted from me and began to…feed, I’d detonate my bombs and kill two birds with one stone.

As the months wore on, my rage couldn’t be satiated by just killing.  Those fuckers took everything from me.  I began to capture them and keep them on one of the abandoned Chu Chi Tunnels.  Salt worked great on most of them, but silver worked better on the ones that looked like people.  Come to find out, they were vampires.  They screeched and screamed, but we were underground.  There was nobody to hear them except me, and I loved every minute of it.  After a while, I’d get board and let them stew for a bit before I killed them.  Let them live out the last couple hours, waiting helplessly for my sweet embrace.  That’s when they started telling me things.  Little tidbits of information.  I came to learn about what they were and how they killed.  I learned more about their unique weaknesses, and why iron hurt them all.  Iron sapped their magic, and magic maintained many of their body’s cellular processes.  Silver hurt the ones who were humans but afflicted with a mutagenic magical disease like vampires and werewolves.

There was one notable thing I did learn.  One day as I was pouring salt onto a shadow person, it managed to scream out two words.  “It’s…Real,” It screamed into my mind.

I stopped dumping salt on it.  “What do you mean?” I asked.

The shadow person began to brush off the suspended salt in the air, its shadow moving in conjunction with it’s movements.  “It’s real,” it repeated.  “The dream you had.”

“Explain,” I commanded.

“You…humans think that when we touch you, we simulate a dream while we steal your life force.  We don’t do that.”

“Then what the hell did I experience?” I asked, the anger of having my family referenced by this creature bubbling to the surface again.

“Another dimension.  The optimal timeline for you.  When you were forced to wake up, you had died in that dimension.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“I give you my word.  Us magical creatures are bound by our word.”

“Do you swear to continue to tell me the truth?” I asked, not trusting that this was real.

“I do.”

“Then would I be able to see them again?  Would you be able to put me back?”  If it said yes, I wouldn’t trust it, but I would follow up with that lead.  If it said no, then I might start to think this whole magically bound by their word thing was real.

“No.  That timeline moves much faster than yours.  In the two minutes it takes me to sap your life, you would have lived out the rest of your life in that timeline.  Your family is long dead,” it said with a laugh.

I quickly thrust an iron tipped spear into it, sapping away the magic that sustained its consciousness.  The creature died quickly and painlessly, which was my mercy to it for giving me useful information.  I put on my salt laced gloves and unshackled another from the wall and threw it into the cage.  I began to pour salt onto it, letting the screams resume.  This was the beginning of my transformation from a mindless killer of the supernatural into a smart killer of the supernatural.

As the months wore on, some even began to swear fealty to me, promising to serve and protect me for all time.  I killed the first couple who made those promises, but then a thought occurred to me.  I could use them.  I could use them to kill other magical creatures.  I accepted one deal with a vampire, just to see how it worked.  It explained to me that magical creatures were magically bound by their word, confirming what the shadow man had said.  Of course I didn’t believe him at face value, so I had him kill himself just to make extra sure.  When he did, I knew it must be true.  Vampires were selfish by nature, so it wouldn’t sacrifice itself like that just to convince me of a lie.

I accepted a couple more deals.  Some only wanted me to have them protect me, which I allowed.  Others were willing to do anything.  I found that ramping up the torture made them more…willing to strike a deal.  The ones who gave their will over to me completely presented challenges that I hadn’t even imagined.  When a creature agrees to give it’s will over to someone, the person who is receiving their will has to dominate it with their own first.  It’s as if the creature invades your mind and you have to squash it into dust.  I found out after I completely dominated my first magical creature that it was a last-minute ploy to try and kill me.  It did not succeed.

After the magical creature’s will is dominated, it’s as if that creature no longer has a will of its own.  It requires almost no will on my own part to keep it dominated, meaning I was free to go and subjugate more magical creatures.  But each creature I dominated took its toll.  At first, I was limited to having just five creatures under my will at any one time, but as my skill at dominating magical creatures increased, so did my willpower itself.  I soon found that I could have ten creatures under my will…and then twenty, thirty, fifty, and so on until I didn’t know what my true limits were.

The creatures under my direct will were very useful in helping me to capture and/or kill magical creatures.  As time wore on, I gathered an army of magical creatures sworn to me.  I became so adept at controlling them, commanding them was like moving my arm. When my tour in Vietnam came to an end, I couldn’t bring most of them back with me, so I instructed them to continue to kill the magical creatures in the Vietnam Jungles and to never harm another human.  Those whose contracts with me were not subject to my direct will I simply killed.  I did bring back several shadow people and a Pied Piper with me, instructing one of the shadow people to remain in my shadow.  If anything threatened me at close range, the shadow person was instructed to feed off of it.  I brought back a whole host of creatures I called wraiths.  They were able to completely take over the body of a person.  That person remained conscious the entire time, and the wraith fed off that person’s fear.  They were ethereal creatures that I could not directly see or hear, but I could communicate with them through vampires and detect them by the chill in the air they brought with them.  Once I had them dominated, it didn’t matter if I couldn’t see or hear them. They were subject to my will, and as a result I knew exactly where they were and what they were thinking at all times. I had some ideas for these creatures for when I got back to Boston.

I expected that once I left the Jungles of Vietnam, I wouldn’t encounter any more supernatural.  I got back states side and enrolled in the Boston PD, and I spent about two years working as a beat cop while I worked my way to becoming a detective like in my old life.  I also began setting my plans in motion with the creatures I had brought back with me.  During those two years I noticed similar things to what I noticed back in Nam, but also different.  I noticed buildings that nobody else seemed to pay attention to, but they did when I pointed it out to them.  I noticed vampires, witches, and pied pipers but I also noticed creatures I had never encountered in Nam.  They were smarter…more subtle in their approach to hunting their prey.  Creatures that seemed to gravitate towards cities.  I certainly had my work cut out for me.