“Duncan, why don’t you go wash up in the kitchen and get a snack,” he said.
“I want to stay here with you and Mom, Grandpa.”
“Go on, Duncan,” Fran said. “This one is adults only.”
Duncan sighed, then plodded down the hall and through the kitchen door.
“I’ve only seen this three times.” Wiley spoke while threading the film through the projector’s sprockets. “The first time, back in Vietnam. Then twenty years ago, when I bought a video camera and transferred it to VHS. The last time was just a few months ago, when I made a digital copy on my computer.”
“Why don’t we watch it on one of those other formats?”
“Because both of those have large screens. This way, I can make the image small.”
Wiley frowned. Even small, it still hit like a sucker punch. But at least you didn’t see as much detail.
“Can you flick the wall switch?”
Fran pressed it, and the overhead fluorescents winked out. Wiley turned the knob to run and aimed the square of light at a blank spot on the wall. The image was half the size of a sheet of paper.
They watched.
The first shot was inside a helicopter, obviously in flight. The camera jerked and jolted, making a blurry pan across the faces of five men sitting in the bay. They all wore black uniforms, their expressions no-nonsense.
“Does this have sound?” Fran asked above the clackety-clack of the projector.
“It’s silent.”
“Who are these men?”
“A secret military unit. They aren’t wearing any insignia, but you can tell they’re U.S. by their boots and weapons. Plus it’s one of our choppers. And see there?”
Wiley pointed to a sixth man, standing by the door, looking smug.
“He’s got major’s stripes. These are our boys, no doubt.”
The film cut to the helicopter after it landed, the cameraman following the six others out of the bay and onto the ground. They were in a village, a poor one, surrounded by jungle. A handful of ramshackle buildings stood alongside a dirt road. Clothing hung on drying lines. Livestock roamed freely.
There were people in the village. Vietnamese peasants. They looked at the approaching unit with curiosity, some of them openly smiling. None of them ran away.
You should have, Wiley thought.
Another cut, and the villagers were being rounded up, gathered in the middle of the town. Over fifty in total.
Then the soldiers raised their M16s.
Wiley winced, knowing what was coming.
Villagers panicked but couldn’t escape their fate. The men in the black uniforms opened fire. The people began to drop.
“Notice they aren’t shooting to kill,” Wiley said. “They’re aiming for legs, so they can’t run away.”
When the whole town was on the ground, screaming, panicking, bleeding, the soldiers set down their guns and drew their knives.
The first peasant died by having his belly slit open. The cameraman got a close-up of his insides being yanked out.
“Oh, Jesus,” Fran said.
It got worse. Much worse. Throats were slit. Eyes gouged out. Limbs hacked off. Scalpings. Beheadings. Castrations. Skinnings. When the pregnant woman came onscreen, Wiley had to look away.
The cameraman had a hard time keeping up. He sometimes got in close to see detail work, other times pulled away to catch multiple atrocities happening at once.
Wiley glanced at Fran. She had her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. He looked back at the flickering image.
They were at the scene where the soldiers began to undress.
“Can I turn it off now?” Wiley asked.
Fran nodded. He reached for the knob and stopped the evil, grateful for the reprieve.
Darkness and silence filled the hallway.
“What happens next?” Fran whispered.
“The soldiers rape many of the people who are still alive. And some who aren’t. They don’t discriminate with age, sex, or orifice. Sometimes they even make new orifices. Based on the position of the sun in the shots, it went on for at least four or five hours. Then they kill the few who are still alive, dismember the bodies, put everything in a big pile, and set it on fire.”
“And then?”
Wiley took a deep breath, let it out through his clenched teeth.
“Then it gets kind of confusing. There’s a quick shot of them setting up charges, and then it jumps to a big explosion, and the camera spins away and dies out. I think the cameraman got too close before it blew, and he died. That’s how they lost the camera. But before that happens, it reveals the name of the village, on a sign. It was in South Vietnam.”
Fran turned on the lights. Wiley squinted against the sudden glare.
“South Vietnam?” she said. “We were fighting to liberate South Vietnam. They were our allies.”
“That’s why no one ran away when the chopper landed. They probably thought we were there to help them.”
Fran was silent for several seconds. Then she spoke a single word.
“Why?”
“When I saw the film the first time, I recognized the major. He was the man I went to after the war ended. I asked him the same thing.”
“What did he say?”
“He said the military was creating a new type of soldier. But before they went into the field, they needed to be tested. They picked a town that wouldn’t see it coming, wouldn’t fight back.”
Wiley turned the knob to reverse the film, keeping the bulb off. They both watched it slowly rewind.
“You went to the major to get money from him.”
Wiley didn’t answer. But he managed a slight nod.
“That unit,” Fran said. “Did it have a name?”
“The major called them a Red-ops unit.”
Fran stood. “Those fuckers outside. They’re a Red-ops unit, too.”
“I figured as much.”
“Why didn’t you expose this? Why didn’t you go to the press?”
Wiley had thought about that many, many times. He didn’t go at first because he wanted the money he thought he could extort from the major. But instead of paying, the major had sent two of his Red-ops team to visit Wiley, to get him to reveal the location of the film.
They worked on him for less than an hour. But they’d inflicted enough pain in that hour to last a lifetime. Nothing permanent had been done to him. Just squeezing. Hitting. Pulling. Breaking.
Wiley would have talked within the first few minutes, but the film was at his parents’ house, shipped back from Vietnam with the rest of his war booty. As selfish as he’d been in the past, as reckless and unconcerned for their feelings, he wasn’t going to let these animals get their hands on his parents. Even if it meant dying in agony.
He got lucky. The Red-ops soldiers the major had sent were geniuses at torture but pretty stupid otherwise. They talked slow. Repeated themselves a lot. Wiley convinced them the film was under his bed, and they believed him. When they couldn’t find it, they brought Wiley over. He reached into the hidden slit in his mattress, grabbed the gun he kept there, and killed them both. Then he hurried to his parents’ house, grabbed all of his stuff, and fled.
That had been the last time he ever saw them.
He could have gone to the press after that. But he was terrified that they’d find him. And they’d hurt him, and his mom, and dad, and brother. So he drifted around for a few years, coming back to Safe Haven after his folks had died, building this bunker where he separated himself from the world.
“You could have stopped them,” Fran said. “Even while you were hiding here. All you had to do was mail the damn film to one of the networks.”
Wiley told her the truth.