We saw what he saw.
Somebody had dug a pit, scooped a hollow out of the earth. They’d dumped the bodies of fifteen or twenty villagers into it and burned them. What we were looking at was like some blackened mass grave of jutting limbs and screaming faces, bodies cremated nearly down to skeletons. And the smell… Jesus. Roasted flesh, charred bone. And something else, kerosene maybe.
Roshland looked at me, at Barber. “What the fuck, man?” he said, his voice breaking. “What the fuck is this all about?”
“Must’ve soaked ’em and lit ’em up. But why?” I said.
We turned away, each separately filing this away for future nightmares. The village was the sight of an atrocity we could only guess at. I was thinking about what that old lady said, about us going into the land of the dead and not coming back. She knew what we’d find. Maybe those VC with her had been the ones who’d done this, probably yesterday. But, for some reason, I didn’t think they had anything to do with the kid or the man. That was something else. The VC were more like… what? Damage control? Burning those bodies like plague victims, so some pestilence wouldn’t spread.
But that was crazy, right?
I started thinking about our target, the other village, wondering why the brass insisted we hit it in broad daylight. They’d even told Barber that under no circumstances were we to make contact at night. What the fuck was going on here?
“Let’s go,” Barber said, regaining his composure. “Whatever happened here, it’s not for us.”
Back into the jungle. Swamp. Hills. Insects. Brush so thick you had to crawl through it on your belly in spots. After a few hours of that, we spotted the river. The village couldn’t be too far. My back was aching from being stooped over for so long. It hadn’t been that sore since my first week of BUDS, frogman school.
We paused on the riverbank and looked around. Everything was quiet and serene. For a second there, I almost forgot where I was and what I was doing. All I could hear was the rushing of the water. It could have been a river back home in Michigan, save for the oppressive heat.
And it got hotter, too.
We crossed the river quickly, the cool water feeling great as it sluiced around my waist. I wished we could’ve submerged ourselves in there for awhile and cooled off. But that was out of the question: We had to cross it as fast as possible, just as we had been taught.
On the other side, we slipped into the jungle and paused while Barber checked out his funny papers.
“I wonder where Thurman is right now,” Roshland said. “Probably dead…all cut to shit by Charlie. We found a Lurp like that once, Davis, when you was still with Two. We were across the border on a recon patrol. Poor bastard was cut to pieces. Got himself caught in a booby trap—then they got him.”
“Laos?” I asked.
“Yeah, damn straight. Pathet Lao mothers can be wicked.”
“Quit it all ready,” I snapped. “Slopes didn’t get Thurman. He could’ve wasted a platoon of them with his fucking knife.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know. A jungle cat or something.”
“Sheeeit.”
“Well, it wasn’t Charlie.”
In about five minutes, we continued on.
“How far?” I asked Barber.
“Be there soon.”
I’d heard that one before.
The terrain wasn’t bad at any rate. It was high ground, dry, without an overabundance of brush. Just enough so there was plenty of cover, but you didn’t have to hack your way through.
It was weird, though.
The closer we got, the deader things became: no animal sounds, no insects…nothing. I didn’t like it. Something was telling me we were in the shit and it was getting deeper every minute.
We pushed on.
I can’t honestly tell you what that fear was like. It was just this cold dread that made my blood feel like ice water. It was in every cell of my body, shivering. I’d known fear before, I’d lived with it day in and day out over there, but never anything remotely similar to what was in me that day.
I was ahead of Barber and Roshland by then, walking the point. Every step was worse than the last. I wasn’t worried about VC or NVA, but something else entirely. I just didn’t know what.
Ten minutes later, I stopped dead.
I motioned Barber and Roshland forward.
I wanted them to see what I saw, because I was beginning to doubt my own eyes.
They came up behind me and I just pointed.
“Shit,” Barber said.
It was hanging all over the trees and bushes —long, gooey strands of transparent slime that looked like snot. The air was pungent with its scent: sharp, acrid, like ammonia. A dirty yellow mist was steaming from the stuff, collecting along the jungle floor in patches of ground fog.
“What the fuck?” Roshland said, prodding a dripping mass with the barrel of his 60. The stuff sizzled as it contacted the metal.
“What is it?” I asked Barber. It was obvious from the drawn look on his face that he’d seen it before or at least knew what it was.
“Laughing Man,” was all he would say.
“What’s that?” Roshland said. “What the hell is that?”
“Bad shit,” I said under my breath.
Laughing Man was a defoliant.
The Air Force had high hopes for it at first, but something happened and they canceled the project. That was the official version… and the rumors took off from there. This Laughing Man shit didn’t kill the foliage like it was supposed to, at least not right away. It took a few weeks to work.
In the interim is when the nasty things happened.
The inhabitants that came into contact with it sort of went insane and killed each other off. There were all sorts of rumors concerning cannibalism and self-mutilation. What I knew was mostly hearsay and some crazy shit a Marine Recon told me at a bar in Saigon. He and about eighteen or twenty other Recons had to lead a team of Agency spooks up north to a village the Air Force had accidentally sprayed with the stuff. He told me that Laughing Man was no defoliant, but a biological contaminant. He’d heard the spooks whispering about it. A biotoxin.
When they got to the village, no one was left: the entire population was dead, about twenty-five men, women, and children. The place stunk to high heaven; all those bodies had been lying around in the summer humidity for nearly a week. Most of ’em were bloated and decomposed and some had been eaten. The spooks opened up a few cadavers and found the stomachs full of half-digested bits of human anatomy. A few had been stripped to the bone by their fellow villagers. Some of the bones had been snapped open, the marrow sucked out.
Others were just gnawed to hell.
It was like a fucking slaughterhouse, he said.
Later that night, as they headed back to the LZ, loaded down with body-bagged villagers for further testing, an NVA patrol came at them. Obviously, they had been dusted by Laughing man, too. They were wired. They didn’t have any weapons… and their eyes shined yellow in the dark. Just like Christmas bulbs, the Recon said. They were foaming at the mouths like rabid dogs. The Marines blew ’em to hell with everything they had: light machineguns, automatic rifles, SMGs, shot guns, grenades—and still the bastards came. He said he emptied a full clip into one gook and still the little fucker crawled at him like a piece of Swiss cheese. The Marines managed to hold them back long enough to get to high ground and call in an artillery strike on those crazy slopes. The gunners back at the fire station pounded the shit out of ’em with their 105s.
It turned out later they weren’t North Viets at all, but an ARVN Ranger patrol. Laughing Man turned them into killers and they didn’t give two shits what uniform you wore. Everyone was the enemy.