The stifling night air was thick with moisture and filled with the chirping of so many crickets that it was almost deafening. Twenty one year old Sergeant First Class Bobby Singer sat suspended between two branches of a large conifer tree, his XM-21 tactical rifle with its Starlight scope resting on his lap. On the tail end of his second tour in as many years, he was now one of Alpha Company's thirteen cent killers and he was set to rock and roll.
In the Nam it was said, "We own the day, but Charlie rules the night." During the day, his unit went looking for the enemy but couldn't find them. At night, they came looking for Alpha Company and knew exactly where to find them.
The Marines at firebase Angel willingly, even gladly handed the night back to Charlie so they could relax and listen to "Riders on the Storm', get high and await the coming dawn and as always, Bobby Singer would be waiting between his men and Charlie.
Bobby never got high on anything other than the constant rush of adrenalin brought on by shooting and being shot at and he rarely slept more than an hour or two a day and more often than not he forgot to eat, even his favorite, the ham and motherfuckers that came in little green cans that were left over from the Korean War and as old as he was.
He mainly lived on the little packs of incredibly stale cigarettes that came with the c-rations that his buddies tossed to him. It was kind of like throwing chunks of meat to a lion in the zoo. The cigarettes kept him docile and happy.
His gaunt face and the dark circles under his slightly wild eyes scared most of the soldiers in his company and only the short timers who had gotten to know him over the long haul would have anything to do with him. They knew he was a stone killer who had been in Indian Country far too long but that it was a plus to have him as a friend and a huge negatory to have him as an enemy.
Charlie should have been let in on that little bit of info because every night Bobby would dress in subdued camo, religiously and superstitiously refusing to write his medevac number on the seat of his pants since the day he'd seen a soldier searching through a group of K.I.A. looking for a buddy of his.
The dead soldiers were pretty well messed up and could only be identified by the numbers written across their asses. The soldier had found his friend, the one he'd lent a pair of his pants to the day before, and after seeing his own id number laid out on the ground before him, spent the rest of the war wondering if the land mine that had killed his friend had really been meant for him.
If Bobby was going to die in the jungle, as he felt he probably would, he didn't want his body identified and sent stateside. He'd rather feed the tigers, some of which had grown incredibly fat on the flesh and bones of the fallen. So with his face painted black, he'd position himself outside the trip wires every night waiting for the first of the satchel carrying gooks to approach.
The rifle's suppressor would effectively muffle the sound and hide the muzzle flash so he could pick off enemy sappers all night long and if they came in numbers too many to handle alone, a well placed shot into one of the satchels, carrying the deadly explosives meant for the Marines, would tip them off and they would light up the night sky, the boys on the perimeter slicing and dicing anything caught standing with their 50 cals.
Placing the Starlight to his eye, he scoped the jungle ahead of him and the bulldozed area in front of the firebase. He was 600 yards to the left of the compound and up about eight feet when he first smelled it.
The jungle stank to high heaven most of the time with rotting vegetation but as the Marines pushed further north toward Hanoi and west toward Laos, it more often than not smelled of death. Bobby didn't think he'd ever get the smell off of him, not after 36 confirmed kills and just as many unconfirmed when he hadn't gone out with his spotter. But what he smelled now wasn't familiar and it reminded him of home and the sulfur smell of chemistry class.
The rank odor he smelled was nothing compared to the sounds he heard. It was screaming the likes of which he'd never heard before, not even as horrendous as the screams of the GI's the Viet Cong had been torturing until he and another thirteen cent'er had tracked them down and killed every last one of the motherfuckers before calling for a medical dust off of the wounded.
From the sounds of these screams, the rapid-fire shots from the AK-47s and the hysterical Vietnamese pleading, whoever was torturing these guys was evidently a master and on the side of might and right.
The hair stood up on the back of his neck and he signaling the forward ops position to let them know he was on the move. He dropped to the ground heading into the bush. He'd traveled less than a klick when he saw the orange glow of what appeared to be a flamethrower torching bodies on the ground and men still alive trying to run or crawl away.
When he looked to see if he could spot the good guys in the ring of light from the burning Viet Cong and dense underbrush, he jammed his hand into his mouth and bit down until he drew blood. It was the only way to keep from screaming hysterically and giving away his position as it turned glowing eyes to look in his direction.
And the jungle reached for him, tearing at his uniform, slicing his face as he ran in the opposite direction from which he'd come. He didn't know if he could outrun it or not, but he wouldn't lead whatever it was back to the firebase and he'd keep running all the way to Laos if he needed to.
That night he saw something in the jungle, something he couldn't fathom or explain but it changed what he believed and what he believed in forever.