by Wilson, David Niall; Brown, Tonia; Meikle, William; McCaffery, Simon; Brown, TW; T. A. Wardrope
In 1963, a frustrated Kennedy asked the Pentagon to mount subversive operations against North Vietnam––a job he felt the CIA had been bungling in the same manner as their farcical attempts to unseat a certain vociferous Cuban dictator. JFK didn’t live to see the fruits of his decision.
After his assassination Johnson ordered the Pentagon to form the Military Assistance Command Vietnam’s Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG, often shortened to SOG, or to those who participated in its covert atrocities and mud-caked fiascos, SLOG). SOG ran America’s covert war against Hanoi and the North from January 1964 until April 1972. Congressional oversight committees were told that SOG’s mission was to rescue downed airmen, transport captured enemy prisoners, and conduct supply runs throughout Southeast Asia. The real mission was a long series of clandestine operations inside Laos and Cambodia to disrupt activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nothing was off-limits. SOG opened Pandora’s Box, employing illegal and experimental warfare tactics throughout the region. They practically invented psywar––psychological warfare––and the use of POW double-agents and captured civilians. They staged commando black-ops raids, not discriminating between military and noncombatant targets. They managed the insertion and running of spies and fabricated guerrilla resistance. They planted radio-equipped seismic sensors along the Trail and flew cloud-seeding missions in the upper atmosphere to extend the monsoon season, hoping to drown Charlie inside his elaborate network of tunnels. They employed newly in-vogue “remote viewing” psychics to sit in small barracks rooms and visualize underground enemy movements and map the nightmare world beneath Cu Chi. And when aerosol rainbow herbicides like Agents Orange, Green and Blue didn’t force a withdrawal, SOG command authorized the use of ground-water biologicals like Agent Green-6.
Many of SOG’s diabolical schemes fizzled like cheap Chinese fireworks, but not all of them. Over 3,500 pages of MACV-SOG’s operational records were finally released in 1995, but all mention of Green-6 and the incident at Phu Bihn Valley was redacted.
Which is where I come into the story. My name is David Harris, MIT Class of ’67, double major in biochemistry and chemical engineering. After graduation I was recruited by my master’s advisor, a tenured professor who it turns out was consulting for the CIA. Don’t forget that the CIA founded the infamous Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies in 1950 and by the mid sixties was funneling millions of dollars into pre-DARPA weapons research programs. I was weary of my grueling academic life, and the thought of beginning a doctoral program made my head swim. I had worshiped JFK and wanted to do something important for my country.
By the fall, I was supervising my own lab in an anonymous Brookline Street warehouse in Cambridge, lavishly funded by––you guessed it––SOG.
* * *
Everything happens very quickly. At some point in the melee I turn to run, and feel myself lofted into the air like a rag-doll, my stomach and sanity falling away. My head snaps back and I see an ocean of sharp stars stitched by white-hot tracers from Weller’s RPK. Something in my left shoulder pops like a champagne cork. Something inhuman that smells a million times worse than the reanimated steer howls in ear-splitting pain, and I pinwheel down and down into the thick elephant grass.
Then Tompkins is shaking me, turning me over. I feel wetness but it isn’t blood, and I blush with shame like a first-grader.
Tompkins helps me sit up and I yelp with pain.
“Your shoulder’s dislocated,” he says.
He fixes that and I screech.
“Shut up,” he hisses.
Tompkins pulls me to my feet and I stare at the destroyed campsite. All of our tents and equipment, including the communications gear, have been flattened. The three remaining canisters of Green-6 are scattered thirty yards away, ruptured, their deadly cargo spilling out into the soil.
“Where are the others?” My ears are ringing and it is hard to form sentences.
“Gone.”
Underneath the Jackson-Pollock spattering of blood, Tompkins looks gray with shock, but he is methodically gathering up ammo and weapons.
Tompkins hands me an AK-47 with a fresh banana clip. The stock is slick with human claret.
“Hurry up, Harris. Let’s move out.”
“Move out where?”
“They’re not all dead.” He’s suddenly in my face, roaring. “My MEN. THEY’RE NOT ALL DEAD. Those things took them and we’re going to get them.”
“Who took them?” I say stupidly.
“The giant apes,” Tompkins says. He stares at me with scorn.
Of course I saw exactly what he saw, but I find myself, an earnest young Man of Science, denying it again and again, like Simon Peter. Had the apostle pissed his pants when the Romans came for him?
It dawns on me that there are no bodies lying among the debris––man or monster. Including the carcass of the twice-dead steer.
* * *
Years later, I understand that they weren’t monsters. At least, not until we slipped them an Agent Green-6 mickey.
In 1935 a Dutch paleontologist with the tongue-tying name of Dr. Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald purchased a yellowed molar among the “dragon bones” for sale in long wooden boxes in a Hong Kong pharmacy. For centuries, Chinese medicine men had used the dragon bones––fossil bones and teeth––to create arcane powders with curative powers. Von Koenigswald had discovered the tooth of Gigantopithecus blackii, a ten-foot, 1,200-pound uber-gorilla that lived alongside both H. erectus and H. sapiens 100,000 years ago in southern China, Dhok Pathan in Pakistan, and in limestone caves such as Tham Khuyen throughout Vietnam and Laos. “Black’s Giant Gorilla.” Over the years, intrigued scientists pieced together a description of these fearsome animals using nothing more than a set of jawbones and handful of very large teeth. Then in 1983, paleontologists unearthed a partial skeleton in the Sichuan provinces, and announced the discovery of a second primate species of even larger dimensions. Its height was estimated at fifteen to eighteen feet, drawing the predictable comparisons to a certain iconic Hollywood lovelorn ape. The team’s claim was widely refuted and shots were fired back and forth in academic journals for the next twenty-five years.
These massive cousins of Gigantopithecus were undoubtedly the creatures we encountered in the vast Phu Bihn Valley on the way to Son La and the Black River (dammed to form the Ho Song Da reservoir decades later), where the Vietcong’s buried pipeline delivered life preserving water to the deprived, half-starved troops living above and below the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Anthropologists later speculated that the giant primate’s extinction was hastened by competition with pandas for their staple diet––bamboo––or perhaps it was their inability to compete with the more nimble-minded, tool-bearing human tribes once they began venturing beyond their traditional river valley dwellings and invaded the higher elevation jungles.
Located in the heart of the Phu Bihn Valley is another cave complex more vast than Tham Khuyen. These freakishly overgrown gorillas probably migrated south thousands of years ago after bamboo became depleted, abandoning their subterranean kingdoms and the rounded limestone towers at Liucheng. Perhaps they were driven there by bands of fire-wielding tribesmen. Perhaps the dense jungle and mineral-rich peaks around Phu Bihn reminded them of their ancestral Chinese home.
Clearly, Green-6’s secondary effect on fatally disrupted mammalian central and peripheral nervous systems and neurotransmitters was wholly unintended. Night of the Living Dead wouldn’t be unleashed upon drive-in movie viewers at home for another two months, so I had no reference point for what I had witnessed.
Unfortunately for us, Gigantopithecus’ larger cousins were not entirely extinct by the mid twentieth century; they were tool-bearing gorillas, and Tompkins and I were not the first modern men to discover their lair.
There were giants in the Earth after all, and thanks to SOG, they now felt an insatiable new hunger.
* * *
“You’re making too much noise,”
Tompkins tells me for the second time, as we track the creatures across the grass-covered valley. Like their NVA counterparts, the Green Berets move silently across the most treacherous terrain the trail offers, but I’m stumbling along like a scarecrow. The third time I trip and go down on my face with a grunt, Tompkins pulls me up by my soiled camo jacket like a kitten.
“Get your shit together, college-boy. If you alert them, I’ll let them pull your arms off.”
We move on. The motto of the Special Forces is De oppresso liber (Latin: To Liberate the Oppressed). In the pit of my shaken, snow-globe stomach, I feel we are on a forced march to liberate the dead and digested, but I cannot bring myself to tell Tompkins this for fear of what he might do. Under a three-quarters-full moon we don’t need our two missing native trackers to follow the trail of crushed foliage, which is initially puzzling. A troop of giant gorillas would have long ago learned how to remain under the radar and not leave obvious trails crisscrossing the countryside.
We see the bodies of many birds of all sizes. Pigeons, swifts, owls, ducks, plover, and a large, beautiful falcon. All stone dead. Apparently Green-6 has a different effect on avian species versus mammals.
We keep walking. A lone, brown fox-like dog––a dhole––launches itself from the underbrush and Tompkins kills it with his boot heel.
“Just what in the hell was in the shit we dumped into the water?”
I say nothing, head down, miserable.
Exhaustion sets in. I try not to think of my warm apartment on the cheaper, rundown side of Beacon Hill, or Bethany, the long-legged girl I am dating. I concentrate on placing one boot in front of the other as quietly as possible.
Four klicks later we are ascending the far side of a deep ravine when Tompkins shoves me to the grass, knocking the wind out of my lungs. Despite my fatigue I’m furious, and I start to squirm and holler, but his hand clamps across my mouth. It stinks of sweat and the grease used to pack automatic rifles. He motions for me to be silent.
We huddle there for several minutes, and then I hear it––a soft whistling sound on the breeze. We can hear it because we have again entered a sphere of deathly silence. My heart begins kicking inside my ribcage.
Tompkins scrambles forward, motioning for me to follow. Ahead, the ink-black doorway to hell awaits, the thick vines and foliage that normally obscure the cave’s entrance carelessly pushed askew. Its damp, abyssal breath flows over us, and my panic spikes. Like the mainly Hispanic grunts asked to assume tunnel-rat duty beneath Cu Chi, I cannot go in there, even if means Tompkins will slice my throat open like the steer. Dawn cannot be more than an hour or so away. I try to frame an argument in my mind that we should turn back and hike to the next village to call for reinforcements (as if they will have a payphone). At a minimum we should wait until daybreak––
Tompkins unsheathes his serrated pig-sticker and cuts a ten-yard section of climbing cord from his pack. He ties one end around my waist and the other end to his belt.
“In case you slip or we get separated,” he says. He grips my lower jaw where the nerve endings sing, fixing me with wild eyes that reflect moonlight against his grim, black-streaked face. “Try to stay right behind me.”
Shaking but helpless, I shuffle forward into the creatures’ lair.
As a kid I read all the Tarzan novels, and the pulpy adventures penned by H. Rider Haggard––tales of swarthy swashbucklers exploring caves filled with diamonds, ivory, and gold. One look at the cavern system we are entering would have convinced Allan Quatermain and Captain John Good to punch out and beat a hasty retreat.
We half walk, half slide down a wide sloping incline covered in mud and leaves. Tompkins clicks on a small penlight with a red lens and plays it ahead as we carefully descend. After thirty yards, we arrive on a broad ledge overlooking a larger cavity. Tompkins crawls to the edge and briefly shines his light below.
He crawls back and shakes his head––no creatures in sight.
We take a descending passage to the right, red lamp trained low, following the enormous gritty footprints. The air grows chilly and moisture drips down.
On the floor of the first chamber, Tompkins shines his light skyward, illuminating a sizeable open space, the ceiling black with roosting bats sated from a night’s feeding. We trudge into a cul-de-sac, then backtrack through a shallow, freezing stream, and find a high-ceilinged passage leading downward. No more muddy footprints are visible on the other side.
We descend through several cavities until we arrive inside an otherworldly cathedral vault filled with massive, convoluted columns rising up to meet dangling rock formations seventy feet above our heads. A geologist’s fantasy of flowstones, stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws, and helictites fill the chamber. Our breath clouds in the freezing air. I feel like a field mouse standing inside a giant Tyrannosaur’s fleshless, dagger-toothed jaws.
A muffled noise ahead from the next chamber. Tompkins clicks off his light and we crouch in the clammy blackness, waiting, not daring to breathe.
A hammering sound, and a muffled cry of pain.
Tompkins turns around and clicks on his penlight. His fearsome scarlet face floats briefly in the gloom, as if he is about to deliver the world’s most terrifying campfire story.
“This is it,” he says, his lips hardly moving. “They’re up ahead. Make sure your rifle’s safety is off and whatever you do, don’t fucking shoot the men or me. If you panic and try to run, I’ll leave you here and you’ll never find your way out alive. Got it?”
I nod, my heart trip-hammering. In a second it will stutter out of rhythm and stop.
“When I give the signal, switch on the light under your barrel. Hopefully that will startle them long enough.”
Long enough for what? I wonder.
Tompkins unties the climbing rope and stows it. We creep forward and round the corner. Tompkins whispers, “Now!” and we fire up the lights strapped to our Kalashnikovs.
In traditional tales of the macabre, the author, if he or she is worth a damn, never fully reveals the monster. The more you don’t see––the more your cranked-up imagination is forced to fill in, drawing from its own reserve of childhood terrors––the better. But I wasn’t spared the sight of them, so why should you be?
What I see when we round the gigantic cone of slippery, textured rock is a thousand times worse than any shaggy Lon Chaney Jr. Universal Studios creature or jerky Willis O’Brien animation.
There are five of them, hunched in a rough circle around a mammoth shelf of rock. They turn slowly to look at the sudden source of illumination and I see that they all wear the same vacuous expression as the butchered steer. Their cavern nightworld is obviously fed by tributaries of the same stream we laced with enough Green-6 to dose the population of a good-sized town.
In the moment before their roars ricochet off the wet limestone walls, I gather some quick impressions. They are at least forty feet tall, with a gorilla’s thick raven pelt, massive torsos and large conical skulls. I note the deep-socketed eyes––now soulless––and protruding jaws lined with powerful square teeth designed for chewing tough vegetation. Now those wide, wrinkled vegetarian faces are smeared with gore and shreds of flesh and bone.
The stone buffet is littered with human and bovine body parts and bits of uniforms. One of the giant gorillas hoists one of Tompkins’ wounded men from a nearby pit and dumps him onto the makeshift table. The soldier––I think it is Evans––tries to scramble away, until a second gorilla pins him. A third gorilla brings down a huge flat ax-head of chipped stone, severing both of the soldier’s legs mid-thigh.
Tompkins howls like a banshee and advances, opening up with the AK-47. The gorilla holding the large cutting stone snarls and pitches backward with a deafening crash. Tompkins adjusts his aim and fires another burst and a second gorilla topples.
“Harris! Fire, goddamn it! Aim for the skull.”
I brace the rifle stock against my shoulder and sight on a third zombie gorilla. Squeeze the trigger an
d stagger forward. I scream above the roar of the gas-operated weapon as it sprays bullets into the beast and vaporizes a gallery of slow-drip millennium wall sculptures.
My wounded gorilla and the two remaining others retreat into darkness, probably into an adjoining chamber. I keep my rifle trained in that direction in case they charge. My breath comes in tight gasps and the barrel of my rifle trembles like a dowsing rod.
Tompkins scrambles up onto the stone shelf. Evans has bled out, both femoral arteries severed. Tompkins moves to the other side and peers into the pit.
“Harris, Weller is alive. Get your ass up here and help me.”
I lower my rifle and jog forward, and that is when a sapling-sized stalagmite sails out of the darkness like a prehistoric javelin and skewers Tompkins. He staggers backward, eyes and mouth wide, and disappears into the pit with a thud. I fire blindly into the void and then my clip is empty. And Tompkins has all of the spare ammo and grenades.
Silence, except for my rasping breath. The most intense terror arcs through my nervous system.
I hear muttering sounds and the shuffling of feet from the dark anteroom.
I imagine them bursting into view, their powerful black fingers grasping me, transporting me to the cold stone shelf in their great dining hall, holding me down while one of them butchers me like a chicken.
I rip free the flashlight from my useless rifle, wheel, and run. I hear––or in my panic imagine I hear––low hooting and grunts and heavy footfalls behind me.
I pass the body of the first gorilla and skid to a stop. I shine my light on the beast’s neck below its blood-soaked face.
Impossible.
I see a large gray plastic collar with a bulge on the side, battered and cracked, bearing a thin metallic plate engraved with a long sequence of Vietnamese script and numbers. It looks like a serial number.