Haunted House…

Part Six:

Here begins the jumbled part…things got disorganized and bumply, like a film shot while running through the woods. I remember rushing in to the sleeping area, and the first person my flashlight found was a 6’7” black private that I would one day see firing an M-60 machine-gun one handed while running forward. Now, he was on his back in a jumble of blankets and his sleeping bag, whimpering, comatose, tears streaming down into his ears. We looked around, and in the fell light that seemed to come from the …fog? Something was pouring out of their noses and mouths, straight up for a couple of feet above their faces, and then darkening and coalescing up in the rafters.

I bolted for the light switch panel and flipped them all. There were several pops as bulbs blew, but enough wan light flickered into life that we were able to see well enough to run from cot to cot, rousing them as best we could. It seemed as if we were running in a dream…our buddies began to stir and choke and then cough and some were starting to sit up with dazed looks on their slack faces and…

I remember being back in my own barracks, winded as if I’d just ran five miles, and there was the Senior Drill, E7, angry god of my life, looking like someone had just rousted him out of bed, wondering who he was going to kill first, and yet…yet…he had something more to his anger. Whatever that was permeating the air, our minds, nibbling at the edges of our souls, he felt it too, and it didn’t sit well on that reddened Scots visage. His eyes and the brim of his campaign hat flipped up past me over my shoulder, and I turned to see every man from across the way, bestraggling one by one through our main door, clutching armloads of blankets and gear, and looking for all the world like the GIs you see in photos from WWII, as they retreated from Bastogne. Our Platoon Sergeant stalked up to my big black man and asked, in a quiet tone, loaded with potential doom and destruction, exactly what in the blue virgin mary motherfucking fuck did these privates think they were on about? “We sleepin in heah t’nigh, s’ant fuhst class” was the answer he got, and that is when I stepped in and pulled my teensy weensy rank and asked the Mad Scotsman if he would please go into his office and speak with me. His eyes cut across me like light sabers, and he saw something in my face that said “Hey, Sarge, we are men, here, and you have been straight with me, and you know me well enough to know I’m not some young, dumb, full of cum dipshit like you are used to dealing with…whattaya say you let me save your ass and ours as best I can on this one…”

He jerked his chin towards his office down at the far end, and we hustled down there while the overflow guys, with suspicious lack of comment from the guys in my building, settled down in exhausted slumber, on blankets and air mattresses on the floor next to the other guys bunks. I left the other squad leaders to finish squaring things away as best they could in the middle of a nightmare, and I went in to talk with god.