He wasn’t supposed to stay, just borrowed one patrol. That was the plan. We were running crossber operations out of Quantum in late ‘ 69. MACV SOG, studies and observations group, though everyone knew what that meant by then. The name was bureaucratic camouflage, the kind of label that made senators comfortable during appropriations hearings.
We went places that officially didn’t exist, did things that officially didn’t happen, and wrote reports that officially disappeared into filing cabinets that officially weren’t there. We were good. We knew we were good. Had to be. The teams that weren’t good didn’t come back. And their mistakes became lessons for the rest of us. Every man on a Masi VOG team, had survived selections that most special forces candidates never even heard about.
We’d trained together, bled together, learned to read each other’s movements in the dark. We moved through the jungle like we owned it. Then they sent us an Australian, not assigned, borrowed, some exchange program between commands that existed on paper somewhere, designed by staff officers who thought cross-pollination of tactics would benefit everyone.
One patrol, they said, see how the other side works, learn something, share techniques, then he goes back and we get on with our war. Sergeant SAS, older than most of us, maybe 35, which in that jungle felt ancient. Most of us were in our early 20s, a few pushing 30. The Australian had lines around his eyes that didn’t come from smiling.
He showed up at the FOB with less kit than our radio operator carried. No extra magazines strapped everywhere. No grenades hanging off his webbing like Christmas ornaments. No knife strapped to his boot, no extra cantens, no personal modifications to his gear. Just his weapon, basic load, water, like he was going for a walk. We looked at him.
He looked at the jungle. Didn’t say much. Our team leader introduced everyone. The TL was from the Midwest. Career Army, three tours in country, and working on his fourth. Solid man. Didn’t take chances, but didn’t hesitate when it mattered. He’d kept us alive for 8 months, which in MOG terms was a geological epic.
The Australian shook hands, nodded, found a corner to check his gear. Methodical, quiet, the kind of quiet that isn’t shy or uncertain, just conserving. like he understood that words were expendable resource and he wasn’t interested in wasting them on pleasant trees. We briefed the patrol route standard 5-day reconnaissance package. Cross the fence.
Move to a trail junction deep in the operational area. Establish an observation post. Count traffic. Identify unit types. Collect intelligence. Get out clean. No heroics. no contact if we could avoid it. The mission was eyes and ears, not trigger fingers. The Australian listened, asked two questions, both about water sources, not about enemy strength, not about extraction points, not about fire support or alternate LZ’s. Water. The TL glanced at me.
I shrugged. We crossed the fence at Oto 300. The first thing you noticed about the Australian was his pace. We move fast. That was doctrine. Get in. Get deep. Establish your auron before first light. Speed was survival. Every minute near the border increased your chances of compromise. The longer you stayed shallow, the more likely you’d stumble into a patrol, a listening post, a trail watcher who’d get on a radio and bring the world down on your head.
So we moved, not running, but pushing, aggressive, confident. The Australian didn’t rush, not slow, just measured. Each foot placed deliberately, testing weight before committing. He moved like he was reading the ground through his boots, like the jungle was a language written in dirt and leaves, and he was translating as he went.
After 20 minutes, the TL looked back. We’d opened a gap. The Australian was 50 m behind, still visible in the green darkness, but lagging. The file had stretched. The TL stopped the patrol. We took a knee. Standard halt procedure. Security out. everyone listening waiting. The Australian closed up, didn’t apologize, didn’t explain, didn’t offer any excuses about the terrain or his kid or needing to adjust anything.
Just took his position in the file. Fourth man back where we’d slotted him. We moved again. Same thing. Gap opened. This happened three times before dawn. The third time, our point man whispered to me, “He going to make it?” I didn’t know. The point man was Oklahoma born farm kid, phenomenal in the bush. He could read terrain like some men read newspapers, anticipate obstacles before they appeared, find game trails that made movement easier.
If he was concerned, that meant something. But I didn’t have an answer. The Australian was here. We were stuck with him. All we could do was adjust. We reached our aon just before light broke. Standard procedure. Set claymores. Establish watch rotation. Eat cold. Sleep in shifts. The Australian found a position on the perimeter.
Didn’t need to be shown where. Didn’t need to be told what sector to watch or how to orient himself. Just read the terrain and took the spot that made sense. a position with good visibility and covered with draw. I had first watch with him. We sat there as the jungle woke up.
Birds first, always birds, then monkeys crashing through the canopy, shaking branches, making noise that covered every other sound. Then the insects building to that constant wall of noise that became the soundtrack of every day. By full morning, the jungle was a living thing, breathing and moving and screaming at frequencies that made your teeth hurt.
The Australian didn’t sleep. He watched, not scanning the way we were taught. Not that mechanical left, right, left pattern that every military in the world drills into its people. just watching like he was waiting for something specific, like the jungle would eventually tell him something if he paid attention long enough.
“You always move that slow?” I asked quietly. Everyone else was trying to sleep, and sound discipline applied even in the Aon. Fast enough, he said. That was it. No explanation, no defense, no lecture about proper field craft or Australian tactics or how we Americans always rushed everything and missed the important details. Just fast enough.
I let it go. We didn’t know it yet, but within 48 hours, none of us wanted him leaving. The difference became apparent on day two. We were paralleling a trail, not on it, 50 m offset, moving through secondary jungle, watching for traffic, standard reconnaissance work. The trail itself was well used, hard packed dirt with fresh footprints and bicycle tracks, a major supply route, which meant it was worth watching and dangerous to approach.
Our point man was leading. Good eyes, good instincts. He could smell an ambush before it developed, sense when terrain felt wrong, feel when eyes were on us. He kept us honest, kept us careful. The Australian was fourth in the file behind me. We’d been moving about an hour when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Not grabbing, not urgent, just resting there.
Light pressure enough to mean halt. I turned. The Australian had stopped. His hand wasn’t signaling danger. Wasn’t pointing at anything. Wasn’t doing anything except touching my shoulder. Light enough that I could have shrugged it off if I wanted to. I raised my fist. The patrol stopped. Everyone took a knee. Security out. Weapons ready, waiting.
The Australian’s head was tilted. Listening. Not looking around. Not scanning the jungle. Not checking the ground or the canopy. just listening. 30 seconds passed. Nothing. The point man looked back, questioning. I shrugged. Didn’t know what we were waiting for. Another 30 seconds. Still nothing. Just jungle noise. Birds, insects, the wind moving through the canopy. Normal sounds.
Nothing out of place. The Australian lowered his hand. We moved again. 10 minutes later, it happened again. Hand on my shoulder, we stopped. This time, he pointed, not at anything specific, just at the ground ahead where the point man had just walked. The same ground we were all about to walk across. Then he moved forward, stepped past me, past the point man. He knelt. We waited.
He studied something, looked at it from three angles, touched nothing, just looked. His head moved slowly, examining whatever he was seeing from different perspectives, like a jeweler examining a stone. Then he glanced up at the point man and traced a line with his finger about 10 ft to the left of our current route. The point man frowned but moved.
We adjusted, shifted our line. Everybody followed, trusting without understanding. That was the thing about small teams. You trusted or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, you shouldn’t be there. Nothing happened. We kept moving. At the next halt, the TL came back to me. What was that? Don’t know. I said he saw something.
What? I didn’t have an answer. That night after we established the Aon, I asked the Australian. What did you see this morning? He was cleaning his weapon. Slow, methodical process. field strip, wipe down, reassemble. His hands moved with the kind of precision that comes from doing the same task 10,000 times. Didn’t look up. Bent grass, he said. Bent grass.
Wrong direction. Wrong direction. Bent toward the trail. Grass bends away from traffic, not toward it. Unless something came from the trail recently, last few hours. I thought about that. tried to picture what he’d seen. Tried to remember if I’d noticed the grass at all. Could have been an animal, I said. Could have been.
But he’d moved us anyway. That was the thing. He hadn’t argued, hadn’t insisted, hadn’t made it a big deal. Just quietly suggested a different route, and we’d taken it. And now we were here talking about bent grass. I wanted to ask more. wanted to know how he’d spotted it, how he’d known it mattered, how he’d learned to read those signs.
But he’d gone back to cleaning his weapon, and the conversation was clearly over. It wasn’t that he knew more, it was that he trusted less. Day three, we reached our primary observation point. Good position, elevation, clear view of the trail junction below, covered with draw route up the ridge behind us. We settled in for the long wait.
This was the boring part, watching, waiting, counting. Sometimes you’d sit for 3 days and see nothing. Sometimes you’d see a battalion moving south and have to count every truck, every weapon, every soldier, knowing that intelligence somewhere would feed it into their models and projections. We saw nothing that first day.
The Australian sat slightly behind the main observation line, not watching the trail, watching everything else, the canopy, the approach routes, the dead ground in the valleys, the ridge lines, areas we had already cleared, already dismissed as unimportant. Second day at the OP, he tapped the TL. Birds, he said. The TL looked.
What about them? They stopped. We listened. He was right. The normal bird noise had faded. Not gone, just muted. Like someone had turned down the volume on the jungle. Something moving, the Australian said. Not close. Maybe 200 m southside. The TL studied the jungle, saw nothing. Neither did I. Neither did anyone else.
just green in shadow and the thick vegetation that made visibility past 50 meters almost impossible. You sure? The Australian didn’t answer, just kept watching. His weapon was across his lap, hands resting on it, ready but not tense, waiting. 15 minutes later, we spotted them. Four NVA moving perpendicular to the trail about 150 m out.
Not searching, not patrolling, just moving. Probably a courier team or liaison element traveling between units. They carried light packs, moved with purpose, didn’t stop to check their surroundings. They passed. Never knew we were there. After they were gone, the TL asked, “How’d you know?” “Birds always know first.” The Australian said they stop singing when something’s wrong.
Not all at once, just less. You listen to them long enough, you can tell the difference between normal movement and wrong movement. What’s wrong movement? Humans, the Australian said. Predators, anything that doesn’t belong. The TL nodded. Didn’t say anything else, but I saw him listening more carefully after that. We all did.
At some point, we stopped saying, “What do you think?” We just waited. The patrol was supposed to last 5 days. On day six, the TL got a radio call. Command wanted to know when the Australian was rotating back. Some scheduling thing. Exchange program had other units waiting. Time to swap him out. Send him back to his unit.
Get the next guy in the rotation. The TL looked at the Australian, looked at me, looked at the rest of the team. Tell them the patrols extended, he said into the handset. How long? Not done yet, the TL said. We’ll advise. He didn’t explain. Command didn’t ask. In Mac Vog, mission requirements took precedence over schedules.
If we said we weren’t done, we weren’t done. They’d ask questions later, maybe, but not now. Day eight, we were moving to a secondary OP. Different trail, different valley. The terrain was worse here. Steeper, thicker vegetation, triple canopy that made navigation difficult and movement slower. Every meter gained felt like work.
The point man found what looked like a game trail cutting through some bad ground. Natural corridor relatively clear would save us two hours of machete work and scrambling through wait a minute vines. Easy decision. He started down it. The Australian stopped him. Not with words, just stepped in front, blocking the path. The pointman looked at the TL.
The TL looked at the Australian. Problem? The TL asked. The Australian walked forward slowly, studying the trail. He knelt at the entrance where the game trail opened up from the jungle, touched the dirt at the edge, rubbed it between his fingers, smelled it. This gets used, he said. Yeah, the pointman said by deer.
Maybe, the Australian said. He stood, looked at the terrain on both sides, then up at the canopy, then back at the trail itself, following its line with his eyes, reading it like a map. Someone’s watching this trail, he said. You see a position? The TL asked. No. See any sign? Fighting positions, cleared fields of fire, anything. No.
Then how? I’d watch this trail, the Australian said. Natural choke point, only easy route through here. Everything else is hard movement. If I was them, I’d watch it. Put a twoman LP here. Rotate them every few days. Catch whoever takes the easy route. We looked at the trail again. It did make sense. Perfect spot for a listening post.
Perfect spot to catch lazy patrols. Could be nothing, the point man said. Could be. The Australian agreed. We went around. Took three hours instead of one. Machete work. Slow, exhausting movement through vegetation that seemed designed to stop human passage. Thorns that caught on everything. Vines that wrapped around ankles and weapons.
Heat that made breathing feel like work. Nobody complained because we understood now. We were starting to see the jungle the way the Australians saw it. Not as terrain to cross, but as a living system that told stories if you paid attention. We didn’t say we needed him. We just said the patrol wasn’t done yet. Day 11. We were moving back toward the border.
Extraction in 2 days. The patrol had been quiet. Good intelligence gathered. unit identifications, movement patterns, supply flow estimates, no contact, no compromises. Exactly how you wanted it to go. Ghost in, ghost out. We were tired. That kind of tired where your body keeps moving, but your brain starts to drift.
11 days of hypervigilance wears you down in ways that don’t show on your body. Your mind gets fuzzy. Reaction time slows. You start making mistakes, little ones at first, that accumulate into big problems. The Australian was still watching everything. Late afternoon, he stopped us again. This time, he didn’t point at anything.
He just stood there absolutely still, not frozen with fear, just paused, listening, feeling, reading something we couldn’t read. We froze. He tilted his head. That listening posture we’d learned to recognize. The one that meant he was hearing something that mattered, something that didn’t fit. 30 seconds, a minute, then very quietly.
Someone’s behind us. The TL’s eyes widened. How far? Don’t know. Can’t hear them. But something’s wrong. What’s wrong? Too quiet. Ahead of us. normal jungle noise. Behind us, nothing. We listened. Tried to hear what he was hearing. Tried to feel what he was feeling. He was right. Behind us, the jungle had gone silent.
Not dead silent, but muted, suppressed, like something was moving back there that made everything else nervous. “Could be coincidence,” I whispered. “Could be anything. Weather change, predator, anything.” The Australian didn’t answer, didn’t argue, just stood there waiting for the TL to make a decision. The TL made it fast.
Change route, cut east, then circle back north. We moved different direction, slower, quieter, maximum stealth. Now, if someone was behind us, we needed to know. If someone was tracking us, we needed to lose them. An hour later, we stopped on a small ridge. The Australian climbed a tree, not high, just enough to see back over the terrain we’d left, maybe 20 ft up, hidden in the branches, using the natural cover.
He stayed up there for 10 minutes. When he came down, his face hadn’t changed, but something in his eyes had something dark, something certain. They were following, he said. You see them? saw where they stopped, where we turned. They sat there for a while, then went back. How many? Can’t tell. At least four, maybe more. How do you know they were following us? They stopped exactly where.
We changed direction. Exactly. They reached that point, realized we’d turned, sat there deciding what to do, then went back. The TL absorbed this. They tracking us or just happened to be on the same route? They were following, the Australian said. Too deliberate, too focused. Why’d they turn back? The Australian thought about that, lost the trail, or decided it wasn’t worth it, or knew they couldn’t catch us before dark.
We sat there in silence, all of us thinking the same thing. We’d been compromised and hadn’t known it. Someone had picked up our trail, followed us for who knows how long, and we’d been oblivious until the Australian felt it, not saw it, not heard it, felt it. That night, the TL requested another extension.
Command was less agreeable this time. The exchange program was behind schedule. Other units were waiting. The Australian needed to return. Schedules had to be maintained. paperwork had to flow. Some staff officer somewhere was looking at a timeline that didn’t match reality. The TL didn’t argue, just said, “Understood.
We’ll comply.” Then he turned to the Australian. We extract day after tomorrow. You’ll go back to your unit. The Australian nodded. Nobody said anything. What was there to say? He wasn’t ours. Never had been. We’d borrowed him and now we had to give him back, but nobody wanted to. The absence of contact is the proof.
Day 13, extraction day. We reached the LZ early. Standard procedure. Secure the area. Establish perimeter. Check for threats. Wait for the birds. The LZ was a bomb crater from an old B-52 strike. Big enough for one helicopter surrounded by secondary jungle. Not ideal, but workable. The Australian set his gear down, started his pre-flight checks, weapons safe, magazines counted, nods stowed, everything by the book, preparing to transition from field to flight, from mission to movement.
The point man came over, extended his hand. Appreciated it, he said. The Australian shook, nodded. Didn’t need the words explained. They both knew what was being said. The TL gathered us up. Quick debrief before the birds came in. What worked? What didn’t? What we’d learned, what we’d change. Standard stuff.
The kind of afteraction discussion that happened on every patrol. The way we stayed sharp, stayed alive. Then he looked at the Australian. Anything you want to add? The Australian thought about it. You could see him considering, weighing whether to say anything at all. You move well, he said finally. Fast, aggressive when you need to be confident, he paused. We waited.
But sometimes slow is faster. That was it. No elaboration, no explanation, no lecture about patience or observation or the importance of fieldcraft. Just sometimes slow is faster. The helicopters came in. Loud violent rotor wash flattening the grass and making speech impossible. We loaded up. The Australian got on the first bird heading back to his unit.
We got on the second, heading back to the FOB. We flew back. At the debrief, something happened that I didn’t expect. The intelligence officer asked the TL about contact, any sightings, any engagement, any fire exchanged, the usual questions. None, the TL said. 13 days, no contact. Correct. The intel officer looked skeptical. That area was hot.
Regular contact was expected. teams went out there and came back shot up or didn’t come back at all. 13 days clean was unusual. Any near misses, close calls. The TL glanced at me, then back at the officer. We avoided three potential compromises, he said. How better fieldcraft? The officer waited for more. The TL didn’t offer any.
just sat there calm, waiting for the next question. The officer moved on, started asking about unit identifications, movement patterns, all the intelligence we’d gathered, the real purpose of the debrief. But I kept thinking about that exchange. Better fieldcraft. That’s what the TL had said. Not luck, not random chance, not the enemy having a bad day. Better fieldcraft.
which meant we’d learned something out there, something that mattered, something we hadn’t known before. The Australian went back to his unit. We requested him for the next patrol, denied. He was scheduled for rotation back to Australia. His tour was up. Someone else’s turn. We requested any SAS scout. Didn’t have to be him.
Anyone with similar training, similar skills, similar way of seeing the jungle denied. Exchange program was full. Other units had priority. We’d had our turn. We went out on the next patrol without him. Same area, same mission profile, trail observation, intelligence collection, quiet work. Day three, we got hit. Ambush.
Well planned, well executed on a trail junction we’d identified as low risk based on our normal assessment. They’d set it up perfectly. Caught us in the open. Initiated with automatic weapons from three sides. Nobody died, but we took casualties. Two wounded, one serious. Had to call for emergency extract. The mission was blown. The patrol was compromised.
and we spent the next six hours running and gunning our way to an alternate LZ while attack helicopters covered us. In the debriefing afterward, the TL didn’t say anything about the Australian. Didn’t need to. Didn’t have to point out that we’d walked into something we should have avoided. Missed signs we should have seen.
Move too fast when we should have moved slow. We all knew. We’d known for three days. Known that something felt different without him. known that we were operating the old way again, the fast way, the aggressive way, the American way, and it had caught up with us. We didn’t ask him to stay. We asked when we’d see him again.
6 months later, I rotated out, came home, tried to forget, tried to adjust to a world where the most dangerous thing was traffic, where nobody was trying to kill you, where you could walk through woods without checking every footstep. Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t. Years went by. Decades. I got married, had kids, built a career, did all the things you’re supposed to do when you come home from a war.
Went to college on the GI bill, got a job, bought a house, tried to be normal. I thought about that patrol sometimes. About the Australian, about what he’d shown us. Usually late at night when I couldn’t sleep, when the old memories came back uninvited. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no firefight where his skills saved our lives in some obvious way.
No heroic moment you could point to and say, “That’s when he made the difference.” No medal worthy action. Just a series of small things. Bent grass, quiet birds, a feeling that something wasn’t right. A game trail that felt wrong. Silence behind us that shouldn’t have been there. Each one insignificant on its own. Together they kept us alive.
In 1998, I took a trip to Australia. Personal thing, my wife wanted to see Sydney. Her sister had moved there, married an Australian, and we’d been promising to visit for years. So, we went two weeks, played tourist, saw the harbor, the bridge, the opera house, all the things visitors are supposed to see. While I was there, I started asking around.
veteran groups, RSL clubs, SAS associations. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for at first, just curious, wondering if anyone remembered the exchange program, if anyone knew about the Emac of VOG attachments. Someone gave me a name, then another name, then a contact. I found him in Perth, retired, owned a small farm outside the city.
sheep, mostly some cattle. Quiet life, I called. He didn’t remember me at first. Why would he? I explained. The patrol in ‘ 69, Mac Vogg, quantum 13 days, trail observation. Oh, he said. Right. Long pause on the line. You want to talk about that? He asked. If you’ve got time. Yeah, he said. I’ve got time. We met for coffee in town.
He looked older, of course. So did I. 30 years had passed. He was in his 60s now, still lean. Still had that way of sitting that suggested he was comfortable with silence and didn’t need to fill it with words. We talked for a while. Families, work, the usual things. His kids were grown. Mine were in college. Life had moved on for both of us.
Then I asked him, “Did you know when you were with us? Did you know you were changing how we worked?” He thought about that, took his time, the Australian way. Wasn’t trying to change anything, he said finally. Just doing what made sense. But you were different. The way you moved, the way you watched, the way you read the jungle.
Maybe, he said, your blo moved like they wanted to find the enemy. We moved like we wanted to avoid them. That’s it. He smiled. Small smile more in his eyes than his mouth. That’s everything, he said. I asked him about his tour, about other patrols he’d done, other Americans he’d worked with. He didn’t say much. Quiet man.
Even after all these years, even in a cafe in Perth with nothing to protect, nothing to hide, he still operated with that same economy of words. But he did say one thing that stuck with me. You fellows thought the jungle was an obstacle, he said. Something to overcome. We thought it was a library full of information if you knew how to read it.
A library? I had never thought of it that way, but it made sense. Perfect sense. Did you ever go back? I asked. After the war to Vietnam? Yeah. Once, he said. 1995. Just to see. Tourism thing. Wife wanted to go. How was it? He looked out the window. Quiet street, Australian afternoon sun, peaceful. Different, he said.
Still hot, still wet, but different. No one trying to kill you makes a place feel different. We talked for another hour, then he had to go. Farm work. Animals don’t care that you’re having coffee with an old war buddy. We shook hands. He gave me his address, told me to write if I ever wanted to. I said I would. I never did. Don’t know why.
Just seemed like we’d said what needed to be said. He went back to his unit, but he left something behind. A different way of seeing the jungle. A different way of measuring success. Not by contact made, but contact avoided. Not by enemy killed, but by coming home intact. Not by ground taken, but by ground understood. I think about the young men.
We were, American soldiers, confident in our training, our firepower, our aggression. We had been taught to close with and destroy the enemy, to dominate the battlefield, to impose our will through superior force and violence of action. And I think about the quiet Australian who showed us something else.
Not better, not worse, just different. Patience over speed, observation over action, trust over assumption, listening over speaking. We borrowed him for one patrol, turned into 13 days, turned into a lesson that lasted a lifetime. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he’d stayed. If they’d made it permanent, if that exchange program had turned into something real, if Australian SAS scouts had been embedded with Macy VOG teams on a regular basis.
How many patrols would have come back clean? How many men would have made it home? how many names wouldn’t be on that wall in Washington. But that’s not how it worked. He had his own unit, his own war, his own mission. Australia’s involvement in Vietnam was smaller than ours, more selective, more careful.
They couldn’t afford to scatter their SAS all over our operational areas, no matter how much we might have wanted them to. We had our war, they had theirs. For 13 days, those wars overlapped. And in that overlap, we learned something we didn’t know we needed to learn. The jungle doesn’t care about tactics. It doesn’t care about doctrine or training or national pride.
It doesn’t care if you’re American or Australian or Vietnamese. It respects one thing, those who respect it back. The Australian respected it, understood it, read it like a language he’d learned young and never forgotten. And for 13 days, he taught us to do the same. Or tried to.
Some of it stuck, some of it didn’t. We went back to our old ways eventually because that’s what training does. It creates patterns that are hard to break, even when you know they need breaking. But those 13 days changed something in me. changed how I saw the world, not just the jungle. Changed how I approach problems. Changed how I listened.
Even now, decades later, in a world where jungles are tourist destinations and wars or memories, I catch myself doing things the way he taught us. Pausing before acting, watching before moving, listening before speaking, trusting my instincts when something feels wrong, even if I can’t explain why. That’s the story. No firefights, no body counts, no dramatic rescues, no medal ceremonies or official recognition.
Just a quiet Australian who moved through the jungle like he belonged there. And a group of Americans who were smart enough to pay attention. We didn’t want to give him back. Not because we couldn’t do the job without him. We could. We had before. We did after. But because he’d shown us how to do it better. And that’s a gift you don’t forget.
Even when you try, even when the memories fade and the details blur and the names disappear, and all you’re left with is the feeling of moving through green darkness with someone who understood it better than you ever would. Even then, I still have dreams sometimes about the jungle, about patrols, about that feeling of being watched, being tracked, being one wrong step away from contact.
In those dreams, I’m always moving too fast. And there’s always someone behind me, hand on my shoulder, telling me to slow down. I never see his face. Don’t need to. I know who it is.
