The ceiling fan in my bedroom has a slight wobble. [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] To most people, it’s a nuisance, a mechanical rhythmic clicking that needs a screwdriver in a steady hand. To me, it’s 1969. It’s the sound of a Huey slick coming in low over the canopy of the Central Highlands.

It’s the sound of salvation and the sound of doom. All wrapped up in the beat of rotor blades cutting through air so thick with humidity you could drown just by standing still. They tell you that time [music] heals all wounds. They’re liars. Time just builds a thin layer of scar tissue over the shrapnel. If you sit still long enough, if the room gets dark enough, that tissue thins out [music] and you’re back in the mud.

You’re 19 again. Your boots are rotting off your feet and you’re carrying 60 pounds of hate and iron through a jungle that wants to swallow you whole. My name is Elias Thorne. In the first cavalry division, they called me preacher, not because I was holy, but because I carried a pocket Bible I never read. I kept it for the paper, thin enough to roll a cigarette when we ran out of lies.

By the time I left N in 1970, the Bible was missing most of the New Testament and I didn’t believe in God anymore. I only believed in the M16 in my hands and the man to my left and right. This is what it was really like. Not the movies, not the glory, just the screams. I stepped off the plane at Cam Ran Bay in late ‘ 68.

The first thing that hits [music] you isn’t the fear, it’s the smell. It’s a mixture of burning human waste, diesel fuel, rotting vegetation, and a sweet cloying scent I later realized was decaying flesh. It sticks to the back of your throat. You never truly get it out of your sinuses. The heat was a physical weight.

It felt like walking into a wet wool blanket that had been sitting in an oven. We were kids, fresh-faced, shaved heads, starred still in our fatigues. We saw the [music] guys getting on the plane. We just vacated. They looked like ghosts. Their eyes were hollow, fixed on something miles behind us. They didn’t look at us.

They didn’t want to know our names. We were the new meat. In their eyes, we were already dead. Within a week, I was processed and sent to a firebase near the A Sha Valley. My platoon leader was a guy named Lieutenant Miller. He was 22, but he looked 40. Thorne, he said, looking at my paperwork without looking at me. Don’t get attached to your gear and don’t get attached to the guys in your squad.

It makes it harder when [music] the jungle takes them. I thought he was being dramatic. I was a fool. The life of a grunt wasn’t constant shooting. It was the hump. We spent 90% of our time walking. We walked until our feet bled. Then we walked until the blisters popped and the raw skin turned into a blackened fungal mass we called immersion foot.

We carried everything. extra ammo, claymores, srations, ponchos, and water. Water was more precious than gold. The jungle wasn’t just trees. It was a multi-storied fortress [music] of elephant grass that slice your skin like razors, way a minute that snag your gear, and triple canopy forests that blocked out the sun.

Even at noon, it was twilight on the ground. You lived in a world of green shadows. You’d be walking in a file, the guy in front of you sweating through his ruck. The silence only broken by the clinking of gear. Then the silence would change. You’d feel it before you heard it. The birds would stop.

The insects would go dead quiet. That was the moment your stomach dropped. That was the moment you knew Charlie was watching. He didn’t fight like us. He didn’t have 52s or napal. He had the land. He had pung stakes, sharpened bamboo dipped in feces hidden in pits. You’d hear a thud dash, then a scream that sounded like a wounded animal.

One of her buddies would be pinned to the earth, a stake through his calf or thigh. We’d have to cut him out while he howled, knowing the infection [music] would probably kill him before the chopper arrived. That’s when the screams started in my head. They haven’t stopped since. It happened in April 69.

We were moving through a dry creek bed [music] near LZ Mary Jane. I was third in line. Up front was a kid [music] named Rat because he was small and could crawl into tunnels. Rat stopped. He raised his hand. The line froze. I saw a flash of khaki. Not the black pajamas [music] of the VC, but the tan uniforms of the NVA North Vietnamese army.

These were the pros, regulars, disciplined. The world exploded. [music] The sound of an AK 47 is distinct. It’s a metallic clack clack clack dash. Slower than our M16s, but heavier. The first burst caught rat in the chest. He didn’t fall. He was slammed backward into the mud. [music] Contact front. Miller screamed. I hit the dirt.

You don’t think. You don’t pray. You just react. I pushed the selector to full auto and sprayed the treeine. The noise was deafening. You can’t hear the orders. You can’t hear your own thoughts. You just hear the crack crack of rounds snapping over your head. When a bullet passes close, it makes a sound like a whip cracking.

It’s the sound of death missing you by an inch. Grenade, someone yelled. A Chinese thick grenade thudded a few feet from me. I buried my face in a muck, praying to the god I was currently using for cigarette paper. The blast threw dirt over my back and rang my ears like a bell. When the shooting stopped 10 minutes later, though it felt like 10 hours, the jungle was shredded.

Leaves were falling like green snow. I looked over at Rat. He was still alive, but his chest was a red ruin. He was trying to say something, but his lungs were filling with blood. He made this bubbling whistling sound. The death rattle. Doc, get up here. I screamed, but Doc was busy.

We had four wounded and Rat was a lost cause. I sat there and held Rat’s hand. His grip was incredibly strong, then it went soft. The light in his eyes didn’t go out slowly. It was like a light bulb being flicked off. One second, he was a kid from Ohio who liked comic books. The next, he was just a piece of meat in a wet uniform.

That night, we sat in the dark. Noise mocking, no talking, just the rain starting to fall, washing the blood into the soil. I realized then [music] that the jungle didn’t care about us. It didn’t care about democracy or communism. It just wanted to be fed. By June, the monsoon had arrived. It didn’t just rain.

[music] The sky opened up and dumped the ocean on us. Everything was wet. Your letters from home were pulp. Your cigarettes were mush. Your skin started to peel off in white flakes. We were sent to a ridge called Hill 882. The brass wanted it because it overlooked a supply route. The NBA wanted it because they live there.

For 2 weeks, we fought for every inch of that mud. It was meat grinder warfare. We’d take a bunker, they’d mortar us, we’d retreat. The jets would drop napal, and we’d go back up. I remember the smell of napal. People say they love it. Those are the people who never saw what it does to a human being. It’s jellied gasoline. It sticks.

You can’t dive in water to put it out. I saw an NBA soldier run out of a bunker covered in it. He looked like a birthday candle. He wasn’t screaming anymore because his lungs had been scorched out. He just ran until he collapsed and turned into a blacken husk. We grew cold, not from the temperature, but in our hearts. We stopped using names.

We used nicknames or just hey you. There was a guy in our squad we called cowboy. He was from Texas. carried a saw-off shotgun and had a laugh that could jumpst start truck. One afternoon during a lull in the rain, we were sitting in a shell crater. “Preacher,” he said, leaning back.

“Why get back to El Paso? I’m going to buy a Cadillac, a white one with red leather seats, and I’m going to drive it until I run out of road.” “You got to get through the week first, cowboy,” I muttered, cleaning my rifle. “I’m a ghost man,” he grinned. Charlie can’t hit what he can’t see. 5 minutes later, a sniper round.

One single shot, entered through his left temple, [music] and exited through the right. He didn’t even finish his sentence. He slumped over onto my lap. His blood was hot. That’s what stayed with me. How warm it was compared to the cold rain. I didn’t cry. I just pushed him off me and kept cleaning my rifle. That’s the madness.

When your best friend’s brains are on your trousers and your only thought is, “I hope my cigarettes stay dry.” The worst memory, the one that triggers the screams at 300 a.m. happened in August of ‘ 69. We were set up in a night defensive perimeter NDP near the Cambodian border.

We had dug in, set our claymore minds, and tripled the guard. It was a black night. No moon. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I was on the radio when the first trip flare went off. The landscape was suddenly bathed in a harsh flickering magnesium light. The treeline was alive. Hundreds of them. They weren’t sneaking.

They were charging. They were blowing whistles and bugles. It was a human wave. Crank the claymores. Miller yelled. Click, click. Boom. The front of the perimeter disappeared in a cloud of ball bearings and fire. But they kept coming. They were crawling over the bodies of their own dead. It was chaos.

We were firing [music] at shadows. The muzzle flashes blinding us. I saw a North Vietnamese soldier jump into the trench with document. They grappled in the mud, rolling over each other like wild animals. I couldn’t shoot. I’d hit document. I jumped in and used the but of my M16.

I felt the bone in the man’s face give way. I hit him again and again until he stopped moving. Doc was screaming. He’d been stabbed with a bayonet. He was holding his stomach, trying to keep his insides in. “Fix me, preacher. Fix me,” he wailed. I wasn’t a medic. I was just a kid who’d lost his Bible.

I took a bandage and pressed down, but the blood was pumping out between my fingers. The air was filled with the smell of cordite, blood, and the metallic tang of fear. All around us, the perimeter was collapsing. It was hand to hand. I saw Miller get hit by AB40 rocket. He just disappeared. One second he was there, the next he was a red mist.

I grabbed Doc’s collar and started dragging him toward the center where the command bunker was. The sky was lit up by spooky an AC 47 gunships circling above. It looked like a red line of fire connecting the plane to the Earth. The sound was a low roar like a giant chainsaw. It was raining 6,000 round a minute.

We survived the night barely. When the sun came up, the perimeter looked [music] like a butcher’s shop. There were bodies everywhere. Ours and theirs. The mud was no longer brown. It was a deep, sickly purple. Doc died on the medevac chopper. He died screaming for his mother. That’s the thing they don’t tell you in the history books.

They don’t die saying long live the United States or victory to the revolution. They all die calling for their mothers. Every single one. After that night, I changed. Something inside me snapped. I stopped being Elias Thornne. I became a machine. I went on search and destroy missions. We burned villages.

We were told they were VC hubs. Maybe they were. Maybe they weren’t. We’d see old men and women watching us with eyes full of a hatred so deep it felt like it could burn through our armor. We were the invaders. We were the monsters in their woods. I remember standing in a burning [music] village watching a water buffalo wander through the smoke. I felt nothing.

I just wanted to go home. But I knew home didn’t exist anymore. The person who lived in that house in [music] Pennsylvania was gone. The thousand-y stare isn’t a myth. It’s what happens when your brain realizes it can’t process any more trauma, so it just disconnects. You’re looking through the world, not at it.

I saw my reflection in a shard of glass in a destroyed hutch. I was 20 years old and my face was lined like a man of 60. My eyes were flat, dead. I looked like the ghosts I’d seen stepping off the plane when I arrived. [music] In 1970, my tour was up. They put me on a plane. The transition was too fast.

One day I was in a foxhole in the Highlands. The next I was in San Francisco. I was still wearing my jungle fatigues, stained with the red dirt of the a sha. I expected I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a thank you, maybe a welcome back. I got spat on. I was called a baby killer. I walked through the airport feeling like an alien.

I wanted to tell them about Rat. I wanted to tell them about Cowboy and Doc and Lieutenant Miller. I wanted to tell them that I didn’t want to be there, that I was just a kid who got drafted and sent into a meat grinder. But I couldn’t speak. My throat was tight. I went back to my parents’ house.

My mother had made a roast. My father wanted to hear war stories. “Was it like the movies, son?” he asked, leaning in. I looked at him. I looked at the roast beef on the plate. The red juices pooling at the bottom. It looked like the mud at the NDP. It looked like Doc’s stomach. I walked out of the room.

I went to the backyard and sat [music] in the grass. It was too quiet. The silence was terrifying. In the jungle, silence meant an ambush. I found myself reaching for a rifle that wasn’t there. My heart was hammering against my ribs. I was shaking. Elias, my mother called from the door. I couldn’t answer.

I was back in a creek bed. I was hearing the whistles. I was hearing the screams. It’s been over 50 years. I have a wife now and kids and grandkids. I’ve had a career. I’ve lived a normal life, but I still don’t like the rain. I can’t go to fireworks shows on the 4th of July. The smell of sulfur and the loud bangs make me want to crawl under the nearest car.

I don’t like the woods. People talk about the peace of nature, but to me, the woods are a place where things hide. The screams haven’t left. They’ve just changed. Sometimes I’m in the grocery store and I’ll see a young man, maybe 19 or 20, laughing with his friends. And for a split second, I see Rat.

I see the light in his eyes before it went out. I think about the NVA soldier I killed with my rifle. But I think about his family. Did he have a mother he was calling for? Did he have a girl back in Hanoi he promised to marry? We were both just kids thrown into a blender by old men in suits who never had to smell the burning napal.

Every year I go to the wall in DC. I find the names. Robert Rat Miller, James Cowboy [music] Henderson, David Doc Lewis. I run my fingers over the cold black granite. The stone is smooth, but the memories are jagged. People ask me why I still [music] wear my old uni hat. They think it’s pride.

And maybe a part of it is, but mostly it’s a warning. It’s a reminder of what we lost. We didn’t just lose a war. We lost our souls in those trees. The ceiling fan continues to spin. [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] I close my eyes. The humidity rises. I can feel the weight of the ruck on my shoulders. I can feel the red mud between my toes.

Stay frosty, preacher, cowboy whispers in my ear. I’m 75 years old, but I’m still in the jungle and I still hear the screams. If you’re listening to this and you’re carrying your own jungle around inside you know that you aren’t alone. The war ends on the map, but it never ends in the heart.

We carry the dead so they aren’t forgotten. We tell these stories so the world remembers the cost of [music] a grunt’s life. To my brothers who made it back, welcome home. To those who didn’t, we’ll see you at the final LZ.