This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Kountreh on 2026-05-20 18:34:01+00:00.

---

We were bastard children of a generation reshaped by a conflict that left a gaping wound in the world.

The men who came back from the fields of Europe and the islands of the pacific, gave rise to a new generation of men...more so boys, who were completely ill equipped for this new world. A world that bore scars and damage so deep, it affected even the lands that never saw the conflict.

An evil unknown by man except for maybe in the times of Genesis, was unleashed upon the world. Spreading itself across the globe and creating ripples of destabilization.

Those shockwaves are still felt today.

---

Running, jumping, pull ups, pointless tasks, getting screamed at, repeat.

Day after day, week after week. The monotony of every day felt almost like a messed up 9 to 5 as opposed to basic training.

We were all young and dumb, eager to serve our country and fight the evil commie hordes.

Constant discipline and structure molds you into an obedient soldier. It teaches you how to think and move like a single unit, how to follow orders as well as improvise when things inevitably change.

You learn to fight, with your hands, blades, guns, whatever is provided. All that training makes a young man feel invincible. Millions of naive boys have met terrible fates across the ages from this Superman fallacy.

Sometimes even with the training, the stupidity of young adult hood, and millennia of human kind learning and studying war; you find yourself in a situation that reduces you into nothing more than small ink letters in the pages of a casualty report, filed away to never be seen again.

Of course, the US government does its best to keep that kind of sobering reality locked up tight. That wouldn't make a very good recruitment poster on the wall of a Woolworths.

If you spend enough time in the military, you become privy to this reality. Some learn the hard way; most however, only get glimpses of it in after action reports. Often too proud or ignorant to even put the pieces together.

I, however, have never been a lucky man.

I was not fortunate enough to only get a glimpse of that kind of horror as it merely passed through my finger tips on the way to a fax machine...

My platoon was a recon platoon, stationed in Camp Davies on the Saigon River.

Life was pretty good, despite us being in the thick of it in 1966, we didn't have many threats that far south.

Just occasional deployments to some random patch of jungle, to scout ahead for a larger force.

My squad and I spent a lot of our time drilling, reading comic books, and telling stories about women, cars, sports, you know.

Quite frequently when we were really bored, or sleep deprived in the middle of the night, we would start telling ghost stories.

"Carter" , our machine gunner, is a good ol' Appalachian boy. 6 foot 4, 280 pounds of corn liquor and repressed childhood trauma.

He always had the most, and the best stories. Tales of creatures on two legs, inexplicable sounds in the woods, disappearances, wild people, even bigfoot.

Most of the time I think he was making them up or embellishing a sick deer encounter. Sometimes though, I couldn't help but feel like there was an actual air of truth to his ramblings.

On one of these nights, all of us huddled in a circle in the middle of the barracks.

Carter was in his element, scaring the new guys with a story he'd told a hundred times about how his ancestors spoke of a tribe of people deep in the hills.

Feral people, that hunt hikers and moonshiners, live in caves, and don't have any kind of language other than grunts and screams.

His ancestors believe these tribes of people exist everywhere on the globe, even as far as Vietnam.

Of course Carter uses this to try and scare the shit out of the privates fresh from basic. Most of the time it worked.

My closest buddy "Bill" was a devout Christian, and tended to be the voice of reason to combat Carter, in defense of those poor recruits.

He may have believed in God, spirits, demons, and a plethora of other supernatural things, but he seemed dead set on disproving all of Carter's tall tales.

Bill was in the middle of telling a very annoyed private about how Carter is a Godless heathen, when our barracks door swung open abruptly.

Our lieutenant stood silhouetted in the light of the hallway outside, one hand holding the door open.

"JOHN, BILL, CARTER, MATTHEW, RONALD! You have a new assignment" He said sternly

I looked at Bill, confused. Why did the LT only need our squad? Why was he giving us such short notice in the middle of the night?

"Can I finish my story sir?" Carter asked

"I was just about to get this kid to piss his pants." He said, smirking and gesturing at a young freckled kid across from him.

"No you weren't!" The boy retorted, his voice cracking in the process.

"Negative, they want you right now. Get your shit and get up." The Lieutenant barked.

"They?"

"You'll find out when you get to the airfield. Now get going!" He ordered, shutting the door behind him.

Grumbling, we put on our uniforms, grabbed our packs and kit, and headed to the airfield.

We were greeted by the LT and a man in plain clothes, looking kind of like a tourist. They stood hunched in front of a blacked out huey, engine running and ready to go.

"This is your handler for the next few days!" The LT shouted over the whir of the blades.

"You'll be taking orders from him, and he'll be taking you where you need to go!"

I glanced at the man, light hair, clean shaven, aviators. At night. Who does this guy think he is?

He met my gaze and simply gestured to the open chopper doors.

The five of us piled in, and put on the headphones, as we watched the man climb in the co-pilot seat.

As we were lifting off, Ronnie (our group control freak) broke the air with a question we were all thinking.

"Why are we not getting a briefing, and where are we going?

Our handler replied with a voice I didn't expect "You're going to be looking for a team we lost on a search and destroy mission. Details classified, all you need to know is they reported contact at 03:50 yesterday, and we haven't heard back from them since."

"We will drop you off 10 klicks from their last known position, afterward you will trek north until you find the position on the maps that will be provided to you."

A question burned in my mind that I'm sure was shared amongst the group: Why us? We were just a regular army recon team, and this guy wreaked of the Agency.

Did they want someone disposable? I squirmed in my seat, hoping that thought was a simple anxiety induced exaggeration.

The rest of the flight was pretty uneventful, albeit long. The five of us stayed silent, exchanging glances at each other. Carter made lewd gestures to try and break the tension, but he could tell it wasn't working.

Our handler gave us the maps. Fairly standard terrain, nothing we couldn't handle. We were going to a hilly location with a river to the north. They'd been kind enough to mark the previous team's path.

We'd follow a valley about 5 klicks north until we hit a small mountain. After climbing that, we'd follow the ridgeline east for about a mile until we reached an old landslide. After that it was a simple hike through the unforgiving jungle, until we got within a few hundred yards of the river. That's where they lost contact with the team.

Our silence was shattered by the voice of the pilot "30 seconds out, get ready."

Bill put his hand on my shoulder and sent up a silent prayer for our team. A ritual that has come to comfort me more than I care to admit.

We touched down in a small, burnt out clearing in the jungle. With one last "Good luck boys." From our handler, we hopped out of the huey and into the dark expanses of never ending jungle.

I knelt at the front of our perimeter, scanning the trees and waiting for my eyes to fully adjust.

The sound of the chopper slowly faded away, and I gave a silent hand gesture to move forward.

The second we stepped through that tree line....I don't know.. there was just a heaviness to the air. Like something evil resided there. I think everyone felt it; even Matt - always one for quick humor - was completely silent, scanning the dense undergrowth.

We made it about a mile before we heard rustling to our right. We immediately dropped to a knee and listened. It sounded quick and light, like a rodent or something. It scurried around on and off about 30 yards away, probably hunting for bugs or something.

Honestly, it was kind of comforting. I cracked a small smile imagining its little body scampering around the undergrowth, in its own giant world....until I heard a crash, sticks breaking and frantic squeaking before it was abruptly cut off with a flesh ripping tear.

We stayed silent, waiting for the stray dog or big cat to leave. Eventually we did, but the footsteps sounded weird. They were heavy, like what we expected, but there was something off that I couldn't figure out.

After a few minutes we continued on our path, trudging through the foliage and making sure to watch for traps left by the Vietcong.

We stumbled upon a body right before we hit the mountain. We smelled it before we saw it. The sour, thick smell of death violating our nostrils. It was hanging from its leg, stuck in the crook of a branch about 10 feet up.

Getting a closer look, we could tell it was an NVA soldier, his blue uniform ripped and tattered, barely clinging ...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1tiuku1/theyre_in_the_trees/