Post by forcon on Aug 10, 2019 19:58:45 GMT
We'd been in country for nearly three months when it happened. Eight years in the corps - three years in intelligence and five in special ops - and I'd never seen anything remotely like it. I'm a combat veteran: I have two tours in Afghanistan, another in Iraq, and deployments to Yemen and Angola under my belt. I've led men through scorching deserts, mountains and valleys, and knee high snow. Nothing compares to what we saw, what we might have unleashed on that brutal night on the border between the Central African Republic and Chad. Our mission in Chad was simple enough; train local forces to counter the rising influences of both Islamic Fundamentalist groups and our good friends in Moscow. We were based out of the US embassy in the capital, using a small compound out the back of the complex. With sleeping bags and a thin metal roof, I wouldn't call it homely, but I've definitely slept in worse conditions.
But I digress. Our deployment was turning out to be 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror, as usual. That was until the night of June 8th. I was summoned to the tactical operations centre where Colonel Hadley, the commander of the American military mission in Chad, was waiting for me. His face was tired amd gaunt, but the veteran officer showed excitement on his tanned face.
He told me, "Captain, I've just recieved a report from AFRICOM" - Africa Command - "reporting that an aircraft has been shot down and has crashed along the border."
My ears immediately pricked up. Another mission, a chance for action. "What kind of aircraft, sir?" I asked, expecting it to be one of ours. "I take it this is a combat search and rescue?"
"That's a negative, son," he told me. "Command won't discuss the aircraft type either, but insists that there are no survivors. Your mission is to secure the wreckage. Preferrably before the Russians do." In my mind, I had already figured out what was going on. Hadley made eye contact and gave me a knowing look. I figured that some type of experimental aircraft had been shot down by the garrison that the Russians maintained over the border in CAR. Half of that statement would turn out to be true.
Half an hour later, I was sitting inside a Chadian helicopter with the other members of my team. There were 14 of us total, led my yours truly. I'd commanded many of these men in combat across the Middle East and Africa before, and even the FNG, - Fucking New Guy - Corporal Greyson, was a veteran of one overseas deployment. My senior enlisted man, Gunny O'Riley, known amongst the men as Baba, in reference to that old song by The Who, had twenty years in Marine infantry and special ops units. Even after all my own years of experience, I was still learning from him. We were veterans, like I said; rough men who had faced our baptism by fire long ago in the mountains of Afghanistan's remote tribal regions. We were so confident back then, so trusting in our ability to kick ass and take names, although deep down we knew we weren't invincible.
The helicopter was an ancient Chadian Mil-8, so creaky that I feared it would drop out of the sky at any moment. I've never liked flying. From day one of Rot-See I was trained to be an officer, to take charge, but flying left my own fate and the fate of my boys in the hands of someone else. Thankfully, this Chadian pilot was a skillful as any American crewman I'd flown with.
"Hey, Skipper, are we there yet?" One of my Marines asked jokingly. "I gotta piss."
"Use your fuckin' canteen, Rudy," another man replied.
"My dick won't fit. I'll miss." The banterous exchange continued throughout the flight as I tried to envision the crash site. I'd managed to get a brief look at a satellite photo before we boarded the chopper, but it was grainy and only showed the area before the crash rather than after. When we were ten minutes from the landing zone, the crew-chief gave me a warning in accented English.
Momenrs later I could smell the smoke over the constant stench of diesel fumes. I spat out a mouthful of Copenhagen and stood up, gaining hold of my seat to steady myself as the helicopter slowed to a hover. The darkness of the jungle night was broken by flames that danced menacingly below us. Thirty feet above the ground, we threw ropes out of the open doors and then began to slide to the ground in quick succession.
The sight that greeted me could perhaps have been described as beautiful by some despite the devastation. I didn't recognise the wreckage of the downed aircraft. I could make out the elongated black fuselage, which had been torn from what I assumed to be the cockpit by the impact. A burning shard of shrapnel was visible about fifty metres to my left.
"Sergeant Bradley, take your boys and set up a perimeter to the east," I barked to one of the two Staff Sergeants who each commanded a squad within my team "Sergeant Webster, set up an OP from that ridge line to the west" - I beckoned to a low, squat hill that protruded from the jungle. With the perimeter secure to about fifty metres out, I radioed back to the TOC. Hadley informed me that more Marines and some Chadian trucks would arrive within the hour to remove the wreckage. When I asked him if there was any word from command on the nature of the aircraft, he simply replied, "negative."
Baba and the Doc, a Navy corpsman assigned to my team, entered the fuselage. I followed behind, removing my night vision goggles because the flames made it nearly impossible to see with them. It looked as totally foreign to me, almost alien. The floor and walls were made of a thin, graphite-like material. When I prodded the nearby wall, it seemed to withdraw at the touch, as though it were made of a soft material rather than a hard one.
"I don't know whose this thing belongs to, Captain, but it sure as hell ain't one of ours," said Doc Milton. We moved through the fuselage, which must have been twenty feet long, clutching our weapons but not aiming them. After confirming the emptiness of the fuselage, the three of us stepped back out into the jungle. I was suddenly struck by how silent it was. Even out here in the middle of jungle, there are sounds to be heard at night. In fact, the jungle is usually alive with the chirping of insects and the sound of wildlife.
Baba noticed it to. "Something doesn't feel right, sir," he said over the crackle of the flames. Before we got any further from the wreckage, I received a radio call from Bradley's patrol. He told me he had found 'something'. This was uncharacteristically vague, but his voice sounded tense. Not so much afraid, but ready to spring into action. I made my way through the jungle, returning to the use of my NVGs to navigate my way to Bradley's position. He and another Marine were crouching beside something. When I saw what he was looking at, my blood turned to ice. The body was silent and unmoving, but was spread out respectfully on the jungle ground.
It was not human. It had two legs and two arms, and would have been roughly eight feet tall had it been standing. Through the green tint of my NVGs it was difficult to make out the color of it's skin, but I could just about tell that it was an ugly, brownish red. It's head - I assumed it to be it's head, anyway - held a row of sharp fangs with no skin seperating the inside of the mouth from the exterior.
"Jesus..." I called for Doc.
"Looks like your mom, Greyson," one of the men joked, drawing a round of slight snickers. I was nervous at that point, and curious. The men were unsettled; that didn't stop any of them from taking the opportunity to make an inappropriate joke. Before Doc could get to us, a Marine holding the perimeter called out, "Contact!"
I knelt beside him, peering into the distance and seeing four trucks trundling down towards us. I'm telling you this story because the truth needs to come out: I'll not bore you with the details of the skirmish that occurred. A brief description, however, is necessary. We engaged the trucks at five hundred metres with machine gun fire. The occupants, who we could tell were Russian paratroopers by their uniforms, disembarked and advanced by bounds through the treeline towards us, laying down covering fire. Staff Sergeant Webster died in the firefight. I soon called in mortar fire from a Chadian garrison, and within ten minutes tje attempt to seize the crash site hsd been repulsed. Webster was dead, but we had done our jobs and prevented the Russians from capturing whatever it was we found out here. We did our job for them, but our commanders would later betray us.
Three hours after our arrival, a trio of helicopters - American heavy lift aircraft, not Chadian birds - arrived. They deposited combat engineers, who wore chemical protective gear and who worked quickly and under our protection to remove as much of the wreckage as they could and load it aboard the helicopter. A man dressed in civilian clothing and armed with a pistol, whom I pegged as CIA or DIA, ordered Bradley's men to lift the unidentified corpse onto a stretcher and move it onto the nearby Chinook. The boys looked at me as if to ask me to confirm the spook's order. I nodded, and four men lifted the body and carried it aboard the chopper.
We were oddly silent on the way back to the embassy: confusion and anxiety about what we had seen that night mixed with our mental anguish at Bradley's death. The choppers didn't fly us back to the Embassy. Instead, we landed at an airstrip guarded heavily by local troops and their American advisers. I gave a curt nod of respect to the Green Beret Captain to patrolled the perimeter with his Chadian counterparts after I had disembarked. Almost immediately, we were ushered aboard an Air Force transport plane. I never saw the corpse, or any of the pieces of wreckage that Bradley had died to protect, ever again. By this point I was worried about what was going to happen to my men. Was command going to try to shut us up? What was it that we had seen? One potential answer kept popping into my mind. It seems ridiculous even now to a man like me, a firmly atheistic sceptic. Surely, it couldn't have been...an extraterrestrial craft of some kind?
Aboard the aircraft, we were greeted by another Spook, this one in a suit, and by an Air Force Brigadier General. In special operations units, one doesn't generally salute a superior in the field. It's a prime way of marking a the senior officer out as such to an enemy sniper. The General's face showed disgust at our lack of military bearing. As special ops Marines, we were allowed to grow our hair out longer than most military personnel, and several of my men sported beards.
"What you men witnessed was an experimental aircraft," the Spook said. "We believe it was shot down by Russian forces. Thanks to your efforts, the wreckage of that aircraft did not fall into the hands of an enemy of the United States."
I called bullshit. I'd seen the corpse. That thing wasn't human. I held.my tongue though. I had a morw pressing and immediate concern. "Sir, why were the engineers wearing MOPP suits? Is there any chance we were contaminated with something?" I asked.
The General answered me, rather than the Spook. "It is highly unlikely that you and your men were exposed to any hazardous material, Captain. It was just a precautionary measure since the engineers had to handle the wreckage," he assured me, before continuing. "However, as another precautionary measure, you will be quarantined for a very short period upon your return to the US, while we run some tests."
We touched down at Hill Air Force Base in Utah twenty-one hours later. I spent most of the flight mulling over the idea of being quarantined. My men were worried, and I could tell. If we were potentially contaminated with something, we couldn't be contagious; the General and the Spook weren't wearing masks in our presence, after all. What worried me more, however, was the reception we received upon landing. We still had our weapons as we disembarked the aircraft. Seconds after we stepped onto the tarmac, two Humvees and a truck came hurdling towards us and skidded to a halt. Air Force MPs, all heavily armed, disembarked from the vehicles. They didn't point their M-16s at us, but I could see they were ready to do so given the slightest wrong move on our part.
"Captain Walcott," the senior MP addressed me, strolling over with his hand on his holstered pistol as though he were goddamned John Wayne, "for your own safety, have your men unload their weapons and place them on the deck."
I looked around. There had to be twice as many of them than there were of us. Each of the Humvees had a machine gun mounted atop it, manned by an MP. We stood no chance. Begrudgingly, I gave the order. We weren't handcuffed or strip searched like criminals, but we were surrounded by MPs who guided us to the base hospital. Upon entering, we were given new uniforms and boots to change into. Our old uniforms and gear vanished promptly at the hands of several more MPs.
The thirteen of us were placed in a locked ward, with at least two MPs standing guard outside at all times. Doctors and nurses scurried in and out frequently, jabbing us with needles. For the first two days, we felt mostly fine. We quietly discussed our theories about what we had seen, and the prospect of escape did come up several times. We had all been through Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, school, after all. After some mulling, I decided against any escape attempts: the doctors weren't actually harming us and if we were contaminated with something, I didn't want any of us becoming a Typhoid Mary, inadvertently spreading the contagion.
Things took a real turn for the worse on day three of our confinement. Webster and Baba both fell ill in the early hours of the morning. After being unable to sleep, the two men broke out in cold sweats and complained of headaches. Both began vomiting shortly after. By midday, they were vomiting up pieces of stomach acid, and then stomach lining.
We did all we could to assist them, but beyond offering comfort there was little that truly could help. As Baba and Webster became began to exhibit rashes on their skin that night, Greyson, Doc, and three others - Hiller, Wilcox, and Ramirez - began vomiting. At that time, I felt okay aside from a worsening headache. Though we were all scared by now, we remained calm. Panic helped nobody.
Then Webster's skin started to fall off. Like a piece of fruit that had become rotten, Webster began to wither as his demise neared. It took another two days of agony for the worst to come. By now there were massive, gaping holes over his legs, arms, torso, and face, each one deep enough to insert a clenched fist. When the doctors touched any piece of his skin, it seemed to disintegrate and give way to the mushy fragments of a man. Where the holes appeared, pieces of greenish, hard, scaly skin began to emerge. Baba started showing these horrific symptoms some hours later, as I myself began vomiting.
That night, Webster turned. His face was now a pockmarked mixture of dangling flesh, green, reptilian skin, and empty sockets where his teeth had once been. As I stumbled over to him, with acid burning in the back of throat after an hour's vomiting session, the Staff Sergeant ceased his agonised groans. He stood up, with strength that should have been denied by his near-flesh-less legs. He looked at me, snarling like a rabid dog, and then lunged forwards, crashing into me before I could ready myself. I fell to the floor in pain, but as Webster tried to clamber onto me, I landed a kick to the back of his knee, causing him to fall. As doctors and MPs burst in, I and several of the Marines whose symptoms had yet to worsen to such a degree pinned Webster down.
MPs came and separated all of us after that. Some of the others have turned; I hear them howling away in hungry, unsatisfied agony. And as for me? I can feel them crawling beneath my skin, gnawing at me. I tried to vomit them up today, but only a thin mixture of blood and stomach acid came out. I think my skin will start to rot away soon. The pain, the burning, is beginning to spread from the pit of my stomach. I don't have long left.
-Captain Matthew Walcott, US Marine Corps
But I digress. Our deployment was turning out to be 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror, as usual. That was until the night of June 8th. I was summoned to the tactical operations centre where Colonel Hadley, the commander of the American military mission in Chad, was waiting for me. His face was tired amd gaunt, but the veteran officer showed excitement on his tanned face.
He told me, "Captain, I've just recieved a report from AFRICOM" - Africa Command - "reporting that an aircraft has been shot down and has crashed along the border."
My ears immediately pricked up. Another mission, a chance for action. "What kind of aircraft, sir?" I asked, expecting it to be one of ours. "I take it this is a combat search and rescue?"
"That's a negative, son," he told me. "Command won't discuss the aircraft type either, but insists that there are no survivors. Your mission is to secure the wreckage. Preferrably before the Russians do." In my mind, I had already figured out what was going on. Hadley made eye contact and gave me a knowing look. I figured that some type of experimental aircraft had been shot down by the garrison that the Russians maintained over the border in CAR. Half of that statement would turn out to be true.
Half an hour later, I was sitting inside a Chadian helicopter with the other members of my team. There were 14 of us total, led my yours truly. I'd commanded many of these men in combat across the Middle East and Africa before, and even the FNG, - Fucking New Guy - Corporal Greyson, was a veteran of one overseas deployment. My senior enlisted man, Gunny O'Riley, known amongst the men as Baba, in reference to that old song by The Who, had twenty years in Marine infantry and special ops units. Even after all my own years of experience, I was still learning from him. We were veterans, like I said; rough men who had faced our baptism by fire long ago in the mountains of Afghanistan's remote tribal regions. We were so confident back then, so trusting in our ability to kick ass and take names, although deep down we knew we weren't invincible.
The helicopter was an ancient Chadian Mil-8, so creaky that I feared it would drop out of the sky at any moment. I've never liked flying. From day one of Rot-See I was trained to be an officer, to take charge, but flying left my own fate and the fate of my boys in the hands of someone else. Thankfully, this Chadian pilot was a skillful as any American crewman I'd flown with.
"Hey, Skipper, are we there yet?" One of my Marines asked jokingly. "I gotta piss."
"Use your fuckin' canteen, Rudy," another man replied.
"My dick won't fit. I'll miss." The banterous exchange continued throughout the flight as I tried to envision the crash site. I'd managed to get a brief look at a satellite photo before we boarded the chopper, but it was grainy and only showed the area before the crash rather than after. When we were ten minutes from the landing zone, the crew-chief gave me a warning in accented English.
Momenrs later I could smell the smoke over the constant stench of diesel fumes. I spat out a mouthful of Copenhagen and stood up, gaining hold of my seat to steady myself as the helicopter slowed to a hover. The darkness of the jungle night was broken by flames that danced menacingly below us. Thirty feet above the ground, we threw ropes out of the open doors and then began to slide to the ground in quick succession.
The sight that greeted me could perhaps have been described as beautiful by some despite the devastation. I didn't recognise the wreckage of the downed aircraft. I could make out the elongated black fuselage, which had been torn from what I assumed to be the cockpit by the impact. A burning shard of shrapnel was visible about fifty metres to my left.
"Sergeant Bradley, take your boys and set up a perimeter to the east," I barked to one of the two Staff Sergeants who each commanded a squad within my team "Sergeant Webster, set up an OP from that ridge line to the west" - I beckoned to a low, squat hill that protruded from the jungle. With the perimeter secure to about fifty metres out, I radioed back to the TOC. Hadley informed me that more Marines and some Chadian trucks would arrive within the hour to remove the wreckage. When I asked him if there was any word from command on the nature of the aircraft, he simply replied, "negative."
Baba and the Doc, a Navy corpsman assigned to my team, entered the fuselage. I followed behind, removing my night vision goggles because the flames made it nearly impossible to see with them. It looked as totally foreign to me, almost alien. The floor and walls were made of a thin, graphite-like material. When I prodded the nearby wall, it seemed to withdraw at the touch, as though it were made of a soft material rather than a hard one.
"I don't know whose this thing belongs to, Captain, but it sure as hell ain't one of ours," said Doc Milton. We moved through the fuselage, which must have been twenty feet long, clutching our weapons but not aiming them. After confirming the emptiness of the fuselage, the three of us stepped back out into the jungle. I was suddenly struck by how silent it was. Even out here in the middle of jungle, there are sounds to be heard at night. In fact, the jungle is usually alive with the chirping of insects and the sound of wildlife.
Baba noticed it to. "Something doesn't feel right, sir," he said over the crackle of the flames. Before we got any further from the wreckage, I received a radio call from Bradley's patrol. He told me he had found 'something'. This was uncharacteristically vague, but his voice sounded tense. Not so much afraid, but ready to spring into action. I made my way through the jungle, returning to the use of my NVGs to navigate my way to Bradley's position. He and another Marine were crouching beside something. When I saw what he was looking at, my blood turned to ice. The body was silent and unmoving, but was spread out respectfully on the jungle ground.
It was not human. It had two legs and two arms, and would have been roughly eight feet tall had it been standing. Through the green tint of my NVGs it was difficult to make out the color of it's skin, but I could just about tell that it was an ugly, brownish red. It's head - I assumed it to be it's head, anyway - held a row of sharp fangs with no skin seperating the inside of the mouth from the exterior.
"Jesus..." I called for Doc.
"Looks like your mom, Greyson," one of the men joked, drawing a round of slight snickers. I was nervous at that point, and curious. The men were unsettled; that didn't stop any of them from taking the opportunity to make an inappropriate joke. Before Doc could get to us, a Marine holding the perimeter called out, "Contact!"
I knelt beside him, peering into the distance and seeing four trucks trundling down towards us. I'm telling you this story because the truth needs to come out: I'll not bore you with the details of the skirmish that occurred. A brief description, however, is necessary. We engaged the trucks at five hundred metres with machine gun fire. The occupants, who we could tell were Russian paratroopers by their uniforms, disembarked and advanced by bounds through the treeline towards us, laying down covering fire. Staff Sergeant Webster died in the firefight. I soon called in mortar fire from a Chadian garrison, and within ten minutes tje attempt to seize the crash site hsd been repulsed. Webster was dead, but we had done our jobs and prevented the Russians from capturing whatever it was we found out here. We did our job for them, but our commanders would later betray us.
Three hours after our arrival, a trio of helicopters - American heavy lift aircraft, not Chadian birds - arrived. They deposited combat engineers, who wore chemical protective gear and who worked quickly and under our protection to remove as much of the wreckage as they could and load it aboard the helicopter. A man dressed in civilian clothing and armed with a pistol, whom I pegged as CIA or DIA, ordered Bradley's men to lift the unidentified corpse onto a stretcher and move it onto the nearby Chinook. The boys looked at me as if to ask me to confirm the spook's order. I nodded, and four men lifted the body and carried it aboard the chopper.
We were oddly silent on the way back to the embassy: confusion and anxiety about what we had seen that night mixed with our mental anguish at Bradley's death. The choppers didn't fly us back to the Embassy. Instead, we landed at an airstrip guarded heavily by local troops and their American advisers. I gave a curt nod of respect to the Green Beret Captain to patrolled the perimeter with his Chadian counterparts after I had disembarked. Almost immediately, we were ushered aboard an Air Force transport plane. I never saw the corpse, or any of the pieces of wreckage that Bradley had died to protect, ever again. By this point I was worried about what was going to happen to my men. Was command going to try to shut us up? What was it that we had seen? One potential answer kept popping into my mind. It seems ridiculous even now to a man like me, a firmly atheistic sceptic. Surely, it couldn't have been...an extraterrestrial craft of some kind?
Aboard the aircraft, we were greeted by another Spook, this one in a suit, and by an Air Force Brigadier General. In special operations units, one doesn't generally salute a superior in the field. It's a prime way of marking a the senior officer out as such to an enemy sniper. The General's face showed disgust at our lack of military bearing. As special ops Marines, we were allowed to grow our hair out longer than most military personnel, and several of my men sported beards.
"What you men witnessed was an experimental aircraft," the Spook said. "We believe it was shot down by Russian forces. Thanks to your efforts, the wreckage of that aircraft did not fall into the hands of an enemy of the United States."
I called bullshit. I'd seen the corpse. That thing wasn't human. I held.my tongue though. I had a morw pressing and immediate concern. "Sir, why were the engineers wearing MOPP suits? Is there any chance we were contaminated with something?" I asked.
The General answered me, rather than the Spook. "It is highly unlikely that you and your men were exposed to any hazardous material, Captain. It was just a precautionary measure since the engineers had to handle the wreckage," he assured me, before continuing. "However, as another precautionary measure, you will be quarantined for a very short period upon your return to the US, while we run some tests."
We touched down at Hill Air Force Base in Utah twenty-one hours later. I spent most of the flight mulling over the idea of being quarantined. My men were worried, and I could tell. If we were potentially contaminated with something, we couldn't be contagious; the General and the Spook weren't wearing masks in our presence, after all. What worried me more, however, was the reception we received upon landing. We still had our weapons as we disembarked the aircraft. Seconds after we stepped onto the tarmac, two Humvees and a truck came hurdling towards us and skidded to a halt. Air Force MPs, all heavily armed, disembarked from the vehicles. They didn't point their M-16s at us, but I could see they were ready to do so given the slightest wrong move on our part.
"Captain Walcott," the senior MP addressed me, strolling over with his hand on his holstered pistol as though he were goddamned John Wayne, "for your own safety, have your men unload their weapons and place them on the deck."
I looked around. There had to be twice as many of them than there were of us. Each of the Humvees had a machine gun mounted atop it, manned by an MP. We stood no chance. Begrudgingly, I gave the order. We weren't handcuffed or strip searched like criminals, but we were surrounded by MPs who guided us to the base hospital. Upon entering, we were given new uniforms and boots to change into. Our old uniforms and gear vanished promptly at the hands of several more MPs.
The thirteen of us were placed in a locked ward, with at least two MPs standing guard outside at all times. Doctors and nurses scurried in and out frequently, jabbing us with needles. For the first two days, we felt mostly fine. We quietly discussed our theories about what we had seen, and the prospect of escape did come up several times. We had all been through Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, school, after all. After some mulling, I decided against any escape attempts: the doctors weren't actually harming us and if we were contaminated with something, I didn't want any of us becoming a Typhoid Mary, inadvertently spreading the contagion.
Things took a real turn for the worse on day three of our confinement. Webster and Baba both fell ill in the early hours of the morning. After being unable to sleep, the two men broke out in cold sweats and complained of headaches. Both began vomiting shortly after. By midday, they were vomiting up pieces of stomach acid, and then stomach lining.
We did all we could to assist them, but beyond offering comfort there was little that truly could help. As Baba and Webster became began to exhibit rashes on their skin that night, Greyson, Doc, and three others - Hiller, Wilcox, and Ramirez - began vomiting. At that time, I felt okay aside from a worsening headache. Though we were all scared by now, we remained calm. Panic helped nobody.
Then Webster's skin started to fall off. Like a piece of fruit that had become rotten, Webster began to wither as his demise neared. It took another two days of agony for the worst to come. By now there were massive, gaping holes over his legs, arms, torso, and face, each one deep enough to insert a clenched fist. When the doctors touched any piece of his skin, it seemed to disintegrate and give way to the mushy fragments of a man. Where the holes appeared, pieces of greenish, hard, scaly skin began to emerge. Baba started showing these horrific symptoms some hours later, as I myself began vomiting.
That night, Webster turned. His face was now a pockmarked mixture of dangling flesh, green, reptilian skin, and empty sockets where his teeth had once been. As I stumbled over to him, with acid burning in the back of throat after an hour's vomiting session, the Staff Sergeant ceased his agonised groans. He stood up, with strength that should have been denied by his near-flesh-less legs. He looked at me, snarling like a rabid dog, and then lunged forwards, crashing into me before I could ready myself. I fell to the floor in pain, but as Webster tried to clamber onto me, I landed a kick to the back of his knee, causing him to fall. As doctors and MPs burst in, I and several of the Marines whose symptoms had yet to worsen to such a degree pinned Webster down.
MPs came and separated all of us after that. Some of the others have turned; I hear them howling away in hungry, unsatisfied agony. And as for me? I can feel them crawling beneath my skin, gnawing at me. I tried to vomit them up today, but only a thin mixture of blood and stomach acid came out. I think my skin will start to rot away soon. The pain, the burning, is beginning to spread from the pit of my stomach. I don't have long left.
-Captain Matthew Walcott, US Marine Corps
