The Horror of the War

The North Korean Theory of the Infestation

Over the course of the second, third, and fourth sessions, Halemen developed his initial position on the nature of the task, as it were, that had been set before him by his military-human circumstances. For he continued to assert ever more detailed things about the "bugs" and other anomalies.

"Four months in, they decided to make me walk a road in the infested woods. They wanted to see what would happen. Wanted to test a theory..."

"Is this why you looked upset when I asked about drugs earlier? Because they'd done something more traumatic, but similar in nature?"

Haleman, however, laughed at that. "By fucking God, no.

"Or yes. Doesn't matter. But that forest, that was a fucking trip."

"Howso?" Now I did suspect drug usage in this man's past; he showed what appeared to my now admittedly untrained eye to be classical, clinical traits of a former or current addict.

"I was in there for two fucking months. Quiet as fuck so much of the time. I went to a few hamlets for a few days or nights, but let me tell you before you make any fucking assumptions, I did not want to stay in any of them for more than those few hours that I did. Not one of them seemed welcoming. I can't even honestly say a single house seemed really welcoming. Like, they were all closed-in for some reason, not just against me, but against anyone from something they thought of as 'outside.' Not all the way outside, though; they had a different idea about that sort of place..."

"So nothing notable happened?"

"I tell you not to assume a fucking thing, and you go and fucking assume something that stupid? Don't play me for a fool, doctor."

"I don't play people for fools, soldier," I said, debating whether I sounded stern and if so, whether I was justified in sounding so.

"I bet you don't. I'd bet a fucking trillion dollars you don't. Anyway, you want notable? You'll get it.

"I went, then, doctor," and that intense grin, alongside that eerie longing with which he graced his tattoo, came over him again, "to a really squalid hamlet, and there I stayed the longest. So actually, technically, I stayed in one little village for a few days. But not because I wanted to. That's still true."

"The one you saw the 'bugs' in?"

"Oh, I'd already seen them plenty of times. Their carcasses, that is, rotting on and through the foliage. Like I said, I was placed in the infested region, not just near it. The miasma was everywhere... Just, maybe, here or there, like in that little hamlet, there was more of it."

In fact, Haleman explained with a sudden detachment that I confess rather astonished me, why I knew not and perhaps still know not quite at all, that the concentration all around the hamlet was so suffuse that it was inadvisable to simply wander out of the set of buildings, for the soldier had seen men---and women, and children---die from inhaling too much of the rot-fumes. Therefore, and he emphasized therefore alone, had he made camp in that dire glade for as long as he had.

Next he recounted the hideous night I was instantly sure had most shaped his memories of this trauma---that had scrawled these delusions onto the rational propositional essence of his mind, or had inspired him to code an authentic experience in an extended metaphor of surpassing literary complexity. "The second night there was, it turned out, the worst in the hamlet and possibly the worst---I really don't know what was the worst part of the whole fucking ordeal---out of all my time there. I saw one of the kinds of things I'm glad I didn't see more of."

At midnight, a howling as of a child---and it immediately became clear to the quickly awakened Haleman that it was a child---pierced the stillness in the darkness. She was being violently grasped on both arms by two heavily-attired men or women per arm, and they were apparently trying to pull her in half as others nearby chanted in a low voice a prayer that this sacrifice would allow the cha gog ro to protect the village during the "other outsiders'" bombing raids.