Rat

The Department of Defense Neurotics Conscription Initiative in Vietnam

My nickname was Rat because I had big ears and a rat face and I was a human lab rat for the Department of Defense during Vietnam.

I've been blasted apart and put back together so liberally there's not much time or willingness to recollection left in me to get my story out, so here it is.

During the drafting process I was the top of a selection of nervous freaks and fairies we called the "pansy corps".

They wanted the ideal scout for active environments which, through an advanced American scientific effort, meant men with hyperactive fear stimulus responses, neuroses embedded deep in the brain and spine capable of picking up the slightest signal changes registered by the body. DoD figured neurotics and paranoids be the most likely to acquire intelligence and survive alone in hostile territory.

See, I grew up on the bayou, where there weren't a lot of cars or other noise back then, where its quiet except for bugs and frogs and such. You can hear anything happen from far.

Service was different. During training they once sent us into a big gulch with blindfolds on, launched mortars in indirect fire, and had us dodge the blasts by listening to the initial shot.

After a while we learned the battlefield dance and could sense trouble from afar in cityscape, villages, or the jungle thicket. Birds song changes. Bug chirp stoppin. The tea vendor didn't show up on the street corner today, that kind of thing. One especially crazy guy could, with some effort, burrow into the soil and perceive distant activity from miles away.

We were unarmed except for a survival knife most of the time. We were usually dressed up like the Vietnamese. Half of the unit was Slant-Eye-Americans : Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Native American dudes we called "chinos" that could pass and were taught the Vietnamese language. Some of the more effeminate looking of the pansy corp they'd gussy up like a lady with makeup and a dress to increase the likelihood of gettin taken prisoner rather than killed.

They’d drop us off alone in an enemy controlled area of interest and have us find our way home to a forward operating base, picking up troop movements, encampment locations, and logistics convoys along the way. I’d watch them through these fancy binoculars equipped with a rangefinder and make a mental survey of distances.

When we’d get back they’d strap us to a bed, dose us with research chemicals cooked up at some university in California and put us in an hypnotic recall trance. An intelligence officer would inquire where and what we had seen, and they’d make sketches on a map of the events that had transpired. Sometimes they’d shock us with a low voltage zap to retrieve memories that had been blocked by trauma responses.

We were all fucked up before and after every mission and recall process so they doped us up further with Narcosynthesis procedures, all sorts of combinations of drugs and psychosomatic rehabilitation programs. My therapy of choice was to get stoned on high potency Thai Sticks, rub my joints with a menthol balm, and watch Bugs Bunny cartoons and laugh and cry.

I got 3 pieces of shrapnel in my chest leftover after some surgeries, so it hurts when I breathe, 2 bullets in my left arm from an interrupted operation called "parallel" where you drop from a helicopter on a rope. Thanks to a VC mine, I’m a double limb replantation recipient on both my legs and had two of my fingers sewn back on. And I've broken just about every bone in my body.

I'm on a cocktail of painkillers, tranquilizers, anxiety medications, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, vitamin supplements, human growth hormones, and new age meditation techniques, all thanks to the Veterans Health Administration, but I still can't sleep at night. To really relax, I have to listen to bird song or rain recordings while doing breathing exercises, feeling my heart beat through my chest.

There’s a magnet in my skull they implanted during my service to research electromagnetic navigation in humans. I think it gets messed with by the radio waves in the air. I’ve noticed the ringing in my head gets worse around cell towers.

Oh hell, I can feel my phone buzzing, it’s hurtin’ now!