It was dark when Ortega woke up in his hospital bed.
It was half way through the night by then, but severe exhaustion, along with losing Rambo and Jorgenson, compounded by all the drugs in his system had really messed him up. He was somewhat disorientated, and now he couldn’t get back to sleep.
He lit himself a cigarette and sat quietly smoking it. He could hear the other patients breathing deeply and slowly all around him.
Only one person wasn’t sleeping however, and that was Gary.
Gary was nineteen, had just lost a leg and never stopped moaning.
Actually, he mumbles, most of time.
Nevertheless, there was a sort of dignity in the way he moaned.
Gary never raised his voice and suffered quietly through the night so as to not wake anyone else.
He did it all despite how painful losing a leg must be.
Yet, that night, Ortega was too tired to think or feel any pain for that matter.
Most importantly, he’d decided not to get his hopes up about Rambo and Jorgenson.
The SOG stats were as clear as day: once you make the missing in action list, you never came fucking back. Not fucking ever.
It’s hard enough to go missing in conventional warfare, but down here in Laos, as an SOG, it’s even worse, especially if you got caught.
Okay, although it was true that every now and again, the Vietcong could be civil to your average American soldier in uniform. When you got caught fighting undercover in Laos however, you didn’t have a hope in hell. Even if you were “just” missing, that fucking country wasn’t only enormous, it was infested with Vietcong as well.
In any case, everything was harder across enemy lines when Rambo and Jorgenson went missing. It just happened that they were missing in the place they shouldn't even have been in, and definitely not fighting in.
So, if caught they’d have been treated far worse than any simple soldier would have.
As far as the Vietcong were concerned, they were criminals.
As such, the Vietcong had 'the right' to do anything and everything they wanted, to them.
Using them as Guinea Pigs or laboratory rats was naturally included.
You let some fucking psycho use your best friends as lab rats.
You didn’t have to be a Nazi to do this sort of thing. Quite the contrary, it happened a lot more often than people would have liked to believe.
Ortega couldn’t help but recall the infamous Japanese group of so-called scientists, known as 'Unit 123'. Unit 123 were the Japanese “scientists” who had used American POWs as Guinea pigs in World War II.
Primarily they studied the effect certain poisons had on internal bleeding.
As you can probably imagine, they didn’t stop there.
The Japanese soldiers in that unit used to organize decapitation contests. Whoever decapitated an American POW best with a Katana, won. By 'best', they meant in the cleanest possible manner.
Ortega knew that story well, and yes, it was true.
It was all there, black on white, clear as day in every fucking History book he’d had to study during his training course. He’d read them all, each and every one of them.
Entirely.
That's why he wasn’t going to kid himself about how it would end with Johnny and Jorgenson.
People think what a soldier fears most is death, but that’s not true.
There are some things that are even worse than death, if you can imagine.
Only the thought made his eyes sting.
He wasn’t actually crying, but had an strange feeling inside.
Before long however, he had broken into hiccupping sobs and could barely breath. He was almost convulsing.
He was completely beside himself that night.