From Dispatches by Michael Herr
Because the Highlands of Vietnam are spooky, unbearably spooky, spooky beyond belief. They are a run of erratic mountain ranges, gnarled valleys, jungled ravines and abrupt plains where Montagnard villages cluster. thin and disappear as the terrain steepens. The Montagnards in all of their tribal components make up the most primitive and mysterious portion of the Vietnamese population, a population that has always confused Americans even in its most Westernized segments…
Dispatches by Michael Herr
…in the Highlands, among triple canopies, where sudden, contrary mists offered sinister bafflement, where the daily heat and the nighttime cold kept you perpetually, increasingly, on edge, where the silences were interrupted only by the sighing of cattle or the rotor-thud of a helicopter, the one sound I know that is both sharp and dull at the same time. The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in Nature could have been born here, where even on the coldest, freshest mountaintops you could smell jungle and that tension between rot and genesis that all jungles give off. It is ghost-story country,…
Oh, that terrain! The bloody, maddening uncanniness of it! …
Spooky. Everything up there was spooky, and it would have been that way even if there had been no war. You were there in a place where you didn’t belong, where things were glimpsed for which you would have to pay and where things went unglimpsed for which you would also have to pay, a place where they didn’t play with the mystery but killed you straight off for trespassing.
Now that is some Lovecraftian description! That’s where you’re some out of contact LURP team trying to track NVA movements coming in across the Laotian border and you stumble on some forgotten, some LONG FORGOTTEN temple and then shit goes sideways.
Back in my high school days, I actually wrote something like that for a creative writing class. Had just finished re-reading Dispatches for the umptyumth time. Main character was a Green Beanie working with a Montagnard team.