What We Found In Brazil

This one is from an operation we undertook around 2011. It happened around January of that year. Anyways, straight to the point.

We were undergoing routine training, as any unit does, involving rappelling and taking down multi-storied buildings with mock explosives when the ‘suits’ arrived. I was a staff sergeant now with an abnormal pay raise. I was promoted after Argentina for my ‘stellar’ performance. I’m not dumb. I knew even at the time that I was given that promotion as a way to tell me “Stay quiet and we’ll reward you.” So I was ok with them, for now. Money is money, right?

Before I move on, Team 3 had been replaced at this point. A group of new recruits into the program arrived, after approved selection from other units. Veterans, you see. But they looked puzzled when they noticed the ‘suits’.  I just shook my head at them as a way to tell them to not worry and told them to not get involved with them as best as they could. I assured them as best I could.

Shepard walked alongside the ‘suits’ and ordered us to head to the briefing room. We packed our equipment up and went where we were told to go. Again, the powerpoint showed a map of South America. The ‘suits’ thanked our unit for our work in Argentina. I could see Shepard shift and glance away when they talked about it. I felt the same way he did. I could tell.

Slides of Brazil lit up the dark room. Pictures of slums in Rio de Janeiro flashed by, weather reports of the region, etc. All I remember thinking at the time was how I wanted to go to one of the beaches there, lay in the sun, maybe pick a girl or two…

The presentation ended and snapped me back to reality. The suits said that, like before, we would be accompanied during the mission but reassured that this would not always be the case. It seemed like they were trying to mold us into how they wanted us to behave so that they wouldn’t have to get in the dirty stuff themselves. But hindsight is 20/20.

Shepard assigned leadership for the mission. Team 2 was out. This operation called for only two teams and he wanted the newly replenished team 3 to get the ‘experience’ of these sort of missions. He knew, just like everyone else that this was probably not going to be the last time the ‘suits’ would have a mission for us. And he, we, were right.

We arrived in Rio late at night. I remember distinctly that it was storming really bad because the choppers were grounded. So we instead had to take SUV’s bought from the local police. They weren’t the best, but they would do. The ‘suits’ led us to a large tent set up in desolate area of the airport. Entering it, I immediately noticed tables with lines upon lines of weapons, uniforms, and masks. The suits talked to Shepard for a moment and then he spoke.

“Alright, everybody listen up! Strip out of your uniforms, drop off your weapons and clothes in the bins next to the tables, and gear up with what’s on the tables. We move out in 15.” Everyone quickly got out of their clothes and began donning the stuff on the tables. It was all Brazilian equipment. FAL’s, M12 submachine guns, explosives, gas masks, you name it. I quickly got the uniform on, grabbed an M12 with ammunition, several pounds of C4, and put on the gas mask provided to me. It wasn’t too long before everyone else was finished as well. We straight up looked like Brazilian military regulars. We marched out of the tent as migrant workers entered and began packing everything up. Dumped into large mounds, they quickly lit them up with gasoline and matches. Plausible deniability was in full effect now.

We loaded up the SUV’s and hit the road. We drove for what seemed like an hour, maybe an hour and a half, in the darkness of the midnight moon. I knew exactly where we were though. The powerpoint from the briefing wasn’t necessary. Everyone knows what a Brazilian favela looks like. We pulled down a tight alleyway and stopped. Orders squaked over our aged radios. ‘Get out and move up to the sandbags.’ The cars stopped and doors flung open. I ordered Team 3 to disembark and take up positions around us. Another call came over the radio. ‘It’s the wild west here, everyone. All targets are open game. No ROE, folks.’ This caught me by surprise. Even after all of my time in the middle east, and even in Argentina, we always had some sort of rules of engagement. Civilians were always a no go, but we had just been ordered that anyone and anything was equally a target.

We stopped at the sandbag wall. I made my way through team 1, who was staring intently at something beyond the sandbags. When I got there, it was not surprising why they were. There was a large hole in the ground. It looked to me like a pit to hell it was so dark in there. Stairs led down as far as I could see, and I imagined they went further down into the hole. Into the darkness. Flood lights lit the rim, with Brazilian military forces aiming intently at the dark pit. But no light seem capable of puncturing the black dark. Like it was unwilling to. One of the ‘suits’ addressed us before I could begin to wonder why we were even here.

“Team 3 is going down first to recon the situation. We’ll feed you further instructions when you’re secured down there. Team 1 is going to pull security here. Anything that comes out that isn’t Team 3, remember what your commander told you. No ROE. Anything’s fair game”

I can tell you I felt extreme dread when my team lined the rim of the pit and prepared to rappel down. I had never felt that sort of anxiety before in my life up to that point. It just did not feel...correct to be there. But we had a job to do so we did it. We all turned on the flashlights on our helmets and I ordered the team to start descending. It was about five feet to where the….ink was. I don’t know what to call it to be honest but that’s the best way I can describe it.

I wasn’t the first to reach it. Private Ordega next to me was the first. I watched as he slipped through the barrier of darkness. I tried to watch him as he went but he literally passed through a wall of darkness. The ink stayed undisturbed from his passage as well. It was incredibly unsettling. We all pushed through it. I felt a shiver flow through me as I went through it. I felt cold to the bone. The whole way down, had to of been around a hundred feet or so was the same cold, inky darkness. When we reached the bottom is when it changed, and not for the better.

Here the air was wet, humid, and it was extremely hot. Completely uncomfortable. And this is coming from someone who has served in the Middle East on several occasions. It was hotter than the hottest day I had seen, and wetter than a Vietnamese jungle during monsoon season. I had to fight internally about ripping off my gas mask right then and there. But I knew better. So did my team. I trained them well. They knew how to operate even in the worse of conditions. We pushed forward.

We had been creeping along for maybe thirty minutes down the tunnel when we noticed our flashlights no longer cut through the darkness. I raised my hand in front of my face and still couldn’t see it. I ordered the team to stop. I turned it off and switched to my NVG’s (night-vision goggles). The lack of light prevented the night vision aspect from working. I switched over to the thermal setting. The tunnel lit up in a mixture of blues, yellows, and reds showcasing the heat in the area. “Switch to thermal,” I ordered.

As the team got up to par, I finally had time to process everything. Why were we using Brazilian equipment when we were underground? There wasn’t a single soul down here as far as I could tell. It made zero sense. And why the hell was there this pit in the middle of the favelas? Shoddy construction job? Bomb detonation? I didn’t know but it didn’t add up for me. It put me on edge.

We moved on for what seemed like an hour. I don’t know how long it took because I remember being curious as to how much time had passed. I glanced at my wristwatch. The hands on it messed with me. I blinked hard and shook my head. The hands were moving wildly in both directions. I knew it couldn’t have been broken. It was working the whole time before we came here, wherever here was now. I snapped out of it when our pointman radioed for me.

“Sir, I have an opening up ahead on thermal,” Ordega said. I moved up next to him, turning a short corner. He felt the rush of air from the outside. I waved us forward and we moved through the opening. But it wasn’t quite outside. It was a large cavern. I guessed at the size being around the size of Cowboy’s stadium. It was huge. There was an opening up above too, which I knew led to the real outside as rain fell through the darkness filter that filled the room. A long pair of stone stairs led to it, I noted. I wanted to know where it led to, and what was on the other side.

I was about to order for us to continue moving on when one of the members called out. “Staff sergeant, I have something on thermal over here!” I turned to my right. It was corporal Barker, and he was pointing his rifle to the group’s right. I looked to where he was pointing. Someone was hunched over along the far wall. And they were digging at something at their feet. I walked forward, my team behind me. We got to I wanna say forty feet from the individual when I stopped in my tracks. I couldn’t get a good look with thermals so I chanced I look without them. I toggled my light on and I almost wished I hadn’t.

The light illuminated better than it had when we were moving through the tunnel. And it showed what we were looking at pretty well. It was human, or at least it appeared to be. It was extremely pale and showed no reaction to the light. I figured it was probably blind at that point. It had long, darkened nails on the ends of its fingers that it was using to….just remembering what it was doing sends me back there. It was dipping its nails into a deceased women and then using the blood to what I can only decipher as draw symbols of an unearthly nature on the rock wall. I lifted my rifle and aimed. Barker and Ordega did the same, but one of them took a step forward and tripped on a rock outcropping.

When Ordega hit, the thud of him and his gear echoed through the giant room. His gun fell from his hands and skid towards the being who stood up now and slowly turned toward us. I saw what I would call its face. It had black eyes, a slit-like nose, and its mouth stretched from ear opening to ear opening. Jagged blades of teeth poked out of its menacing grin. It breathed deeply before screeching so loud I had to cover my ears. It pierced my eardrums and I honestly thought I would pass out from the pain. It was worse than any bullet wound that I had felt or seen.

The beast rose to a towering nine feet as it finally stood up completely. It crossed the distance between Ordega and itself in less than a second. Before I could even open fire, it had already picked him up by his neck and crushed his neck. My smg’s rounds punctured through its body but appeared to do nothing. Barker fired, the rest of the team fired as the beast took Ordega’s head into its mouth and ripped it off. His headless corpse was then thrown at us, striking Barker and I. Tumbling backwards, I watched as my team retreated, firing as they did as the beast slowly made its way towards them. Nothing seemed to slow it.

I pushed the body off of me. I got lucky. Barker hadn’t. The force of the body had crushed his chest and blood pooled around us. I swore under my breathe and order my team to get the stairs I had seen. We needed out of this place, and I knew that what we were doing was having no effect on whatever it was that we were currently engaging. I made it to the stairs quickly, and I turned back to see where my team was. They were on their way, but about half was lagging behind, trying desperately to slow or kill the thing that was pursuing us.

Before I could say anything, several more beasts emerged from the darkness and ripped their deadly claws into the half that was cut off from us. I didn’t want to, but I had to come to terms with losing half of my squad. I ordered the surviving members to start up the stairs. I figured that if we couldn’t kill them with bullets, than C4 was better than anything. Or at least a structural collapse of the place would bury them. I placed charges as I went, ordering my team to do the same. We ran, oh god we ran so hard up those stairs that I almost fell a few times. I could hear the roars behind us. Before I knew it, we passed through the opening and we were not in Rio anymore. We were on the top of a small mountain. I looked around. We were in a small clearing with a small village nestled in the back, abandoned for some time now.

We ran to the the houses nearby and as I turned I could see a long pale arm reach out from the pit. I detonated the charges. The explosion was large. The trees nearly were uprooted, and the hillsides nearby suddenly shifted. A massive landslide began to cascade downward and the opening to the pit was briefly reopened before the ground around it buckled underneath and it too joined the landslide. When it was all said and done, the village we were at barely survived. The land all around it was torn away but somehow the village stayed. I don’t believe in a God but I figured something saved us. Luck, perhaps. I radioed Team 1 and Shepard for the first time since we went in. I could hear the suits swearing up a storm in the background, something about the explosion and shit. Shepard told me to ignore them, and thanked us for making it out alive. He told me that the choppers would come to pick us up in an hour when the rain cleared.

I took the time to rest, as did the rest of the crew. After a while, my bladder informed me that I needed to piss. I got up and headed outside. But as I made my way to back of the village, I saw a small shack that glowed with light on the edge of the village. I approached cautiously. I didn’t want to take any chances. I kicked the door down and inside took me back to Argentina. Nazi propaganda adorned one whole side of the wall, and a shelf of religious books took up the other side. A small bed lay at the far end. I could see someone in it, but they had clearly cut their own wrists, evidenced by the blood spilled out onto the book at their lap.

I didn’t tell any of the others what I had found when I returned. When the helicopters arrived, the suits exited and scoured the village. Shepard ordered us aboard and we returned to the airport. As we left the country, I had a feeling that what I had seen so far in South America was only the beginning. And I fucking hated it.

So I wanted to talk about it after all the Brazil stuff but that had gone on for longer than what I had thought it would. But all that needed to be said. The weird shit going on in the world should be public knowledge. That’s what I believe, but I know for sure that others do not share my views. This became evident once we got back from Brazil.

We had just touched down at Fort Bragg when it changed. Everyone was exhausted, mentally and morally drained from what we had just participated in. My team was particularly affected due to the high casualty rate we had suffered. That’s what happens when you go into the field blind like we did. We had no one to blame but the suits. Everyone on the team knew it. And the suits knew that too.

Instead of our usual routine of disembarking, dropping off our equipment to the armory (though we did not have any as all the Brazilian stuff was returned to them), and then taking some R&R either on base or off, we were instead instructed by the suits to head immediately to the briefing room. I did not really feel like doing another mission at the moment. Consider this: I had just led a costly operation in Brazil, fought with God know’s what, and my team, hell the whole platoon, needed to rest to be combat effective again.

I remember looking at Shepard for reassurance. He looked back at me with a just as puzzled look on his face. We crossed the base to the where we held our briefings.I remembered activity on the base being far busier than it should have been. Like, personnel were everywhere, and armed with what they would be carrying with them on a patrol in Afghanistan. There was also a lot more of the suits on base. Before it had just been the two that had been with us, sometimes a third or fourth who would be out of sight most of time. Now it was more like fifty. And that’s just from my rudimentary counting on our walk. There could have been more, or a little less. I don’t know. All I do know is that it was strange.

When we got to the room, it was packed with everyone from our unit, not just our teams. Here, we were flat out told that we would have handlers. Minders is what they were more like, to be honest. They tried to sugar coat it by telling us it was a program approved by a joint-venture between Congress and the military to help prevent suicide and to examine the effects of post-combat cooldown. But I knew better. They didn’t want us talking about anything we were seeing. Most of the men took it well. Maybe they knew better than to question anything. Or maybe they were just incredibly ignorant. Hell, I know I was at one point. But I wasn’t then and I’m not now.

We were dismissed after meeting our respective minders. Mine was a guy named Phillip, if that even was his real name. He’d be staying with me on base, same with everyone else. That’s what they told everyone. I knew it was bullshit and I wanted to test it. Night couldn’t come fast enough. I left base that evening to head home. I lived nearby Fort Bragg so I didn’t have to live on base. It was better for my family that way.

I had been driving on the highway for around ten minutes when I noticed I was being followed by a black SUV. I moved through traffic seeing if it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. When the SUV failed to show up again, I thought that maybe I was just being too paranoid. I mean, after what I had just been through, I don’t think it would surprise anyone.

I pulled into my house, greeted my wife and daughter. My wife had made steaks. We ate well and soon the time ticked away to when it was time to go to bed. Everyone else had gone to bed at this point. All the lights were off, save for the light coming from the TV I had been watching. I stood, turning it off, and went to the front picture window to close the drapes. As I did, I shiver resonated from my spine. I saw a black SUV parked down the street, a man sitting in it and waiting.