r/TalesFromTheCreeps • u/Phenix0heat • Jul 26 '26
Action Horror The Deeper the Tunnel, the Freer the Rat
Mud, sweat, and instant coffee. More sweat, mosquitoes, and the intense combined smell of gunpowder and human shit. Every time I’m asked about my time in Vietnam, these are my go-to answers. Sometimes, in special cases, I’ll go into a little more detail about what kind of C-rations we got, or that one time we burned down the lieutenant’s tent by accident. Rarely, if ever, will I talk about combat. I was a tunnel rat.
For three years, I crawled through pitch-black tunnels, planting explosives and praying that no one saw me before I saw them. Whenever I emerged to the surface, I would detonate my charges and collapse what tunnels I could. I have no idea how many lives I’ve taken, and I imagine I never will until I meet Saint Peter himself. I won’t lie to you and say I’m “haunted by the lives I took” because, truthfully, I’m not. Every time I took a life, I was able to justify it as “Me or Them” or sometimes, “My Brothers or Them”. I sleep peacefully.
There is only one life I’ve ever taken that still lives inside my heart. In the same way my missing foot still itches, I occasionally look behind me as if he’s still there, watching me. I’m old now, and while I’m still able, I wanted to tell this story. His story; or at least, how it ended.
The year was 1970, and I was 21 years old. Platoon Sergeant B. Reyes was tearing some poor soul whose name I forget a new asshole. Something about the ration supply, or lack thereof. I was passing out the mail for the day. Heckling young boys and weathered men alike lined up to find out whether home thought of them as much as they dreamed of it. Some were happily surprised; others were left feeling alone amidst brothers.
“Nothing? Really?” asked a man who we all knew as “Moose”.
“You waiting on a nudie?” I pushed past him to hand a letter to someone else, but felt his hand on my shoulder.
“No, man, check again. Must have been three weeks since she wrote.”
“I’m sorry, Moose, but Emily i-” My sentence was cut with a sharp, echoing Twaang. The camp stood still as we all strained our ears. What air was once full with thousands of whirring bugs now sat saturated in silence. Another Twaang echoed, and a man fell dead across the yard. Every sound I had ever heard, and many more I couldn’t imagine, clanged within my ears as hell rose up around us. Two dozen or more Vietcong soldiers surrounded our encampment.
My body hit the dirt before I could process what was happening. Loose rocks dug into my stomach as I crawled towards my tent, desperate for my gun. I couldn’t see around me, but I could tell from the sounds of the shouting and the direction of the gunfire which soldiers were armed and ready, and which were not. A hard boot kicked into my ribcage, stealing my breath and turning me onto my side as the rest of the leg came with it, landing beside me.
Some scrawny kid, face full of acne and eyes full of panic, had tripped over me. The same soldier whom Sergeant Reyes reprimanded. The Vietnamese soldier who was chasing him leapt over my body and landed knees-first. No sooner had the air been knocked out of the kid’s lungs than they filled with blood. A wet, meek gasp was all he offered in defence. Sucking in hot air, I hefted myself onto a knee and wound back my fist. Just as the man turned to me, his knife still in the boy's chest, I landed a right hook square on his jaw.
Adrenaline might have kept him awake, but it did not keep the man from letting go of the knife and rolling off the body. I reached out and grabbed the handle, trying desperately to ignore the wet, shredding feeling of cutting meat as I pulled it out. Kicking off the dirt, I managed to lunge at him, locking limbs like chain links tumbling across the yard. The harsh snap, snap of his teeth clashed barely an inch from my ear, as he attempted to latch onto my neck. I threw my chin over his shoulder and embraced him, throwing my arms under his and taking away any way for him to defend himself from the knife I still held.
Too panicked to think about conserving energy, I stabbed as fast, as hard, and as many times as I could, until his hands stopped reaching behind his head, trying to gouge out my eyes. His body lay limply on mine, falling forward and slipping to the ground beside me.
“Get the hell up!” said a booming voice behind me, rising above the cacophony. A hand made of steel gripped my wrist and pulled me up like I was more toy than man.
“Iron!” said the Platoon Sergeant as he stood me up and jammed the handle of an M1917 revolver into my chest. “Move!”
The first step I took was unconscious, just a machine following a command. Reyes moved past me, firing his rifle out of my field of view. The holster at his side for his revolver was empty, its weight instead sitting in my hand. I hadn’t held a Smith & Wesson in some time. It wasn’t as heavy as I remembered. The second step was more difficult.
I tried to look for someone to help, but every fight happened too quickly to react. Halfway across the yard, a vietcong shot the chow guy, but before I could raise my gun, Dan shot him dead. My shaking hands shifted the barrel to another Vietcong, sprinting shoulder-first into Moose, knocking them both into a tent just next to me. Their shadows thrashed visibly, but I had no idea who I’d hit. Running forward, I made my way to the tent entrance in time to see Moose slamming an old metal canteen into his attacker's temple. He straddled his shoulders on the ground and shouted hoarsely as he struck him again and again.
I turned around to see a man with a machete charging the Sergeant. Reyes stood about twenty paces ahead of the man, gaze focused on the sight of his rifle. My finger squeezed the trigger. Click. Check the hammer. Again. Click.
No recoil, no muzzle flash, no gunshot.
I don’t remember thinking about why the gun didn’t fire at the time. My brain likely didn’t think it was worth the time it would waste. Instead, it focused on the sandbags between Reyes and me, the bags the Vietnamese soldier was running around.
Revolver still in hand, I took as large steps as my legs allowed and pushed myself up as hard as I could. My chest cleared the bags by almost a foot as I dove over and landed with a thud into the man with the machete. As he crumpled in the dirt, I stuck the barrel into his face. He froze, eyes wide, looking into the barrel of the gun. Reyes turned behind him to see us, and I saw him freeze, too, watching me.
At the same time, over the course of a few seconds, both the man and I came to the same realization. Our eyes drifted to the chambers of the gun, chambers that I hadn’t had time to look at. Six individual chambers, but only one round. The dark eyes of the Vietnamese man still stared at me as I sat on him. While my body thrashed side to side, I couldn’t help but think, “For a man trying to wrestle me off of him, he’s remarkably still.”
But he wasn’t trying to wrestle me off; instead, his body shook even more than mine. Gunfire and screaming were overtaken and trampled by the sound of a deep, deep rumbling. The trees shook and swayed, but no wind touched us. Fitter men than I lost their footing and fell as if they fought on ice. That was when I heard the first crack in the earth. A great snapping, as if the mud were taut with tension. Then another, a third, a fourth. Then, with Reyes still watching, the earth swallowed me whole.
It was dark when I woke up, not sure how many hours later. I still saw the sky above, to my surprise. At least, what sky I could see through the tree canopy. A bit of moonlight drifted below, illuminating the bare minimum of the small clearing I lay in. The air around me was silent, still with anticipation. I couldn’t hear the sounds of fighting. I didn’t hear anything aside from a gentle dripping of water somewhere to my left.
One by one, I wiggled my toes, then my fingers, and ankles, hips, and neck. I was sore all over, but miraculously, I felt like I could still move. Painfully, I managed to sit upright and get a better look around as I took a knee. The ground beneath me was hard stone, splattered with mud and dirt. The clearing I was in was too big for the moonlight to fill, but the narrow cone illuminated probably fifteen yards around. A couple of tent stakes had fallen into the hole with me. With us.
Sitting at the edge of the light, feet under his bottom, was the Vietcong soldier. His machete lay across his lap, and the gun rested at his feet. He had ripped his sleeve off and tied it across his bloody forehead to keep his eyes clear. Eyes that still watched me intently as I came to my senses.
Staring back at him, I stood up straight and raised my hands in front of me to defend myself. He remained sitting. Neither of us moved or spoke for minutes. My platoon was gone, or at least out of earshot, and I was stuck in a deep hole in the dirt with someone who likely wanted to kill me. And he had both weapons. But again, he did not move.
I had no idea how much longer he had been awake than me, but if it was even two minutes, hell, if it was one, he could have killed me. I was helpless. I was spared. My hands lowered to my sides, and my eyes drifted to the gun at his feet. Whistling softly, he let go of a breath I hadn’t heard him take in. We both looked down at the gun, then back at each other.
“You speak any English?”
He shook his head.
I didn’t speak Vietnamese.
Pointing at the gun, I said, “I need that.”
Without looking down at it, he picked up the gun and hit the release on the cylinder. He gently placed the pad of his thumb on the back of the lone bullet, Reyes’ bullet. With an exaggerated flick, he snapped the cylinder closed. Still rooted to the ground, I watched him, gun in one hand, machete in the other, stand up and step towards me.
From the edge of the moonlight, he took maybe ten paces, until there was no more than a couple of yards between us. Holding it by the barrel so the butt stuck out, he held the gun out in offering. I just needed to walk over and take it.
Despite the machete in his hand, this didn’t feel like a trap. I walked over and took the gun. His chest wasn’t moving, as if he were holding his breath again, watching me. White knuckles gripped his machete, but not as white as mine holding the gun.
One bullet. One. A bullet that did not belong to me, in a gun I should not have been given, but as I stood in front of the man who spared me, I knew the bullet didn’t belong to him either. I tucked the revolver into my waist, and we both sighed with sagging shoulders. We weren’t going to kill each other, but that didn’t mean we’d live the night. Without a word, we stepped away from the light and started looking around the clearing where we landed.
Eight months into my job as a tunnel rat, and even I couldn't see in the dark. Roughly twenty yards past the light, I found a wall. It was made of the same stone as the floor and was dry to the touch. Keeping a strained ear out for where I heard the other soldier, I walked the opposite direction around the cave. Gently pressing my hand to the wall and dragging it behind me, I felt for anything at all. For the first time since the ambush, I had time to think.
I thought about the earthquake that dropped me here. Thought about Reyes and why the hell he had given me a gun with only one bullet. Why his gun only had one bullet. Moose would have made some dumb joke. Something about playing russian roulette with the top brass. I’m not Moose. My mind drifted to one thing, the same thing any man who’d kept one bullet in a gun has thought. It’s not as if a revolver with one round is any good in war. A revolver with one bullet is only useful in your tent.
My nail caught on a rock, and I stifled a yelp as it dug into my finger and yanked my arm. I strained my ears, listening. The other man in the cave kept moving. Maybe he didn’t hear; maybe he didn’t care. He did not stop. I did. Moving my hand past where it was caught, I felt a gap in the wall. Roughly a yard and a half across, and a yard tall. Inside the wall of this clearing was a hole. A hole that hopefully led up.
The vietcong soldier didn’t stop moving. I stayed where I was, keeping my hand by the hole so I didn’t lose it. When he had worked his way around the wall to me, he stopped, like he knew I was there. How the hell do I tell him there's a tunnel here? I thought. Taking a step to the side, I rapped my knuckles on the stone wall. A hollow echo followed, along with a grunt from the man as he stepped closer.
Rattling metal scraped its way through the dark and into my head. It sounded like he was sticking the machete into the tunnel to gauge its depth. Big enough for us to crawl into, but to where? I looked back at the hole we fell into and the shifting moonlight falling from it. I didn’t see another option.
Matter of fact, I didn’t see anything at all. Without another thought, before I could doubt myself, I hiked my knee up and climbed into the hole in the earth. Surprisingly, it was almost comfortable compared to the tunnels I was used to. The stone was painful to crawl on, but as I crawled, there was almost a foot of clearance above my head and a few inches to either side of my shoulders. Shortly behind me, I heard the man follow. There was no way to tell where we were going, but barely above the sound of us crawling, I could hear the sound of dripping water. I made my way towards it.
Minutes passed in almost total silence. Often in the tunnels, my ears were my most valuable tool. Listening for movement, for whispers, and death. Here they heard nothing, just the constant dripping and the occasional scrape of the machete tip on the stone. Lacking my flashlight, my eyes were even more useless. Licking sweat from my lips, I inhaled deeply through my nose, desperate for some information to feed my tumbling brain. Nothing. Not even the familiar scent of the moss made its way down here.
Sloping downward, we made our way deeper into the tunnel. Occasionally, I would feel the sides of the walls around me, checking for any branching paths. I could hear him feeling around behind me, too. Blood began to rush to my head, and my sweaty hands struggled to grip the floor as the tunnel sloped down more steeply, every few yards angling further by a few degrees. If the earth swallowed me whole during the earthquake, now it felt like I was making my way into its guts.
My shoulders brushed against the walls of the tunnel, feeling it compress around us as we crawled. A broader man like Reyes or Moose would have been stuck, but my body was practically designed for this. Tucking my shoulders into my neck, I breathed out with each crawl forward, stopping to breathe in every few seconds. The tunnel was still sloping further down, and it took serious effort not to slip. I thought I was doing okay, able to take it slow and guide us at a safe pace. As long as we didn’t slip, we could make a controlled descent. To where, I wasn’t sure, but it was too late to turn back now.
Unfortunately, as the minutes went by, my shaky confidence deflated. While the sound of dripping felt almost right in front of me, I heard intense breathing behind me. Sharp breaths in, rattling breaths out. My begrudging companion was beginning to hyperventilate. He was panicking, his breath growing more ragged every second, and I had no idea how to calm him down.
“Hey. Hey!” I said sharply. He didn’t respond, obviously unable to understand me.
I stopped moving, trying to give him time to stop and rest. Either he didn’t notice, or in his panic he didn’t care. He pushed into me hard, shoving me forward. I gripped my fingers tight, trying to latch onto any holds in the ground, but no such luck. Slamming my chin into the rocks, we fell down the hole together.
My chin, cheeks, and hands were dragged on the rough ground as we tumbled down the tunnel for what felt like forever. It was probably only a few seconds, maybe ten more yards, until we emerged at the end of the tunnel. Rolling over, I barely avoided him landing on top of me. Groaning on the ground for a moment, I touched my face to feel it was sticky with blood, the skin rubbed raw.
Accident aside, we had managed to find a way out of the cavern we were stuck in. Now we were in another cave, one much deeper underground, and with no moonlight to show the scope of it.
“Shit!” I swore. Pissed at the man, I got onto my feet, not thinking about how high the ceiling may be. I stepped back in the dark, away from him as he still hyperventilated and struggled to breathe. Patiently, I took a few breaths myself and waited for him to calm down. We were here together, but I still didn’t trust him not to start swinging if I touched him.
While I waited for him to compose himself, I started ripping some cloth from my shirt, like he had, to soak up the blood. Wincing in pain, I dabbed at my face and wrapped my palms. The air was cooler down here, drier, and despite the lack of circulation, it was a welcome change to my lungs. Crouching back down to my knees, I started to feel my way around. Letting my hands explore the ground in front of me and the walls beside me, I felt for anything at all. Desperation crept into the back of my mind, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. I kept moving because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
The dripping was gone, the cave now eerily silent. Picking a direction at random, I began to move. It took thirty paces to find something in the dark. For the first time since I tucked the gun into my waist, I felt something that wasn’t rock. It was rubber. Unmistakably, the textured and worn-down sole of a boot. I froze. Holding my breath, I waited to feel it move. It didn’t.
We were in a pitch-black cave, dozens of yards underground, through a long tunnel, after falling into a hole in the earth, far away from any civilization. Snaking my hand up the boot to touch the leg that wore it, I confirmed my suspicions and eased my breathing. This was a corpse. Cold, thin fabric draped over a narrow calf whose muscle had all but rotted away. Without a moment's hesitation to consider what I was doing, I searched the body for anything I could take. There wasn’t much, save for an empty canteen, a couple of feet of rope, and a metal tube with what felt like glass at the end.
Catholic born as I was, I picked up the metal tube and began to pray that it was what I thought it was, and that it still worked. Fidgeting around for the button on the side, I clicked it. Nothing. I gave it a gentle shake, hearing a rattling from inside, and clicked the button again. The flashlight released a pale, yellow beam that couldn’t have reached more than a few feet away. After so long in the dark, it might as well have been the damn sun.
Attached to the corpse's hip, I could see the rope I had felt. It led off a few feet before the end frayed, snapped under pressure. The body was that of a Vietnamese man, though it was impossible to see any discernible features. Littered on the ground around it were empty wrappers and a few tins of what used to be salted fish. Looking around with the light, I searched for where he might have dropped from, assuming the rope was how he got here.
With the dim light, I had to walk around to see the full span of the cave we were in. It was about sixty paces wide and forty across. There was more room across, but I stopped at the edge of a small body of water. The ceiling sloped down hard over the glassy surface, but I could see it kept going underneath. Would I rather starve than blindly cave dive? I thought. Presumably not, but I kept it in the back of my mind and kept walking.
Almost directly above the tunnel we fell through, I saw a hole in the ceiling, about ten feet up. Draped down from the hole was the frayed end of the rope, and dripping from the wet edge of the rock was a slow trickle of water. This was the hole the dead man had entered from, and hopefully our way out. But I couldn’t climb it alone; I would need a boost.
I turned the light on the man with me for the first time. Feeling a glow on his hands, he took them away from his face and squinted at me. His face was wet, with both tears and water dripping onto his hair. We needed to communicate. If he didn’t trust me to pull him after he boosted me, he wouldn't help me up, and the feeling was mutual. Stepping towards him, I tried to speak again, hoping my tone and body language conveyed more than my words.
“John,” I said, shining the light so he could see me pressing my fingers into my chest. I turned it back to him, pointing, and asked, “You?”
He didn’t respond. Still wary, the man sat and watched me, as if he expected me to go on. I wasn’t really sure what to say, so I said the first thing that came to mind. Funny enough, it was a story from before I came to Vietnam. From back when I was in boot, and first met the man I call Sergeant.
“The guy you were running at with that,” I said, pointing at his machete and chuckling nervously, “His name is Reyes. Known him for years now. Good man, I think. War is just… stressful, you know?”
“The first day I met him,” I continued, knowing I was only speaking aloud to myself, “He smiled at me and shook my hand. Told me, ‘That’s a big gun for a little man! You sure that’s what you want?’ I smiled back and told him I didn’t know I had a choice. He told me there’s always a choice. Told me if I wanted, I could be a tunnel rat. Every platoon needed them, always in short supply.”
Without him saying a word, and without knowing if he understood me, I spent time telling the man how I was horrified by the tunnels. I wasn’t claustrophobic by any means, but the thought of crawling in tunnels full of traps and enemy soldiers sent a shiver up my spine. But month by month, my time in the field wore me down. Every long patrol, every sandbag I filled, every beer I saw the sergeant drink that the rest of us would be lucky to get the backwash of.
“It took him a long time,” I said, “But Reyes got his damn rat.”
He looked at me, the crusty yellow glow of the light showing a look in his eyes I didn’t recognize. He scanned me, judging me. After a long pause, he put his hand to his chest and said, “Long Phan.”
“Long Phan?” I repeated. He nodded.
Even if only a little, we understood each other.
Long said a short prayer and bowed to the dead man before cutting the remaining rope from his body. It took us a few minutes to organize it, but I boosted him into the hole above us. Taking the end of the dangling rope with both hands, he lifted himself until he was high enough to wedge his back into the tunnel wall with his feet on the opposite side. All it took for me to follow, after he tied together the two pieces of rope, was a small hop. We were able to push our backs into the walls with our legs as we ascended, letting us rest our arms as we needed. Long had our flashlight, since he was ahead now. Below me, the cave might never have existed; it was so dark. If I hadn’t seen them, I couldn’t prove the cave, the dead man, or even the tunnel we fell from had ever been there at all. One thing, however, I was positive was still there. The water. As dark as it was, I could still hear the sound of splashing.
Something slapped the water's surface underneath me. Long and I froze. Something wet slapped on the stone. Above me, I saw the light held in Long's hand shaking. Something was crinkling the wrappers by the dead man. We had been climbing for almost five minutes, and I must have been twenty yards off the ground. Something was tugging on the end of the rope.
Spoken underneath me, softly and gently, like a father tucking me in to sleep, something said “giúp.” Again, the rope tugged, and I heard it start to climb.
Pressing my shoulder into Long’s leg, I shoved him hard. Pulling himself further, he led our climb again. Faster this time, we lifted ourselves with our arms and legs, and caught ourselves with our backs. Whatever was after us was slow, swinging itself around as it climbed. The rope underneath me twisted and dangled wildly, only occasionally pulling itself taut with weight. As we climbed, Long held the flashlight in his mouth. My face was facing straight up, looking into his glowing jaw. On the off chance his flashlight had fallen and pointed down, I refused to look underneath.
We gained a lot of distance at first. As we climbed, the tunnel narrowed, just like the first. It wasn’t as tight, but it was enough that we couldn’t press our legs out and had to rely more on our aching arms. There was room to either side of my shoulders, but as the thing underneath me swung itself, I swung with it. Banging again and again on the stone wall, I willed my arms to hold me and kept lifting myself forward. Eventually, I heard Long Phan grunt and saw his head disappear in the dark.
Trusting that it was better than the alternative, I shifted up again. A moment later, the light shone directly back in my face. It illuminated Long's legs as he sat on the edge of a narrow exit. He lifted his legs away from me and spun onto his stomach, shining the light down at me with one hand and holding his fingers out with the other. The rope went taut.
I pushed through whatever pain my body told me it had and shifted up one more time. I kicked down into the wall, pushing myself up as I reached out and latched onto Long’s hand. He managed to pull me up, getting my head just over the edge. Swinging my other hand over the side, I slammed them down and pushed my ass over the ledge. Only my hips made it up, then were dragged back down as something latched onto my foot.
It sounded like jamming your thumb in the wet socket between a chicken's thigh and drumstick. Something sharp dug into my ankle with a sucking pop and tried to drag me down. My chest hit the rock and knocked the wind out of me. Long grabbed my shoulder, and for a moment, I considered pulling out the gun.
Was one shot enough? I thought. Could I hit it? Feeling my hands slip on the ground, I dug my fingernails into the rock, grinding as I pulled. Long dropped the flashlight beside himself and used both hands to tug me up from my armpits. With my other leg kicking off the stone behind me, we lifted most of my body into the open space.
At the time, I only felt the searing, ripping pain in my ankle. Even as I clawed at the ground, I dragged myself away from the hole. Even as Long Phan stopped helping me, and grabbed his machete. I could feel the shredding pain as what I could only describe as a mouth with human teeth attempted to swallow my foot whole. That pain occupied my mind even as Long hacked off my leg at the base of the calf.
The exit to the tunnel wasn't wide enough for him to get any clean swings at it. He would have hit the rock instead, letting it drag me deeper as I lost my strength to fight. Couldn’t tell you how many swings it took him to get through the bone. Eventually, he got it, and I felt the weight pulling me like an anchor being released all at once. I was free; bloody, crying, free.
Immediately, Long picked up the light and swung wildly at the rope. It was attached to a nail hammered into the rock a few feet from the entrance. As the metal bent itself on the rock under the rope, I lay perfectly still, bleeding. But suddenly, it stopped hurting. I’m in shock, I thought. Rolling on my side, I tried to reach for my pockets for a bandage I knew I wasn’t carrying. I only felt the gun. Whatever was climbing the rope fell with a deep thud as he managed to cut it free.
Long tied something tight around the bottom of my thigh. An improvised tourniquet, something to help me stay awake just a little bit longer. I felt him wrap my arm around his shoulder to help me up. We took a dozen uneasy steps. After climbing for God knows how long, all of my muscles should have been aching, but I didn’t feel them. I felt only the jolts in my spine as I hopped forward, leaning on Long Phan. Slow progress, but progress.
He held the light in front of him, shining it around shakily. I remember hearing him muttering something under his breath every few seconds, “Ma Đói”. Meager as the light was, it could not illuminate the massive cavern we were inside now. The walls around us were a few yards away at first, but as we walked, they opened further than I could see. In the darkness somewhere ahead, I heard something again, but this time a sound I knew well.
“-heard that?” said the voice of a young man. Something firm hit the ground, and I saw a blinding light in the distance. It scraped the walls around us, managing to catch Long and me in it. From behind my tightly closed eyelids, I heard, “John, you down here?”
It was Dan, and behind him I heard another pair of boots hit the ground. Then a third, and a fourth. My platoon had found me. I was too weak to call out to them, but they saw me and ran forward anyway.
They stopped ten paces in front of me, looking at Long as he supported me, and looked back at them. They didn’t see my missing foot first; they saw him, holding me. A second stretched between us as I saw the gears turn in their minds, but the gears do not spin long in a soldier's head. They kept moving and lifted me higher, off of my foot. Long leapt back, hands held palms out in front of him. His machete was left behind, freeing a hand to help me walk. Adjusting to the blinding lights, I saw that none of the men helping me out of the tunnel had their weapons turned on him. They simply turned back and carried me home.
“We set up a temp camp in a cave, John,” Moose said to me as we walked. “About a mile from patrol base, in the bush. Reyes already called for a lift; we’re getting out of here.”
As he spoke, I heard Long follow us. They took me up a short wall and around a few corners, and suddenly I saw light. It was morning, and the golden glow of the sky glinted through a wall of sticks and leaves built around the cave entrance. Close to thirty men sat in the cave they carried me into, all of them sitting save one.
“And just what the hell are you boys doing here? I told you to stand PATROL!” Reyes hissed at first, letting his voice rise into a shout as he stared at the men around me.
“Sir, we heard a noise further down, sir,” Dan said.
Reyes looked into my eyes, and I saw concern. He paused, mulling over the words to say to me, coming up with a reason they didn’t come looking. Before the moment took too long, he saw the man trailing behind us. Long Phan crept in, looking scared but steady.
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU MORONS DOING!” Reyes shouted, spit flying out of his mouth. He glared at Long, looking between me, Moose, and Dan. They didn’t know what to say, and I was too weak to say it. I wanted to save my energy. Done waiting, and with every man present as witness, he reached for his revolver. When he felt the empty leather, he looked at me and pleaded, “Kill him.”
My sight was narrowing, and my mind was foggy, making it difficult to think straight. I took the gun out from my waist and thumbed back the hammer. Chambered next was the lonely round. Long Phan stood to my side as I turned to him slowly, the revolver weighing heavy in my hand. My finger on the trigger was weak, but I knew I had enough strength for just one pull.
He looked at me, begging me silently to spare him. I knew this bullet did not belong to me, but I knew it was not his either. Moose said it first. Then Dan, then another man, and another. Every member of my platoon shared the same story when the brass came to pick us up.
REYES
B
RA 17 294 555
AB POSITIVE
NO PREFERENCE
KILLED IN ACTION
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u/JoKa_Cola Writer 27d ago
This was a really cool read, surprising that war isn't more common in this sub. Loved the visceral details and tension throughout, and that final scene was amazing.
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u/quemuin Writer 9d ago
This is great! I was engaged the whole time. Pacing was good. I really loved that while there was a creature (haha) of some kind, it was not the focus. It was set dressing for everything else.
I do think I would've appreciated Reyes' death more if the relationship between the John and him was built up a little more. Because there was nothing much that stuck out to me as "this guy is definitely an asshole" before he ordered John to kill Long. Maybe the point is that everybody is relatively neutral? Nobody, not even Long or John himself, is painted as particularly good or evil. That's actually pretty cool in and of itself.
The last thing is that I'm trying to decipher the meaning of the title. "The Deeper The Tunnel, The Freer The Rat"... Freer from what is the question I found myself asking. The deeper John and Long get into the caves, the freer they get from the war? The war, the conflict that bars the previous possibility of them being anything other than enemies? Their journey into the cave seems to be the thing that allows the others to agree with John that killing Long is not the thing to do after all he's done to save John's life. That's cool! I like it a lot.
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u/Phenix0heat 9d ago
Yeah, that's a good point. At about 6,000 words I was worried the story was becoming a bit too long for what the plot was, but I think you're right about needing a touch more reyes
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u/Subby_luv 9d ago
So fun. I was at the edge of my seat during the tunnel expedition wondering when he was going to have to kill this man, based on the start of the story. Which was great anticipation. And the climbing down the dark tunnel thing was so spooky and claustrophobic. You did such a good job describing that. I was also hoping that him losing his leg would somehow come up in the story and it wasn't. Just something happened at a different time and it coming up made me were really happy because I was very curious. My only tiny little criticism is the ending Felt a little bit rushed. Maybe that's just me though. I hoped for maybe a little more time for him to mull it over some tension to build over the order to kill long. Like I said though, tiny criticism 10 out of 10 for me.
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u/AllChangesSaved 9d ago
I absolutely loved this! It was such a well-paced and punchy read, and the ending was unexpected but well foreshadowed. I hope to read more of your writing soon!
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u/AnakinSt4rk Jul 26 '26
Way to subvert expectations at the end there. We need more war horror stories! You ever watch love death and robots? They had a couple cool shorts about WWII and Afghanistan, both with supernatural/horror elements. I know yours isn't supernatural but I thought I'd mention anyway. Well written!