This happened in Iraq. October 2003, early in the deployment. I was with the 1st Marine Division, and we'd been operating in the area around Fallujah for about six weeks at that point. I was a SAW gunner, that's Squad Automatic Weapon, so I was carrying my M16A2 and about 600 rounds of linked ammo. Heavy kit. We'd been running patrols through these villages where the fighting had been worst, doing sweeps, checking for weapons caches, that kind of thing. The smell was what got to you first. Bodies don't keep well in that heat, if you know what I mean. This particular night we were tasked with a perimeter check around a site where there'd been heavy contact two days prior. Insurgents had tried to overrun a checkpoint. Didn't work out for them. There were still bodies out there, ours were already pulled out, but theirs were just lying where they fell. Command didn't want anyone moving around out there until EOD could sweep for IEDs. So we're walking this perimeter, four of us, staying maybe fifty meters back from where the bodies were. It was around 0200 hours. No moon that night, just stars and our night vision.
My squad leader, Sergeant Ramos, he kept us moving clockwise around the site. Professional, quiet, weapons ready. We'd done this kind of thing a hundred times by then. You get into a rhythm with it. Watch your sectors, keep your intervals, stay alert but not jumpy. The desert at night has its own sounds, wind moving across sand, equipment creaking, your own breathing inside your helmet. We were about halfway around the perimeter when I saw something move. Not out in the desert. Out there, where the bodies were. I held up my fist, standard signal to halt. Everyone froze. Ramos moved up beside me, whispered 'What've you got?' I pointed. Told him I saw movement at our two o'clock, maybe forty meters out, right in the kill zone. He glassed it with his optic for maybe ten seconds. Then he said, 'I don't see anything. Probably wild dogs. They've been at the bodies.' That was true, we'd seen evidence of scavenging. But this wasn't a dog.
We kept moving. I kept my weapon trained toward that area, but I didn't see it again for maybe another five minutes. Then there it was. A shape. Moving between the corpses. It was humanoid, but wrong. Too tall, maybe seven feet, and the proportions were off. The limbs were too long. It moved in this jerky way, like stop-motion footage. It would be at one body, then suddenly it was at another body ten feet away. No transition. Just there, then there. I tapped Ramos again. This time he saw it too. I watched his jaw tighten. He keyed his radio, quiet voice, 'Actual, this is Eagle-Three. We have movement in the kill zone. Possible hostile. How copy?' The response came back, 'Eagle-Three, Actual. No friendlies in your sector. Weapons free if threatened.' But Ramos didn't fire. None of us did. Because the thing wasn't approaching us. It was moving from corpse to corpse, bending over each one. The night vision gave everything that green glow, and in that green I could see it crouch beside a body, lean down like it was examining it, then move to the next one. It was completely black. Not wearing black, it was black. Like a shadow that had mass. No details, no features I could make out even with the PVS-14 monocular giving me perfect clarity. Just a black silhouette against the desert floor.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]