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North from January 1964 until April 1972. Congressional oversight committees were told that SOG’s mission was to rescue downed airmen, transport captured enemy prisoners, and conduct supply runs throughout Southeast Asia . The real mission was a long series of clandestine operations inside Laos and Cambodia to disrupt activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nothing was off-limits. SOG opened Pandora’s Box, employing illegal and experimental warfare tactics throughout the region. They practically invented psywar––psychological warfare––and the use of POW double-agents and captured civilians. They staged commando black-ops raids, not discriminating between military and noncombatant targets. They managed the insertion and running of spies and fabricated guerrilla resistance. They planted radio-equipped seismic sensors along the Trail and flew cloud-seeding missions in the upper atmosphere to extend the monsoon season, hoping to drown Charlie inside his elaborate network of tunnels. They employed newly in-vogue “remote viewing” psychics to sit in small barracks rooms and visualize underground enemy movements and map the nightmare world beneath Cu Chi. And when aerosol rainbow herbicides like Agents Orange, Green and Blue didn’t force a withdrawal, SOG command authorized the use of ground-water biologicals like Agent Green-6.
    Many of SOG’s diabolical schemes fizzled like cheap Chinese fireworks, but not all of them. Over 3,500 pages of MACV-SOG’s operational records were finally released in 1995, but all mention of Green-6 and the incident at Phu Bihn Valley was redacted.
    Which is where I come into the story. My name is David Harris, MIT Class of ’67, double major in biochemistry and chemical engineering. After graduation I was recruited by my master’s advisor, a tenured professor who it turns out was consulting for the CIA. Don’t forget that the CIA founded the infamous Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies in 1950 and by the mid sixties was funneling millions of dollars into pre-DARPA weapons research programs. I was weary of my grueling academic life, and the thought of beginning a doctoral program made my head swim. I had worshiped JFK and wanted to do something important for my country.
    By the fall, I was supervising my own lab in an anonymous Brookline Street warehouse in Cambridge, lavishly funded by––you guessed it––SOG.
     
     
    * * *
     
     
    Everything happens very quickly. At some point in the melee I turn to run, and feel myself lofted into the air like a rag-doll, my stomach and sanity falling away. My head snaps back and I see an ocean of sharp stars stitched by white-hot tracers from Weller’s RPK. Something in my left shoulder pops like a champagne cork. Something inhuman that smells a million times worse than the reanimated steer howls in ear-splitting pain, and I pinwheel down and down into the thick elephant grass.
Then Tompkins is shaking me, turning me over. I feel wetness but it isn’t blood, and I blush with shame like a first-grader.
Tompkins helps me sit up and I yelp with pain.
“Your shoulder’s dislocated,” he says.
He fixes that and I screech.
“Shut up,” he hisses.
    Tompkins pulls me to my feet and I stare at the destroyed campsite. All of our tents and equipment, including the communications gear, have been flattened . The three remaining canisters of Green-6 are scattered thirty yards away, ruptured, their deadly cargo spilling out into the soil.
    “Where are the others?” My ears are ringing and it is hard to form sentences.
    “Gone.”
    Underneath the Jackson-Pollock spattering of blood, Tompkins looks gray with shock, but he is methodically gathering up ammo and weapons.
Tompkins hands me an AK-47 with a fresh banana clip. The stock is slick with human claret.
“Hurry up, Harris. Let’s move out.”
“Move out where?”
    “They’re not all dead.” He’s suddenly in my face, roaring. “My MEN . THEY’RE NOT