The Green Veil (Redaction 001)

"Sorry Mama, ain’t coming home. I’m damned with Uncle Sam, and the hills I roam."

The jungle stretched in every direction—a tangle of verdant scars and jagged canopies swallowing the remnants of forgotten empires.

On the outside it looked like chaos. Untamed. Primeval. But I knew better. This was nature in full control. Every branch, every vine, every bird call like a coded transmission. The jungle didn’t grow—it arranged.

Ruins poked out of the overgrowth like half-buried landmines from another war. Broken idols stared up with blank stone eyes, lips chipped mid-prayer. Moss crawled over their faces like mold on a corpse no one bothered to bury.

This wasn’t the wild I’d been trained for. No ridgelines to mark, no clear LZs. Just a sea of green that folded in behind you, real quiet, like a door clicking shut.

I wasn’t just passing through—I was being processed. There was ceremony in it. Roots underfoot like tangled rosaries, shafts of sunlight cutting through the canopy like stained glass in a chapel no one had built.

I’d call it beautiful, if it didn’t feel like the place was trying to ordain me. And yeah, I’d taken vows before—oaths, codes, a dozen pledges to flags and uniforms. But this?

This was something older. No signatures. No salutes. Just a contract written in blood, mud, and memory. The kind of covenant that doesn’t wait for consent.

The jungle doesn't give a damn about kings. It swallowed the old ones—Jaguar Lords in feathered cloaks, their priests gutting prisoners beneath the sun, thinking blood kept the world turning. Then the new world armadas came with crosses and ships, carving saints over old gods, spilling blood in the same of Salvation.

Haciendas and rancheros rose like fat ticks on the land, but time doesn’t play favorites. Modernity rolled in like a slow-moving executioner, and now their bones are just more rot for the earth to chew.

The world beneath that green ocean was shrinking, carved up by the iron claws of industry and the scorched-earth policies of men with too much power and too little patience. The rivers ran slick with black chemicals, the trees blistered where the napalm had kissed them.

The jungle was still alive, but it was dying, slowly, deliberately—and it wasn’t going down without a fight.

Speaking of a fight, the meds were kicking my ass. New stabilizers. A fresh cocktail from the Chemical Corps, engineered to keep my hands steady and my mind clear. That was the idea, anyway. Instead, it felt like trying to balance on a tightrope in a storm. Too much focus in one direction, too little in another. My breath came measured, my heartbeat steady—but not by my own doing.

Unlike the ones I'd seen before, Latin America wasn’t a warzone. It was timeless and unhurried in the expanse. These were our friends—the first line of defense in the grand old Monroe Doctrine. That little piece of paper that told the Kings of the Old World to quit rattling their sabers in our backyard.

Of course, America would never dream of being a king. That would be unseemly. No, we were just the friendly big brother, keeping a watchful eye on the neighborhood, making sure the kids didn’t play with the wrong crowd.

And if, a few elections had to be adjusted, and a few too many men wound up in unmarked graves—well, that was just the cost of looking out for family.

I wrote too many papers on our strategies in the Western Hemisphere. I was known to butt heads without instructors but these people paid for my college.

I didn’t want to make it up mid level supervisor at the winery in Central Valley of Cali. Hot summers where the A/C units rattled against rusted window frames, the scent of sour grapes clinging to every pore. Cineplex's with floors so sticky they could hold a man hostage. That wasn’t the life I wanted.

A life with unmediated ghosts rattling around in my skull—just like my mother. The recruiter told me to use “verbal whiteout” if it ever came up. Smile. Nod. Say the right acronyms. Don’t tell them what you hear when it gets real quiet.

So I took the recruiters blood money, played the game, and told myself I’d figure the rest out later. They plucked me straight from a conference, stuck in a room with other biological units from across South America, all nodding along to some pitch about a shiny new bio-lab on the freshly laid tracks.

A state-of-the-art facility, they called it—progress, cooperation, the usual buzzwords. But we all knew the score.

Uncle Sam wasn’t about to let some testing center pop up in his backyard without wrapping his big brother arms around the whole operation. Not protection—possession. The coalition smiled, shook hands, signed papers, but the ink might as well have been stamped with an eagle’s talons.

State-of-the-art. That’s what they called it. A gleaming fortress of steel and glass, where men in lab coats poked at things that should’ve been left in the ground. But I’d seen enough to know the real threats didn’t come from spies in black masks or some foreign saboteur with a vendetta against Uncle Sam.

No, the real enemy was human nature—corner-cutting, back-slapping, budget-slashing negligence. The kind that leaves backdoors open and biohazards mislabeled. The kind that lets underpaid guards sleep through shifts while pathogens sit one cracked test tube away from turning a jungle into a morgue.

Hack writers love their boogeymen, their shadowy infiltrators whispering in foreign tongues. But I knew better. The worst threats don’t wear ski masks—they wear badges and sign cost-saving contracts. They take long lunches and ignore the red flags because fixing them means paperwork.

If this place went down, it wouldn’t be because some Bond villain broke in. It’d be some asshole forgetting to lock a freezer.

I breathed in the the canopy when the alarms started screaming.

Red lights. Shouts. A sudden jolt as the bird pitched hard to the left. The burning wires pierced my nose before I saw the black fog reached out out the seals of the control. Hydraulics gone. No time for prayers, just muscle memory—brace, breathe, count.

More men get killed or torn to pieces because of cut-rate contracts and the lowest bidder than by a sniper’s bullet. But you won’t see that in the movies—doesn’t make for a good war story when the real enemy is penny-pinching and cheap parts.

The sheets of green and hazel came up fast. The first impact rattled my bones. The second punched the wind from my lungs. By the third, we weren’t a helicopter anymore—just scrap metal and bodies tangled in the trees.

“Oh death where is thy sting.” The preacher used to say. Would the casket be closed and did I clear my browser history before I left.

I must’ve blacked out because when I came to, the rotor was still spinning uselessly above me, half-buried in the mud. The air stank of fuel and blood. Someone was groaning nearby, but I knew better than to call out. The jungle was listening.

Then I heard it. The Voice.

Not from the wreck, not from my radio—from the trees themselves. A low, thrumming whisper threading through the leaves, sinking into my skull..

You survived, Youre not waking up from this nightmare

I rolled onto my knees, spitting mud and blood. "Not for long," I muttered.I’m gonna find whatever dive the wrench jockey drinks at and knock his teeth down his throat. Then I’ll pay a visit to the egghead who signed off on that bird—see if he’s got a spine or if he just rubber-stamped us into a fireball..

I reached for the gear, but the world had turned slow, syrup-thick. Smoke slithered through the slits in the green, curling like fingers, like tongues. The fire moved strangely—not spreading, not consuming, just reaching, unfolding in black and orange like a hand waiting to be held.

The trees stood still, their shadows stretched long and wrong. The jungle refused to burn passively—it was watching. The green expanse was going to take me with it. Wake up, please wake up.I pressed my fingers against the pilots' jawlines, searching for that faint, rhythmic thump of life. No dice. Just silence and cooling skin.

For a moment, I swore I saw a smile. Not frozen in death—the moment before you paid the ferry before the black crossing, a secret that only the dead can keep.

No. Just my mind filling in the gaps, twisting the shadows and slack muscles into meaning where there was none. But the longer I looked, the more it felt like they were in on a joke that I wasn’t.

The radio muttered.

The voice cracked through the static—not mechanical, not distant, but anointed, like a fireside preacher who had seen the other side and come back wrong. It soothed and unsettled in equal measure, an angel’s whisper with the weight of something much older pressing against my skull.

"We all walk through the valley of the shadow of death… but you walk alone. Your friends left you behind."

The sound slithered through my ears, pooling at the base of my spine. The fever burned hotter. The trees breathed in slow, rhythmic pulses. The jungle tilted, not swaying in the wind, but shifting, watching. The man knew scripture.

My fingers locked around the survival carbine before I even realized I’d moved. The front sight lined up with the green, where the shadows stretched too far, where the undergrowth rustled without a breeze. The green stared back, and the radio laughed.

"Enter through the narrow gate."

The voice dripped through the static, slow and deliberate, like it was savoring each word. "For wide is the gate, and broad is the road that leads to destruction… and many march gladly through it."

The radio hummed—a low, uneven drone that bent the edges of sound itself. Words warped and stretched, syllables unraveling into something half-spoken, half-sung, like a fevered prayer whispered through cracked lips.

It wasn’t language anymore, not quite—more like the jungle breathing through the static, calling out from some place beyond sense. The signal twisted, curling into shapes that crawled beneath my skin and tangled with the shadows in my mind.

The fever pulsed in my skull, a slow rhythm beating against the walls of reason. And in that fractured soundscape, I heard it—the voice of a man lost between worlds, beckoning from the dark heart of the forest, where light dies and something waits.

“Come closer, soldier. The jungle knows your name.”

He preached

"But small—so small—is the gate… and narrow the road that leads to life. And only a few, only the chosen, ever find it."

The jungle pressed in, thick and humid, the trees listening, judging. My fingers clenched the carbine, but it felt useless—like a relic from a dead world. The voice knew. It had always known.

"Tell me, soldier—"

The transmission crackled, then came back clearer than before, like the speaker was standing right behind me.

"Which road are you on?"

The radio hissed beside the ruins, its voice curling through the static like smoke from a dying fire. A summoning.

The kind whispered from burning thorns and carried on desert winds.

Moses was a stranger in a foreign land too, the thought slid unbidden into my mind. Did he trust the voice that called his name?

The transmission crackled, warping, twisting in the thick jungle air. The heat made the ruins shimmer like they weren’t all the way there—like they belonged to a time that hadn’t yet passed.

I glanced at the radio. It was waiting for me to answer.

"There were protocols to get me. Big official ones. Thick binders and radio frequencies and call signs, all designed to make sure a guy like me made it home. That’s the lie. The movies show Uncle Sam moving heaven and earth to bring a soldier back, but the truth?

I was far off the dotted lines on the guided tour. This was bad optics. The kind of thing that made diplomats sweat and generals issue denials when their pensions could be hit, these guys that played in the Gulf now play gold.

The U.S. had spent half of the new administration deporting, destabilizing, and strong-arming its way through Latin America—another rogue op in the jungle wasn’t just a problem, it was a liability. And liabilities got buried fast.

“Why are you here, soldier?” The voice crackled through the radio, thick as the jungle heat. “Don’t bother lying. The vine whispers, the beasts confess. The green swallows your tracks like the tide under a hunter’s moon.”

It had that same weight, that same knowing hush—like my father when he found the nudie mags stuffed under the sock drawer. Not anger. Not yet. Just the slow drag of a cigarette before the sermon.

“You hold that gun like a talisman,” he said, voice thick with jungle rot and old ghosts.

“There are Spanish muskets buried deep, rusting in the soil. Automatic rifles fused to skeletons, their barrels choked with vines. It did them no good either.”

He spoke of the arms of white empires—of conquistadors and grunts, all thinking cold steel could tame the jade in the name of Gold and God. This was the land of zealots, and I laid in the cross haired.

Chemical Corps—because nothing says “military necessity” like figuring out new ways to make people choke, burn, or see God. I wasn’t some grunt kicking in doors or a sniper stacking bodies from a mile out.

My war was fought in labs and boardrooms, where the air was cold, the coffee was bitter, and the real killers came in vials, not bullets. I could shoot well enough, but my weapons didn’t leave shell casings—they left nightmares.

The sting hit before I heard the hiss. A blow dart—fast, clean. My fingers found the shaft, snapped it, but the damage was done. Whatever was in me was already working.

The jungle twisted. The trees leaned in like they knew something I didn’t. My breath turned sharp, my pulse a hammer in my skull.

I ran. Didn’t think, didn’t plan—just moved.

The radio hissed through the static, but the voice came clear—calm, certain, like it was speaking of a truth older than the trees themselves.

“Don’t go past the trees that cry white tears—that’s where the Weeping Widow holds court, soldier. That ground isn’t ours to tread anymore.”

She doesn’t listen to me anymore.

Not like she used to—back when I still had a name she remembered. Now, her eyes glaze over like the jungle’s thick fog, distant and unreadable.

The Weeping Widow moves through the shadows, but she’s no longer the woman I knew.

Her whispers come through the leaves—half prayers, half curses—but when I try to reach her, she turns away, swallowed by the roots and scars that have become her skin.

She’s not just lost to me. She’s lost to herself.

And maybe, just maybe, she’s lost to the world that sent us both here.

There was a weight in the words, a kind of reverence that felt carved into the very bark and bone of the jungle. Those pale sap-streaked trunks wept like fresh wounds, bleeding slow and silent beneath the heavy canopy. The air hung thick with the ghosts of the lost—souls tangled deep in the roots, trapped between earth and shadow.

It wasn’t just a warning. It was a recognition—of something ancient, sorrowful, and unstoppable. She wasn’t just a woman; she was the jungle’s lament made flesh, patient and unforgiving.

“Honor her, soldier. She is the forest’s grieving mother—and its final judgment.”

The drug was working fast, turning my blood to fire, my breath to sandpaper. The jungle swayed wrong, too alive, the trees ahead slashed deep—long, red claw marks, still wet, too high for any animal I knew. The cuts didn’t just bleed—they dripped.

I kept moving. Didn’t have a choice. The river roared ahead, black and swollen. I heard something behind me—branches bending, leaves parting, breath that wasn’t mine.

The radio clicked again.

“They’ll let you run.” A pause. Static. “For now.”

I dove. -just instinct, fear, and that old voice in my spine telling me this was the only way out.

The current hit like concrete, snapping the air from my lungs, ripping the breath right out of me. It wasn’t just water down there—it was weight, history, gravity with a pulse.

Above me, the jungle leaned in, not like branches bowing in the wind, but like something aware. The canopy didn’t just shift—it rearranged, trees bending at angles that defied sense, leaves curling inward like they were closing the lid on a coffin. Something moved in them. With them. Not a creature. Not separate from the forest—

—of it.

And then the black water swallowed me.

It wasn’t cold. It was thick. Like sap. Like breath. The kind of wet that filled not just your mouth but your thoughts. Pressure built behind my eyes. A roar in my ears that might’ve been the current—or the whispering green above, echoing down through the riverbed.

I sank. Or maybe I was pulled. I don’t remember the surface breaking. Just roots in the dark. Things brushing my legs. No fish, no stones. Fleshlike. Listening.

Because when I came to—if that’s what this is—

it didn’t feel like waking up. It felt like entering a covenant. No snark, no witnesses. Just water in the lungs, roots brushing the skin like fingers across a page.

The jungle didn’t just spare me. It claimed me. Asilent pact whispered in a tongue older than words, one my mother might not explain, but would know deep in her bones.

She never needed diagnoses to feel the river’s pull or hear the jungle’s breath. She’d keep her word, bound by the wild beneath her skin. And now, so must I.