Barely ten minutes after that the corporal Braddock and the detachment from the 1st Division of Cavalry have shot out from the noisy Chinook helicopters to securize the surroundings of the landing zone, more than ten casualties and even more wounded by either sharpshooters or booby traps were already reported, thus proving that the awful reputation of the Iron Triangle was sadly deserved. But the boys had to fight the partisans for the cause of America ... the cause ... really ?

  -   "Fucking Viets ! OK, guys," he said while turning toward the ten soldiers he had in charge.

  -   "Next permission is in two weeks, so keep your eyes open and be careful."

The small group went through the edge of the not-yet-defoliated forest and began to move forwards slowly in the dense jungle. Each one was attentively scanning the ground, looking for suspicious roots and creepers, even checking the canopy of the large old trees in search of a sign of ambush or nasty trap. The never-accustomed fear very quickly added its effects to the stifling wet heat, making the men sweat buckets.

Suddenly, the corporal's ears perceived a muffled detonation like a very short 'foom', a quite familiar sound. Too familiar... Instinctively, his legs gave away under him and he tried to shout "Look out !" but was caught as well in the blast of a powerful explosion which threw him head first onto the water-saturated humus. After a short while, he pushed on an elbow and turned himself until be able to sit down.

  -   "Oh fuck ! That's a DM-6 at least, with the mess it's done," he said to himself when seeing the rest of his men laying on the ground or holding a probably injured part of their body. "OK, I'll count : One !" he yelled.

Nobody resumed the counting, contrary to the basic instructions, but at least four guys seemed to be getting back on their feet.

  -   "Johnson, stay with the wounded and take care of them, I'll call the medics! Brian, Bob, Johnny, come with me ! We'll make these bastards pay dearly for that ... "he shouted, raising his M16.

The reduced assault section continued its journey into the hostile forest, looking for the smallest indication of the commies' presence, but things started to drift out in the direction of the strange...

The first oddity happened when the corporal had the impression that Brian, against all rules of jungle welfare and with the risk of loosing visual contact, was moving away from him. He shouted at him to come back into the group and then noticed that the private was in fact rather near him. His silhouette though was blurred as if a very dense patch of mist separated them. Turning his head on the left, Braddock saw the same phenomenon applied to Bob, who was no more than three meters behind him, and that, with such strength that he could not distinguish the features of his face. "Why's my vision so unstable?" thought the soldier. "Perhaps it's from the shock wave of the blast, but I'm dead sure to not have been hit by the jumping mine. It's truly a miracle and I'll take huge pleasure in celebrating that by making mincemeat out of the next Viets I'll flush out ..." The flaw in his reasoning was that only humans seemed to be affected, as he could see and almost count the nervures of the leaves.

He decided however not to take this it into account, and pursue his assigned mission by making a sign to his team to keep going as he started walking at a faster – and more reckless – pace. The endless setting of the primary forest again started to unfold in front of his watchful wandering eyes, so the corporal soon had to fight boredom instead of an invisible and elusive enemy. He wanted to ask Brian if he had spotted something worthy of mentioning, but saw no any trace of him where he should have been walking. Same thing for Bob. Finally, he succeeded in finding the misty outline of Johnson, and discreetly addressed his fading image, "Sure the gillie suits we're wearing are quite efficient, but not that much..." just as the latter was walking alongside a large tree trunk that completely hid him... But then, he did not reappear on the other side!

Greatly surprised, with his heart starting to pound in his chest, Braddock cautiously circled around the creepers-covered trunk, believing he was going to have to face the nightmarish scene of the private who had certainly fallen into one of these awful tiger traps, lying on the ground and horribly agonizing, but actually, he found neither the one nor the other. "He couldn't have flown off just like that! Sure, there's no fucking trap and I didn't hear a scream in fact ... But Geez, what's going on here ?"

Being alone did not make things better, as his chances of being injured, killed or worse, captured were increasing exponentially now that he had no fellow GIs to watch his rear, so the very light movement of the leaves on the left made him shrink back behind a bush and set on full auto the fire rate selector of his M16. Then, moving very carefully from hiding place to hiding place, he came closer to the location of the first movement and saw there something that made him fell both happy and frightened : three Vietcongs, wearing their traditional conical hats and checkered headscarfs as well as old rifles were standing around a camouflaged, underground shelter entrance, with one of them being already as far as his shoulders into the gallery. Without delay, the GI raised his gun, aimed quickly and pulled the trigger until the ejector remained in a backward position due to lack of ammo... And yet, that did not seem to bother the partisans, who went down the entrance one after the other as if nothing had happened.

Being dumbfounded in front of such an incredible spectacle, the corporal recovered his mind only after the trap door was closed again.

  -   "It's... fucking impossible ! Those assholes were less than 30 feet away from me, I couldn't have missed them!" he said half out loud to himself.

Shaken by a sudden doubt, he disengaged the clip of his gun : it was full!

  -   "But... I felt the recoil against my shoulder and saw the flames coming out of the muzzle... I didn't imagine the whole fucking scene, didn't I ?"

He shook his head, trying to put his thoughts back into place, then moved to the gallery entrance trap : its camouflage was so well done that he would have never found it, not even by walking directly on top of it, if he had not seen the partisans use it. Having absolutely no will to open the very small hatch and go explore by himself the tunnels underneath – there were even more deadly traps and ambush fire positions in these hundreds of kilometres of tiny damp subterranean conduits covering all the sectors of Chu Chi and the Iron Triangle than on surface – and being the section's radio holder, Braddock tried to contact the nearest base and ask for reinforcements from the Tunnels Rats, the elite units specialized in this kind of job. But no answer arrived, not even the slight normal crackling from the background noise, nothing.

He realized only at this instant that the jungle, usually swarming with the various noises and shouts from the blown up foliage or the wild animals, was plunged into a complete silence.

  -   "The explosion must've made me deaf," he tried to rationalize, "and that explains why I didn't hear myself fire... but my bullets should've killed these fucking commies!" Taking this risk of being spotted, he took out the clip, took a munition from it and loaded it manually into the rifle chamber, then setting his sights on the nearest tree barely two meters away, he pulled the trigger. New feeling of brief shock against his shoulder, a new short burst of flames at the end of the canon ... but no impact on the bark and an intact cartridge in the barrel!

This time, he could not take it all in stride and was seized by panic, turning on his heels and beginning to run in a desperate attempt to get back to the landing zone. The branches were lashing hard against his face, the creepers grazing his hands and shoulders, his careless feet being at the mercy of the first trap or landmine, but his mind was only focused on the relative security of the cleared parcel and the big noisy fans landed there. After a while, his legs started to give out and the corporal had to sit down, hidden by a fig tree, with his lungs on fire and completely short of breath.

Waiting for his strength to come back, Braddock took a long look at the surroundings, searching for his probable pursuers, but the still strangely quiet and immobile forest did not give him any sign of life. He noticed then that the leaves' colours were becoming brighter and brighter, as if the Sun was rising ... a thing quite improbable during the afternoon and under the opaque foliage of a primary jungle. In addition, the light of a pure whiteness was bathing the scene, leaving no shadow or penumbra, even if the corporal believed that it was coming from behind him. "OK, no more woo-woo this time, please... There must be a fucking, rational explanation : perhaps it's the light from a Huey search projector or a lighting rocket from a low-alt recon plane. But it isn't night yet", he thought while checking his watch, "and lighting rockets don't last that long."

For once, driven by curiosity but still wanting to avoid any needless exposure to potential enemy fire, he took his pocket mirror from a pouch of his suit and placed it just at the corner of the trunk of a nearby tree. There was a tiny glade, largely lighted as if an invisible, powerful lamp had been put in the centre of it, but nothing strange or hostile looking was perceptible in the field of vision offered by his small looking glass. Braddock decided nevertheless to play prudently, engaging a new clip in his M16 and even loading an armor-piercing grenade in the sub-cannon launcher.

  -   "OK, 3, 2, 1 !" he said before dashing forward, with his gun pointing straight ahead of him.

And then, he stood frozen on the spot, at the sight of something out of this world.

At first glance, one could mistake the creature standing in front of the corporal for a White Dame – one of those malefic spectra who take on the appearance of extremely beautiful women, but then try to seize the soul of mortal men – but her non-human nature appeared clearly when she turned her head in his direction : long triangular ears were pointing through her long silky hair, a little pink nose was the focal point of her fine pointy muzzle and several fluffy tails – "One, two... five, six... nine" he counted silently – formed a kind of peacock corolla behind her back.

All these facts made him badly want to raise his gun and fight, or run away for his very life, but his body would not obey him any more, now that his look had met the deepest blue of her bewitching eyes and saw on her face a little smile, easily disarming him with its tenderness.

She began to walk slowly toward him, her tails wagging in a harmonious, coordinated movement as if they were calligraphy brushes tracing mysterious signs in the air. The whole thing was as gracious as the soft and quiet swinging of her feet, which seemed to not touch the ground, or the undulation by the breeze of her long hair of a warm ash grey that easily reached the bottom of her voluptuous hips.

As she approached, closer and closer, he was less frightened by her supernatural nature and more and more enthralled by her ineffable beauty : she was divinely feminine, without contest. Her birthday suit offering no dissimulation at all of the perfect proportions of her long slender legs or the irresistible charm of her gracious shapes and her short fur of an immaculate whiteness, surely as soft as the finest silk.  He entire being was an invitation to appeasing embraces and tender caresses. All that, plus the little smile she was still wearing, made him feel totally warm and fuzzy.

His eyes stayed locked in hers and he had to raise his head when she drew level with him, as she was taller of the two of them. Then, opening her arms in a gesture full of gracious restraint and making a last step, she tenderly embraced the human, just like a mother consoling her hurt and sad son. The contact with the dense fur and the beneficial warmth it diffused soon released all the tensions the soldier had kept buried deeply inside his mind and he snuggled up against her chest to cry without restraint or shame. She then began to caress his nape in a maternal way and he had the most tenacious impression that she was muttering "Don't cry son, I'm here. All of this will be over soon," with a little charming voice, even if in reality it was forgotten memories from his long-lost childhood resurfacing again.

Finally, having let out all the sad thoughts he had and now, with his soul at peace, he raised his head and plunged his regard into her large loving eyes for the last time. Then, his fate was fulfilled and the spirit of the long-dead soldier began to break up into thousands of tiny white sparks that climbed in the air like light burning papers whipped up by a powerful fire, before gathering themselves into a life thread going up vertically into the sky.

The kitsune contemplated the soul of the mortal heading to its final destination, then closed her eyes as small tears flowed down her cheeks.