Wandering souls - Vietnam

She floated on a lily pad in a rice paddy, gazing up at the sky. It was clear, a soft marble blue. Wisps of cloud drifted lazily overhead.
Then the clouds turned black.
The screams came first.
Then the crying.
Then the fire.
Burned bodies drifted in the water—babies, children—some floating, some sinking beneath the surface.
Ahn’s eyes flickered open.
The nightmare again.
She thought she would be used to it by now, but she never was.
Because it wasn’t imagination.
The nightmare had happened.
The Vietnam War, Operation babylift 1975, a token effort from the USA to rescue abandoned Vietnamese children ended in one of the worst air disasters ever, Ahn was testament to this dark history..
————————————————-
1988
The old PRC-6 walkie-talkie radio was gathering dust in the corner of a Vietnamese village market stall, surrounded by other war relics—helmets, badges, uniforms, bayonets, and old ammunition.
A British Vietnam War collector picked it up and was surprised by its good condition, complete with knobs and aerial. Soon the haggling began.
Items from the war were plentiful in Vietnam, a treasure trove for collectors. One day, he thought, these relics would be worth a lot of money—a pleasant and interesting savings scheme. But it also felt good to help the people selling them, giving them some much-needed money for objects that once belonged to those who had brought such misery to their country.
Deal done, along with several other items, the PRC-6 was soon on its way back to England.
Twenty-seven years later, the British collector decided to cash in. His Vietnam War collection was sold piece by piece, not from a market stall this time but through an online auction site open to the entire world.
And so the old PRC-6 radio began another journey—this time back across the Atlantic, returning to America, the country where it had first been made.

————————————————————————-
Ahn Minh, a 49-year-old Amerasian woman now in the USA was down on her luck & everything seemed against her. After years of struggle she had finally managed to buy her own home, but now she was behind on the mortgage payments. A letter had arrived that morning: pay the arrears or lose the house.
She shrugged it off. She had been homeless before and had survived it.
Ahn had never managed to settle down with a partner or start a family. She had always had to rely on herself. That had been the way of things since 1975.
She had a decent job and had usually managed to keep her head above water. But over the past five years she had been searching for something—someone. She had spent those years trying to track down her American father, a soldier from the Vietnam War.
The search had come at a cost.
Not only was it draining her emotionally, it was draining her bank account too. Investigators, records, travel, endless dead ends. Maybe it was time to give it up.
Maybe it was time to accept that some people were never meant to be found.
————————————————————————-
“Dammit… what a bonus it would be if I could just get this piece of junk working. The new crystals haven’t worked, it’s tripped the electric & stinks of burning, and I paid over the odds for it but That’s what happens when you get caught in an auction bidding frenzy. Still, it’s been fun trying to get it to work, and at least it’ll look good on display—one more addition to the collection.
“Alright then… let’s give you one last try.”
He switched on the temporary power supply.
“That’s odd… I’m sure I heard something. Was that static? Are you actually beginning to work? Well, the day’s just gotten better.”
Despite the excitement of getting the old radio to respond, he couldn’t shake the anxiety that had followed him since bringing the war relic home. He had hoped he was finally getting used to the damned phobia, but the familiar feeling had returned—the unsettling sense that someone was watching him.
Usually he could shrug it off like the other episodes.
But this time felt different.
This time it felt real.
Whatever was troubling him all these years seemed a lot closer.. now uncomfortably closing in..
——————————————————————————
1969
The little VC in black pyjamas had done a terrific job.
Creeping silently through the mud and darkness, he had slipped past five rows of concertina wire without a sound. Inch by inch he crawled forward until he reached the claymore mine guarding the perimeter.
Carefully, slowly, he turned it one hundred and eighty degrees so that it now faced the defenders instead of the jungle beyond.
He allowed himself a small smile in the darkness.
Time to wake the Marines…
The explosions shook the fire base as flares and tracers lit up the night sky. Mayhem followed instantly as the quiet darkness was violently awakened. The probe was over quickly—the attackers gaining the information they needed before the coming main assault.

The lingering stench of cordite and drifting smoke slowly began to dissipate.
Eerie moaning from the wounded added to the grim theatre.
“Goddamn it, Charlie… I ain’t falling for that one again.”
The voice boomed out into the darkness.
The Marine—half his face blown away—stood up from behind the wire. He casually tossed his weapon aside and walked straight toward the perimeter, stopping at the exact place where the VC in soaking wet black pyjamas lay hidden in the mud.
Reaching down, the big Marine lifted the concertina wire.
The VC, a dark hole through his stomach, sighed in resignation being dragged from his hiding place.
The pair began walking off together through the darkness, trading jibes as they went.
“You’re gonna have to do better than that, Charles.”
“You number ten forever, GI.”
The Marine chuckled softly. “Guess I’ll see you tomorrow—same time. Try to do a bit better next time.”
Other shapes moved quietly in the darkness nearby—figures lingering in the night.
The two soldiers disappeared into the murk, their voices fading as if the war itself had never quite ended.
—-————————————
Jim was a middle-aged collector of Vietnam War memorabilia. His house was already filled with relics—helmets, webbing, badges, faded uniforms, field gear—each piece a fragment of history. The latest addition to his vast collection was a PRC-6 U.S. military walkie-talkie radio from the war, bought after an intense bidding battle at an online auction.
On the drive home from the auction, the familiar feeling returned.
The scopophobia -The irrational but overwhelming fear that someone was watching him.
It had troubled him for years, coming and going in waves. Usually he could manage it by accepting the sensation and letting it pass. But this time it felt stronger than ever before. His hands trembled on the steering wheel.
He wondered if the collection itself was feeding the condition. Perhaps surrounding himself with relics of war was not as harmless as he liked to think.
Back at home he examined the radio closely and made several attempts to repair it. On the third try it finally responded with a faint burst of static.
Jim grinned.
A fifty-year-old radio still working—who would have thought?
Now came the difficult task of finding batteries for it.
After some searching he finally managed to order the correct type. When they arrived a few days later, he fitted them carefully and switched the set on.
The radio crackled into life.
At first it was just white noise, but after about five minutes something strange happened. Faint music began to drift through the speaker.
Jim froze.
The sound grew clearer until the unmistakable opening of The Animals’ “We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place” filled the room.
More songs followed—music from the 1960s. Between the tracks he could occasionally hear a faint voice speaking, barely audible beneath the static. Jim assumed it must be a DJ or someone hosting the broadcast.
What puzzled him was the frequency.
Those bands had long since gone silent, and every time he switched the radio off and on again the signal seemed to appear on a different channel. He could never find the station again once it disappeared.
Jim became increasingly fascinated with the strange set.
Over the following days he noticed something else.
Between the music the voice was becoming clearer.
It sounded American.
Not just American—military.
The slang was unmistakable, like dialogue from an old Vietnam War documentary. One phrase in particular repeated itself often:
“It don’t mean nothing, it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing”
But there were other voices too—speaking a language Jim couldn’t understand. Vietnamese perhaps. Sometimes the voices rose in angry shouting. At other times there were faint screams, so distant they were almost swallowed by the static.
Maybe he was picking up CB traffic, Perhaps a local business using handheld radios, A takeaway service, maybe.
Still, the sounds unsettled him. They did nothing to help the creeping sense that he was being watched, in-fact made it worse.
A few days later he was sitting with the radio again when the American voice came through more clearly than ever before.
Jim picked up the handset and pressed the transmit key.
Static crackled back immediately.
His heart jumped.
He tapped out an SOS using short and long presses.
A moment later the pattern came back through the speaker.
Jim stared at the radio in disbelief.
“Dammit… I knew somebody was there,” he muttered.
But who?
Suddenly the angry shouting returned, louder this time. The unfamiliar voices were filled with rage. Jim couldn’t understand the words, but he could feel the venom behind them.
“Hey! Can you hear me?” he shouted into the handset.
There was no change—only more shouting, more chaos in the background.
A chill ran through him.
Whatever he was hearing… it wasn’t worth it, nothing as bad as this had ever had such a hold on him..
Jim reached forward and switched the radio off.

———————————————-
Despite the fear, Jim couldn’t leave the radio alone.
It still played the same persistent music from the 1960s. The latest song drifting through the static was “Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide.”
Jim couldn’t help noticing how appropriate that felt.
The voice was clearer now—more frequent too—talking as if it were still over fifty years ago. At one point it mentioned that “SOB LBJ abandoning them,” and then complained about “the crook Nixon as president.”
The other voices were becoming clearer as well. The angry shouting in the background was sharper, more venomous. The language sounded oriental to Jim at first, but after writing down some of the words and searching them online he realized what he was hearing.
Vietnamese.
Frustrated, Jim still believed someone must be messing around with him.
He began keying the handset repeatedly—faster and faster—sending bursts of static into the ether. Each time the radio answered with a crackling response between the music.
Then suddenly a voice broke through.
“Who’s there? Who the hell is there? Goddamn it—stop screwing with me!”
In the background came the unmistakable sounds of chaos: gunfire cracking, explosions thudding in the distance, men shouting and screaming somewhere in the jungle with its own natural sounds..
Jim froze.
He recognized the sound immediately.
A firefight..
Shocked but curious, Jim spoke into the handset.
“Who are you?”
For several seconds there was no reply.
Then the voice returned, breathless but steady.
“Bobby Fabrizi. Rifleman. Five-six-six-nine-seven-six-eight-two. United States Marine Corps… 1972.”
Jim rolled his eyes, Yeah, right.
To him it sounded like another Vietnam War enthusiast, maybe a reenactor with an old radio set tuned to the same frequency, playing music from the era and having a bit of fun.
But then the voice began asking questions.
That was odd.
Jim felt his anxiety rising again. His condition made him uneasy when strangers questioned him, and this was no different.
Yet he noticed something strange.
Whenever the Marine’s voice spoke, the other angry voices vanished. The screaming Vietnamese voices—what Jim had started to call the demons—fell silent.
It was almost as if they were taking turns using the radio.
They hadn’t disappeared entirely. Every so often they burst back in, shouting furious, unintelligible abuse before fading again into the static.
Jim found himself wishing he could keep talking to the Marine. Anything was better than hearing the demons.
More than once he considered switching the damned radio off for good.
But something had changed inside him.
Jim had begun to accept a disturbing possibility.
He was—unwittingly and reluctantly—a psychic.
The radio was simply the conduit.
“Scopophobia my ass,” he muttered to himself.
This was why he had always felt watched.
The spirits had been with him all along.
He just hadn’t known it.
Now he knew for certain.
—————————————-
“Goddamn it, Charlie, you little bastard—where are you?!”
The big Marine stood ready for the usual probe, scanning the darkness beyond the wire.
But nothing came.
For a month now it had been like this.
Dawn was beginning to show along the horizon, pale light creeping across the jungle. Normally by now the night’s deadly ritual would have played out—the crawling through the mud, the wire, the Claymore turned the wrong way, the sudden explosions and chaos.
Every night for half a century..
Ever since the night he had left this earth.
But tonight there had been nothing.
No movement in the jungle.
No whisper of black pyjamas in the wire.
No attack.
As the Marine slowly walked away from the perimeter, he realized something else.
The other figures were gone too.
The silent shapes that had always lingered in the darkness—the ones he could see but never approach—had vanished.
For the first time in 50 years the big Marine stood completely alone.
And now, as the jungle grew quiet in the coming daylight, a feeling he had not known in decades began to creep over him.
Fear, and something worse than fear.
An intolerable Loneliness.
—————————————————————-
Now Jim could hear the voice as clearly as if the man were standing beside him.
“Alright, Jim, start talking. What unit are you from? How the hell am I picking you up on this radio? And how come you’re stateside? How old are you? What’s the date over there?”
Jim hesitated, then answered.
“Two thousand and twenty-two.”
Silence.
Then the Marine burst out laughing.
“Yeah, right. That cannot be. What are you, some kind of time traveller or something?”
Jim snapped back. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“Stop jerking me off and start talking some goddamn sense,” the voice replied.
Jim sighed. “You tell me the date first.”
“1972.”
Jim laughed. “I don’t think so.”

The argument went back and forth for several minutes, both men accusing the other of messing around. Eventually the absurdity of the situation got the better of them and they both started laughing.
“Time traveller my ass,” the Marine said between chuckles.
Just After the laughter faded, the voice grew serious.
“Alright… if you really want proof I’m telling the truth, check something out for me. My twin sister—Debbie Fabrizi. And my best friend from the Corps—Al Greenwood. Look them up.”
Jim frowned.
“No chance. I’m not playing detective for some joker on a radio.”
The Marine didn’t argue further.
But the names stuck in Jim’s mind.
Later that evening curiosity got the better of him. Jim searched through a Vietnam War veterans website and quickly found something interesting.
Bobby Fabrizi.
United States Marine Corps.
Missing in Action, 1972.
Jim leaned back in his chair.
OK Anyone could find that information, he told himself. It proved nothing. JUST A DAMNED JOKER. Jim switched the radio off and removed the batteries.
The thing had already caused more trouble than it was worth.
It could sit on the shelf as a display piece with the rest of the collection.
Besides, pretending to be a dead soldier felt wrong to him—disrespectful.
It had been interesting while it lasted, but enough was enough.
Time to call it a day with this crank on the radio… and the other Vile lunatic with his abuse messing with his head.
————————-—————————
Ignoring the radio turned out to be a mistake. A BIG MISTAKE..
The nightmares began almost immediately.
Each night Jim found himself trapped in vivid scenes from the Vietnam War. They were images he had seen before in books, documentaries, and films—but never like this.
These were real.
He saw burning monks kneeling in silent agony. Children running down dusty roads with their skin dripping from napalm. Rivers carrying the small, charred bodies of dead babies past shattered villages.
Every night he woke up drenched in sweat, curled at the bottom of his bed, shaking.
It was the worst the nightmares had ever been.
Finally Jim decided he needed answers.
He put the batteries back into the radio.
The familiar crackle returned, followed by the persistent sounds of 1960s music. After a few moments the voice returned as well.
“Jim—listen to me,” the Marine pleaded urgently. “You have to follow my instructions. I’m running out of time. We won’t get another chance.”
Again Whenever the voice faded, the other sounds returned.
The screaming.
The high-pitched shrieking that Jim had started calling the demons.
Now it had risen to an unbearable, tinnitus-like whine.
Suddenly the noise surged louder and louder.
Jim switched the radio off in shock—but the sound didn’t stop.
It kept rising.
Higher…Sharper.
The pain was intense, Jim threw the radio to the floor, clamped his hands over his ears, staggering toward the door.
“HELLSTEETH!!! This thing’s going to blow,” he gasped.
At that moment the wine glasses on a nearby shelf shattered, exploding into thousands of glittering shards.
And then—
Silence.