I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around any of it. The scratches across my face, the gashes on my sides, the unignorable pain that radiates through my neck and head every time—none of it makes sense. This is what I wake up to every morning. Every night I go to sleep, and the next morning I wake up to the same headaches, markings, and cuts just like the morning before. It’s been this way for two months. My name is David Earley. When it started, it was just bruises on my neck, as if someone had tried to strangle me in my sleep. It troubled me to say the least, and I became concerned that someone had tried to break in, but nothing had been stolen, and nothing has been stolen.
Every morning the strange wounds would repeat. They turned into scratch marks, and then missing locks of hair, and eventually the slashes on my torso that have since led to literal scars. Between the ER and the police station, I’ve made countless attempts to uncover the cause of these happenings, but I’ve filed nearly a dozen different reports for many different charges, but no sufficient evidence has been found that could point to any living person who may have done this. Not a single trace of DNA. By now, something like this would be all over the news, but where I come from everyone is either crazy or dangerous, so I’ve fallen into the former, and after each investigation my sufferings were brushed off as self-harm.
Before long, I’d be hauled off to a mental asylum, so eventually I ceased my attempts to get answers from authorities. All I could do at that point was hope I wasn’t in critical condition when I woke up in the morning. I grew numb to the pain as the weeks progressed, and I dismissed the pounding headaches that would keep me in bed for an hour each time as par for the course. It wasn’t until a little less than a month ago that I was onto something. One random morning instead of a gash that would turn into scar tissue in the following weeks, I suffered a deep flesh wound that wouldn’t allow me to get up out of bed without screaming in agony.
Needless to say, I went back to seeking help, and before long I was airlifted to the city hospital to be treated. A few scans confirmed whatever had ripped into me was still inside of me, and it required surgery to remove it. I didn’t wake up until well into the night hours, and when I did the practitioners were by my side with horrifying news. A bullet was the source of my injury, and it had broken into a few pieces inside of me. Had I slept for another hour and I’d have bled out, but while I was under, my entire home had been investigated by higher authorities. There was nothing they could use to prove any gun going off in my bedroom or my house to begin with.
The investigation continued for a few weeks, but with no evidence and not even a suspect I couldn’t press charges. The higher officials involved with the case offered security at my home so nothing happened overnight, but the local officers insisted I was insane and likely doing it to myself. Despite having a higher position, the officials folded when the county chief explained that this happens all the time and every time I make a call the search turns up no evidence. Now all of them were convinced I was doing it to myself, so a deeper investigation was conducted at my house until, surprisingly, they found something more than worth mentioning: an M1-Garand rifle. It was in my basement, stowed away in one of the storage bins left behind by the previous house owners. I stood firm that it wasn’t mine, but the gun had an almost fully-loaded magazine so they legally had to take in. Not long after it was found the bullet that tore through me overnight was one of the many full-metal jacket rounds that were in that rifle.
I have almost no history of parasomnia. I had frequent nightmares and night terrors when I was younger, but that hasn’t happened since I was a young boy, and so hasn’t anything else of that nature, so I’d surely remember if I were to wake up, get out of bed, fetch an M1-Garand out from my basement, shoot myself in the stomach, and somehow hide it back in my basement while keeping any blood from escaping my body, right? There was no way they could prove I was lying, or that I was telling the truth, but this was still enough for them to sue me for false reporting. I had just enough in my savings to pay for a lawyer, but I didn’t bother wasting it, because I know this will blow over soon enough. This is just them trying to get rid of me and my supposed bullshit, and the complete lack of evidence will surely work in my favor, so I have since gone back to waking up to gashes and scratches like normal.
My injury had healed, and I’d taught myself how to treat my wounds by then, and since then I’ve stocked up on ointment, bandaging, and whatnot and started making trips to different clinics in the area to treat the particularly nasty cuts I can’t operate on myself, but now that my money’s running short because of all of this I demanded answers. I marched right down to my basement and started digging through all the junk the old owners had carelessly left behind. I started where the rifle was at—the locals had showed me where they’d found it—and after a few minutes of rummaging I got to the bottom of the bin, where I found some old case files. I flipped through them, finding nothing but old billing forms and envelopes until I came across a letter inside a folded sheet of paper. I knew it was a letter because rashly scribbled on the outside was:
“FOR JACK EDISON. READ THIS TO KNOW WHY”
With the lack of context I had, anyone who titles a letter like that must not have good intentions, so I was immediately curious as to what the letter said. What laid in store for me on the inside of the sheet of paper would tell me everything I needed to know, but I didn’t understand it upon the first read, so you can imagine my confusion when all I saw written was:
“The world knows what we did. What you did. And what you made me do. You put me and the rest through hell, and now it’s coming back to you. No one ever believed us, but who’s crazy now, you evil son of a BITCH?”
-Pvt. Donald Gerding
It didn’t come across as suspicious to me, but I was still very perplexed by it, and sought out to find more. If what I was reading was a real war note, surely it’d be worth something, but first I had to confirm if it was real or not. Even if the rifle the police had found belonged to this Pvt. Edison, it still wouldn’t prove I hadn’t shot myself in the stomach, but if I could get money out of what could be a historical artifact, it could surely be more than a few bucks, maybe even enough to pay for a better lawyer in case the odds get stacked against me during the trial.
I soon took the letter and drove down to the local library where I could get to researching. I didn’t have any leads, and never found anything at first. As you can imagine there are more than a few past American soldiers with the last name Edison, and even more with the first name Jack, and there were a good three dozen profiles for ones named Jack Edison, but none of them posed any details other than basic information about their serving dates, branches, etc., and the same was for the search for Ronald Gerding. However, it was then that I realized the key to my findings might point to my home itself: who knows where this letter even came from, but if by chance it was meant to be left where I found it, this Jack Edison’s house could’ve been my very own.
Still online, I searched for old records of residency for my town, and as if right on que, I noticed a listing for a Jack Edison’s residency for my exact address from 1964 to 1982. Further details revealed his middle name was Atticus, and upon searching the full name I was finally taken to sources that would give me answers. When I pressed the enter key, the top article was the purple link of the one I’d just visited, and the one below it had both Edison and Gerding’s full names in a featured snippet, but the title was “The Vietnam Cult Members Who Vowed For Revenge”. The article was from over a decade ago, but I rushed to click on it anyway, the last word “revenge” undeniably sticking out to me. This was the point where everything that’s happened to me—everything that’s been done to me—it was all finally answered.
Jack Edison and Donald Gerding were both soldiers in the Vietnam War back when the draft was first issued. Edison adapted easily to his new lifestyle, but Gerding and the others in their platoon didn’t. Edison often had to take charge when their lives were on the line against their enemies, and he took most of the platoon’s kills for himself. Tensions rose between the two, as Gerding became aware of the toll the war was taking on Edison. He’d become cold and unsteady, always out for blood, as many soldiers were during the war, but it all came to a head when Edison had enough of him “making all the hard choices”. The day came when the platoon was tasked with invading a Vietnamese village, and Edison would lead the platoon to commit heinous acts against the villagers.
The others followed Edison’s orders out of fear, but Gerding could only watch in horror as the many villagers were gunned down, mutilated, and burned alive by the wrath of the platoon. When he looked left a screaming young child was being thrown into a blazing inferno, and when he looked right an elderly man was being held down and impaled with the bayonet of a rifle. As I read this section of the article, my stomach churned at the details of the attack. I of course came to know about the horrible things that took place during this war, but the real, accurate accounts of them surely made it more disturbing to take in.
In the midst of the attack, Edison spotted Gerding as he was standing still in pure shock, and he ran over to him in an instant fury. He grabbed him fiercely by the arm and dragged him over to where a nearby child was being held down by other soldiers. The child was crying out to be let go, but the soldiers maintained their grip as Edison leaned in to speak to him. He told him he was done waiting for him to “come to terms”. He forced a tomahawk into Gerding’s hand, pointed a gun to his head, and waited.
It worked. Edison moved on from him to pick out more frozen soldiers to “fix”, and Gerding was on the ground screaming out in self-shame as the child slowly bled to death beside him. He was pleading to be forgiven—by God, by the child, by his family—and he remained flat on the ground until the attack was over. When Edison returned to him, he grabbed his hand and yanked him to his feet, congratulating him on finally “coming to terms”. At this point I was just staring at the monitor blankly. I had an emotionless expression on my face, one that would tell the people in the library I was focused, but on the inside I was shaken up.
I could no longer stop reading, but God knows I wanted to. Just imagining what that child must’ve gone through—a poor, innocent child being exposed to such horrors, only to die such a gruesome death—I wouldn’t wish it to happen ever again if I had the choice. Not only the child, but Gerding. That man was yanked into an environment he clearly wasn’t built for, and on top of that his hand was forced into taking the life of a child. He and the others must’ve felt like absolute monsters, because the accounts say none of them were the same after. Gerding couldn’t escape what he had done, and it chipped away at his soul day after day, so one day he surrendered. He and a few others left his platoon, were declared to have gone AWOL, and showed up at the nearest Vietnamese unit to surrender to them. This is where “cult member” plays into it.
After hearing about what they’d done—what they’d been forced to do—the Vietnamese let them live, seeing them for the shells of what they were and their continuous words of remorse, and they were instead taken to North Vietnam as prisoners of war. There, they encountered the Hòa Hảo, a Vietnamese religious sect that was variously influenced by practices of black magic and witchcraft. They believed in reincarnation, and made a promise to Gerding and the others to help them seek vengeance on Edison for his crimes.
The many members of the cult put together a plan to sneak them out of the prison, and once it was put into action they were able to indoctrinate them into their sect to begin their superstitious plots for revenge. Before long, Gerding was able to put a curse on Edison that would force him to be rebirthed into a life that would force him through the same horrors he exerted on the many innocents during the war.
Of course, I didn’t believe a fucking word of what I was reading. The attack on the village was one thing—that was at least historically accurate, but witchcraft? At this point, I was no longer invested, and stopped reading the article. At least now I knew the letter and gun had value to them, so I decided I would make an attempt to sell the letter like I thought about and hopefully get the gun back once the trial blew over to sell it too. By then, however, it was getting late, and it wouldn’t be another hour before I’d be asleep. I drove back home, stored the letter in my bedside drawer, and went to sleep. I expected my next experience to be the typical scratches and bruises, but instead it was an absolute hellscape.
When I opened my eyes, I found myself on the floor of a forest being bombarded with a cacophony of noise that was soon made out to be gunshots and the roaring of flames. I was struggling against men that were holding me down on the ground, which shook as a shell exploded in the near distance. My ears were ringing slightly, and, overwhelmed by my surroundings, I gave up and stopped squirming around. I observed my captors to see that they were fighters. There were three: one was pinning me by the left arm, one by the right, and the third one was in front of me, staring me down with absolute disdain—a look of hatred I had never seen before. For some time I couldn’t look away from his fiery eyes, but when I finally did, I saw the patch on his uniform that read “U.S. ARMY”, and next to it was the patch with his name: Gerding.
“Who’s the crazy one now, you EVIL SON OF A BITCH?!” Gerding spat in my face with every ounce of hatred that was already in his face. Before I could even respond, he let out a mighty war cry as he held up an M1-Garand and shoved the tip of his bayonet into my chest, piercing it brutally and all the way through my back. I woke up screaming in horror and pain. I thought I was safe, but I should’ve known better. It was more than a nightmare. I put a hand on my chest to feel a patch of warm liquid spreading on my shirt. I was in the sharpest pain of my life, and I couldn’t take a single breath of panic without a wave of agony getting sent all throughout my chest and back. I felt the searing pain shoot in many directions, but never seize. I shot my arms at my bedside table, rushing for my cell phone. I cried to the operator for help as my sheets were slowly soaked with blood. It was rinse-and-repeat. The airlift, the hospital, the investigation, everything, only much more painful than last time. I was in-and-out of consciousness throughout the whole ordeal, and I truly almost didn’t make it that time around.
That same morning, the evidence to the case had been altered. The rifle’s bayonet had blood on the entire length of it, and the test confirmed it was indeed mine. The cops don’t know how to rationalize it, but they haven’t given up the lawsuit. This was instant proof that I wasn’t the one behind my sufferings, but they didn’t care. They were still sick of me. They even tried getting the hospital residents on their side, who are already exhausted enough without me now in critical condition every two days. None of that matters to me, though. Even if they did have enough to put up a good case against me in court, they won’t get the chance to. It’s only a matter of time.
I’m David Earley, but by now you should know me better as the rebirth of Pvt. Jack Edison, the war criminal from Vietnam who was cursed by his comrades to endure the same horrors he committed once he was reincarnated. And no one believes him. No one believes me. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but it won’t be good, and it just may be the end of me. The good news is I get to be someone else when it does end, but if a new life didn’t allow me to escape my crimes the first time, who’s to say it will the second time. Or the third time. Or the fourth. Or ever.
I can’t stop thinking about my coming fate. I’ve locked myself in my home, boarded up the windows and bolted the door shut so no one will try to save me. I can only hope the torment will come and be over as soon as possible, but who knows what will happen to me. Maybe the next thing I suffer is a shell that reduces me to bits of flesh and bone. Maybe Gerding will keep me alive until I find a way to kill myself. I can’t sleep, because in the back of my mind I still dread what waits for me in my unconscious state. All my movements have been reduced to rocking back and forth on my bed and pacing left to right around my bedroom floor. I’m an absolute fucking wreck. I’m crazy. Gerding was right.