A horrific story of my grandfather served in the Vietnam War

Hello everyone, I hope you're ready for chapter 3. I have a collection of the creepiest tales found on the internet. Do you think you can handle them, or are you too scared? I guess we'll see. Let's journey further into this series. My grandfather told me a story about his time in Vietnam. Written by Jaybird RS, my grandfather served in the Vietnam War. I was always fascinated by his time in the service, but my mother instructed me not to ask him about it from a young age. I never did, but he would bring up little bits and pieces from time to time. It wasn't often though. My grandfather was a kind, yet strict man. My grandmother told me that he was a laid-back and calm man before the war, but afterwards he became the old-hearted man that I knew growing up. I distinctly remember playing with military toys as a kid, and he just walked in and shook his head, saying it wasn't like that. What I'm trying to say is that, although I love my grandfather, he can be a cold man sometimes, and I don't blame him. I didn't see the horrors that he saw, and time has taken a toll on my grandfather. All these years of smoking have finally caught up with him, and for the last few weeks he's been in a hospital on his deathbed. The cancer has spread from his lungs to the rest of his body. I've been spending a lot of time beside his bed, just keeping him company or watching TV with him. Recently, he has been telling stories - some about his childhood, raising my mother, old school friends - while others, and more importantly, have been about his time in Vietnam.

The story my grandfather shared with me began with tales of his friends who served alongside him in Vietnam. As he continued, he opened up about the events he had witnessed and participated in. He described the napalm attacks that took place in the jungle, with he and his squad on the edge of the clear zone when the planes dropped the incendiary substance. The jungle was set ablaze, and my grandfather heard the screams of those trapped and burning alive - a sound he described as gut-wrenching and agonizing, like the cries of hell on earth. Even more disturbing was the sight of a victim running out of the inferno, engulfed in flames from head to toe. My grandfather told me that these memories still haunt him to this day.

My grandfather's story continued with a particularly harrowing experience. He and a war friend of his approached a burning body on the ground, struggling to extinguish the flames. My grandfather looked away at this point in the story, unable to bear the sight of a kid with flesh melting off his bones. He knew they couldn't just leave the victim there, so he took up his weapon and put the child out of his misery. As he shared these memories with me, I could see the stress they were causing him - memories he likely had tried to forget for years. I told him he didn't have to talk about any of this if he didn't want to, but he insisted, saying that wasn't even the worst thing he had seen. He then described a day when he and his squad were walking through the jungle, doing their usual routine, when their sergeant suddenly signaled for them to stop and stay quiet.

This happened sometimes, my grandfather said, and it had saved their lives a few times. On this particular occasion, they all sat and listened for a minute, until my grandfather noticed something strange - there was no sound in the jungle. No wildlife, no bugs, not even the rustling of leaves in the wind. Nothing. He tightened his grip on his gun and looked around, his eyes darting from a treetop to the ground, searching for the enemy. It was then that he noticed something else - the jungle was suddenly ice cold. In just a second, he could see his breath fog up as it left his mouth. He turned to see his squad mates all looking around in amazement, their breath also fogging up in the air. They sat there frozen in shock, witnessing this strange phenomenon, when a fellow squad mate right behind him suddenly jerked to look around.

Suddenly, one of the soldiers, Tharp, was clearly startled by something he had heard in the jungle. Tharp and my grandfather were buddies, having seen a lot of difficult things together in the war, so my grandfather knew he was usually level-headed, even under fire. However, the look on Tharp's face showed that whatever he had heard had spooked him terribly. Out of nowhere, he called out into the jungle, "Jill!" My grandfather said he instantly clapped his hands over Tharp's mouth to shut him up, but the soldier struggled against him, trying to break free as the rest of the squad got ready for the inevitable firefight that was sure to come after Tharp had given away their location by yelling. "Wait," I interrupted. "Was Jill another soldier?" "Jill was Tharp's girlfriend back home," my grandfather said coldly. Even with my grandfather's hand over his mouth, Tharp kept trying to call out for Jill over and over again.

I kept whispering to Tharp, "You have to calm down. Jill's not here. You're going to get us all killed." But he just kept struggling. That was when another soldier called out, this time calling for his mother. No one was there to stop the other soldier, like my grandfather had done for Tharp, allowing him to run straight into the jungle calling out for his mother. Tharp was still fighting to break free, tears now rolling down his eyes as he struggled to escape my grandfather's grasp. My grandfather held his ground, doing his best to keep this soldier pinned, but he was distracted as another soldier ran into the jungle, calling out for someone they knew from home - someone who had no right to be in the jungles of Vietnam. Tharp used the distraction to pull out his knife and stab my grandfather in the leg. I screamed as Tharp broke free and ran out into the jungle, calling out for Jill. One by one, the squad broke down and ran into the jungle, all the while the temperature seemed to be getting colder and colder. The whole time, soldiers were running into the jungle for someone they had heard calling for them.

My grandfather and the remaining soldier stood back to back, guns drawn and at the ready, as their breath fogged up in the now cold jungle air. After a moment of silence, screams from the rogue squad mates filled the jungle air all around them - some far away, while others seemed to be coming from right next to them. The screams were even more piercing given the silence that had momentarily fallen upon the area. And then it happened for my grandfather - he heard his grandmother's voice. "It was like she was right next to me, whispering into my left ear," he said, his lip trembling. He turned to look at her, but when he saw something through the trees, he knew it wasn't her. It wasn't close to him, like it sounded. It was a good 30 feet or so back into the clearing. He paused, and I asked him what it was. He let out a laugh. "Hell if I know. It sure wasn't Charlie, that's for sure." He struggled to describe it, saying it looked like radio static - like his eyes were getting a bad signal. He could tell that it was big, though. "Real, real big. It looked like a shadow, too."

"I could see that it was ripping one of our guys apart, sending the legs of one of my squad mates hurtling into the jungle," he added. "I didn't want to see what it did to the top half of the guy. I don't know if the other guys who ran towards that thing had seen it or had just heard a voice and ran in a panic, but whatever the reason, I didn't go after it. I was mortified. I grabbed the guy behind me and started dragging him back in the general direction of our base. He figured out what I was doing and he screamed at me, said that he wasn't going to leave his soldiers behind." My grandfather paused and reached over to his nightstand to grab a glass of water with a trembling hand. He took a long drink before continuing. "I told him it was a suicide mission, that he hadn't seen the thing in the trees and what it would do to him, but he didn't care. He said we left no man behind and ran into the trees towards the screams of our friends. I continued my way back to base. It wasn't long until I heard gunshots, then screaming, then nothing. I sat in silence as my mind digested my grandfather's story. So, what happened next?" I asked. "I made it back to base. I tried telling my superiors what had happened, but they figured I was just some scared kid who had seen a squad massacred in front of me. They weren't wrong about that, but I know it wasn't men or bullets that killed them. I know what I saw.

It has been about two weeks since my grandfather passed away and shared with me the story of the mysterious creature in the jungle. To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of it. I figured I would share it here and let you draw your own conclusions. However, I can say with certainty that my grandfather was never delusional, even near the end. And although the story may sound impossible, I saw the terror in his eyes as he spoke about the creature. There was no way anyone could be that afraid of something that didn't happen.