JUST AFTER dusk on the night of Feb. 10, 1970, the jungles near the U.S. Army’s Fire Support Base Chamberlain in Hau Niga Province, South Vietnam came to life with a cacophony of spine chilling sounds. Mournful wailing, sobbing, and baleful shrieks filled the air — unearthly sounds that seemed to be coming from everywhere, but nowhere in particular.
And amid the blood curdling chorus was a clearly audible warning:
“My friends,” pleaded a disembodied voice from across the darkness, “I have come back to let you know that I am dead… I am dead!”
“It’s hell… I’m in hell!” it continued in Vietnamese. “Don’t end up like me. Go home, friends, before it’s too late!”
The eerie warning was followed by a chorus of other strange sounds: banging gongs, sobbing women and a child’s voice calling for her father.
To the Viet Cong soldiers hiding in blackness beyond the American perimeter, these otherworldly sounds sounded like the wandering souls of departed comrades. According to local folklore, the sprits of the dead that were not returned home for proper burial were cursed to walk the earth in torment until their remains were found and properly interred. Vietnamese legends held that on the anniversary of the death of one of these lost souls, a spiritual channel between our world and the afterlife opens making communication possible.
Were these hair-raising sounds just such a phenomenon? Were they spirits of the dead of some past battle reaching out to the living? Perhaps to the communist guerrillas listening it seemed that way.
The reality was something much less fantastic.
GENERATION EXORCIST 
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