You're not who I'm looking for.
[helicopters flying overhead]
You Sergeant Hines, yeah?
Jacob Palmer, Central Intelligence Agency.
I'm the guy you've been communicating with.
This is Sergeant Carr
of the Studies and Observation Group.
You're far from your friends, Sergeant Hines.
When you wandered off,
your unit thought you had deserted,
wanted you court-martialed.
You're still drawn to it?
You have to kill it, yeah?
Too late, though.
The river god did this three days ago.
We'll get some men up here to clean this up.
Come on, let's head out.
I have something to show you.
Have you ever heard of Firebase Quatro?
Outside of Tay Ninh, on the border of Cambodia.
We set up Quatro as a base for tracking the river god.
You know who he is?
I need you to do something for me, Hines.
I give you info,
you do what I ask. Understand?
Now, the river god was a Vietnamese farmer.
We keep the survivors of his attacks at Quatro,
in the field hospital.
There's someone there I want you to meet--
a kid named Bracken.
He's the only survivor of the river god
who can still talk.
[helicopter radio chatter]
-Jacob Palmer? -Yeah.
Major Brickerson.
JSOC told me
you might be able to shed some light on things for us.
We got our asses whupped by a VC ambush.
We waited for reinforcements,
but when those soldiers came,
they were...
they were monsters in the shape of men...
They wouldn't die, not by shooting them.
So we retreated to Firebase Tarheel--
or we tried to--
but...
Tarheel was gone.
Just fucking gone.
That's when I called in the air strike.
We lit that jungle on fire...
and we burnt everything.
And there he was, just standing there...
not running,
no pain,
invisible...
except for the napalm just sticking to him.
Something I'll never be able to explain.
It just doesn't make sense.
Look, I'm not here to connect the dots for you.
The events at Tarheel are classified.
I got men in this unit I trust, men I know,
men I've shed blood with,
and they're saying
things happened to them that they can't explain.
My boys are saying they saw the devil...
the devil.
Yes...
I want your men to help us kill the devil.
I think the CIA better start to explain
what the fuck is going on here,
or you're going to have a mutiny on your hands.
Please state your name.
Bracken.
Corporal Richard Bracken. Sir.
All right.
Please recount the events at Firebase Tarheel.
How did you get burned? What happened?
The day started weird.
There was some...
something along the riverbank.
Seals had found it,
and a call came down for us to get Intel on it.
The camera guys in air cav were sent with us,
and we saw it.
It was...
I don't know what it was.
What happened at Firebase Tarheel, Corporal?
We were shooting everywhere.
They had us pinned down.
All my buddies got fucked up.
I mean, bad.
And I just seen him there looking at me.
The river god.
He was looking right at me.
And I never felt anything like that.
One minute, I'm in the jungle,
looking at that...
thing.
The next, I'm in South Carolina,
back on the day we were gonna deploy.
I don't mean like a dream or nothing.
I mean, I was in America.
And?
The planes...
they were all destroyed.
And we were under attack.
There was Russian aircraft,
but not like migs, or nothin'...
It was this blue napalm.
Like a propane flame napalm.
And everyone was burning.
They were burning us.
Soldiers burning.
Like hell.
Did that happen?
Did that happen at Charleston Air Base?
Are they all dead?
Charleston's safe.
But it did happen.
It did.
Because then, uh...
Freddy and the boys,
they pulled me out of the ditch.
-I was still on fire. -Here?
Yeah. Here.
In the jungle.
I was like...
here again but on fire.
Like they pulled me
out of South Carolina into Vietnam.
[screaming]
A lot of my buddies were along the river bank.
[man]: Bracken, let's go!
Come on!
He's raising the dead up.
Like ghosts.
He's making their...
their insides...
like, hard...
like a cockroach.
They look like spiders or something.
I asked if anyone else had seen their...
the god.
No one else had.
Thank you, Sergeant Bracken.
[Dr. Bonham]: Corporal Bracken
will be flown back to the States,
enrolled in MKSEARCH,
and his name will be stricken off the rolls here.
He'll officially be MIA,
along with the 318 other Americans lost at Tarheel.
As of this moment...
Firebase Tarheel never existed.
Get some rest.
We head out in a few hours.
I don't sleep anymore.
Try.
[high-pitched whining in ears]
[voices shouting]
All these men...
they're gonna die tonight, you know that, right?
I'm not sure you care if these soldiers live or die,
You don't even care if you live or die.
Maybe that's how it works.
Who are you?
What are you becoming?
These details are slipping away from you, aren't they?
I can help.
I have...
these dreams.
More like visions.
Trying to tell me something...
I can't understand what it's saying.
It just sounds like noise.
[Palmer]: I spoke to soldiers in your previous unit.
I've heard all the accounts about you.
"Hines isn't meant to die."
"Hines is protected by a divine hand."
Objects were put in your path to shield you,
put there to protect you at exactly the right moment.
To shield you from the right piece of shrapnel.
It's almost as if life itself knew you were coming.
The universe keeping you alive,
saving you,
as though it has a plan for you.
And the river god?
That man you're compelled to hunt?
He is an error.
A mistake.
Plain and simple.
Life wants him gone.
But what is he?
A simple villager.
He had no connection to the Vietcong.
He had a wife.
He had children.
He was pushed by grief to the point where...
that the very fabric tore around him.
The local villagers who knew him,
they began calling him "The River God."
He wandered the Mekong,
leaving a wake of destruction.
I don't even think he knows he's doing these things...
these horrors.
Manifesting reality through his subconscious thoughts.
Changing matter inside the dead,
reanimating them as visions of his own hell.
Eventually,
he wandered into an NVA Base,
begging for help...
but by that point,
his flesh had entirely burned off.
Invisibility...
telepathy...
As a god walking the earth...
his mind is set free.
We will set the jungle on fire.
Burn everything
until flaming gel splatters across him,
lighting him up for us to track.
We will find him.
This is the electromagnetic coil gun.
It's firing projectiles about l/20th the speed of light.
Now, this...
this is the real jewel.
It creates a magnetosphere,
positive and negative polarity.
Everything about this
is designed to keep reality unbroken,
so you can function.
You will be protected from the breakdown in space-time.
We call it a relativity capsule.
It amplifies the gift you already have.
[Hines]: Put on the whole armor of god,
that you may be able to stand...
against the schemes...
of the devil.