The Monkey that Changed Jonestown

Fiction

Timothy G Davis

             “Sergeant Clark,” the colonel said from behind thick glasses.  I could see his eyes magnified on the other side.  A major sat on his right, and one on his left.

            “Yes sir,” I said.

            “Do you understand why you are here?”

            “Yes I do, sir.”

            “I take it that you are familiar then with the recent articles in Newsweek, Time, not including the newspapers around the world.”

            I nodded curtly.  “Yes sir, I’m familiar with just about anything written about the alleged finding.”

            The colonel looked over his glasses.  “Now you say alleged, but they’re not saying that in Guyana, or in the Congress.  As Inspector General, it’s up to me to find out just what the hell is going on here.  We’ve read your statement, and quite frankly, I just can’t believe some of the things you’ve written.  I have several questions.  Now then, let’s start at the beginning.  Were you the one in charge of the ground operation?”

            “No sir.  That was Sergeant Scanlon.  I reported to him.”

            “Okay.  Now you say that all bodies were accounted for.  Is that right?”

            “Yes sir.”

            “And you stand by that.”

            “A hundred and ten percent, sir.”

            The colonel shook his head.  “Tell me what happened from the time you got the call at Ft. Kobbe, until you returned.  Just the highlights please.”

            “Yes sir.  It was just before Thanksgiving when we got the call.  We’re the only Airborne unit in Central and South America, and we thought at first we might parachute in.  Initial flyovers indicated a lot of dead people for no apparent reason.  It was actually the Guyanaian military that suggested rebels.  We didn’t have boots on the ground for two days.  Only then did we begin to realize the immensity of the operation.  It instantly changed from a search and destroy mission, to a recovery mission.  We started bagging bodies.”

            “Is that when you and some of the stateside units started fighting?”

            “It wasn’t really fighting, sir, but there was some bad blood.  There was a game they played at night that I had to put a stop to.  It created some resentment.”

            “And what kind of game was that?”

            “They called it the Head Game.  You see, besides the hundreds of dead suicide victims, the three camps that made up Jonestown also had hundreds of cats and dogs.  These were killed, too.  After a few days in the hot tropical sun, they were practically falling apart.  What some members in this other unit did was, they’d pick up a cat by the head, or a dog, and grip it tight.  Then, they’d snap the body, but held on to the head, and the carcass would fly off.  Whichever one went the farthest would win.”

            “Win what?”

            “Some other kind of duty for a day other than bagging bodies.  The animals weren’t the only ones in bad shape.”

            “How many were involved in this activity?  A handful?”

            “No sir, quite a few.”

            “Did you report this to Sgt. Scanlon?”

            “Yes sir.”

            “What did he say?”

            “He mentioned something to them but it didn’t go over very well.”

            “Why not?”

            “Well, sir, when we first got there, Sgt. Scanlon and some of the others decided to take some pictures.”

            “What kind of pictures?”

            “Pictures of the dead.”

            “Okay.  What’s wrong with that?”

            “They had their pictures taken after they climbed inside the body bags and posed with some of the more bloated corpses.”

            “See, Sgt. Clark, that’s where I have a hard time believing you.  I just can’t believe our boys would do shit like that.”

            “With all due respect sir, I was there, and I personally witnessed it.”

            “All right, sergeant, we’ll get back to that issue.  As I understand it, things got progressively worse.  Is that an accurate statement?”

            “In my opinion, yes.  My team was responsible for loading the bodies onto the helicopters after they were bagged.  Members of the other unit would kick the bags, breaking water.  When my men lifted the bags, this fluid would pour out through holes they had made and drip all over their pants.  I went to their First Sergeant and complained.  Finally, something was done, at least for a while.”

            “What’s that mean?  Did something else happen?”

            “Yes sir.  It’s not in my report because I didn’t think it mattered at first.  But now it all makes sense.  It’s at the root of the United Nations investigation into the official body count at Jonestown.  It’s why I stand by a count of 912, not 913.”

            “How can you be so sure?”

            “Because sir, we counted those bodies frontwards, backwards, upside down, you name it.  Plus, not one family member has ever said they have a missing relative.  Every single person from the camp records we had I personally accounted for.  Here’s what I think happened—”

            “This better be good, and I mean really good.”

            “Yes sir.  We found this monkey there, or an ape; hell, I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t indigenous to the area.  It was something they brought with.  Well, one of the soldiers had pulled off the left arm and was using it as a pillow.  I caught him with it and told him to put it with the other smaller monkeys we found to keep their remains separate.  We had the cats and dogs in one group, the primates in another.  And of course, we had evacuated all the humans out.  On the last night I had all the cats and dogs, plus some other garbage, bulldozed into a large pile at the end of where the main camp was.  The next day, we burned all we had, dressed in new fatigues, and flew back to Ft. Kobbe, Panama.”

            “I’m not following you.  What does any of this have to do with a prominent Guayanian doctor from identifying human remains outside the former camp and adding one more to the official body count?”

            “Sir, that UN group, including the doctor, went back to Jonestown four months later.  By then it was the rainy season, and a lot of the mud from the big trash pile I had directed was washed away.  And in the pile, the good doctor saw bones, bones that looked very similar in their decayed and broken state to those of a human.  Now I don’t know how good this doctor is, or if he was just trying to get one up on the US.  But, whatever the reason sir, he did it.  What convinced me is that when they pulled that skeleton out, it was missing its left arm, the same arm that soldier had used as a pillow.  There is no missing body, sir.  It’s nothing more than a monkey.”