During my deployment, something outside the wire started copying me...

I was a Marine deployed to Afghanistan in 2012. I’m going to be vague about where exactly we were and change a couple of names, not because what happened is classified or anything dramatic like that, but mostly because I don’t particularly want some guy I haven’t spoken to in fourteen years messaging me and asking why I’m telling people about this. A few of them know what happened. Most don’t.

At the time I was twenty years old and a lance corporal, which basically meant I had reached the point where I thought I knew everything while still being trusted with almost nothing. Our patrol base wasn’t much: Hesco barriers, plywood structures, a few fighting positions, generators that seemed specifically designed to break whenever you wanted to sleep, and dust in places dust shouldn’t physically be able to reach. There was a little village maybe half a mile away, although I could be wrong about that distance. I’m terrible at judging distance now and I was probably worse then. Between us and the village were fields cut up by irrigation ditches, most of them dry by that point in the year.

At night you could hear dogs barking over there constantly. That detail matters, although not because the dogs were supernatural. They were just fucking annoying. I’d get off shift, crawl into my rack exhausted, finally start falling asleep and hear about twenty dogs losing their minds somewhere outside the wire.

Night watch itself was usually boring. People who’ve never done it imagine you’re standing there staring dramatically into enemy territory for six hours with your finger on the trigger, but mostly you’re fighting sleep. You check the same stretch of dirt for the thousandth time, adjust your gear, drink warm water, think about food, think about your girlfriend back home and wonder whether she’s already decided to break up with you. One guy in our platoon, Carter, could somehow eat sunflower seeds continuously for an entire watch without running out. I still don’t understand how he did it. He’d come down with half his face numb from salt. I usually had gum.

The first time I saw it was during one of those watches. I was alone in the position because nothing had been happening in our area for a while. I don’t remember what day it was, although I think it was September or maybe October. It was definitely toward the end of the deployment, and it was sometime after midnight when the village dogs suddenly stopped barking.

That was what made me notice. There wasn’t some dramatic final howl or anything like that. They were making noise, and then they weren’t. When you’re surrounded by a sound every night, the sudden absence of it can be more noticeable than the sound itself. I remember taking one side of my headset off because I thought maybe I’d done something to my hearing.

That was when I noticed someone standing in one of the dry irrigation ditches.

I couldn’t see much with the naked eye, obviously, just the vague shape of a person, so I looked through my night vision. There was definitely somebody there. He was maybe seventy or eighty meters from the wall, although again, don’t hold me to the distance. He was standing down inside the ditch, which meant I could only see him from about the waist up. I watched him for a few seconds and then called it in.

“Possible movement east.”

Nothing unusual about that. The guy in the COC asked what I had, and I told him there was one person near the ditch line. He asked if the person was armed. I said I couldn’t tell. They told me to keep eyes on, so I did.

The person wasn’t moving. I remember being irritated more than frightened because I figured it was some farmer who had decided that two in the morning was a reasonable time to wander around near a Marine position. Then I shifted my weight, and the person shifted too. Exactly the same way.

I didn’t immediately think anything of it because people move. I leaned slightly against the wall of the post and, maybe a second later, he leaned too. I stood straight again. He did the same thing.

I actually smiled because I thought one of the guys was fucking with me. That probably sounds ridiculous given that this person was outside the wire, but Marines will do incredibly stupid things for a joke. I lifted my left hand and the figure lifted its left hand, or what looked like its left hand from where I was standing. I lowered mine and he lowered his. There was maybe a second between us, perhaps two.

I did it again and got the same result.

I keyed the radio and said, “Alright, which one of you assholes is outside the wire?”

The COC came back immediately. “What?”

“Who’s in the ditch?”

There was a pause before someone answered, “Nobody should be outside.”

That killed the joke pretty fast.

They asked if I still had visual. I said yes. The figure hadn’t moved. I raised my hand again and it raised its hand. Someone else came up on the radio and told me to stop screwing around. I told them I wasn’t.

A few minutes later they sent two guys over to look from another position, but neither of them could see anything. That bothered me because I could see the person clearly enough. Not facial features or anything like that, but the outline was obvious. I gave them directions, telling them to look near the bend in the ditch, then past the dead tree. They still couldn’t find him. I remember getting pissed at them because I thought they were looking in the wrong place.

Then Carter came up and stood next to me. He’d been sent over from the COC.

“Show me.”

I pointed. Carter stared through his night vision for maybe ten seconds before saying, “Yeah.”

That made me feel better for about half a second, until he added, “What the fuck is that?”

We watched together. I lifted my arm and the person lifted theirs. Carter laughed, but it was one of those nervous little laughs people make when they’re waiting for someone else to explain why something isn’t actually strange.

“Do something else,” he said.

So I crouched. The figure disappeared below the ditch. When I stood up, it came back.

Carter stopped laughing. “Fuck that.”

He called it in himself. Eventually somebody hit the area with white light and the ditch was empty. There was no gunfire, no screaming, no creature sprinting away, and no dramatic confrontation. There was simply nobody there anymore. The dogs started barking again maybe ten minutes later.

In the morning, a few guys went out and checked the ditch. They didn’t find anything. I asked about tracks and was told there were footprints everywhere, but that didn’t mean much because locals used the irrigation system all the time. By breakfast everyone had turned it into a joke. I got accused of making friends outside the wire, Carter told people I had discovered my Afghan twin, and for about two days every time I moved somebody would copy me.

Honestly, that helped. Once everybody starts laughing at something, it becomes difficult to remain scared of it without feeling stupid. I decided we’d seen a local guy screwing with us. That explanation had problems, obviously, but it was Afghanistan. Lots of things had problems.

About a week later, I was on the same post again. A different guy was with me this time, a Marine named Lewis. We didn’t see anything for the first couple of hours. Lewis spent most of the watch complaining about a rash on his back and asking whether I thought our corpsman would give him something for it. That’s one of the reasons I remember the night so clearly. There was nothing ominous happening. We were discussing his disgusting back when the dogs stopped barking again.

I didn’t say anything at first. I simply looked toward the ditch and saw someone standing there.

Same place. Same rough height.

Lewis noticed me staring and asked what was wrong. I pointed, and after a few seconds he found the figure through his NVGs. For whatever reason, I immediately felt embarrassed, almost like I’d been caught believing in something.

“That’s what I saw last time,” I told him.

Lewis watched for a moment. “Guy’s just standing there.”

“Watch.”

I raised my right arm.

Nothing happened.

I felt like an idiot, but then the figure raised its right arm.

Lewis chuckled. “Okay. That’s weird.”

I moved my head slightly to one side, and the figure copied me. I leaned forward and it leaned forward.

Then I scratched the side of my nose.

The figure lifted its hand before mine reached my face.

I stopped halfway through the movement. Its hand stayed against its face.

Lewis looked at me. “What?”

I didn’t answer. I lowered my arm, and a moment later the figure lowered its own.

I tried something else. I started shifting my weight toward my left foot, but before I had fully moved, the figure shifted left. I stood still. So did it.

I don’t know how to explain how deeply that bothered me. When something copies you, you’re still controlling the interaction. When it moves before you do, you aren’t.

Lewis seemed to understand what was happening because he stopped joking. “Do it again.”

I slowly lifted my hand, and the figure’s hand was already rising.

Lewis muttered, “Nope,” and got on the radio.

I’m not going to pretend we sounded like calm professionals at that point. We probably sounded ridiculous. Lewis basically told them there was someone outside copying our movements and asked someone else to take a look. The response was what you’d expect.

“What do you mean copying you?”

Lewis snapped, “Exactly what I fucking said.”

Then the figure lowered its arm and turned around. That was the first time I’d seen it do anything that wasn’t copying one of us. It climbed out of the ditch and started walking toward the base.

Lewis and I immediately started yelling at it, first in English and then using the few commands we knew in Pashto. Stop. Don’t come closer. Hands where we can see them. The usual stuff.

The figure kept walking.

We raised our weapons and it stopped.

“I don’t think he has a weapon,” Lewis said.

I hadn’t noticed until then. Its arms were hanging by its sides. It was close enough now that the night vision gave me a little more detail. It looked male and thin, wearing dark clothes, although I still couldn’t make out its face.

Then it raised both hands in front of its chest.

Not surrendering.

It held them the way someone would hold a rifle.

Except there was nothing there.

Lewis lowered his own weapon slightly.

The figure lowered its hands.

Lewis raised his rifle again.

The figure raised its invisible one.

“Jesus Christ,” Lewis said.

We shouted at it again. It took another step, so Lewis fired a warning shot.

The figure dropped instantly into a crouch.

I crouched too, reacting automatically to the gunshot, but the figure had already moved before I did. I remember realizing that while I was down behind the wall. It hadn’t reacted to me. It had known what I was going to do.

By then both of us were shouting and other Marines were moving toward our position. When I looked back over the wall, the figure was gone.

Nobody found it.

The next morning, I didn’t tell people about the moving-first part. Neither did Lewis. I think we both understood how it would sound. There’s a point where a weird story becomes a story that makes people look at you differently, and neither of us wanted to cross that line.

A few nights passed and everything was normal again. A patrol found an old pressure plate and everybody got tense for a day. The generator died twice. One of the guys got a package from home containing four enormous bags of gummy worms and refused to share them. Nothing supernatural happened, and I started feeling stupid again.

Then Carter woke me up one morning by kicking the side of my rack.

“Miller.”

I rolled over. “What?”

“Did you get relieved early last night?”

I hadn’t been on watch, and I told him that.

He stared at me. “You weren’t on Three?”

“No.”

His expression changed slightly. “I saw you.”

I sat up. “Where?”

“Walking down from Three.”

I made some joke about him needing sleep, but he didn’t laugh. He said he’d been going to take a piss and saw me climbing down from the post. He’d even said, “Hey, Miller.”

The person looked at him but didn’t answer, then walked around the back of one of the Hesco barriers. Carter assumed I was being an asshole and didn’t think much about it until breakfast, when he saw me come out of the sleeping area.

I’d been asleep for almost six hours.

I asked what the guy had been wearing.

“Your shit,” Carter said.

“What do you mean, my shit?”

“Your gear.”

“Helmet?”

“Yeah.”

“Rifle?”

“Yeah.”

“What rifle?”

He hesitated. We all had similar equipment, but there were little differences. Tape, pouch placement, sling setups, scratches, things you started noticing when you lived with the same people long enough.

“I don’t know, man. I wasn’t inspecting you,” he said.

I asked who had been on Post Three.

It was Lewis.

I found him after breakfast.

“Did you see anything last night?”

He stared at me for a little too long before answering. “No.”

“Carter says he saw me come down from your post.”

Lewis didn’t respond.

“Lewis.”

He looked around us before speaking quietly. “Something came up the ladder.”

That sentence still bothers me more than almost anything else that happened over there.

I asked what he meant. He said sometime during his watch he heard someone climbing toward the position. He assumed it was his relief and didn’t bother turning around immediately. Whoever it was reached the top.

Lewis said, “What’s up?”

No answer.

When he finally looked over, there was someone standing behind him. He couldn’t see the person’s face properly because of the angle and gear, but he thought it was me.

He said my name.

The person tilted its head and then climbed back down.

That was all.

Lewis admitted he hadn’t challenged it properly because he thought I was messing around. By the time he looked over the side, nobody was there, and he hadn’t reported it.

“Why the fuck wouldn’t you report that?” I asked.

He got angry. “What was I supposed to say? Miller climbed up here and then disappeared?”

Fair enough.

I told him about Carter seeing it too.

Lewis went quiet again and then asked me something I hadn’t considered.

“Why you?”

I didn’t have an answer.

For the next couple of weeks I tried to avoid that post. Not in some dramatic refusal-to-follow-orders way. You don’t really get to pick. I traded watches where I could, took shitty jobs and volunteered for stuff. Nobody noticed, or if they did, nobody cared enough to say anything.

Eventually I ended up back there.

Of course I did.

Carter was with me that night, which actually made me feel better. Nothing happened for hours. The dogs kept barking and the night felt completely ordinary.

A little before morning, Carter said he needed to piss. There was a piss tube near the position, but he’d left his water down below and wanted to grab it too, so I told him to go.

He climbed down.

Maybe thirty seconds later, the dogs stopped barking.

I immediately shouted, “Carter?”

He answered from below. “What?”

“Get back up here.”

“Why?”

“Just get up here.”

I heard him bitching to himself as he started climbing.

A few seconds later the ladder creaked, and Carter’s helmet appeared through the opening. He climbed onto the platform and asked what was wrong. I looked back toward the fields. There was nobody there.

“Never mind,” I said.

He called me an asshole.

Then we heard someone moving underneath us.

Carter looked at me.

Something bumped against the ladder, followed by the sound of a boot landing on the bottom rung.

Metal on metal.

Carter leaned toward the opening, but I grabbed the back of his vest.

“Don’t.”

“Could be somebody.”

“Then they’ll fucking announce themselves.”

We called down.

No answer.

Another step.

Then another.

Slow and deliberate. Whoever was climbing wasn’t trying to be quiet.

Carter pointed his rifle toward the opening. “Identify yourself.”

The climbing stopped.

For a few seconds nothing happened.

Then my voice came from underneath us.

“It’s Miller.”

I’m not exaggerating when I say my brain simply refused to process it for a second.

It didn’t sound like a monster trying to imitate me. It wasn’t distorted, raspy or unnatural. It sounded exactly like me.

Carter looked at me, then back at the opening.

I whispered, “Don’t fucking answer it.”

The thing underneath us repeated, “Don’t fucking answer it.”

Same voice. Same tone. Same whisper.

Carter backed away.

The ladder creaked again.

I grabbed the radio and called the COC. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something about somebody trying to enter the position. They asked for identification.

“We don’t know,” I said.

My voice below repeated, “We don’t know.”

The radio operator heard it. I know he did because his response changed immediately.

“What was that?”

The thing beneath the floor repeated, “What was that?”

People started moving toward us.

Whoever was on the ladder climbed one more rung.

Carter had his rifle aimed at the opening. I did too.

Then we heard running below us.

Not running away.

Running around us.

Fast footsteps in the dirt, circling the base of the post.

Carter moved toward one side and the footsteps followed him. He moved back and they moved back. I stepped toward the opposite wall, and whatever was outside shifted with me.

We stopped.

The footsteps stopped.

Then something started climbing the outside of the post.

Not the ladder.

The wall.

There was a scraping sound against the plywood as it moved upward until it seemed roughly level with us. Neither of us moved.

I could hear breathing on the other side.

My breathing.

Same rhythm.

I held my breath.

The breathing stopped.

I breathed out.

So did it.

Carter started crying. Not loudly. He’d probably punch me for telling people that, but he was. A tear was running down one cheek and he kept wiping it away like he was pissed off at his own face.

Eventually Marines reached the bottom of the position, and the scratching immediately stopped. Somebody shouted up asking what was happening. Carter practically screamed at them not to climb.

They thought we’d lost our minds.

Eventually they came up anyway.

Nothing happened.

There was nobody outside, nobody inside and nobody hanging from the wall.

They searched the surrounding area again and found nothing.

We got relieved.

I barely slept.

That afternoon Carter came and found me. He didn’t say anything at first. He just handed me his phone.

He’d taken a picture of the outside wall of the post.

At first I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

There were two dirty handprints on the plywood about eight feet off the ground.

They weren’t scratches.

They were complete handprints.

The left one was missing the tip of its index finger.

So am I.

I lost part of mine when I was fifteen in a stupid accident involving a trailer hitch. Carter knew because he’d seen my hand.

Whatever had left that print shouldn’t have known.

Nobody really investigated it, or if they did, nobody told us anything. The marks eventually got painted over. Lewis stopped talking about the whole thing. Carter refused to stand that post again and took whatever shit came with that decision.

I never saw the person in the ditch after that.

We went home not long afterward.

For years I treated it like one of those deployment stories people tell after enough beers. I didn’t embellish it. Usually I actually left parts out, because saying all of it made me feel stupid.

I haven’t seen Carter since 2017. I lost touch with Lewis before that.

I’ve got a normal life now. Job, wife, two kids. I don’t have nightmares about Afghanistan much anymore, and when I do, they’re rarely about combat. Usually I’m back in that post looking through night vision at someone standing in the ditch.

The strange thing is that in those dreams I can never remember which one of us is copying the other.

I hadn’t thought seriously about any of this in years until Carter called me three days ago. We haven’t spoken on the phone in a long time, and at first he sounded embarrassed. We talked about ordinary stuff for a while: kids, work, guys we both knew.

Eventually there was a long silence.

“You remember that thing?” he asked.

I knew immediately what he meant.

“Yeah.”

Another pause.

“I saw you yesterday.”

I laughed because I thought he was joking.

Carter lives almost a thousand miles away from me.

He wasn’t joking.

He’d been driving home after work when he noticed somebody standing beside the road near the entrance to his neighborhood. Combat helmet, old desert MARPAT, no rifle. Just standing there.

Carter slowed down because he thought there had been an accident or somebody needed help.

The person raised his hand.

Carter said he raised his own without thinking.

The man lowered his.

Carter lowered his.

Then the man raised his hand again.

This time Carter hadn’t moved yet.

I asked what the person looked like.

Carter didn’t answer for several seconds.

“Like you did back then.”

Twenty years old. Same gear. Same face.

I told him to call the police if he saw the guy again. I don’t know what else you’re supposed to say in that situation.

We spoke for another minute and hung up.

Ever since then I’ve been thinking about something Lewis asked me all those years ago.

Why me?

I still don’t know.

Earlier tonight I was brushing my teeth when my six-year-old son came into the bathroom and asked why I had been standing in the backyard.

I told him I hadn’t.

He looked confused and pointed toward the window over the sink.

“Then who’s that?”

I didn’t turn around.

I grabbed him and walked straight out of the bathroom.

My wife thinks I’m losing my mind. Maybe I am. The curtains are closed now and the kids are sleeping in our room tonight. There’s nothing on the security cameras, even though I’ve checked them about twenty times.

But every now and then, from somewhere behind the house, I hear footsteps moving through the grass.

When I walk toward the left side of the room, they move left.

When I walk toward the right side, they move right.

So I’ve been sitting in the same chair for the last hour, trying not to move.

A few minutes ago, the footsteps stopped waiting for me.