Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 1992

3.5 stars. This is a horror short story, free online at Nightmare Magazine. It's pretty good if you like that kind of read. It won the Nebula and World Fantasy awards back in 1993. This full review was first posted on Fantasy Literature:

An unnamed Army veteran who has a sleep disorder that, oddly, he REALLY wants to keep, reminisces about his experiences in Vietnam twenty years earlier. While in Vietnam, he worked in the Graves division, responsible for handling soldiers’ dead bodies. He describes in detail the disgusting disintegration of bodies that are left in the jungle for more than a few hours.

One day he and Dr. French, the pathologist with whom he works, are called to look at an odd-looking corpse in situ, out in the Vietnamese jungle. The body they’ve been called to examine is that of a native; the soldier thinks it’s from the Montagnard tribe rather than a Vietnamese, and the corpse is oddly desiccated, with teeth filed into points. Things go downhill from there, in a jungle guerilla warfare kind of way, but then some disturbing things happen, and the soldier has never quite been the same since.

For most of the story “Graves” seems like a fairly standard tale of the Vietnam war, somewhat coarse and violent. The twist might not be all that surprising to those who read more in the horror genre, but I have to admit that the ending snuck up and sucker-punched me.