This is an hallucination that William Manchester had while he was in a foxhole one night on an island in the South Pacific during WWII.
    "I sat up, my muscles rippling with suppressed panic, stared across the shell hole, now dimly lit by moonlight and a descending flare, and saw that I had company, a creature somehow familiar, who flickered in and out of sight...
    Another flare revealed that my visitor was feminine. That was startling: what was a woman doing up here? My heart welling with pity, I thought she must be a native, one of the innocent civilian bystanders who were dying in the struggle for the island. Then the shock of recognition hit me. She wasn't harmless. She was evil. I was in the presence of the Whore of Death. Since killing my first Japanese soldier I had been one of her many pimps, leading Jap after Jap into her brothel. Now she wanted me as her next trick.
    Her identity might have puzzled others. She lacked the grace and movements of a geisha; she wasn't even oriental. Nor was she the stereotypical slut of the Occident. She wore no black-net stockings, no flimsy negligee. She knew her mark too well for that. She was, instead, dressed like the girls I remembered at Smith and Mount Holyoke: a cashmere twin-sweater set, a Peter Pan collar, a string of pearls, a plaid skirt, bobby socks, and loafers. Her dirty-blond hair fell in a shoulder-length pageboy coiffure, and when she turned her head abruptly to glance at her watch, she tossed her tresses like a young goddess. Her legs were crossed, her skirt demurely below her knees.
    But she wasn't from the Seven Sisters. Indeed, to a healthy imagination, she was the most improbable of sex objects. Her flesh was anything but appealing. It was deadly white, like a frog's belly, and covered with running sores. Twin lines of vile maggots appeared on her upper lip, entering her nostrils in endless, weaving columns. Gray fungus grew up her arms. Gaunt, prehensile hands restlessly clutched at each other, like fingers stitching a shroud. When she grinned lewdly, as she presently did, she revealed vicious jagged teeth sharp enough to rip out your throat, as those Java rats are said to lunge through your cheecks to reach the morsel on your tongue. She exhaled a foul stench. But it was her eyes, eyes as old as tombs, which were the most phenomenal. A direct stare is the boldest way to invade the shealth of privacy which envelops each of us, and she was using it devastatingly, diminishing the distance between us to the intimacy of a membrane. Her wide pupils were in turn stony, reptilian, shameless. She trembled suggestively. She was soliciting me...."

    --Goodbye, Darkness, William Manchester

    More war weirdness from William Manchester's Goodbye, Darkness (his own WWII hallucination will be posted tomorrow):
    "Hallucinations, as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon recalled in their memoirs of World War I trench warfare, are common in war. If you lie in a dark hole, listening to the sound of your own breathing, dead objects may rise and live, bald rocks may be transformed into men's pates, pinnacled stones may become witch's fingers. One of the commonest delusions is to see in the distance a buddy you know is dead, one you actually saw die, now very much alive. He is smiling at you. You run over and, of course, he isn't there. Then there are appearances of phantom Japanese* soldiers. I knew a major who dropped his pants in the bush on Guadalcanal and squatted to defecate. A shot rang out. Another Marine had spotted a Japanese* sniper in a coconut tree overhead. The dead sniper dropped thirty feet and plopped right in front of the major. Starting right then he developed an extraordinary case of constipation. Every time he tried to empty his bowels he saw Japs above him. Three weeks later he was flown to Noumea for surgery, but meanwhile his value in combat had been wiped. Similarly, a man in our 81-millimeter mortar platoon awoke in his foxhole one night and saw himself ringed by Japs with fixed bayonets. He grabbed his carbine, tried to turn off the safety, and hit the magazine instead. The magazine fell out. He had a weapon but no ammunition in it. He grabbed the barrel by the stacking swivel, turning the butt into a club, and swatted away in all directions, crying for help. He was lucky he wasn't killed by the other Marines around him. They wrestled him to the ground and convinced him he was out of danger, but to the end of his life, three weeks later, he stubbornly insisted that those Japs had been real. And, of course, to him they were."

*"Nip" in the original text.

    The psychological cost of war, any war....this remembrance is from a WWII vet:
    "Our Boeing 747 has been fleeing westward from darkened California, racing across the Pacific toward the sun...but slowly, three hours later than West Coast time, twilight gathers outside, veil upon lilac veil. This is what the French call l'heure bleu. Aquamarine becomes turquoise; turquoise, lavender; lavender, violet; violet magenta; magenta, mulberry. Seen through my cocktail glass, the light fades as it deepens; it becomes opalescent, crepuscular. In the last waning moments of the day I can still feel the failing sunlight on my cheek, taste it in my martini. The plane rises before a spindrift; darkening sky, broken by clouds like combers, boils and foams overhead. Then the whole weight of evening falls upon me. Old memories, phantoms repressed for more than a third of a century, begin to stir. I can almost hear the rhythm of surf on distant snow-white beaches. I have another drink, and then I learn, for the hundredth time, that you can't drown your troubles, not the real ones, because if they are real they can swim. One of my worst recollections, one that I had buried in my deepest memory bank long ago, comes back with a clarity so blinding that I surge forward against the seat belt, appalled by it, filled with remorse and shame.
    I am remembering the first man I slew."

--William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness