Vengeful Spirits in Forest

This story belongs to my step brother. He served in the Taiwan military as well. He serviced around the time 2011. I tried to translate the story as best as i could and the story will be in he's POV.During our recruit training, one of our training was pack marching. Our pack march sustained of 3 days and will be marching through some dense jungles and some mountains as well.

We were told a couple of rules by our commander just before our pack march.

1) under no circumstance to leave alone.

2) if you need to go to toilet make sure to report to your corporal about it.

3) do not ever mention your name / buddy's name during the time in the jungle or mountain.

We were very puzzled by rule number 3. As it didn't quite make sense to us. We were told by our corporal starting from our march we will be calling each other by recruit number just to be safe.

My recruit number was 33045 so everyone called me by 045. We didn't go through any sort of jungle until day 2.Before we pack march through the jungle, our platoon sergeant recapped the rules again and handed all of us some sort of Amulet.I questioned my buddy (046) what this is for.He answered "This is suppose to ward off any sort of spirits if we do run into them."On our Platoon sergeants command we ventured into the dense jungle. At 18:00 the sky was getting darker and darker.By 19:00 i could barely see anything out of my arms length. So we ordered to hold on to our buddy's shoulder thats infront of us and kept on moving.

At 20:00 we were ordered to set up a simple camp and rest on the spot until tomorrow morning. We spread our selves up a bit to give each other some space. I fell asleep near instant when i lied down on my back and using my pack as a pillow. Some point during the night i was woken up by some rustling noise. In half sleep half awake state I saw six soldiers holding each other by the shoulder and was moving towards a direction.

I looked around my surrounding realizing no one is around me. Meaning those soldiers must be my buddy's.

The soldier's uniform looked a bit roughed but i didn't want to be a burden in my unit so i held the shoulder and followed.All of a sudden i heard my number being called out and was suddenly pulled back by my platoon sergeant.He asked where i was going and what was i holding on to. I explained everything to him and he immediately took me straight to the company commander. The Company commander demanded to see my Amulet. I tried looking for it and by surprise i must've dropped it somewhere. He gave a spare Amulet and told me to not tell anyone what had just happened.

He explained to me that this forest had claimed many lives before. It had a long history of Japanese soldiers slaughtering the indigenous people in the forest and many of them died as a vengeful spirits.A lot of them would disguised as your friend or your love ones and try to draw you away from the group to posses you. After receiving this i was a bit shook and was not able to sleep the whole night. By the end of the pack march i was very sleep deprived and was looking forward to sleep on a bed.

But before all of that i got a bit curious and asked my platoon sergeant if there was any incident like this that happened to the last batch of recruits. He nodded and said. "Everytime we went through the same forest we will always get missing recruits. Ever since we started giving out Amulets to the recruits no one was gone ever since."I nodded and asked "Do you know exactly how many recruits went missing?"My platoon sergeant replied to me with a sigh and said "six"Ever since that incident i have developed xylophobia and will absolutely refuse to go close to a forest.