Mystery: J376

This story is dedicated to my close friend Seriff Pilcrow. While this isn’t everything he likely desired it to be, I nonetheless did my best given the circumstances that have transpired around this one write-up. Thank you for everything, bud. I greatly appreciate your assistance.

This story’s cursed. I swear on a Bible, it’s cursed. Every time I try to write about it, something bad happens. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the track record for it.

September 2019: I suffered a terrible nightmare about my ex-girlfriend that led to me contemplating grabbing my father’s service handgun and shooting myself in the head.

November 2019: A group of friends that I frequently hung out with got into a major argument. I played the mediator for weeks (this began around the time as the event mentioned above too) upon weeks and I finally broke down from the constant fighting and bickering. The two groups fractured and I was forced to abandon my plans for last year’s Decemystery. I ultimately scrapped this story because of how stressed I was; how I managed to not miss a single day of Decemystery 2019 is beyond me, but I consider it an act of God (and my sheer unbridled will to not fall behind on my work, though at what cost, I’ll never know).

January 2020: My acid reflux began to flare up extremely badly and I was forced to take time off; this did ultimately lead to me deciding to make the megalist of 500 conspiracy theories. This is also the only time that anything good came from this nightmarishly awful mystery.

March 2020: I suffered from a severe depressive episode due to my Yellow Lab dying; I scrapped covering it as a surprise for a friend of mine.

May 2020: I ended up having a complete and total mental breakdown in the middle of the month the week I’d begun to work on it once more. I’m still recovering from the breakdown because it was triggered by a year’s worth of pent up emotional distress and anger; the end result was five separate suicide attempts, losing a close group of friends I’d made four months ago, and being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

July 2020: The day I started to cover this, I nearly had a breakdown due to the regret I’ve experienced due to the above mentioned breakdown. This culminated in a terrifying 3-hour-long mood swing where I became lucid to my desires to slit my wrists with razor blades and repeatedly contemplated other methods to end my life.

Lucky for me: seven is one of my lucky numbers. So on this seventh attempt, we’ll be covering J376.

The Story

The story of J376 begins on 4chan when a user going by the name “guard” posted about his time in Iraq. Specifically, he spoke about an instance where some military contractors accompanied them on a covert operation to a secret base. It was here that some truly weird and twisted stuff occurred; all were told to be shot on sight. No ifs, ands, or buts. As the story continued, guard stated that there appeared to be an infection that was going around this base—it was something akin to a zombie virus, though it wasn’t quite like an actual zombie virus. If you were to ask me how it acted, I’d compare it to a cross between the contagion from the 28 X Later series and the Ebola Virus Disease. The zombification was closer to that of Rabies as a side note, but that’s purely from my own observation of what was spoken of by guard.

Continuing on though, the story’s atmospheric nature lends credence to its validity and the terminology used is fairly decent. By the end, guard states that he was meant to be killed, but the lead contractor assists him in his escape and the two flee; guard signs off by saying that if you were to look for him, he’d be listed having been killed in action and gives the hint of “J376” as a way to figure out what exactly happened.

That's an extremely abridged, butchered, and downright slaughtered version on my part as to what the story now known as J376 is. The actual story itself is considerably longer, so if you want to read about it, click here. If you don’t want to, let’s just dive straight into what exactly entailed after the story was told.

Given that this is 4chan, a land where autism reigns supreme like Spez’s ego and inability to lead his way out of a plastic bag reigns supreme on Reddit, people were enticed by guard’s story and what he had to say. The idea of a virus being tested out in the Middle East is nothing exactly novel, let alone surprising. This theory has been posited for a fair bit and the usage of chemical and biological weapons in warfare—while decreed as being inhumane and sadistic by every human rights activist this side of the Universe (let alone galaxy)—is by no means new in and of itself, some have theorized that a zombie virus is being tested in the Middle East so that it may be spread to wipe out some of the population on Earth due to overpopulation. This theory ties into the belief of the New World Order, Illuminati, and just about every other theory native to some One World Government.

Moving on though: should you Google J376, the first result will be a Wikipedia page for a location called Camp Bucca. This lead nowhere until I found a thread on 4plebs (a 4chan archive). It was posted on May 10, 2015 and supposedly has guard chime in it a bit. However, the thing that caught my eye were a series of posts in particular. They read as follows:

Post #1

Camp Bucca (Arabic: سجن بوكا) was a detention facility[1] maintained by the United States military in the vicinity of Umm Qasr, Iraq

On 9 June 2007, 6 detainees were killed, 68 wounded and one Iraqi Corrections Officer was wounded when a rocket struck Compound 8, in the Theater Internment Facility located at Camp Bucca.[66] On 10 June 2007, a seventh detainee, who had been medically evacuated to Balad Air Base, died from wounds he sustained in the attack.[67] On 23 June 2007 an eighth detainee who had been hopitalized in critical condition since the attack, died from cardiac arrest.

In August 2007, two separate news articles reported Camp Bucca's detainee populate stood at approximately 20,000 inmates

On 20 November 2007, a security convoy operated by personnel from the 887th ESFS was traveling north of Safwaan city, Iraq from Camp Bucca was struck by an IED.

The story lines up with what I've dug up through wiki so far. I'll talk to my vet buddies and see if any were/knew MPs who were at Camp Bucca.

Post #2

Well the story mentioned they were driven from their base/fob/camp to the black site somewhere. I imagine, based on his "being killed in a mortar attack near Umm Qasr in late 2007" that he very well was stationed at Camp Bucca and probably in the 887th ESFS.

On the off chance that I'm correct so far and the anon who wrote this story sees this, if I can blow your cover you need to cut and run dude, because I'm just some ex-Commo dude. Chances are though if I figured this out with a cursory google search, dude's probably dead.

Post #3

11-20-2007 US Paredez Jr., Alfred G. Sergeant 32 Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack Baghdad Baghdad (eastern part) U.S. Army

11-22-2007 US Martin, Jonathon L. Staff Sergeant 33 Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack NA Regensburg, Germany U.S. Army

2 records that match an IED attack on/near 20 Nov 07. One died in a hospital in Germany.

Post #4

So, my guess is, without me pouring through all the casualty reports with a fine toothed comb for a few more days, that the guard in this story is SGT Paredez Jr., Alfred G.

This begs the question: is Sargent Paredez actually guard? This is likely impossible to determine if we’re to apply my extremely large care package known as the benefit of the doubt to the story, though guard himself never responded to the post. This is understandable given that the story is more or less about a grunt surviving a CIA blacksite (which are notorious for officially being off-the-record and being expunged the second someone so much as spills coffee onto a table).

Though it’s because of that that I must end the story here. While J376 has a plethora of medical aspects to it that I’d love to go over—with me having gone so far as to ask a close friend of mine who’s a medical student assist me—I’ve been burnt six times too many by this story to dare press my luck as going in-depth with it. So because of that, I’m going to go ahead and simply jump into the theories section.

Theories

1. It was a real event

For our first theory, we have the idea that this was a real story that actually took place. CIA blacksites are by no means anything new, but this one in particular is quite astonishing and incredibly large in scale. While the theory of zombie viruses is nothing new, it’s rare you hear a story—even on 4chan—that’s even remotely detailed. Though even then, is there any evidence to back this theory up? No, though the one user’s findings about Sargent Paredez can be taken as the ultimate proof if you wish to buy into it and not assume it as being dumb luck.

2. It’s a creepypasta

The second and final theory is that this was a piece of creative horror fiction written to scare (and fool) the denizens of 4chan. While all signs would point to that, how exactly did one user narrow down the possibility that guard was actually Sargent Paredez? It’s entirely possible that guard was in fact a soldier in Iraq who caught wind of the events that transpired in Camp Bucca and used it in his story. It’s also possible that it was simply a bored user who simply used the events there for their story. It’s also entirely possible, as stated above, that it was a stroke of dumb luck.

My Take

The puzzle pieces in this story all fit together to create one of my all-time favorite greentext horror stories. I cannot state that enough: I truly adore this story. Cliche as it may be in how it flows, and the numerous tropes that are used, I still think that the story is equal parts exciting and creepy. However, in the way of it being real, I would say that it’s more likely that George Hodel murdered Emperor Nero.

Let’s set aside the medical inaccuracies and say, for the sake of argument, that everything we know about medicine and disease is completely wrong; that Big Pharma has deluded every single doctor into abiding by some pseudo-scientific nonsense that instead makes us less healthy as opposed to healthier. Even if we’re to accept that, there are still numerous problems with the simple nature of humans that create a gargantuan problem. Namely, the idea that someone—anyone—would keep their mouth shut and not once let a secret slip to someone that they feel comfortable with or could trust well enough.

This aspect is what causes a lot of conspiracy theories to fall apart for me. While you can argue that J376 being talked about on 4chan to already fulfill that requirement, the mere idea that guard never once talked about it to anyone else—not a single soul—prior to posting about it on 4chan is absolute hogwash. Humans are prone to spilling secrets, big and small, and generally can’t handle the weight of what they know well enough to where nobody will eventually ask: “Are you feeling okay?”

It’s just utter nonsense.

Given what guard saw would no doubt weigh on him to the point that his wife, parents, friends, acquaintances, or anyone in passing would ask if there’s something wrong, one has to ask how in the world such a monumentally disturbing story wasn’t revealed to the public. This is also not something you could simply cover up by marking him as being killed in action; something would slip out. Whether that’s the virus or a secret from an agency like the CIA is up for debate, but I don’t think you can keep the lid on a zombie virus for very long.

In short: no, I don’t think J376 is real. I think it’s a work of fiction, just like most stories told on /x/. Why I just spent so long rambling about it is beyond me, but hey, this blog is nothing if not dedicated to a plethora of stories that could be shortened to a few sentences.

Conclusion

To call writing this story a nightmare would be an insult to nightmares; this story has given me so much trouble for close to a year now and I cannot fathom how in the world I didn’t just expunge it from the recesses of my brain. Between the horrific luck I’ve had when trying to write this story and the ridiculously large amount of pressure I put on myself to make sure this reached some semblance of quality I aspire to always when I have a passion project in front of me, I think it’s safe to say that I’ll never look at the term “zombie virus” without having Vietnam-style flashbacks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to burn the nearest Resident Evil copy I’d like to pretend I still own. Bleh bleh zombie.