Belka, Why Don't You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa

Author:Hideo Furukawa
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781421550893
Publisher: Viz Media, LLC
Published: 2012-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

1963–1989

Dogs, dogs, where are you now?

Everywhere. You scattered. You increased without limit. Naturally, some of you bore puppies and some didn’t. Bloodlines extended, ended, became intricately intertwined. Thus were you born, one dog at a time, and thus did you die. One dog at a time. Your lives had limits. Your family trees, however, kept growing.

It had begun on the western tip of the Aleutian Islands, and it continued.

All across the globe.

You would never go extinct.

But you were toyed with, exploited. Why? Because this was the twentieth century. A century of war. A century, too, of military dogs.

Two great wars were fought during the twentieth century on the chessboard of the world. In the first half of the century, that is. In the second half, two more wars were fought, both alike in many respects. Both were limited wars. Both were offshoots of the Cold War, and both were played out in Asian nations. In the first, American soldiers shed their blood; in the second, Soviet soldiers shed theirs. The first unfolded in Southeast Asia; the second in Central Asia.

One war on the Indochinese peninsula, one war in Afghanistan.

Each lasted a decade.

America first sent combat forces into Vietnam on March 8, 1965. The Vietnam War lasted until 1975.

The Soviet Union sent its forces across the border into Afghanistan on December 25, 1979. The Soviet-Afghan War lasted until 1989.

The Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. A quagmire for each nation. Each a product of the Cold War, each a decade long from the point of direct intervention to the end. Similar indeed. Dogs, dogs, how you were toyed with, exploited, in the name of these two catastrophes! And it wasn’t only the United States and the USSR that left their mark on your family trees. It wasn’t only these two nations that pruned and spliced, made your destiny grow.

There was also China.

Red China, the third player.

1963. Mao Zedong despised Khrushchev.

At that time, in that year, every dog in the PLA Military Dog Platoon was descended from Jubilee. The platoon was not permanently stationed in any military region; it was assigned instead to the highly mobile field army—the army’s main force, which went wherever strategy demanded.

1963. America was operating under a misapprehension. In its eyes, the globe was still a page in a coloring book that two ideologies were rushing to fill in. It was, so to speak, a geographical contest. Needless to say, communist states were red. This much of the American interpretation was correct. Even America wasn’t always wrong. And yet…and yet…it had it wrong. America had failed to understand that the red patches in the book were by no means all the same tint of red. Or perhaps the Americans understood that fact but decided to ignore it, intentionally chose to be color blind and narrow-minded. America’s political decisions were all based in a sweeping, simplistic judgment that red is red, even when the crayons were, in reality, of quite different hue.

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