Document

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-06-20T09:23:48.750000+00:00

His mind skipped from the lake to the Thanh Hoa station, which was burning fiercely after the bombing raids. Everything that could burn was burning. From the capsized train men, women, and children rushed onto the platform to escape. Clothes caught fire and burned on their bodies. Headless shadows stamped about. The roar of the planes continued unabated, with bombs falling obliquely in the sunlight. For the first time in his life he saw people being killed, saw barbarity, saw blood flowing freely.

From then on his whole generation threw itself into the war enthusiastically, fiercely, making its own blood flow, and causing the blood of others to flow in torrents. Rushing onward, engaging in fierce hand-to-hand combat at the foot of the Ngoc Bo Ray mountain, soldiers bayoneting each other, beating each other with rifle stocks. Human forms running helter-skelter, zigzagging from machine-gun sights only to be sent flying into the air.

Kien saw himself holding a rifle, shooting at someone's head; the submachine-gun bullet, as powerful as a bomb, hit him right in the mouth and his face exploded, taking his left eye, his cheekbone, and his lower jaw. "Ahaaaahhaha," he cried. The sound was like laughter, yet more like a wail. How frenzied and aggressive this generation of his had become!

The violent and dreadful years and months. The Tet Offensive, Second Tet, the 1972 dry season, the post-Paris Agreement battles. The parched lands, dazzling under the sunlight, writhing in pain.The immense Central Highlands, cruel with a rolling red dust clouding the sky.Ya Mo, Dac Dam, Sa Thay, Ngoc Rinh Rua, Ngoc Bo Bieng, Chu Co Tong, all places which conjured the most terrible, fierce memories replete with suffering. There had been also the laughing, the shouting, swearing, drinking, talking, and happy times. A lot of crying, too.

Kien was again back in the jungle at Cong Ho Rinh, an ancient, desolate village, now ruined, laid flat by fighting and now just a graveyard where human bones, broken weapons, and other war materials lay around like garbage.

It must have been as beautiful as little Dien Binh village, which he saw before it got caught up in the firing. It had been part of a lovely pastoral scene along the Dac Po Xi river when Kien's battalion first saw it. Now it was a heap of ash and corpses, and one imagined the spirits of the dead flying away in such numbers they'd make a fog bank along the river.

Shaking the curtain of dew and smoke from another memory he saw very clearly himself and Elephant Tac both kneeling at a huge captured M60 machine gun and firing it nonstop at a stream of enemy stragglers from the ARVN 45th Regiment.They were running for their lives from Phuoc An, near Buon Me Thuot, being herded by tanks.

The machine gun eagerly ate up the cartridges and spat the copper shells aside, blazing deadly fire at the stream of insane men rushing on into their sights, making themselves targets of flesh. The gun trembled violently, swiveling on its base, steam rising from its cooling tank.

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