I had killed scores of people and had seen many people killed not by my hands but others’.  I had seen deaths during the land reform when human lives were worth less than a scrap of tobacco paper. Worthless lives reduced from noble ranks to baseness. It makes killing easier. My father, a denounced landlord, crawled on his hands and knees to the platform of the People’s Court, sitting in that doglike posture while peasants hurled accusations at him. A noble Catholic priest, after having his robe removed, looked shrunken like Satan had just sucked the soul out of him. On his hands and knees, he sat with a sudden dumb look on his face that made me hate him. Perhaps we all hate the cowardice in ourselves.
But it wasn’t self-hatred I felt when I saw the dumb look on the American pilot’s face as they took him through a crowd of agitated villagers. I was seventeen, a year after I killed the headmaster. I was a member of the Vanguard Youth with the required age from sixteen to thirty. We were to help repair roads and bridges after an air raid. That year, 1965, the Americans started bombing our city. They bombed the Hà m Rong Bridge but after two days of heavy bombing the Dragon’s Jaw still stood. Then highways and bridges came under constant aerial attacks. Schoolchildren like us were told to move out of the city to the surrounding villages that belonged to the commune. My friend Huan and I and another student roomed together in a peasant’s thatch-roofed house. We brought our own rice so the peasant’s wife could cook for us. Our families paid the peasant for our stay. At the end of each week, we rode our bicycles back into the city. During those rides, with the city twenty kilometers away, we pumped and pumped our legs to gobble up dirt space under our bikes, fearing the sound of sirens against air raids.
One early morning in August, the Americans bombed the rail yards and a truck park on the edge of the city. Some errant bombs hit a bordering village. For a whole day it burned. We were ordered to go there to clean up and help. I went through this village before on my way to the peasant’s village, and the dirt road was shady under the lacing crowns of ginkgo trees and flame trees and milkwood trees. You biked through the village without seeing the sun. When we got there at noon, most trees had burned to stumps. The dirt road glared red. The air singed. Everywhere we went the napalm-burned victims screamed in pain, and the dead shredded of clothes lay bare in charred flesh. A ripe, stomach-sick odor hung in high noon. Ashes grayed the hedges, and soot-blackened houses still simmered. Many had no roofs. I looked at those still roofed. The seared straw now glimmered with a hazed yellow and rice grains, scorched black, lay strewn across the dirt floors in tiny black dots like crickets’ droppings. If you have never seen a napalm victim, you’ll never know the horrid color of burned flesh. They told us not to touch the burned victims. They told us to wait for the soldiers to come and carry them away. In the sun glare I stood watching a mangy dog gnawing an old woman’s leg bone. I could still make out her face, the black turbaned head, but there was nothing left of her body except shriveled flesh and white bones. Then a little girl came and shooed the dog away. The dog growled at her and I kicked it in the rump and it trotted off. The girl stood, looking down at the old woman, and cried. Late in the day soldiers and city workers came. They brought no medicine but a few burn sprays. They sprayed the burned victims and then carried away all the bodies. The old woman’s body, too.
It was dusk when the local militia came through the village. I was carrying back bamboo trunks on my bicycle from another village to rebuild the houses now in ruins. I saw them on the dirt road, walking in tandem, flanking a buffalo cart. There was already a large crowd of people on both sides of the road, clothed in indigo and black and brown. I got off my bicycle, pushing it, and edged my way toward the cart to see better. The American sat slumped against the slatted wooden side of the cart. His cropped hair was sand-colored and, though sitting, he was filling the cart and you could see his whole upper body above the slats. They had stripped him of his boots, his jumpsuit. In his white boxer and white T-shirt, his torso was lean, muscular. They had shot down his plane when his squadron bombed Thanh Hóa City. Three kilometers outside the city they captured him, still tangled up in his own parachute. The crowd grew bigger now going through the village toward Thanh Hóa City. Staccato curses and shouts flew. Dirt clods, rubber thongs too. They called him murderer. Animal. Savage. Scathing words that sent him to the lowest realm of Hell. The militia tried to push back the crowd. I saw his face just as a wooden sabot hit his chest.
Then I saw a peasant, his head wrapped in a black turban, bull his way through the crowd. He charged in between the two militia and came up to the side of the buffalo cart. It was then I saw him raise his scythe. The long curved blade shot a gleam in the dying sunlight. The blade scythed the American at the neck and the head fell rolling on the ground. Blood gushed up from his gaping neck, splattering his white T-shirt. Suddenly the ruckus stopped.
The crowd stood, eerily quiet, gawking at the headless body doused in blood, tottering like an effigy in the cart as it creaked along. On the red dirt the head rested facing the twilight sky. As I looked down at it, I saw the eyes suddenly blink. My whole being shivered.
Khanh Ha’s debut novel is FLESH (June 2012, Black Heron Press). He graduated from Ohio University with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism. His new novel has earned a 2013 Leapfrog Fiction Award Honorable Mention. His short stories have appeared in Outside in Literary & Travel Magazine, Red Savina Review (RSR), Cigale Literary Magazine, Mobius, DUCTS, Lunch Ticket, The Mascara Literary Review, Taj Mahal Review,  Glint Literary Journal, The Literary Yard, WIPs Journal, Squawk Back, The Missing Slate, Zymbol (2013 Fall Print Edition) and are forthcoming in the summer issues of storySouth, Crack the Spine, Sugar Mule, Yellow Medicine Review (2013 September Anthology), The Underground Voices (2013 December Anthology), and The Long Story (2014 March Anthology). His work has also been nominated for the Sundress Publications 2013 Best of the Net Award.
Reprinted with permission WIPs: Works (of Fiction) in Progress
