When I was very young, I loved riding to bed on my dad's shoulders and making the coo-coo clock work along the way. He'd tuck me in, then sit on the bed to tell me a story and say my bedtime prayer. Mostly, my father told me about his time in the Vietnam War. His job was to pick up the bodies in the war zone. He talked about the ants that fell like rain from the trees and would strip a person to bone before they made it to the other side. Often he told me about the men who only had moments to live and that he couldn't touch them until they were fully dead. Half of their head would be gone, blood and brain matter splattered across the jungle, and they would beg or pray in their final moments. A few times he told me about the Vietnamese whores who would fill their vaginas with razor blades. They did this before they would have sex with American soldiers in order to kill them through castration. Once he told me about the men in high ranking uniforms that were crossing the road backwards. My father killed them because they were Viet Cong and cleaned his gun before he got back to camp so their would be no evidence of what he had done. They weren't allowed to kill without orders.
The scariest tale he told was about the village wash women. They had gained the trust of his platoon so they were paid to come into their camp and handle the men's laundry. One night the camp was attacked by Viet Cong. Children were sent through the razor wire with grenades and started blowing up the tents. When the 9 year old boy came to my father's tent, he shot the boy in the head. My dad explained that if he had hesitated, the boy would have killed him. Over the next few days the men tried to figure out how the enemy had discovered where they were and how they were able to get through the camp defenses so quickly. As it turned out, the wash women gathered information while they were in the camp and sold it to the Viet Cong. They waited until the women came again, allowed them to do their work. After the washing was done, they rounded up the wash women and shot them all. The bodies were left on the side of a road as a warning.
He told me that story when I was 6 years old. When I was 9, I looked in the mirror and wondered if he could kill me as easily as he killed that boy. It might have been a silly thing to wonder about but it seemed to beg the question.
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