Horror Stories

Falling Like Apples

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

1975

Terrified, I have to leave my house. In need of food, I've been scavenging for pieces of dry bread around the house for the last week, but the time has finally come for me to do the dreaded shopping. If I had it my way, I would never interact with another person for as long as I live, but my stomach aches for food, and physical necessity overthrows my other desires. I step out of this rank shithole of a house for the first time in months, not bothering to change out of my reeking, stained trousers and T-shirt.

The air outside smells fresh, so much cleaner and breathable compared to the musty air in my house. Mental reminder to open some windows when I get home, I make my way down the street. This street is filled with kids running around, shouting and playing, and families buying food, toys and clothes from street vendors. It is cherry blossom season, cherry blossom petals fall all around, and everyone is getting ready for picnics.

Terrified, I have my route carefully planned out so I can get back to the safety of my own home as soon as possible. I need to walk towards the Kombukae Marketplace without making eye contact with anyone. I stare at my shoes, lace up boots torn up with my toes peeking out, the sole almost entirely ripped apart. I step, step, step, and a bird falls from the sky like an apple, a few inches away from me. I stop for a second, and look over at the small bird. It's not dead, it blinks and makes feeble chirps, but its wing is badly injured, almost entirely ripped apart. A small strip of dark red spreads around the area the wing is ripped out, as if contaminating its beautiful, bright blue feathers. With lightning speed, a hawk swoops down and scoops it up. I go on walking, step, step, step.

The dropping bird reminds me of the war. After it ended, most casualties were covered up, the death toll so, so much higher than disclosed. Dead people rained from the sky, just like the bird. The only difference was that this was more like a mass grave, no one to pick up or eat the remains. These were senseless killings, not nature taking its course. No one talks about how you couldn't take a few steps without stepping into a dead person's guts. The sound never leaves your head, the squelch of the decaying organs squeezing and ripping under your combat boots. The smell never leaves you either, the smell of a putrid cess pit. It also really makes you lose your appetite. I have hyper panic attacks when I'm near any scent that even remotely resembles that smell, so I make sure to never venture even close to the Southside of the marketplace, where the slaughterhouse and fish market is.

No one talks about the sea of blood that rained down during the war, you couldn't step anywhere without splashing in the sludge-blood mixture. I used to tie a bandana around my face as a mask, just to prevent myself from inhaling the blood of our fallen comrades. After the war, the government turned their back on most of us, we were on the wrong side to have been honored, not that we had a choice in the matter. Most veterans are homeless, unable to go back to living like normal, functional humans after what they had seen, but I was given my house and a tiny monthly pension for serving as Lieutenant, and having a few General Officers under my command. I don't know if I can be called lucky for that reason, I just have the blood of innocent people on my hands. I never wanted to be Lieutenant, but a sergeant gave me a badge and the title when he saw that I was the best marksman at training. I never actually fired a shot on the field, not even once, but to keep up pretense I led so many to their grave. I was scared that if people found out that I wasn't actively contributing to the massive death toll they would torture or kill me or something. But leading people into battle was awful, I would've been better off, at least more honorable, dead.

I guess at that point I still wanted to stay alive, I had a reason to. His name was Kai. We both got drafted sometime towards the end of the war, around 1971 and we had become friends as soon as we met at training camp, when we still had extremely warped, deluded ideas of what war was actually like. We thought it would be sitting in trenches, filled with sadness, a few deaths before we returned back to our families, sadder and hardened, but mostly unchanged. Boy were we wrong.