I SOMETIMES REMEMBER MY
SISTER.
The grenade was
placed by mistake, or in any case haphazardly, without real concern for
safety. There was intelligence about a
VC scout and no one whose life
would matter would be around anyway, right?
There
in the hut was the prettiest, most ticklish country girl I'd ever seen.
I had seen her before. Her buttermilk belly had been revealed to me on
a patrol. She wrung out a wet shirt by the creek. The evenness of the
fleshy plane was accentuated by a prominently protruding navel. Now, in
the shady, sulfurous cavity of the hut, I heard her weak sobs and saw
that abdomen spread with red. A substance
not unlike human blood, the CO would joke.