Sự thách đấu

(Defiance)
This story is set in South Vietnam in 1968. Heartily sick of the Viet Cong,An extremist republican general by the name of John Robertson began napalming hundreds of communities in North and South Vietnam if he even suspected them of having Communist sympathies. This had unexpected repercussions for Robertson, as unfolds in this story.

Prologue
Fire.

It was everywhere.

Mai Ché barely recognised the village, his home. The foul smoke of napalm stung his eyes, he could not recognise his fellow villagers, who ran, screaming, for their lives. He barely recognised himself amidst the heat and the chaos.

All he could see was fire.

Robertson. The name which had inspired terror throughout Vietnam. Word had flooded across the land of his merciless punishments for all those whom he suspected of siding with Ho Chi Minh’s supporters. Mai and the others had always spoken highly of the communist cause, and now they were paying Robertson’s price. There was nothing for it, he ran, avoiding the fire whenever he could, until he found himself splashing through the familiar muddy water of the rice paddies. Coughing and gasping, he knelt down in the mud until his eyes and lungs were finally free of the noxious stench of the napalm.

How long he lay there, hiding among the rice fronds, he never knew. When morning finally broke, he staggered to his feet, exhausted by the night’s events. As he sloshed his way through the paddy to the great pillar of black smoke pouring into the sky of Vietnam, casting the sun’s light into a dark, murky red, only the splashing of the mud broke the silence of the day. None of the familiar chirping of the jungle birds or the happy chattering of the villagers. Only the crackling of the remnant fires accompanied Mai’s footfall.

When he entered what had once been his home village, the sheer devastation the invaders had wreaked met his eyes.

As he looked around in despair, he saw the blackened remnants of the old huts, where his friends, his fellow villagers had once lived. Of all of them, only charred, unrecognisable corpses lay around the scorched ground. Tears began welling in his eyes as he walked slowly across the devastated ground. Here, a black and white photo of a just-married couple lay, its frame splintered. There, a singed doll sat, a charred, dismembered hand still holding it by its chest.

Mai almost broke down, when something caught his eye. A large length of cloth lay in a heap to his left. Moving over to it, he realised it was a flag.

Red on top, blue at the base, with a large golden star emblazoned at its centre, it shone out of the grey ashen ground like a glowing symbol of defiance.

Standing up, Mai clenched his hands into fists. His face contorted with fury, he bellowed out a challenge that echoed through the ruined village, over the rice paddies and into the tree-covered hills beyond. Robertson would pay.