By Kelvin Weston - Year 12, Otago Boys' High School
The air was heavy with guilt, sinking in our chests, condemning, unforgiving.
We knew what we had done.
Three hundred massacred. Some of the platoon said 400.
I was sitting in the forest and I saw red. My Lai, my hell, it was a Nazi kind of thing.
The jungle towered all around our platoon. It was hostile to foreigners like us.
We were foreigners here, I knew this now and I knew now too that we would be foreigners to the people at home.
I was an animal, a thing of bloodlust, of craven anger, of predatory instinct, of bitter mirth at the death of an enemy, of clawing mourning at the death of a friend. The mosquitoes and crawling things buzzed madly around us. They were angry too from the smell of blood and it aroused them, just as it disgusted us now.
A squad member had collapsed three feet from me.
He was motionless in the dirt, his eyes open and full of nothing.
Our platoon leader was crouched beside a corpse and whispering to command on the phone: ''We'll stay low in the interim, Charlie Company, over''.
The guilt was a beast in my chest, seething from within, and I wanted to rip it out, to lay it oozing with the lizards on the jungle floor.
Some men stood unashamedly, crying to the canopy.
''In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
my head is bloody, but unbowed.''
If I had the strength, the will to rise, condemn them, I would curse their gruff allusion and say: ''Ashamed one should be, our sins before us laid, if our souls would be free, and our blood debt be paid''.
Instead I prostrated myself before the jungle.
Men stared with sorrowful looks.
They questioned me not, as I lay in the mud, for grief of their own consumed them.
We were Freud's theory realised, for there was an animal inside every man, only released truly through toil of war.
There was an animal in me and I was trying, trying to understand it.
I had murdered three girls and I had murdered their mother.
I didn't see their faces. I couldn't remember them. I heard only their screams.
They weren't like the screams from the movies. They were the screams of dying lambs.
I wished as I lay that they would vanish, that their haunting visage might be expelled, that their aching, shuddering wails would be silent, and my raging heart be quelled.
In desperation, I muttered a eulogy.
''Harken now to peace from your wretched fate
Give me my blows, my punishment writ on the scroll
But curse me not forever, ease in purgatory your hate
Embrace me not again, send me justly into hell's hole.''
Bowed, bent and broken we were, a sorry lot of vagabonds.
We were bandits, we were predators, now prey to our compassion.
I was prodded where I lay and knew it was time to move.
We would skulk away like thieves, through the jungle undergrowth, skulk home, to our mother's skirts and bloody them with our touch.
