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Purgatory

Whumptober Day 8: Back from the dead 

Summary: ​​ Vietnam, 1967. Marine Captain Alfred F. Jones, born on July 4th 1942, is killed in action at 0930 hours, twenty klicks from Quang Tri city. This is the aftermath. 

Or: Alfred, through the eyes of one of his men. Because not every human’s experience coming face-to-face with their nation is a good one. 

Notes: CW for violence, death, graphic injuries, war, depictions of PTSD, murder and Cold War-era imperialism. This fic leans hard on the darker side of ‘nations as creepy as hell eldritches and their relationship with war’; citizenship, loyalty and nationhood can cut many ways can’t it? 

“VC” refers to the Viet Cong— the Vietnamese guerrillas who fought against both the US-backed South Vietnamese military and US forces. They were allied with, but distinct from the regular ARVN (aka, the North Vietnamese military). “Charlie” became a slang for the Viet Cong, because the NATO phonetic alphabet reads “V.C” as “Victor Charlie.” [3.2k words]

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One week after Jones dies, a VC sniper nails me twice in the right thigh on a night patrol, with all the suddenness and wrath of a prayer answered by the Almighty. 

Maybe Charlie had been aiming for my balls and had missed, the helo pilot on the medevac chopper had guffawed. He’d seen people in worse shape than me, I’d live, so just sit tight and shut up. 

It enters my leg at a diagonal, it hurts like a bitch, fractures my thigh bone, shreds a whole lot of muscle and nerve tissue, nicks a major artery; I lose buckets of blood. The surgeon at the field hospital in Khe Sanh who ties the artery, fishes out the bullet fragments and sews me back together tells me that at best, I’d walk with a painful limp all my life—if I even recover that much function. Then, I get a raging infection. I burn and I freeze; my temperature shoots to a hundred and three, I’m pumped with antibiotics, I’m told I nearly died—but I don’t give a shit. 

I’m giddy, delirious and incoherent, hopped up on morphine and euphoria. 

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