Kaleidoscope Of War

• Nitya Singh, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2019

The sun dropped behind the mountains and I was now covered in deep shadows. The chopper hovered near the ground leaving me for a free fall of three metres or so. I jumped down into the tall grass and sprinted for the tree. Any tree. Every step was going into the unknown. You didn’t know what was going to lurk around the next tree or around the next branch but all that you had to do was wait. Wait in fear, wait in pain, wait until you heard the sound of someone being shot in a nearby distance. Wait- it was this palpable tension that drowned me in my own fears, filled my lungs with poison until I couldn't breathe and had a reason to give up.
This was war. I wanted to run, run like the wind far away from here, swim far out in the sea and get lost so that the serenity of the waves clouded my PTSD. But how could I? This was war after all. ‘A person would start dying when they stopped dreaming’, I would say to myself. And so, I would dream. Dream about how verdant the hills would be before this atrocity started and photograph the rugged landscape of Saigon with my weary eyes. What was the point of war? This scenery, these innocent animals and people were just pawns in a game of chess and so was I. Dictatorship ruled once again.