Rekishi- history.  We thought we were making it.  I think the story we left behind is not the story we thought we were telling.  Bruised from the war, still bleeding from the horrors of Pearl Harbor, it was so easy to believe what they told us.  Kill the Japs.  They're the enemy.  Look what they did to us on our own shores.  One soldier killing another- now that's easy to dismiss.  One enemy soldier killing innocent women on beaches where we vacation with our families, play with our children, and try to make love to pretty girls?  That is different.  Fueled by such righteous fire, it was so easy to buy into the cause.  The fight for freedom and the desire for revenge became the same thing. 

I enlisted two days after Pearl Harbor.  Caught up in the fight for victory and the fight for right, I found myself fighting the good fight in nearly every theatre of war in the Pacific.  Not too shabby for a simple boy from Westchester County who liked to play football, drink cold beer on sunny afternoons and kiss his girl until her toes curled.  I wanted to do my country proud.  To make my mother proud.  What a fucking joke.     

Semper Fi.  More words in another language that have come to mean something entirely different to me than they once did.  Always faithful.  To whom?  To what?  America?  The Corps?  The ideals of justice and freedom and equality for all? 

We believed it, you know.  

Believed all the propaganda.  Stay on the job until every murdering Jap is wiped out!  I'm making bombs and buying bonds.  We're going to win because God is on our side.  Duck and cover.  And we swallowed it all and asked for more.  But back then the motto was: Loose lips sink ships!  Everyone had a different story.  Nobody had the truth.  And it would get worse before we did.  So much worse before we saw the truth with our own eyes.  Saw things that could not be neatly explained away with clever slogans and nifty jingles.

We all sang them.  They were written in the blood of the fallen.  Inscribed on our honor.  Carved into our very souls.  We had been deeply cut and we wanted our pound of flesh.  All of us young stupid kids...... thinking we were men, thinking we knew it all.  It makes me sick to think of it now. 

Stories started to come around, spread from unit to unit, boat to boat, man to man.  Whispers.  A-bomb.  That'll stop them.  End the war fast.  Save the lives of our brothers and our allies.  Wipe out the Japs... make them pay and end the fighting so we can all go home to our mothers and our wives and our sweethearts.  Nagasaki.  I actually volunteered for that duty.  We fucking wanted it.  Wanted the bomb to fall.  Wanted revenge in the way that burns so brightly in the blood of young men.  

We whispered about it at night.  Boatloads of us young Marines.  None of us really knew anything.  Most of us hadn't even had the A-bomb training.  Which pretty much amounted to: 'don't look directly at the flash and for an hour after the blast, try not to breathe the dust'.  That's it.  That's all we were ever told.  To us, it was just a bigger version of what we'd already experienced.  And like all young men, we were almost excited for it.  Bigger.  Better.  Louder.  Progress.  It was the age we lived in. 

And it was the same feeling driving us that we felt as boys when we would light firecrackers off at home on the 4th of July, always looking for ways to get a bigger flash.  A louder bang to impress our friends or even just to see if we could.  Testing the limits.  Testing our limits, you know?  God, some of us over there weren't really all that far from those days of being a kid running wild in the neighborhood back home.  Most of us still had that same mentality.  Our illusions still hadn't really vanished.  I think half of us were still ten feet tall and bulletproof. 

Pikadon.  Yet another of the words written onto my soul.

Pika- it means glitter or sparkle, like a bright flash of lightning.  And don- it means 'boom'- a loud noise.  Hence: flash-boom.  It came to mean the atom bomb.  A new word created for a new age, born of innocence and suffering.   

Duck and cover.  What a fucking joke.  Tell me, just how does one do that when the flash was so intense it permanently burned the shadows of the cowed into the stone they stood against?  Bright enough to blind you if you saw it with a naked eye.  Hot enough to turn a body to ashes in seconds.  Powerful enough to vaporize flesh, leaving nothing but a shadow if you were unlucky enough to be that close.  Or maybe those were the lucky ones.  Those who lived suffered unspeakable agony.

And we saw it all.  

Growing up in a flash.  The flash.  It would be funny if it wasn't the truth.  You can't understand unless you were there.  Pictures and words don't do it justice.  Better men than me have tried and failed.  To most Americans, the war was this thing that happened somewhere else.  To other people.  It was glorified.  Mostly people back home just wanted it to be over.  They were tired of hearing about it.  Tired of talking about it.  Tired of seeing it in the papers.  But they sure didn't see what we did as we walked among the rubble.  Imagine that?  The censors would never let it happen.  Put a human face on war for the folks back home?  Not a fucking chance.  

What I remember most about that day was how calm I was.  We all were.  Walking through the Valley of Death like we were on a Sunday stroll.  I think it was simply too enormous to absorb.  It was less like walking through a bomb's crater and more like walking in the Devil's footprint.  So wide and deep and never-ending that you couldn't process what you were seeing.  We had no point of reference.  No buildings stood to measure against. 

It was simply too much.  I remember laughing with my friends, sharing a smoke among black rubble that was littered with colorful bits of glass and random body parts, like someone had taken a hammer to a box of porcelain dolls.  An arm here.  A finger there.  It was surreal.  I smoked a cigarette next to a severed foot and nobody remarked on it.  Maybe we were in shock too. 

The jubilation of our great victory tarnished over time as little by little, we began to be affected.  It wasn't the vast expanse of destruction that pierced us.  That was too easy to blank out, mostly because it was just too much to make sense of.  We didn't see the forest.  We didn't even see the trees.  We saw a single leaf.  A broken blade of grass.  A burned butterfly. 

It was the little things that got to me.  On patrol we passed a group of five little boys.  None of them had clothes.  We had none to give them.  They asked for water.  I spared what I could.  When we returned an hour later, two were dead.  The next day, the other three were gone.  Where did they go?  I still wonder what happened to them.  I think I always will. 

Other things, too, began to work their way into us like splinters.  We were numb to the blackened bodies.  Even the charred remains of little children, teeth gleaming white in a twisted mass of ash couldn't move us....  but I remember seeing this dog a few weeks after the blast.  It was starving and had lost most of its hair.  Wet.  Hungry.  Cold.  Lost.  Suffering.  Somehow, it touched me like nothing else.  I hid in the burned out remains of a building and cried. 

Why cry for the dog and not the people?  The dogs were bad enough.  The thought we'd done this to people was just too much to grasp.  It wasn't just soldiers we killed.  Oh no, and not just families either.  It was three and four generations of the same family, all their belongings, their pets.  Everything.  I think the dog got to me because maybe, just maybe, my mind couldn't yet process the fact we had not only done this to people, we'd actually yearned for it to happen.  Cheered when the news first reached us.  We got drunk to celebrate. 

To celebrate.

And two days later, we walked upon the field of victory.  Saw the few survivors so traumatized they could sit and drink from a jug next to a bloody corpse without batting an eye.  I saw a woman standing with her face in the wind.  She seemed like a delicate flower, this one beautiful spot of color in a sea of crumbling gray stone.  Her hair was so pretty and dark, blowing gently over her soft cheek.  I smiled at her.  She turned and I saw half her face had been melted away.  Like a mask- only which one was the real face- the pretty one or the one expressing the horror of this place?

I saw trees with no leaves, twisted and black against the misty sky.  I saw beasts of burden, mangled grotesquely under wooden carts, like toys snapped in half.  I saw living death.  I saw women selling themselves for water.  Water.  I saw piles of shit, open sewers and open wounds.  People with no clothes.  People with no hair. 

My God, they didn't even know why they were sick.  They thought it was dysentery from lack of sanitation.  It was months before they discovered it was radiation sickness.  And it would be more months still before we figured out that we had been exposed to it as well.  What did we know?  We were just a bunch of stupid kids playing fort in the biggest scrap heap the world had ever seen.  Those wizened hairless bodies seemed to have more dignity than we did. 

And yet somehow, life went on.  We drank green tea and ate rice until I could no longer stand the flavor of either.  We smoked contraband cigarettes and drank too much sake.  Someone had a football.  We played on blackened earth.  Our laughter was loud and false.  Better that than crying, though.  At least, that's what we told ourselves.  Not that it worked.   

I liked nighttime the best.  When it was dark, you couldn't see the damage around you.  I would stare up at the night sky and dream of home.  Sometimes, when it was clear, I'd watch the stars and wonder if my sweetheart back home had ever looked up at those same stars and thought of me.

It was a confusing time.  I wasn't much of a letter writer to begin with, but I wrote her less and less in the weeks and months after the bomb.  I felt so guilty for wanting what had happened to those poor people.  I devoured her letters, craving solace, even as wanted to distance myself.  I wasn't the hero she called me.  I was something else.  I wasn't sure what.  Words like monster and murderer came to mind.  I didn't want what I'd become to sully her. 

Sweet innocent Claire.  I missed the way she tasted.  Her mouth.  Her cunt.  Her skin.  Just everything.  We were lovers before I left.  She wasn't a virgin, but she was innocent in all the ways that really mattered.  I didn't want the stink of this to ever touch her.  I used to dream about her touching me, though.  Sometimes it was so good.  Sweet and soft and fun... the way it used to be back home when we stole time to make love wherever we could.  I would wake up hard and throbbing, or worse, shuddering my pleasure into my skivvies, eyes watering as I tried not to make a sound, hoping none of my buddies had heard me and praying I hadn't been moaning in my sleep or humping the ground. 

Sometimes it was worse.  I'd dream of touching her.  It would always start out so sweet.  She was so clean and smelled so good.  She'd hold me and let me kiss her breasts but when I went to touch her, my hands would be twisted and burned or bloody- or both- and she would shrink from me, screaming and screaming until the sound filled my mind.  I would jerk awake, choking on the urge to vomit, hoping for a different reason that nobody saw me.  Someone almost always did.  We lived in each other's pockets in those days.  Shared everything from food to dirty pin-ups. 

It was so strange, that camaraderie.  Young men forced together like that.  We knew everything about each other- and we knew nothing.  We could squat and shit a foot away from each other.  Could ignore the guy in the next bed jacking off.  Could razz each other for it too.  And for the night terrors.  We made crude jokes about wet shorts and turned a blind eye to the wet eyes, even as someone slipped you a smoke or a drink or a joint to calm you the fuck down.  I think the only thing we didn't ever share was our feelings about that place. 

Funny how you can talk about fucking and sucking and every other dirty thing under the sun or kick your buddy's feet to get him to jack off a little more quietly- or even hold him as he cried- all without ever asking why. 

Itai- it hurts.  Somehow, I'm not surprised that's another word that has permanently written itself into my history.  The war..... people at home used to say it made men of us.  I'm not so sure.  I think maybe it just showed us the kind of men we really were.  I didn't like what I saw.  Nothing made any sense.  I spent my days killing the 'enemy' and taking the odd picture that the censors made sure nobody ever saw.....and my nights.... well, those were spent like most of the men in my platoon.  Drinking.  Playing cards.  Talking about girls.  Hitting on nice ones when we could find some.  Paying others when we couldn't.

I think half of us were more interested in being held than in getting our rocks off.  Getting a bit of solace.  Feeling a soft body under ours.  A tender touch.  For a few moments, you could almost forget where and what you were.  Almost.  Of course, we wrapped it up in crude talk, but then- we're men.  That's what we do.  The more shit we talk, the more you can be certain we don't anyone to know what we're really feeling.  I think the truth is we were all running scared.  Those of us who could still feel anything, anyway. 

I became even more distant.  Claire was like this far away memory from another life that I took out from time to time but felt too dirty to touch.  I finally stopped sending her letters altogether.  Funnily enough, that's the one thing I never felt guilty for doing.  I just got lost in that place.  Drifted until life caught me up again.  

Yuriko.  There was a girl.  That was her name.  She never told me what it means.  Funny, with all the words that stuck with me that I don't know the meaning of the only one that brought me some measure of happiness.  Yuriko worked at the hospital where we sometimes delivered supplies.  She was small and ethereal.  Soft spoken.  Demure.  She had a laugh that sounded like tiny bells.  She was everything I wasn't, but mostly what drew me to her was the feel of her.  This aura she had.  She was like the very spirit of that place.  Somehow both fragile and enduring.   

I never understood that.  The Valley of Shadows broke even the strongest men- but not her.  It seemed impossible that the blast could have destroyed a city and left a fragile blossom untouched.  Her quiet dignity seemed to say more than the loudest enemy battle cry that I had ever heard. 

We will endure.  

It made what we'd done to that place seem even worse.  If there were still flowers in the rubble after we left, what was the point of all?  Everything had made so much more sense when it was just soldiers killing soldiers.  Yuriko never killed anyone.  Why did she have to suffer the loss of her family and her home?  It made no sense.  Nothing made any sense anymore.  But then, sense had been burned to ashes along with everything else.  Morality.  Conscience.  Decency.

Mo sukoshi- a little more.  That's all anyone wanted.  A little more peace.  A little more sunshine.  A little more food.  A little more laughter.  I just wanted a little more of her.  I used to watch her while we delivered supplies.  Sometimes she watched back.  I should have stayed away.  So much for not wanting to sully a nice girl with what I'd become.  But then, I was young.....my blood was hot.... and I still ached for solace. 

What I had with her- it wasn't love.  It wasn't a wartime romance.  I'm not even sure it was that sort of life affirming sex that happens after a battle.  I'd had my share of that.  This was different.  More basic.  We were young and alive- neither of us knew for how long.  It was some blend of living in the moment, grabbing what pleasure we could and partly some resurgence of something primal I'm not sure I ever really understood.  The circumstances of the situation seemed to override every barrier from culture and language to basic right and wrong.  All that was left was male and female and this sense that humanity was so very much more fragile than any of us had ever imagined.

We didn't talk much.  Not with words anyway.  We spoke a different language.  One we both understood.  There was a question in my eyes.  And an invitation in hers.  She was a virgin.  My first.  I never understood why she chose me.  It was as surreal an experience as walking through the Devil's footprint had been that first day.

She was so small compared to me- but not like a child.  There was a grace in the way she moved, a sensuality that only comes with time.  Late one afternoon, for no special reason other than some electric current passing between us when our eyes met, she waited until I was alone and bade me to follow her.  I did not have to ask why. 

There were plenty of places for us to go.  The world was an empty husk of itself.  We wound up in the remnants of some little shop.  It was leaning terribly and made me think of funhouses at the fair back home, where everything is sloped and all the angles are wrong.  We didn't lay on the floor.  We wound up against the wall instead.  It was more comfortable, leaning as it was at a steep angle.  It made what was happening seem all the more surreal. 

I was excited.  Hard- and not quite able to believe it was actually happening.  I'd followed this delicate girl here for sex.  Because she wanted me.  Unbelievable.  And then there we were, standing together, staring at each other in this private place where we could do whatever we wanted to each other.  Conscience and convention belonged to a different world.  A dead world.  All we had was the moment. 

And we made the most of it.

I put my hands on her hips and pressed against her, my heavy gear still hanging from me.  Neither of us cared.  She felt so small and exotic.  Her skin was smooth and soft, radiant like a pearl, as if she had some magical luminous glow that was unique to her.  I think she did.  I couldn't look away from her face, from the unfamiliar sweep of her almond eyes to the beautiful fullness of her bottom lip.  I had always been attracted to petite slender girls.  I liked the way it made me feel to hold them, how it highlighted our differences.  I liked feeling strong and big and powerful.  And I liked a tight fit too.  I always have.  I've got a big cock.  And I know how to use it. 

I am not sure what it was about me that attracted her.  She was shy, but even more curious about my body than I was about hers.  I think I must have been the first western man she'd ever seen or touched intimately.  Most Japanese had this image of Americans as strong and big, uncouth and cruel.  I still wonder what she made of me that day.  I was bigger, hairier; fairer and more golden than the men of her country.  My face had more stubble and was rougher.  My eyes were a different shape and color.  My cock was cut.  I can still remember the feeling that swept though me as I thought about her touching it for the first time- some blend of insecurity and power.   

For long moments, we just stayed that way, pressed up tight against each other.  Not grinding.  Not kissing.  Just breathing.  Touching each other shyly.  She wasn't the first girl I'd ever disappeared with into an abandoned building in that country- but the experience was so different.  Not as sordid.  Those other girls I'd paid.  There had been no touching besides the obvious, clothing shifted not removed.  Fuck and come.  Over and done with in mere minutes.

With Yuriko it was slow and we undressed each other as much as we dared.  She disarmed me in every sense of the word.  Her eyes were demure and she kept looking away.  I would stop, still my fingers and wait until she met my eyes again before continuing.  My gear hit the dirt along with my damp uniform jacket.  I opened her thin blouse and groaned at the sight of her small tight breasts, brown nipples pebbled and hard in the cool air.  She hid her face in my shoulder and held my arms tightly with her hands when I touched and kissed them. 

It feels as stupid and inadequate now as it did in that moment, but I wanted to show her how sorry I was, how ashamed I was for what happened to her people.  Desire.  Atonement.  Animal magnetism.  Agony that was soul deep.  Attraction.  Chemistry.  Hell, maybe it was just as simple a woman reacting to a man's hunger for her.  I will never know what drove that moment.  All I knew was that touching her and being touched by her felt so good.

We kissed.  She tasted of ginger and sweet plums.  I simply stood there and let her touch me as she liked, feeling the weight of the equipment I carried lessen as she removed each piece so carefully and then let it drop at our feet without a single care.  She seemed fascinated with touching my face, returning to it again and again, rubbing her palms and her cheeks and lips against my scratchy jaw.  Licking my neck to feel the rough stubble against her soft tongue. 

I remember tightening my hands on her small hips and reminding myself that I would need to be careful with her.  She was so slender and fragile.  And she was making me so crazy.  I dropped my head and looked away when she explored my tattoo.  USMC- anchor, globe and eagle.  How proud I was of it when I'd first gotten it.  And how painful it had become.  It seemed to ache worse each day I spent in that place.  Standing there, a soldier half undressed, baring a native woman's body to my gaze, my tattoo was an uncomfortable reminder of exactly who and what I was.   

Unable to stand that reminder a moment longer, I opened my pants without embarrassment and widened my legs before I took her hand in mine and put it on my cock.  She breathed in sharply, with apprehension and pleasure.  In the moment before she hid her face from me, I saw something in her eyes that needed no translation.  She liked what she saw.  Liked my size.  Maybe even feared it a little.  It made me smile.  For the first time in a long time, I felt a moment of pride.  It made me feel good.  Powerful.       

I opened her skirt and let it fall, sliding my hand gently but firmly between her legs.  It hit me again how awkward the moment really was, allowing a stranger such intimacy.  To reveal the private parts of ourselves that we usually kept well hidden.  She was exquisite, small but fully mature.  Young, but still a woman.  The hair between her legs was so silky, soft and black.  For a moment she resisted, trapping my hand between her closed legs... but then she just leaned back against the gritty stone wall and pulled me closer, opening her legs and her mouth in wordless invitation. 

I kissed her.  Her hand trembled around my cock.  I covered it with mine and rubbed against her palm.  I didn't want to scare her but I was a man not a boy.  I needed more.  I wanted to give her more too.  In the years ahead, if she was lucky enough to have them, I wanted her to look back on this moment fondly.  I spoke to her then, using words I'm sure she'd never heard before.  Told her that I was going to put a finger inside her.  That I wanted to feel how tight she was.  That I would be gentle, help open her up to take my cock.  That it might hurt.  That I was sorry.  Sorry for more than I could ever express.  I think I cried.  I'm not sure.

Mostly, I just remember how she closed her eyes and relaxed fully, letting me hold her slight weight easily to keep her from slipping down the wall's steep incline.  Her feet were tiny.  Her lashes were long and dark.  She had the prettiest flush on her cheeks and throat.  Her brows furrowed and she made a sound like a wounded bird when I pushed a thick finger inside, but I knew what to do.  Where to touch.  How to make it good for her.  Soon she was writhing.  Panting.  I added another finger, wanting to kneel and taste her, to feel her writhe on my mouth, but I was afraid it would be too much this time.

This time.

Somehow, I knew there would be others.  More moments where convention was tossed away to join the ashes in the wind.  The thing I remember most about that encounter was that she did not even try to stifle her moans and cries.  She just let it all go.  She wasn't particularly loud, but there was this sense she had cast away all her inhibitions.  What I was doing felt good to her and she wanted me to know it.   

And so, in the ruins of an old teashop, I made a virgin come on my fingers and felt like a man again.  She had strong muscles that squeezed me hard.  I nearly came at the thought of those same muscles gripping my cock.  Neither of us stopped to consider the consequences of what we were doing.  Rubbers were the last thing on my mind.  I couldn't even wait for her to catch her breath before I was getting on top of her.  Her hands were soft at the nape of my neck, encouraging me.  Letting me know it was okay.  That she still wanted me.  She even pushed her hips up at me, unaware her body would need time to take mine.  The ultimate capitulation.  Pain and pleasure.  She was so small, stretched obscenely on my girth.  I'm ashamed to admit it, but I liked the sight of it. 

The feel of it was beyond words.

I tried to go slow.  To touch her face tenderly.  She turned and sucked my finger into her mouth.  My body responded instinctively, surging forward into hers.  She cried out.

Itai- it hurts.  Only she was smiling as she said it.  That she would choose that phrase so often uttered by the injured and dying made me feel raw and bruised, and yet, I was unable to stop.  She'd cried out, but I had too.  She was so tight.  It felt so good.  Warm and wet and safe.  It was a humbling experience, moving my body inside hers.  I was the one with the experience and yet she simply held me with this mysterious welcoming smile on her face as I thrust to orgasm between her slender thighs.  I couldn't wait for her.  I simply buried my face in the delicate hollow of her throat and shuddered, lost and helpless.  I thought of Claire as I came.  Another sin to add to the list, I guess.  When I lifted my head, there were tears in her eyes.  I hoped there were none in mine.   

Mo sukoshi- a little more.  That's all she needed.  Just a little more.  I gave it to her, sinking down on shaky legs to lick her softly.  I had thought I wouldn't show her that pleasure the first time.  I was wrong.  Bracing myself for the pungent flavor I'd added to her sweet taste, I made her come again, this time on my mouth.  It was a strong one.  Made her shake.  Made me feel like a man.  Even a good man, but only for a short while. 

We didn't talk afterwards; we just held each other on that crazy tilted wall.  I think we were both hiding.  It made sense in a strange sort of way.  Everything else was tipped on its head.  We were like that wall in a way, shaken up, changed forever by what had happened to us, but somehow still standing.  For now.   

A hundred thousand times since then, I've tried to imagine it through her eyes.  Did she ever wonder whether she could understand through my eyes what that time was about?  And why had she chosen me?  Was I just a young man who seemed less cruel than the rest?  Was it just that she thought I was some handsome soldier with soulful eyes?  Was it something else entirely?  I'm almost glad I don't know her reasons.  It would have taken the magic out of it if I had.  And at that point, there was precious little magic left in my life.  

The world intruded too soon.  We cleaned up as best as we could and redressed, brushing the dust and grit from each other's clothes before we parted.  After that, we still watched each other, only now sometimes we would share a secret lover's smile when nobody was looking.  It turns out, someone was.  One of the doctors who worked there, a distinguished man in his early fifties, pulled me aside one afternoon when we were delivering supplies and told me to leave her alone.  Said that he'd seen us leaving together.  Said that I'd only hurt her.  He told me to go away and never come back. 

I didn't listen.  What did he know?  I wasn't hurting her.  After that first time, we met many more times.  I can't explain why.  We were driven, helpless to stop ourselves.  I showed her what her body could do.  Shared with her what she could make mine do.  We brought each other solace.  She brought me a measure of peace.  I brought her little things, coca-cola or American candies if I could get them.  Sometimes cigarettes for her to trade later so she could get something she wanted that I was too ignorant to think to bring for her.  I knew her body but she was so foreign to me.  I never really knew her at all.

One afternoon after we'd had one of our frantic bittersweet encounters, making love wildly in against a wall of old crumbling bricks, I was shadowing her home as I always did, when I saw something that made me understand what that doctor had been talking about.  Four teenage boys surrounded her, heckling her.  Her own people.  They called her a whore and a traitor.  Spit on her and pushed her into the ditch beside the road; punishment for letting a white man touch her.  I stood rooted to the spot, unable to help without making it worse for her.

Kurushii- mortal agony.  I understood exactly what it meant now.  I stayed hidden until the boys left and then tried to approach her to help her from the fetid ditch.  It stank, full of stagnant water fouled with garbage and human waste.  I just wanted to help her.  She yelled at me and threw a handful of refuse.  Something small and hard hit my chest as I reached for her.  She pushed me away.  I bent to pick up the little melted bowl that had struck such a blow to my insides. 

She turned her back on me as she walked home.  It was the first time she'd ever walked with her chin down in shame.  Always before she'd walked with dignity and grace.  I was the one responsible for the change.  Me.  Agony burned in my chest.  I trailed her all the way home.  When I was assured she was safe, I left and got drunk, turning that bowl over in my fingers as I did.  I kept it.  Not really sure why.  Maybe it was because it was the only thing she'd ever given me- besides the most painful wake up call I'd ever had.  The perfect reminder of that place.  And of her.  Pain and pleasure..... and memories I wished I could shatter like so much burned glass.            

The doctor was right.  I had hurt her.  I'd never meant to.  It was just like the feeling I'd experienced when I saw the damage the bomb had done.  In ignorance, I'd wanted something without considering the real consequences.  The brief moments of solace I'd taken from her had turned out to be as twisted as everything else in that godforsaken place.  I think everything died in my breast that day.  What little hope I had crumbled away to nothing.  The last fragile glimmers of beauty and grace left in my bleak world were gone.  I'd killed them.  Along with her innocence.  And my own.

I never saw her again.  

That was years ago and I still dream about her.  Sometimes they're good.  I smile up at the stars, remembering the feel of her body under mine and hearing her laughter in my dreams.  Sometimes I give up silent tears to the night and wonder if somewhere in the Valley of Shadows, I've left behind a child with almond eyes and rosebud lips.  Does he hate me?  Does she?  I don't suppose it matters.  I hate myself enough for both of them. 

After that experience, I could never go home.  Not really.  Even if I sat at my mother's table, I'd never really be home again.  Some part of me had died in that place.  I was too cynical for my own people.  Too white for an alien culture.  Too dead inside to care anymore.

Gembaku- a place of suffering.  My final lesson.  That is the name the survivors call that place.  It is in everything there.  The ground.  The air.  The water.  The hearts of the people. 

It's in my heart too.  

I took it with me when I left and I will carry in my history for all my days.  An empty place in my chest that no amount of longing can ever hope to fill.  It was raining when I left, like even the sky couldn't keep from weeping.  I pulled my collar up against the rain and boarded a troop ship with a hundred other soldiers just like me.

Rough men with no magic left inside.