Our first unit - Battle desciptions.

Our first unit deals with the language of warfare. One of the activities in our class has been writing a short description of a battle. Three of us have contributed with some material.

Chronicle of a narrated death by Maxino Rivi.

When the battle broke out, there was a moment of silence. A silence so powerful it penetrated my ears and befuddled my instincts. As soon the shock of the detonation wore out, despite my bleeding ears and blurred eyesight, I could make out the human sized abominations creeping in a slow but menacing fashion.

What had been a green hill before the outburst became a swarm of tentacled snail-like fiends. Moving at a constant pace, they fed upon every lost soul who had stumbled on his way to salvation in the trenches.

It was a long, painful torture once they had you. Nobody knows exactly what they are but some thought they were tentacled leeches with a machine’s strength.

 Their merciless process of ingestion would begin by getting you squeezed tight into their unyielding firm tentacles, while they slowly nibbled at your uncovered fingers and occasionally, if you had dropped your helmet, your head. After your fingers, these bastards would process your feet and arms, biting and sucking into your veins and arteries as if they were honeysuckles. For the grand finale, if you were so unlucky to have remained alive, they would attach their bodies like leeches onto you, and suck upon your face so hard it became common therein to see eyeless heads with disfigured faces and missing chunks of body spread around the field.

I could hear muffled cries of desperation and gut-wrenching screams of pain.  The sky became dark and the land had been tainted with dark and thick crimson. The smell of blood infected my lungs and all that seemed breathable now was the never-ending supply of fear, despair and misery.  Although we had been talked into this, this sudden feedlot-like slaughter had taken me aback, for I expected nothing of this nature.

I saw men fighting for their lives uselessly against these menacing tentacles, shooting at the beasts, who found it amusing and interesting, but never threatening. 

Someone patted my back, which meant it

was time to go.

 I hope the end comes quickly; maybe I will try and take my helmet beforehand so that death comes upon me faster.  I hope death takes me far away into the eternal banquet of afterlife. I hope that when I have been through this I shall look back at it as a vague memory, or maybe not even look back at it at all. I just hope this sacrifice is worth the pain we have all been through, that someday they will recall this war as an example of compassion and true surrender into the hands of god and love towards freedom and liberty on behalf of this world.

I see my company tread by me, time to go…

Moving closer into the devil’s mouth, I breathe one last breath. I close my eyes and run like hell, thinking of the prize lying at the end of the road. I feel the urge to stop and vomit, but that tempting prize so close keeps me going. I see death’s face and sprint faster towards it- finally feeling its embrace.

Without eyes by Juan Diego Serrano

There I was- in the middle of the jungle- human silence. Only insects and the sound of wind could be heard.  This made it even more frightening. It was only needed a shot to make chaos present, and that happened. I started shooting everywhere because in the jungle it was impossible to see clearly; you didn’t even know if you were shooting a friend or an enemy. You could only hear your success when you heard the shouting of the almost dead ones. This was war in Vietnam: burning sun and exhaustion.   

My fault by Joaquin Gutierrez Galvan

And once again, I found myself in the land of my nightmares. Shoot, go down, move, shoot again… Always the same… RATATATAT-BOOM-AARGHH-BANG-RATATATAT…It was unbearable. Mud splashing, rockets swooshing, men shouting, guns roaring, blood splattering, rocks bursting, smoke everywhere…

  “Why am I doing this?” I asked myself again, while shooting the enemy. Then, once again, I remembered. For my dear Debbie. My little girl. I would not let her die as her mother. I didn’t care about fighting against my land, my own family. I would do anything for her to be safe. And I knew it was my fault. I kept on shooting every man who carried a weapon.

  Lately, I had made too many bad decisions. I should have never left them alone. It was my fault that Rose died in the explosions; that Debbie was in hospital. My fault, I kept on thinking until I saw a yellow explosion and then- everything was happening in slow motion. I could see my partner falling with his head blown up, the blood splashing; and a bullet into my chest. Then…nothing.