I SOMETIMES REMEMBER MY SISTER.
The grenade was placed by mistake, or in any case haphazardly, without real concern for safety. There was intelligence about a VC scout and no one whose life would matter would be around anyway, right?
There in the hut was the prettiest, most ticklish country girl I'd ever seen. I had seen her before. Her buttermilk belly had been revealed to me on a patrol. She wrung out a wet shirt by the creek. The evenness of the fleshy plane was accentuated by a prominently protruding navel. Now, in the shady, sulfurous cavity of the hut, I heard her weak sobs and saw that abdomen spread with red. A substance not unlike human blood, the CO would joke.