A Colder War

© 1996 Stephen Hunt (UK)

Print this one out? Approx 5 pages of A4 text

My fingers are stiff and my time is short, but even through the lucid dreams of cancer-fever I can still remember enough to let me tell this story. Oh yes. I can recall enough, enough that I sometimes wake up before the sun has risen, blinking away the intricate lines of tracer fire etched across my eyelids; then I stare past the bamboo windowframe, the Perfume River rippling under the warm night air, and I remember the petrified tree trunks of Wyoming. And the cold.

 In the winter of 1967 the soldiers in my regiment knew me as Yinyuejia - the musician - although my proper title was Captain Kan Ho Xi Tralong. Even before I came to America I was well known as a flute player. I had played in Hanoi for the pleasure of committee members, but it was along the slopes of Mount Washburn that my laments were to find their true measure.

 The story starts inside a sandbag bunker, the National Army's regional command centre at the foot of the Absarokas. My platoon had just received a fresh attachment of soldiers, young fools stripped out of state farms and Saigon sweatshops.

Few of them had seen snow before and they hated the bitter cold with a passion. When our comrades were shot, steam would rise out of their wounds, and those that survived would point bewildered at the corpses and cry that this land was so ill-favoured by spirits that you could see a man's soul rising to heaven.

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