Got this story rolling around inside my empty head. So I sat down and wrote the opening paragraph. Now I can't write the rest because how can it measure up and keep the momentum going? Besides my short stories don't seem to be read much. Should I continue? If you lived through the era of the Viet Nam War, you either saw the picture or heard about it. The picture was of two US service members, hands tied over their heads to bamboo poles and disemboweled in the center of a village. The western papers printed a sanitized version of the picture. The Asian papers printed another version. The Asian papers showed the bound US soldiers watching in disbelief and screaming in pain and terror while their entrails spilled out on the ground and the village pigs and dogs fought over them. The soldiers had been slit with a scalpel like precision from side to side across the hips and then slit vertically from sternum to groin causing the entrails to spill out. The picture had to have been taken just before the men either died or went into shock before death.
