I think of my sister most

          Kneeling here in the rain, hunger gnaws at my soul. I don't have the strength to dig this pit, but like hundreds of my brothers I have to, tonight. I have not eaten in 2 days.

          I started digging with a stick, but in the rain the red mud kept filling the hole. I complained and got a shovel - I am closest to the base, where the patrol will come, my trap needs to be complete. So where a complaint would normally earn me a beating, I got a shovel. Still it feels like it is taking forever.

         As I think I am going to collapse from the cold rain, the hunger and my sorrow, I think of my family. My father who was shot in front of our village. My mother, I watched her burn to death when the flames fell from the sky and consumed our village, watched her run screaming from our hut, we could not put the flames out until she was not her anymore.

          I think most of all of my sister, we fled the village but the enemy soldiers found us. They did not care for me, but they spent half a day with my sister. She was dead after that, and I was alone. But at 10 I was now a man.

          I have finished my pit, shove the sharpened bamboo stakes in. I would piss on the stakes as I have been taught, but the rain would wash it away. I leave the pit and the stakes with the thought "That will teach them a lesson". They were not my enemy, but they made themselves so. If I get one in my pit I will die happily, for if the hunger does not finish me off soon then the war will.