#they told that the private teams (he called them 'lone fighters')

[niemernuet]

Hi Mom!

[hazel-writes]

Summary: You embark on your first mission off-board the Finalizer, but only to learn that trouble tends to follow you no matter where you are...

Word Count: 2,800

Notes: Things are starting to pick up!

Warnings: strong canon-typical violence, blood

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

I think it's gonna be a long, long time

'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find

I'm not the man they think I am at home

Oh no, no, no

I'm a rocket man

• Rocket Man - Elton John •

This was your first time in the hangar since Ms. Stoney had rudely ushered you to your quarters on your first day onboard the Finalizer.

As you entered, you were once again faced with the great speckled wall of never-ending space. The scariness of its infinite expanse reminded you of the first time you ever saw the ocean.

You were ten. You and your family had traveled to a remote part of Lothal for your father’s birthday. He had been wanting a change of scenery to spark some new inspiration for his paintings and your mother had surprised him with the impromptu vacation.

You didn’t remember much from that trip, but you did recall your older brother, Doran, attempting to teach you how to swim.

“Move your arms like this, and your legs like this,” he said, demonstrating the correct movements.

You crossed your arms defiantly. “I still don’t understand why you want me to learn how to swim. We don’t live anywhere near the ocean!”

Doran’s eyes lit up. “Maybe someday you will. Maybe someday there’ll be a huge rainstorm and the whole world will flood, and you, thanks to me, will be the only person on Lothal who knows how to swim. You’ll escape, start your own civilization, and be queen of the new world.”

You raised a sceptical eyebrow. “So you’re saying, if I learn how to swim, I’ll become queen of the world?”

He smirked. “Precisely.”

You looked to your mother, still not fully believing him. “Ma, is that true?”

She shrugged. “Crazier things have happened.”

"Okay, fine. I’ll learn how to swim. But I don’t want to be queen.” You look out to the vast ocean, trying to find its end. “It would be much too lonely to rule the world on my own.”

As if on cue, you were pulled from your memory when the First Order’s own ruler entered the hangar, accompanied by General Hux and a brigade of stormtroopers.

The Commander and General made their way onto a small private shuttle, while the troopers entered a larger one to their left. You, Akilah, Takoda, Rilea, and Soren followed behind the troopers.

————————————

The ride to Dantooine was cramped and bumpy, but much shorter than you imagined it to be.

When the shuttle lowered its ramp for the troopers to exit, the view you were met with left you breathless.

Your eyes were embraced by a kaleidoscope of colors. Green hills framed small valley villages like nature’s very own picture frames. Blue skies provided the perfect backdrop. Pink and purple flowers dotted the rolling ground and ancient trees towered over them, almost protectively.

Takoda laughed, nudging you forward, “What, you’ve never seen a tree before?”

“Not like this,” you replied, awestruck.

He sighed, looking around, his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, I suppose this place is kinda special.”

You laughed. “You suppose? ”

Rilea appeared next to you. “Koda lived here for a while; he’s used to it’s ‘specialness’ by now.”

You turned back to Koda, surprised. “You lived here? On Dantooine?”

“Yep, a long time ago,” he sighed again.

This shocked you. “Even though there’s so many Resista-”

You are silenced midway through your question as General Hux began to speak to the group.

“All of you have your missions. This should be a quick, easy job. Myself and Commander Ren will be speaking with the leaders here. Troopers, only engage with citizens if absolutely necessary. If any resist violently, kill them. We will not waste our time on wannabe rebel scum.” He turned in your direction. “You five, distribute the posters and try not to get yourselves killed.” He pauses. “You are all dismissed.”

The crowd dispersed as you turned to face your team members.

“Well that was downright inspiring,” Soren quipped sarcastically.

Rilea scoffed, “ You’re one to talk, Mr. Melancholy.”

Soren rolled his eyes.

“So how does this work?” you asked, changing the subject.

“I think it’s best if we split up,” Rilea said, “We have a lot of ground to cover.”

“Sounds good!” Koda replied. “Meet back here in an hour?”

We all nod.

Akilah speaks up. “Just remember: keep your head down. Try to put up the posters when there aren’t too many people nearby. If you get into any trouble, run back here. Got it?”

We all nod again.

“Good. I’ll see you all in an hour,” she said before walking away.

You start in the opposite direction, towards a thick tree-line at the edge of the meadow that the shuttles landed in.

After walking for about twenty minutes, you came across some small buildings — a mix of houses, tiny shops, and public amenities.

You took out your stack of posters, pulled one off of the top, and taped it to the building closest to you.

Success.

You found another building with a white wall, pulled out a second poster, and had just started to put it up when you were approached by three men.

“What do you think you’re doing, First Order scum ?”

Why is it always me?

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you.” You took a step back, smiling. “Just putting up some posters.”

The man nearest to you, who was sporting a floppy brown haircut, spoke next. “Posters… is that what you call ’em?” he laughed. “ We usually refer to them as First Order trash!”

He walked towards you, stumbling a little, and snatched the poster out of your hand before crumpling it into a ball.

The man smelled like alcohol and looking around, you noticed that the building you decided to tape your poster to was a cantina.

Great.

The man threw the crumpled-up poster in your direction and you stumbled backwards, dropping the rest of the posters on the dirt below.

“What a shame,” one of the other men said sarcastically. He wore a dark blue shirt that was ripped on one sleeve.

You attempt to stay calm. “Look, I don’t want any trouble — I’m just doing my job.”

“Ha!” the floppy-haired man scoffs, looking at his two comrades. “We’ve heard that one before, haven’t we boys?”

“Yeah!” the man with the ripped shirt shouted emphatically, “Were you ‘just doing your job’ when you murdered my brothers and sisters? When you destroyed our houses? When you stole our land and resources?”

You were lost for words. “I- I’m sorry. I truly am.”

“You really think I’m some bantha-brained idiot?” he replied, infuriated. “If you were ‘truly sorry’ you wouldn’t be putting up those posters.”

“I know, it’s just-”

The floppy-haired man spoke up again, a sinister smile on his lips. “You know what boys, I think we should give the Order a taste of their own medicine.”

You didn’t like where this was going. “Please, let me just-”

Before you could get another word out, the man had grabbed your arm roughly.

You tried to squirm out of his grasp, but he was too strong. You could try using your newfound powers, but you remembered what Commander Ren had told you: don’t reveal your Force abilities while on the mission.

Thinking quickly, you were able to bring your knee up to hit him where it hurt, and he stumbled back momentarily, cursing.

The other two men surged forward, slamming you into the wall behind you. Your head made contact with the hard surface and you saw stars.

Feeling dizzy and disoriented, your body slid to the ground, as the men began to search your pockets.

“What- what do you want?” you managed to choke out, still dazed from the impact on your head.

The man you had hit, having recovered from your blow, made his way back over to you.

“Shut up, you sithspit.”

His words spurred a surge of energy within you, and you did your best to grab and scratch at the hands that were searching your pockets, only to have the floppy-haired man backhand you, hard .

Your cheek stung, and so did your emotions. You felt angry. Hurt. Constricted. Frustrated. Trapped.

A familiar sixth sense began to build within you, begging to be released from your body.

No, no, no, you thought. Remember what the Commander said. Remember what he said. Don’t disappoint him. Not again.

You felt the sense within you retreat and you breathed a sigh of relief. Your head was pulsing to the painful rhythm of your panicked heart. You could feel blood seep from the spot on your cheek where the man had hit you.

The guy with the blue shirt, having found the credits you had brought along with you in case of emergency, shouted in victory.

“We’ll be having a big feast tonight, fellas!” he shouted, holding out your coins for them to see.

"Wait-” you started, knowing that without those credits, you’d be pretty much broke.

“What did I say, girl — shut your mouth!”

You felt a heavy boot make contact with your already nauseous stomach.

Your eyes glazed over, silent tears falling, as you curled into the smallest ball you could manage. It was what you did as a child whenever you heard the X-Wings and TIE fighters exchanging fire above your house.

Your ears suddenly picked up the sound of another pair of heavy footsteps approach from a nearby alley.

Through bleary eyes, you watched as each of your attackers were lifted off the ground and thrown into the wall opposite to you with sickening crunches.

You shuffled back as fast as you could, given your current state, not wanting to incur the wrath of whatever it was that approached you.

Your back hit a hard wall and you could do nothing more than shut your eyes and shield your head with your arms, preparing for the imminent attack.

“Stop.”

A voice sounded from in front of you.

A familiar voice.

“Commander,” you whispered, hoarsely.

He knelt down, his mask scanning your slumped body.

“You need medical attention,” he said, in his typical ‘stating a question as an order’ tone.

“Yes, I think you may be right,” you responded, letting out a pained chuckle.

He continued to stare at you, intently, through his visor. You began to feel a prickling at the back of your head, much like the time in Hux’s office. Except now, it was gentler — comforting. And this time, you embraced it, letting it in completely.

After a moment, the prickling stopped.

The Commander looked down for a moment, as if uncomfortable with what he was going to say next.

“You- you didn’t defend yourself,” he said in a tone you had never heard from him before. He sounded confused, conflicted.

“I tried,” you said, rubbing your hands, which were still sore from clawing at your attacker’s limbs.

“I meant with the Force,” he continued. “You felt prompted to do so with Hux, and yet with this more... threatening encounter, you refused.”

You gazed up at him, surprised that he didn’t already know the answer to his own question.

“You told me not to,” you said simply, looking at him, the corner of your mouth twitching upwards.

“And you would rather risk death than defy my orders?”

Finally, you thought. A genuine question.

“I trusted that the reasons behind your orders were important,” you replied, confident in your explanation.

He seemed taken aback by that. Maybe he wasn’t used to people following his orders because they ‘trusted’ him. Instead, he was probably used to them following his orders out of fear .

You started to stand, but your stomach reeled at the attempted movement. You sucked in a sharp breath of air through clenched teeth and put a hand on the wall behind you for stability.

Your head was spinning — you had hit it harder than you thought. Lights danced before your eyes, making it hard to see.

The Commander’s cloaked shape rose next to you, and as your eyes followed his movement, you realized you had almost forgotten how tall he was.

He reached a gloved hand towards you, slowing slightly when he got close, almost as if he was expecting you to flinch.

You didn’t.

He took that as a sign to continue his maneuver. Placing one arm below your shoulders and the other at the backs of your knees, he wordlessly lifted you off of the ground and into his arms.

You were on the brink of consciousness, but managed to whisper a final “thank you” before drifting into an unrestful sleep.

———————————

When you woke, you weren’t in your bed like before. You looked down, only to realize you were still in the arms of your Commander.

Slightly embarrassed at your vulnerable state, you closed your eyes and pretended to be asleep, as to avoid any potential awkwardness.

“I know you’re awake.”

Kriff.

You opened a hesitant eye and looked up at the source of the deep, rumbling voice, but his mask was pointed straight ahead, on the trees in front of him.

“Where are we?” you asked, your voice coming out hoarser than you wished it to.

Still looking forward, he responded. “We’re almost back to the shuttle.”

“Oh,” you replied.

A comfortable silence fell over the two of you; no noise was present other than the breeze blowing the leaves of nearby trees and the sound of the Commander’s boots crunching twigs and branches at a steady pace beneath you.

His walking slowed as you neared the edge of the tree line. You looked past it to see the larger meadow where the First Order shuttles were situated.

The Commander came to a complete stop and looked down at you quickly, before bringing his eyes back to the clearing ahead.

There was that strange emotion again: confliction.

He probably doesn’t want to be seen carrying me, you thought. Too much visible empathy isn’t good for his menacing reputation…

You decided to speak up first — making the decision for him. “You can let me down now, I’m fine.”

He shifted his glance downwards as you moved in his grip. However, instead of letting you go, as per your instructions, he maintained his tight hold.

You wished you could read his mind like he had read yours back on the Finalizer.

What was he thinking?

Why does he seem so conflicted all of a sudden?

Why is he helping you, again?

Suddenly, as if in response to your questions, waves of intense feeling washed over you.

Anger. Frustration. Confliction. Curiosity. Reluctance.

It took you a second to realize that these weren’t your feelings, they were his.

Shocked by your sudden intrusion into his mind, he looked at you, tilting his head slightly to the side, before guiding you to stand on your feet. The Commander remained silent as you leaned on a nearby tree for support.

He glanced between you and the shuttles, shifting uncomfortably on his feet.

“Go,” you waved him in the direction of the meadow.

He didn’t move.

“Go,” you spoke again, softly, attempting a smile. “I understand.”

Seemingly content with your reply, he nodded his head slightly, and headed into the meadow, cape blowing in the breeze behind him.

Breathing a sigh of relief, you waited for five minutes, giving the Commander enough time to get to the shuttles before you followed.

The pain in your head, cheek, and abdomen increased, so you began to stumble into the meadow, hoping to make it to the shuttles before you passed out again.

Luckily, a familiar voice called your name.

“Guys, come on — I found her!” Akilah’s words sounded across the meadow.

Your exhaustion got the best of you, and you crumpled into the soft grass beneath you.

“Sor, come help me!”

You looked up to see Akilah’s worried face, followed by Soren’s confused one.

Koda and Rilea followed close behind, but Akilah soon directed them back towards the shuttle to warn the medical crew of your arrival.

She directed her attention back at you, smiling. “Here, hold on, we’ll get you back in no time. Sor, grab her other arm.”

You felt your body lift off the ground, Akilah holding up your left side and Soren holding up your right.

“Wait,” you spoke, barely a whisper. “I- I dropped the posters.”

Soren looked at Akilah. “Is she serious right now?”

“Umm… I’m really not sure,” she replied, frowning. “Could be a head injury.”

“We better get her back,” Soren replied, as the two of them helped you back to the shuttle.

They laid you on a makeshift bed and the on-board medic began attending to your injuries.

You used the last of your strength to lift your head slightly to search for Commander Ren, but he was nowhere to be found.

Dropping your head back onto the pillow, you closed your eyes, finally embracing the comforting darkness of sleep.

———————————————

Previous || Masterlist || Next

[redemptivexheroics]

Search For Anakin (Star Wars Drabble Featuring Ellis)

Ellis Orion one of the most powerful Jedi among the Jedi Order though she was a Jedi Knight she was not in the same tier as the Council but with hard work and dedication she could be but if she ever was offered a role that high she would turn it down because one she didn’t want Anakin to feel alone and they practically trained together, were friends and to everyone concerned, where like siblings. If Anakin wasn’t training with Obi-Wan or on a mission those two were together she even knew of the secret of Anakin and Padme and never told a soul and would not regret holding that secret either. Her and Anakin shared a strong Force Bond something that not many Jedi had, it was why they made an effective team when it came to dealing with disruptions and those fighting for the Sith. After the Clone Wars ended, Ellis had no interest in using the Clone Troopers something just didn’t feel right, like they could easily be bought, with much discussion with Masters Yoda and Windu she had been granted a small private militia when doing her peacekeeping duties.

Ellis was on her home world of Naboo in Thebes taking part in a yearly festival something she had always attended since she was a little girl even after becoming a Jedi.She was dancing around with a little girl not a care in the world when she felt and it was as if someone thrusted a fist into her stomach making it hard to breath, this was nothing other than the connection she shared with Anakin and she could feel anger, loss, confusion coming from her best friend. She had to enter an empty shed and place a hand on the wall to stop herself from falling. After a while the feeling went away and she tried everything to reach Anakin, through the force and through communications but when that didn’t work she tried Obi-Wan, the temple even her own Master, Mace but it was silence and something did not feel right so racing for her star fighter she jumped in and immediately set course for Coruscant, the world that house the Jedi Temple in search of answers. 

Arriving at the temple Ellis landed her star fighter and exited, what she seen from the air and what she was witnessing before her put a knot in her stomach. She felt a disturbance in the force and without hesitation summoned her saber to her hand, it was too late to call in her militia but she would have to handle this situation alone, running into the temple she saw bodies littering the floors of the temples, blaster marks, small fires, chaos and destruction she didn’t get a moment to herself before her senses heightened and she ignited her saber just in time to block blaster first from a Clone Trooper before she could assess the situation more of them showed up, blasters ready to fire which they did and she blocked every last one and even summoned her second saber to her hand to make it easier, she could feel the fear in the Clones and in swiftness she struck them down. Her fear for Anakin’s status worsened, wondering if her friend had been gun down and if that turned out to be the case she would take down who was responsible but with each dead Jedi she found her heart sunk until she finally came to the room for the Council and saw dead younglings, she fell to her knees wondering, who could do such a monstrous thing. Footsteps made her turn around and use the force to lift a lone Clone Trooper. 

“Who did this!? Tell me now!” When the Clone didn’t respond she snapped his neck using the force and let his body drop to the ground. That was a surprise to her, tapping into her anger, she couldn’t allow that again or risk tapping into the dark side of the force. She heard blaster fire and ran into the halls to find Master Obi-Wan and Master Yoda, they had been summoned by a beacon sent out from within the temple, together the three made for the security room and watched as Clone Troopers led by Anakin stormed the temple and took down all that opposed them. Ellis shook her head, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, that wasn’t Anakin, that was not her friend striking down fellow Jedi. Scared and feeling betrayed Ellis left, with a promise from Obi-Wan that he would get to the bottom of this, to not cast Anakin aside just yet. It had been two years since that horrible day, Ellis hadn’t seen Anakin in that long, Obi-Wan filled her in telling her that he managed to bring Anakin back into the light but Ellis made a choice to stay away but she couldn’t any longer when she discovered that there was a bounty on his head, and a lot of people wanted to see him executed.

He was in hiding and if someone found him she feared what would happen as the result. So she snuck onto a ship controlled by the Empire and gathered intel trying to find any clues to Anakin’s whereabouts, to warn him, save him or protect him. She could never forgive him for what he done while under the influence of the dark side but if she pushed him away entirely he would no doubt be lost. After a battle and complicated escape with Anakin’s location she went to find him of course she was chased and her fighter sustained heavy damage but she reached her destination. After exiting her fighter after crash landing her eyes laid upon the man she thought she never see again her saber at hand before putting it away, uttering one word before passing out from the exhaustion. 

[justinsdaysinthedark]

Post #1 - Welcome

Firstly, welcome. Whether you’re family, a friend or even somebody I don’t know - welcome to what will be my journey. I’ll be honest and upfront about what’s going on and I’m not afraid to express my deepest feelings.

Will this blog be everybody’s cup of tea? Absolutely not. I’ll give you the heads up now - this will be boring. This will lead down some dark and negative paths (don’t stress, it’ll be mostly positive!). I do feel however that I need to express myself this way and explore my emotions as they clash with what is going on. Sit back, relax and come with me in what will be some light slightly heavy reading.

Where does one start with such a blog? Let me preface this by saying once all is said and done, I will never complain about anything trivial again. Ever. The past six weeks has been an emotional roller coaster - not only on myself but those close to me. I wouldn’t wish this upon anybody I know and I don’t say that lightly!

Where am I at now? Monash Hospital - Clayton. Over the past six weeks, I’ve spent 26 days in hospital across three different stints. It’s currently 22:49 on Monday 15th July and I’m about to endure what will be the most confronting couple of days I’ve experienced in my life... but let’s roll it back a few weeks and fill you in.

What’s wrong? Where and how did it all it begin? Let’s touch over a few things...

Sunday June 2nd - It all started with an immense eye pain one Sunday afternoon. I’d stayed up late into the night to watch Australia’s first Cricket World Cup clash with Afghanistan. Getting to bed at roughly 3am Sunday morning and waking up normally by 10am, I thought this particular Sunday was going to be a stock standard one. I stayed over at my partner Courtney’s house and we went to watch her nephew play football. 4pm rolled around on Sunday and I thought I was suffering from what I thought was a simple case of eye strain - a deep, immense pain in my left eye. After all, my mum, dad and sister all have glasses so I assumed my time was up!

Courtney booked me an appointment at the optometrist for the following weekend and I kept on in my evening assuming this eye pain would settle with some rest.

Monday June 3rd - Waking up Monday morning, the pain was still there. Had it gotten slightly better? Not at all. I continued on my Monday as normal with an incredibly busy day at work and headed around to Courtney’s for the weekly ‘Monday night roast’ courtesy of her mother. Knowing I had a rostered day off on Tuesday, I knew I could sleep in, relax, take it easy and my eye would eventually get better - surely! It has to!

Tuesday June 4th - With the day off, no alarms set I was woken up at 8:30am with the call I was least expecting. My mum was in tears as she somehow bravely blurted that my grandfather had passed away that morning. Poppy was ill and attempting to recover from a recent hip operation he had after a fall - we all thought he’d fight through it and keep battling but unfortunately his time was up and nanny had called him to join her. A man I was so close with, a fighter had suddenly left us. I was in shock, but raced to pick mum up from work. We made the decision to join my family in Bairnsdale - 3 hours away from where I live. Mum and I shared the driving there, no worries in the world. My eye pain was still there - Worse than it had been, but that was secondary this day. I could still see perfectly normal still assuming it was just eye strain.

Wednesday June 5th - As soon as I woke up, I knew something wasn’t right with my left eye. The pain had slightly subsided however my vision just wasn’t right. I can’t explain what I felt that morning. My left eye was still moving as it should however the vision just wasn’t right. I chose to close my left eyelid and primarily look through my right. It was at this moment I just knew it wasn’t an eye strain - it was something worse.

Mum went down the street that morning and I tagged along. Fortunately, Specsavers (Bairnsdale’s local optometrist) was open and they could squeeze me in for an eye check. I knew I had to rule that out before attending a hospital.

Not to my surprise, my vision was 20/20 out of each eye as it had been for my life. The optometrist suggested if I’m having issues, to head to the local hospital - so that I did.

Rolling on into Bairnsdale Regional Hospital at 2pm on a Wednesday afternoon wasn’t exactly on my schedule when heading down to Bairnsdale originally, but that’s what it had come to. The triage nurse saw me immediately and rushed me through to be seen (within 30 minutes and a waiting room full of patients!) The doctor - who was only in his second year out of uni was quick to assess that I was having issues with my third nerve (something that wouldn’t be mentioned again for a couple of days). In consultation with the Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, it was recommended I leave Bairnsdale immediately and go and present myself to them - a 4 hour drive. With other matters on my mind, I was hesitant to go. My family basically pushed me out the door and it was at that moment that I knew I had to go.

9pm I walk in the entrance to a ridiculously busy waiting room. I present myself to triage and they pull the papers they had from earlier in the day. I thought this may mean I’d get through a bit quicker - boy oh boy I was wrong! Fortunately, State of Origin I was on and that entertained me until 10:30... and from there it was a genuine slog. 11:45pm I walked through the sliding doors and was met by who I can best describe as an overenthusiastic young(ish) Pom who was keen to have a look at me. It was late. I was tired. This bloke was over the top, but my word did he know his stuff! Did that help him diagnose me? No. 2am came around and he sent me home, telling me to expect a call at 9am with plans on what to do next.

Thursday June 6th - Just to his word, a phone call comes in at 9am from the doctor I’d seen only seven hours earlier. He advised I needed a CT scan (at 1pm) and an appointment with a specialist (3pm). The CT scan went well and I assumed I’d be out by 4pm and be able to head to the Sandown Greyhounds for the night as I’d been busy organising a night out over the weeks prior. This all changed when we saw the specialist. She ran her basic tests and ordered an MRI scan ASAP. I got taken over to St. Vincent’s Private Hospital for the scans via an underground tunnel - yes! They exist! My very first MRI scan was done and back to the Eye and Ear Hospital we went. The specialist that I’d seen earlier in the day was rostered on that night in emergency fortunately for me! She got the scan results back and ruled out a stroke and bleeding on my brain pretty early. This was a relief, I suppose. I wasn’t going to die in the short term! It was from here where she advised i’d be required to be admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital that night for further tests over the next few days. It was at this point where I felt helpless. Disappointed and helpless. I was expecting to have a few tests done and go home and continue my life as per normal. I didn’t want to be admitted to a hospital so far away from home. I didn’t want to wait around for tests. I wanted to be home. In my bed. Some normality at least. This is where my mindset had to change and that it did - pretty quickly.

Dad walked with me over to St. Vincent’s and we entered the emergency department. We were told “you won’t have to wait long... they are already expecting you.” Well, once again, what was I thinking? A city central hospital with no waiting in emergency? In retrospect, I was definitely getting my hopes up.

A solid 3 hour wait finally saw me enter through the doors and be seen to. This is where dad left me - for the first time in this ordeal I was alone. Was I scared? I won’t lie. Yes, yes I was. At 24 years old, no idea what’s wrong with me and alone in a major hospital in the city? I think that’s justified.

How’s the eye at this stage? Terrible. In the prior 24 hours I’d developed double vision and my left eye had significantly moved with no ability to control it - as you can see below.

Friday June 7th - 4am I was finally taken to a ward and had a bed to myself. It was on the 9th floor in the ward that generally deals with major bone breaks and reconstructions/replacements. I was wheeled into a twin-share room with an old guy who had just had his hip replaced. In retrospect, I had such a good room in what turned out to be an incredible hospital. The food was excellent, the nurses went above and beyond to make sure you were comfortable and as happy as you can be and in the end, I had a great view of Melbourne.

10am came by and I saw the first of what felt like 100 doctors that day. They were pretty quick to diagnose me with Third Nerve Palsy in my left eye - something I hadn’t heard since I first presented in Bairnsdale two days prior.

Unfortunately, being a part of the neuro team of doctors - things didn’t happen too quickly. Just my luck too, this upcoming weekend was the Queens Birthday long weekend. I didn’t realise or even think that hospitals go on skeleton staff over the weekends and scans don’t get done very quickly... I wasn’t booked in for a follow up CT and MRI scan until Tuesday...

Monday June 10th - I’m not going to lie. Mentally I was struggling. Presented to a hospital on Thursday night/Friday morning for what was Third Nerve Palsy and they just left me there over the weekend. No follow ups. No nothing. I didn’t realise how much hospitals shut down over weekends - I certainly do now! I was a mess. I felt lost. I didn’t know what was going on or even why for that matter. My eye was doing something it had never done and I couldn’t control it. I felt helpless and lonely.

Courtney was just getting over a serious case of the flu, so I hadn’t seen her in over a week and it was killing me.

I broke down Monday night after I’d calmed down from what was a good win by my Pies. 8pm came around, visitors were gone and I was there by myself. No clear plan about what was wrong with me or how they were going to fix it. I was an emotional mess.

Tuesday June 11th - Finally. The long weekend was over and didn’t I notice the difference. 7am and the hospital was a hive of activity. My CT and MRI scans were booked in for later that day as well as what will turn out to be my first of many lumbar punctures (LP) - something that scared the life out of me. Mentally, 24 hours later I was doing okay. I could see things progressing...but one thing was playing on my mind. Poppy’s funeral was on Friday and I knew within myself I had to be there to say my final goodbye. I let the nurses and doctors know and they seemed to be okay with letting me out on day leave - however logistically that left an issue. 4 hour drive with an 11am funeral wasn’t going to be possible.

Wednesday June 12th - At this stage, my eye hadn’t got any worse. It was just the third nerve affected and otherwise, I was perfectly fine. The results of my scans and LP came back which showed inflammation on my third nerve (which was expected) as well as a high white blood cell and protein count. This lead the doctors to believe it was due to either inflammation or infection. The doctors pretty quickly leant away from infection as I wasn’t presenting with any other signs so they treated me with an incredibly high dosage of a steroid called methylprednisolone to treat the inflammation.

IV drip for the first lot on Wednesday night and 10x 100mg tablets on each Thursday and Friday.

Thursday June 13th - The doctors agreed to let me out Thursday afternoon providing I had no further reactions to the methylprednisolone. Turns out I didn’t, so they fortunately let me out at 3pm to do what I needed to over the following few days. They were happy not to see me again unless of course things progressed and got worse and organised a follow up scan in two months time. At this stage, the diagnosis was Third Nerve Palsy due to inflammation of the nerve that was treated via steroids and may get better over the following weeks or months - or may not get better at all.

Friday June 14th - Sunday June 16th - Whilst Friday was a heavily emotional day saying my final farewell to Poppy, physically I got through it okay and had no further issues. This was my life now - whether I liked it or not. Deep down I had confidence it would get better in time and I’d have to see St. Vincent’s every few weeks to check up and I was okay with that.

Monday June 17th - I wake up Monday morning at home incredibly sick. What was wrong with me? I didn’t sleep during the night and was having hot and cold flushes, dizzy spells, hallucinations, no appetite and had absolutely no idea where I was. It was the flu, without having the flu or feeling sick. It was such a strange feeling. I started to develop an immense pain in my right jaw - incredibly similar to my eye. I started to worry - instantly. I called the doctor who was looking after me at St. Vincent’s and he wasn’t worried about it. He advised me to go to my GP and just get an X-ray to make sure everything is okay.

Deep down, I knew something was wrong but didn’t know what. I suspected the sickness was the come down from such a high dosage of steroids (which was later confirmed) but this jaw pain felt all too similar and I was scared.

Needless to say, I didn’t go to the GP or get an X-ray purely because I didn’t want another round of doctors looking at me, wasting the prior time at St. Vincent’s.

This continued through Tuesday and Wednesday. Exactly the same symptoms... I got further worried.

Thursday June 20th - Mum was on my back about going to my GP. I was resentful, but booked an appointment for 4pm to get checked out. I was still a mess, but better than I had been. Dad took me to my GP appointment and came in with me. By this stage, I couldn’t chew. I’d lost all strength completely in my jaw - both right and left side. My regular doctor took one look at me, checked my files she got from St. Vincent’s that morning and advised that I needed to head back into hospital - be it St. Vincent’s or Monash Hospital Clayton. She recommended Monash Clayton for two reasons; 1. Closer to home & 2. Well renown Neuro doctors.

I was hesitant, but knew I had to. I was more open to going than I had been a fortnight prior and was happy to be in for the long haul. Mentally, I was in a good spot. I knew something more was wrong and it wasn’t just inflammation. Alas, in I went. Straight to Emergency Department at Monash Clayton.

Friday June 21st - To cut a long story short, to get a bed at Monash Clayton was horrible! I spent a few hours in emergency, followed by 5 hours in short stay and eventually 24 hours in a day ward before I was moved onto a general medical ward. Friday was spent in the day ward with Neuro doctors coming back and forth obsessing over my eye and jaw issues.

I’d bloody done it again. Gone into hospital late on a Thursday... this time I knew not much would happen over the weekend and I was prepared for that.

Monday June 24th - As expected, not a whole lot happened over the weekend. I got moved to a general medical ward and that was it.

Monday afternoon finally brought some news once the Neuro team had looked at me properly. I’d lost my third nerve (which we already knew) and my fifth nerve (jaw) was also shot and gone. Great. I couldn’t eat. I was put on what was called a ‘minced and moist diet’ which can only be described as an unknown meat, minced with gravy with a few unknown vegetables on the side (see below). It was horrible. I didn’t have much of an appetite however what I did have was quickly swept away with the sight of this food.

Over the next few days, more CT, MRI, Ultrasounds and LP’s were done. Blood tests twice daily. I was quite frankly getting sick and tired of getting poked, prodded and scanned only for the Neuro doctors to come in once (maybe twice) a day to tell me there’s no real update and they needed to wait for tests to come back.

Thursday 27th June - During the week, things had progressively gotten worse. I’d lost my sixth nerve in my left eye as well as feeling in my chin (just below my mouth) and started to develop quite a large, painful lump underneath my right earlobe.

Doctors were then forced to act fast. They’d suspected I was suffering from either a virus that hadn’t made itself too known and was attacking my nerves or an auto immune disease that was forcing my white blood cells to attack my own nerves, picking them off one by one.

They did some more tests and sent them to both Brisbane and Canberra to be looked at as Monash Clayton or anywhere in Melbourne couldn’t get the results they wanted.

Immediately, they started to treat me for both of these conditions simultaneously. I was having an anti-viral drip 3x/day every 8 hours for the virus as well as what was called IVIG (derived from blood) to fight the auto immune disease and kill off my bad white blood cells.

I was scared. Every day I was getting worse and I suppose I just wanted to know what was wrong with me. I probably felt most for my direct family and Courtney who all had no answers despite all the tests and scans I’d done previously. They were left in the dark - as was I. 22 days it had been since I felt some sort of normality and it was killing me. The fact they had no answers was slowly eating away at me, but I put on a smile and a positive attitude as I always do. They’ll find something soon. They have to. It’ll come back positive for auto-immune, I’ll get treated and away we go back to normality. I was wrong.

Friday July 5th - This treatment cycle went on for the next week or so. The doctors were happy I wasn’t getting worse, my sixth nerve had slightly returned so they were happy to let me go home. 15 days in hospital this spell. It didn’t feel like 15 days though, not to me anyway. I think that’s probably because of the positive mindset and willingness to stay in until they found what was wrong with me. I’d started to develop muscle aches and pains in my left leg but I thought nothing of it - assuming that was just because I’d been in hospital and confined to a 3x3 room for 15 days!

I’d had a full body MRI scan and ultrasound on my leg the day earlier and they saw something around my stomach they wanted to investigate a little bit further. Before they let me out, we agreed to have a follow up MRI in two or three weeks as well as a PET scan within the next week and a bit to investigate my stomach a bit more. I was happy, the doctors were happy and away I went. Back into the world they call life. I was happy.

Monday July 8th - After spending a relaxing weekend between home and Courtney’s, I had an unexpected call at 1pm. It was a woman from Moorabbin Hospital wanting to urgently book me in for a PET scan and was wondering when I was available. She advised she only really had the following day at 2:30pm available for the next three weeks and advised I need to be there. So I took it. I had no bloody idea what a PET scan was, so as any 24 year old would do, I gave it a Google.

“A positron emission tomography (PET) scan is an imaging test that allows your doctor to check for diseases in your body....”

My heart sunk as I read a bit more. PET scans are generally used to pick up cancers. Wait. What? Why do the doctors want to do this so urgently? They were talking over the next week and a half, so why are they doing it now? My gut feeling wasn’t good. I knew something deeper was wrong but I brushed it aside - my condition despite being unconfirmed was in my mind, still auto-immune.

Tuesday July 9th - I’d never had a PET scan before but I did a YouTube search so I knew what to expect. It was like a CT scan pretty much. They inject the radioactive glucose into you, wait an hour so your body can absorb it and have a scan. Simple.

For the first time in this whole ordeal, something went exactly as I expected it. It was an easy process made easier by the wonderful nurses in there. My PET scan went well and I was happy. I was convinced nothing would show but still had that deep feeling in my gut that something wasn’t right.

I had a call that night and booked myself in for a follow up MRI at Monash Clayton for the following day - once again a few weeks earlier than expected. The woman on the phone said the doctors wanted to rush it through and once again, my gut sank. Something just wasn’t right. Why are the doctors pushing through these scans when we’d only discussed 4 days earlier about having them in a few weeks. Whatever. I’ll go. I have to. I just want to know what’s wrong with me!

Thursday July 18th - 16:32. An unknown number calls. This is how I’ve been getting my scans booked. Is it another one? “Is that Justin?” the gentleman on the other end of the line goes.

“It’s Jason from the haematology department at Monash Clayton. I’m not sure if your Neuro doctors have called you yet, but I’ve just had a look at your PET scan from Tuesday with them. We can see significant areas in your stomach, liver, gall bladder and groin that has lit up which we weren’t expecting. It’s your lymphnodes that have reacted with the glucose and are showing us we need to investigate a bit more. We’ll need to get you in for another LP and we’re going to have to do a biopsy of those lymphnodes to get more of an idea. At this stage, we’re looking at lymphoma as a genuine cause of what’s wrong with you...”

I tune out. I’m still processing his first few sentences. What? You mean they’ve found something that isn’t related to the nerves in my eye? Lymphoma? Isn’t that cancer? I might have a type of cancer? But I’m 24? That can’t be right.

I finish the conversation with him and hang up the phone. I was home with mum and the time. She looks at me and asked what the phone call was about. I break down. I cry. I don’t know how to process the news. I’m a mess for a solid 15 minutes. I eventually get strong enough to tell mum. She breaks down as well. It must’ve been incredibly difficult to hear your 24 year old son may have lymphoma. I call dad and let him know....and Courtney. Other than that, I keep it on the downlow. I don’t want to get ahead of myself. What if it is nothing?

Jason calls back later that night. Pretty much says I have an appointment on Monday for another LP and they want to do the biopsy ASAP. He said not to go to ED at Monash Clayton and just to expect a call at any moment between then and Monday that they have a bed for me. When I get the call, I had to go in. I was okay with this. It wasn’t going to happen for a few days!

Sunday July 14th - Court and I went down to dads for the lunch and catch up with his wife and her kids. It was a great day to forget about the reality of life for a few hours. That was until we went to Coles to get stuff for lunch and I had a missed call from a private number. Without listening to the voicemail, I knew what it was. My gut dropped. I told Courtney and we listened to the voicemail together.

“Hi Justin, we’re just letting you know a bed is available and if you could come into the ward ASAP.”

I’m okay with it. I knew it was coming... then a few minutes later I broke down in the middle of Coles. What hit me? I don’t know. Reality I suppose. I didn’t want to go back in. I knew I had to. I knew this trip was going to be about whether or not I have lymphoma - a type of a cancer. I was scared. I grabbed Courtney’s shoulder and just cried. Cried for a solid 5 minutes. I couldn’t control myself. It just hit me.

I thought I’d wait until they called back instead of making that call to enquire further to bide myself an extra hour or two. Half an hour later, they call and I answer. I was able to arrange an extra four hours until I had to be in there. This gave me enough time to get home, pack a bag and mentally prepare myself to head in.

By 5pm that night, I was in a bed with the lumbar puncture booked for the following day at 2:30pm.

Monday July 16th (Today) - I’m not afraid to say I hate LP’s. Being larger than your average 24 year old, they can’t do the blind and require them under CT guidance. It makes the process easier, but it certainly doesn’t feel as pleasant!

I saw the haematology doctor at 11:30 this morning. He was open and honest with me. Which I appreciated. He basically said up front “We’re 90% sure you have lymphoma. All we are waiting on is the biopsy to come back positive and we can start treatment...which will be chemo...”

That’s about all I took out of the conversation. It hit me. Not hard that I’d cry, but the reality hit me hard. Here I am, apart from overweight, I’m a normal otherwise healthy 24 year old. In the space of six weeks, I’ve developed symptoms I don’t wish upon anybody and getting told the doctors are 90% certain I have lymphoma.

I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy to be where I am at the moment. It’s a funny time in my life. I’m being as positive as I can however I know I’m about to face the biggest battle of my life. In a way, I really hope the biopsy does come back positive - just so we finally have something. Confirmation on something and can start treatment pretty much instantly.

With my biopsy scheduled for between 8:30 - 11:30 tomorrow, I’m not going to lie, i’m shitting myself. Sedate me. Put a camera down my mouth to my stomach. Take tissue samples of my lymphnodes. Sounds like a great Tuesday morning to me. For once in my life I think I’d prefer to be at work!

Realistically, I’m expecting the results back from the biopsy in 24-36 hours from tomorrow morning and expect if confirmed to be lymphoma, to begin my chemo treatment late this week.

As I said earlier, it’s going to be the biggest fight of my life...But I’m ready. I’m not prepared to fail, I never have been. I will beat whatever is wrong with me.

If you’ve made it this far, kudos. It’s now 1:32am and I’m starting to get the tired eyes. As I started, I feel as if I had to start this blog to move forward mentally. Whilst this will be my longest entry I’ll have, it certainly won’t be my last. I assure you of that.

Wish my luck for tomorrow!

Juzz xx

[this-book-has-been-loved]

Blood and Water

For @platonicvldweek​ Day 4: Individual/Group

Keith, unsure what to do regarding the sudden appearance of his mother, turns to the only family he's ever really known

Read it on Ao3 | Read it on FFN

Keith piloted the Galran fighter back to the Blade of Marmora base with ease. He’d gotten used to navigating between the black holes and the blue star, until he could do it with almost no trouble.

That didn’t help ease the tension of the flight this time around.

After Krolia—his mom—had dropped her bombshell, the flight back had been quiet, uncomfortably so. His head had been swimming with questions that he’d wanted to know the answers to, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask even a single one.

Krolia seemed to respect his decision not to talk, and didn’t push him.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Landing back at the Marmora HQ was a relief. Watching as the last chances of private conversation left, as other Blade members filed into the hangar, Keith sighed. “Alright,” he said flatly, standing up forcefully. “We’re here.”

“Keith—” Krolia started.

“Don’t,” he cut her off. “Not now.” And with that, he strode off the aircraft to meet Kolivan’s cold gaze.

The Marmoran commander was waiting for them just beyond the exit ramp, his hands clasped firmly behind his back. A masked Blade stood behind him at each shoulder.

“Keith,” Kolivan barked. “Report.”

Keith stood up a bit straighter, his military training from the Garrison kicking in. “Operative located and retrieved, as ordered.”

“And the weapon? Were you able to destroy it?”

Keith looked down at his feet. “No, sir.”

“No? And why’s that?”

“I’m afraid that’s my fault, sir,” Krolia interjected. She glanced quickly at Keith, but he kept his gaze stubbornly fixated on the ground. “Perhaps if we could debrief in a more private setting—”

But Kolivan’s attention was fixated firmly on the smaller Blade before him. “This was a high stakes mission, Keith,” Kolivan reprimanded. “I told you not to let your emotions get the best of you.”

“Then maybe I wasn’t the right person to send,” Keith muttered, pushing past him.

“Keith!”

But no one made a move to stop him, and he stormed from the hangar without pause.

Would Krolia stand up for him? He pushed the thought from his head. He didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure if he even cared.

He went straight to his room—barrack, really—closing the door behind him and slumping heavily onto his bed. He leaned forward, resting his head in his hands, trying to steady his breathing.

His mom.

He’d just met his mom.

The Mom who he’d never really known, who’d left him and his dad earlier than he can remember, who he had always distantly wondered about—why did she leave? Didn’t she love me? Didn’t she care at all?

Once he’d learned he was Galra, that had opened a whole new wave of questions. Knowledge or death, they’d said. But he came out of those trials with more questions than answers.

The silence was too loud.

Normally, he liked the quiet. But now, alone with his thoughts, he needed some noise, needed some distraction, needed to talk to someone, needed—

He needed Shiro.

Keith had a private communicator. He didn’t use it very much, but he did have one. There were a lot of times since leaving Team Voltron that he’d held it in his hands, barely resisting the urge to call.

But tonight, he gave in.

It took maybe ten ticks for Shiro to answer. Not long, but long enough that Keith considered canceling the call before it even went through.

“Keith?” Shiro’s face filled the screen, immediately on guard. “Is everything okay?”

Keith paused. No, not really. But he couldn’t just say that, couldn’t bring himself to admit it. “Yeah,” he forced. “Just wanted to talk.”

“Ah, Keith!” another voice shouted, and Coran popped into the viewscreen. “It’s good to hear from you!”

Shiro adjusted the angle of the transmission feed so it could better capture both him and Coran, and Keith was greeted with a view of their surroundings. Sleek gray walls, harsh purple lighting, what looked like a computer console in the back, displaying a bright pink screen—

“Where are you guys?”

“Galra high command!” Coran chirped back. “Quite the exciting excursion.”

“Lotor invited us as a show of diplomacy,” Shiro explained. “Coran and I wanted to take a look at their records room, cross-reference current fleet movement with our own charts.

“Everyone else is on the base too,” Coran added. “Should we tell them you’re on the line? I’m sure they’d all love to talk to you.”

“No, that’s fine,” Keith stammered. “I just….”

Shiro furrowed his brow. “Are you sure everything’s alright?”

“Takashi, I….”

It was the use of his first name that got to Shiro. His face tightened, and he turned over his shoulder to address the other person in the room. “Coran, I’m going to take the rest of this call in the other room, okay?”

“Sounds good, number one,” Coran replied. “And Keith?” The Altean gazed at him through the comms screen with a gentle smile. “You let me know if you need anything, alright?”

Keith relaxed ever-so-slightly. “Thanks, Coran.”

The angle of the vidfeed changed as Shiro left the room he was in, stepping through a door into one that seemed much smaller and emptier.

When the door slid closed, Shiro looked intently at Keith, frowning ever-so-slightly. “What’s wrong?” he asked, gentle yet firm. When Keith didn’t respond, Shiro pressed further. “Keith, it’s clear there’s something on your mind,�� he said. “I know that things have been rough these past few...well, months. But you know you can talk to me, right?”

“Yeah,” Keith whispered. “I know.” There was a long pause, then he took a deep breath. “I just got back from a mission, and….”

“Did something happen? Like what happened with Regris? Keith, I’m sor—”

“It was a solo mission,” Keith responded absently. “Nothing like that. I was just sent to meet another operative, and she—” His voice broke off, and he took a shuddering breath. “Shiro, I just met my mom.”

He was met by silence.

“Your mom?” Shiro eventually echoed, his eyes wide in shock.

“Yeah,” Keith rasped, closing his eyes tight.

Shiro was quiet for a long moment, mulling that over. “And how do you feel about that?”

“I—I don’t know,” Keith said, running a hand through his hair. “Anxious, mostly? I mean, I’ve always wanted to know who my mom is, but now that I actually found her….” He sighed, his hand moving from his hair to cover his face. “I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s understandable,” Shiro assured him. “This is an stressful situation that just popped up; it makes sense to not know how you feel about it. Let me ask this: how do you want to feel about it?”

“I—” He fumbled for words. “I mean, I guess I want to be happy that I finally met my mom. But…I’m angry. I’m angry that it took this long.” He clenched his fists. “She left me.”

“Maybe she had a good reason.”

Keith looked up sharply. “What reason could be ‘good’ enough to warrant this?” he demanded. “Abandoning your own child—”

Shiro held up his hand in surrender. “I don’t know, Keith. That seems like something you would need to ask her.”

Another long silence.

“Have you talked to her at all?” Shiro asked. “About this?”

“Not really,” Keith confessed.

“Do you want to?”

He shrugged listlessly.

“Okay. What’s stopping you?”

“I don’t know how to be a family!” Keith exclaimed. “I didn’t get to grow up in a loving family like I was supposed to. I had a mom I couldn’t remember, and a dad who disappeared when I was barely old enough for grade school.” He choked back a sob. “Shiro, you’re the closest thing to a family I’ve ever really known, and—” He broke off.

“Keith,” Shiro said gently. “Keith, you’re like a brother to me.” Keith looked up, his breath catching at the familiarity of those words. “And if it’s any consolation, I think you’re the best little brother I could have asked for. There’s no one I’d rather have by my side.”

The boy took a shuddering breath, his voice hitching. “Shiro—”

“You want my advice?” Wordlessly, Keith nodded. “I think you should talk to your mom.”

“Krolia,” he said numbly. “Her name is Krolia.”

“Krolia,” Shiro repeated. “I think you should talk to Krolia.” Keith was silent, and Shiro pursed his lips. “Or I could try talking to her, if you’d prefer,” he offered.

Keith managed a strained laugh. “Somehow, I can only imagine that ending in disaster,” he said. “But thanks.”

“I’ll keep my distance, then,” he said, eyes twinkling. “Though I would like to meet her at some point, if that’s alright with you.”

“Yeah,” Keith said. “I’m sure you’ll get the chance sooner or later.”

Shiro opened his mouth to say something else when the door behind him slid open. “Ah, Shiro?” Coran called, popping his head into the room. “Sentry arrived with a message for you.”

Shiro frowned, turning towards the doorway. “What happened?”

“Apparently, Lance and Pidge and Hunk caused a bit of a disturbance. Something about the robeast coffin?”

“What did those three…?” He broke off, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, I’ll be right there.” When Coran ducked back out of the room, he sighed heavily. “Keith, I’m gonna have to go, I need to track down our wayward paladins.”

Despite everything, Keith cracked a smile. “Right,” he said. “Good luck with that.”

“And you’re always welcome to come back to the castle at any point,” Shiro reminded him. “Coran wasn’t kidding when he said that everyone would be happy to see you. We miss you.”

“I miss you guys too,” Keith said with a smile.

“It’s okay to break sometimes,” Shiro continued. “God knows I definitely have. You don’t need to be the stoic lone wolf. We’re always here if you need us.”

“I know,” Keith said. “Thanks, Shiro.”

“Of course,” Shiro replied. “Anytime.”

“Oh, and Shiro?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t tell the rest of the team yet,” he requested, eyes pleading. “I want to tell them myself.”

Shiro smiled warmly. “Of course. Whenever you’re ready.”

And with that, the call ended.

Keith took a deep breath, focusing his thoughts, then exhaled in a long rush of air. “Okay,” he told himself. “Okay. Here we go.”

He stood up and went over to the door, pressing his palm against the handpad to open it. The door slid open with a hiss, and he nearly ran smack into Krolia.

She stood with one hand raised as though about to knock, and their startled eyes locked onto each other. “Keith,” she said, a bit taken aback, slowly lowering her hand. “I don’t mean to intrude….”

“No, I was just about to go try and find you,” he admitted. Her expression morphed into one of shock, and Keith steeled himself. He stepped aside, leaving the threshold empty. “Do...do you want to come inside?”

[blonde-batgirl]

Day Two: Space

There’s something ironic about Pidge, of all people, calling Keith “the loner” in The Red Paladin (Season Three, Episode Two). Pidge might not be quite as much of a loose cannon as Keith (she actually told them when she was going to leave in Fall of the Castle of Lions, Season One, Episode Four, which is just basic manners. I mean, honestly, Keith…), but she does have loner tendencies. In fact, the (original) arms of Voltron both seem to have a liking for their own personal space.

Privacy

One of the first things we learn about Pidge is that she’s very protective of her privacy. We see this in The Rise of Voltron when she reacts explosively to Hunk touching her equipment (“Stop touching my equipment!”) and later to him rummaging through her stuff. She’s also the only paladin who takes issue with the mind-linking exercise in Some Assembly Required (Season One, Episode Two). Part of this can be put down to the fact that she is trying to keep her true identity a secret and doesn’t want anyone to stumble across it in her diary. However, we can infer that it is also a part of her personality because of her penchant for stealth. Adding invisibility to her lion was her own choice, for example.

It’s subtler with Keith in that it’s not his words but his actions that imply a need for privacy. Pidge is willing to reveal bits and pieces of her secret to explain her actions. Case in point, in The Rise of Voltron she tells Shiro that Commander Holt is her father so that he will understand why she needs to free the prisoners. She has to know that this will allow him to infer that she is really a girl named Katie, but she doesn’t care because they don’t have time to argue. She’s weighed the pros and cons and decided that it’s worth revealing. There’s a similar scene in Ark of Taujeer (Season Two, Episode Six) when the group are discussing how Zarkon is tracking them. Keith suggests quite confidently that he’s the problem. When he’s asked to explain it, he could tell them about the blade, but he doesn’t. Maybe he’s afraid that they’ll come to the same conclusion as he has, or maybe he just doesn’t want to be told that he has to get rid of it. Either way, he makes up some unconvincing guff about Zarkon imprinting on him…maybe… Keith’s identity arc is extremely personal to the point where none of the other characters know anything about it until the episode where his Galra heritage is revealed. Even then, it’s not his choice. The fact that he doesn’t confide in anyone – even though he tries to get answers from Coran (Greening the Cube, Season Two, Episode Four) and has the opportunity to speak to Shiro alone (Ark of Taujeer) – shows that this is intensely private to him.

Solitude and Loneliness

I think it’s important to remember that Pidge has essentially been alone for a year prior to the formation of Team Voltron. She couldn’t allow herself to grow close to anyone at the Garrison because she was couldn’t risk someone working out who she really was. In the first episode, Lance and Hunk find her scanning for alien radio waves on the roof. Given that she came here to find out what happened to her family, we can assume that she’s been spending a lot of her nights up here. Alone. Early on, she seems to actively distance herself from the others. For example, in Some Assembly Required, when the team are drinking space juice, Lance is sat with Hunk, Shiro is sat with Keith, and Pidge is alone in the centre. As a character, Pidge is naturally self-sufficient. There’s nothing wrong with her social skills, but she still seems to like her solitude – she apparently has no problem with the idea of going off alone in a pod in space (Fall of the Castle of Lions, Season One, Episode Four). Or, at least, this is the impression we get before Across the Universe (Season Two, Episode One). In that episode, upon finding herself alone, she says, “This’ll be nice. I’ll have some ‘me’ time. No one to annoy me.” She proceeds to make models of the other paladins out of rubbish and do silly impressions of her friends. To be honest, I’d call that character development. She’s grown attached to the others, and she misses them being around. Going back to Some Assembly Required, Pidge’s mind-meld vision is of her and her brother. She’s thinking of a specific person she wants to be around. The paladin models serve a similar purpose. I still think that Pidge likes her solitude (she certainly likes the idea of it), but she likes it to be her choice rather than something forced on her.

Keith likes the quiet (Greening the Cube) and, during the mind-meld in Some Assembly Required, he looks back on his time alone in the desert. I don’t think being alone is actually what bothers him. Keith is very independent: he lived on his own for a year, he trains alone in his free time (Crystal Venom, Season One, Episode Nine), and he’s perfectly happy taking the initiative to rush off on his own and chase a druid (Collection and Extraction, Season One, Episode Ten). What bothers him is the idea that he’s not worth staying for. That people have left before and they will keep leaving because he just isn’t good enough, because he’s let them down. He reacts angrily to Pidge planning to leave in Fall of the Castle of Lions, and Blade of Marmora (Season Two, Episode Eight) shows that he has serious abandonment issues. Letting down the universe is apparently not a problem, but when hologram-Shiro tells him, “You’ve chosen to be alone,” and turns to leave, that’s unbearable to him because his worst fear is coming true. Shiro is leaving because Keith did something wrong. Keith made the wrong decision. Keith was selfish. What all this really shows is that Keith has a low opinion of himself. Deep down, he doesn’t think that he deserves people who care about him. After Shiro goes missing at the end of season two, it’s somewhat implied that Keith withdrew from the others. In Changing of the Guard (Season Three, Episode One) his temper blows every time someone suggests that Shiro is gone for good. In The Red Paladin, he stands apart from the others, leaning against the wall whilst they’re sat on the sofas. It’s impossible to deny that Shiro is the character Keith is closest to in canon, and he seems to take his loss the hardest out of the entire group. But he’s not alone. He’s just angry. We see this in Changing of the Guard when he says, “Shiro is the one person who never gave up on me. I won’t give up on him.” It’s like he thinks Shiro’s loss is his fault, and giving up on finding him would be letting him down. Unlike Pidge, Keith grew up without the unconditional love of a family. Therefore, if he’s all alone – if he’s lonely – it must be his own fault for letting the people who were willing to care about him down.

Working Alone

Pidge is perfectly capable of holding her own when alone. Fall of the Castle of Lions and Tears of the Balmera (Season One, Episode Five) prove this beyond all doubt. The castle is occupied by Galra and she manages not only to evade them but also to stop them taking off and take one of them out. She’s excellent at acting on her own initiative. When the communications cut out, she doesn’t sit around and hope it fixes itself, she takes out everything inside the control hub. She uses the training deck against the sentries who come after her, weaponsising the maze. She uses the vents to get around unseen. Pidge might be small, but she’s incredibly smart. Between her stealth and her ability to use their environment against them, the Galra don’t stand a chance. In Collection and Extraction, she passes the time waiting for Shiro and Allura to call for an extraction trying to hack a drone for information. In Escape From Beta Traz (Season Two, Episode Ten), Pidge essentially plays mission control from a Galra computer she hacks her way into. Whilst giving Shiro and Lance directions, she also advances her personal mission by using the computer to search for information on her brother. Given all the time she spent undercover at the Garrison, Pidge is used to being self-reliant. Her stealth and initiative make working alone ideal for her.

Keith might not have Pidge’s brains, but he has incredible instincts and he’s a capable fighter. Often, going off on his own is a bad idea, but he does it with good intentions. In Collection and Extraction, for example, he’s right that getting information on quintessence would be useful, but wrong that he can take a druid alone. In The Black Paladin (Season One, Episode Twelve), helping Shiro is the right thing to do, but it leads to him taking on Zarkon which is possibly the worst decision any character has made in this show so far. And that includes all the decisions that Zarkon and Honerva make in The Legend Begins (Season Three, Episode Seven). I think Keith has a need to be constantly be doing something he perceives as useful. He can’t just sit and watch. He has to be doing. I’d actually tie it back into the abandonment issues I mentioned above. If he’s doing something, he’s being useful, and if he’s being useful people will stay. Like with Pidge, I think that Keith is used to being self-reliant. He doesn’t doubt that he can do things alone because he’s used to doing them alone. In Best Laid Plans, he takes on what is outright described as a suicide mission. He has Pidge and Shiro’s help to get in (one he asks for, one he’s given), but once he’s on the Galra ship, he’s on his own. Given the recent reveal of his Galra heritage and the uncertainty that was met with, I’d argue taking on that mission was about proving that he was still reliable. Loyal. Useful.

[marketingadvisorvietnam]

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Marketing Advisor đã viết bài trên http://www.ticvietnam.vn/forgetting-thanh-phong/

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Vietnam grapples with the unsavory dilemma of having to close the book on a war crime to open a U.S.-backed school.

The small bus rumbling toward the south-eastern tip of Ben Tre Province was packed with fruit and farmers on a damp morning last October.

On the flat peninsula that stretched out from the road, mechanical paddles churned the brackish shrimp ponds replacing rice paddies in Thanh Phu District – the front line of Vietnam’s modern war with creeping seawater that promises to make life in this tough corner of the Mekong Delta tougher still.

Women checked messages on cell phones wrapped in plastic bags; salt filled the air as the bus neared its final stop, a parking lot where motorbike taximen stood ready to take foreigners on a brief loop of the tragedy that’s become synonymous with the place.

After a 15 minute drive into Thanh Phong, they stopped before a granite stele that stood between a beer distributor and a windowless shop that sold everything from shampoo to ice cream.

The low gate to the monument’s overgrown concrete courtyard sat ajar. Two frangipani trees perfumed the wet air, masking the scent of a lone papaya rotting in the weeds.

Rain had washed away most of the memorial’s gold lettering, but one could still make out the words:

This area was raided by the United States SEAL force led by Bob Kerrey on February 25, 1969. Despite the fact that there had been no shots fired by the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam, Kerrey’s team committed the brutal murder of civilians. They stormed into houses and slit the throats of the people inside, and then gathered others before executing them with machine guns at short range. Twenty-one civilians, including elders, women and children, were massacred barbarously.

The crossroads in Thanh Phong where a stele memorializes the Navy SEAL massacre that occurred on February 25, 1969. The monument specifically disputes Kerrey's claim that his men came under fire and responded by strafing the village before them. Instead, it alleges the unit known as "Kerrey's Raiders" rounded up and executed 21 unarmed civilians. Photos by VnExpress/Calvin Godfrey

Across the street, a group of fishermen sat on a porch, slapping cards on a plastic table, letting ice melt in their beer while the sounds of students at a nearby kindergarten filled the air.

No one knew who Kerrey was – only that he had come back to run a school, or some such.

And then a short man with a high voice named Quang Van Phuc stepped forward and held a hand out at his hip.

“I was this tall that night,” he said, before describing how he'd heard gunfire and screaming and ran into the darkness. “The next day we came back to the village; I remember they had piled all of the bodies and severed flesh on a bed.”

Phuc grew up hearing that the raid had been the fault of a local who left the village years before the massacre and led a Marine unit back to the area, long after Communist fighters had fled inland.

A 'distortion of history'

In May, the U.S. Secretary of State gathered reporters at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and announced Bob Kerrey would return to chair the Board of Trustees at the Fulbright University in Vietnam (FUV).

Three years prior, then-President Truong Tan Sang met personally with his counterpart in the White House and welcomed an initiative to build the school.

The Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee later donated 60 hectares (148 acres) of land in a high-tech industrial zone that sits idle today; even the sunburnt security guards patrolling the odd mix of vacant lots and multi-national microchip factories say they have no idea when work would begin on the university campus.

Those close to the school have declined to speak about the controversy or what it means for FUV.

Billed on its website as “the first private, nonprofit Vietnamese university founded on the principles of accountability, meritocracy, transparency, self-governance, mutual respect, and open inquiry,” FUV has virtually disappeared from public discourse.

Individuals close to the project say they have already “moved on” from the discussion and expect John Kerry, the retiring U.S. Secretary of State, to return to Vietnam with good news before his term ends this month. Others have publicly floated the possibility of welcoming the first class this fall.

Vietnamese officials remained decidedly more reticent, until Tuesday, when Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan published a review of Vietnam's major media stories from the previous year.

In it, he dedicated significant space to what he described as “an unusual campaign for the appointment of Mr. Kerrey at Fulbright University.”

The minister described the effort to promote Kerrey’s appointment as an effort to distort history.

“Kerrey was a war veteran who directed and participated in a barbaric massacre of innocent civilians in Ben Tre Province during the American invasion of our country,” he wrote.

“There have been several articles in the mainstream media that not only sought to legitimize the appointment, but also conflated the tasks of a soldier with war crimes that violate international laws.”

The minister called the media campaign “extremely upsetting” because it had “hurt the spirit of innocent people who died because of such crimes.”

Tuan reminded his readers that Kerrey had confessed to the crimes, which were initially exposed by U.S. media.

“There is even proof of the event on display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.”

Meanwhile, at the museum

The Ho Chi Minh City War Remnants Museum sits about two kilometers from the Rex Hotel and attracts over a million visitors per year, most of them foreign.

On a recent weekday, scores of tourists packed its halls and doorways; several huddled around a round concrete sewer on the second floor, where Bob Kerrey’s name hovered at the center of a blue plastic panel.

The panel says Kerrey and a team of Navy SEALs arrived in the village of Thanh Phong – 48 years ago next month – and murdered three children they found hiding in the sewer with knives.

Tourists at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. A sewer on the second floor of the museum contains a plaque at the center that claims three children hid in the concrete tube on the night of the raid and were murdered with knives when Kerrey's unit discovered them. The family only donated the sewer to the museum following the 40th anniversary of the killings.

On the opposite wall hangs the names of the other civilians who died that night; around the corner is an exhibit on the My Lai Massacre.

“It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public,” the panels read.

That’s not entirely right.

Kerrey received a Bronze Star medal for the Thanh Phong raid from then-President Richard Nixon. He only acknowledged the event had been a massacre when confronted with classified documents and an account from one of his men who said the squad had rounded up and executed the unarmed group of mostly women and children.

Two of Kerrey’s squad told reporters they stabbed an elderly man who stepped out of the first thatched hut they encountered; they either didn't remember or differed on what became of his wife and three grandchildren.

Before these messy narratives spilled into American papers, Kerrey gathered all but one of his fellow squad members to issue a joint statement alleging the victims had been caught in a crossfire between his men and unseen Viet Cong soldiers.

Huynh Ngoc Van, the director of the War Remnants Museum, recalled that when the news broke in Vietnam it inspired a flood of local newspaper accounts of the killings, many of which she considered “exaggerated.”

Van personally accompanied museum researchers to Thanh Phong to investigate the events.

She and members of her team spent years interviewing witnesses before a bereaved family finally agreed to donate the sewer where the three deceased children had hidden, following the 40th anniversary of their deaths.

“We had many Thanh Phongs in southern Vietnam,” said Van, who views the incident as unique only insofar as the events had been investigated and the perpetrators confronted.

Over the years Kerrey has apologized for the deaths (repeatedly and at length) while maintaining that he only ever ordered his men to return fire. In this way, he has done much more than his government, which never apologized for sending Kerrey and a group of other young men to a fishing village in the middle of the night with the name of a single Communist cadre they were supposed to find and kill.

In the flurry that followed Kerrey’s appointment, editorial writers all over the U.S. (including the journalist who initially exposed the massacre) offered unsolicited paths to redemption for Kerrey – some suggested he’d already earned the world’s forgiveness.

Kerrey himself has always bucked direction on how he ought to make amends in Vietnam.

“An apology has always felt insufficient,” he told local media in June. “It is like fish soup without the fish. And so I have tried to help the Vietnamese people when I can. By being a part of the effort to end the trading with the enemy act, normalizing relations, supporting expanded bilateral trade and aid, and especially supporting efforts to improve Vietnam's educational system through the Fulbright program.”

Kerrey did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but he publicly pledged to ignore calls that he resign his new post as late as June, the same month discussion of his appointment largely tapered off.

When asked whether he should take the job, the director of the War Remnants Museum went quiet.

“I thought a lot about this one,” Van said, before noting that Vietnamese culture requires students of all kinds to address senior school administrators by the respected term “teacher".

“This makes me … worried,” she said in English. “I think if Bob feels very sorry for what he’s done for the war he can support the Fulbright with money or he can support Thanh Phong, which is very poor until now.”

'Lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral'

Thanh Phong’s retired village chief Tran Van “Sau” Rung greeted reporters from his bed in a palm leaf extension built onto a wide pink tile home just a short motorbike ride from where the killing occurred.

A woman sewed needlepoint in his living room and children ran in and out of the house as Sau stood and swept his salt and pepper hair over his tall forehead in a manner not unlike Kerrey's.

The old soldier grew up in the low-lying farming area and said he’d had two choices: join the Southern Republic of Vietnam or join the Viet Cong.

“I chose the Viet Cong,” he said.

Tran Van Rung (AKA Sau Rung) was one of the first to arrive to the scene of the raid after the killing stopped.

After sustaining an injury while fighting in the surrounding districts, Sau says he received orders to lay low near Thanh Phong. In his estimation, no revolutionary soldier would have dared to occupy the coastal village itself.

The whole area, he said, had been stripped of vegetation by chemical defoliants and any man of fighting age found along the bare coastline would have immediately been captured or killed.

When government and U.S. patrols encountered a local French teacher here, he said, they carted him off.

“Luckily, they didn't kill him,” Sau said. “They put him in prison for a year; when he returned he took his whole family from the area because it was just too dangerous.”

Sau recalled that Kerrey’s squad had visited the area three times before the massacre.

He can still remember villagers streaming toward him in the final hours of the night in question. He and the other able-bodied men woke to the sounds of children wailing as they fled.

Sau and his men spent two hours finding the civilians safe places to sleep, before heading to surmise the casualties in Thanh Phong.

“I had enough experience in combat to know when the Americans had withdrawn,” he said.

Sau and his men quickly sifted through the corpses, piling dead children next to their mothers and covering the horror with straw mats.

“We didn’t want to stay,” he said. “We knew they’d come back.”

Then Sau found 12-year-old Bui Thi Luom weeping and peppered with shrapnel.

He carried the girl to a clinic in a nearby village, then went to sleep.

The next day, civilians returned to the area to bury the dead.

“Most of the families had lost everyone, so there was no one left to mourn them,” he said. “Besides, it was a war: you were lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral.”

He continues to keep a log containing the names of the victims and their birthdays. Whenever relatives return to the area, he helps inform them about what happened here.

Sau said Kerrey had an open invitation to come drink tea with him any time.

“Of course, I'd accept his apology,” he said. “But why ask me? I think it would be better for him to come and talk to the surviving relatives and, perhaps, offer some money to take care of the tombs of the dead.”

Meeting Bob Kerrey

The road to Bui Thi Luom's house turns to muddy sand long before you arrive – sand that seems to stick to everything for kilometers in any direction.

As the sun set over her small farm, the sole survivor of the massacre limped out onto her lopsided patio, heavyset in cheetah-print pajamas.

Kerrey’s Raiders, as the squad was known, killed Luom’s grandmother, four aunts and ten cousins—all women and children she slept with in an earthen dugout designed to shield them from harm.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times quoted her as saying she’d kill Kerrey and his men if she had the chance.

But time, it seems, had softened those feelings.

“I don't have any bitterness toward Kerrey after all these years,” she told VnExpress International. “I was only 12 then; I’m almost dead now.”

Bui Thi Luom was 12-years old on the night of the raid and is considered the sole survivor of the violence that claimed her grandmother, 10 cousins and four aunts. She's pictured here at her home in Ben Tre Province.

Over the years, she’s explained to visiting reporters that the unit called her and her family out into the night and, after a brief conference, began shooting them.

Luom survived by ducking back into the dugout when the killing began.

“I have scars all over my body, and my knee injury is the largest one,” she said, rolling up a pant leg. “Sometimes I can still feel the pain.”

Sau told VnExpress International Luom grew up in an inland village with her mother.

When she was well enough, she began caring for the graves of those killed in the raid—something she considered her lifelong duty.

She now lives with her husband, niece, sister-in-law and older brother who collectively earn about $450-$650 per month, mostly from fishing.

“We don't have much land here to grow anything,” she said, gesturing to the dark brown soil around the house.

A few years ago, when her family moved here, Luom exhumed the bones of those killed and buried them at a nearby cemetery so she could clean the tombs and provide regular offerings to their spirits.

“I couldn't move the bodies of all the children because there were too many,” she said.

No American, she said, had ever come to say sorry to her. Luom, who first heard Kerrey’s name in 2001, knew very little about the controversy surrounding him or the land sitting idle outside Ho Chi Minh City.

She spoke cautiously, but at the conclusion of her interview she seemed to have made a decision.

“I want to meet Bob Kerrey and talk to him,” she said. “All my relatives are dead and it would be great if he could offer me something.”

Luom saw no reason to prevent him from opening a new university, but she doubted it would benefit her and her family in any way.

“I don't think my kids or grandkids would ever make it there,” she said. “They'll drop out of school around the eighth grade to start working.”

Nhung Nguyen contributed reporting to this story

Related news:

> U.S. veteran Kerrey refuses to step down from Fulbright University Vietnam

> Bob Kerrey speaks out after Vietnamese anger at his role in Fulbright University

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[marketingadvisorvietnam]

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Marketing Advisor đã viết bài trên http://www.ticvietnam.vn/forgetting-thanh-phong/

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Vietnam grapples with the unsavory dilemma of having to close the book on a war crime to open a U.S.-backed school.

The small bus rumbling toward the south-eastern tip of Ben Tre Province was packed with fruit and farmers on a damp morning last October.

On the flat peninsula that stretched out from the road, mechanical paddles churned the brackish shrimp ponds replacing rice paddies in Thanh Phu District – the front line of Vietnam’s modern war with creeping seawater that promises to make life in this tough corner of the Mekong Delta tougher still.

Women checked messages on cell phones wrapped in plastic bags; salt filled the air as the bus neared its final stop, a parking lot where motorbike taximen stood ready to take foreigners on a brief loop of the tragedy that’s become synonymous with the place.

After a 15 minute drive into Thanh Phong, they stopped before a granite stele that stood between a beer distributor and a windowless shop that sold everything from shampoo to ice cream.

The low gate to the monument’s overgrown concrete courtyard sat ajar. Two frangipani trees perfumed the wet air, masking the scent of a lone papaya rotting in the weeds.

Rain had washed away most of the memorial’s gold lettering, but one could still make out the words:

This area was raided by the United States SEAL force led by Bob Kerrey on February 25, 1969. Despite the fact that there had been no shots fired by the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam, Kerrey’s team committed the brutal murder of civilians. They stormed into houses and slit the throats of the people inside, and then gathered others before executing them with machine guns at short range. Twenty-one civilians, including elders, women and children, were massacred barbarously.

The crossroads in Thanh Phong where a stele memorializes the Navy SEAL massacre that occurred on February 25, 1969. The monument specifically disputes Kerrey's claim that his men came under fire and responded by strafing the village before them. Instead, it alleges the unit known as "Kerrey's Raiders" rounded up and executed 21 unarmed civilians. Photos by VnExpress/Calvin Godfrey

Across the street, a group of fishermen sat on a porch, slapping cards on a plastic table, letting ice melt in their beer while the sounds of students at a nearby kindergarten filled the air.

No one knew who Kerrey was – only that he had come back to run a school, or some such.

And then a short man with a high voice named Quang Van Phuc stepped forward and held a hand out at his hip.

“I was this tall that night,” he said, before describing how he'd heard gunfire and screaming and ran into the darkness. “The next day we came back to the village; I remember they had piled all of the bodies and severed flesh on a bed.”

Phuc grew up hearing that the raid had been the fault of a local who left the village years before the massacre and led a Marine unit back to the area, long after Communist fighters had fled inland.

A 'distortion of history'

In May, the U.S. Secretary of State gathered reporters at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and announced Bob Kerrey would return to chair the Board of Trustees at the Fulbright University in Vietnam (FUV).

Three years prior, then-President Truong Tan Sang met personally with his counterpart in the White House and welcomed an initiative to build the school.

The Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee later donated 60 hectares (148 acres) of land in a high-tech industrial zone that sits idle today; even the sunburnt security guards patrolling the odd mix of vacant lots and multi-national microchip factories say they have no idea when work would begin on the university campus.

Those close to the school have declined to speak about the controversy or what it means for FUV.

Billed on its website as “the first private, nonprofit Vietnamese university founded on the principles of accountability, meritocracy, transparency, self-governance, mutual respect, and open inquiry,” FUV has virtually disappeared from public discourse.

Individuals close to the project say they have already “moved on” from the discussion and expect John Kerry, the retiring U.S. Secretary of State, to return to Vietnam with good news before his term ends this month. Others have publicly floated the possibility of welcoming the first class this fall.

Vietnamese officials remained decidedly more reticent, until Tuesday, when Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan published a review of Vietnam's major media stories from the previous year.

In it, he dedicated significant space to what he described as “an unusual campaign for the appointment of Mr. Kerrey at Fulbright University.”

The minister described the effort to promote Kerrey’s appointment as an effort to distort history.

“Kerrey was a war veteran who directed and participated in a barbaric massacre of innocent civilians in Ben Tre Province during the American invasion of our country,” he wrote.

“There have been several articles in the mainstream media that not only sought to legitimize the appointment, but also conflated the tasks of a soldier with war crimes that violate international laws.”

The minister called the media campaign “extremely upsetting” because it had “hurt the spirit of innocent people who died because of such crimes.”

Tuan reminded his readers that Kerrey had confessed to the crimes, which were initially exposed by U.S. media.

“There is even proof of the event on display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.”

Meanwhile, at the museum

The Ho Chi Minh City War Remnants Museum sits about two kilometers from the Rex Hotel and attracts over a million visitors per year, most of them foreign.

On a recent weekday, scores of tourists packed its halls and doorways; several huddled around a round concrete sewer on the second floor, where Bob Kerrey’s name hovered at the center of a blue plastic panel.

The panel says Kerrey and a team of Navy SEALs arrived in the village of Thanh Phong – 48 years ago next month – and murdered three children they found hiding in the sewer with knives.

Tourists at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. A sewer on the second floor of the museum contains a plaque at the center that claims three children hid in the concrete tube on the night of the raid and were murdered with knives when Kerrey's unit discovered them. The family only donated the sewer to the museum following the 40th anniversary of the killings.

On the opposite wall hangs the names of the other civilians who died that night; around the corner is an exhibit on the My Lai Massacre.

“It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public,” the panels read.

That’s not entirely right.

Kerrey received a Bronze Star medal for the Thanh Phong raid from then-President Richard Nixon. He only acknowledged the event had been a massacre when confronted with classified documents and an account from one of his men who said the squad had rounded up and executed the unarmed group of mostly women and children.

Two of Kerrey’s squad told reporters they stabbed an elderly man who stepped out of the first thatched hut they encountered; they either didn't remember or differed on what became of his wife and three grandchildren.

Before these messy narratives spilled into American papers, Kerrey gathered all but one of his fellow squad members to issue a joint statement alleging the victims had been caught in a crossfire between his men and unseen Viet Cong soldiers.

Huynh Ngoc Van, the director of the War Remnants Museum, recalled that when the news broke in Vietnam it inspired a flood of local newspaper accounts of the killings, many of which she considered “exaggerated.”

Van personally accompanied museum researchers to Thanh Phong to investigate the events.

She and members of her team spent years interviewing witnesses before a bereaved family finally agreed to donate the sewer where the three deceased children had hidden, following the 40th anniversary of their deaths.

“We had many Thanh Phongs in southern Vietnam,” said Van, who views the incident as unique only insofar as the events had been investigated and the perpetrators confronted.

Over the years Kerrey has apologized for the deaths (repeatedly and at length) while maintaining that he only ever ordered his men to return fire. In this way, he has done much more than his government, which never apologized for sending Kerrey and a group of other young men to a fishing village in the middle of the night with the name of a single Communist cadre they were supposed to find and kill.

In the flurry that followed Kerrey’s appointment, editorial writers all over the U.S. (including the journalist who initially exposed the massacre) offered unsolicited paths to redemption for Kerrey – some suggested he’d already earned the world’s forgiveness.

Kerrey himself has always bucked direction on how he ought to make amends in Vietnam.

“An apology has always felt insufficient,” he told local media in June. “It is like fish soup without the fish. And so I have tried to help the Vietnamese people when I can. By being a part of the effort to end the trading with the enemy act, normalizing relations, supporting expanded bilateral trade and aid, and especially supporting efforts to improve Vietnam's educational system through the Fulbright program.”

Kerrey did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but he publicly pledged to ignore calls that he resign his new post as late as June, the same month discussion of his appointment largely tapered off.

When asked whether he should take the job, the director of the War Remnants Museum went quiet.

“I thought a lot about this one,” Van said, before noting that Vietnamese culture requires students of all kinds to address senior school administrators by the respected term “teacher".

“This makes me … worried,” she said in English. “I think if Bob feels very sorry for what he’s done for the war he can support the Fulbright with money or he can support Thanh Phong, which is very poor until now.”

'Lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral'

Thanh Phong’s retired village chief Tran Van “Sau” Rung greeted reporters from his bed in a palm leaf extension built onto a wide pink tile home just a short motorbike ride from where the killing occurred.

A woman sewed needlepoint in his living room and children ran in and out of the house as Sau stood and swept his salt and pepper hair over his tall forehead in a manner not unlike Kerrey's.

The old soldier grew up in the low-lying farming area and said he’d had two choices: join the Southern Republic of Vietnam or join the Viet Cong.

“I chose the Viet Cong,” he said.

Tran Van Rung (AKA Sau Rung) was one of the first to arrive to the scene of the raid after the killing stopped.

After sustaining an injury while fighting in the surrounding districts, Sau says he received orders to lay low near Thanh Phong. In his estimation, no revolutionary soldier would have dared to occupy the coastal village itself.

The whole area, he said, had been stripped of vegetation by chemical defoliants and any man of fighting age found along the bare coastline would have immediately been captured or killed.

When government and U.S. patrols encountered a local French teacher here, he said, they carted him off.

“Luckily, they didn't kill him,” Sau said. “They put him in prison for a year; when he returned he took his whole family from the area because it was just too dangerous.”

Sau recalled that Kerrey’s squad had visited the area three times before the massacre.

He can still remember villagers streaming toward him in the final hours of the night in question. He and the other able-bodied men woke to the sounds of children wailing as they fled.

Sau and his men spent two hours finding the civilians safe places to sleep, before heading to surmise the casualties in Thanh Phong.

“I had enough experience in combat to know when the Americans had withdrawn,” he said.

Sau and his men quickly sifted through the corpses, piling dead children next to their mothers and covering the horror with straw mats.

“We didn’t want to stay,” he said. “We knew they’d come back.”

Then Sau found 12-year-old Bui Thi Luom weeping and peppered with shrapnel.

He carried the girl to a clinic in a nearby village, then went to sleep.

The next day, civilians returned to the area to bury the dead.

“Most of the families had lost everyone, so there was no one left to mourn them,” he said. “Besides, it was a war: you were lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral.”

He continues to keep a log containing the names of the victims and their birthdays. Whenever relatives return to the area, he helps inform them about what happened here.

Sau said Kerrey had an open invitation to come drink tea with him any time.

“Of course, I'd accept his apology,” he said. “But why ask me? I think it would be better for him to come and talk to the surviving relatives and, perhaps, offer some money to take care of the tombs of the dead.”

Meeting Bob Kerrey

The road to Bui Thi Luom's house turns to muddy sand long before you arrive – sand that seems to stick to everything for kilometers in any direction.

As the sun set over her small farm, the sole survivor of the massacre limped out onto her lopsided patio, heavyset in cheetah-print pajamas.

Kerrey’s Raiders, as the squad was known, killed Luom’s grandmother, four aunts and ten cousins—all women and children she slept with in an earthen dugout designed to shield them from harm.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times quoted her as saying she’d kill Kerrey and his men if she had the chance.

But time, it seems, had softened those feelings.

“I don't have any bitterness toward Kerrey after all these years,” she told VnExpress International. “I was only 12 then; I’m almost dead now.”

Bui Thi Luom was 12-years old on the night of the raid and is considered the sole survivor of the violence that claimed her grandmother, 10 cousins and four aunts. She's pictured here at her home in Ben Tre Province.

Over the years, she’s explained to visiting reporters that the unit called her and her family out into the night and, after a brief conference, began shooting them.

Luom survived by ducking back into the dugout when the killing began.

“I have scars all over my body, and my knee injury is the largest one,” she said, rolling up a pant leg. “Sometimes I can still feel the pain.”

Sau told VnExpress International Luom grew up in an inland village with her mother.

When she was well enough, she began caring for the graves of those killed in the raid—something she considered her lifelong duty.

She now lives with her husband, niece, sister-in-law and older brother who collectively earn about $450-$650 per month, mostly from fishing.

“We don't have much land here to grow anything,” she said, gesturing to the dark brown soil around the house.

A few years ago, when her family moved here, Luom exhumed the bones of those killed and buried them at a nearby cemetery so she could clean the tombs and provide regular offerings to their spirits.

“I couldn't move the bodies of all the children because there were too many,” she said.

No American, she said, had ever come to say sorry to her. Luom, who first heard Kerrey’s name in 2001, knew very little about the controversy surrounding him or the land sitting idle outside Ho Chi Minh City.

She spoke cautiously, but at the conclusion of her interview she seemed to have made a decision.

“I want to meet Bob Kerrey and talk to him,” she said. “All my relatives are dead and it would be great if he could offer me something.”

Luom saw no reason to prevent him from opening a new university, but she doubted it would benefit her and her family in any way.

“I don't think my kids or grandkids would ever make it there,” she said. “They'll drop out of school around the eighth grade to start working.”

Nhung Nguyen contributed reporting to this story

Related news:

> U.S. veteran Kerrey refuses to step down from Fulbright University Vietnam

> Bob Kerrey speaks out after Vietnamese anger at his role in Fulbright University

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[marketingadvisorvietnam]

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Marketing Advisor đã viết bài trên http://www.ticvietnam.vn/forgetting-thanh-phong/

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Vietnam grapples with the unsavory dilemma of having to close the book on a war crime to open a U.S.-backed school.

The small bus rumbling toward the south-eastern tip of Ben Tre Province was packed with fruit and farmers on a damp morning last October.

On the flat peninsula that stretched out from the road, mechanical paddles churned the brackish shrimp ponds replacing rice paddies in Thanh Phu District – the front line of Vietnam’s modern war with creeping seawater that promises to make life in this tough corner of the Mekong Delta tougher still.

Women checked messages on cell phones wrapped in plastic bags; salt filled the air as the bus neared its final stop, a parking lot where motorbike taximen stood ready to take foreigners on a brief loop of the tragedy that’s become synonymous with the place.

After a 15 minute drive into Thanh Phong, they stopped before a granite stele that stood between a beer distributor and a windowless shop that sold everything from shampoo to ice cream.

The low gate to the monument’s overgrown concrete courtyard sat ajar. Two frangipani trees perfumed the wet air, masking the scent of a lone papaya rotting in the weeds.

Rain had washed away most of the memorial’s gold lettering, but one could still make out the words:

This area was raided by the United States SEAL force led by Bob Kerrey on February 25, 1969. Despite the fact that there had been no shots fired by the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam, Kerrey’s team committed the brutal murder of civilians. They stormed into houses and slit the throats of the people inside, and then gathered others before executing them with machine guns at short range. Twenty-one civilians, including elders, women and children, were massacred barbarously.

The crossroads in Thanh Phong where a stele memorializes the Navy SEAL massacre that occurred on February 25, 1969. The monument specifically disputes Kerrey's claim that his men came under fire and responded by strafing the village before them. Instead, it alleges the unit known as "Kerrey's Raiders" rounded up and executed 21 unarmed civilians. Photos by VnExpress/Calvin Godfrey

Across the street, a group of fishermen sat on a porch, slapping cards on a plastic table, letting ice melt in their beer while the sounds of students at a nearby kindergarten filled the air.

No one knew who Kerrey was – only that he had come back to run a school, or some such.

And then a short man with a high voice named Quang Van Phuc stepped forward and held a hand out at his hip.

“I was this tall that night,” he said, before describing how he'd heard gunfire and screaming and ran into the darkness. “The next day we came back to the village; I remember they had piled all of the bodies and severed flesh on a bed.”

Phuc grew up hearing that the raid had been the fault of a local who left the village years before the massacre and led a Marine unit back to the area, long after Communist fighters had fled inland.

A 'distortion of history'

In May, the U.S. Secretary of State gathered reporters at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and announced Bob Kerrey would return to chair the Board of Trustees at the Fulbright University in Vietnam (FUV).

Three years prior, then-President Truong Tan Sang met personally with his counterpart in the White House and welcomed an initiative to build the school.

The Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee later donated 60 hectares (148 acres) of land in a high-tech industrial zone that sits idle today; even the sunburnt security guards patrolling the odd mix of vacant lots and multi-national microchip factories say they have no idea when work would begin on the university campus.

Those close to the school have declined to speak about the controversy or what it means for FUV.

Billed on its website as “the first private, nonprofit Vietnamese university founded on the principles of accountability, meritocracy, transparency, self-governance, mutual respect, and open inquiry,” FUV has virtually disappeared from public discourse.

Individuals close to the project say they have already “moved on” from the discussion and expect John Kerry, the retiring U.S. Secretary of State, to return to Vietnam with good news before his term ends this month. Others have publicly floated the possibility of welcoming the first class this fall.

Vietnamese officials remained decidedly more reticent, until Tuesday, when Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan published a review of Vietnam's major media stories from the previous year.

In it, he dedicated significant space to what he described as “an unusual campaign for the appointment of Mr. Kerrey at Fulbright University.”

The minister described the effort to promote Kerrey’s appointment as an effort to distort history.

“Kerrey was a war veteran who directed and participated in a barbaric massacre of innocent civilians in Ben Tre Province during the American invasion of our country,” he wrote.

“There have been several articles in the mainstream media that not only sought to legitimize the appointment, but also conflated the tasks of a soldier with war crimes that violate international laws.”

The minister called the media campaign “extremely upsetting” because it had “hurt the spirit of innocent people who died because of such crimes.”

Tuan reminded his readers that Kerrey had confessed to the crimes, which were initially exposed by U.S. media.

“There is even proof of the event on display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.”

Meanwhile, at the museum

The Ho Chi Minh City War Remnants Museum sits about two kilometers from the Rex Hotel and attracts over a million visitors per year, most of them foreign.

On a recent weekday, scores of tourists packed its halls and doorways; several huddled around a round concrete sewer on the second floor, where Bob Kerrey’s name hovered at the center of a blue plastic panel.

The panel says Kerrey and a team of Navy SEALs arrived in the village of Thanh Phong – 48 years ago next month – and murdered three children they found hiding in the sewer with knives.

Tourists at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. A sewer on the second floor of the museum contains a plaque at the center that claims three children hid in the concrete tube on the night of the raid and were murdered with knives when Kerrey's unit discovered them. The family only donated the sewer to the museum following the 40th anniversary of the killings.

On the opposite wall hangs the names of the other civilians who died that night; around the corner is an exhibit on the My Lai Massacre.

“It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public,” the panels read.

That’s not entirely right.

Kerrey received a Bronze Star medal for the Thanh Phong raid from then-President Richard Nixon. He only acknowledged the event had been a massacre when confronted with classified documents and an account from one of his men who said the squad had rounded up and executed the unarmed group of mostly women and children.

Two of Kerrey’s squad told reporters they stabbed an elderly man who stepped out of the first thatched hut they encountered; they either didn't remember or differed on what became of his wife and three grandchildren.

Before these messy narratives spilled into American papers, Kerrey gathered all but one of his fellow squad members to issue a joint statement alleging the victims had been caught in a crossfire between his men and unseen Viet Cong soldiers.

Huynh Ngoc Van, the director of the War Remnants Museum, recalled that when the news broke in Vietnam it inspired a flood of local newspaper accounts of the killings, many of which she considered “exaggerated.”

Van personally accompanied museum researchers to Thanh Phong to investigate the events.

She and members of her team spent years interviewing witnesses before a bereaved family finally agreed to donate the sewer where the three deceased children had hidden, following the 40th anniversary of their deaths.

“We had many Thanh Phongs in southern Vietnam,” said Van, who views the incident as unique only insofar as the events had been investigated and the perpetrators confronted.

Over the years Kerrey has apologized for the deaths (repeatedly and at length) while maintaining that he only ever ordered his men to return fire. In this way, he has done much more than his government, which never apologized for sending Kerrey and a group of other young men to a fishing village in the middle of the night with the name of a single Communist cadre they were supposed to find and kill.

In the flurry that followed Kerrey’s appointment, editorial writers all over the U.S. (including the journalist who initially exposed the massacre) offered unsolicited paths to redemption for Kerrey – some suggested he’d already earned the world’s forgiveness.

Kerrey himself has always bucked direction on how he ought to make amends in Vietnam.

“An apology has always felt insufficient,” he told local media in June. “It is like fish soup without the fish. And so I have tried to help the Vietnamese people when I can. By being a part of the effort to end the trading with the enemy act, normalizing relations, supporting expanded bilateral trade and aid, and especially supporting efforts to improve Vietnam's educational system through the Fulbright program.”

Kerrey did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but he publicly pledged to ignore calls that he resign his new post as late as June, the same month discussion of his appointment largely tapered off.

When asked whether he should take the job, the director of the War Remnants Museum went quiet.

“I thought a lot about this one,” Van said, before noting that Vietnamese culture requires students of all kinds to address senior school administrators by the respected term “teacher".

“This makes me … worried,” she said in English. “I think if Bob feels very sorry for what he’s done for the war he can support the Fulbright with money or he can support Thanh Phong, which is very poor until now.”

'Lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral'

Thanh Phong’s retired village chief Tran Van “Sau” Rung greeted reporters from his bed in a palm leaf extension built onto a wide pink tile home just a short motorbike ride from where the killing occurred.

A woman sewed needlepoint in his living room and children ran in and out of the house as Sau stood and swept his salt and pepper hair over his tall forehead in a manner not unlike Kerrey's.

The old soldier grew up in the low-lying farming area and said he’d had two choices: join the Southern Republic of Vietnam or join the Viet Cong.

“I chose the Viet Cong,” he said.

Tran Van Rung (AKA Sau Rung) was one of the first to arrive to the scene of the raid after the killing stopped.

After sustaining an injury while fighting in the surrounding districts, Sau says he received orders to lay low near Thanh Phong. In his estimation, no revolutionary soldier would have dared to occupy the coastal village itself.

The whole area, he said, had been stripped of vegetation by chemical defoliants and any man of fighting age found along the bare coastline would have immediately been captured or killed.

When government and U.S. patrols encountered a local French teacher here, he said, they carted him off.

“Luckily, they didn't kill him,” Sau said. “They put him in prison for a year; when he returned he took his whole family from the area because it was just too dangerous.”

Sau recalled that Kerrey’s squad had visited the area three times before the massacre.

He can still remember villagers streaming toward him in the final hours of the night in question. He and the other able-bodied men woke to the sounds of children wailing as they fled.

Sau and his men spent two hours finding the civilians safe places to sleep, before heading to surmise the casualties in Thanh Phong.

“I had enough experience in combat to know when the Americans had withdrawn,” he said.

Sau and his men quickly sifted through the corpses, piling dead children next to their mothers and covering the horror with straw mats.

“We didn’t want to stay,” he said. “We knew they’d come back.”

Then Sau found 12-year-old Bui Thi Luom weeping and peppered with shrapnel.

He carried the girl to a clinic in a nearby village, then went to sleep.

The next day, civilians returned to the area to bury the dead.

“Most of the families had lost everyone, so there was no one left to mourn them,” he said. “Besides, it was a war: you were lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral.”

He continues to keep a log containing the names of the victims and their birthdays. Whenever relatives return to the area, he helps inform them about what happened here.

Sau said Kerrey had an open invitation to come drink tea with him any time.

“Of course, I'd accept his apology,” he said. “But why ask me? I think it would be better for him to come and talk to the surviving relatives and, perhaps, offer some money to take care of the tombs of the dead.”

Meeting Bob Kerrey

The road to Bui Thi Luom's house turns to muddy sand long before you arrive – sand that seems to stick to everything for kilometers in any direction.

As the sun set over her small farm, the sole survivor of the massacre limped out onto her lopsided patio, heavyset in cheetah-print pajamas.

Kerrey’s Raiders, as the squad was known, killed Luom’s grandmother, four aunts and ten cousins—all women and children she slept with in an earthen dugout designed to shield them from harm.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times quoted her as saying she’d kill Kerrey and his men if she had the chance.

But time, it seems, had softened those feelings.

“I don't have any bitterness toward Kerrey after all these years,” she told VnExpress International. “I was only 12 then; I’m almost dead now.”

Bui Thi Luom was 12-years old on the night of the raid and is considered the sole survivor of the violence that claimed her grandmother, 10 cousins and four aunts. She's pictured here at her home in Ben Tre Province.

Over the years, she’s explained to visiting reporters that the unit called her and her family out into the night and, after a brief conference, began shooting them.

Luom survived by ducking back into the dugout when the killing began.

“I have scars all over my body, and my knee injury is the largest one,” she said, rolling up a pant leg. “Sometimes I can still feel the pain.”

Sau told VnExpress International Luom grew up in an inland village with her mother.

When she was well enough, she began caring for the graves of those killed in the raid—something she considered her lifelong duty.

She now lives with her husband, niece, sister-in-law and older brother who collectively earn about $450-$650 per month, mostly from fishing.

“We don't have much land here to grow anything,” she said, gesturing to the dark brown soil around the house.

A few years ago, when her family moved here, Luom exhumed the bones of those killed and buried them at a nearby cemetery so she could clean the tombs and provide regular offerings to their spirits.

“I couldn't move the bodies of all the children because there were too many,” she said.

No American, she said, had ever come to say sorry to her. Luom, who first heard Kerrey’s name in 2001, knew very little about the controversy surrounding him or the land sitting idle outside Ho Chi Minh City.

She spoke cautiously, but at the conclusion of her interview she seemed to have made a decision.

“I want to meet Bob Kerrey and talk to him,” she said. “All my relatives are dead and it would be great if he could offer me something.”

Luom saw no reason to prevent him from opening a new university, but she doubted it would benefit her and her family in any way.

“I don't think my kids or grandkids would ever make it there,” she said. “They'll drop out of school around the eighth grade to start working.”

Nhung Nguyen contributed reporting to this story

Related news:

> U.S. veteran Kerrey refuses to step down from Fulbright University Vietnam

> Bob Kerrey speaks out after Vietnamese anger at his role in Fulbright University

Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter

[marketingadvisorvietnam]

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Marketing Advisor đã viết bài trên https://www.ticvietnam.vn/forgetting-thanh-phong/

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Vietnam grapples with the unsavory dilemma of having to close the book on a war crime to open a U.S.-backed school.

The small bus rumbling toward the south-eastern tip of Ben Tre Province was packed with fruit and farmers on a damp morning last October.

On the flat peninsula that stretched out from the road, mechanical paddles churned the brackish shrimp ponds replacing rice paddies in Thanh Phu District – the front line of Vietnam’s modern war with creeping seawater that promises to make life in this tough corner of the Mekong Delta tougher still.

Women checked messages on cell phones wrapped in plastic bags; salt filled the air as the bus neared its final stop, a parking lot where motorbike taximen stood ready to take foreigners on a brief loop of the tragedy that’s become synonymous with the place.

After a 15 minute drive into Thanh Phong, they stopped before a granite stele that stood between a beer distributor and a windowless shop that sold everything from shampoo to ice cream.

The low gate to the monument’s overgrown concrete courtyard sat ajar. Two frangipani trees perfumed the wet air, masking the scent of a lone papaya rotting in the weeds.

Rain had washed away most of the memorial’s gold lettering, but one could still make out the words:

This area was raided by the United States SEAL force led by Bob Kerrey on February 25, 1969. Despite the fact that there had been no shots fired by the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam, Kerrey’s team committed the brutal murder of civilians. They stormed into houses and slit the throats of the people inside, and then gathered others before executing them with machine guns at short range. Twenty-one civilians, including elders, women and children, were massacred barbarously.

The crossroads in Thanh Phong where a stele memorializes the Navy SEAL massacre that occurred on February 25, 1969. The monument specifically disputes Kerrey's claim that his men came under fire and responded by strafing the village before them. Instead, it alleges the unit known as "Kerrey's Raiders" rounded up and executed 21 unarmed civilians. Photos by VnExpress/Calvin Godfrey

Across the street, a group of fishermen sat on a porch, slapping cards on a plastic table, letting ice melt in their beer while the sounds of students at a nearby kindergarten filled the air.

No one knew who Kerrey was – only that he had come back to run a school, or some such.

And then a short man with a high voice named Quang Van Phuc stepped forward and held a hand out at his hip.

“I was this tall that night,” he said, before describing how he'd heard gunfire and screaming and ran into the darkness. “The next day we came back to the village; I remember they had piled all of the bodies and severed flesh on a bed.”

Phuc grew up hearing that the raid had been the fault of a local who left the village years before the massacre and led a Marine unit back to the area, long after Communist fighters had fled inland.

A 'distortion of history'

In May, the U.S. Secretary of State gathered reporters at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and announced Bob Kerrey would return to chair the Board of Trustees at the Fulbright University in Vietnam (FUV).

Three years prior, then-President Truong Tan Sang met personally with his counterpart in the White House and welcomed an initiative to build the school.

The Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee later donated 60 hectares (148 acres) of land in a high-tech industrial zone that sits idle today; even the sunburnt security guards patrolling the odd mix of vacant lots and multi-national microchip factories say they have no idea when work would begin on the university campus.

Those close to the school have declined to speak about the controversy or what it means for FUV.

Billed on its website as “the first private, nonprofit Vietnamese university founded on the principles of accountability, meritocracy, transparency, self-governance, mutual respect, and open inquiry,” FUV has virtually disappeared from public discourse.

Individuals close to the project say they have already “moved on” from the discussion and expect John Kerry, the retiring U.S. Secretary of State, to return to Vietnam with good news before his term ends this month. Others have publicly floated the possibility of welcoming the first class this fall.

Vietnamese officials remained decidedly more reticent, until Tuesday, when Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan published a review of Vietnam's major media stories from the previous year.

In it, he dedicated significant space to what he described as “an unusual campaign for the appointment of Mr. Kerrey at Fulbright University.”

The minister described the effort to promote Kerrey’s appointment as an effort to distort history.

“Kerrey was a war veteran who directed and participated in a barbaric massacre of innocent civilians in Ben Tre Province during the American invasion of our country,” he wrote.

“There have been several articles in the mainstream media that not only sought to legitimize the appointment, but also conflated the tasks of a soldier with war crimes that violate international laws.”

The minister called the media campaign “extremely upsetting” because it had “hurt the spirit of innocent people who died because of such crimes.”

Tuan reminded his readers that Kerrey had confessed to the crimes, which were initially exposed by U.S. media.

“There is even proof of the event on display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.”

Meanwhile, at the museum

The Ho Chi Minh City War Remnants Museum sits about two kilometers from the Rex Hotel and attracts over a million visitors per year, most of them foreign.

On a recent weekday, scores of tourists packed its halls and doorways; several huddled around a round concrete sewer on the second floor, where Bob Kerrey’s name hovered at the center of a blue plastic panel.

The panel says Kerrey and a team of Navy SEALs arrived in the village of Thanh Phong – 48 years ago next month – and murdered three children they found hiding in the sewer with knives.

Tourists at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. A sewer on the second floor of the museum contains a plaque at the center that claims three children hid in the concrete tube on the night of the raid and were murdered with knives when Kerrey's unit discovered them. The family only donated the sewer to the museum following the 40th anniversary of the killings.

On the opposite wall hangs the names of the other civilians who died that night; around the corner is an exhibit on the My Lai Massacre.

“It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public,” the panels read.

That’s not entirely right.

Kerrey received a Bronze Star medal for the Thanh Phong raid from then-President Richard Nixon. He only acknowledged the event had been a massacre when confronted with classified documents and an account from one of his men who said the squad had rounded up and executed the unarmed group of mostly women and children.

Two of Kerrey’s squad told reporters they stabbed an elderly man who stepped out of the first thatched hut they encountered; they either didn't remember or differed on what became of his wife and three grandchildren.

Before these messy narratives spilled into American papers, Kerrey gathered all but one of his fellow squad members to issue a joint statement alleging the victims had been caught in a crossfire between his men and unseen Viet Cong soldiers.

Huynh Ngoc Van, the director of the War Remnants Museum, recalled that when the news broke in Vietnam it inspired a flood of local newspaper accounts of the killings, many of which she considered “exaggerated.”

Van personally accompanied museum researchers to Thanh Phong to investigate the events.

She and members of her team spent years interviewing witnesses before a bereaved family finally agreed to donate the sewer where the three deceased children had hidden, following the 40th anniversary of their deaths.

“We had many Thanh Phongs in southern Vietnam,” said Van, who views the incident as unique only insofar as the events had been investigated and the perpetrators confronted.

Over the years Kerrey has apologized for the deaths (repeatedly and at length) while maintaining that he only ever ordered his men to return fire. In this way, he has done much more than his government, which never apologized for sending Kerrey and a group of other young men to a fishing village in the middle of the night with the name of a single Communist cadre they were supposed to find and kill.

In the flurry that followed Kerrey’s appointment, editorial writers all over the U.S. (including the journalist who initially exposed the massacre) offered unsolicited paths to redemption for Kerrey – some suggested he’d already earned the world’s forgiveness.

Kerrey himself has always bucked direction on how he ought to make amends in Vietnam.

“An apology has always felt insufficient,” he told local media in June. “It is like fish soup without the fish. And so I have tried to help the Vietnamese people when I can. By being a part of the effort to end the trading with the enemy act, normalizing relations, supporting expanded bilateral trade and aid, and especially supporting efforts to improve Vietnam's educational system through the Fulbright program.”

Kerrey did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but he publicly pledged to ignore calls that he resign his new post as late as June, the same month discussion of his appointment largely tapered off.

When asked whether he should take the job, the director of the War Remnants Museum went quiet.

“I thought a lot about this one,” Van said, before noting that Vietnamese culture requires students of all kinds to address senior school administrators by the respected term “teacher".

“This makes me … worried,” she said in English. “I think if Bob feels very sorry for what he’s done for the war he can support the Fulbright with money or he can support Thanh Phong, which is very poor until now.”

'Lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral'

Thanh Phong’s retired village chief Tran Van “Sau” Rung greeted reporters from his bed in a palm leaf extension built onto a wide pink tile home just a short motorbike ride from where the killing occurred.

A woman sewed needlepoint in his living room and children ran in and out of the house as Sau stood and swept his salt and pepper hair over his tall forehead in a manner not unlike Kerrey's.

The old soldier grew up in the low-lying farming area and said he’d had two choices: join the Southern Republic of Vietnam or join the Viet Cong.

“I chose the Viet Cong,” he said.

Tran Van Rung (AKA Sau Rung) was one of the first to arrive to the scene of the raid after the killing stopped.

After sustaining an injury while fighting in the surrounding districts, Sau says he received orders to lay low near Thanh Phong. In his estimation, no revolutionary soldier would have dared to occupy the coastal village itself.

The whole area, he said, had been stripped of vegetation by chemical defoliants and any man of fighting age found along the bare coastline would have immediately been captured or killed.

When government and U.S. patrols encountered a local French teacher here, he said, they carted him off.

“Luckily, they didn't kill him,” Sau said. “They put him in prison for a year; when he returned he took his whole family from the area because it was just too dangerous.”

Sau recalled that Kerrey’s squad had visited the area three times before the massacre.

He can still remember villagers streaming toward him in the final hours of the night in question. He and the other able-bodied men woke to the sounds of children wailing as they fled.

Sau and his men spent two hours finding the civilians safe places to sleep, before heading to surmise the casualties in Thanh Phong.

“I had enough experience in combat to know when the Americans had withdrawn,” he said.

Sau and his men quickly sifted through the corpses, piling dead children next to their mothers and covering the horror with straw mats.

“We didn’t want to stay,” he said. “We knew they’d come back.”

Then Sau found 12-year-old Bui Thi Luom weeping and peppered with shrapnel.

He carried the girl to a clinic in a nearby village, then went to sleep.

The next day, civilians returned to the area to bury the dead.

“Most of the families had lost everyone, so there was no one left to mourn them,” he said. “Besides, it was a war: you were lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral.”

He continues to keep a log containing the names of the victims and their birthdays. Whenever relatives return to the area, he helps inform them about what happened here.

Sau said Kerrey had an open invitation to come drink tea with him any time.

“Of course, I'd accept his apology,” he said. “But why ask me? I think it would be better for him to come and talk to the surviving relatives and, perhaps, offer some money to take care of the tombs of the dead.”

Meeting Bob Kerrey

The road to Bui Thi Luom's house turns to muddy sand long before you arrive – sand that seems to stick to everything for kilometers in any direction.

As the sun set over her small farm, the sole survivor of the massacre limped out onto her lopsided patio, heavyset in cheetah-print pajamas.

Kerrey’s Raiders, as the squad was known, killed Luom’s grandmother, four aunts and ten cousins—all women and children she slept with in an earthen dugout designed to shield them from harm.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times quoted her as saying she’d kill Kerrey and his men if she had the chance.

But time, it seems, had softened those feelings.

“I don't have any bitterness toward Kerrey after all these years,” she told VnExpress International. “I was only 12 then; I’m almost dead now.”

Bui Thi Luom was 12-years old on the night of the raid and is considered the sole survivor of the violence that claimed her grandmother, 10 cousins and four aunts. She's pictured here at her home in Ben Tre Province.

Over the years, she’s explained to visiting reporters that the unit called her and her family out into the night and, after a brief conference, began shooting them.

Luom survived by ducking back into the dugout when the killing began.

“I have scars all over my body, and my knee injury is the largest one,” she said, rolling up a pant leg. “Sometimes I can still feel the pain.”

Sau told VnExpress International Luom grew up in an inland village with her mother.

When she was well enough, she began caring for the graves of those killed in the raid—something she considered her lifelong duty.

She now lives with her husband, niece, sister-in-law and older brother who collectively earn about $450-$650 per month, mostly from fishing.

“We don't have much land here to grow anything,” she said, gesturing to the dark brown soil around the house.

A few years ago, when her family moved here, Luom exhumed the bones of those killed and buried them at a nearby cemetery so she could clean the tombs and provide regular offerings to their spirits.

“I couldn't move the bodies of all the children because there were too many,” she said.

No American, she said, had ever come to say sorry to her. Luom, who first heard Kerrey’s name in 2001, knew very little about the controversy surrounding him or the land sitting idle outside Ho Chi Minh City.

She spoke cautiously, but at the conclusion of her interview she seemed to have made a decision.

“I want to meet Bob Kerrey and talk to him,” she said. “All my relatives are dead and it would be great if he could offer me something.”

Luom saw no reason to prevent him from opening a new university, but she doubted it would benefit her and her family in any way.

“I don't think my kids or grandkids would ever make it there,” she said. “They'll drop out of school around the eighth grade to start working.”

Nhung Nguyen contributed reporting to this story

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> U.S. veteran Kerrey refuses to step down from Fulbright University Vietnam

> Bob Kerrey speaks out after Vietnamese anger at his role in Fulbright University

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