It was over in a few seconds, but those few seconds were on a loop playing through his mind for the rest of his life.
First he saw the kid on the water buffalo, then he saw the kid's gesture then he shot the kid precisely as he was shot.
He seemed to remember the child's round and perfect face falling to the ruined grass, but he knew he wasn't close enough. He seemed to remember a thin figure carrying the child's body away in the night, but he knew there was no way he could have seen it. He did not remember the Viet Cong soldiers kicking at his body and not bothering to waste a bullet.
So he lay with his gut wound communing with the teeming jungle earth and he lay for three days before a medic shoveled him onto a stretcher and they helicoptered him out of there.
The people of a holy roller church in a California marijuana town prayed night and day for him and maybe that's what saved him. Or maybe it was eighteen years of milk and hamburger meat and orange juice and potatoes. Or maybe it was the accident of the genes he had inherited and the antibiotics he was given that enabled him to fight multiple septicemias and win.
It took a while but his grey face turned white and his eyes came out from under his eye brows and the holy rollers sang most joyously and welcomed him home all pale and sickly as he was.
``I killed a child,'' he said, but they would not hear him.
``I killed a child,'' he would say, and they would smile and turn away.
He learned to be a welder and he stopped talking. Except when necessary.
When his daughter was born he loved her more than anything, but as she grew sometimes her graceful gestures brought harshly back another graceful child's light movement of the arm - over there - his daughter said - over there - the child on the water buffalo echoed.
He was not well liked. His silence caused people to fear him, but he didn't care. He loved his wife, his daughter.
When his daughter was ten he went into her bedroom one evening. She was a little resentful. He hadn't knocked.
``I want to tell you something. I killed a child.''
``So tell me now so I can have bad dreams,'' she said. ``I don't want to listen. Go away go away!'' and she pulled the covers over her head and he went away and his daughter was sixteen before she asked him to tell her how and why he had killed a child.
He told her.
``Why dad,'' she said, ``you had to do it. You had to do it. Don't feel bad!''
He looked sadly at his daughter.
He'd hoped she'd understand.
He prayed she never would.