81: Chapter 82 You still have the nerve to ask for food?

The lingering excitement of the sports meet had not yet fully dissipated,

When the camp returned to its usual routine.

Following the policies of their superiors, the administrators

Arranged for the prisoners of war to do what work they could—growing vegetables, repairing barracks, and weaving straw sandals.

Most people cooperated.

Duncan had already tilled his vegetable patch for the second time.

Tony's foot injury was seventy to eighty percent healed.

Every day he carried firewood and washed dishes, not saying much.

But there were always those who wouldn't stay quiet.

Sergeant Harvey, from an artillery battery, captured at Chipyong-ni.

This man's presence in the camp relied entirely on his mouth—lying on his bunk from morning till night, his mouth never stopped.

"Cornbread. Cornbread again."

Harvey broke apart the coarse grain cornbread distributed by the administrator,

Glanced at the grayish-yellow texture inside, slammed it onto the ground, and stepped on it.

"In Texas, we feed this stuff to pigs, and even the pigs wouldn't damn well touch it."

He leaned against the doorframe, legs crossed, picking his teeth with a dirty fingernail. Several American veterans nearby joined in the jeering.

"I want steak. I want coffee. I want goddamn bacon and fried eggs."

The administrator stood three paces away, listening as the Translator finished relaying this, and said nothing.

A cadre in his forties with an old scar on his left cheek, his expression didn't change.

He turned and walked away.

Jack sat in the corner of the mess hall, holding his chopsticks without moving.

The bamboo chopsticks were crudely shaved, the burrs pricking his palm with a steady ache.

He looked at Harvey for three seconds.

Then he stood up.

"Come with me."

Before Harvey could react, Jack had already grabbed him by the collar.

The 180-pound former Infantryman dragged the 160-pound artilleryman out of the mess hall with one hand, turned a corner, and headed to the kitchen.

The kitchen had no door, just a mud wall to block the wind.

Three Volunteer Army cooks were squatting by the base of the wall eating.

Their enamel bowls were chipped, and their chopsticks were just shaved twigs.

The contents of their bowls were even worse than the cornbread—bran, wild vegetable roots, and a little coarse grain flour,

Stirred into a grayish-green mush where even a grain of salt was hard to find.

Jack shoved Harvey's face toward those three bowls.

"Do you see?"

His voice was kept very low, but the live stream's audio system transmitted every vibration of his breath.

"The people guarding you eat worse than you do."

Harvey's face froze.

The three cooks looked up at them, said nothing, and lowered their heads to continue eating.

One of them, the youngest, scraped the bottom of his bowl three times and was still scraping, the tips of his chopsticks worn down to white wood.

The bullet chat went dead for five seconds.

It wasn't a lag. No one was typing.

Then a single comment emerged from the bottom, the font small, but it was voted to the top—

"The guards eat mush, the prisoners eat cornbread. Whose prison is this, anyway?"

Harvey wrenched himself free from Jack's grip, backed up two steps, his lips trembling.

"At least... at least we in the United States don't play these tricks of mistreating prisoners of war—"

He didn't finish his sentence.

The flap of the medical tent was pulled open from the inside.

Dai Dai walked out.

In her hand, she held a glass jar, sealed, about the size of a fist.

The jar was crawling with black things—ants, dense and crowded,

Climbing along the glass walls, their tiny legs making a faint rustling sound against the interior.

The tent flap wasn't fully closed, and the scent of iodophor wafted out.

Dai Dai placed the jar on the table.

She said,

"These were recovered from the casings dropped by your planes."

Harvey's pupils constricted.

"What do you mean?"

Dai Dai's voice wasn't loud. Every word was enunciated clearly.

"Your Air Force dropped insect bombs carrying Yersinia pestis and Vibrio cholerae on the front lines. Ants, fleas, flies, packed in ceramic shells and dropped from B-29s."

She paused for two seconds.

"These ants are biological weapons of your United States of America! A serious violation of international conventions!"

The mess hall was so quiet one could hear the ants' feet scratching against the glass.

Harvey's face went from white to red, then from red to purple.

"Nonsense!"

He twisted the lid off the jar.

Jack took half a step forward—

Dai Dai raised her hand, stopping him.

Harvey grabbed a handful of ants and shoved them into his mouth.

He chewed twice and swallowed.

A few ants crawled out from the corner of his mouth, and he wiped them away with the back of his hand.

"See?" He glared at Dai Dai, bits of insect legs stuck to the corner of his mouth,

"Ants can be poisonous? Your communist propaganda won't fool me!"

Dai Dai looked at him.

She didn't stop him.

Jack looked at him.

He didn't stop him.

A young soldier nearby tried to come forward to take the jar, but the administrator held him back with a gesture.

Three days later.

Harvey squatted in the latrine until his legs were numb.

On the first day, he had diarrhea.

On the second day, it was like water.

By the third day, when he emerged from the latrine door,

His complexion was the same color as the moss at the edge of the camp,

His belt was wrapped twice around his waist, and his hands shook so much he couldn't do up his buttons.

The camp doctor prepared medicine for him.

His bedding was changed three times.

The other prisoners stood by their bunks and watched him being helped back, each of them turning their faces away.

The jar of ants still sat on the mess hall table.

No one touched it again.

Su Yun didn't do much in the background.

He simply pushed a synchronized declassified file to the bottom right corner of the global live stream—

A laboratory report from the U.S. Army's 406th Medical General Laboratory, with clear numbering and complete seals.

X-ray photos of ceramic bomb shell fragments.

Pathological slides from three Korean civilians: pneumonic plague, cholera, and anthrax.

The words "civilized nation" were simultaneously put in quotation marks by the global bullet chat.

Su Yun stared at the emotion panel in the background. "Anger" rose by four percentage points. "Awakening" rose by six.

He took a sip of his cold coffee, his expression neutral.

—

That night, Tony tossed and turned, wrapped in his military blanket.

There was movement in the next bunk. Duncan had somehow found a cigarette butt, lit it, took a puff, and handed it over.

The two sat in the darkness. The spark of the cigarette butt flickered, illuminating Duncan's profile, which was missing its front teeth.

A long time passed.

Duncan spoke first.

"The day I was captured at Goyang, a Chinese soldier pulled me out of a mud pit."

He took a puff of the cigarette and exhaled, the grayish-white smoke dissipating into the dark.

"At the time, I thought he was protecting a valuable prisoner."

The cigarette spark dimmed again.

"Now, I'm not so sure."

Tony took the cigarette butt and had one last puff. The filter burned his lips, but he didn't pull back, instead crushing the butt out against the sole of his shoe.

"Duncan."

"Yeah?"

"Tell me... what are they actually after?"

There was no answer in the dark.

But during morning exercises the next day, Tony noticed Duncan standing by the vegetable patch.

Clutching a hoe, he was learning how to till the soil from a young Chinese soldier.

He held the hoe backward, with the blade facing up. The young soldier helped him turn it around with a grin. They couldn't understand each other's language, so they relied entirely on gestures.

Duncan took his first swing with the hoe, a clod of dirt flipped over, and an earthworm crawled out.

He stared at that earthworm for several seconds.

Then he knelt down, carefully picked it up, and put it back into the soil.

Tony watched this scene and said nothing. He looked down at his own worn-out military boots, which were so torn his toes were showing.

Before dinner, something extra appeared on his bunk.

A pair of straw sandals. They were crudely woven but sturdy, with a layer of old tire rubber for soles.

A note was pinned beside them, the handwriting shaky and the English grammar a mess, but the meaning was clear—

"Your shoe broken. This for you. ——POW-0312 Duncan"

Tony stood there for a long time, clutching the note.

The British man he had captured on the battlefield at Goyang was weaving straw sandals for him.