He kept staring at yet another orange sun drowning amidst distant screams and cries. Japan, the land of rising sun. But who cared if the sun rose or not anymore. All they cared for was the morning jet that came along; either to drop bombs or supplies. '3rd July. Kim's turn today, right?' he could hear his mother's conversation in the background. 'Ah there's his plane, soaring behind Konrad's. Such men they are.' He could feel his father's disappointed gaze tear into his profile from the back. Yoshi San-his father- the liveliest school principal in town. The biggest preacher of 'All Lives Matter'. He couldn't help pitying at what he had been reduced to. To convince himself into sending his own beloved son into the face of death. From 'All Lives Matter' to 'Boys as weapons'. That's how incredibly ugly war could be.
'Boys as weapons'. 'Boys as drone replacements'. All he had found himself worth since the age of nine was a war tool. Enemies had technology. Drone technology. And Japan had people. In the unwritten War Legislation, no one questioned why boys above nine must be trained to fly planes-real fighter planes-into the hearts of enemy camps. Humans called it victory. Defeat of humanity at the hands of humanity was considered victory. Wow. Niho had grown up loathing this absurd concept of self-destruction. His green eyes sparkled with the vast potential he believed humanity possessed, which lay wasted in a plane's cockpit beneath a destroyed base camp somewhere in America. "I won't" was his brief reply to the order concealed in the tone of a proposal made by his father to send him crashing into death.
He shook his head at the first star peeping shyly through the blanket of darkness. Niho knew the rest were too innocent to witness such display of destruction in the beautiful world beneath. Alarm noise muffled his parents' taunts. He would laugh at the irony of these alarms announcing the onset of another bombing. Of sharpening in his own face, the knife of a lamb's slaughter; asking it to flee off, to nowhere at all. Niho reacted subconsciously by running off into the shelter camp, yet another gift of war; of self-destruction.
