Alexander Bult

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“Shogo looked at Shuya and Noriko. "The winner's forced to transfer to another school where he or she is ordered not to mention the game and is instructed instead to lead a normal life. That's all."

Shuya felt his chest well up inside and his face froze. He stared at Shogo and realized that Noriko was holding her breath.

Shogo said, "I was a student in Third Year Class C, Second District, Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture." He added, "I survived the Program held in Hyogo Prefecture last year.”
― Koushun Takami, Battle Royale

tags: battle-royale, game, shogo

26 likes

“The April forced ‘Resettlement’ of the villages of Long Phuoc, and Long Tan inflamed the already seething hatred of foreigners by the local Vietnamese people. They had only recently removed the French yoke after almost a century of cruel and repressive French rule. Now here were the Americans and their allies who in the Vietnamese eyes were continuing to do as the French had done before them. Into this sort of environment of hate, the Australian soldiers were sent to complete what the Americans had started.”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

tags: educational, entertaining, factual, indochina-war, insightful, political-dictatorship, united, unity, unrest, warring

191 likes

“capitaine,”
― Jim Fergus, The Vengeance of Mothers: The Journals of Margaret Kelly & Molly McGill

22 likes

“Longstreet took a deep breath. In the winter the fever had come to Richmond. In a week they were dead. All within a week, all three. He saw the sweet faces: moment of enormous pain. The thing had pushed him out of his mind, insane, but no one knew it. He had not thought God would do a thing like that...she kept standing in the door: the boy is dead. And he could not even help her, could say nothing, could not move, could not even take her into his arms. Nothing to give. One strength he did not have. Oh God: my boy is dead.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

10 likes

“Thickly forested regions of Phuoc Tuy including the Rung Sat swamps and farms considered to be controlled by the Vietcong, were regularly sprayed by defoliants including “Agent Orange” using aircraft. This was both an inhumane and unsuccessful strategy which only destroyed enough food to feed 245,000 Vietnamese people for a year resulting in a propaganda gift to the Vietcong. (Ham, 2007). Given that defoliation did not uncover the enemy, who kept on fighting from jungle, caves and tunnels, the whole defoliation programme must be considered a failure. Given also, that birth defects and other health problems associated with defoliants can be directly blamed upon “Agent Orange”, it stands to reason that the allies in the Second Indochina War who sprayed it upon villages and farms can in fact be said to be, “Guilty of War Crimes!”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy