12dz Chapter 946 Backlash (3)
Chapter 946 Backlash (3)
[Time]: Autumn 1956, the first night after the Geneva Conference.
Location: A two-story wooden cabin on the outskirts of Scranton, Texas, USA.
Outside, cold rain pattered against the tarpaulin on the roof.
The kitchen faucet wasn't turned on tightly, and water dripped into the rusty metal sink, the sound particularly clear in the quiet night.
In the living room, the television screen was still lit with static, the lingering glow of the town's only television station after it had ended its broadcast a few hours earlier.
The screen's reflection illuminated Anna Kowalski's aged, wrinkled face.
She sat motionless in the creaking rocking chair, wearing a faded floral apron and hugging her knees.
She sat there from the time it got dark.
The stewed meat on the table had long since gone cold, and a layer of white oil had condensed on top.
That was fresh beef she had specially bought in town today, which she planned to stew for her eldest son, George.
George worked in a nearby mine and came home exhausted every day, but he would always bring her a piece of black bread from the union.
But George didn't come back today.
The youngest son, James, is the "Private First Class Kowalski" in the holographic image.
Last month, she also received a postcard from him from Cuba, which depicted sunshine and beaches, saying that the war would soon be over and he would bring her a beautiful coral.
This afternoon, the town's pastor, accompanied by two FBI agents, knocked on her door.
They handed her a document that said James "gloriously sacrificed his life in a courageous act for freedom and democracy."
They also gave her a neatly folded Stars and Stripes flag and a check for a thousand dollars.
The bespectacled detective told her to be proud of her son.
Just two hours earlier, George's coworker, a young Polish man named Pete, rushed over in a panic, saying that the miners had gone on strike over some "Cuban truth" and were in a standoff with the police.
He shoved a crumpled newspaper into her hands, on which was printed James's terrified, tearful face.
Anna is illiterate.
But she recognized her son.
I also recognize that thing on TV, the one that those big shots play over and over again, where their son turns into something and then turns back, that thing called a "holographic image".
The wooden door was pushed open, letting in a gust of cold wind.
The eldest son, George, stumbled in. He was soaking wet, and had a fist-sized bruise on his forehead that was still bleeding.
He walked with a limp, as if his leg had been broken.
“Mom…” George’s voice was hoarse. He saw his mother sitting blankly in the living room. He wanted to say something, but in the end he just walked over and gently hugged her from behind.
“Those police officers…they hit us with batons.”
“They said we were reds, that we were thugs.”
"Pete...Pete was dragged away by them to protect me. I don't know what they're going to do to Pete."
George's voice was trembling with tears. He was a strong man, almost two meters tall, who could usually lift half a ton of ore by himself in the mine, but at this moment, he looked like a child who had made a mistake.
Anna didn't turn around; she simply reached out her rough, tree-bark-like hands and touched her son's wet hair.
"The meat... is cold."
Her voice was calm, so calm it was frightening.
"I'll go warm it up for you."
She stood up, picked up the plate of already cold stewed meat from the table, and slowly walked towards the kitchen.
He didn't ask his son why he was injured, nor did he ask about James.
George looked at his mother's hunched back, which appeared incredibly thin in the dim light.
Suddenly, he burst into tears, squatted on the ground like a wounded bear, and buried his face in his arms.
The sounds of crying and dripping water from the faucet mingled together.
In the kitchen, Anna Kowalski did not light the stove.
She walked to the greasy window and took a double-barreled shotgun from a nail hanging on the wall.
That was the only legacy her husband, the man who died on the Normandy beaches, left to the family.
She skillfully opened the breech, took out two fully loaded buckshot from the drawer, and with a click, inserted it.
Then she turned and walked out of the kitchen, placing the gun and the neatly folded Stars and Stripes on the living room table.
“George.”
She called out softly.
George looked up, his tear-streaked face filled with confusion.
“It’s dawn.” Anna looked out the window at the dark, rainy night and said slowly, “We’re going to Washington.”
"Go ask those big shots."
“My son James… how he was ‘glorious’.”
---
Location: University of California, Berkeley campus
The auditorium was packed with people.
The air was filled with the mixed smells of tobacco, sweat, and cheap perfume.
On stage, a student wearing a denim jacket and with long, flowing hair was holding a wooden guitar and singing at the top of his lungs.
"They sit in the White House, drinking whiskey / They move you and me on the map / They say it's for freedom, for God / But all I see are brothers' corpses turned into weapons..."
The singing was rough, and the melody was very simple.
But thousands of young students in the audience sang that lyric over and over again, following the rhythm.
"No more war! No more lies!"
Allen Ginsberg, the poet who later became a representative of the "Beat Generation," was among the crowd at that moment.
He didn't greet anyone, but just silently watched the stage and the young, angry, and confused faces below.
Beside him, a philosophy graduate student wearing black-rimmed glasses, who looked refined, rolled up a copy of Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" into a paper tube and used it as a megaphone.
“We’ve been scammed! Utterly scammed!” he shouted to the people around him.
"They used a Hollywood script to make us believe this was a just war! But in reality, it was a dirty, brutal experiment of slaughter fueled by the blood and flesh of our own people!"
"Is so-called democracy just about turning your opponents into monsters, fabricating evidence, and inciting the public to kill them?!"
"This is fascism! It's the Nazis who, after Nuremberg, have been resurrected under the Stars and Stripes!"
Suddenly, the heavy doors of the auditorium were kicked open from the outside.
Dozens of National Guard members armed with riot shields and batons rushed in, followed by several German Shepherds with their tongues lolling out, looking unusually excited.
"Listen up, you people inside! You are holding an illegal assembly! Disperse immediately! Otherwise, we will take coercive measures!" a police officer shouted through a metal megaphone.
"Fascists! Get out!"
"We have freedom of speech!"
The students did not back down; instead, they surged toward the door in even greater anger.
The lead officer sneered and waved to his subordinates.
No warning.
The guards in the first row sprayed high-pressure tear gas directly into the crowd.
Acrid smoke instantly filled the air, and the students screamed, covering their eyes and backing away.
In the chaos, police batons rained down on people.
The girl's cries, the boy's curses, and the muffled thuds of bones breaking blended together.
The philosophy graduate student who had just been shouting "existentialism" was pinned to the ground by two tall policemen. His black-rimmed glasses were shattered under their feet, and blood flowed from the corner of his mouth.
Ginsburg was shoved and knocked to the ground by the crowd. His head hit a chair leg, and his vision went black for a moment.
In his last moments before losing consciousness, he saw the singer holding a guitar being dragged off the stage, and the wooden guitar being smashed to pieces by a policeman with a baton.
The off-key singing still echoed in the auditorium.
---
Location: Outside the White House, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.
I don’t know when the rain stopped.
The clouds hung low, and the air was damp and cold, like a chilly towel.
People have been gathering here since yesterday.
At first, there were only a few dozen people, mostly elderly people with white hair and some middle-aged women wearing black mourning clothes.
They stood silently, holding up photos of their children.
But now, the crowd has become a sea.
Families of fallen soldiers, anti-war students, union leaders injured by police, organizers of the Black civil rights movement, and even some veterans with a conscience, all came from all over the country. They held up all sorts of signs.
"Give me back my son!"
What is the truth about war?
"We are not monsters!"
"Dulles resign! Defense Secretary resign!"
Anna Kowalski stood at the very front of the crowd.
The double-barreled shotgun lay at her feet, wrapped in a gray blanket.
Beside her were dozens of mothers from miner families who had also come from Texas.
They supported each other, their faces devoid of tears, displaying only a chilling calm born of being driven to the brink of despair.
Martin Luther King Jr. also came.
He didn't stand at the front; instead, he and his companions maintained order on the periphery of the crowd, distributing bread and water.
He said to an emotional young Black man:
"Calm down, child. Violence won't solve anything."
“We stand here today not to create more hatred, but to seek an answer.”
"The answer? Dr. Kim, they turned our brothers into cannibalistic monsters! Now you want us to reason with them?"
The young man asked, puzzled.
"Yes, because truth is our only weapon."
Jin gazed at the white building in the distance, his eyes deep and thoughtful.
"When they can no longer even cover up their sins with lies, their end is near."
Three rows of fully armed National Guard soldiers stood in front of the White House's iron fence.
They wore gas masks, obscuring their facial expressions, and the bayonets on their M1 rifles gleamed coldly in the gloomy sky.
An armored vehicle equipped with a loudspeaker slowly drove out of the White House gates.
A hoarse voice came from the loudspeaker:
"...Final warning! Your actions have seriously threatened national security!"
"According to the Emergency Decree, you have fifteen minutes to disperse. After fifteen minutes, we will take all necessary measures to clear the square..."
The warning echoed across the empty square, but no one moved.
Anna Kowalski slowly bent down and picked up the hunting rifle wrapped in a blanket at her feet.
She turned her head and gave a smile that was more painful than crying to the other mothers around her who had also lost their children.
"They...don't want to give us answers."
"That……"
She untied the blanket, revealing the dark, cold barrel of the double-barreled shotgun.
"...Let's go ask for it ourselves."