[Matt Q]

Hi Jim,

This held my interest throughout. I say it's well worth working on some more. My reading here is that the boy in question has informed on his uncle in revenge for being beaten by him for stealing fish and because his mother is now sleeping with him.

I don't quite understand why the soldiers check the officers are gone before they shoot the village elders. Because the officers would have stopped them doing this? But then, the village elders' deaths would have been hard to cover up. I'd wondered if they were checking that the officers were gone before they revealed the woman was alive and contrary to orders had not (yet) been killed. She will, I presume, be killed later, after she's been raped, and then the officers would be none the wiser. But it does read like they are making sure the officers are gone before they kill the elders. And the children don't want to witnesses, so presumably the soldiers are doing something they shouldn't here and are taking a significant risk here -- a risk big enough that witnesses might be in danger of being silenced. But whether it's the rape of the woman (perhaps they won't kill her afterwards and that's what they might want to cover up?) or the killing of the elders, is unclear to me. I'd prefer to clearer on this.

The penultimate paragraph tells us: "The children always tried to be strong like they were taught, and to never behave foolishly like jabbering monkeys", but this is contradicted in the next paragraph where, "The boy stuck his arm into a patch of young bamboo spreading near the water well and, shouting for help, frantically struck the thick growth with his stick while pretending he was being dragged into the mother jungle". Is this for effect? I don't understand what.

At the close, I don't understand why the girl says that "only a stupid boy would sell fish to the army cook". Clearly this is what the boy has done with the fish he stole from his uncle, but are we supposed to know why that's stupid? Is the implication that the boy selling the uncle's fish has got the uncle killed. Maybe the fish were bad? I'd assumed, as above, the boy had gotten his uncle killed in revenge the beating (and the uncle sleeping with his mother).

"The soldiers steered the elders between the dead men and tied them with their torsos in line with the splintered sections of the newly empty posts." -- I don't understand this sentence. I can't picture it. I don't think I'm given enough information. Where are they elders tied? To the posts? But if the posts have been shattered, how does that work. Or are they tied elsewhere, but "in line" with the posts? In which case, where are they tied?

I'd lose the final 's' from "farm workers’s"

Craftwise, I'd say there's a fair bit of scope for condensing this: information that's given twice, has already been implied etc.

For example, in the first paragraph, do you need the first sentence? The second sentence seems to imply everything in the first. If you explain that the three men are tied to the posts do you need to also say the woman is? So this could be:

The soldiers let the boy and a few other children from the village stand nearby to watch the executions. The soldiers had been told to make the children go away, but they knew the children would watch anyway from the cover of the jungle. After the bullets exploded, the [three] male prisoners bound to three of the posts hung limply dead against their ropes while blood spread across their shirts. The woman tied to the fourth post was still standing [and] physically unscathed. She began weeping and shaking even though she was blindfolded and unable to see her fallen companions.

Note that in the fourth para you again say that the woman is blindfolded. And in the second para, for example, do you need to mention that only one of the two was blindfolded, when in the third para you'll explain that one of them refused a blindfold? And so on.

best,

Matt