---
It's sad.
We are here to simply exist. Not one of us is innocent.
My name is Nguyen Binh. I am the son of a Nazi scientist and a Vietnamese prostitute. I have no shame in my parentage, for I am nothing like them. They were both the scum of the earth, one very accepting of that justice while the other denied it at every turn until it eventually killed them both.
I have killed many people. It is not something I am proud of. I do not flaunt my "victories" like Himmler or Mengele. It is an abominable thing to even remember. I killed boys in the war for my country. Do you think I enjoy thinking of their faces? Do you think I fondly regard the moment where I closed their eyes for the last time, and wept upon their chests? There is nothing about what I have done that I enjoyed, for I am not like my father.
---
I remember my first tour of duty into the jungles. I was thirteen, and I still had my face.
---
August 17th, 1960
"Nguyen," the sergeant whispered. The air, thick with moisture from the rainy season, almost choked me. I had never been this far into the foliage before.
"The South Vietnamese dogs are over the ridge. You know what to do,"
I hated this. Nothing made me sicker than what came next. The officer's cap danced in my crosshairs. One squeeze of the trigger, and it became a red mist. Disarray followed. Bullets soared past my head, and I dove down for cover, screaming and crying. The sergeant came back to me, his face covered in blood.
"Get up," he grabbed me by the arm and pulled, throwing me into a foxhole with a heavy machinegun straddled on the edge. I stopped about midway down into the center. A corpse looked back up at me. The sergeant didn't care.
"Start shooting!"
More crimson puffs. I tried to pretend they were something else, but the shouting didn't stop.
The noise didn't stop for another fifteen years.
---
1965
"Who is this?" Dr. Johann Straub demanded to know, lifting the tarp away from the body.
"He is a soldier from the front lines of the conflict. The Americans started using napalm today. This is one of the burned victims, the only one of his unit to survive - however little of him remains,"
Dr. Straub grunted, gesturing the subject to be taken into the operating room.
"He will have to do. This is our last chance, after all,"
Ever since the fallout of the second World War, Dr. Straub and his associates were working feverishly to develop weapons that would change the outcome of every war yet to come. Perhaps in an attempt to reignite the Nazi party, Dr. Straub introduced the super soldier program in early 1947. He was staunchly denied, as the process claimed the lives of too many test subjects. Now, as the only German still alive in the secret headquarters of the dying National Socialist front, Straub was free to accomplish anything he wanted to.
Unbeknownst to him, the man brought to him for the project already knew of his identity.
---
Three months later...
"A pity about the face and upper torso. Most of his skin was destroyed in the napalm blast, but his anatomy was salvageable. He will never be an Aryan citizen, but at least he survived. Now, dispose of him. I have no further use for a dirty yellow man like that,"
Nguyen stirred in his deep, coma-like slumber. The pain numbed his mind to the point where he did not feel what had happened to him for the past eighty days.
Until now.
His muscles spasmed against their restraints of both physical and mental variety. Stress accumulated from unused portions of his body avalanched into capital soreness and a cacophony of agonizing threats to his nervous system. His brain went into overdrive, analyzing the danger present until he exploded from the makeshift holding cell - which, to him, was little more than a coffin. He made a lunging grab for his captor's throat, nearly crushing it in his intensity.
"U-Unhand me, swine!" the doctor mumbled in gasps.
"F...Father?" the monstrous creature relaxed his grip for a brief second.
Dr. Straub, perhaps in a movement to further control his creation, accepted this broken reply. "Yes, my boy. I am your father,"
Nguyen's eyes flashed in another bout of anger. He was confused, but not by pretend familial ties.
Dr. Straub and the original Nazi party died that day, but what they left behind would be put to a greater use than their genocidal fetishes would allow.
---
Throughout the remainder of the Vietnam War, Nguyen Binh posed a threat of a colossal variety, using his lifetime of guerrilla experience to his advantage as he maneuvered alongside the Vietcong in a campaign against the Americans that would cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides. Nguyen, already humbled by the atrocities of war, was never once numbed to them.
Even though he wore the swastika, he wore it as a symbol of Kali - the Buddhist god of spiritual freedom, and magic. The rules of genocide and white supremacy practiced by the Nazis had no lasting effect on Nguyen, for he had no use for such intolerance and stupidity. After each and every battle, he would wander the killing fields, not to loot, but to observe. The men he killed from America were mostly just boys. He wondered what their lives were like across the world. He always heard of the Land of the Free, but did that extend to teenagers fighting and dying for a war they did not belong in? Was that the extent of the freedom of America? To interfere in wars they had no part in?
This is mostly the reason behind Nguyen's various encounters with the Star Spangled Super Soldier, Allegiance. They formed a vicious rivalry, each one commanding an eerily similar experience in the green hell.
Soon, the war came to an end as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. The Chinese and Russians were adequately commended for their efforts in helping the Communist effort spread to Indochina.
---
2014
"The President of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has been shot. This is a horrific day for our people, and we must stay strong in the face of this atrocity."
The vacuum of power left behind did not remain terribly undersized. But if smaller men would fill in the shoes of already pitiful politicians, the world would never adapt to the dangerous road ahead. Nguyen Binh, a war veteran, would rise to power in this short amount of time. The people would recognize him from his campaigns in defending his country against the Americans as well as working to unify it through Communism. The base word of the political science remained in community.
It was basic human understanding to apply it to those that needed it. Saigon, Vietnam's only advanced city - and not by much, according to the standards set by the remainder of the planet - held its first national assembly for the new president, who held a banquet in honor of his predecessor. There were people who were worried that his advanced age and his intense scars would interfere with his stature and bold words, but Nguyen had evolved past all of such useless concerns.
He stood, as strong as ever, in front of the crowd, and raised his glass.
"Now, and forever..."
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