Are we only targets?

I felt disgust with rage.  While the soldiers sang we continued shouting.  "The people will bring you to trial!  The people will send you to the gallows!"

Suddenly the soldiers stopped singing and began applauding.  A moment later the stood and scattered to the sides of the road.  Then we saw the reason why.  Two rows of tanks were bearing down on us, rumbling forward from Tiananmen Square with awesome power, seemingly unstoppable.

We stared, aghast.  No one moved.  No one stood up or ran away.  Then someone began singing "The Internationale" again, and we took it up.  

Some students in the front row stretched themselves flat on the pavement. "Let our blood awaken China's democracy!" they cried.  We sang even louder, our voices rising in magnificent crescendo.  The tanks rolled inexorably forward.  We thought the tanks wouldn't stop, couldn't stop.  Their momentum would certainly carry them forward to crush us all.

But they did stop, not six yards away.  Some soldiers in the tanks threw something out at us.  Were they bombs?  Grenades?  We kept on singing.

The objects tumbled to the ground harmlessly.  They were small aluminum canisters.  They looked like cans of soda pop.  We started at them without comprehension.  A moment later a thick yellow gas began seeping out of the cans.  Noxious fumes swirled and rose with the wind.  Whoever inhaled it began coughing and choking.

I felt completely dismayed.  Somehow we could face bullets and tanks without fear, but this insidious cloud seemed more horrible than death.  In the crowd someone shouted, "Let's not be stupid!  Run!"

Everyone scattered, wheezing and coughing, trying to walk or crawl to the sides of the street.  Yefu leapt forward, however, and began  taking photographs of the tanks.  I yelled at him to come back, but another canister had fallen near my feet and it began releasing its fumes.  I felt overcome with dizziness.  My chest hurt.  The world went black.

I came to, lying where I had fallen.  A young girl, a university student probably, was squeezing drops of water onto my face from a soaked gauze mask.  As soon as she saw my eyes open she half-carried me to the edge of the street.

A group of young men lay there, taking turns putting their faces to the opening of a sewer, its manhole cover removed.  They breathed deeply of the awful stench to recover from the poisonous tear gas.  I tried it for a while and, in spite of the bad smell, I began to feel much better.

Standing up, I looked around for Yefu.  I was afraid something terrible had happened to him.  I started to run westward along Chang'an, away from the Square.  Many others were running that way too.  Ahead of us the tanks rumbled west as well, the soldiers still tossing out canister of gas.  I felt nearly asphyxiated, but forced myself to keep moving.

Many people tried to flee into the Zhongnanhai government compound, whose entrance faced Chang'an.  I followed this group, but we were beaten back by the guards.  When I reached the next interesection, at Fuyou street, I saw what had happened to those who had run ahead of the tanks instead of escaping to the sides of the road.

On the far side of the intersection stood a crowd of people.  On this side was the line of tanks, which had stopped and was now slowly rumbling in reverse, drawing back from the intersection.  In the road lay a massive pile of bodies.  Corpses lay sandwiched between the bicycles and pavement covered with blood and bearing the marks of tank tracks.

One man's skull had been crushed, his brains scattered across the pavement.  A bespectacled student lay impaled on the handlebar of a bicycle.  Another corpse was so crushed that only a patch of brightly colored skirt showed that a young girl had died. Next to the bodies lay a red school banner, soaked a deeper red with blood.

From the mangled bodies near me I heard a groan.  It was a young man, still alive.  He lay under several other bodies, only his head and upper torso visible.  All around the intersection people were loading the injured onto flat-bed tricycles.  One man came my way with a tricycle, so I reached down to pull the injured man out.  In a low, guttural voice he moaned, "My legs...oh, my legs..."

I looked down.  His legs were gone, both cut off by the tank that had rolled over him.  Only blood remained, gushing out.

Just then Yefu appeared at my side.  I felt relieved to see him, but my thoughts were so muddled that I couldn't say a word to him.  He was still taking pictures.  He took pictures of the young man, and then we began pushing the tricycle in the direction of the hospital.

Looking around I saw the scenes I will never forget.  Here was the body of a student, a plastic bag protruding from his pocket.  The bag had held a loaf of bread.  Was this that student's last supper?  The remains of the loaf had been crushed to a fine powder of crumbs by the rolling tanks.

Two old women knelt on the ground, beating the palms of their hands against the pavement and rocking back and forth.  They were weeping loudly, crying out; "Our students!  Our children!"  It was the most grievous sound I ever heard.

The loudspeakers that lined the street suddenly blared to life. "A counter-revolutionary rebellion has occurred...Some thugs and hooligans have violated martial law...Soldiers of the People's Liberation Army have been brutally killed while protecting our country..."

The pale sun had risen higher.  The cloud of smoke was dissipating.  The once-beautiful street was harshly illuminated.  All the bloodstain, shell cases, and marks of tank treads were laid bare.  It was not a warm, yellow sunlight, but a cold, white glare, the Chinese color of mourning.

In the empty street, holding a fellow student who had just died, I waited for my tears to come.  I waited, but none came, none came at all.