POWs

POW's

We all read in the newspaper, the news that the Atalaks had attempted once again to invade our country. I say "once again" because they've tried it four times before in the last 90-some years, and each time we've been able to defend against them. When will they ever learn?

My name is Cilla. I'm an eighteen year old girl, and in my first year at the university. Like all citizens of Graling, I'm enrolled in the Ready Reserve. I did my eight weeks of basic military training last summer. But I had not expected to be called to duty, until today when I received my notice to report.

I immediately went home, changed into my khaki shirt and shorts, grabbed my rucksack and canteen and some snacks, and reported for duty at the armory. The place was packed with young girls about my age, several hundred of us. We were all very curious about what was going on, since ordinarily all the men would be called first, and then the girls to fill gaps in the support and logistics units. Instead they were calling up girls first, it seemed.

I had never been assigned to a unit, so that was the first thing that happened. There were 20 of us in the platoon, plus a lieutenant and two sergeants -- all females. We immediately marched to the railroad station and embarked for the front -- or at least we assumed that was where we were going, since nobody told us.

Two hours later the train stopped in a small town and we assembled along the tracks. Still no idea what was going on, but we started marching off, each platoon in lines of two, for some unknown destination.

During this march I thought about the war, and the Atalaks, and why they were always to hostile toward us. It seems so stupid, really. Their own country is a perfectly fine country, with good soil and water and climate. What do they want with our country? But they do. On their maps, Graling doesn't even exist; it's just another province of Atalak which honor requires that they conquer and absorb. What would happen to us, if they succeeded? If you pay attention to their propaganda, we'd all be killed or enslaved.

Besides being very warlike, the Atalaks are pretty stupid, too. They must be, otherwise wouldn't they figure out that we're not going to roll over and give up? There's only four passes through the mountains, and no other way for them to attack. So each time they attack, they try a different pass. But we've had nearly a century to build defenses, so ten or twenty thousand men can block an attack by two hundred thousand. Also, we have roads and railroads that run parallel to the mountains, so soldiers can be moved quickly if they're needed. And we have observers stationed on the mountain peaks, so the Atalaks can't mass an army without us finding out.

Yet they still try. The last time was 22 years ago. An Atalak army of about 200 thousand soldiers tried to charge through the north pass, and ran into our defenses. Some of them broke through and burned some villages, before they were rounded up and killed. The main force, however, never got past our first line of defense, and after two months they retreated.

As we marched along, we passed several small army camps, and gradually found out what was happening. It seems as though our intelligence service learned that the Atalaks were planning a new invasion, so it planted some false information -- that three of the passes had been reinforced while the defenses of the fourth had fallen into disrepair. The Atalaks took the bait, and threw their entire army, including reserves, at the fourth pass. Our army "closed the door" behind them, and we captured about 300 thousand Atalak POWs! Woo hoo!

As we marched over a hill, we finally saw at least some of the evidence of this victory. The valley seemed filled with people, and as we got closer we saw that most of them were captured Atalak soldiers. And as we got even closer, we saw that the enemy soldiers had been stripped of their uniforms -- they were all completely naked, head to toe!

The road we were on gradually merged with the road that some of them were being moved along. That's when we saw how the prisoners were being controlled -- their hands were cuffed behind their backs, they had metal collars around their necks, and they were chained together from collar to collar. They seemed to be chained together in groups of about 100, and there were lines of them extending back down the road as far as we could see. There were others spread out on the hillside, covering nearly the entire hillside, but the way they were all chained together, there wasn't any way they could try to escape.

Up ahead, in the direction we were headed, there were lots of tents. They seemed to be our destination, which was good because I for one was thirsty and tired of the long march. Finally we reached the tents and fell out for some water and a rest. Then each platoon was directed to one of the many tents.

The day had been full of surprises, and there were more to come. There were twenty tables set up in two rows, each about three feet wide and four feet long. Then I noticed that the table legs were actually posts sunk into the ground, so whatever purpose was intended for these tables, they were certainly quite sturdy.

That was when the Lieutenant told us what was going on. Yes, the entire Atalak army had been captured. Our diplomats were in talks with theirs, concerning the terms of a cease fire and repatriation of prisoners. But we were going to teach the Atalaks a lesson which hopefully they would never forget.

At that point two Atalak prisoners were brought in. They had been gagged and blindfolded, and each was being held firmly by two female guards, who were a lot bigger and stronger than me. One prisoner looked to be about 25, the other was real young, maybe 16 or 17. They were led to the first two tables. Each was pushed face-down on the table. A wide leather strap attached on one side was flipped over the prisoner's lower back and cinched down on the other side. Then each leg was stretched out to the side and strapped to a table leg. The prisoners tried to struggle, but they were immobilized except for their heads and shoulders.

Now I'd seen lots of naked boys in my life. I do have younger brothers, and then of course I've been swimming at the lake. So I was familiar with the male genitalia. Already today I'd seen thousands of naked prisoners, with their penises and ballsacks. It was still strange, however, to have these two tied down on these tables in front of us, with their legs spread apart and their ballsacks hanging down. They looked so�. so vulnerable.

The Lieutenant said something to one of the sergeants, and it was then that I noticed she was holding some strange tool in her hand. Actually it was strapped to her right forearm, with a claw-like appendage and something like a trigger. In her other hand she held a metal strip about half an inch wide and two inches long, curved into an open-U shape. She fitted the metal clip into the jaws of the tool.

The lieutenant ordered us to "pay close attention, now," as if any one of us might be distracted from what we were watching. The sergeant approached the bound prisoner and dropped to one knee right behind him. With her left hand she grasped the prisoner's scrotum and pulled down on it, as if she was milking a cow. The young man tried to struggle, but of course there wasn't much he could do. When his scrotum was stretched downward several inches, the sergeant pressed the tool against the base of his scrotum, about half an inch from the perineum, and pulled the trigger mechanism.

Even before we could see what the sergeant had done, we saw the consequence, as the prisoner's body spasmed violently. Then the sergeant stood up and backed away, so we could see that the metal clip now tightly encircled the base of the prisoner's scrotum, trapping his testicles.

"It's very important," the Lieutenant informed us, "that you leave about half an inch of skin between the clip and the prisoner's body, and also between the clip and the cut. Otherwise the clip might come loose, resulting in possibly life-threatening loss of blood. Ok sergeant (referring to the other one), show us the next step."

The other sergeant also had a tool strapped to her forearm, but its purpose was by now obvious. It looked like a big pair of scissors, but with curved blades about two and a half inches long. Those blades looked capable of removing small branches from trees or bushes. The sergeant pulled back on a lever, which seemed to cock the mechanism. Then she knelt behind the prisoner and took hold of his scrotum in her left hand. The prisoner again tried to struggle, but without effect. The sergeant pressed the open blades of her tool against the prisoner's scrotum, about half an inch below the clip, and when she was satisfied with the position she pulled the trigger.

I had not been aware that I was holding my breath, until I let it out with a gasp. The sergeant stood up, her left hand extended, the young prisoner's ballsack in her palm. I looked back at the prisoner, and the empty space between his legs where his balls had been hanging just a few seconds before.

"Sergeants, go ahead with the other one." The Lieutenant did not seem to be paying attention to her sergeants or to the prisoners, instead she was looking at each of us, trying to figure out if we were going to be able to do this task ourselves, when it came our turn.

The other prisoner was the young one, about 16 years old. He was smaller, and his scrotum had shriveled up to be practically nothing. The sergeant in charge of banding him explained that "when you get one of these, you have to be careful. You want to capture both testes in the bottom of the scrotum, so you might have to pull then down with considerable force."

One of my fellow soldiers asked "Doesn't this hurt them terribly?"

"The short answer is 'yes.' It hurts them if you yank on their nutsacks, it hurts them when you cut off their nutsacks. But the pain will diminish and in a couple days, when they go back to Atalak, they shouldn't be feeling any after-effects." Finally she had the scrotum stretched out to her satisfaction, with the testicles trapped in the bottom, and she pressed the banding tool against the base of his scrotum and pulled the trigger. Again we could see the metal clip tightly wrapped around the prisoner's scrotum, compressing it to less than half an inch in diameter. Even though he was gagged and blindfolded, the prisoner had to be aware of what had just happened on the next table to his comrade in arms, and he was struggling to free himself. But of course he couldn't.

The other sergeant was now in position with her cutting tool. She had to pull down on the young prisoners' nuts, because she didn't want to cut too close to the clip. When she was satisfied she pulled the trigger, and the young prisoner's ballsack dropped free into the palm of her hand. At that instant the prisoner ceased his struggles, as that which he fought to keep were lost forever.

Both prisoners were now drug away. (There was not much fight left in them.) Now the Lieutenant addressed us directly.

"The High Command has issued the order to castrate all the Atalak prisoners, before they are repatriated. We don't have the facilities to hold them for more than two more days, so that's why you reservists have been pressed into action. You'll work in teams of two, one will band, one will cut. Work carefully, we don't want to cause loss of blood. But work quickly. This is an important job but one that must be completed as soon as possible. Do any of you have any questions?"

One of my fellow reservists spoke up. "What's the reason for castrating the prisoners, Ma'am?"

"Think of it this way, soldier. The average Atalak woman has between six and seven children, so in every generation there is a surplus population, especially of unemployed young men. To keep the people from getting angry at the government for its incompetence and inability to create new jobs, the leaders tell their people that we are the cause of their suffering. So every generation we face a potentially catastrophic war from these people. Our solution is simple; the soldiers we castrate are not going to want to make war against us again, and the next generation in Atalak is going to be a lot smaller, reducing their country's population pressures.

"So the High Command believes that this action will diminish the chance of another war by Atalak for at least 40 years, and probably at least 60. And maybe in the next 60 years the people of Atalak will figure out how to solved their problems without blaming everything on Graling. Any other questions?"

"Yes, Ma'am. Why do they have us girls assigned to do this?"

"Two reasons really, soldier. First, it's not a job a man ought to do, castrating another man. It's more likely to cause psychological trauma for our own men, if we order then to do this. Second, when the Atalak soldiers go home, we want to them to know that it's the women of Graling that have taken their balls. It'll make them even less likely to want to go to war again."

Then the Lieutenant opened the tent flap and gave a signal to someone outside, and guards started bringing in more prisoners and tying them to the tables. Meanwhile we split up into teams of two, and the banding and cutting tools were handed out. I received a cutting tool.

Then we all received our on-the-job training. I watched as another team went first. One girl placed the clip one the prisoner, just below his perineum. Then the other girl cut off the scrotum, just blow the clip. It was starting to look pretty simple. Then they did another prisoner, a younger one with a smaller scrotum, and I could see that not every prisoner would be easy to cut. But with the sergeants' advice and direction the first team was able to complete their task, with neither prisoner losing much blood.

Then it was my turn. I watched intently as my partner banded our first prisoner, then I knelt down and took his nutsack in my hand. I tried not to think about the pain I was about to inflict; instead I concentrated on positioning the blades just right. It was weird, holding a boy's scrotum in my hand, preparing to cut it off. Then I pulled the trigger, and the severed scrotum was just lying there in my hand, still warm and spongy. There were buckets placed beside each table, and I dropped the nutsack into the bucket with a slight thud. By this time my partner had already banded the other soldier, and it only took me a few seconds to position the blades of my cutting tool, and then I took his nuts too.

We watched as, one by one, each team practices on two prisoners. There were a couple incidents. One girl placed the clip too high, too close to the perineum, so she had to put on another one a little lower. And one girl cut too close to the clip, and it slipped off, and there was quite a lot of blood. A medic was standing by to sew up the wound, so the prisoner was not in danger of dying, but it was a useful lesson to us on the need to be careful.

Eventually all of us had our chance to practice, and the Lieutenant was satisfied that we knew what we were doing. So all the castrated prisoners were dragged out and the tables refilled with new prisoners. The Lieutenant gave the order to get to work, so we did.

My partner's name was Bella. She banded each prisoner and went on the next. I cut each prisoner and went on to the next. By that time another prisoner was back on the first table. I don't think either one of us was trying to go fast, but after awhile I realized that each prisoner was only spending about one minute on the table, from the time he was pushed face-down on the table, a strap across his lower back to immobilize his lower torso, his legs stretched apart and tied to the table legs, Bella positioning her banding tool and clipping his nutsack, and then me severing the nutsack with my cutting tool.

Somebody turned on some music somewhere, which drowned out the grunting sounds made by the prisoners as they lost their balls. Sometimes Bella would warn me to be careful with a particular prisoner, if he had a small tight nutsack, so that I didn't cut too close to the clip. I caught a mistake of hers, though; she missed a testicle! One was high, the other low, and she banded him with only one nut trapped below the clip. One of the sergeants had to take over with that one.

We got into a routine that wasn't too stressful, at least for us. (Pretty stressful for the prisoners, though.) After a while I noticed that it was taking eight guards working just as fast as they could, to keep our tables filled up with prisoners. And there were nine other teams besides us, working in this tent. And there'd been 280 other female reservists with us earlier in the day, at the armory. 140 other teams?

I was doing the math in my head. I was castrating about two prisoners a minute, let's say 100 prisoners an hour. That sounded about right, considering the scrotum-filled buckets that were being carried away. So about 1000 prisoners per hour in my tent, and about 15000 prisoners per hour if all other others were working at the same speed.

Could that be possible? 15,000 boys and young men, losing their balls every hour? At that rate it would take us twenty hours to castrate every soldier in the enemy's army.

But of course we couldn't keep working non-stop for twenty hours. After one hour the sergeants told us to take a break. I still had some snacks in my rucksack, but somebody brought in some sandwiches and coffee. The tables were already filled up with a new lot of prisoners, so while we ate our lunch we talked among ourselves about the prisoners.

Some of the prisoners had erections. I guess I'd noticed this before, but hadn't really paid attention. Now it seemed as though a third of them were hard. I wondered if they were hard before they were brought in, or if they erected when they were tied down. I went outside and asked some of the guards, and learned that very few of them were erect before they were placed on the table. That got me wondering, if there wasn't something erotic, in some weirdly twisted way, for these male prisoners when they realized they were about to be castrated. The guards told me that the prisoners had been gagged and blindfolded some distance away, to prevent them from getting any indications what was going to happen to them. So their first real clue was when they were strapped down and they felt someone grab hold of their nutsacks. At that point it was less than a minute before their nuts were gone -- yet it was enough time for their penises to erect. Amazing!

Did any of them ejaculate when they were cut? Apparently they did -- it looked like there was semen under some of the tables. I had not touched any of their penises, only the scrotums. Can a man ejaculate without any penile stimulation? Apparently so.

Our break was over and the Lieutenant ordered us back to work. I was still curious to see how many of the prisoners got erections, and if any of them ejaculated. But this meant that I started spending more time after I cut each prisoner, and Bella told me to hurry up or we'd get in trouble. So I tried to just do my job, going back and forth between the two tables, slicing off scrotums with as much speed and proficiency as I could muster. Prisoners were dragged in, prisoners minus their nutsacks, and in diminished spirits, were dragged out. The buckets were filled and replaced with empty ones.

Every hour we got a short break, every other hour a longer break. After several hours of this I was starting to get tired of the constant bending and kneeling. It really wasn't that hard, 100 to 120 times an hour isn't that difficult. But I couldn't sit down, and immediately after cutting a prisoner I had to hurriedly get out of the way of the guards, so they could bring in another one. However, I did manage to keep my focus on the job, and didn't make any mistakes with my cutting tool. If I was going to err, I wanted to leave a little bit too much skin, not too little.

It was around dusk when the Lieutenant ordered us to take a longer break, with some food and maybe a short nap. I asked if we were going to quit for the evening, and was told that the cutting would have to go on all night. I walked around outside, and partly up the hillside. From there I could seen long lines of prisoners in both directions, coming and going. For the first time I was realizing just how immense this job was. I went back to the tent and laid down on one of the cutting tables, and immediately fell asleep.

Two hours later I was awakened by one of the sergeants. "Get up, time to get back to work." Soon the tables were filling up again with prisoners, and Bella and I were back to our routine. Hour after hour, on into the night, the prisoners kept coming, Bella banding the scrotums and me cutting them off. Any curiosity I had at the beginning about how much pain I was inflicting, or what sort of life these men would have after they lost their balls, was gone. I didn't think of them as individuals, I didn't even think of them as the enemy. They were just male bodies with scrotums that had to come off. All I cared about was making the cuts in the right places. Every once in a while one of the sergeants came by, to offer encouragement or criticism, and I was proud that none of the criticism was ever directed at me.

Bella and I talked about nearly everything, mostly school and our families and our plans for the future. Castrating boys was just something we did while we talked. We both were wondering what it would be like, to be back with out boyfriends at home. Would we tell them what we did in the war? Would that scare them, if they found out that we'd castrated thousands of boys? Should we even tell our families?

Or was this something we could talk about? Maybe the government or the army wouldn't want the civilians back home to know about this project. I didn't see how they could keep secret something this big. I supposed we'd find out what we could discuss, or what we couldn't.

We kept working on through the night, with another two-hour break just before sunrise. After some breakfast I was feeling amazingly refreshed when we started up again. I had a vague idea of how many hours I'd been working, and figured out that at that point Bella and I together had probably castrated about 1500 of the Atalak prisoners. If there were 300 thousand prisoners to begin, and 150 teams doing the cutting, then we were probably more than half finished.

We kept cutting throughout the morning, took another break at noon, and then continued into the afternoon. Finally, around 3 pm, there were no more prisoners for us to castrate. We threw down our tools and wandered outside, stretching our limbs and breathing in some fresh air. Off to the north we could see the last of the prisoners being led away, probably en route to the pass and repatriation back to Atalak. We saw a trench that had been dug, where all the buckets of scrotums had been dumped; 300 thousand of them, filling the trench nearly to the top. Some of the guards were shoveling dirt on top, covering over the trench. Others had begun to take down the tents. The Lieutenant called us all together, congratulated us on a job well done, and then we started marching back to the railhead. Everyone was real tired, so it took us nearly four hours to complete the march that took only two hours the day before. Rail cars were waiting for us, to take us back to the city, and by midnight I was at home, had a shower, and was asleep in my own bed.

I lied to my family about the duties I performed; I told them I guarded prisoners and gave them water to drink, but I didn't know anything about the mass castration of Atalak prisoners until everyone else did. The government came under a lot of criticism, and the prime minister lost the next election. Graling came in for a lot of diplomatic criticism too, and not just from Atalak, but eventually the clamour died down.

And Atalak did become a more peaceful nation. It had a change of government, too, and the new government stopped inciting hatred of Graling. They even changed the maps in their textbooks and atlases, with the name Graling appearing on their maps for the first time in one hundred years. With so many of their young men unable to reproduce, Atalak underwent a "baby bust," and its population actually declined slightly during the next forty years. By that time the women of Atalak had become accustomed to having only two or three children, instead of six or eight, and the result was a stable and satisfied populace.

I met Bren in college, and we married after graduation. I didn't want any secrets from him, so I told him the truth about what I did in the army. He was very understanding -- I was just following orders, after all. He'd been on active duty when the Atalaks attacked. His unit had been outnumbered 20-1, but the defenses built over many decades by Graling had blocked and channeled the Atalak advance. Then explosives had been detonated to block the pass and prevent the Atalak horde from retreating. He approved of the government policy regarding the Atalak prisoners, to discourage future attacks.

Sometimes, at night when we are in bed, he'll ask me to tell him about what I did in the army. I'll play with his scrotum, and roll his testicles around in my hand, and describe how I castrated the enemy POWs. How I cut off their balls and tossed them in buckets, one after another, hour after hour. Thousands of them. Boys and young men. Then I'll slide down on the bed and take one of his balls in my mouth, and pretend to bite it off. This gets him very excited, and it always makes him very enthusiastic in his love-making.

I'm proud of my service in the army, during the war, and always get a feeling of deep satisfaction when I remember the duty I performed. What I did, helped to prevent another war, even if it was traumatic for the prisoners I castrated.