"Hey boy!"
"Yes you boy, with that ragedy op you call hair, running with your filthy friends. Come here."
"Why are you hesitating, hasn't anyone ever told you to respect your elders. Sit down here, I've got a story to tell you."
"No it isn't a happy story. There's death and destruction and fire. Lots of fire."
"Why should you listen? Because it is educational. Most tragic stories are."
"You go to school you say? We both know that they don't teach nothing but propaganda down there."
"Oh, what can I teach you that they can't? Well, about the airbender genocide for one."
"So the airbender's last stand is what they're calling it these days, eh? Well kid, your teachers know jack about what happened there, but I do."
"How, you ask? Cause I was there. It was thirty years ago and I was a young man of twenty two, certain I was going to conquer the world. My parents couldn't afford to send me to college, and jobs were scarce, so I had enlisted in the army right out of high school. I remember the day of the massacre like it was yesterday. We were all excited cause we were young fools then, fed on the idea of glory in battle and drunk on our ambitions. We had been shipped out months before the comet, towards the northern air temple. On the night before the killing I couldn't sleep so I stayed up polishing my boots washing my uniform and practicing my basic katas. I woke up that morning with the power of the comet in my nostrils and I felt my blood sing. Boy I pity your generation for you will never feel that exhilarating rush that much power will give you. We went in that day with the knowledge that we wouldn't lose and that those evil airbenders would be wiped off the face of the earth. But you know what boy? While I was expecting us to win, I wasn't expecting them to give no battle. There were no strong young bold men among the monks in the northern, only old ones and children.
We caught them with their pants down and for the first wave of fire, they couldn't do much but stand around stupidly and catch fire. It was hard boy, looking into the faces of men who know they are going to die. There is something otherworldly about them, as if that knowledge already made them ghosts. I tried to look down and not at their faces and pretend that I was burning trees, but that only worked until I could smell sizzling flesh.
We cut down the majority of them in that first attack before they could respond. The rest of them scrambled away from us, using their air gliders if they had them or trampling all over each other to escape into the temples towards their sky bison. The stupid brave ones, they stayed behind to protect those who ran with their feeble passive airbending, it was almost pathetic really, like a faceoff between a dragon and a winged lemur. We killed those airbenders easily then mopped up the rest. We killed them in the courtyards, in the temple corridors, we killed them with their bisons, then when we were done with the adults, we moved on to the babies."
"Why are you backing away boy? This is an important bit of history you need to learn. We killed the babies because our order was to make sure no airbenders survived, not even the younguns. We didn't use fire for them, the temple was filled to the brim with smoke, anymore fire and we would have choked to death, so we killed all those babies one by one, bashing their heads against the temple walls. It was kind of like breaking a plate, except for all the guts. And after we were done, we burned down the temple, cause none of us wanted to remember what had happened.
The smell of cooked flesh penetrated our eyes, our nose the pores of our skin. We were sweating heavily and panting. After it was done, our adrenaline had died down and we could see what we had caused without the fire to screen the process from our sight. The bodies littered the area, all carrying varying degrees of burns.
The lucky ones, or the unlucky ones if you want to think about it that way, them that died from smoke inhalation, lay untouched and those were the only ones we could stand lookin at because they looked like sleeping angels. The rest were marred beyond recognition, some to little more than melted bones and organs.
Ever wondered at what degree flesh burns boy? Well neither did I, but I learned that day, because I had no choice. And afterwards when I was vomiting out the contents of my stomach that's what we all were doing then, my captain came to me and said, 'kid, why do you look so ashamed? We did nothing wrong today. All we were doing is cooking the Fire Nation's dinner.'
Oh, are you running boy? Well good. Run from this story, and keep practicing running boy, maybe you'll be able to run from the draft. I had a choice, you don't. The Fire Lord needs every man he can get and they'll take you soon as your old enough. The army will take you, strip every ounce of humanity it can from you, and when you've served your country, if you survive, they'll throw you out like yesterday's trash and your country will ignore you as another washed up tired old soldier who loves his drink too much, just like me. We both will end up cooking the Fire Nation dinner and those ungrateful bastards will leave us alone to deal with everything we've lost for it."
A/N: I don't know if this has been done before but here goes, my take on the airbender genocide from the POV of a fire nation soldier who made it happen.