These Buffalo Suck

Our relationship has become a perfect meadow. Clover, tulips, and tall grass, honey bees and
anti-personnel mines.
Our little purveyors of pain used to be stuck up in the north-west corner of the fields, sequestered away where the hills roll into the dark woods, where soft green slowly burns into shadow under the barren, steely trees.
But mines migrate. They are less the flying V and more the plodding herd of buffalo, quiet but powerful and deadly. They are so unobtrusive as to become part of the scenery itself, merely a prop for a landscape painter until they’ve migrated their way directly in front of you, seventy-three half-ton claymore mine creatures.
You can’t step on them.
They’re buffalo.
But a misplaced word, a noun where there should be a verb and they explode in a flash of orange-white light, sending chunks of blood-clumped brown fur, meat and bone flying at me in a tidal wave of passive aggressive gore and self-deprecating apologies delivered with all of the melancholy resignation to Fate of a 23 year old Japanese civilian turned once-pilot, climbing over the bright red Rising Sun into the cockpit of his dynamite-laden Mitsubishi Zero, keeping his left hand securely in the pocket of his grayish green flight-suit, thumb pressing hard and rubbing slow circles around the face of a black and white photograph.