Victor over the Past - Chapter 2

From: … Nguyen @yahoo.com>
Subject: Nguyen... 's Biography
To: thuyhang606@yahoo.com
Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2010, 9:42 AM

Thân tặng TH quyển hồi ký …

" Về chia sẻ kinh nghiệm với bạn bè. TH cứ tự nhiên. Nếu bài học cuả mình có hữu ích được cho đời thì mình nên chia sẻ. Có vậy thì xã hội mới tiến bộ và phát triển được. Những gì mình có thể để lại trên đời này thì mình nên để lại."

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CHAPTER 2

After 8 years of fighting, the Viet Minh finally defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu

in 1954. Later that year, a meeting held at Geneva called for the departure of all foreign

forces and the division of the Vietnam into two parts at the 17 degrees north latitude. Since

then the north was under the control of the communist party while the south was a noncommunist

state. Not long after the country was divided into two, North Vietnamese

secretely sent their organizers to the south to start a Communist-dominated National

Liberation Front of Vietnam (or Viet Cong). Also at that time, the South Vietnamese Regime

was in a deep turmoil. To prevent the total collapse of the South Vietnamese Regime, U.S.

President Lyndon Johnson approved the plan to bomb North Vietnam and to dispatch U.S.

combat troops to South Vietnam. That was the beginning of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam

war. About that time, my father was transferred to South Vietnamese paratrooper. He stayed

a paratrooper for almost 10 years; then he was transferred again to the South Vietnamese

army. He told me that it seemed impossible for him to fulfill the promise at that time. He

would rather have died than to live with the unfulfillment. He was very fortunate . He

stayed on the front line all the time, but he did not get hurt. And the longer he stayed on the

front line, the faster he got promoted. The faster he got promotions, the more he wanted to

stay on the front line.

My father often told me that a secret for his success to get promotion was self-

improvement. He never wasted any of his time in vain. As soon as he got a break from

fighting, he read books to expand his knowledge. When he became a sergeant, he met my

mother. My mother's parents had a fast food restaurant next to the military campsite, and

my mother was helping them. My father loved my mother for her beauty, her independence,

and her strong will. At the time, my mother had many suitors. They all had much better

status than my father. In his words, my mother's parents were worried and concerned for

my mother when she fell in love with my father. They did not know much about my father's

background, and he made barely enough to support himself. But after a year of courtship,

they got married.

Soon after she married my father, my mother knew that she could not rely on his salary,

so she tried to do some business herself. Plus, after they married, my father was sent back

to the front line all the time. In the beginning my mother borrowed money from the temple

to buy a house because a temple loan was free of interest. Then she sold the house for profit.

She kept doing that until she paid back all the loan she got.

In the year of 1954, my mother gave birth to the first born girl Thanh-Van. A year later,

she had the second girl Thanh-Tung. Then two years later, she had the third girl Thanh-Tam.

It must have been difficult for her because she had to move with my father wherever he was

assigned. As years went by, she gave birth to three boys; one was my older brother, one was

I, and one was my younger brother. I did not know my older brother because he died a few

months after he was born. Even with the larger family, we still had to move from town to

town with my father.

 I still remember there was a time we lived in a small village in Pleiku. Once every two

weeks, people who lived in the isolated area in the mountain came to our village to sell wild

animals such as turtles and snakes to us. The first time we met these people, we were afraid

because they did not wear clothes, and we could not talk to each other. All we did was sign

to each other and hope the other person could understand. Interestingly enough they did

although we did not buy much.

Many of my memories about that time are fragmented because my father was transferred

to many places all over Vietnam. Every time we moved to a new place, it took me sometime

before I could realize what was happening. Finally in 1964, my father was transferred to the

South Vietnamese army, and its camp site was close to Can Tho. But my mother decided to

stay in Saigon for a while because education and business opportunities were much better

in Saigon than they were in Can Tho. Yet we still went to visit our father from time to time.

 One time we went to visit our father at his camp site. He was on duty at a different

village. While we were waiting for his return, we heard people running around chaotically

and screaming, "Look out! look out! Viet Cong are heading toward us. All soldiers with your

weapons move into the assigned position immediately. All the women and the children stay

close to the ground and keep your head down." Then all of us had to run and hide in the

bunker for our safety. At that time I was about five or six years old.

 Then we heard gunfire and people shooting at each other. I was curious about who the

Viet Cong (V.C) were, and how they looked. I had heard a lot of stories about how cruel the

Viet Cong could be. I heard that they would come into a village capturing innocent people

and killing the children. Everything that I heard about them was bad. That made me

wonder what these people were really like. I asked my mother to help me to see these V.C.

My mother did not like the idea at all. But because my sisters and I insisted we see them, my

mother took us to a place where we could look out into the field where the shooting was

happening and pointed toward those people out there in the field and said, "Those are the

Viet Cong. They are the bad people. You all should be careful when you see them." My

sisters and I looked toward that direction. We saw a group of ten or eleven people in their

black uniforms who pointed and fired their guns toward our camp site.

 They looked just like us. To us they were not as monstrous and savage as we imagined

when we heard stories about them, so we asked our mother," These V.C. look just like

ordinary people. They don't appear to be bad at all so why do we try to kill them?"

 My mother replied," If we don't kill them, they will kill us. Don't you see they are

attacking us?"

My sisters said," But I saw our men open fire first. If we did not, would they still want to

kill us?"

My mother said," Yes, they would still want to kill us even if we did not fire first." At that

point we did not ask anymore questions, but from then on, we realized that the V.C. were

people like us who shared the same feelings and emotions except for their political beliefs.

 That was the first time the question of why people wanted to kill each other came into

my mind. The exchange of gunfire lasted only a few minutes, and it ended when the V.C.

decided to withdraw and run away. We all felt relief that the threat of the V.C. attacking us

was removed. We went back to running around the camp site and playing, waiting for the

return of our father. When he came back, we all ran to him and hugged him and told him

about the fight that we witnessed at noon. We told him how we were afraid that the Viet

Cong could take over the camp site, and how surprised we were to know that the V.C.

looked just like us. He told us that the V.C did not look different from us, but if they got

hold of us, they would kill us all. So we should be careful about that. Although my sisters

and I were not quite satisfied with the answer, we just ignored it and resumed our normal

activities. We stayed with our father for that day, and we went back to Saigon the next day.

To be continued …