“I’ll ask my mother to let you come and study with us,” I said and clapped him on the shoulder. Teacher Uc tutored us twice a week at home. Every Friday afternoon, he stopped by for tea and cakes with my mother.
Hoi glanced up and smiled as if he knew something that I didn’t and wasn’t about to tell. He turned and headed off toward his house. Hoi was the poorest student in the class. His family didn’t have a single rice plot. I knew he wasn’t comfortable being inside the estate. Whenever my cousins were around, Hoi got very quiet and refused to eat anything I gave him, always saying he wasn’t hungry.
Hoi’s family lived at the edge of the village, in a two-room bamboo cottage. The yard had been turned into a vegetable garden full of beans, yams, maniocs, and eggplants. When we got there, Mr. Bui was on his knees, working on the hibiscus shrubs that fenced around the family’s property.
I bowed. Hoi grinned and shook his basket.
“Did you boys catch any field crabs today?”
“No, Father, but we’ve got plenty of grasshoppers.” Hoi’s family was fond of crab soup. It was very good with banh da.
“What are you doing, Mr. Bui?”
“I’m mending this hole. We lost a lot of vegetables from our garden last night.”
“Walkers,” Hoi mumbled and led me inside. His family didn’t have a big guard dog; they couldn’t afford to feed another mouth. Small dogs were worthless because they were often lured outside, killed, and eaten by the Walkers.
The house was smoky and cramped. The whole family slept in the back room and used the front room for making banh da. Mrs. Bui and Hoi’s sister, Lan, were hovering over the cooking fire built in the middle of the floor. Even though I was from the wealthiest clan in the village, Hoi’s family was always nice to me, especially his mother.
“Mrs. Bui, I brought you some guavas from our garden.” I had access to our whole family orchard so it wasn’t hard to bring them something whenever I visited. We had all sorts of fruit trees, so something was always in season.
Mrs. Bui thanked me. Lan looked up, grinning. I knew she liked green guavas with chili-salt. Small and even more frail than her mother, Lan rarely talked, the size and manner of her smiles saying most of what she wanted. She was fourteen and pretty in a wan, wispy way. She spent most of her days with her mother in the kitchen.
They squatted in front of four steaming cauldrons of boiling water, each kettle with a cloth stretched taut over it like a drum skin. They poured a ladle of rice batter onto the cloth, swirled it into a thin round layer, and placed a tin lid over the cauldron to let it steam, working fast to conserve firewood. In a few moments, they removed the thin banh da with a bamboo stick and laid it out on a rack to dry. It was simple but exhausting work.
“Mrs. Bui, you’re making a lot of banh da today,” I said, pointing to the racks filled with wax paper packages. “You must have many orders.”
Mrs. Bui opened her mouth to speak, but stopped herself. She took a deep breath, then smiled. “Would you like some banh da?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Bui. We’re going to roast some grasshoppers,” I said.
If food weren’t so scarce for them, I would have accepted. Since Hoi and I became friends, banh da had become one of my favorite snacks. There were many ways to eat them. You could toast them and eat them plain like crackers or with dips. You could serve them with meat or salad, or add them to soup, or deep-fry them like chips. You could also soak and cut them into strips to make noodles. But none of these dishes were the sort of food people ate during the famine. It seemed odd that they were grinding up rice to make banh da while people were stretching their rice stocks by making thin soup. This was almost wasteful, because rice satisfied the stomach far better than banh da.
I would learn much later that foot soldiers often soaked banh da in water, rolled them up with a bit of brown sugar, and ate them on marches, during ambushes or fire-fights when they could not light a cooking fire.
WE sat under the eaves and killed the grasshoppers by pinching their heads. Hoi buried them in the embers of the cooking fire. I was salivating by the time he brought them back on a hard square of dried palm leaf. The toasted grasshoppers were very hot. Their burned wings had turned into thin layers of ash clinging against their bodies. I snatched the biggest grasshopper, plucked off its head, and stripped away its legs. Rubbing the steamy little nugget between my palms, I blew away the ashen wings and burnt bits. When it was cool enough, I popped it in my mouth. It was flaky and crunchy like a butter pastry with a nutty-meaty cream center, and faintly salty like tofu skin.
I didn’t know why, but the first one always tasted the best.
But they were all so good, we gobbled them up as quickly as we could. I didn’t care that Hoi had less to eat at home than me. We raced through the whole batch, not bothering to count out our shares.
I smacked my lips, looking at the final pile of grasshopper heads. “We were lucky to catch so many. I thought the Walkers got most of them already.”
“They can barely move. To catch a grasshopper, you have to be fast.”
I took out two peanut candies from my pocket and gave him one. Hoi had expected it all along. I always brought some sweets and they would be the last things we ate.
Hoi bit a small piece from his candy and sucked on it to make it last longer. “You are my best friend.”
“You are my best friend too,” I said.
He grinned broadly. “Hey, look at all those dragonflies on the hedge. You want to catch some and catch frogs with them?”
“Yes, but it’s late. I’d better get home before my mother sends someone looking for me.”
“I’ll go with you to your gate.”
It was part of our routine, the fifteen-minute walk along the inner village road that took the better part of an hour. We were of an age without a notion of time. We picked up sticks, rattled fences, beat hedges, chased cats, and threw stones at birds.
“Here it comes…,” Hoi whispered, gesturing with his eyes to a shadow creeping behind the hedge.
I realized with a jolt that we were crossing the territory of the Beast, the biggest and meanest dog in the village. I heard branches snapping. Without a single warning bark, Beast shot out of the bush, punching a hole through the foliage.
We sprinted. Beast closed the distance in a flash.
Hoi shouted, “Now!”
We spun around. The monster was right behind us. I flung the first stone without aiming and missed. Hoi struck Beast smack on the head and made it wobble. I whizzed another one into its flank. Hoi threw so fast his arm blurred. He didn’t miss once. Snarling insanely, the dog circled and tried lunging at us from the side. Hoi hurled another stone into its jaws. Beast stumbled, yelped once, retreating. We kept pelting until it bolted back to the safety of the hedge. Beast vented blood-chilling barks, challenging us to come closer.
I was tingly from head to toe, flushed with fear. We jogged to a safe distance before cheering. Hoi and I slapped each other on the back, congratulating and puffing ourselves up like heroes. Grinning, we skipped down the street.
“It’s going to get us one of these days.”
“I hope the Walkers get him first,” said Hoi.
“He’s too strong for them. Besides, any dog that mean must taste terrible.”
Hoi laughed. “I bet he’d be tasty. His owner must have fed him well for him to get that big.”
Neither of us had ever eaten dog meat, but that didn’t stop us from speculating what it might taste like. The discussion lasted us the rest of the way to my family’s estate. We stopped at the side gate. It was still open. The sentry was expecting me. Farther down the road, a huge crowd queued up at the main entrance. It was nearing time for the evening soup.
I asked Hoi, “You’re going to take the long way back?”
“Yes. I don’t think I can hold off Beast on my own.”
I wished I could walk him back to his house. “Here, take some more stones, just in case.”
&nb
sp; Hoi touched my arm and loped away. I watched him from my gate. He always looked back right before disappearing behind the first turn in the road.
Hoi shouted at the top of his lungs, “I’ll bring some dragonflies, and we’ll catch lots of frogs tomorrow!”
It was my lasting image of him, my best friend, unalterable by all that was to come. I could not remember him as a leader of Uncle Ho’s Youth Brigade or a hero in the Resistance. But I remembered the distance between us; our symmetry. I remembered him, a shirtless, barefooted boy standing in the thickening dusk, just a purple silhouette at the far bend of the road, inky branches curving over him, those arms of darkness, those crashing waves.
THE SOUTH
1963
12. THE DRAFT
The bad news came over the radio after dinner. Anh was crouching over the tin basin on the floor, washing the dishes, and I was grading my students’ papers. It was our usual routine. The announcer called my age group and then read the list of canceled draft exemptions. A pot clattered on the cement slab. Anh hugged her knees, her eyes closed. My exemption as a teacher had been rescinded. The music came back on the radio. I turned it off. Anh came to the table and sat quietly next to me, hands folded in her lap.
There were no words to comfort her. We couldn’t look at each other; that would confirm the looming disaster. We stared at the wooden tabletop. It was secondhand, banged up and full of scratches, but it was ours. We earned this tiny two-room alley house with years of hard work. Anh saved and skimped, never spending anything on herself. She did the neighbors’ laundry. I taught full course-loads at two different schools at opposite ends of the city, commuting on buses four hours daily, six days a week. We had just moved into Saigon from Ben Tre to avoid the Viet Cong recruiters. All our bright plans were shattered.
We put the baby to sleep in her crib across the room from our bed. Anh turned down the oil lamp, unrolled the mosquito netting, and curled into my arms. She was usually bubbling with gossip and stories about her day and the neighborhood, whispering us both to sleep. Tonight she was still, her hands clutching mine.
I was more afraid of being away from my wife and child than I was of being sent to fight. This was all the love and happiness I had built for myself. I wondered how Anh would manage. She had never held a job. I knew with shameful and terrifying certainty that the day would come when she would have to pawn her single piece of jewelry, a jade bracelet, to feed our child. The thought was devastating. My precious little world was crumbling. I was twenty-seven.
We held each other through the sinking hours. Midnight passed, then she whispered the most amazing thing: “None of this matters. I had a dream that we grew old together.”
DRAFT Monday arrived quickly. The wonderful aroma of pork-and-mushroom dumplings filled our home. Anh smiled at me from the kitchen. She was making a special breakfast of banh cuon and a luxurious cup of hot cocoa with condensed milk. It was a delicious farewell treat—much better than my usual breakfast of one fried egg and bread. Her cooking skills had developed considerably since we first lived together. I teased her that if I weren’t drafted, I’d open a restaurant and put her to work while I relaxed and counted the money. Anh giggled and pinched me. I was trying not to think that our savings would only last her a month or two. My soldier’s wages would come late, and they would be a pittance.
“I want to see you to staging camp,” she said for the fourth time.
“It will be hard for me to say good-bye there. Stay here; try to think of it as a long teaching stint out of town. In a few weeks, they’ll transfer me to the training camp or the military school. We can see each other then.”
Friends who had been drafted told me what to expect. They gave me a list of what to bring: a mosquito net, a pair of pants, two shirts, boxers, toothbrush, toothpaste, and a comb—certainly nothing of value. I bundled everything inside a brown paper bag and tied it with a length of twine. Bring money if you want to eat, they said, but keep your wallet and your wits about you; we’re all educated and slated to become officers, but there are thieves among us.
I waited for half an hour, but no one from my big family came to send me off. I had thought that at least one of my brothers would come with good wishes. Father was still disappointed with my marriage. No doubt he considered this draft was part of the bad luck that came with Anh. It was just as well. Our family was never good at showing our feelings.
Anh walked me down the alley, carrying the baby. She was silent in a distracted way that I had learned was her expression of sorrow. She knew how to hold her tears, and I was grateful for it. On the main street, the sun had climbed above the buildings and the sidewalk was bustling with pedestrians and vendors. We stopped at the curb. I put my bundle on the ground. I kissed the baby and gathered the three of us into a big long embrace, not caring that strangers were looking. I hugged them until the knot in my throat was about to undo me completely.
We looked at each other and sighed. She smiled, squeezing my forearm. I hailed a taxi. Anh hung on to the door and wouldn’t let go. I pried her fingers loose. I looked through the rear window. She kept waving until the taxi turned the corner.
QUANG Trung was a training camp for noncommissioned officers, half an hour from Saigon, sitting on a thousand acres of bush land suitable for staging counter-guerilla training. Near the front gate, they had fenced off a large barren area from the rest of the camp. Within the enclosure, there was a handful of wooden structures and military tents housing several hundred men. This was the staging ground for draftees.
Dozens of young men arrived at the same time as I did—some by taxis, others by motorbikes, most attended by family and friends. It was a somber gathering, women sobbing, their men trying to put up brave faces. I took a deep breath and went directly to the gate. The bored guard waved me through without glancing at my ID card.
At the administration cabin, a hundred new draftees milled about the dirt yard in various states of dejection. It took three hours for the two typists to peck out our names and personal information while chatting, smoking, and taking breaks every half hour. Three soldiers lounged about, reading newspapers, trading jokes while waiting for the typists. They shuffled us from one line to another for no apparent reason, and finally assigned us bunks in tents housing twenty men each.
We went to the kitchen tent for lunch. A handful of men sat at the tables staring morosely into their tins. The moment I saw the scraps the cook ladled into my plate, I knew why. Hungry, I tried a spoonful of rice and spat it out. It was foul, mildewed rice. I picked out a couple of rice worms and laid them on the table. The salty soup had a faint smell of chicken and lumps of fat, but neither vegetables nor meat. We looked at each other and shook our heads in dismay. Our reactions didn’t surprise the cook. He pointed us to a diner in the middle of the compound.
It was a big, flimsy wooden house with a tin roof and packed-dirt floor. A canvas awning extended the dining area around the house, sheltering a knickknack collection of chairs, benches, and tables. The structure was open on all sides, except for the back where the kitchen and storerooms were located. Service girls took orders from behind a long glass case counter displaying stationery, snacks, beverages, toiletries, and other sundries. They had four rice plates, grilled pork, beef, fish, and fried eggs, all served with white rice and boiled vegetables. I would come to learn that besides food, the three most popular items were beer to numb a draftee’s mind, cigarettes to soothe his anxiety, and lottery tickets to give him hope. I became a chain-smoker in the staging camp.
Per diem cost for feeding each draftee was predetermined by the army, so the cheaper the food the camp commander fed us, the more money he skimmed from the budget. And the longer we were kept at the staging camp, the bigger the profit he pocketed. As if that wasn’t enough, he permitted the diner to overcharge for meals and sundries, at three times market price, for more than seven hundred men daily, year round. Naturally, he reaped a healthy kickback percentage from the operator.
The
diner became the center of our existence in the staging camp. Every single draftee spent money there. In my three weeks at the staging camp, I would end up spending the equivalent of my wife’s grocery budget for three months. Day after day, there was nothing to do except wait for our names to be called for a physical exam or for transfer to training camps. When the sun was overhead, we crawled beneath bushes because there were no big trees in the camp. Sooner or later we crawled back to the diner to buy lemonades just for the privilege of sitting for an hour under the tin roof.
For me, within a few days, the scope of the whole staging camp passed from the realm of inefficiency to stupidity and then to the ludicrous. It made me furious. There was nothing I could do but sit in the hot dirt fuming. We were expected to fight for our country, and yet here we were, exactly where they put us, squatting under the searing sun, thirsty and hungry, crazy with insect bites, out of our minds with boredom, simply so our own superiors—the men to whom we were to entrust our lives—could steal from us repeatedly, day after day, for weeks on end. It was the sort of abuse that leached away whatever patriotic sense of duty a draftee might have had in the first place. It sowed a festering seed of doubt in the soldier’s mind about his leaders, and it taught him from the very beginning to fend for himself. And it made him certain that the enemy had worthier leaders.
I had no idea at the time, but it would be no different at Thu Duc Academy, the officer training school, my next destination. Entrenched corruption, outrageous inefficiency, and plain apathy permeated the upper ranks of the South Vietnamese army. Even before I picked up a gun, I had already lost faith and respect for our leaders. No one around me actually harbored any hope of winning this war.
For the next seven years, the only things that gave me heart and held me steady in the face of danger would be the heroism and sacrifices of the soldiers, the noncommissioned officers, and the low-ranked officers in the South Vietnam army—these men who fought to defend their fellowmen and homeland even when they knew our leaders were lazy and corrupt. Their courage would inspire me to rise above self-pity and perform my duties to the best of my capabilities so as not to betray their effort, their blood, their lives.
The Eaves of Heaven Page 8