Late Blossom

by Laura Lam

  Over such immeasurable land,

  The storks have boundless space

  To fly with their widest of wings.

  Over such immeasurable land,

  The dogs have endless distance

  To run their tails off without restraint.

  The running dog is a person, not an animal. He is the servant of the colonial regime. The stork is not the benevolent deliverer of babies as known in the West. In Asian cultures the stork is treacherous. If you raise one, the legend goes, it will peck your eyes out.

  When my grandmother finished the story, Uncle Muoi asked us, “Who is the stork in the story? Can you tell us?”

  We all answered him at once, “The French!”

  * * *

  Over several rainy days my mother transported the dismantled materials from our house by sampan to a bare and muddy patch of ground already assigned to us. On her last journey, we came with her. I held Trung, while she was paddling with Nghia between her knees.

  For the first few nights we slept on top of a simple bamboo frame erected by my mother, with our feet covered in red mud. Because of heavy rains, the ground was soft and sticky and there was no way to keep our feet clean. My mother and all maternal relatives toiled in a state of deep despair and profound resentment, as did all our former neighbours.

  Before the enforced relocation, most of the young men in Truong An who had not already joined the NLF went over to it. They did so by moving to the neighbouring village of Vinh Vien to live and work. This was part of a Nationalist zone (free from ARVN control) at the time. As a result, the majority of residents living in the Strategic Hamlet were the elderly, women and children.

  We were all subject to restrictions. Every day at sunset, all sampans had to be pulled onto the bank of Constance Channel where they were closely guarded – to prevent the Viet Cong from using them, we were told, but also to keep us from traveling at night. The authorities gave each person a yellow card. Every time a person left the Hamlet he or she had to exchange this for a blue card. Everyone had to have a personal record book in possession at all times. Each family was required to submit photographs of all members for daily security check. If a person returned home late or was still visiting relatives somewhere else, other family members were hauled in for interrogation.

  In the evening the residents were required to attend political lessons, which they disliked intensely. Every political lecture began with the banging of a brass gong. Any adult who failed to attend more than once was labeled “Viet Cong” and endured punishment. My mother was sometimes able to make her excuse as she needed to look after us children at home. They did not harass her because my father was a government “official” in Sai Gon. For Uncle Muoi and Uncle Phan, who were farmers, there was no excuse.

  The government had classified us into groups according to our political backgrounds. Those who were suspected to have immediate family members in the Nationalist force were concentrated in the section closest to Constance Garrison for daily surveillance, while Catholic families were placed at the further end of the fortified village. We were assigned among the Catholic families while Uncle Muoi’s family and my grandmother had to live closer to the Garrison.

  Young children were unhappy in the new living arrangement. The lack of trees, most of which had been cleared away to make room for the new residents, made it impossible to find shade from the intense daytime sun. Children mostly stayed indoors, using whatever they could find to entertain themselves. Girls would gather bamboo chopsticks and a small nylon ball for a new game. They would throw the ball toward the ceiling while turning the chopsticks at a high speed, then catch the ball in time. With white chalk boys could draw a pattern of squares on the floor to play a game of rubber bands. Given the confined space inside the house children often hit various objects and even caused damage to the furniture. The adults complained about the noises they made.

  Lien and Cam were free to play but my mother kept me on a tight rein. At ten years old, I was fully responsible for my two brothers, while she did her sewing. Her outbursts of anger grew in frequency and violence. My failure to be mindful over the tasks would result in a beating – her consistent form of punishment.

  Even in a war zone, and even being confined to a small crowded area, many village children still enjoyed some of the carefree moments of childhood. But that was never my experience in those days. I had an angry mother, an absent father, and a lost grandmother.

  PEASANT REVOLTS

  For blood in torrents pour

  In vain – always in vain

  For war breeds war again

  John Davidson

  In the summer of 1962, Strategic Hamlets’ residents in various provinces were busy secretly debating possible ways of “destroying” the prison-like compounds. They voted on the most difficult and the most dangerous method of all – destroying each compound entirely, for good, and thus, preventing any possibility of returning in the future.

  The residents of all provinces chose 15 September as the date for the total destruction of the Strategic Hamlets. It would be known as the General Uprising – the Dong Khoi. In Truong An, the first attack began in the early hours, when a unit of the Nationalist forces kidnapped a senior ARVN officer and took him into the jungle. They shot him while the sky was still dark.

  Shortly before sunrise, a squad of soldiers from Constance Garrison came out on patrol. Half a dozen of them were gunned down immediately and several were captured. Terrified, the rest of the group rapidly withdrew into the Garrison.

  Wives and mothers of soldiers drafted into the ARVN learned from the grapevine that Constance Garrison was going to be attacked that day. They rushed to the area, calling and begging their husbands and sons to escape or surrender before the attack. Ranking officers in the Garrison tried to stop the soldiers from fleeing. They made threats and even beat up some of their own troops, keeping them from meeting their families waiting outside.

  Meanwhile, hundreds of civilian men, women, and children from the Strategic Hamlet, armed with homemade weapons, joined the uprising. They carried brass drums, copper horns, wooden mo, knives, choppers, axes, scythes, bamboo poles, and white banners denouncing the Americans and the Diem regime. They marched towards the Garrison behind a leader with a loudspeaker, “ Clear away the Strategic Hamlet! Tear down the Strategic Hamlet!” From the Hamlet I could hear the rapid clicking sounds of the mo, the repeated banging of copper trays, and the uninterrupted ringing of brass bells, all chimed in with the harmonicas blown by the black-uniformed soldiers along Constance Channel.

  Uncle Muoi had gone out early in the morning. We saw him among the crowd near the Garrison, holding a big axe. We also spotted Aunt Di Nam, armed with an iron hoe and Mo Muoi wielding a large bamboo spear. My mother and I decided to join the village women. We ran back home and I took a bamboo pole. My mother snatched up her giant black iron scissors. Grandmother and Uncle Phan decided to stay home to look after the little children with Mrs Lua, my grandmother’s elderly neighbour.

  Urged on by the loudspeaker, the Nationalist troops started firing at the Garrison and civilians crawled under the barbed wire fences and tried to break in with their homemade weapons. The besieged troops in the Garrison responded with heavy gunfire.

  Both Dai and his brother-in-law, Van, were members of the NLF. Van was beating a wooden mo Uncle Phan had made for him. He and several others were calling upon the soldiers inside the Garrison to surrender but the ARVN soldiers ignored them and fired back. I heard Van shouting out to his troops, “Advance further! Further!”

  Van continued to beat the mo rapidly after each bout of firing from the open fields and from Constance Channel. Two black figures from the Channel jumped up, their arms arcing high with grenades. Immediately two explosions rocked the walls of the Garrison. Return fire flashed from the Garrison’s loopholes. Both grenade throwers were wounded. One struggled to lift the body of his comrade out of the water and dragged him along the Channel into a sampan.

&
nbsp; Heavy fighting continued throughout most of the day. Dead and wounded, young and old, mostly soldiers but civilians too, were scattered around the Garrison terrain. In keeping with the Nationalist tradition, none of the wounded cried out, a result of their training, in which they learned to tolerate extreme physical pain and hardship in silence, in order to maintain secrecy. In the afternoon, Dai’s father and Uncle Phan helped lift the seriously wounded into sampans to transport them to emergency field-stations. Although Uncle Phan had not participated in the morning uprising, he left his house to assist with the wounded. Hien had told him he was needed. Aunt Di Nam, Mo Muoi, and my mother delivered hot meals to the Nationalist fighters. Uncle Phan’s wife remained at home with her two daughters-in-law cooking.

  My mother gave us some rice and chicken soup on the battlefield.

  * * *

  Late into the night, the sounds of wooden mo, brass drums, and people shouting could still be heard. The return fire from Constance Garrison appeared to weaken. When midnight arrived and passed, the shooting stopped. The Garrison fell silent. The Nationalists made their final assault cutting through the barbed wire fences and entered. Inside, the air still thick with the smell of gunpowder, they found dead and wounded bodies. Weapons and people were scattered on tables, chairs, beds, and on the bloodsoaked ground. A few suffering minor injuries pretended to be dead while others moaned and screamed. Those who could escape had made their way out.

  Meanwhile, Hien and I were at Aunt Di Nam’s house waiting for Dai. Di Nam and Van’s wife became increasingly anxious. Di Nam, unable to relax, busied herself restlessly around the house and pestered her daughter to prepare rice, fish and vegetable soup for the young men. They were so on edge that neither of them could eat. Di Nam would go to the hammock to sit down but immediately got up again. Then she took betel leaves and areca nuts out of a copper bowl and started polishing the bowl again and again, trying to hide her fear and anxiety.

  It was morning when Dai and Van returned, ravenously hungry, with their torn clothes covered in mud and blood. Hien and I had fallen asleep, but the two women were there to greet and feed them, having stayed up the whole night.

  Following the uprising, all the adults in the Strategic Hamlets went to work frantically – taking apart their houses while there was still time. Everyone feared that new ARVN troops would soon arrive to fill Constance Garrison.

  As always, Uncle Muoi helped my mother. Hinh and Dai also returned from the jungle to help us rebuild our house in the old village, over the same foundation as previously. This house was built more cheaply then its predecessor, a house that had itself been cheaply built. We were becoming poorer and poorer. A few months later, with savings from my father, Dai and Hinh helped my mother build a large kitchen hut, which turned out to be almost as big as the main house. At the same time, she and I restarted our vegetable garden at the back of the house.

  My cousins – those who had not already joined the NLF – were anxious to do so now. Women and children gathered weekly along the village roads leading to Constance Garrison to protest against the Americans and the Diem regime. They carried white banners written in bright red ink, “No more Strategic Hamlets! “Imperialist Americans! Get out of Viet Nam!” At night – the work went on secretly for three consecutive years – women of all ages joined in the digging of fighting trenches (chien hao) around the Garrison, which were then concealed from view by camouflage. The trenches spread in four directions, about a hundred metres from the Garrison. Hinh was involved in the supervision of the work so that he was able to come and see us more regularly, even during the day.

  The General Uprising to break down all the Strategic Hamlets in the South had been masterminded by Nguyen Thi Dinh, one of Ho Chi Minh’s heroines. By the end of 1963 eighty percent of the Strategic Hamlets had been destroyed. In some areas such fortified villages had been built and torn down and rebuilt and torn down again at least thirty times.

  Nguyen Thi Dinh had joined the Viet Minh during the French colonial era and formed the Women’s Army of the Coconut Jungle (Nu Chien Si Rung Dua) when the French War broke out in 1946. During the second phase of this war, when Granduncle Cuong was working in the Mekong Delta region, many women of the Coconut Jungle received intensive medical training from him in order to aid Viet Minh troops. To train them in warfare Dinh introduced the Three Arrows of Close Combat (Ba Mui Giap Cong), which involved direct attack, persuasion of the ARVN soldiers, and a political strategy. After Dien Bien Phu, she continued to build her guerrilla force in her home province of Ben Tre and many battles took place in ensuing years along the Upper Mekong River. By a terrible irony of war, from 1958 to 1961 Dinh’s army – consisting mainly of women – was fighting against the ARVN Marine division of my Uncle Nam.

  The Three Arrows of Close Combat policy was implemented by the women of Truong An village, who found how easy it was to persuade ARVN soldiers to give up their guns, and the deserted men would become new members of the NLF. My two maternal aunts, Uncle Muoi’s wife, and other civilian women volunteered their time and effort. Nearly every day they cooked meals and delivered them either in the jungles or to the underground shelters connected to the peasants’ huts. As well as providing food and shelter, they participated in weekly public protests against the American-backed regime. * * * Following the General Uprising to break free from the Strategic Hamlets, Nguyen Thi Dinh received secret assistance from the ARVN Lieutenant colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, who was the new provincial chief of Ben Tre. A devoted nationalist, Thao was a master spy for the National Liberation Front but because he was a Catholic the Diem ruling family trusted him. Meanwhile, Uncle Nam was appointed by Ngo Dinh Diem to be head of Tay Do – a newly created province south of Can Tho. My home village of Truong An now became part of this new province. Nam was a lieutenant colonel at the time and his appointment was paralleled by Thao’s ascendancy in Ben Tre. He had no idea that Thao was a double agent. He was amazed at Thao’s popularity with the people of Ben Tre, as much a stronghold of NLF resistance as was Tay Do, whereas he, for his part, continued to encounter tough resistance from local residents.

  Prior to Thao’s appointment the government had tried to crush the General Uprising in Ben Tre by sending in thousands of troops to raid villages, using children as human shields to protect government troops. Following the assaults, the residents of Ben Tre organized public protests and fighting went on for weeks. Subsequently, the Diem regime announced that the “Viet Cong” had organized the riots. Diem also reported that the Viet Cong “had destroyed La Mo Church, attacked the Virgin Mary, and murdered a priest.” He made an appeal to the international Catholic community for sympathy and also sought the world’s support for his regime.

  Once Thao, the secret agent, had become provincial chief of Ben Tre, the Women’s Army of the Coconut Jungle was upgraded, strengthened, and re-named the Long Hair Army (Doi Quan Toc Dai). It welcomed women of all ages from various backgrounds. By 1968 the province of Ben Tre had more than three thousand women in the regular army and sixteen thousand in the irregular force, responsible for the transportation of food, supplies and ammunition to battlefields. The Ben Tre women’s army was considered a role model and responsible for helping other provinces set up their own forces.

  In my home province of Tay Do, with Uncle Nam as its chief, the women’s army was secretly reorganized and strengthened, but in much more difficult circumstances. Under constant surveillance by Nam’s troops, it still managed to become a part of the Long Hair Army’s network. By 1968, after seven years of recruiting and training, Tay Do province had more than ten thousand women in its regular and irregular forces. Six of the female companies were based in Truong An. By then Hien had already left the village to join them.

  It was the arrival of American troops and weapons in ever-increasing numbers during the 1960’s that had the effect of channeling thousands of women into the NLF ranks. There were new factors that came into play, causing the percentage of female soldiers to rise. Firstly, Vietna
mese losses during the nine-year war against the French had been high. Secondly, in honouring the Geneva Agreement of 1954, Ho Chi Minh moved his forces back to the North, leaving only a nominal male resistance force in the South. Thirdly, under both Diem and Thieu regimes, a huge number of men were killed and imprisoned. As prisons and graveyards steadily filled with the broken bodies of their male loved ones, the hearts of many suffering women swelled with deep resentment and anger, thus motivating them to avenge the fates of their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. By 1968, the total force of the NLF had grown to more than a quarter of a million and forty percent of these were women. Recognizing their strength, Ho Chi Minh awarded them the title “Southern Women, the Bronze Citadel” (Phu Nu Nam Bo, Thanh Dong). While promoting Nguyen Thi Dinh to the post of Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the NLF, he proudly announced, “Without the women there will be no victory.” The women’s tasks included direct combat, transporting heavy weapons and food supplies to battlefields, managing emergency medical services, constructing trenches and tunnels, and demoralizing the enemy through skills of persuasion. In addition, from the very beginning, children were recruited to perform a variety of tasks.

  One day Dai called the village children to an urgent meeting and asked us, “You all know what the helicopters do, don’t you?” Before he ended his sentence we all sang out loud:

  Whenever the helicopters appear

  They lower themselves in the air