Nationalist in the Viet Nam Wars: Memoirs of a Victim Turned Soldier
616
Nationalist in the Viet Nam Wars: Memoirs of a Victim Turned Soldier
616Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253356871 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2012 |
| Pages: | 616 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
Nationalist in the Viet Nam Wars
Memoirs of a Victim Turned Soldier
By Nguyen Cong Luan
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2012 Nguyen Cong LuanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35687-1
CHAPTER 1
A Morning of Horror
It was a cool summer morning in 1951 in my home village, a small and insignificant place on the Red River delta, some sixty miles south of Hà Noi, in the north of Viet Nam. Under the bright sunlight and the cloudless blue sky, the green paddy in front of my grandma's house looked so fresh and peaceful. It would have been much more beautiful if there had not been war in my country.
I was surprised that I was still able to perceive beauty when the whole village was filled with horror. At about 5 AM, African soldiers of the French Army arrived, took position in the pagoda area, and began searching the village houses at sunrise.
Sitting by the doorway of our brick house beside my grandma and a cousin, I was waiting for the worst to happen to me. The village was very quiet; even birds seemed to be aware of impending dangers. At that hour of a day in peacetime, the air would have been noisy with voices, children babbling, birds chirping, and the rice fields active with farmers working.
We three sat still for hours. At times we spoke, but only in clipped words as if a complete phrase would precipitate disaster. My chest was heavy, my mouth dry, and my mind blank. Occasionally I cast a quick glance at my eighty-two-year-old grandma and my fifty-year-old third cousin. Their eyes were expressionless, their faces tense, and those only heightened my fear.
I turned my eyes to the horizon far away. Beyond the winding canal a mile from my village was a hamlet where columns of black smoke rose high behind the bamboo hedge. The French Army soldiers must have been there and set the houses on fire. Fortunately, my village had been spared fire and destruction after many raids in four years of wars. I loved my village so much. It was small with the population of about 300. Since 1950, my village had been under French military control. A village chief was appointed along with members of the village committee working under King Bao Dai's administration, the noncommunist government that sided with France against the Viet Minh.
However, our submission to the French military authority did not protect us from being looted, raped, tortured, or killed by French soldiers. Every private, whether he was a Frenchman, an African, or a Vietnamese, could do almost anything he wanted to a Vietnamese civilian without fear of being tried in a court or punished by his superiors. It was safer in the cities where higher military officials and police authorities could exert their judicial power.
In 1950, my mother brought my two little sisters and me back to Nam Ð?nh (our provincial city, only six miles from my village), where I would attend high school. The French military forces had controlled the city since early 1947, a few months after the war broke out on December 19, 1946.
During the summer of 1951, I came to see my grandma as I always did whenever there was a day or two open from school. Although life in the countryside was full of danger, she refused to come live with us in the city. Despite every hazard, she was happy to remain in the house where many generations had lived and died, full of memories of her life with my grandpa. They had eight children, of whom my father was the fifth.
She loved me more than anyone else in the world, as I was her only grandson. She always worried about my safety. A bruise on my knee or a cut finger would move her to tears.
As if she happened to remember something, she handed me a bowl of warm rice she had cooked before dawn with a chunk of fried fish. She whispered, "You eat something. You should not be hungry."
She did not say what I knew she really meant: she wanted to be sure that I would not be a hungry ghost in case I should be killed. I was always willing to please her, but I found it impossible to swallow even a small bit as fear choked my throat and dried my mouth.
Long hours of waiting drained my energy. I wished that the soldiers would come sooner if the calamities were unavoidable.
When the sun had climbed high above the bamboo row, I heard the black soldiers shout loudly about 300 feet away. Often we could tell how near they were by the sound of their heavy boots and the smell of the tobacco they smoked, which could be detected from a mile or more away.
The noises of household objects being broken and the cries of women and children drew nearer and nearer. After a while, four tall black soldiers appeared, rifles on their shoulders. The area so far had been free of activity by the Viet Minh, so it was not necessary for these soldiers to be ready for combat. They kicked open the gate of my cousin's house across a small garden and a low wall from my grandma's and walked in. In a few minutes, they came out, after breaking a few jars and earthenware.
They walked across the garden, entered my grandma's house by a side door, and searched every nook and cranny. They didn't find anything worth stealing. How could anything of value be left after so many raids during the previous years? One of them broke the rice pot with his rifle butt; the other swept the altar with his machete and shattered a joss-stick burner. On the way out, the tallest soldier took a small bottle of rice wine left on the altar and emptied it in just four or five gulps.
The tallest soldier approached the doorway where we were sitting. He stared at me for a few seconds, then motioned for me to stand up. I rose slowly, trying to find out from his countenance what he would do to me. It was a blank face, hard and savage, and it frightened me much more than his rifle and machete did. He grabbed my arm and pushed me toward the gate. I felt his big hand tightening around my upper arm like an iron vise. As I only came up to his chest, he had no difficulty keeping me in his hand without any fear of my escape. I produced my student ID card, but he refused to look at it.
My grandma burst into tears. She rose to her feet, clasped her hands together, bowed low before the soldiers, and implored them in Vietnamese to set me free, although she was well aware that the African soldiers did not understand her language. One of them turned and, without a word, hit her in the upper back with a big bamboo stick, knocking her down on the ground beside my cousin.
The soldiers brought me to a place beside the dirt road where there were about twenty villagers, all the men and teenage boys, who were crouching under the soldiers' rifles. I sat down beside one of them. Each glanced at me, then looked away. I felt calm, not from any courage but from the utmost despair that numbed my feelings and perhaps from seeing that there were many others suffering along with me.
Whenever I was in great danger, I used to ask myself what would happen to me the next minute and hope that it wouldn't be worse. In doing so, I could calm down a little by nourishing a flickering hope of getting through a perilous situation.
When a soldier arrived with two villagers, the three soldiers beside us flew at the two and beat them violently while laughing. It was obvious that they tortured the villagers for pleasure, not out of anger. The tallest soldier hit a fifty-year-old villager in the lower back with a wooden club. The man collapsed with a short, loud scream. Some of us were about to help him, but a soldier stopped us with his rifle. The blow didn't kill the man, but he could never sit up or stand again.
Suddenly, the tallest soldier turned to me. He pulled me up and led me to a fruit garden about thirty yards away beyond the thin bamboo hedge. He asked if I spoke French. My French at the time was very poor, hardly enough to exchange anything more than very simple ideas. It was a risk to speak that kind of French to the Africans, whose French wasn't much better than mine, so I shook my head. He asked, "Where are the Viet Minh?" Again I shook my head.
The soldier flew into a rage. He slapped my face, and I almost fainted. I felt warm blood trickling down my lips and chin. He yelled at me in French and held out a book, demanding to know whether the book was mine. That was my French textbook with my name, the date of purchase, and a small photograph of me glued on the flyleaf. It was foolish to say that it wasn't mine, so I nodded.
He slapped me again and asked me why I didn't speak French to him. I could only say that I was afraid of speaking with my poor French vocabulary. In fact, my language was no worse than what was taught in the textbook, but it was useless to explain to him.
"Where are the Viet Minh?" he asked, his eyes red with anger.
"I don't know any Viet Minh," I said, trying to make every syllable as clear as possible.
"You liar! You swine!" He shouted at my face, so close that his breath made me feel queasy. Again he slapped me several times and pointed at a piece of paper on which two names were scrawled. The names were of two villagers in their twenties who had joined the Viet Minh and left home two years earlier.
The soldier took a piece of rope about two yards long and pushed me down, my face on the ground. He then tied my arms together on my back from my wrist up, so hard that the elbows nearly met, my shoulders pulled back, and my chest tightly drawn. Then he led me to the paddy nearby and showed me two little boys sitting on a grassy bank. Because their faces were badly bruised, it took me take a few seconds to realize that they were my cousins.
The soldier showed them the paper, pointed at me, and shouted, "Parler! Parler!" (Speak! Speak!) One boy told me that the soldier had beaten them, given them paper and pencil, then asked them, "Viet Minh? Viet Minh?" Therefore they had to write the only two Viet Minh names they knew. I was surprised that the African soldiers also applied a Viet Minh intelligence technique: drawing information from children and old people in their dotage.
I tried my best to explain to the soldier that the two men had left the village, but he kept shouting at me. I really didn't know whether he understood me or not with such pidgin French, his and mine. He began hitting me hard, punching my chest and my face, and kicking my ribs and stomach. His wall-eyed face convulsed. He clenched his teeth, and saliva dribbled from his mouth while he was beating me madly.
I held my breath with all my strength to bear the blows that landed all over my left side. For minutes I didn't feel any pain. The great fear probably turned me numb to every blow. I closed my eyes to undergo the agony.
When he stopped, I opened my eyes and had a faint hope that it was all over. I was wrong. He picked up the submachine gun that he had hung on a small tree nearby while beating me, and before I knew what would be happening, he kicked me hard in the chest. I lost balance and fell over on the soft soil.
Lying on my elbows, I could see the soldier cocking his French MAT-49 submachine gun and pointing it at me with one hand. And it flashed with something deafening but so quick that I could hardly hear it.
The whole thing happened in no more than a second. I didn't have enough time to feel fear, to close my eyes, or to turn away. I was still able to reckon that only one or two rounds were shot, then the magazine was empty. I also realized that the bang of his gun was less dreadful than one shot at a longer range of about 50 to 100 yards that I had experienced previously. The bullets hit the soil beside me, sending dirt high above and then down on my face and chest.
I lay there not frightened yet, only wondering if any bullet had hit my body. Seeing no way to escape death, I kept still, waiting for what would happen. The soldier angrily replaced the empty magazine with another one. "It must be full with thirty rounds," I thought.
As he was about to cock the gun, an African sergeant ran up. He snatched the gun from the soldier, spoke to him in his language with a rather loud voice, and shoved him away to the roadside. The sergeant took the end of the rope and pulled me up.
Only in that very minute did I feel a great fear. Horror seized me, and my knees trembled. My legs were paralyzed. In five seconds or so, I wasn't able to move when the sergeant told me to step forward onto the dry ground.
I still thought that I must have been wounded somewhere. I had heard that one might feel nothing in the first few minutes after he was shot. So I tried to look at my legs but was unable to bend my head as the tied arms pulled my neck backward. When I finally could make a few steps to the pathway, I turned back to see if there was any blood on the soil. No blood, so I had not been shot.
The sergeant told me to sit down in front of him and talked to me in soft voice. He told me that if he had arrived a few seconds later, I would have been dead. I thanked him with the best words I could summon from my wretched vocabulary. What surprised me was that the sergeant spoke French with the formal grammar we were taught at school. Despite my poor French, I could understand him, at least the main points.
I answered his questions about the two Viet Minh, and he seemed to believe me. I also told him about my family and that I was a high school student on summer vacation. He glanced at my student ID. After a moment, he told me to stand up. He untied the rope from my arms and tied it around my left wrist to keep me from running away. Then he took me to a high ground down the road and away from other soldiers, where we sat.
Encouraged by this unexpected behavior, I told him that his French was perfect. He replied that he had been a junior high school graduate in Senegal and that he had volunteered for the army, not for money but because something very sad had happened to him. When I asked why he was not promoted to officer rank, he only said, "The French," and pointed his thumb down.
At last, I asked him if he could release me. He looked at me for a few seconds and sighed. "In this war, every private can arrest anybody but none of them has the right to release, even if he finds out it was an error a few minutes after that." What he said has been and still is partly true in Viet Nam.
When I asked him for help, he said, "I can't release you, and I can't help you overtly. But there is something I can do. In about an hour, the units operating in this area will move back on this road. I'll let you see if there is anyone you know who can give you some help." Then he led me up the road to the pagoda area near his mortar section.
It was about 9 AM. Passing by a white brick wall under the bright sunshine, I looked at my silhouette and I could see how my face was swollen. It must have been badly deformed.
The soldiers and the captives were still there, but I saw no more beating. The sergeant and I sat under a big fig tree. About an hour later, a green cluster-star flare was shot into the air far to the south. The sergeant nodded to me. It was a signal for the troops to withdraw.
From a village half a mile from mine, a long column of troops slowly approached. Most of them were Vietnamese along with Senegalese and Moroccans marching as if on a pleasant hike, not like warriors. Some drove cows or buffaloes; some carried chickens dead and alive and other household objects that they had looted from the area.
The sergeant and I stood a few yards from the road. My left wrist was still tied to one end of the rope, the other end held fast by the sergeant. After hundreds of troops had passed by, I had seen no one I knew. There were some who looked familiar, but I dared not claim acquaintance. If by mistake I should choose a "death informer," it would be my certain death. A death informer at that time was a former Viet Minh who had surrendered to the French Army and was used to identify other suspected rebels. Anyone identified by such an informer as a Viet Minh would be shot on the spot, unless he might be a good source of intelligence. These informers were envoys of death all over Viet Nam during the first few years of the 1946–54 war.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nationalist in the Viet Nam Wars by Nguyen Cong Luan. Copyright © 2012 Nguyen Cong Luan. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Major General David T. ZabeckiPrefaceA Note on Vietnamese NamesPart 1. A Grain of Sand1. A Morning of Horror2. My Early Years and Education3. 1945: The Year of Drastic Events4. On the Way to WarPart 2. The War of Resistance5. Take Up Arms!6. My Dark Years in War Begin7. Between Hammer and Anvil8. The Shaky Peace9. Bloodier Battles10. The Geneva Accords11. The Year of ChangesPart 3. The Cogwheel12. To Be a Soldier13. Progress and Signs of Instability14. Mounting Pressure15. The Limited War16. The Year of the (Crippled) Dragon17. On the Down Slope18. Hearts and Minds19. Sài Gòn CommandoPart 4. Victory or Defeat20. The Tet Offensive21. Defeat on the Home Front22. The New Phase23. The Fiery Summer24. Hope Draining25. America 1974-7526. The EndPart 5. After the War27. Prisoner28. ReleasePart 6. Epilogue29. On the Viet Nam War30. Ever in My MemoryNotesIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Of all the many books I have read about the Vietnam War, this one pays the ultimate tribute to the incredible sacrifices made by the courageous soldiers and people of South Vietnam. Through the eyes of a true patriot, the history and decisive operations of the conflict are reviewed from the unique perspective of a victim turned soldier. I have known the author for nearly four decades and can attest to his personal courage, his passion for life, and his intense love for his country. This book is a must read for those who want the complete picture and whole truth about a tragic war that consumed the world for over two decades.
"Of all the many books I have read about the Vietnam War, this one pays the ultimate tribute to the incredible sacrifices made by the courageous soldiers and people of South Vietnam. Through the eyes of a true patriot, the history and decisive operations of the conflict are reviewed from the unique perspective of a victim turned soldier. I have known the author for nearly four decades and can attest to his personal courage, his passion for life, and his intense love for his country. This book is a must read for those who want the complete picture and whole truth about a tragic war that consumed the world for over two decades. "
"An important book. One of the most compelling and thoughtful ARVN [Army of the Republic of Viet Nam] accounts I have ever read. . . . It is an unblinking, unflinching account . . . a very honest book, the author's integrity comes through on every page."
An important book. One of the most compelling and thoughtful ARVN [Army of the Republic of Viet Nam] accounts I have ever read. . . . It is an unblinking, unflinching account . . . a very honest book, the author's integrity comes through on every page.