The ups and downs of nations and empires as well as the lives and deaths of humans are at the mercy of God. But this does not stop our tears in the face of heart-rending disaster, calamity, or death. Since the beginning of time, war has brought more tears to human eyes than any other catastrophe.
When I was a child, I witnessed firsthand the shedding of tears from war. I saw killing and burning and fear, and I will now tell the truth of that bitter war beginning with my dreary memories of disaster in my small town and the war’s destruction of my country.
I was born on January 8, 1934, among the dark rice fields and virgin forests of a remote village in Camau District, the corner of the farthest peninsula in South Vietnam. My father was a farmer and my mother a homemaker. I have two elder brothers, an older sister, and a younger sister. My family belonged to the middle class; my father owned nearly one hundred hectares of fertile land—about four hundred U.S. acres. He had a modest education that enabled him to speak French and to write the difficult Chinese characters.
The war in Vietnam began in December of 1946. But it had been smoldering several years before that. At about the same time I first began to notice my own existence and I became aware of a world even larger than the love of my family.
Before the summer of 1944, I spent my whole childhood on my family’s rice field. I ran and played games with other children without thinking of much else. Then I and the other third-grade students in our village began our first lessons in history. Our teacher, an old but clear-headed man, taught us about love for other people, and about the “spirit of the land,” the “foreign domination,” “independence,” and the “war.” I had only a foggy notion of what my teacher was telling us. But one day, I suddenly felt that the rice field itself had been concealing a marvelous and passionate force. This force sounded in me on sunny days when I heard the wind fleeing on the blades of the rice plants, when the chants and riddles of the peasants trilled the air, and even on rainy nights with the raindrops falling on the foliage and the chirps of the crickets lulling from the plain. I began to love the rice field, not because it belonged to my father but because that land probably had its own means of pleasure and sadness. All lured me to come every day, sunny or rainy.
Day after day, I observed that the sun always rose in the east and set in the west. However, many days it did not appear. On those days when it rained, the sky was covered with dark clouds and the field was overcast, wet, and dreary. Night often fell with the heavy thunderstorms of the monsoon. On many days I spent hours waiting for the sun. In my little mind, I thought that it was still sleeping in the east because my teacher had once lamented, “Now the sun has set, but why in the East?”
One day in class I suddenly understood what his words meant. He taught us “You know, the elementary history book teaches us ‘nos ancêtres sont des Gaulois.’ But, I tell you the Gauls were the ancestors of the French, not of us. Our ancestors were the Lạc-Việt. We are in the East; the French are in the West. The men from the West came here to plunder the prosperity and the spirit of the land—our ancestors’ land. They took away our independence.” This was my awakening; and then I began to understand more things.
After many rainy monsoon days, the sun reappeared and brought its brightest light to the rice field. I admired its colored radiance, but I felt something was missing. The sunlight was there. The rice field was the same, except that the young rice stems grew taller and turned into a darker shade of green. There was nothing tangible missing, but something was indeed gone. I guessed that was the spirit of the land—perhaps our independence—but the feeling was still vague to me. One thing I knew. I became fonder of the rice field, every stem of rice, every piece of land, and every bank of earth. I loved all people, all the buffaloes, the birds, and every living thing around me. On windy mornings I often contemplated the beautiful waves of paddies running far to the horizon and at sunset I watched the herons flying in the shape of a reverse V with the leader pointed ahead, fluttering and disappearing in the skyline. My emotions were in flux, but I had a growing compulsion to know things beyond my sight. I did not realize that I had a “thirsty soul.” I often asked the elders what was beyond the horizon. Many told me: “It is just like here!” My father laughed and said: “Heaven or Hell!” Only my teacher complained: “War and more war; war from the ancient times. They still fight now for their reasons, in Europe and in the Pacific. One day you are going to grow bigger, you might fight for your reasons.” I did not know exactly where Europe and the Pacific were, or what the war was or why it was being fought.
A decade later, I began to fathom the scope and the dimension of the Second World War from the West to the East, perceive the causes and effects of this massive conflict, and differentiate the reasons why the worldwide powers had to fight. I realized and ascertained that my old teacher at my home village’s school was a compatriot.
In the summer of 1944, my family moved to our town house, newly built, in Camau City. My mother opened a business and my older sister and I continued our education at the city’s primary school. One morning in September of 1945, we heard a commotion coming from the soccer field across the street from our classroom. Our teacher went out to look, and came back moments later shouting: “Independence! Independence! Vietnam independence!” and “Out! Out! All of you out to join them. We have independence!” Immediately, all students from our class and other classes poured out. We crowded the street and most of us ran to the soccer field shouting, “Independence! Independence! Long live Vietnam! Long live independence!” We were deeply moved. Most of us were crying. My eyes were blurry with tears.
We joined hundreds of people who had been in the soccer field. We continued to shout and celebrate with them. How lovely and precious was the word “independence” that I had heard from my teacher! At that very moment, I thought I could see it, touch it and grasp it. Was my feeling wrong? A meeting was held to celebrate our independence led by a group of people unknown to me. Some came up to a newly made podium to talk to the crowd and lead it in shouting hurrah. We did not know who they were and what they were talking about, but we did not mind. We cheered with joyful emotion. We cried and we laughed. By afternoon, the meeting exploded into a massive parade that lasted until midnight. It seemed that thousands of people left their homes in town and happily joined in. We marched through the streets carrying a forest of flags, banners, slogans, lamps, and torches. Our small city radiated with light and color, joy, excitement, and animation. No one could say how many times we marched around the city and how many times we exclaimed, “Long live Vietnam! Long live independence!” This sudden display of enthusiasm and elation by the masses in our small town illustrated how much we loved our country and wanted independence.
Unfortunately, we were not to enjoy independence very long. Two weeks later the communists—the group who had led the last meeting and parade of independence—began to turn victory into tragedy. Two months later the French returned and plundered it from us again.
After that exhilarating day of independence, the communists began to form committees to rule the city, to censure every family, and to monitor each individual suspected of having had close relations with the French and the Japanese. Communist guerrillas began to arrest, torture, and execute suspected collaborators (called “Việt-gian”). Some executions were performed by shooting but most people were drowned alive (called “Mò-Tôm”). The first victim was the district chief of police, a martial arts master, who had had close relations with the Japanese when they came to town in March. He was executed by gunfire under the city bridge one morning in mid–September. In the following days, many former employees of the colonial government were arrested and tortured or executed. I learned that my old village teacher was also arrested and executed. I profoundly mourned his death. This patriot and moral master who had devoted his whole life to teaching history and sowing seeds of knowledge and love for our country was unjustly killed by the communist butchers.
Only two days after the independence parade, my father disappeared. In 1921, he married my mother in Saigon. In 1922, the couple moved to the Mekong Delta to become farmers and owners of a small parcel of cultivated land at Thai Binh Village. There, they lived quietly and happily until the summer of 1944. Because my mother moved to Camau City, my father had to commute from the countryside into town. He retained our beautiful house and our productive land in my natal village. In the summer of 1945, feeling that he could not peacefully live with the communists, my father slipped out of their clutches and fled. I did not know the reason.
I also did not understand why the communists hated the indigenous Cambodian monks so violently. Many were arrested and executed by “Mò-Tôm” in bundles of three, four, or five at a time. Several days later, the bundles of corpses emerged from the bottom of the river and drifted along the waters.
The communists were expert not only in the art of killing, but they also excelled in propaganda and in the collection of money. With the slogan of “A Week for Gold to Save the Country in Danger,” the communists in Camau District collected a fabulous fortune of gold and money from the city residents through this so-called “Voluntary Donation.” Under the rules of the communists, independence apparently meant killing and extortion.
Besides suffering the malevolence of the communists, the residents of our small city faced another fear. The French returned to Saigon in mid–October and their pacification forces had launched southward of the peninsula. They reoccupied its lowlands from Tan-An, My-Tho, Ben-Tre, and Vinh-Long to Can-Tho Province. Panic spread over Camau District as we heard gruesome news. The French forces, when coming down to Soc-Trang and Bac-Lieu Provinces, brought with them hundreds of indigenous Cambodians formed into “partisan units,” which then massacred innocent Vietnamese, included women and children as they marched through city and countryside. These cruel wholesale slaughters—called “Cáp-Duôn”—were considered to be acts of revenge for the killing by the communists of their respected Buddhist leaders. Indeed, as the Vietnamese communists sowed the wind, the Vietnamese innocents reaped the whirlwind.
In the midst of these fearsome circumstances people around the city prepared to evacuate to the countryside. The communist “Administrative Committee” of Camau District changed its name to the “Committee for Resistance and Administration.” The new committee ordered all residents of the town to evacuate and everything to be burned by the guerrillas in a “scorched earth policy” to fight against the French (Sách-lược Tiêu-Thổ Kháng-Chiển, chống Pháp).
At the end of November 1945, my family—composed of my mother, my two sisters, and me—was forced to flee to the coast in a small boat. The night we left our home the city was torched. After traveling several miles on the waterway, I looked back to see a large column of bright flame tearing the dark sky over the city. We knew that the town and our house were burning. We cried in silence. Only my mother spoke: “We lost our house in town, but we still have our village house and you will meet your father and your brothers. God bless them.”
My two elder brothers, who had been attending the second cycle of education at Phan Thanh Gian College in Can-Tho, became stuck at Bac-Lieu provincial city on their way home and could not join us. They and some of their classmates joined with the communist “Committee for Resistance and Administration” of Bac-Lieu Province and ran with its members to some remote area.
During that critical period, youth in South Vietnam faced hard choices: to stay in town and work for the French, perhaps to be killed by the indigenous Cambodians, or to join the communists to fight against the French. My two elder brothers chose the latter path.
For nearly three months, my family’s boat wandered deserted waterways in the Dam-Doi and Nam-Can areas. Finally, we followed the Ong-Doc and Trem Rivers back to Thai-Binh, our natal village. Unfortunately, we could not resettle in our house because the communist guerrillas had occupied it as their head office. We had to live temporarily at the home of one of my father’s relatives, located deep in the U-Minh forest. Only members of a few residential families could reach it so we were safe for a time.
Fortunately, my father and my eldest brother were able to follow and rejoin us at great peril from both the French and the communists before Têt (Lunar New Year) of 1946. Only my second brother was still allied with the communist “Committee for Resistance and Administration” of Bac-Lieu Province, where he remained for two more years.
Due to his detailed knowledge of the region, my father was able to evacuate our family safely to several areas in U-Minh forest where we avoided danger for one and a half years, before returning to Camau City in mid–August 1947. By that time, the French had changed their policy and called for the people to return to their cities and towns to reestablish their normal lives. Most families had no choice but to return to their hometowns; the nomadic jungle life, full of uncertainty, sudden evacuation, and little subsistence, was too much for anyone.
Most who resettled into their hometowns faced problems and could not easily recover their losses from the previous years of evacuation. Many had lost family members in addition to homes and property. In Camau City, three quarters of public buildings were destroyed, included the hospital and the beautiful primary school. Ninety percent of private homes had been burned down since the day the communists began their scorched earth policy. The northern bank of Canal 16, where our town house had been located, had become a wasteland covered with weeds and bushes. People begin their lives again, from scratch. Like our fellow citizens, my family suffered the loss of both our homes and all assets and properties, including a few hundred hectares of uncultivated land in my natal village which had become the communist guerrillas’ lair.
Nevertheless, life continued for everyone despite the hindrances and the developing communist guerrilla warfare. My father rented a small house on the outskirts of town and created a forging furnace as a temporary means of subsistence for my family. Thus, a rich and happy farmer before the war became an empty-handed and humble forger in a devastated town. My eldest brother and I had to help him in his hard work. As a result, I could not return to primary school, which had temporarily been built on its former foundation with scrap wood, bamboo, and thatches.
However, we could no longer live in this new home because the communists began to increase their nightly executions of suspected “Việt-gian” by “Mò-Tôm.” They threatened to kill all who had any contact whatsoever with the French. My father decided to move my family to Bac-Lieu provincial city in November 1947. There, he applied for a job at the provincial police station and became a police officer, second to the provincial chief of police. My eldest brother had a job at the provincial office of administration and I went back to primary school.
Many in our small town moved to larger cities in search of better livelihoods. But most residents continued to live in this small city and witnessed more changes to its face, while remembering its now-ruined images and its now-wounded soul. One of them was my second brother. Indeed, after he fled from the communist embrace in December of 1948, he returned to Camau City where he has lived to this day. Now, at age seventy-eight, he can tell us the most moving remembrances of the ups and downs of this small city.
In this sorrowful narrative I can tell only a fraction of what occurred in our city during the very first years of the Vietnam War. At that time, as a child, I did not understand that to gain independence we had to pay a price. But the price we paid in 1945 was too high, both physically and spiritually. We lost enormously: a city burned down, innocent lives sacrificed, and many properties destroyed for nothing. However, our biggest loss was the inspiration the word “independence” had given, because we were ashamed and frightened by the unimaginable cruelty of the communists, acting in the name of independence. We considered this “communist-claimed independence” a tragedy or a delusion. We lost confidence in those who pretended to be “saviors” of independence and liberty for our country. In reality, they were the planters of all seeds of misfortune, suffering, and disaster for the Vietnamese people day after day. We had seen enough shameless hypocrisy, and suspected anyone who claimed to fight for our independence.
Prior to 1955, the French educational system was complicated and difficult for Vietnamese students. Also, there were many differences between students of French colleges and Vietnamese colleges, public institutions and private institutions, and a lot of other problems concerning the different programs of education. All of these issues would be summarized in one word: “restriction,” which was associated with the French colonial policy of “restraining intellectual education” for the people of their colonies. This restriction was seen more clearly in higher education. In Vietnam, prior to 1945, there were only a few higher level institutions in Hanoi, Tonkin (or North Vietnam), such as “École de Droit and Administration,” “École de Médecine Indochinoise” and “École Normale Supérieure,’‘ respectively training indigenous judges and administrators, local doctors, and teachers of high schools (in Vietnam these teachers were called “professors”). At the same time, none of these institutions existed in Saigon, Cochinchina (or South Vietnam). Thus, those who had the Baccalaureat Complet and wanted to attend higher education in science, engineering, advanced medicine, or other majors had to travel to France. However, the number of Vietnamese allowed to go was kept to a minimum and places were reserved only for those who had French citizenship or those who belonged to wealthy families. These problems led to several demonstrations by “collégiens” (high school students) in Saigon during the first months of 1950, the year after the first State of Vietnam was established.
In retrospect, I would say that these student demonstrations in Saigon were new events in Vietnam’s political life. For the first time in history, student demonstrations erupted in the streets of the former capital of the French Federation of Indochina, the new capital of the State of Vietnam. Moreover, these heated demonstrations became the prototypes for many subsequent demonstrations by Vietnamese students in the 1960s.
At first, students of several public and private collèges (before 1954, high schools in Vietnam were called “collèges” for junior students, and “lycées” for senior students) in Saigon organized moderate demonstrations at public places demanding reform of the outmoded French system of education. Although Vietnam was then a newly independent state within the French Union, the French continued to handle all important matters, such as the education system, and economic, political, and military affairs. They also controlled the country’s security forces, including the Army of Vietnam, the National Police, and the Federal Security Services. However, war with the Vietnamese communists came into a new phase in North and Central Vietnam with increased guerrilla activity in South Vietnam. Facing a new form of struggle from the masses, the French reacted firmly. Police, firefighters, and secret agents of their Federal Security Services were dispatched to crush these demonstrations. In one such action, those men shot down a student, beat or injured hundreds of others, including schoolgirls, and arrested several dozens more.
After the death of the student, a second phase of demonstrations involving thousands of students with more political demands occurred in front of the palace of the prime minister. These demonstrations were more intense and popular opinion said that many communist cadres had joined in. The repression by the French security and police forces was also more violent. Finally, the struggles of the Saigon students were shut down. Hundreds of students were arrested and tortured by the French Security Services, sending a great wave of other students in Saigon and in other cities fleeing to the communist-free zone (called the “movement of going to the maquis” or “phong trào thoát ly ra bủng biền”). This movement was emerging like a pest. Hundreds of secondary students, most of them belonging to middle-class families, fled their homes and took sides with the communists to fight against the French.
Like other students at collèges and lycées, I faced pressure from pro-communist students who engaged in a sort of “whispering propaganda,” urging us to join one of the secret communist organizations in town in order to take action against the French and the Government of Vietnam, or to fly to the communist-free zone to fight for the “independence and liberty” of the country. At the same time, students faced scrutiny by Federal Security Services operatives who disguised themselves as students to monitor the activities and movements of other students in these collèges and lycées. As a result, the actions of these clandestine agendas led to hundreds of students leaving their families and joining the communists and hundreds of others being arrested.
In six years, from August 1945 to August 1951, thousands of students fled to the communist side. The first wave occurred in the two years of 1945 and 1946, when the French came back to Vietnam, and the second wave occurred in the two years of 1950 and 1951, after the students in Saigon failed in their struggles for the reformation of the national system of education. Thus, the French neglected the challenge of “winning the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people, particularly the youth—the hope of the country—when they came back to Vietnam after World War II. Indeed, the arrogant actions by the colonists pushed many of the city’s elite students to the open arms of their foes while they also failed to control the youths in the countryside. (Later, those who had fled to the jungle with the communists became their active political and military cadres; however, after the war, most of them were excluded from important organizations in the communist regime, especially those who were from South Vietnam. Since these people had been originally belonged to the “little-capitalist” class, or middle-class families, they were denied acceptance in any proletariat institution but could be used by the communists in wartime).
A more damaging consequence of this French policy was that a majority of secondary students who remained in towns and continued the French system of education later became the strongest anti-colonist and anti-communist proponents in the national forces of South Vietnam. They had seen clearly the corrupt ambitions of both the French and the communists. In early 1950, only a few years after the harsh suppression of student demonstrations in Saigon, the French had to face both the Vietnamese communists in the battlefields and the Vietnamese nationalists on the political front, the latter were fighting for true independence for Vietnam.
I was one of the secondary students who remained in Saigon during that critical period. In May of 1954, I received a draft order to be trained as a Reserve Officer Cadet (Élève Officier de Réserve, EOR) at Thu-Duc Reserve Officers’ School (École des Officiers de Réserve de Thu Duc) located about 15 miles northeast of Saigon, South Vietnam.
At that time, those who graduated from collèges and lycées, or had a higher degree of education, were called into the army as “EORs” at Thu-Duc Reserve Officers’ School in South Vietnam or at Nam-Dinh Reserve Officers’ School in North Vietnam. In 1951, the latter was dissolved and all of its EORs were integrated with those in Thu-Duc. From First to Fifth Class, EORs who graduated became second lieutenants in the Army of Vietnam. Many famous generals of the later Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces had graduated from this military academy. Those who wanted to become regular officers from the beginning were required to have the same basic degree of education as EORs, and also had to pass an entrance examination to be admitted as cadets of the “École Militaire Inter-Armes de Dalat” (EMIAD) that formed career officers for the army of the new State of Vietnam. The educational and military abilities of the reserve and regular officers of Vietnam at that time were not much different, since all of them were educated through the same French system of education and the same French military training programs.
I provide these details about training to point out an important fact: most officers graduating from these military institutions belonged to the class of intellectual and elite students in Vietnam. Although all were educated in public and military schools by the French, officers of this generation were recognized as anti–French because, first and foremost, they knew the ambitions of the French after returning to Vietnam in 1945 had devastated their country. Consequently, while fighting against the communists, they were also trying to support the government of the State of Vietnam and, for the sake of the Vietnamese people, expel the French from the country instead of serving French interests. They might have liked French civilization, language, and literature or appreciated the spirit of liberty and equality of’ the French people, but they rejected the colonialism of French political and military leaders of that time. This was the difference between these officers and the first generation officers created by the French in previous years, prior to the establishment of the State of Vietnam in July 1949.
After two months of training in Thu-Duc, we learned that the French and the Vietnamese communists had signed the Geneva Treaty on July 21, 1954. This treaty cut Vietnam into two parts, after the communists totally defeated the core of French Expeditionary Forces at Dien Bien Phu garrison. The Ben-Hai River became the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the North and the nationalist State of Vietnam in the South. This was a very bad news for all of us.
I was one of 1,200 EORs in the Fifth Class. One-third of these EORs were North Vietnamese intellects or students. The Geneva Treaty proved disastrous for them as they were cut off from their families in the North and risked losing them forever. Blessedly, nearly a million people from the North migrated to the South. I did not know how many of my peers would be able to reunite with their families due to the migration. However, I was sure of one thing, that in the following years they might have to fight against those they had once loved, their brothers, sisters, relatives, and friends who had remained in the North and were later forced into the war in the South by the communist leaders.
In January 1955, about eighty-five percent of the EORs, including myself, graduated with the rank of second lieutenant. During ten days on leave I returned to Bac-Lieu City to visit my parents before being assigned to an infantry unit. I learned that Camau District, my hometown, had become a transit place for the communist cadres and guerrillas in the Mekong Delta to congregate before regrouping to the North with their “comrades” and “Uncle Ho” (Ho Chi Minh). All bodily organizations of the Government of Vietnam (GVN) at Camau City had been temporarily moved to Bac-Lieu City. My hometown again suffered from turmoil. Worse, it would have to witness deadly fights between its sons in a near future. Indeed, in this small town, where everybody knew everybody else, many residents were taking sides to fight with either the communists or with the nationalists. I had many friends from primary and secondary school who became communist and formed into several units and regrouped to the North. They became my foes. Thus, my lovely hometown became spiritually divided by the division of my country. However, just a few months after the regrouping of these communists to the North, Camau District was upgraded to a “province,” called An-Xuyen Province.
After my short leave in Bac-Lieu, I returned to Saigon to receive orders for my first assignment of my long journey in the army. I began as a platoon commander at the 61st BVN (“Bataillon Vietnamien,” or Vietnamese Battalion), located at Duc-Hoa District of Cholon Province, for one year. In January 1956, I was reassigned as a company commander to the lst Battalion, 43rd Regiment of the 15th Light Infantry Division at Duc-My, Nha-Trang, in Central Vietnam. In January 1958, I attended an intelligence course at the Military Intelligence School at Fort Cay Mai in Cholon. After graduation, I was retained at this school as an instructor. From that time I began a humble and silent career backstage, as if I was walking under the shadow of the smoke of war but not within it, for more than ten years. As a result, I was promoted more slowly in the military compared with my classmates who were commanding combat units.
However, in this ten-year period in Saigon, I had the opportunity to attend four intelligence courses with the most advanced military intelligence agencies of that time. The first time, I took the “Territorial Intelligence Course” in Singapore offered to Vietnamese intelligence officers by the British Royal Forces in the Far East. The second and third times, I attended, respectively, the “Counter-Intelligence Course” and the “Field Operations Intelligence Course” in Okinawa with the U.S Forces in the Pacific at USARPACINTS (U.S. Army Pacific Intelligence School). The last time, I traveled to the United States to take the “Allied Senior Officers Intelligence Course” at the U.S. Army Intelligence School in Maryland, which trained senior intelligence officers to take leading roles in the field of operational intelligence for units the size of a division or larger. All of these intelligence courses enriched my knowledge of the conflicts between the communist world and the free world. I knew that the United States had no choice but to involve itself in the war in Vietnam to save Indochina and safeguard freedom for other nations in Southeast Asia.
During that period, I often suffered anguish as I witnessed many disastrous events that threatened our democracy. I saw unimaginable demonstrations in the streets of Saigon; the two coups d’état of the “generals” (in 1960 and 1963) to overthrow President Ngo Dinh Diem and a series of consecutive coups in the following years; and unrest around the country whenever communist saboteurs came too close to urban areas or inside the capital. In addition to these misfortunes, the arrival of tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops into the country brought a flow of dollars that changed the face of every city and town. Hundreds of snack bars sprang up like the mushrooms in fertile ground, which severely altered the economic life of the social classes and led to corruption. Our society faced new challenges involving the choice between good and evil, justice and crime, and conscience and malfeasance.
For two years, 1966 and 1967, as deputy commander of the Military Intelligence Center (MIC), which belonged to the J2 JGS RVNAF (Joint Staff Intelligence of the Joint General Staff of the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces), I was commissioned by the Chief Staff J2, who was concurrently Commander of MIC, to organize a dozen Military Intelligence Detachments (MIDs) to work alongside each Staff S-2 (intelligence) of every allied grand unit fighting in Vietnam. Vietnamese officers and NCOs of these intelligence detachments were to help their allied partners with interrogation of prisoners and in understanding documents captured in the battlefields. I often visited them to encourage them in their duties around the four military regions of South Vietnam. On these tours, I always remembered my father’s words about “heaven or hell” and the first history lessons on the “spirit of the land” that I had learned from my old teacher at my natal village. Yes, I did fly from one horizon to another, and I felt the presence of that spirit in every corner of the land, but everywhere I just saw flames, blood, tears, suffering and misery. Saigon was hell and everywhere in my country was hell. If there was a place called “heaven,” it seemed to exist only in my dreams.
The misfortunes of Vietnam that I witnessed inspired me to compose poetry. I did not care if I was a good or a bad poet. What I wanted to do was to give voice to the hardship, agony, and misfortune of the Vietnamese people who were suffering during the war. In each word, I felt propelled by unremitting turbulence that led to calamity and suffering—the blaze of violence and war afflicting our motherland, changing the face of our society, and disrupting the lives of the people, even as I was evolving painfully in the midst of it all.
In such a troubled time, “war and peace,” “love and hate” and “life and death” were the main themes of Vietnamese literature. Many writers and poets at the time wrote to appeal to the conscience of the Vietnamese leaders, both communists and nationalists. Their voices were unheard and sometimes their lives were in danger. In fact, under the communist regimes in North Vietnam, during the two decades of the 1950s and 1960s, many famous writers and poets were imprisoned under harsh conditions or simply disappeared. Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, men of letters were free to write, although their voices were deeply buried in the sounds of battles that raged around the country. Decades after the end of the war, the mainstream writings of Vietnamese in exile in any corner of the world involve memoirs or research and discussion on the Vietnam War. Yet the common purpose of these writings is to help the younger generations of Vietnamese understand why the war left such a bloody mark in their country’s history. This too is my purpose: by tracing the war’s events I hope to convey an understanding and clarity that will help younger generations of Vietnamese to be more reconciled with the past so they can make even better progress in the future.