The Road to Freedom I

CHAPTER 1
WAR AND CHILDHOOD

It was 1949, and the war to regain Vietnam’s independence from France had intensified to ever more bloodshed. My family was in a very difficult situation, as were thousands of others. My father had joined the Viet Minh front in 1945, with a dream of bringing back independence as well as wealth and happiness to my people. He returned home for a few days to visit my family once a year. Because of my father’s absence, my mother became the head of the family. She opened a small, low-income business in order to provide food and clothes for us. Every day she bought rice from villagers, stored it then sold to wholesale merchants.

There were four children in my family. Lan is the eldest child in the family, born in 1937. She was a shrewish and cruel young girl. I, Hiep, was born in 1942. My younger sister, Mai, was born in 1943, and our youngest brother, Thang, had recently been born.  My family had been forced to evacuate several times since 1945, around Hue, a former capital, Nghe An and Thanh Hoa, before settling in this small village, called Nap. Nap is about 5 kilometers southwest of Thanh Hoa province. Thanh Hoa is a province in the extreme north central part of Vietnam, which belongs to the 4th Inter Zone[1], totally controlled by the Viet Minh.

Several of our aunts and uncles on both sides of the family had resettled in Nap also, so I had many cousins there. Tru and Cu, whose ages were the same as mine, were my best friends. Tru was the fifth son of an aunt on my mother’s side. His family evacuated from Ninh Binh province a few years earlier. Cu was the sixth son of an uncle on my dad’s side, Mr. Du. His family was very rich, and resided in that village all his life. Mr. Du cooperated with Viet Minh as the district chief.

Although mom’s income was low, she tried to raise us well, by good management. We lived in a small, thatched cottage, with only one bedroom, next to a 4-meter wide dirt road. This road curved around a large pond, connecting the main open market of my village, called Hom Market, to the others beyond Nap Mountain. There is a chain of limestone and granite mountains around this area. I remember the two limestone mountains best, Nap and Nhoi at the western side of my village.

Nap Mountain is very beautiful. It suddenly rises high among flat, green paddy fields. There are several small, ancient Buddhist temples hidden under luxuriant banyan trees. One temple is about half a kilometer from my house. In front of this temple, there is a big gate built from granite. Between the gate and the temple is a large green grass yard. In the middle of this yard, there is a beautiful lotus pond full of lotus and water lilies in the summer. Nhoi Mountain is more beautiful than Nap. It is also surrounded by green paddy fields. On top of this mountain, there is a huge piece of rock about 10 meters high and 3 meters wide, with a strange formation. Standing far away in some direction and watching at that rock, we would realize that it looks like a young lady embracing a baby. Looking over the horizon, she seems to be searching for something. A legend passes from generation to generation about that rock, which is called "Hon vong phu"[2].

The legend goes like this, “A very long time ago, there was a happy family of a young couple. They lived peacefully in a small house by the foot of this mountain. One day, the enemy came and invaded our country. The king asked all young men to join the army in order to push back the enemy. So this young man had to do his duty. Soon the day came when he had to bid farewell to his beautiful wife to go to the battlefield. He promised he would return home soon, when the war was over, to take care of the child that she had been pregnant with for nearly three months.

Day after day, the wife waited and waited for the happy day of his return, but her beloved husband never came back to her, although she already had a new son, who was more than one year old.

Every day she carried her child and climbed to the top of Nhoi Mountain to watch for her husband with the hope that with this high elevation she could see him far, far away. Year after year, she still waited for him without eating, or sleeping, and finally she petrified.”

At that time, I was in 3rd grade. My sister, Mai was in second grade at the same school. My older sister, Lan attended a higher grade in another school. I do not know what grade she was or what school she attended. My youngest brother, Thang stayed at home with my mom. She took care of him while doing her business.

Every day at about 6:00 a.m., we woke up, washed our faces and then joined our cousins and the other children in the neighborhood in going to school with empty stomachs. We followed each other on a dirt road winding along a canal, which curved around the foothills of Nap and Nhoi Mountains. This canal had been built a couple decades ago, during French domination, for irrigation purposes. We walked about 40 minutes to reach our school.

Our school was at the foot of Nhoi Mountain in a small Buddhist temple that was surrounded by rocks caves and lofty trees. There were many reasons that the school was located in this area. First, during the war, the Viet Minh had torn down all large buildings, even pagodas, churches, hospitals and schools to prevent French troops from using them for military purposes. They borrowed this strategy from Soviet Union, which used it during World War II, when Hitler invaded that country. Secondly, during an air raid by enemy airplanes, students could use the rocks and caves as bunkers to protect themselves. Third, in the rural countryside there are no public buildings large enough for a small school, except those close to the mountain. This environment provided us lots of fun. During break time, we could play around those rocks, especially hide and seek.

 After school, about noon, we all walked 3 kilometers back home from school. Although the school was very far away for us, we still enjoyed it because we had many friends and a very beautiful landscape. On the way home, we ran after birds or caught butterflies or grasshoppers. We were also happily thinking of the good lunch awaiting us at home.

During the hot, summer afternoons, my cousins and I went to the canal on the western side, or to the Nap River on the eastern side of the village to play and swim. The Nap river is a small one, but it is full of boats, from very tiny to huge, which carried foods, merchandise, or people from somewhere to the market or the reverse. Rivers were the main means of transportation in our country at that time,