|
Vietnamese Poems
Christmas 1980
Ðêm Giáng sinh xưa
Mùa Giáng sinh xưa con tàu định mệnh
Ðưa ta đi đời ai biết về đâu,
Bao lớp người nằm chôn đáy biển sâu,
Kẻ thơ ngây chết theo người đầu bạc.
Cơn biển động lay con thuyền trôi dạt,
Cảng Mersing ngọn sóng dữ vô tình,
Biển âm u đời vắng bóng thần linh,
Ôm chặt con , buốt đau lòng cha mẹ.
Rồi sóng gió qua đi, đêm lặng lẽ,
Con nước đưa thuyền dạt vào bờ,
Ðêm cuối năm , công viên vắng chơ vơ,
Thành phố lạ, bơ vơ nơi phố chợ.
Qua hôm sau, buồn vui còn bở ngỡ,
Thoát ngục rồi, du mục biết về đâu,
Ðời sẽ dành bao bến cảng, con tàu,
Thân tị nạn kiếp bể dâu ai biết.
Rời Mersing, gánh gồng ra hoang đảo,
Tengah quạnh hiu, trốn bão từ đây,
Nhìn con thơ, con yên ngủ trên tay,
Ngoảnh mặt lại ngày đắng cay ly loạn.
Mưa núi gió ghềnh, sóng vỗ triền miên,
Ở lại nghe con, giấc ngủ bình yên,
Cha mẹ đi, lòng nặng triũ nổi niềm,
Mong tìm đến niềm tin nơi Thánh Chúa.
Giọt nước biển, nước mưa, giòng lệ ứa,
Nổi buồn, nổi vui, quyện chảy thành giòng,
Bài thánh ca cao vút tận không trung,
Ðêm Giáng sinh tha hương, sao buồn thế !
H.V.H. Nhân mùa Giáng sinh thứ hai mươi tha hương.
Ngày 14 tháng 12, năm 1999.
|
|
Spring on the Potomac River
Mùa xuân trên bờ Sông Potomac
Những dòng sông Việt nam :
Sông Hương của anh, hiền hoà, trầm lặng,
Lững lờ, thơ mộng bên Thiên Mụ chiều nao.
Con sông của em, sông Sàigòn
Ồn ào, náo nhiệt, vui biết bao,
Nơi Bến Cảng dạt dào,
Hai đứa ôm con trong đêm khuya
Ngồi nghe sóng vỗ,
Nuôi bao ước mơ
Vượt biển, lên đường tìm tự do
Chẳng biết tận phương nào.
Con sông của chúng mình, ngày lao đao,
Sông Ðáp La, không cuồn cuộn, không dạt dào
Chỉ một giòng nước nhỏ, lượn quanh co
Êm đềm, rực rỡ,
Thỏ thẻ trong nắng chiều miền cao.
Con sông ngày mộng nhỏ, ngày xanh xao
Con sông thành phố cũ
Mang đứa con đầu lòng ,
Trong giấc mộng đầu tiên.
"Rồi dập diù mùa xuân theo én về,
Mùa xuân mơ ước đó xưa có về đâu"
Trên những dòng sông của quê hương.
Sông Hương, sông Sài gòn, Sông Ðáp La
Của ngày xưa, của chúng ta,
Của những năm tháng đã qua.
Nay ta đi qua chiếc cầu lộng lẫy, thênh thang,
Trên con sông hùng vĩ, mênh mang,
Những đại học, đền đài, tháp cao nhà thờ cổ kính,
Lòng ta thấy nao nao,
Hoa nỡ rộ trong mùa xuân của ta bên bờ sông Potomac
Nhưng sao trong lòng ta
Vẫn dào dạt tiếng hò, tiếng chuông chùa, tiếng gà gáy trưa
Trên những con sông của Saì gòn, của Huế, của Kontum những ngày xưa.
Hồ Văn Hiền, để tặng Hương trong Mùa Xuân 1999.
|
|
Seas and mulberry fields:I went to medical school
Chapter 4:
I went to Medical School.
When I finished high school and passed the French Baccalaureat, it was quite a relief for my family and me. In 1965, military draft was fully enforced and whoever didn’t pass the high school exam to qualify for college had to be drafted into the armed forces. Draft of college students was deferred until they have completed their education. Medical school lasted 7 years, including one premedical year and six years of medicine. There were only two medical schools in South Vietnam: the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Saigon and the other Medical School at the University of Hue, founded much more recently and less selective.
Most high school graduates vied for a spot in medical school. The profession was well respected because of its doctoral degree, its humanitarian purpose and, at least to some significant degree, its relatively comfortable and stable income. There were also other practical considerations: medical students had their military draft deferred the longest (7 years) and there was a remote hope of outlasting the war. After medical school, even when drafted, a doctor becomes immediately a first lieutenant, much above the rank of warrant officer that a cadet earned at entry level after military academy. Their salary was also much higher than the salary of other officers of the same rank; there was a special bonus for the doctors that made their paycheck equal to a major’s salary. Their life was also less endangered by wartime’s standards, doctors died rather frequently as war casualties, but not at the massive rate of combat officers.
About two thousand candidates applied for the 150 spots at the Saigon Medical School. Female students made up about 20-30% of the total. Men did much better at the entrance examination than at graduation. I was 5th on the admission list, at graduation I had a much lower ranking.
The entrance testing covered Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, French or Vietnamese (as primary language) and a foreign language. It probably was in favor of male students who usually were stronger in the sciences. I still remember the essay that I had to write in French, commenting on a famous saying by a French scientist, Louis Pasteur probably, “Science without conscience can only ruin the soul” (Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme). The question in Biology concerned the different enzymes involved at different steps of the digestive process. There was also a quiz asking you about any thing, from mundane subjects like the current price of a bag of rice to test our connection with common daily life of the country, to esoteric topics that was not taught at school (“Who wrote Tao Te Ching?”}. The whole test probably was an inspiration from the MCAT test, of which for sure I was not aware at the time.
|
|
Foyer Alexandre de Rhodes
During my seven year of medical school, I lived in a hostel for students on Yen Do Street, run by a Jesuit priest, Father Henri Forest.
Foyer Alexandre de Rhodes was named after the French priest who came to Vietnam in 1642 and codified the different existing systems for phonetically transcribing Vietnamese language using the Roman alphabet. He was widely recognized as the father of modern Vietnamese writing system, ch» quÓc ng», which replaced ch» nôm (an adaptation of Chinese character to transcribe Vietnamese vernacular) and ch» Hán (sinitic Vietnamese).
My brother was looking for a place where I could stay, have a good learning environment and without being exposed to bad per influence. The foyer was an ideal place for all that; only it was very difficult to get accepted into it. I have to give credit to my brother for being very patient and meticulous in preparing me for the interview with Father Forest. In my country, we rarely had to go to any face to face interview, application to most selective institutions was based solely on “blind” entrance exam, the decision being base solely on one’s ranking, or possibly backdoor bribing. My brother asked me to copy all my transcripts from high school, by hand, because we didn’t have easy access to a photocopying machine then. On the day of the appointment, he accompanied me to the Foyer. The Father, probably in his forties, talked mostly with my brother who spoke perfect French and was very articulate and persuasive. I got in, thanks to my brother thoughtfulness and to my good grades and recommendation from my high school teachers.
Foyer Alexandre de Rhodes turned out to be one of the most educational, formative and decisive in my whole life. There, I learned to live a life of an adult, to be aware of the broad range of societal issues that were affecting our country, outside the ivory tower of medical school, to think and act freely, yet within the framework of humanism and responsibility. On the logo of the Foyer, a needle pointed to the North, the ultimate aim: Esto Vir, Be a man, Sois homme.
Outsiders often described our Jesuit tradition elitism as a kind of snobbism in a poor country at war. However, as many years have gone by, the influence of our Father Henri Forest on our life in our most formative years have inculcated in each of us the basics of leadership and personal and social responsibility that, so many years later, are still alive in every one of us, the so called AFAR (Anciens du Foyer Alexandre de Rhodes/Alumni of the FAR).
We had an AFAR meting a few years ago here in Fairfax, at a friend’s house. Father Forest looked the same to me as he did in my student years, with his large eyeglasses and his silvery hair. Sadly, he has severe Alzheimer disease now and is living in Canada, his native country.
Medical Student.
I had my premed year APM at the Faculty of Sciences (APM= Annee Preparatoire Medecine). We were taught by faculty from the sciences section of the University of Saigon. In the French and Vietnamese system, faculty means a school or a division of the University. The State University of Saigon probably had about 20000 students and its facilities were spread out in different areas of the sprawling city. Around 1965, Thành C†ng Hòa (Republican Citadel), former quarters of the presidential guard under President Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime, was converted into the campus for the School of Pharmacy and the Faculty of Letters. The medical school had more luck in that we got a completely new facility in a large campus completely funded by American foreign aid. It was situated on Hong Bang Street in Cholon, the Chinatown equivalent of our city. Multi-storied white and gray buildings enveloped in concrete screen were totally air-conditioned. The architecture probably was ordinary and typical of government buildings built with public money in the United States. Later one of my friends found the same architecture in another hospital in America and it reminded him with nostalgia his own school, which he had not seen again for more than 25 years. However, the school was a far cry from the small, obsolete building that was the Medical School on Tran Quy Cap Street in Saigon and we were very proud of being the first class to use it. As a footnote, it was rumored that because a large cemetery had to be removed for the new medical school to be built, the school would have a very unfortunate future. The following years in the new location would be marred by internal strife among its faculty, hostility between students and faculty, murders of teachers and students. However, it makes more sense now to blame it on the turn of political events rather than to explain it with a hex from exhumed Chinese ghosts. In fact, in a recent conversation with Dr. NguyÍn SÖ ñông who had lived in the area even before the medical school was build, he told me that this cemetery story was a myth. A polyclinic had been located at the site before the medical school was built.
On the first day of our first year in the new school, the Dean, Dr Phåm Bi‹u Tâm, came to congratulate us in one of the air-conditioned, large classrooms dug below ground level. Dr. Tam was a legend among medical students and the general public as well. He had the reputation of being one of the old style gentlemen who would preserve their academic integrity and not concede to any outside political pressure. It was widespread rumor that years earlier he refused to bend to the pressure from the wife of the powerful brother and advisor of President Ngo Dinh Diem , Mrs. Ngo Dinh Nhu (or her husband?) Mrs Nhu reportedly wanted to have her daughter admitted to medical school even when she had failed the entrance exam. Dr Tam refused to comply and the girl had to go abroad to study medicine in France. As a historical footnote, Mr. Nhu died tragically in a 1963 coup by the military, his daughter later died decapitated in an automobile accident in France. Dr Tam emigrated to the US years after the communist takeover of April 1975 and died in California in 2000.
The premed year (APM) with its basic sciences depressed me with a lot of facts to memorize. The whole curriculum was done in Vietnamese terminology, which was the rule at the Faculty of Sciences. I think I had not been well prepared in high school for courses in chemistry and biochemistry and its laboratory rituals. The whole year course of biology revolved around the study of the frog or the toad. I hated putting a pin through the head of the little creature to kill it. Sometimes, I had the feeling that I was not going to make it. However, there was no choice then. Earlier, I passed the entrance examination to the School of Pharmacy, but I dropped Pharmacy. Its requirement in memorization in botany, chemistry and pharmacology would have been much worse for me.
The first year in Medical School was more interesting though as always there was a lot of fact memorization. We spent three months in the study of bones alone, osteology as it was called, at the famous Institute of Anatomy situated about two kilometers from the new Medical School. We had to understand and remember things like the complex structure of the temporal bone and the many holes at the base of the skull, with the nerves and vessels that go through them. Fortunately, the French who invented most of those absurd requirements in the curriculum also provided us with manuals, which were good but expensive learning aids. Les Feuillets d’Anatomie for example were a collection of about 20 tomes of drawings that gave us a good tri-dimensional view of the most important structures in anatomy. As with the other heavy French anatomy textbooks, I received them from my brothers who went to the same school 13 and 6 years earlier, respectively.
In other disciplines like physiology, embryology, pathology and clinical sciences, our generation was lucky to have American textbooks readily available though the help of the AMA at a very nominal price. Textbooks and visiting professors from American medical schools gave us a fresh outlook at modern, scientific medicine. It was a foretaste of American medicine and an escape from the old, tradition laden French medical system that we copied from our former colonial rulers. This American influence also helped de-emphasize rote learning and put more emphasis on a more comprehensive and integrated curriculum. I was also able to read a wide range of textbooks and journals made available to us at our student hostel by Father Henri Forest who would not spare any effort to enrich our private library with donations from American organizations and with books and laboratory equipments purchased from his trips abroad. Learning the pathophysiologic basis of diseases rather than memorizing a list of symptoms and sign was to me a very captivating approach.
The teaching hospitals
Our first hospital rotation was at HÒng Bàng Hospital, exclusively dedicated to the treatment of tuberculosis that was rampant still in our war torn society. The hospital was close to our medical school and I don’t know why they sent us there right on our third year (in a 6 year curriculum). There, hundred of people were having military tuberculosis, terminal hemoptysis (vomiting blood coming from the cavities in the lungs) and drug resistant disease. Many were in their adolescence, as there was a vulnerable period of increased vulnerability in that age group that coincided furthermore with a lot of stress from harsh school exams and not infrequently malnutrition among this student population. The professor in charge was a French old timer, Dr. Gauthier, who was famous not only for his dedication, his knowledge of this particular tropical disease but also his Gallic bluntness toward the students.
We had rotations of internal medicine at Ch® RÅy Hospital in Cho lon. Students followed the interns, who followed the professors during ward rounds. As a regular, unremarkable student, I was most of the time nearer the hallway than the patient under discussion and had a very vague idea of what was being discussed. Our young professor discussed a case presented in French by one of my pretty classmates, lecturing emphatically and eloquently as if he was reading from his “Vade me cum” (a popular medical synopsis similar to the Merck Manual) while we were trying to take note as much as we could. My first patient was a young woman with a fever and a faint skin rash, which prompted me to quickly made the presumptive diagnosis of typhoid fever. I never knew whether it was correct. I don’t think I had any significant bedside tutoring, medical records were skimpy and any laboratory confirmation was lacking. Most significantly, there was a girl who developed blindness after a febrile onset. I was so moved by the patient’s situation that I wrote a short story about her.
‘-ñèn Çâu? Ánh sáng Çâu?
-Con không thÃy gì cä mË å..’
-Con tên gì?
-Con tên HÜÖng’
-“Where’s the light?
-“I can’t see anything, mom”.
-“What’s your name?
-“My name is Huong..”
She was from the center of the country, like me. After the massive communist attack in the spring of 1968, she had to leave her native village and came to Saigon for more safety. Here, in that overcrowded and faceless city, her family joined the multitude of homeless people living out of mendicity, prostitution and petty crimes. She died, of meningitis probably.
“I waited for the traffic light, sitting on my Honda. The noises and the smoke from military trucks, American autobuses and motorbikes made me dizzy. I had a burning sensation in my eyes. Was it sweat in my eyes or was I crying? Was I crying for you, for myself or for all of us?”.
At the Hospital for Children (BÎnh ViŒn Nhi ñÒng), we had Dr. Phan ñình Tuân as Chairman. He was a quiet, diminutive man from Hue, my native city. I did not have an opportunity to learn much directly from him, I only remember him as a very dignified professor, with the demeanor of a Vietnamese mandarin. The two female professors were from opposite worlds. One was from North Vietnam, very thin, austere and still unusually single. The other was from the South, a graduate from Howard Medical School hence fluent in English, the wife of a wealthy banker and very eager to implement the American way of practicing medicine in our old hospital.
A patient that I still remember vividly from that hospital was a child who was dying of meningitis, with his or her parents crying and screaming at the sides of the crib. I also remember vaguely a baby that I tried in vain to resuscitate by CPR, probably my first case.
Bình Dân Hospital (‘’Hospital for the Common People’’) on Phan Thanh Giän Street was our main location for surgical rotation. Dr. Phåm Bi‹u Tâm was chairman of general surgery. He belonged to the old guard who had received their medical school education at the old University of Hanoi then their post graduate training in France, cumulating in the degree of Professeur Agregé or for only a very few Professeur titulaire (tenured professorship) rarely granted to candidates from the colonies of France like Vietnam. Among this exclusive club were Professor TrÀn Ng†c Ninh in orthopedic surgery (also professor and chairman of pediatric surgery, and for a while member of the cabinet under Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky), Professor ñào ñÙc Hoành in Oncology, Professor Ngô Gia Hy in urology, Prof. NguyÍn Væn Út in dermatology, Prof. NguyÍn ñình Cát in ophthalmology. They were prominent people among South Vietnamese intelligentsia and enjoyed even among the general population a certain celebrity status that they often used in their favor outside of the field of medicine, most noticeably in politics. In contrast to other hospitals like NguyÍn Væn H†c and Ch® RÄy, Bình Dân remained a bastion of the old guard and received very little influence from the ‘’young Turks”, like Professor NguyÍn Kh¡c Minh in anesthesiology, freshly minted from American residency training system and eager to implement the American way of running things.
We had our OB/GYN rotation at TØ DÛ Maternity, named after the mother of King T¿ ñÙc (19th century) who was widely admired as a wise and dedicated mother, venerated by his imperial son. It was a very large public hospital for women, under the direction of Professor HÒng, short, middle age man from the South. For our third year in medical school, we had to have at least 20 deliveries done, from the moment the women were accepted at admission, thru delivery, until they are carried with their babies to the wards. The student had to make sure that the woman under his charge didn’t lose her wooden shoes and that her plastic bag of belongings followed her when his himself pushed her gurney (brancard) on the way to the delivery room. He had to shave her pubic hair properly and without hurting (it was customary the, until years later, when a study showed that shaving did not help in any way with preventing puerperal infection). He had to suffer the bites that a suffering woman in labor inflicted on his arms or his hands. If he made a mistake or result was unsatisfactory, the following morning, he had to go to the Chairman’s office and answer to him. It was also at Tu Du Hospital that I had the most memorable months of my student life. I spent almost a year there as interne fonctionel, where I was kept busy day and night, delivering babies when a difficulty arose, doing surgery with senior interns like ChÎ PhÜ®ng (later she became a political, controversial celebrity under the communist regime), ChÎ Khen that I have seen again since and Dr. NguyÍn Bích Tuy‰t, who was very kind to me and helped me complete expeditiously my required thesis for a timely graduation by the end of 1972, right after I had to leave my civil life to go fight the war.
Fortunately, I also had the opportunity to study from a few excellent American teachers. Medical schools at American institutions like Georgetown and University of Texas were trying to get a foothold at our school (some would look at it suspiciously and call it cultural imperialism or even worse, intelligence in disguise). I was among the few students who were just bored and abandoned by our antiquated system and looked forward to something new an challenging. Dr Smith T in internal medicine, Drs Wasserwald and Benigno in OB, Dr. Lamblet in radiology and a couple of ophthalmologists (Dr McDermott and others) spent a lot of their time tutoring our small study group of students on how to understand signs and symptoms and how to solve clinical problems rationally.
The ophthalmologists even took other student volunteers and me along with them to a hospital in Vinh Long, a city in the Mekong Delta. There we had marathon-like week where we did more than ten eye surgical procedures a day, mostly cataract removal for people who had not seen light for years .One of the patients kowtowed before the surgeon to showed her gratitude when the dressing on his operated eye was removed. It was one of those few moments when I witnessed the miracle of medicine. I also had the chance to help with two cases of cornea transplants. I went with the ophthalmologist to the morgue to remove the cornea from both eyes of a dead man, probably a homeless person. The next day, we transplanted one cornea to a healthy female adolescent and the other one was given to a sickly, tuberculous young woman, probably in her early thirties. Ironically, the graft did well on the rather weak woman, and failed on the other patient. The surgeons and I spent our week in the same military living quarters; we drank milk , ate plenty of beacon and other staples of American food in the military cafeteria. We also went together to Vietnamese restaurants. It was wartime then, we rode a military Jeep and had to bring along M 16 rifles in case of terrorist attack.
Those American teachers were especially helpful to my quest for learning in very difficult times. There was less of a generation gap due to their rather young age, their open-mindedness to challenging questions and their willingness to help. I had very little direct, one to one contact with our own Vietnamese faculty; in part because of my own personality. I was rather too independent to fit in the patron-pupil system. I spent most of my adolescence away from home and that probably had something to do with my uneasiness in dealing with the old bosses in the faculty. I was more at ease and worked better with younger Vietnamese faculty like an OB /GYN female professor at the Tu Du Maternity who was an excellent teacher to me, who went to my wedding and for whom I still have a lot of respect and nostalgic feelings.
The whirlwind.
As noted before, by hex or by historical turn of events, quite a few traumatic events marked my medical school years. In my second year, TrÀn QuÓc ChÜÖng, one of my classmates was assassinated inside the school itself. His arms were tied back and he was thrown down on the concrete sidewalk from the third floor of the Biochemistry building. He died a few hours later. We did not know who killed him and for what purpose. He was the son of a prominent lawyer and earlier had some political activity involving the other side. We did not now which political side he was on at his death.
Another assassination happened during my second year in medical school. Anatomy and Surgery Professor TrÀn Anh, the father of one of my classmates (TrÀn Anh TuÃn) and a handsome, eloquent man in his forties who had previous training in France and America was gunned down on the street while walking home from the medical school. . Huge processions of students took part in the two funerals. Another faculty member who taught us pharmacology {I still remember his lecture on fluids and electrolytes, I was the one who had to take the notes and edit them for printing) was assassinated in a dramatic car bombing by communist terrorists. He was a member of the cabinet at that time.
Into the sand and wind:
“Chàng thì Çi vào nÖi gió cát”
In 1968, our studies were interrupted by the T‰t MÆu Thân, (New Year, Year of the Monkey) events when the communists launched massive, coordinated attacks on major South Vietnamese urban centers. They occupied Hue, my hometown for months. There was blood bath among the military and officials of the South Vietnamese regime caught prisoners by the rebels. South Vietnamese and American forces took back the city only after months of fierce urban guerilla combat and massive destruction of a large part of the historic city. Fortunately, the house where my parents lived was left intact while most of the major buildings in other parts of the city were either razed down or heavily damaged.
At the time of graduation, most male students were preoccupied with getting into the military and were faced with a more uncertain future. Very few among them were allowed to stay for another year of internship in a specialty. For those few, because of their specialty training, a position at one of the military hospitals was assured. They did not have to go with the more risky Medical Corps units called Ti‹u ñoàn Quân Y that had to be mobile, going on combat missions with the divisions. When we got to the end of our seven-year study course, most of us had almost a fatalistic view of our future.
So many preoccupations were in our mind besides getting good grades. Final grade ranking’s only usefulness was to get for each of us a better assignment position.
|
|
I went to war.
1972, Before the Paris Peace Treaty.
My years of premed and medical school went from 1965 to 1972. My graduation date was to be around the end of 1972 when we had to take our final clinical exams. It was customary for graduating medical students to leave school afterward and while working as a physician, their credentials were not completed for a few more years when they were to prepare their doctoral thesis under the guidance of a professor. At the end of those years, after approval by their sponsoring professor, they were allowed to come back to the medical school and present their thesis to a panel of judging faculty. The protocol was burdensome, inherited from French medicine tradition where for each student the ”patron” was the most important deciding factor of his or her career. Therefore without a thesis, a graduated student would never get his official diploma of Bác sï Y khoa QuÓc Gia (State Doctor of Medicine). Without a cooperating patron or without enough time and facility (difficult to afford for a military officer in a country at war) to complete research he would never have his thesis ready for presentation.
The year 1972 was a turning point of the Vietnamese war. Negotiation between the Americans and the Communists almost came to fruition after many years of stalemate, and the Communists were trying at the same time to achieve a few sensational large scale attacks on major South Vietnamese urban centers to put pressure on the peace talks in Paris. The three famous targets were Binh Long in the Southern part of the country, Kontoum in the Highlands and Tri Thien (Provinces of Quang Tri and Thua Thien, in the northern panhandle of the country). The communists provoked a fierce reaction from the regime in South Vietnam, the motto was “Bình Long Anh dÛng, Kontoum kiêu hùng, TrÎ Thiên vùng dÆy” (Binh long is heroic, Kontoum is proud and Tri Thien rises against the invaders).
This historical context helped me in certain ways. In its expanding war efforts, the military drafted more and more newly minted doctors to send them to the new fronts. The medical schools were to comply with the pressure and to procrastinate less in graduating their students. So things went more quickly than usual for my class. In mid 1972 we took our clinical exam and went directly to military training school. Overnight we became officers, received cursory training in the use of firearms, in military discipline, tactics and strategy. Then we had a few weeks of crash course in military medicine: triage technique, evacuation, management of war injuries and critical care for conditions like shock lung and meningococcemia frequently encountered in military settings, particularly among new recruits
I got married.
I got married in August 1972, immediately before I was drafted into the military, for if we waited longer, we would have to get security clearance for my wife and permission for our marriage from the military. I still remember the awkward feeling when I declared myself as “married” and wrote my wife’s name on my registration paper. For someone who just signed his marriage papers just a few days before, it was difficult to get rid of the impression that he still was an independent young man without obligation to anybody whatsoever and without a fixed address where someone was waiting for him.
During my military training, I went home during weekends to live with my wife at my mother’s in law townhouse in Gia dinh, a suburb of Saigon. Weekdays were long and terribly boring. Beds in the military training camps were infested with bugs. My laid back and non-conformist nature made me hate military life. I found military etiquette vain and senseless and I found no meaning nor hope in that endless war.
Mid August, we had our wedding reception at a Chinese restaurant ( Nhà Hàng Kim ñô) on Nguyen Hue Street. My mother fortunately was in Saigon at the time because earlier events in Hue made it rather unsafe there. She had been visiting my brother Phu for a while. Among my family, only mother, my brother’s family and my brother in law Bách were present and my mother in-law was responsible for most of the preparations for the wedding. A friend of my brother, a wealthy and prosperous looking, owner of a large jewelry store was asked to lead the delegation from the groom’s side. His own success in life and in matrimony (stable marriage and numerous male children) was supposed to bring luck (hên) to the newly formed marriage. In retrospect, it cannot be denied that, despite my pride in my newly acquired professional status and my years of university training, I was quite ignorant in matters of practical importance and relied mostly on the benevolence and experience of people like my brother or my mother in-law. From a larger perspective, people of my generation were influenced by the American baby- boomer culture with its hippies, its political protests, and its distrust of the older generation and the establishment. In a sense, when we lost our country, we were indeed victims of all the weaknesses and corruption of our elders, but at the same time we were our own victims in our lack of sense of responsibility to our own country and lack of conviction and belief in our own future.
My Graduation
As mentioned before, because of the necessities of war, our professors were more willing to let us get our degree earlier. I was able to present my thesis title” Technique of Contraception”, in fact a translation into Vietnamese of a British textbook. The intended purpose was to create new Vietnamese medical terminology in the field of contraception, a relatively new field in 1972. Besides Vietnamese medical terminology in that field was almost inexistant. I got my MD degree on that last day of 1972. My wife, pregnant with my first son, was present at the ceremony, and we still have the picture of her helping me put on the doctoral gown. (There was only one for all of us, so we had to take turn borrowing it for the pictures).
I was completely done with my student days then. I was now Doctor First Lieutenant ( Bác sï Trung Uš) with a matriculation number imprinted on a dog tag and ready to go to my first destination: Second Field Hospital in “ Heroic” Kontoum in the highlands.
Kontum in the Highlands.
The week preceding the sacred Vietnamese New Year Tet Festival, I had to leave my wife, five months pregnant with my first son as said before. Kontoum was still under communist siege and there was no regular access to the town. The communists were pouring mortars occasionally on the population. The road to the nearest city of Pleiku in the south was still blocked at a Vietcong stronghold called Chupao, a narrow passage between mountains. I boarded an Air Vietnam propeller plane to Pleiku where I spent one or two nights in the Military Hospital, waiting for a lift by helicopter to Kontoum. Pleiku was a small city, red volcanic soil and its mountainous configuration gave its road and its landscape a peculiar, romantic impression celebrated in many Vietnamese folk songs. Its cool climate gave its women a rosy complexion on their cheeks: “Em Pleiku, má ÇÕ môi hÒng, ª Çây bu°i chiŠu, quanh næm mùa Çông…”( Pleiku girl, with your red cheeks and your pink lips, here in the afternoon, it is year round winter..)
Vietcong hiding in the surroundings also regularly bombarded the city with mortars. In the hospital, piles of protective sandbags surrounded doctors’ beds. Some had photos of their wives and children pinned on the wall. The radio was playing the favorite song of the time, before it was banned from military stations:
Em hÕi anh bao gi© trª låi
Xin trä l©i mai mÓt anh vŠ..
Anh trª vŠ trên Çôi nång g‡
Anh trª vŠ kiŒn tܧng cøt chân..
Anh trª vŠ hòm g‡ cài hoa trên tr¿c thæng sÖn màu tang tr¡ng..
You ask me when will you come back,
let me answer you, tomorrow, or after tomorrow, in the near future,
I will return, on my crutches,..
or I will return in a wooden casket decorated with flowers
On an helicopter painted white, the mourning color..
Not a very encouraging thought for a rookie in this interminable war!
Early in the morning, I boarded an American Chinook, a huge helicopter. They dropped me with my military bag on the airfield of Kontoum. Somebody gave me a lift to the civilian Hospital of Kontum. The original military Second Field Hospital where I was assigned to had been completely destroyed by American bombers during their attacks on the communists.. The military had taken over half of the civilian city hospital which itself was in miserable condition. There was no running water, no operating bathrooms and even the morgue had been destroyed.
I spent there my first Tet in the military, the first Tet of my married life. If not for a small party given by a town council member at his house where all the doctors and pharmacists were invited, there would be no New Year at all.
About one month later, communist siege was terminated with huge losses from both sides. The airfield reopened for civil traffic. My wife courageously boarded one of the first flights available. She was just about three months from due date.
We went to the marketplace, which was just reopened too. We tried to buy some mat for our bed. The only mat we found was a plain damaged one with a big hole in the center. We rented a small, tiny single room in a low, tin-roofed long house. We put our tattered mat on an old wooden bed borrowed from our landlord and got our bedroom. A friend in the artillery division later donated our sitting- room furniture: arm chairs and a tea table made of pinewood salvaged from ammunition boxes.
Life of a military doctor
Initially, I was responsible of the outpatient department. I had a clinic where I treated the servicemen and their families. I was quite inexperienced in matters of ambulatory medicine. In medical school I had been dealing with in-patients, mostly obstetrical and gynecological cases in the context of a poor but better equipped teaching hospital in a large city. I had to learn how to deal empirically with bread and butter cases of cough and cold, fever and chills without much help from the laboratory. Also, medical education had been stressing diagnosis skill and had been rather light on the treatment side. I had to learn what to give for fever. Tylenol was a new American name. Most Vietnamese patients wanted some kind of shot whenever they got sick. We gave them a shot called Pyrethane, an earlier phenacetine compound probably. I had to think of malaria whenever there was fever, because malaria was endemic there. There were frequent cases of black water fever where massive destruction of red blood cells by the malaria parasites released an inordinate amount of hemoglobin to the kidneys and gave the urine the characteristic dark color. Most of them died of the disease. Later, when I was in charge of the ward of internal medicines, I took over about one hundred patients lying on filthy beds with unchanged blankets under the hot corrugate steel roof . The building was surrounded with a mountain of litter. There was no running water. Most patients were sick with falciparum malaria, which did not respond anymore to Chloroquine, dispensed automatically by their very laid back previous doctor. I tested the blood of every one of them, gave them quinine and cured all except about twenty cases that I then treated with a combination of quinine and sulfonamide indicated in resistant cases. All of them did well afterward. I asked the nurses to come to work on time and not to leave in the afternoon. I encouraged them to salvage discarded cartons and plywood boxes from the pharmacy and use them as a kind of insulation against the daytime heat and mountain cold at night. I went to the civilian part of the hospital to borrow emergency medicines that we were badly in short supplies. The condition on the ward improved dramatically, though life was still very primitive for the patients. At a competition, received an award for the improvement in our unit. However, when I was fresh minted from medical school and still very idealistic, it was a challenge that gave me a lot of moral satisfaction, though whatever I achieved was a very minute thing even in the perspective of the life of a small hospital. Another thing that I was proud of was I always tried to be the advocate of my patients, against the will of their superiors who had the tendency to use them as disposable pawns. The short sick leaves that I gave to those poor young men despite the protest of their superiors often were the only breaks that they ever had for years with their family. The greatest regret that I have is that I did not have enough training and experience and I lacked sufficient moral fortitude to intervene for my patients when they needed it. There were cases that should have survived with more aggressive intervention and with more dedication from those who took care of them. But again, everything would turn out to be completely different.
Oasis of peace
Kontum was a very picturesque place. It was a small plateau surrounded by mountain peaks. The soil was not red like in others areas of the highlands. The small, winding river Dapla ran peacefully outside the city, glaring under the red sunset. Sitting at one of the small, improvised café, we could almost forget the ferocious fighting that was going on around us. Farther out, the two small villages of Phuong Hoa and Phuong Quy with neat houses built in the front of small, regular fruit tree groves, reminded us of better, more peaceful times that this region enjoyed before the internecine war.
Life was simple and primitive. We pulled water with a pulley and bucket from a well in front of the house. I planted a few impatiens flowers in used cans of concentrated milk. Once we had a splendid pair of orchid plants with cascades of red and gold flowers that lasted for weeks or months. Those flowers were the most beautiful images of Kontum that still live in my mind.
|
|
Chapter 5
Life in Cam Ranh
Cam Ranh Bay.
End 1973, I was transferred to the Center for Rehabilitation in Cam Ranh. Cam Ranh is one of the most famous harbors in South East Asia, for its strategic location and its calm waters protected from the frequent typhoons that occur yearly in the area. Cam Ranh was also famous for its pristine, white sand beaches and its clear, blue water.
As the war escalated in Vietnam, the Americans had transformed the area into a strategic military compound, well linked to different military American outposts in the Pacific. As American involvement in the war came to an end in early 1973 with the so-called Vietnamization of the war, Americans withdrew from Cam Ranh and left the facility at the disposition of the South Vietnamese Armed Forces. The former Navy Hospital was now the Vietnamese Center for Rehabilitation, serving servicemen who needed further recuperation and rest at a peaceful place after acute care at other military hospitals. Because of its former role as comprehensive military hospital, many of its facilities were underused now. There were interminable covered hallways connecting large buildings made of prefabricated material. The standard was roofs made of compressed cement fiber plates and walls made up of two layers of wood with fiberglass fibers in between for the purpose of insulation. That design worked well with air-conditioning that Americans had brought everywhere with them in Vietnamese tropical heat. It didn’t work for us anymore because there was no more air-conditioning. Then the claustrophobic rooms with their small windows became a kind of oven under the tropical sun, in the middle of immense sand dunes.
Our new home.
My family’s apartment had probably served as a clinic or other office. Dark, cherry color plywood walls had small and narrow windows. Linoleum floor was a luxury to us compared to the concrete floor that we had in our apartment in Kontum. So, despite the heat, we were really happy to move into much better housing than what we had before.
Soon, my wife became pregnant with our second child Hieu and she could not stand the heat in the rooms. She liked to stand in the deserted hallway where the soft breeze was giving her some relief at noontime. We were very grateful when later the carpenter of the center came to our rescue. He enlarged the opening of the window and gave us much needed extra fresh air to breathe.
Mr. Cung, as he was called, was a lower non-commissioned officer with a lot of children to feed. He had chronic urticaria, about which I couldn’t do much to help besides the usual sedating antihistamines available then. He used to go immerse himself in seawater to get some relief from the intense itch that was made worse by sweating in hot weather. His wife was a very hardworking woman, taking care of her numerous children and supplementing their food supply by raising a few chickens that run around sandy yards looking for an unlikely worm. She would often prepare some roasted chicken dish that she gave us as a token of appreciation for I was their family doctor and their closest neighbor.
Besides Mr. Cung’s family, there was only a bunch of single men sharing the quarters with us. The commander of the hospital was a few years my senior from my medical school. He was separated from his wife who had custody their two daughters in Saigon. He was very fond of Hoa who was a toddler at the time, much overweighed and very cute by any Vietnamese standard. He used to carry Hoa up on his shoulder and walked around with the child up above his head. So much that once, Hoa’s head hit the frame of the door. His mother though scared to death, tried not to make any loud complaint. Hoa didn’t get anymore than a bump on his forehead though. There were three pharmacists, a dentist and a surgeon who lived in the compound with us. The surgeon was also a former classmate in medical school; later we met again in the same boat that took us out of Vietnam before Christmas in 1980.
Hoa in Cam Ranh.
Our life also revolved around our first child. We took him around everywhere. Once I took him for a whole day on a trip to the beach, in his baby perambulator that we brought from Saigon. We went along the sand dunes, the deserted road that the American military had left behind. So much that when we got home, the axle of the expensive carriage was broken and we had to throw it away. It was one of those silly romantic things that you do with your son just once, and then you would remember and talk about it long afterwards. I also remember the trip that we made together with a few other military friends to the natural apricot grove that was blooming in spring around Vietnamese New Year time. The dirt path was quite uneven and our Jeep almost rolled over. Hoa was with her mother in the front passenger car and we were really relieved to get away with it.
It was in Cam Ranh that Hoa and myself had a close contact with disaster. One of our friends was a pharmacist who was quite fond of guns, and that, we had plenty available. He had a special shotgun that he was very proud of, slightly altered to add more power to its blast. That day, I was carrying Hoa in my arm and the friend wanted to play a practical joke on me. He pointed his gun nozzle into my stomach and pulled the trigger. There was a click, and I didn’t have enough time to get scared. Then he immediately pointed the gun to the ceiling, pulled the trigger again. An explosion torn a hole through the ceiling, to everybody’s amazement
Our second child.
My wife got pregnant with my second son, while we were in Cam Ranh. It was hot there and my wife really suffered during her first few months. When we went to Saigon to visit my wife’s family and get a reprieve from a military camp, my heart ached each time my wife held up her abdomen in her hands with each jolt caused by the many bumps on the road.
Around the mid-autumn festival of 1974 we came back to Saigon for a few weeks. Delivery date was due for more than a week but my wife did not show any sign progressing labor. The year before, Hoa was born under the care of an experienced, ethnic Chinese midwife, Cô Ba Mø at the An Ky maternity hospital. The same midwife had attended to the birth of my wife as well as of her sister and many cousins over the years. My wife had a bad case of hemorrhage after Hoa’s birth and this time I decided to be there to help with the midwife for added safety.
We went to different places around town on our Honda motorbike as we waited for labor to come. I still remember the movie “The Sound of Music” that they showed at the Van Hoa theater, near the CÀu Bông Bridge. It was a very long blockbuster, there was a large crowd and I think that we had to leave the place early. After waiting for a few days, delivery had to be induced, and Hieu was born a week after his mother’s birthday. He was a little hypotonic soon after birth and he did not cry much. He was a very handsome baby. I still remember Cæu Ba , a friend of his grand mother, called me on the phone (phone use was rather infrequent at that time in Saigon) to congratulate me about the birth of “ a very beautiful baby”. The city was celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival, the 15th of lunar year August when the moon is supposed to be most perfect for all year. I still remember the paper lantern that we bought for Hoa when he came to visit his new brother.
Hieu turned out to be a picky eater and nursed very poorly the first few weeks. He tolerated formulas poorly and vomited very easily after a feed. Her mother had to make a lot of noise, like tapping on empty cans of kerosene, attempting to divert his attention and therefore keep his food down in his stomach. In retrospect, I think he was a bad case of formula intolerance, possibly with gastroesophageal reflux. We took Hieu to Cam Ranh a few months after his birth against the will of his grand mother who would have preferred that we left him in Saigon under her care. His aunt Thuy helped us with taking care of the baby, his reflux persisted a long time even after I was gone to reeducation camps. Soon after Tet of 1975, the communists were approaching Cam Ranh and cities in the central part of Vietnam fell one after another. We had to let his aunt take him back to Saigon to his grand mother because he was the youngest child and very fragile then. We thought he would not be able to endure a sudden evacuation of Cam Ranh should the communists overrun our base.
When I went to the reeducation camps, Hieu was only eight months old. His mother managed to get money to by very expensive Guigoz formula for him, the only thing that he could take without vomiting. When I came back in early 1977, he was already two and half years old, an active, thin and taciturn toddler. He was very daring and once jumped down a flight of stairs at his child care center. In 1980, when we left the country, he endured all the hardship of escape and refugee camps without complaint. Like his brothers, it took years before they recover completely from our long ordeal.
Leaving Camranh.
Around March 1975, pressure from the communists was mounting everywhere,; in particular in provinces north of Camranh. Most of our armed forces there did not have any leadership left and people were flying in droves from a possible communist bloodbath. My wife had to leave Camranh at last, with Hoa and a trunk full of my books, my only valuable possessions then. We plan to leave behind everything else, including our television set that we valued very much at that time.
It was one of the last civil flights from Nha Trang, the largest city near us. Rumors ran that at the headquarters of the second tactic zone, of which we were part, most commanding generals and their staff have left in their ships. Our units did not have the order to evacuate yet, so leaving for us meant desertion and I had to stay at my assignment until further notice. There were corpses on the pavement at one of the intersections that we drove by. At the other corner of the airport cafeteria, there was a Korean, probably a civil worker at one of the Korean construction companies. He looked at us then silently ordered a glass of papaya and milk shake for Hoa. We were surprised when the waitress brought over the gift. We nodded to the stranger to thank him. I was guessing that probably the chubby child reminded him of his son still at home.
After my family left, there were only servicemen at Camranh Center. We followed through the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) daily reports about cities and towns falling one after another and the exodus of people toward Saigon. I was the deputy director of the Center then and the Director was a friend from my medical school and also for many years a fellow member of the Alexandre de Rhodes Hostel for students in Saigon. We did not have any order from above to leave and we just kept waiting. At some point, our staff doctors and pharmacists decided not to wait any further and decided to leave the Center without notifying us.
That night, it became evident that we were in a hopeless situation and we were almost the only officers staying behind. Other people who were still there had decided to stay, whatever happened. Either it was their native town where they would die if they had to; or because of their large families, the escape would be even more hazardous than the coming Vietcong threat.
Dr. N. T. L., the director of the Center, and I were standing by the seaside, on the beach. We were trying to find out a way to get to Saigon. We did not want to drive out of the peninsula and cross the Long Ho bridge. There was news of mutinous soldiers who reportedly destroyed the bridge and shot any officer in sight. Dr.NTL. thought of improvising a draft with the wheels of our Jeep. Looking at the dark sea ahead of us, I didn’t think it was a livable solution though.
Later in the night, someone called us. A Chinese businessman, Mr. Hoa, had left earlier with a group of friends on his small boat. Because of his loyalty to NTL he came back to rescue us at the last minute. I still remember I had to take care of another officer who had a cut on his forehead. I sutured the wound for him before taking some rest on the deck. Only much later in the early morning that I realized how bad seasickness could be. I had the feeling that my guts were pouring out. Lying down made me feel a little better. We went along the coast. Around us were ships and boats of all sizes, packed to the limits, almost sunken to sea water level. People carried with them all kinds of belongings, I remember mostly the many Honda motorcycles that hang along the sides of the other boats.
About two days later, we arrived in Vungtau, a tourist beach resort but also a military seaport. We were not allowed to proceed to Saigon. The government there was suspicious of any of their own military units trying to get into the capital. They feared for their own safety in case of a possible military coup by people who wanted a last minute compromise with the communists.
I had a bath, a good meal, and room to spend the night in a hotel in Vungtau, courtesy of our Chinese friend. The morning after, a helicopter lifted the senior officers to the headquarters (B T°ng Tham MÜu) in Saigon. I was on that plane though I was just a first lieutenant thanks to NTL’s connections. Doctors do sometimes get special perks. In Saigon, I got a taxi and was happy to be out of the turmoil, at least for a few weeks.
|
|
I Went to Reeducation Camps
The Flies.
When I recall the days I spent in the reeducation camps in Vietnam, the memory of the flies comes first to my mind. Somehow those small and annoying creatures became for me the symbol of my two years of misery and human degradation.
It started with a high school in Cholon where we had come to register as officers serving under the previous regime. After one or two days on food provided by local Chinese restaurants and sleeping on the floor, we were transferred in the middle of the night to an unknown destination. We climbed over hundreds of large military Russian made trucks that furtively took us out of Saigon. In the morning, we found ourselves in a devastated military camp, in the middle of nowhere. None of us recognized the place, until later when some looked at the small mountain that was overlooking the compound in a sinister manner and knew that we were located in the Tay Ninh province, west of Saigon, near the Cambodian border. It was formerly a South Vietnamese military camp, with most of the buildings made of corrugated sheet iron. Buildings that remained intact were already occupied by the communist military. They led us in Indian file through a hole torn in a fence to an abandoned hangar, probably a former garage for military trucks. So, about a hundred people tried so settle into that small space. There was no bed, no cot, not even sleeping mats. Everybody searched among the wrecked buildings, looking for a plank, any piece of wood that might be used as an improvised couch at night.
It was summer time in Vietnam and needless to say, it was terribly hot. But heat itself was not the main problem, after a while you got accustomed to it. To me, the most terrible thing was the fly. Right behind the hangar where we lived, there was a large moat that had protected the compound when it was still in use by the South Vietnamese military. Now, it was our garbage dumping ground, our privy and our sewage outlet.
I don’t remember that I minded the smell so much, I only remember the fat, giant flies with their glossy, metallic blue color and their relentless buzz around us.
One of my new friends was a pharmacist. His name was T. T. M. and he was probably a few years older than I. He had the foresight of bringing along a military nylon hammock that could be used also as a bed blanket at night. To me, his hammock, swinging him in the air was the most effective solution against those flies that tried perpetually to land on our face, our nose, and our ears. In retrospect, it sounds a little ironic that such a small thing had so much impact on your consciousness of your own misery, and how long it will remain lively in your memory while much more important things would fade away.
M. would remain a very close friend during our first months in the camp. He was much more lucky than I. After a few months, he was released from the camp. When he got out, he left to me most of his belongings, a kind of treasure for us at the time, consisting of an aluminum (empty) can of Guigoz formula and probably a pair of improvised chopsticks, a bowl, and some articles of clothing. He also left me some money. Later, my wife tried to pay him back but he gracefully declined it.
The Guigoz can.
I think it is worthwhile here to digress a little about that Guigoz thing. Guigoz was the trade name of a very popular formula for infants made in Switzerland or in France. Generations of Vietnamese children were fed with that excellent though expensive formula. The cans containing the formula powder were made of pure aluminum and were “recycled” for use in a multitude of purposes. When I was a child, I used to come in my paternal grand mother’s room for small treats that she gave to me only. My grand mother was very old and blind. She kept candies, French biscuits, and dried fruit in different Guigoz cans in her bedside stand. Those were gifts from many relatives and were rather expensive at the times. I used to hold her hand and took her places around the house. So I had my perks and I still remember those coveted exotic treats from her Guigoz cans. Someone called the era following the arrival of the Communists the Guigoz era. Food was sparse, even petrol used for small kitchenettes was impossible to find. Guigoz cans where best storage containers for food, for drinks when people went to community works, unpaid public corvees (nghia vu lao dong) ranging from sweeping the streets to digging irrigation and drainage canals at “new economic zones”. You could eat from them, drink from them, cook in them, take a bath by using them as a scoop, etc…
Trang Lon Camp, Tay Ninh
So we rummaged through the wrecks of the military compound, built our shacks of corrugated tin, dug our wells with improvised hoes and our own bleeding hands, made our individual stool to sit on it and get ourselves ready for our political reeducation.
The first 10 days, everybody was eager for classes to start. Instead we did not have any information about our location, about what would become of us or about what is happening outside our camp. Obviously there was no visible facility where classes could possibly held in our compound, and there were no teachers in sight. Rumors abounded. Some thought that we were going to be moved to the North or to other concentration camps, Some suspected that all of us would be killed one way or another when they woke us up in the middle of the night to have us run from our beds with all our belongings and standing in formations. They checked each of our faces with torchlight. Everyone was thinking it could be the last moments of our life or it could be the beginning of a life in shackles in labor camps.
A few could not endure this life in confinement, isolation and uncertainty. As early as the first few weeks, we started to have cases of suicides among the detainees. The first case that I heard of was a pharmacist who blew himself up with a grenade. Accidents occurred too, possibly some cases happened on purpose. A former captain for example was scalded and wounded to death when he boiled water in a tightly sealed container formerly used as a box for ammunitions.
For me, after a while I gave up every hope of release in the near future. We were given an extremely meager ration of rice and salt and it was obvious to me that to survive, I had to save my energy and my bodily resources as much as possible. This meant that I intended to move around the least possible and try to find any thing edible. The early months in the camp we had very little to do except writing our confessions again and again as mentioned before. It seemed that the communist government in Hanoi was still undecided about what to do with their trophy in the south.
Long Khanh Camp.
A few months later, we were moved to another site in Long Khanh, probably within 100 kilometers away from Saigon. The new regime did not know what to do with us and we did not know what to do with our idleness. Many of us were obsessed with finding food. They tried hard to exploit the minuscule plots of land available to us. They pulled water from the wells that we had dug ourselves with makeshift tools wrought from iron pikes. They succeeded in growing meager plants of sweet potatoes that provided leaves and tiny tubercles to be cooked in a kind of salted soup. That kind of low calorie food appeased hunger but was a real drain on our malnourished body. Increased expense of energy aggravated the vitamin deficiency that most of us had. Normally vitamins B, in particular thiamin (B1) are found in bran of incompletely polished rice or in normal economic circumstances commercial rice fortified with thiamin. Rice that we ate came from China and had been stored for years in bad storage facilities. It was almost rotten, vermin infested so that when we wash it before cooking, many of its components, particularly thiamin, were gone in the rice water. Many detainees were victims of beriberi, a disease of the nerves caused by thiamin deficiency. They were very weak, lethargic and sometimes unable to walk. I treated them by asking them to collect and drink the rice water at the well where they washed rice.
As outside political condition stabilized, it was now decided that Vietnam was going to be unified under a single communist regime. Life in the camp was still miserable but became less uncertain. We were now convinced that we were going to stay there for years. Food was more available though on scant quantities: we had fish and ready to eat noodle every day. We planted water morning glory (rau muong) in ponds that we dug and fertilized it with human waste scooped directly from the open outhouse. The typical meal consisted of one or two bowls of rice, a fish the size of two fingers, and some soup of watercress and noodle. One pack of noodle was shared among each group of ten people, called an A (a group of about 40 people was called a B).
Letters from home.
Around Christmas 1975, after 6-7 months of isolation from the outside world, we started receiving our first pieces of mail from our family. I received a long letter with my wife typical scrawling handwriting. She tried to pack as much information in there as possible.
What else should she have written to me? I learned that she and her family was staying in the same apartment at Cu Xa Thanh Binh. We had our third boy that she named Hiep as we planned, the name meaning “reunion”. He was a beautiful child with bright, big eyes but his mother almost died of bleeding after delivery. One of my classmates was her obstetrician. At one point, she did not think that my wife would survive. She asked for her patient and friend’s last will that she would relay to me if I would ever come back. Very resilient despite her apparent frailty, my wife survived and went though several months of residual complications to write me the letter. She did much more than that. She raised the children, tried to earn a living for the family, though she was only 23 years old and without any out-of -home work experience. She always remained as my faithful wife who saved me from my worst situations and she never lost faith in her religion and in her destiny.
Also came with the mail a picture of my wife and three children and a picture of Hiep who was about a month old. After the communists came, all cameras were illegal and there were no formally opened photographer’s shops. Nguyen ‘s Photo was a small studio across the street and well known to my wife’s family. So it was a special favor to us when they took the picture of our family.
“If”: Poetry and the Art of Survival.
Outside our camp, everything else in the life of a modern city was put to a halt. Most communications with other countries like newspapers, telephone and even mail were suspended or banned. For us it was even harsher. We were allowed only to read government newspapers. In fact it was one of our assignments to study them as part of our reeducattion. To keep my mind occupied, I had to try to recollect all the lines of poetry that I had learned in school years before or the stories of novels that I had read. I valued most the poem “If” by the British poet Ruyard Kipling that I first knew about when I was in the 8th grade in Danang, Vietnam. Mr. Menguy, our surveillant general, with his French accented English explained it to us when his replaced our English teacher for a day. I kept reciting to myself the lines that I was still able to recall. Part of them was in French. The French version was taken from the book” Un art de vivre” (An art of living) by the well-known French essayist Andre Maurois. Somehow those lines by Kipling helped me forcing myself to live through emptiness and despair. Later, when I had my pediatric medical office in Falls Church, Virginia, I was delighted when our American 70 year old friend searched for that poem at a public library, got a copy, framed it and gave it to me. The framed poem still hangs in my library at home. All my children are familiar with it too. Huy put it in his poetry book, a class assignment. He explained the reason for including the poem: “My father reads this to me since I was a baby”.
To be or not to be.
That’s the questioned that we had to answer perpetually. Besides poetry and literature, other things came to help me with another approach to the problem. When life or death situation came, there was no more of the embarras du choix ( too many choices open),
No more difficulty of a choice. A massive explosion of a huge depot of ammunitions left over by Americans in a nearby compound lasted a whole day. It was provoked by immature, teenager recruits who shot their rifles in the air recklessly. Some of our buildings were blasted away, some collapsed. A few of us were killed. Another inmate was a doctor a few years my junior from my medical school. He also had got married to a pharmacist soon before the communists came. He was feeling sick on that day of the explosion and did not go to work in the field like the rest of us. The bunk bed made of heavy steel plates that used to pave an airfield collapsed on him and killed him. I still remember his corpse lying on one of those steel plates, waiting for burial in a makeshift coffin. It was a cloudy day. Hundreds of us were allowed to walk in procession following his coffin carried by a few close friends, until we reached the rear gate of the compound. We were in rags, our shirts and hats made from green, plastic fiber cloth that we recovered from old, buried sandbags left from wartime. The path that led us to his grave was lined on the right side with open outdoor outhouses that produced a suffocating, heavy stench. On the other side were the maize fields where we had been laboring, removing stones and barbed wires with our bleeding bare hands. As it would have for any other Vietnamese, it made me think of the situation of the main character in the Tale of Kieu. She was a young girl well endowed in beauty and talent, lost in the whirlwind of her destiny. All school children had to study and learn by rote at least a few lines from the classic story. In that particular moment, I acutely was reminded of the scene where Kieu was detained by her Madame in the Ngung Bich Palace;
A wing of the house, marked with the inscription “Condensed Azure” served as the sanctuary of her spring.
In front of it was a fringe of remote mountains, melting in the beams of the neighboring early rising moon.
Around spread the vast horizon.
Far away were the sand hills mingling their yellow color with the rosy dust of surrounding roads.
As at the sight of morning clouds, Kieu felt ashamed to be in the light of the lamp.
The scenery which was unrolling before her eyes seemed to recall her the old souvenirs still carved in her heart.
Not long ago, her true love was still beside her, in the moonlight, drinking with her out of the same oath cup.
And now he was so isolated, so forlorn in a faraway corner of the ocean and under an unknown sky.
Maybe he had been waiting with no avail for the dew to carry happy news from her!
Oh, when could she clean her pure and innocent heart of all this blemish?
And how pitiful her parents were!
Maybe in this hour, they were waiting for her, on the threshold of the front door, as they had done every morning and evening.
Who would take care of fanning them in the summer and keep them warm in winter?
Oh, Courtyard of Lai *! How far did rains and the sun separate you from the exile?
Maybe, in this hour, the trunk of the old catalpa could have increased in size, large enough for an armful…
* A wise man, named Lai Kai, still had his parents alive when he was 70 years old. He dressed like a child so as to give his parents the impression that they were still young.
(Translation by Le Xuan Thuy in Kim Van Kieu, Co So Xuat Ban Dai Nam, Saigon).
|
|
|
