A True Hero of the Vietnam War

Vietnam-The war where Americans came to be the hero once again. The war where American men put their lives on the line to fight for an un-American cause. The war between America and the Vietcong. But what about us? What about the war the Vietnamese faced at home? American soldiers were killed as they tried to kill Vietnamese communists; they seemed to forget that not all of Vietnam was the enemy. To Americans at home, there were two groups of people being killed in Vietnam: The enemy, and the men who entered Vietnam knowing full well what the consequences could be. But there was another group that was forgotten. There were the parents whose houses were ransacked by soldiers searching for Vietcong. There were the children who witnessed the burning of their homes by American soldiers. There were the teenagers who witnessed their comrades killed right before their eyes. We were the forgotten innocent who were forced to suffer more than any others. I’ll tell you one thing- America sure wasn’t our hero. America savagely took many innocent lives. In particular, the life of An Chinh Gia: a rice farmer, a brother, a husband, a friend, and my father.

Forty-one years have passed since the day American soldiers ambushed my home in Lieu An, stole me and my younger brothers and sisters away from my ma, mother, and my Ba, father. I was only fourteen then, my youngest brother was only three. They took us, and my Ba, he tried to come to us. The soldiers wouldn’t let him come, but he tried again. I saw him running for us, running for my little brother because he was crying. Ba was also crying-tears I had never seen a man like my father shed. I saw him running, I heard him yelling, I saw him fall as he was shot in the back, "Don’t allow them to take from you what I have worked so hard to give you". And that was our dignity; our honor. To this day, I have not let that be taken away from me while everything else in my life seems to have been stripped bare.

In the years leading up to this life-altering event, I had come accustomed to the brutality against the people I knew. I heard of and saw terrible acts carried out on my friends, and my neighbors, but I approached these crimes against the people I knew as an onlooker because, for the time being, my family was safe. My Ba was one of the most generous men I knew, and for that matter, have ever known. When soldiers killed a rice-farmer in our village, my Ba helped his family get back on their feet. And I’ll never forget when my Ba ran into the burning home of our neighbors and rescued a mother and son from the flames.
It was the summer of my thirteenth birthday. For the first time, the war was at my doorstep, quite literally. We all heard news of soldiers who were demanding answers from Jin Jian, a friendly merchant, husband and father to his two-year old son, Tuan. Me, along with the other curious children in the village, followed our worried parents to the Jian’s home in order to see for ourselves what was happening. I didn’t like what I witnessed. By the time my Ba and I arrived, it was too late for my Ba to be hero; the Americans had already come and used their “heroism” to kill Jin Jian. I saw a hut engulfed in flames. I saw people frantically throwing pails of water at the fire that quickly took everything in its path captive. But what I remember most was not the fear I felt, nor the tangible fear from those around me, but the screams that emanated from inside the hut. Not screams of pain, not screams of anger, not screams of fear – screams of sorrow. Suddenly, I heard nothing, I only saw what I believed to be a man entering the burning home, and not just any man, but my father. For the thirty seconds that he was out of my sight, I don’t remember taking a single gasp of air, If Baba can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. That was one of the longest thirty seconds of my life. I finally breathed steady when I saw my father emerging, a true hero, from the home with a woman in his arms, and Tuan in hers. Once again I heard the shrieks of sorrow coming from the woman. I saw people rushing to her side, padding her with washcloths, asking her questions, but she did not speak, she did not react. She looked towards her home, now a massive bonfire, as it fell to the ground. Everyone looked at the home as it collapsed - the extravagant finale to the day’s events – but I only watched this woman with tears in her eyes, distress in her face, and her nude Tuan in her arms, as they both looked on at their life falling apart before their eyes.

Tuan sat emotionless, curious if anything, covered in the blood of his dead father who now lay among the ashes of the hut. That was the first of many times my father outshone the American “heroes” who trod on our soil.

And the last time my Baba had his chance to be a hero was that day forty-one years ago. The day that defines what the Vietnam War is for me. I got up at 5:15 in the morning and had begun my normal morning routine, and by 8:30 that same morning my world was flipped upside down. I returned home from fetching water at 6:30. Actually, this place was no longer the home I had known, it looked like a military base; a scene of a battle; a scene of defeat. A dozen Americans dressed in camouflage suits mingled in my front yard. The look in their eyes told me they had a mission – they weren’t here to protect me and my family, they weren’t here to assure us we should no longer fear the Vietcong; they were here for answers and I could’ve assured them they wouldn’t find what they were looking for here. As I approached, three soldiers were escorting my three younger siblings away from the hut and another handful had my two parents, along with several of their acquaintances, cornered against our home as they borated them with interrogations. My father shot me a glance that told me to not come near, but the glance was also glazed with a fear I had never seen in him before. At the same moment that I noticed there was a 42-caliber pistol to the back of my Ba’s head, there was a sudden tug at my arm from behind as I was whisked toward the motionless huddle that was my siblings. It was then that my Ba yelled my name, and attempted to say more, but was hushed by the cold barrel pressed against his temple.

If I thought I saw fear in my Ba’s expression, it wasn’t comparable to the fear in the faces of the huddled mass of my siblings. My youngest brother, Sinh, despite all his efforts to act like the “big boy” he bragged of being, bawled like a baby. I went to him and put my arms around him without saying a word. For every anxious moment that passed, I came nearer and nearer to losing my own composure. I desperately needed to know what was happening to my parents, but I couldn’t compose the courage to raise my head. In a moment, my father was rushing towards us in an impulsive attempt to be with his children and keep us safe, for reasons my Ma later recounted to me: The group of my parents and six of their friends were being accused of Vietcong affiliations; affiliations which they all, to the discontent of the American soldiers, denied. One soldier radioed in to his commander that he had eight civilians, “What do I do with ‘em?”. The response shook every nerve in my mother’s body, and instigated my father’s impetuous efforts to, once and for all, be a hero to his children, “Kill anything that moves”. That voice echoed in my mother’s head until the day she was layed to rest.

At the time, I didn’t understand why my father was trying to escape the barricade of soldiers that surrounded him. I only saw him coming for us, and at last, I felt safe. Like my Baba had saved so many others, he was now coming to save me, to save my brothers and sisters. But before he could make it ten strides, he was forced to the ground by a young boy who thought he had the authority to tell my Ba what to do simply because he held a gun in his hands. Sinh cried for his Baba, and I wish I could stop time right there. When my Ba heard his youngest cry out for him, it was the beginning of the end. He was determined to reach us, to console us, to have us console him. He pushed himself off the ground and made his way towards us again. I cringed when I saw the gun pointed at my father. I cringed, but I could not move, I could not speak. I suppose my Ba saw the expression in my face – or perhaps it was the lack of expression that put my Ba at unease- and it was then that he spoke his last words to me. One blast from the gun and my father was gone, but no gun, no American soldier, could demean my honor or my dignity.
I guess the soldiers considered their work done after they had stolen a life, so they took off, and they left my mother bawling over the body of her dead husband.

A couple years later, I heard of a Napalm attack in a nearby village. I saw children, badly injured, I saw their bodies lining the streets, I saw men, like my Ba, carrying them to safety. If my father had been alive, he would have been the one to come to the rescue of those children – I just know he would’ve. Heroes are the people like my father that save lives, not the people like the American soldiers who take them away.