Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975

This prompted an old man slowly to emerge, sobbing, carrying an old woman with a hideous head wound. He laid her on the ground before bowing solemnly in all four directions. Nam felt shocked by the spectacle, together with that of two dead teenage Vietcong in a nearby ditch, the first enemy corpses he had seen. This was a Catholic community, and in its church he found five more bodies – those of a husband and wife clutching three children to their breasts, all killed by blast, as had been a young girl he found nearby, her purple blouse flapping in the breeze. Nam wrote: ‘I felt stunned and found it hard to breathe, in a daze from my anger and sense of boundless grief.’

Next day, as his battalion swept through an almost abandoned village amid occasional bursts of enemy fire, he found a young woman sitting silent on the brick floor of a wrecked house, holding a wicker basket: ‘her eyes looked straight ahead in a blank, stupefied stare’. She stood up as the soldiers entered and Hieu, the radio-operator, slipped past her into the ruined kitchen, to search for food. Nam asked why the girl lingered in the midst of a battlefield. When he gestured towards her with his pistol, ‘she remained silent, her stunned eyes emitting a flash of terror. Suddenly, as if performing a gymnastic exercise, she thrust out the basket towards me. It contained two sets of clothing, blouses and pants, a head-scarf and a small paper package tightly secured with a rubber band. When I opened it, I saw two gold-strand necklaces and a pair of earrings. Hieu muttered behind my back: “This bitch is crazy. She’s got so scared she’s insane.” Then he caught the glint of the necklaces. “Gold! It must be more than one tael