In the early morning, an order was issued: kill all animals, no exception. More than a dozen chickens and a pig that belonged to the combat logistics unit were transferred to the kitchen. The cook would slaughter them and chop the meat into small pieces, then mix the pieces with salt to make dried food rations.

  As dawn broke, the cook came to our squad to take Lu, who had no idea what was going on. The cook slid a rope around Lu’s neck and tried to pull him away, but Lu resisted, snarling, rearing back, refusing to move. Of course none of us could interfere—it was an order. Finally, Hanh told Tam to take Lu to the kitchen.

  “Why me?” Tam asked. He looked at the rest of us, bewildered.

  Tam and the cook started walking toward the kitchen, and Lu followed them.

  I lay down on my hammock and covered myself with a blanket, but it was no use. I couldn’t get the image of Lu out of my mind. After a few minutes I got back up and ran to the camp kitchen. Tam was already coming back.

  “Did he kill Lu?” I asked, almost frantic.

  “Not yet,” Tam said. “But I can’t stand looking at him.”

  “Follow me,” I said.

  We approached the kitchen from the back and saw the cook tying Lu to a tree. Lu lifted his head and stared at the cook. He had a rock in his hand—he was going to use it to bash Lu in the head. Meanwhile, Lu wagged his tail in excitement and licked the cook’s wrist.

  I felt heartbroken. Then, all of a sudden, I spotted a small bottle of gasoline and a thought popped into my head. Without hesitating, I grabbed the gasoline and threw it in the direction of the stove. After a few seconds, there was an explosion and smoke curled up two meters high.

  “Fire! Fire!” Tam shouted.

  The cook dropped the rock he was holding and rushed to take care of the fire.

  I went to the tree and took out my dagger to cut the rope around Lu’s neck.

  “Run, run fast,” I said, tapping him on the butt. For a moment his familiar wet nose rested against my neck. I could feel him staring up at me, hesitant. Then finally he ran away.

  * * *

  That evening a military truck came. It rained heavily, the last rains of the rainy season. As we were infantry soldiers, it was our first time being transported by truck. The rumor was that this battle would take place in the biggest city in the highlands, which was hundreds of kilometers away. We had to get there quickly. The truck started driving and plunged into the darkness of the night. But I could see Lu jumping out there in the dark, trying to run after us. I sat up in my seat, and so did Hanh and Hoang. Lu was like a shadow trailing behind us, rainwater splashing around his paws. “Go back to the Montagnard girl’s family, go back to the jungle,” I said to him. I turned around until Lu’s shadow finally vanished in the dark.

  They dropped us off about ten kilometers from Buon Me Thuot City. We walked quietly. We headed directly to the airport, where General Phu’s seasoned special forces stood guard. I had no knowledge of how other units had done in previous battles in this city, but in order to seize half the airport our unit ended up losing several soldiers. The enemy, aided by A37 planes, suddenly emerged from the tunnels where they had been hiding and fought back until dawn. Hanh had a leg injury, so I brought him over to a wall at the end of the runway to take cover. We didn’t realize that there was a group of enemy soldiers charging the wall. As soon as two of them jumped down and landed on the ground, Hanh and I shot them, but there were two more after them. They were so close that I hit one of them with the butt of my rifle and tried to stab the second one with my bayonet. But my attempt failed, and the tall enemy soldier jumped on top of me, knocking me flat to the ground. Within seconds, I saw his shining bayonet hovering in the air, ready to kill me. I thought that very soon I would become a bloody chunk of meat on the ground.

  But fortunately, God didn’t take my life.

  Thump!

  I thought I must be dreaming. It was Lu. Out of nowhere he suddenly appeared and jumped onto the enemy soldier, using all of his canine strength to push him away.

  “Oh my God! Lu!”

  That night I held Lu in my arms as I slept. He breathed noisily and licked my face and neck. I had no idea how he’d managed to run more than 100 kilometers to follow our squad. Maybe it was fate that connected us at difficult times when we needed each other most.

  When I woke up the next morning, Lu was staring at me as if there was something on his mind. I didn’t know what he was thinking about. If he were human, I figured, those eyes would be judgmental.

  Three days later, we seized the entire city and the airport. It was an important battle. Then a few days later we received some new recruits from the North and launched an attack near the central highlands. Lu came with us. Nobody wanted to leave him behind now, even the cranky political instructor, so Lu accompanied us into battle. He helped us find a group of civilians who were awaiting death in the jungle—they’d mistakenly run away with the withdrawing troops and had gotten lost deep in the highlands. They were both Vietnamese and Montagnard, children and adults, curled helplessly next to a sang-le tree, their lips cracked and dry from thirst and hunger.

  We marched on, toward Saigon. The enemy had stationed defensive forces on the outskirts of the city. That first day they annihilated one of our units with seven tons of bombs, but we kept fighting, all through the night. Lu was by our side the entire time.

  Around noon on the second day of fighting, our squad stopped at an empty lot between two houses. Gunshots rang out all around us. There were bullets everywhere, and the air was smoky and hot from all the burning fires. While we were lying there, taking cover, a group of children came running down the middle of the street, dodging bullets. Immediately Lu jumped up and went toward them. The kids were cowering against a wall, terrified and screaming. I’m not sure what they thought, seeing this spotted dog in the middle of the burning, deserted street. With his mouth, Lu grabbed the first kid by the collar of his shirt and tried to drag him into a ditch off the side of the street. But the gunfire was everywhere, and almost immediately bullets pierced Lu’s furry chest and then danced over the rest of his body.

  We went over to the ditch where Lu had fallen. Trying to save the kid, Lu had lost his life. He was dead. His blood was all over the street. His four legs were stretched out in front of him and his eyes were closed, as if he were sleeping. He had no idea, certainly, why these human beings had killed him.

  The fallen soldiers from my regiment were buried on a high hill, on the outskirts of the city. We buried Lu with them. No one dared stop us from doing so. Next to the grave we placed a wooden tombstone. It read, “Lu. Squad 3. Regiment 72. Died on April 16, 1975.”

  “Farewell,” I mumbled, as I fired my machine gun up into the air. I was crying, and through the tears I saw strange images in the rising gun smoke. Battalion after battalion of fallen soldiers marching together in unison, and then Lu, galloping toward the endless horizon and disappearing among the wandering clouds in the rainy, southern April sky.

  The next day we marched into Saigon. The war was over.

  2 / WHITE CLOUDS FLYING

  BAO NINH

  Bao Ninh is Vietnam’s most internationally renowned writer, known primarily for his novel The Sorrow of War, which was published in English in 1994. He was born in 1952 as Hoang Au Phuong in Nghe An but has lived most of his life in Hanoi. At the age of 17 he joined the North Vietnamese Army, where he was one of only 10 soldiers from the 456 in his unit to survive the war. Most of his writing deals with the lingering psychological trauma of war. Though he has won nearly all of Vietnam’s top literary prizes and honors, his work is often considered controversial at home because it does not present the war effort as noble and heroic. On the contrary, Ninh’s writing often treats the war as a cause of deep, ongoing psychological and emotional suffering. “White Clouds Flying” was first published in 1997 and features themes present in much of his work: the role of tradition in an increasingly modernized society, the small absurdities of everyday life, the persistent sorrow of war trauma and loss.

  * * *

  It was raining when the airplane took off. The sound of the landing gear retracting up into the body of the plane seemed louder than usual, putting the cabin on edge. I wished that I’d listened to my wife’s suggestion. I should have canceled this trip—it was a bad day to travel, with bad weather.

  Suddenly the entire aircraft lifted up into the air. Next to me, directly to my right, sat a man wearing a suit. He looked pale. His eyes were closed and his lips trembled.

  Meanwhile, I clutched the armrest tightly. I felt like a tiny being who had been dangled over a canyon that was growing deeper and deeper.

  “Clouds are floating in the sky! Do you see them?” said an elderly woman sitting in the window seat, to the right of the man in the suit.

  Once the plane had reached a desirable altitude, it flew straight and level. The electric seat belt sign was turned off, though fluffy clouds were still flying outside the windows.

  “The clouds are so close to us, aren’t they?” the elderly woman said. “I can touch them with my hands, just like I touch the leaves on the trees in my garden.”

  The man wearing a suit opened his eyes. His lips were still closed tightly. He seemed nervous and cranky.

  “I don’t know why people say airplanes can fly above the clouds,” the elderly woman said.

  The man in the suit remained silent.

  “There’s no direction here in the sky, so how do we know which way to go?” the woman asked.

  But nobody answered her question, so she didn’t ask anything else. Instead she sat quiet and still for a moment. She was holding a rattan sack. Her small body seemed to sink deeper into the seat. When a flight attendant came past, pushing a cart down the aisle to serve the passengers breakfast, the elderly woman refused to accept her tray of food. She said she was not used to eating without a bowl and a pair of chopsticks, and anyway, she’d already eaten an early breakfast. Besides, she said, an old person like her didn’t have much money. The flight attendant politely explained that the woman need not worry since the food was included in the cost of the ticket.

  “No wonder it costs two million dong for a round-trip ticket!” the woman said. “When my son’s air force friends offered me this ticket, they said it cost only a few hundred thousand dong. They were being very thoughtful, because in the countryside we don’t talk about millions—a thousand and a hundred are already hard enough to earn!”

  The elderly woman lowered her tray table but didn’t put her food on it. Instead she put everything she’d been served into her rattan sack. She didn’t eat anything. When the flight attendant came by again to serve drinks, the woman asked for only a glass of water.

  “Are we close to the Ben Hai River?” she asked the flight attendant.

  “Well,” the flight attendant said, glancing at her watch, “in about fifteen minutes, ma’am, we’ll be crossing the 17th parallel air zone. But we’re flying over the ocean, ma’am, not the river exactly.”

  “When we get to that area, will you please open this round window here for me so I can get some fresh air?” the elderly woman asked.

  “Oh no—it can’t be opened.” The flight attendant laughed.

  Outside the window, the sun was shining. For a moment the wings of the airplane glittered in the bright sunlight, but it was only a short moment. The sky was still full of clouds.

  I felt a little dizzy, as if I were going round and round on a Ferris wheel. It was probably the storms over the central highlands that had created air pockets, because suddenly we experienced some turbulence, which caused some commotion among the passengers in the cabin. There was a noise that sounded like something cracking underneath us.

  The man in the suit struck a match to light a cigarette. Although I myself was a heavy smoker, the smoke annoyed me. He should have waited to light up until after he got off the airplane—he shouldn’t have just disregarded the “No Smoking” sign right in front of him. But he was obviously scared, which explained his oblivious behavior.

  Carefully, I glanced over at him. The cigarette smoke and his huge shoulders blocked my view of both the elderly woman and the window.

  “Hey you, Miss Flight Attendant!” The man stood up suddenly, straightening his suit jacket. “Is this an airline or a noodle stand? An airplane or a pagoda, huh?”

  “I beg you …” the elderly woman said quietly. “Sir, I beg you. Today is the anniversary of my oldest son’s death. It has been thirty years, and now I have a chance finally to visit the place where he died.”

  The man in the suit hurriedly stepped over me to get to the aisle. His face was red—he looked angry and disgusted.

  The elderly woman sat quietly, bent over, her skinny hands held in prayer against her chest. On her tray table she had laid out a vase of flowers, some green bananas, a few rice cakes, and three incense sticks standing in a glass of dry rice. There was a small framed photo leaning against the cup of rice.

  The flight attendant hurried over. But she stopped right next to me all of a sudden and didn’t say a word. She observed in silence.

  The aircraft began to climb higher above the clouds, making the floor of the cabin steep. The shrine the elderly woman had set up tilted and slid to one side. I reached over to hold the framed photo so it wouldn’t fall. I could see that the photo had been cut out from an old newspaper, but the pilot in it looked very young.

  Smoke from the burning incense gently curled in the air above our seats. The incense emitted a pleasant smell. Outside the window was the bright, endless ocean.

  3 / LOUSE CRAB SEASON

  MAI TIEN NGHI

  Mai Tien Nghi was born in 1954 and lives in the northern city of Nam Dinh. A veteran of the war with America, he has worked as a middle-school math teacher since being discharged from the army in 1976. He began writing seriously in 2006 and has published more than fifty short stories and two novels. His work often portrays the harsh realities of war, as experienced by soldiers as well as civilians. Mai Tien Nghi has said that he wrote “Louse Crab Season” to highlight the difficulties many veterans faced in the postwar period, once they had returned to domestic life. He is currently at work on a novel about the war that addresses the consequences for both the communist North and the former Republic of South Vietnam.

  * * *

  It was early evening. The sun had almost gone down already. To the west there was only a small yellowish glow in the sky. It was the end of autumn, and the weather was chilly. Cold dry winds seemed to blow constantly, and when they stopped blowing people heard the sounds of ocean waves lapping the shore like a long sigh. The ocean was sad and lonely because the exciting days of summer were over.

  Near the ocean, there was a river running through the rice fields that was also lonely. Its surface looked dark purple in the twilight. A raised dike bordering the rice fields separated the sky and the water with a straight line. Along the line appeared the shadow of a man walking wearily. His silhouette looked like a scribbled question mark.

  The man walking wearily at twilight was Tran Xuan Vop. He had just finished fishing in the river and was now on his way home. As he walked, Vop’s thoughts turned to griping about his fate: Why do humans suffer? Why is my life so miserable? When Vop had returned home from his military service years earlier, his wife’s thirst had been like a desert during a quick, heavy rain. Their five children were born one right after another: Ha, Ngao, Gion, So, and Vang. Vop gave them these names because they were all girls and the names seemed to match the sound of his own. Vop sweated and toiled tirelessly in the rice fields, dug up clams, hunted crabs, and cast fishing nets, but he still was unable to put enough food on the table for seven people. His children quacked like wild ducks. In fact, they were an entire family of wild ducks—one mother duck and five ducklings. Vop couldn’t bear all the complaints, the nagging, the derisive comments about him being a worthless man because he failed to provide for his family. Sometimes he felt like giving up completely, but he knew this was impossible. He couldn’t take his own life by jumping in the river. If I died, he said to himself, all of you would be homeless.

  As he walked along the rice paddy dike, Vop all of a sudden looked down at the river. Its water was black—it resembled thick black jelly. He thought the water was very mysterious and must contain thousands of deaths. When he looked toward the mouth of the river, near where it ran out to the ocean, he noticed a floating object. It looked like a giant sea crab bobbing in the water. The crab was dead. Vop rubbed his eyes. No—it wasn’t a crab, he could see now in the opaque twilight, it was a small covered bamboo boat, floating along the surface of the water. It looked empty. It was probably someone’s boat that had not been secured properly. In less than an hour, the current would drag the boat out to sea and it would be lost forever.

  Vop ran along the dike, toward the mouth of the river, until he was standing directly across from the boat. Well, I should swim out there and bring it to shore so that the owner can come collect it tomorrow, and maybe he’ll even give me a little money, Vop thought, jumping into action immediately. He took off his clothes, rolled them into a bundle, and hid the bundle under a bush on the side of the dike. Wearing only his underwear, he ran toward the river. But after a few steps he stopped. It’s so dark out now, and nobody’s around, he thought, removing his underwear. Besides, this type of fabric is easily ruined by seawater. He ran back to the bush and hid his underwear with the rest of his clothes, then returned to the river and jumped in.

  Vop shuddered as his body touched the cold water. No big deal! he said to himself. Nothing is easy, certainly not earning money …