Our truck traveled through waves of fog. Out on the horizon, the silver crescent moon stood still, as if it had been frozen in time. Moonlight lit up the hitchhiker’s seat. I’m not sure why exactly, but I felt extremely happy. In that moment, I believed sincerely that the woman sitting next to me was Nguyet, the same person my sister had always talked about. Every now and then, I’d secretly stare at her and her thick, sweet-smelling hair.

  Suddenly she turned toward me and asked something, which I couldn’t make out because I was so absorbed in looking at her. The moonlight made Nguyet’s face look even more beautiful. I tried to stay focused on the road, which was full of potholes and illuminated up ahead in the moonlight.

  “Is it true that drivers like you know a lot of people?” Nguyet said, repeating her question.

  “Drivers like me are like migratory birds who live temporarily in different forests,” I said. “Our friends are the roads and the moon.”

  I had no clue how I was able to be so poetic all of a sudden.

  It was well after midnight by the time we reached the Blue Stone Bridge. By this time the moon had disappeared. We stopped chatting. I turned on the light and said, “From here on the enemy’s planes are often on patrol.”

  “Don’t worry,” Nguyet replied. “I know this road well.”

  She showed me the way to the underground tunnels. The road was muddy and zigzagging, especially since I had to swerve the truck to avoid bomb craters. I paid close attention and drove carefully. I could feel the truck leaving huge, muddy tracks in the road. A few times the front wheels got stuck in a ditch off to the side, and Nguyet had to get out and help guide me back to the road. I put the truck in high gear and slammed my foot on the accelerator; the cab became heated and the front wheels spun frantically and gave off a burning smell as they slammed against the rocks.

  Nguyet looked at the road and said, “The enemy keeps bombing this area. The road is still in very bad condition even though we keep filling the bomb craters with rocks.”

  I squeezed my hat in my hand and wiped the sweat from my face. I thought about having to say good-bye to Nguyet.

  “Let me know where you want me to stop for you to get off,” I said finally.

  She could have gotten off at the first security checkpoint, but she wanted to accompany me until I crossed the river. She laughed. “It’s very kind of you to give me a ride. How could I leave when you still need my help?”

  I tried to make my tone serious as I responded, “Even if you had gotten off at the security checkpoint, I would never think you were the type of person to abandon your friends in a difficult situation.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  We continued on. Soon I noticed water up ahead. A few days earlier, torrential rains had flooded the Blue Stone Bridge area; the water was over a meter high. I could hear water bubbling up into the truck’s exhaust pipes. The truck rocked violently back and forth like an aggressive buffalo bathing in a river. The headlights shone on the water in front of us. Then the truck stopped moving altogether. We were stuck.

  Suddenly, Nguyet jumped down from the cab.

  “What?” I asked, confused. “Is it enemy planes?”

  “Let me listen for a second,” Nguyet said. Then she told me to turn off the lights. “The enemy can see the reflections of the lights on the water, even from far away.”

  It was dark all around us. I could hear the sounds of water sloshing against the sides of the truck. I tried to drive forward, but the truck just rocked back and forth and the steering wheel locked in place. I noticed then that my clothes were wet. It was an extremely cold night.

  Nguyet, meanwhile, waded through the water carrying a rope from the truck, which she tied around the trunk of a tree. After struggling for a while, I was finally able to drive the truck up out of the water and onto a rocky part of the road. We were both out of breath as we stood side by side, coiling the rope.

  Then suddenly the enemy planes arrived. They emerged from behind the steep mountains in the distance, giving off a roaring sound. I dropped the rope and ran for the truck, but Nguyet pulled me back and pushed me down into a ditch.

  “They are carrying out coordinate bombing,” she said calmly, studying the sky.

  A sound like thunder rippled through the air. The ground trembled. In the few seconds of stillness we could hear the gentle sounds of a cricket batting its wings. Then pieces of earth—soil, rocks, plants, branches—began to fall all around us. In the distance, I saw the enemy parachuting from the planes. I tried to pull Nguyet toward me.

  “If you get injured,” she said, brushing me off, “you will lose the truck anyway. Just stay here.”

  But without hesitation I ran toward the truck. The sound of gunfire was everywhere. My truck was still intact, but the tires were burning. I put out the flames, then started the engine and saw Nguyet come running.

  “Get the truck out of here quick,” she said. “They will continue bombing this place.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Nguyet had started to cough from all the smoke. I pulled her up into the cab of the truck and closed the door. I kept the headlights turned off and drove on with her help in navigating the dark, cratered roads. It seemed like the enemy was constantly above us, incessantly bombing and shooting. Nguyet continued to give me instructions: “Turn left … There is a crater up ahead … There is a hill and a turn …” When the road descended into total darkness, Nguyet got out and I drove slowly behind her, following her small, bright shadow. After a little while, I stopped the truck and parked it at the base of a tall cliff. I switched on the cabin light, and that’s when I noticed blood on Nguyet’s shoulder. Blood had dripped down onto her blue shirt. She was injured, though I wasn’t sure exactly when she had been hurt. I could feel it intensely at that moment—I loved and admired her dearly. She looked down at her wound and smiled. She was beautiful, though her skin looked pale and she was soaking wet from head to toe. I pulled out a handkerchief stained with engine oil and covered her wound.

  I wanted to take her back to her unit, but she said, “No, this is where I’m stationed. Go ahead—leave before sunrise, and don’t worry about me. This is just a minor wound. I am perfectly fine.” Wild roosters crowed somewhere around us. I still had to fulfill my assigned delivery duty, so we said good-bye. I held her bloody hands and promised, “Tomorrow I will come see you.”

  I got back in the truck and drove extremely fast to my outpost. I felt excited and happy, but still I worried about Nguyet. The image was burned in my memory—Nguyet in her blue shirt with a wounded shoulder, carrying her bamboo bag and walking away from the truck. Sometimes I pictured her looking back at me and smiling beautifully.

  “So what happened next?” asked one of the comrades who was listening to the driver’s story. “You went to visit her the next day, didn’t you?”

  The audience in the bamboo hut was still listening attentively, though it was already two o’clock in the morning. There were roosters crowing and birds chirping in the woods.

  I drove very fast that night after saying good-bye to Nguyet, and when I arrived at the base and completed my delivery it was almost dawn. It was too late to drive the truck back to the Sang Le woods, so I hid it where it was and camouflaged it with leaves.

  The next night, my commander assigned me another drive to the same outpost near the Blue Stone Bridge. This time, I was able to stop by my sister’s unit for a short visit. The female construction workers’ huts were located in a beautiful area. The women were always neat and took care of things better than the men; their huts were well kept and neatly organized. When I arrived, my sister Tinh and some other women gave me a warm welcome. These women liked to tease and joke around, but I wasn’t in the mood. I looked at my sister Tinh. For the past two days, I’d been fairly confident that I’d already met the woman I’d heard about all those years before. But I also thought about the Nguyet who had died heroically three or four months ago.

  Tinh took me inside the hut and asked, “Why didn’t you come here yesterday? Nguyet took the day off to come here—she waited for you all day, but you didn’t show up, so she went back to the headquarters.”

  “Why did she have to return to the headquarters?” I asked.

  “She is attending a class for new Party members,” Tinh replied.

  While we were talking, a chubby woman carrying bamboo shoots entered.

  “So, this must be your brother, Lam,” she said. “He should have come and said hello to me. You’re kind of cute. Are you a driver? You know you messed up, right?”

  My sister Tinh laughed. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Later I learned that she was the head cook of the unit and her name was Elderly Nguyet, my sister’s close friend.

  “You should have told her if you were interested or not,” Elderly Nguyet said, blaming me for making the young Nguyet wait. “She was here yesterday. A soldier gave her a ride. She was injured during the drive here.” Elderly Nguyet paused for a moment then asked, “You haven’t seen her, right?”

  She pulled me toward a far corner of the hut where a photo of my beloved Nguyet was hanging on the wall. I could tell that the photo was from several years earlier—Nguyet looked no older than a teenager. In the photo, she stood on a cliff holding a drill balanced on one shoulder, gazing off into the distance. The photo reminded me of the phase of the war when it seemed like all we did was build bridges. There were hundreds of female construction workers back then; they used to tie leather ropes around their waists and then bravely climb the cliffs in order to choose the best spots for anchoring the bridges. I remembered that the beautiful Blue Stone Bridge took almost two years to complete. It was only a few months later that American bombing completely destroyed the bridge.

  Later that afternoon, my sister Tinh and Elderly Nguyet saw me off at the riverbank. Teasing, Elderly Nguyet said, “Lots of soldiers want to marry Nguyet, but she loyally waits for you. I should really help set you two up.”

  Hurriedly I slipped an envelope into the pocket of her apron. I had spent the entire afternoon writing a letter to my beloved Nguyet.

  When I reached the Sang Le woods, I walked toward the remnants of the Blue Stone Bridge. I could see the mountain reflected in the river water below. Fresh grass had grown tall around the old bomb craters. The bridge had been cut in half. Blue rocks that had been used to build the bridge had long ago fallen into the river. Only the columns were still standing and intact.

  After so many years of living with bombing and destruction, I thought, Nguyet still hadn’t forgotten me. Bombs can destroy man-made bridges, but nothing could destroy her strong spirit and optimism about life.…

  The storyteller stopped suddenly, as if something had crept up into his throat from the bottom of his heart. The other soldiers didn’t say a word. Nobody asked him to finish his story. It was almost sunrise. The birds had stopped chirping, probably because they had already found their mates. A bright light appeared in the sky to the west. The moon rose high over the woods. Leaves scattered on the roof of the hut sparkled like pieces of silver. Moonlight illuminated the bamboo hut and the crater-filled road winding from it.

  The storyteller looked up and saw the moon. Then he returned to his corner of the hut and lay back down.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” he said. “We have to get back on the road in the morning.”

  6 / MS. THOAI

  HANH LE

  Hanh Le (1966–2006) is the pseudonym of Nguyen Xuan Hoang. He was born in Pleiku and lived most of his life in the central city of Hue, the former imperial capital of Vietnam. He was a member of the Thua Thien Hue Association for Literature and Arts and the editor-in-chief of Perfume River Magazine, a local literary arts publication founded in 1983. He published one collection of short stories and poetry, in addition to five books of nonfiction about topics ranging from memories of his relationship with his mother to Buddhist-inspired philosophizing on life and nature. Hanh Le died in 2006, at the age of forty, from a heart attack. The story “Ms. Thoai” is notable for its depiction of the wide-ranging impact of the war, how lives were sometimes destroyed on the home front as well as the battlefield. Hanh Le depicts Thoai as a long-suffering but fiercely loyal woman who never gives in to bitterness or cynicism, despite the fact that her life has been violently upended through no fault of her own. Ms. Thoai, Hanh Le seems to suggest, is another innocent victim of the war.

  * * *

  “Try to come home early this afternoon so we can visit Mr. Phuong’s grave,” my mother-in-law said as I took the motorbike outside. “Yes, Mom,” I said, nodding. It was a Friday morning. Every year, on the anniversary of Mr. Phuong’s death, we visited his grave and burned incense. My mother-in-law said that when he was alive, Mr. Phuong’s favorite food was sticky rice wrapped in an areca leaf, so she always brought this dish to the grave site. She also brought an old diary, the pages stained and yellowed, that usually sat on the altar in our home. My mother-in-law said that Mr. Phuong had treasured the diary more than gold. He’d even risked his life because of it—one time, he lost the diary during a fierce battle near Doc Mieu, then later returned to the battlefield all by himself to find it. Phuong knew that he shouldn’t have taken a risk like that, especially as a leader in his unit, but his life would have been meaningless without the diary. My mother-in-law said that Phuong’s life had been full of sorrow. For a long time, he considered his military unit his home, and fighting the enemy was his only pleasure and a way for him to conceal his private feelings and wounded pride.

  * * *

  The story started back in 1956. Everyone in Co Lieu village talked excitedly about Phuong’s wedding. They said it would be the biggest and most beautiful wedding the village had ever seen. The bride, Thoai, was secretary of the village’s local youth union. The groom had graduated from the Infantry Academy and wore the shoulder stripes of a second lieutenant on his uniform. He had a tall, lean body; his nose was straight; and his forehead and face were square. In wartime, weddings usually were not extravagant, but they were still beautiful. The ceremony was like a huge festival, full of people. Phuong and Thoai walked side by side, behind their relatives. The bride wore an aqua-colored ao dai and a silver necklace; her hair was untied and flowed naturally down her back. The groom wore a brand-new military uniform. His shiny black shoes stood out against the green, grass-covered ground of the rice paddies. The bride was shy; she stood shoulder height to the groom. The young men and young girls of the village whispered among themselves. They all wished to be like this happy couple.

  It was a sunny afternoon, and the rice stalks out in the fields were still young and green. More herons than usual flew above the rice paddy, turning the sky white. Phuong looked serious. He seemed nervous; tiny drops of sweat appeared on his bronze skin. As they walked, Thoai stumbled a few times, nervous herself. The back of her ao dai was decorated with light-pink touch-me-not flowers. Occasionally she glanced at Phuong walking by her side and imagined that this was all a dream. She was delighted by the thought that Phuong was hers now. As they walked, Thoai sensed a group of young men, water buffalo herders, teasing her. Among the familiar faces she recognized Lo, son of the Bongs. Children lined up along the wedding procession path and chanted together, “A husband and wife! A husband and wife!” Thoai’s face felt hot; she glanced at Phuong and noticed that he was anxious too. Thoai felt as if she were flying. Gently she took Phuong’s hand and noticed that he was trembling slightly.

  Those were Phuong and Thoai’s happiest days. Their wedding room was full of co co, a flower that grew only along the rice paddies in Co Lieu village. It was the season of the full moon, and every night during the first week of their marriage, Phuong took Thoai out to the rice paddies where, under the bright yellow moonlight, the land seemed to be drowning in fog. In the distance they could hear herons making panicky, screeching noises. Awkwardly, Phuong searched for the buttons of Thoai’s shirt. The sweet, earthy smell of wildflowers coming from her hair mesmerized him.

  He asked her, “Thoai, what are you thinking about?”

  Leaning against her husband’s shoulder, Thoai replied, “I’m dreaming about having a son.”

  “And what if your son joined the military and never returned?” Phuong asked.

  Thoai covered Phuong’s mouth with her hand.

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said. “I know that next year we’ll have a son.”

  Their happy days together went by quickly, as if in a dream. Then eventually it was time for Phuong to return to his army unit. The day she said good-bye to her husband, Thoai made two new shirts for him and prepared some sticky rice for Phuong to take to his unit. They walked together through the rice paddy. The bright red early morning sunlight looked like blood. It seemed as if the pink touch-me-nots lining the rice paddies were still asleep. Phuong and Thoai were both quiet, lost in their own thoughts as they walked along the same path as their wedding day, only now they were heading in the opposite direction, away from the village. At the edge of the rice paddies, they finally parted. Thoai began to cry as if her heart were already broken, as if she were experiencing a premonition that after saying good-bye she would lose Phuong forever. When they kissed, Phuong was affectionate, but his mouth was twisted out of shape. Thoai’s tears tasted salty on his lips.

  Thoai didn’t remember which way she’d taken back to her home after that. She ran as if she were being chased by a ghost, and her body was completely numb. A terrifying emptiness occupied her heart. Days of longing accompanied this feeling. The wedding room she’d shared with Phuong seemed to grow bigger and bigger. Every night, Thoai cried as she fell asleep holding Phuong’s pillow. A month after the wedding, when Thoai still got her period, she cried even more than usual. Her dream hadn’t come true.