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
