Meanwhile here we lost three soldiers this afternoon. When will I see you again? I can’t be sure if I’ll ever get the chance.
Why did you do such a shameful thing, Thoai? You have disgraced me. You have killed a part of me forever. Why did you do that? Whose baby is it? If you tell me honestly, I think I will be able to forgive you. But …
Do you feel better after taking your anger out on her? Now you’re a free, single man. If you are still alive after the war, you will return to normal society and be a popular, desirable bachelor. You can just do what everyone else does.…
Did Thoai really do something wrong? Why am I making her suffer like this? Did I make my decision too quickly? Was getting a divorce the only solution? Thoai, I worry that I’ve ruined your life. My selfishness has ruined everything.…
I turned to the final page of the diary, dated March 22, 1984—two days before Mr. Phuong died:
The older I get, the more I realize that the most precious thing in life is the ability to forgive. Knowing that you’ve been so miserable fills me with tremendous regret. Yesterday the doctor told me that I would recover soon, but I don’t believe him. I wish I could see you again before I die. As I face death, I’ve come to accept an inevitable truth—that making mistakes is only human. The biggest regret of my life is that I was unable to forgive you. I failed to enjoy the short-lived happiness that we had together. Instead I abandoned you. Please forgive me, Thoai. You’re my only love in this life. Thinking of you is my greatest happiness. I know that for a long time you’ve been living unhappily, and this breaks my heart. I know that it’s too late now. Please forgive me, Thoai. Sending you thousands of kisses, my wonderful wife.
In the winter of 1999, I returned to Co Lieu village for my brother-in-law Hai’s wedding. My mother-in-law had moved away from the village by then. But before I left, she pulled me aside and said, “You should visit Ms. Thoai while you’re there. Tell her I say hello. And give her this diary. I think it’s time for her to have it.”
I went to meet Ms. Thoai on Hai’s wedding day. She was still beautiful, though she looked gaunt and bony. All through the night, she talked with me about Mr. Phuong and the details of their story, occasionally pausing to wipe away her tears with the corner of her shirt sleeve. She said that Phuong had been the best man in her life and she had lost him. I gave her Phuong’s diary, which she held in her trembling hands.
“I begged your mother-in-law to let me see this diary,” Ms. Thoai said, “but she always said it was not a good time for me to read it.”
She ran her fingers over the worn plastic cover of the diary.
“Did you read it?” she asked. “Did he really hate me?”
I smiled. “Why don’t you read it and find out?”
Soon the sun started to rise. A thick December fog covered the rice paddies on the outskirts of the village. A stiff wind blew through the banana tree gardens, making a sound like a long sigh. Up in the endless sky, the winter moon looked dull and colorless, like a human face drained of blood.
7 / THE CORPORAL
NGUYEN TRONG LUAN
Nguyen Trong Luan was born in 1952 in Phu Tho and currently lives in Hanoi. He joined the army while he was a mechanical engineering student and served through the end of the war. He has written short stories, essays, and novels about the war, and is the recipient of awards from Military Literature Magazine and the magazine Cua Viet. His 2016 novel, Hungry Forest (Rung doi), was well received in Vietnam, and is currently being adapted into a play and a film. In “The Corporal,” Nguyen Trong Luan pays homage to the hundreds of thousands of female soldiers who served in the North Vietnamese Army. His portrait of Xuan, the poor rural young woman who returns to her village hardened by years of war, highlights the challenges many of these women faced in a patriarchal postwar society still clinging to traditional gender roles. Despite her heroism as a soldier, Xuan’s postwar life is ignominious, characterized by an unhappy arranged marriage, hard physical labor, and crushing poverty. Despite victory in 1975 and the reunification of the country, Xuan is doomed to live a “miserable life.”
Mr. Buong died the day I returned to my hometown from Hanoi. The entire village was in shock. He hadn’t been sick that long, but now suddenly he was no longer with us. My mother just said that he’d had a cold for two days and had stopped speaking. The funeral was simple. I felt sorry for Mr. Buong. My family’s house was at the top of a hill while his home was at the bottom. Funeral trumpets blew their mournful sounds that echoed off the hillsides surrounding our village. My mother was the chairwoman of the village’s Association of Elderly Citizens, so she kept busy attending to the funeral guests and spent her evenings at Mr. Buong’s house, down below. In our house up on the hill, I couldn’t sleep.
When I was a kid, I used to tend to a water buffalo very early every morning. My father said I should join Mr. Buong so I’d learn to be braver around the animal. Mr. Buong showed me how to climb onto a buffalo’s back, how to guide them to the river so they could bathe, and how to remove leeches from their hooves. Usually,
