By the time I joined the army, the story of this woman was all over the front. She had become a legend.
Some people said that the water had carried her the length of the creek and that they’d found her body a week later, so severely bloated that no coffin would fit her; a platoon of combat engineers had to spend an entire day building a special coffin from a large chestnut tree.
Others said that it would have been impossible for her to climb the giant tree where she had hanged herself. The tree was hundreds of meters tall and must have been a thousand years old. It took dozens of people to safely bring her body down. After that there was no bombing, no wind, no rain, no thunder, no lightning. But somehow the tree collapsed; before that it had withstood countless bombings from B52s.
Others claimed that a bomb had hit the creek that morning and her body was blown to pieces. Afterward, the jungle became unusually lush and verdant—flowers bloomed everywhere and birds could be heard chirping from the dense foliage. Bombs and chemical defoliants could no longer destroy this land.
At the army base they listed her as MIA. Nobody knew anything else about her.
I didn’t know what to say to Van Ngoc after her presentation. But something in her gentle, kind face made me think of this woman. I purposely stayed silent and accepted her accusation that I was a cruel person. All I could do was write this story to somehow pay respect to a true incident that occurred years ago. The reader can make their own judgment.
15 / AN AMERICAN SERVICE HAMLET
NGUYEN THI THU TRAN
Nguyen Thi Thu Tran, who writes under the pseudonym Thu Tran, was born in 1963 in Bien Hoa and currently lives in Ho Chi Minh City. She has published more than twenty books, including collections of short stories, novels, and poetry. “An American Service Hamlet” is based on her experiences growing up among American soldiers stationed in the South. She has said that as a child, she did not understand why everyone hated the Americans and talked about fighting them while most of the GIs she interacted with treated her and the other children kindly. The memory of this paradox inspired her to write this story, one of the few pieces of Vietnamese literature about southern women who worked for or had relationships with the Americans. The story is unique in that the American characters are portrayed as innocent victims of the war as opposed to cruel, bloodthirsty killers, which is how Americans had been previously depicted in most Vietnamese fiction about the war. Here, the tone is one of reconciliation and mutual understanding, of acknowledging the tragedy and suffering on both sides and searching for a way to move on.
Miss Trung didn’t shut the door this time as Smith entered her house. Bach stood watching from across the street.
“Bach, go back to the house!” her mother called out to her. “Or are you trying to get a glimpse of the naked American?”
The naked American? Before, when Miss Trung had invited this man into her house and closed the door, Bach had no idea what went on inside. But now the door was left ajar, and inside she could see Smith resting his head against Miss Trung’s chest as he sobbed. It seemed strange to see an adult, especially an American, crying like this. Why was he crying? Miss Trung ran her hand over his head as if he were a child and said something that Bach couldn’t understand because it was in English. Bach craned her head to get a better look …
A sudden pain shot up her back.
“You little slut!” her mother screamed, slapping her with a rattan rod. “Do you want to work for the Americans? Is that what this is about? Get in the house!”
Bach was on the verandah in front of the house. She saw four eyes and two tongues poking out from behind a hibiscus shrub.
“Ha ha! Your mom beat you for spying on the naked American. Ha ha!”
It was some neighborhood kids, Li and Anh.
“So what?” Bach said defensively. “How do you even know the American was naked? You guys are the ones who want to watch.”
Li and Anh continued to stick out their tongues at Bach, but she didn’t care. She found herself thinking about Smith; she wondered if he’d stopped crying.
One time, Bach had referred to Smith as anh ‘Mit, using the typical pronoun for an older male and mispronouncing Smith’s name. Mr. Tam, a driver who was cleaning his tuk-tuk nearby, had overheard what Bach said and shouted, “You must not call the American GIs anh! Call them no,” the disrespectful pronoun.
Miss Trung happened to be standing nearby. She laughed.
“Call them whatever you want,” she said. “In English they’re all called ‘you’ anyway.”
So Bach decided to make it easy: she would call them all you—you Tom, you John, you Henry. But Bach’s favorite was you Smith. Smith was the nicest one.
Li and Anh left finally and Bach again was alone sitting on the verandah. She thought about Smith and his beautiful smile. She had noticed that he liked to carry Teo, Mrs. Xi’s little son, on his shoulders. Smith had blonde hair and blue eyes. He often patted Bach on the head and gave her chocolates. Miss Trung said that Smith had a younger sister who was Bach’s age back in America.
From the verandah, Bach looked across the road to Miss Trung’s room and saw Smith opening the door as he left. Why was he leaving so soon? Well, maybe because today he had cried and he wasn’t as happy as usual,
