I was about to leave the village when I heard a voice coming from the ground. It sounded like a weak kind of shriek, a sound we heard a lot in the war. But it wasn’t that. Bombs from a C130 night patrol plane had destroyed the village. Everything was burnt. The tree in front of me had been ripped up by gunfire. I kicked away a fallen branch and saw a pair of sparkling eyes staring out of a dark hole in the burnt ground.
For a few seconds I was just confused. I shouldered my gun. It was a kid, about eight or nine years old, and he was holding a dog. The kid was clearly dead—his head smashed, neck twisted against the side of the hole at an awkward angle. He was staring straight up at the sky, eyes white and stunned. His blood had dried black all over his hands, which were clutching this puppy. I almost had to break the kid’s fingers to get the dog loose.
We named the puppy Lu. Don’t think that this was some trendy Western name. It was just like the other common names for dogs—Ven, Leu, Eu. We knew that it would sound Western if we called him LuLu, so at first we avoided this and only called him Lu. But he didn’t know his name—he was only a puppy, after all—so we had to repeat it twice, and then it just became our habit to call him LuLu.
He became the seventh member of our squad. We shared our food rations with him. Lu was too weak and skinny to find food himself, so we mixed rice with water to make porridge that he lapped up. If I happened to catch some small fish in a nearby creek and then stewed them with wild tamarinds, I’d let Lu taste a little of the sauce.
In secret, of course, so the rest of the squad didn’t find out.
“I wish we had milk and egg powder like back in ’54,” said Bao, who was from Hang Thiec Street in Hanoi.
This was an unrealistic daydream. The truth was we didn’t even have enough salt. We used to hoard the stuff like treasure. Sometimes I’d take a little pinch and put it on my tongue. It felt incredible.
So obviously we couldn’t even think about sugar or milk for the dog. But Lu got stronger anyway. After three days he started running around our camp, and eventually he started jumping up and down to greet us when we’d come back from patrol. He got healthier and put on weight. His fur, which was yellow with black dots, had been patchy and bare before but began to grow back, thick and shiny. He was quick now, and energetic, just like a normal dog. We were living deep in the jungle, which was lonely and isolating. It was nice having Lu around. About a month after I’d first pulled him from the bloody hands of the dead kid, we heard him bark for the first time—“Arf … arf … arf!” Lu had been practically dead when I found him. Now his barking echoed against the cliffs and the thick jungle foliage.
It made me feel something that was difficult to put into words.
We were all soldiers from Hanoi. There was Hanh, the experienced squad leader who had fought everywhere, North to South. Then there was me, and Hoang, Lam, and Bao—all experienced veterans who knew about the bloody battle of Hue in 1968 and the enemy’s brutal Operation Lam Son 719. There were also Tam and Khanh, both newly enlisted soldiers.
Each of us had a different relationship with Lu. For example, Tam was usually the one who fed Lu, and each time he’d pet his head and say things like, “Hurry up! Faster! Six bowls, six bowls!” in this kind of sing-song voice. Even though Tam was a skinny guy, he lusted after food, whether he or Lu was the one eating it.
Hanh was different. He was quiet. Sometimes he’d sit with Lu for hours, just scratching his head or rubbing his back. Lu would get silent and move his ears, as if he were listening closely to what Hanh might say. I wondered if maybe Hanh had told Lu what he’d told only me, about his sister who spent her days, year in and year out, unloading sacks of coal, fish sauce, and heavy dyeing yams from boats at the Black Ferry Pier. Hanh had been born into a poor family. His parents died when he was young, and he’d been raised by his sister. He’d spent his childhood pulling bark from medicinal jungle trees to sell at the market. A person like Hanh couldn’t live a carefree life like someone whose parents had been state officials or longtime Party members. Maybe it was because Hanh had been through tough times that he was so frugal. He’d never waste even dirty old gun-cleaning rags or a smashed manioc that he found in a field, which he would mix with his daily rice for a little extra food.
Enlisted soldiers like us came from all sorts of backgrounds. Hoang, for example, was the opposite of Hanh. His family was very wealthy. Hoang claimed that his parents sold government rice and his family ate very well. He’d had plenty of pork sausage to eat growing up. When he ate chicken, he said, he only swallowed the juices, not the meat itself. Maybe he only bragged about his family because he was as hungry as the rest of us. I knew that Hoang’s mother and my mother were friends. Back in Hanoi, my mother sold clothes at Dong Xuan Market, in
