War Memoirs of an Old Soldier

Vo Minh is originally from Nghi Thinh commune, Nghi Loc district. This year, he is almost "seventy years old", having been away from home for decades, seemingly becoming a "capitalist", but the voice and personality of a son of the coastal region of Nghe An still cannot be faded. He returns to his hometown two or three times a year, sometimes to be busy with family affairs, sometimes to volunteer for veterans, wounded soldiers, and every time I meet him, he always has the sincere, simple voice of a "Nghi Thinh citizen".

A gentle appearance but hidden deep inside is a fierce personality, thinking is doing, and doing it thoroughly. The heroic veteran of the 271st Regiment of the Southeast region, with an 81% disability due to the fierce bombs of the war, his eyesight is getting weaker and weaker, not very convenient in daily life, but suddenly, on a normal day in 2009, Vo Minh told his wife and children that he would write a memoir!

“That was the moment when I felt that all my thoughts and feelings had reached the point of maturity to be expressed on paper, but in fact the intention to write a memoir had been brewing for a long time. As people who had experienced the war, my comrades and I had many memories to share. Bullets and bombs, deprivation, hardship, danger, blood and tears… Above all, there was the love for the homeland, the country, the camaraderie, the desire for freedom…” - Vo Minh confided.

Author Vo Minh.

No one thought that the veteran who later switched to electrical engineering could speak and work in a strange territory, literature. Vo Minh wrote silently and wrote with great difficulty. Day and night, his eyes, which were blurred by bomb fragments on the battlefield, still persistently typed each key on the laptop. He wrote very quickly, almost without having to think too much about the words, perhaps because all the things, events, people... had "stayed" in his mind for too long, had been condensed through the flow of contemplation and reflection of time, and now precipitated into written pages?

Vo Minh wrote his memoirs as if pouring out his guts:“The war was so harsh, it consumed so many of our people and strength. We wanted to forget it, wanted to bury it deep in the past. Just the other day, the entire 271st Regiment marched into the battlefield. The troops crowded the road to Truong Son. The number of troops at that time was nearly three thousand. But now, sitting back and counting, I wonder if there are still three hundred left?”

The memoir “There was a time like that” was reconstructed by Vo Minh in the style of a diary. His memory is impressed when each milestone is clearly remembered and recorded. Throughout more than 200 pages, there seems to be no page that is not bleeding, no page that is not riddled with bullet holes.

War, written by Vo Minh, is bare, the reality is fierce, life and death. Not as dreamy and aspirational as the diary “Forever Twenty” by martyr Nguyen Van Thac, not as romantic as “Dang Thuy Tram’s Diary”, the memoir “There was a time like that” is not elaborate in words but honestly tells relatives and friends about the arduous and fierce stages of his life and the lives of his comrades. The appeal of the fierce reality has gone beyond the rhythm of literature.

Through his memoirs, Vo Minh has built up his own biography: enlisted in 1970; in November 1971, assigned to Regiment 271, crossed Truong Son to B2; in June 1973, commanded a unit holding a post in Cambodia; in September 1973, marched to the Southern Central Highlands; in February 1974, was shot in the head by an M79 bullet and seriously injured... Between the pages of his memoirs are the lives of many comrades, including many comrades from Nghe - Tinh.

The unit commanded by Vo Minh that year had 26 people, coming from the countryside of Hai Duong, Hung Yen, Thanh Hoa, Nghe An..., especially 11 people from the same commune of Nghi Yen, Nghi Loc district, Nghe An province. The names Dinh, Phong, Truc, Nghiem, Trung, Thanh, Thai, Nhung, Cam, Luyen, Thien... vaguely or clearly appeared in the memoirs with many sorrows and joys, but when leaving the war, only 2 people returned with serious injuries!

Cover of the book "There Was a Time Like That".

Vo Minh's memoirs are not elaborate in style but are very lively with wartime stories. A bout of malaria, a sweet taste of cooked taro, a dead soldier buried in a hammock, an afternoon of marching, a steep slope that had to be climbed by a sky-high rope ladder, a night of extreme hunger that had to go into the fields to steal cassava... He painfully and passionately wrote down his memories, carving out the figures of his comrades in full bloom of youth, the continuous battles day and night, situations beyond human endurance. He wrote about himself - a soldier who had gone through the end of bombs and bullets, was wounded and lost in the forest for 3 days, to the point that when he found his unit, the wound from the M79 bullet was crawling with maggots...

Courage and perseverance have become noble qualities that shine in both wartime and peacetime. Returning after the war, with many wounds and a difficult family life, Vo Minh still decided to pursue his unfinished studies, switching to electrification at the University of Agriculture I. In 1980, he worked as an electrical engineer at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ministry of Transport. In late 1983 and early 1984, Vo Minh was the first Vietnamese to design and install an electrical control system for a 1,000-ton ship and an electrical system for a construction tower crane. At that time, such techniques had to be completely imported.

Having somewhat stabilized his work and life, he connected with his comrades from the Association of Veterans of the 271st Regiment in the Southeast, traveling back and forth on volunteer trips to help the families of veterans, returning to the old battlefield. Vo Minh was always concerned with the lives of his comrades, even in his memoirs, he devoted the most precious pages to listing the martyrs of the 271st Regiment who sacrificed their lives on the battlefields of Cambodia and the Southeast, hoping to build some miraculous bridge, bringing information about the martyrs to their relatives and families.

Vo Minh's memoir is a special book, once read it is hard to forget. Let me end this article with a few words from writer Chu Lai - a famous writer with excellent works about war:“Those are words written in blood, truly a song about soldiers. Reading it, each of us cannot help but look back at the past days to improve ourselves, to know where we are and what we have inherited.”!