Poet Hoang Cat: 'My heart is a grave'

(Baonghean) - The image of My heart is a grave by Hoang Cat in his poem of the same name is one of the most splendid poetic images written about wounded soldiers and martyrs. “My heart is a grave/ I buried my mother who was killed by bombs/ I buried my younger brother - no body found/ On the southern battlefield...”

1. Hoang Cat (from Nam Dan, Nghe An) enlisted in 1965, fought in the Tri Thien - Hue - Quang Nam battlefield until 1969. He was wounded and lost a leg. Perhaps because of that feeling, Hoang Cat often returned to visit the deep spiritual region of his life. In 1971, he returned to the Northern rear with one leg, the rank of sergeant, a class A disabled veteran, writing literature and poetry praising the country.

Then his children's short story The Apple Tree of Mr. Lanh (Van Nghe newspaper 1974) was so innocent and humane, but because of a few extreme criticisms at that time, it turned into a "literary case". In early July, Hoang Cat returned to Hue. He invited me to go with him to Phu Loc, Phong Dien, Quang Dien to visit his comrades, mothers, sisters, and base brothers who had raised him in a secret bunker in the summer of 1967. At that time, he was a trusted military technician. Because before volunteering to join the army, he was a technical officer at the Tran Hung Dao Mechanical Factory, Hanoi.

In the army, he also received a very systematic military engineering course. Hoang Cat was very proficient in dismantling unexploded enemy bombs, mines, and artillery shells, helping guerrillas in remote communes of Thua Thien - Hue have explosives to make weapons to fight against enemy raids...

Poet Hoang Cat.

...The poet lifted his prosthetic foot, each step heavy, sweat soaked his shirt, and together with Nam and Duong (former comrades) climbed up to the martyrs' cemetery in Phu Loc district. The cemetery was built on a high hill, with more than a hundred steps. The June sun in the Central region was like fire. Phu Loc was the combat area of ​​Group 4, a very strong main force unit of the Tri Thien - Hue Military Region. Many of their comrades had fallen here, so no matter how high, they still climbed. Climbed up to light incense sticks in memory of their comrades. Then he returned to the coastal village of Canh Duong, in Chan May lagoon, wading through the sand to visit Meo, a wounded soldier who also had his left leg amputated like him...

He said he almost died in Chan May lagoon, Canh Duong after Tet Mau Than. At that time, there was a cargo ship from Saigon that had run aground for a long time. Our army needed a propeller engine to blow the bellows of the forge for the weapons factory. Hoang Cat was assigned to secretly swim to the stranded ship at sea to find and remove a forge fan. While he was engrossed in his work, suddenly an enemy L-19 spy plane spotted him, hovered close to the sea surface, and rained fire down on the ship. Luckily, no bullets hit that otter-like soldier...

The next day, Hoang Cat took us back to the countryside of Phong Chuong, Quang Thai, Quang Hoa, Quang Thuan, to visit Trieu Dong, Cao Xa, Phu Lai villages... He felt uneasy not leaving. He returned here to stay for a whole month, where the villagers still loved and protected him. The son of Mr. Ho Viet Sung, the base that had raised him in a secret bunker in Phu Lai village in the past, now has a house in Hue. Every time Hoang Cat came, he stayed at the house next to Tinh Tam lake, sometimes for a whole month. Hoang Cat wrote many memoirs praising the villages and the mothers of soldiers in the past. He wrote articles to fight for a decent car road to Trieu Duong village, the old base. He took the female war invalid all the way to Hanoi to reclaim the land that had been unjustly cut off by the commune government. Every time he moved back and forth, Hoang Cat quietly "repaid the favor"...

In the spring of 1967, Hoang Cat was sent to “lie low” in the Phong-Quang plain for 6-7 months to help guerrillas in remote communes with weapons to fight the enemy. When the enemy searched, his mother pushed him into a secret bunker and covered him with garden leaves.

Along the Bo River in Phu Lai village, he had a secret tunnel in the middle of a thorny bamboo bush close to the riverbank. 40 years had passed since that day, Mr. Ho Viet Sung of Phu Lai village, Quang Tho commune had passed away, but Theo's mother and Nghen's mother from Trieu Duong village were still alive. When they saw him again, the mothers cried tears of joy. Only by traveling with him could they fully understand the love of comrades and fellow countrymen. Oh my God, a disabled veteran with no money in his pocket still tirelessly traveled thousands of kilometers to return to his beloved comrades and fellow countrymen...

2. “I thank the dusty sidewalk/ For feeding me through the years of poverty…” (Thank you sidewalk). Hoang Cat’s verses in his new poetry collection Thank you sidewalk brought tears to his friends’ eyes. His situation was so miserable, so painful. In a poem dedicated to his wife, he wrote: “For seventeen years I have not been to the Opera House/ But I have gone through seventeen jobs, salty and bland, together.”

It is true that the couple had to do 17 jobs to make a living: gluing medicine boxes for the pharmaceutical industry, rolling cigarettes and then delivering them to tea shops; roasting peanuts, selling tea, wrapping tobacco, making "bong bi" (a dish made from pig skin, used for Tet soup), making "nem chao", raising industrial chickens, brooding chicks, raising Vietnamese and Japanese dogs, raising pet parrots, making bird cages, selling ice cream, raising pigs...

That's why later Hoang Cat had these heartbreaking poems: "A cup of tea for five cents, a pack of tobacco for a dime/ A sesame candy to coax a hungry child..." (Thank you, sidewalk). Sticking medicine boxes for the Pharmaceutical Company was not easy at all. The couple stayed up many nights to stick hundreds of boxes, in order to have enough to pay the contract the next morning. The 12m2 room was filled with cardboard boxes, there was no more room to lie down. Moving around the house had to be done sideways, while Tam was pregnant with her first child, her belly was too high (Later, she became editor Hoang Trang, speaking English at VTV4). Early in the morning, disabled soldier Hoang Cat had to put on his prosthetic leg and ride a bicycle carrying a pile of cardboard boxes towering on the street to import goods, like a Nghe An man selling clay pots. Hoang Cat kept dragging his prosthetic leg, along with his wife who had a malignant tumor that had spread to her heart, working hard to make a living...

It was hard enough for me, my ten-year-old daughter had to sit in the market selling goods all summer. All her friends shed tears when they saw her. “I was thirteen years old and innocent/ I sat in the market from noon to evening on summer vacation/ The sun beat down on the burning house/ My hat covered my face, no tent or fence...” (Forgive me, Dad).

Thanks to the renovation, in 1988, the name Hoang Cat reappeared in the literary world. Since then, he has published many memoirs, short stories and poems. He has published 6 collections of poems: Long January, Blue Star, Autumn, Love, Life, Then Live... The most recent is the collection Thank You Sidewalk (2006). Hoang Cat's poems are poems flowing from a heart ripe with love, bitterness, and burning love for the Fatherland. After the stroke in 2005, he recognized life more clearly. And sympathized with the fate of ants even more: We wander in the middle of a dry earth/... The body of an ant in the middle of a vast desert... (The body of an ant).

3. The Tang Dynasty had a saying: "Those who have fought for a long time, how many people come back?" But Hoang Cat came back. Not just once, but many times to the old battlefield. He said that in the days after the Lunar New Year of the Rooster in 1969, he was a team leader, leading a weapons team of the 4th Regiment to the northern wing of Quang Nam to learn how to make flying mines for the army and people of Military Region 5. Flying mines are a type of mine that is very effective in attacking enemy posts and tanks. After finishing the course, the trial production was successful, and he was about to return to his unit in Phu Loc, when suddenly the enemy dropped a B52 bomb on the factory. It was noon on the second day of the Lunar New Year of the Rooster. He was thrown up and fell down a hillside. His left leg was crushed like a crushed cabbage...

When the wound was stable, Hoang Cat was carried by his comrades to the North. But just one day after the stretcher left the infirmary, they encountered a huge enemy sweep. A soldier named Linh, a fellow Nghe An native, and a Ta Oi ethnic soldier carried the wounded Hoang Cat right into the landing point of an American propeller plane! They shot like crazy. Linh, who was walking in front of the stretcher, collapsed and died on the spot. The Ta Oi ethnic soldier ran down to the stream. The hammock carrying Hoang Cat was blown up into the sky by the propeller plane.

Hoang Cat lay waiting for a series of bullets to die!... But then the enemy was afraid, they lay close to the other side of the plane. They would die anyway! Hoang Cat risked crawling and rolling down the slope. At night, Hoang Cat heard the code word "dog peeling" from his Ta Oi comrades crawling towards him. Lay called out, saw that he was still alive, and slowly carried him step by step in the night to the transfer station. His left leg was lost in that battle. So life for him was a gratitude to his comrades: My heart is a grave/ I lovingly buried my brother/...I will always keep the graves/ Always warm/ In my chest (My heart is a grave).

Poet Hoang Cat and his wife (left) and poet Ngo Minh and his wife.

In the North, wounded soldier Hoang Cat was fitted with a prosthetic leg. He was happy with his prosthetic leg: Oh my god, the prosthetic leg is off/ I'm crawling like a child... The prosthetic leg became a difficult problem in his life. One time when he visited Hue, when he heard a scoundrel say insulting things about the revolution, he was so angry that he couldn't contain himself and swung his prosthetic leg at him. The leg flew off and broke. He fainted. Thanks to his friends' help, Hue Central Hospital gave him a new, very good foreign prosthetic leg. But he was still worried about what would happen if the prosthetic leg broke again! So he had to worry about "saving" a prosthetic leg: Does anyone know, I've saved/ Not dollars, not gold/ But just one prosthetic leg?... I've saved up a "spare" prosthetic leg... (Save). But he thought: If I'm not real, I'll walk with a prosthetic leg/ As long as my heart is truly my own blood (The Ant's Body).

The day he went to Phong Dien, he saw the clear blue Bo River, so he took off all his clothes, put on his prosthetic leg and jumped into the river to bathe. That was the first time he showed off his prosthetic leg to the Bo River, to his relatives and close friends. He came up from the river shirtless, hopping around innocently and happily. Then he raised his head to look at the sky and recited poetry loudly: We only have one life on earth / Why not sing to the blue sky... If there really is reincarnation / Please let me return to the life of a poet. I suddenly burst into tears. He was living, loving as if his life had never been unjust or miserable...

Hearing that Hoang Cat was sick and hospitalized, friends from all over the country donated money to support his treatment. Now he is well again, every day he still takes off his prosthetic leg, sits at the keyboard to write poetry...

Ngo Minh