Still, I resigned myself to the belief that being a soldier was the most important thing; after all I hadn’t enlisted just to be an officer. I also didn’t enlist because I felt inspired by Hồ Chí Minh’s broadcasts. You could say that I was a lot more confused than most about my reasons for ending up in the army – in fact I could not have told you myself what I was doing there. Sometimes I think I enlisted because I just hated the American planes flying back and forth across the sky, terrifying those below. Then at other times, I think that this couldn’t have been the reason, or at least that wasn’t the only thing … there had to be something more, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, perhaps … maybe … I don’t know. I really just don’t know. But there was one thing I was sure about: right from the moment I joined the army, I was sure that there was no possible way I wouldn’t make it to the front. In truth, such a wish was pretty dumb considering what was going on at the time, but the possibility of not being sent to the front lines just never occurred to me. Besides, I was quite convinced that wearing a uniform meant going to the front. It was only by going to the front, and taking part in battle, that wearing a uniform had any meaning. Therefore, when the crippled base commander À Ơn took me from the training grounds and sent me to a warehouse not far outside Hanoi, Uniform Warehouse No. 203 to be exact, and told me in no uncertain terms that from this day forward my sole military duty was to guard the front and rear gates of this warehouse, I was devastated and nearly cried!

Besides À Ơn, I had two other comrades. One was Old Đường, who had had the bottom half of his chin blown off by an artillery shell; the other was a noisy and mangy mutt. Could it be that I enlisted to prove that I wasn’t a strong, strapping soldier, that I wasn’t suited for the front, that perhaps I was only destined to spend the war with these people? I suddenly felt as humiliated as if someone had cheated me, as though the uniform I was wearing was not really my own, that I had stolen it from someone, that it was all some kind of trick.