As the war expanded day by day, American bombers appeared with ever greater regularity in the skies above Hanoi, releasing their bombs. All too often we smelled the charred, heavy ash wafting through the air from the city. À Ơn worried that if things kept up in this fashion, it wouldn’t be long before Hanoi would itself become the front line. I couldn’t help but secretly long for that day to arrive. Because of this morbid yearning I knew that I had become a loathsome creature, that this was evil. But God knows that I never once cursed Hanoi, only my wasted life. As the workload increased, as the army quartermaster gave me more and more orders to fulfil, I realized that more and more men were hastening to the front. Everything that passed through my hands – each uniform, each helmet, each belt, each pair of gloves, each pair of shoelaces – was heading for the front line sooner or later; even if to begin with it went somewhere else, sooner or later it would be heading that way. From a certain point of view you could say that my sweat helped innumerable soldiers in countless battles, but could this prove anything? It only proved that I wasn’t fighting myself. À Ơn often boasted to me, ‘Ah, Vĩ Phu, you just don’t understand – you’re lucky you’re here.’

Perhaps.

If it were up to me, I’d rather not have had this kind of good fortune. How could this be considered lucky? I spent my days with two cripples and one scruffy dog. Of course, what À Ơn said had some logic to it: the front certainly wasn’t a fun place to be, and you wouldn’t get anything out of it … in fact, it would have been stupid for anyone to go to the front longing for the fame and glory of war. As À Ơn warned me, ‘With bullets flying this way and that … before you knew it you’d have something or other blown off, and you only have the one life to live.’

This I knew, of course.

But they just didn’t understand. My desire to be on the front wasn’t for fame and glory. Nor was it some kind of death wish. No. I just wanted to be with the boys, with the men I had come with. Assigning me to this hell hole – anyone would have thought that I was hiding out of sheer cowardice. God! Who could understand how lonely I was, how difficult everything was, how much I wanted to be as far away as possible from the crippled À Ơn and the pitiful Old Đường?

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