In 1972, amid the days when Vĩnh Linh burned crimson, that narrow strip of earth pressed against the 17th parallel where sky and land shook every single day beneath B-52 bombs, my parents met.

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Back then Vĩnh Linh was more than a place-name; it was the very emblem of endurance pushed beyond human measure. Every inch of soil, every patch of forest, every tunnel torn open by bombs; forests left skeletal from chemical poison, village roofs flung away like dead leaves. Battles followed one after another in the great campaigns of the Southern Liberation Army. Shells plowed through hamlets, the roar of bombs braided with mourning cries

—yet, in fate's cruel whimsy, even amid tranquility or desolation, destined meetings persist, haunting like my parents.

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History records that between 1970 and 1972 more than ten thousand university students from Hanoi volunteered for the front. Many had never held a hoe, yet took up rifles; many had never tasted love, yet chose to die for the homeland… and some,  perhaps, sought oblivion. My dad was one of them. He left his family, rallied North, then hurled himself into the savage battlefields of Zone Four. Years later, whenever Vĩnh Linh was mentioned, he would say, almost inaudibly, that the 17th parallel was not merely a border—it was the grave where he buried his youth, his comrades, and the hauntings he could never speak aloud.

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As for my mom, she was then the celebrated beauty of her regiment: tall, slender, with the proud, sculpted cheekbones of a Northern girl, and a thick cascade of black hair that always carried the faint scent of pomelo leaves. She worked in youth affairs, sang in the cultural troupe, and brought with her a clear, crystalline voice that soothed souls shredded by war. Many admired her in silence, many wrote her love letters; yet her heart belonged entirely to one man—Uncle Trung.

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They met in the midst of battle, where the line between life and death was thinner than breath, and so every moment they spent together became a quiet, sacred kind of happiness. Mom said he was gentle, tender, loving her with the kind of love Nguyễn Bính once wrote of—the Wind and the Grass—sweet, artless, and hushed like the surface of a village well. Three years by his side were three years she lived inside a rare pocket of peace carved out of a world on fire.

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Then one day, news came from home: his mother was dying, calling for her son one last time. In their small house, with trembling hands clasping his, she told him that during the years he had been away at the front, a woman named Bông had cared for her daily—kind, patient, devoted. All she wished of him before closing her eyes forever was this single promise: marry Bông, so she could leave the world in peace.

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He nodded in silence.

A rushed wedding was held just in time for the dying mother to see her daughter-in-law. Shortly afterward, she passed. Uncle Trung returned to the battlefield, carrying with him the thunderbolt of news he had to deliver to my mom.

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Her heart shattered, yet she uttered no reproach.
Cô Bông knew his heart still leaned toward my mom, so she too went to the front to find her husband.

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For the next three months, the two women—two wounded hearts—sat side by side in the rare hours when they were not hiding from bombs or holding rifles. Then one day, my mom said quietly: “Three years by his side and we have no child… perhaps it was only fate passing by, not a bond meant to last. If I stay, it will only hurt all three of us.”

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And she let him go.

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And soon after, she met my Dad—the man who loved with the wild, blazing heart of Xuân Diệu.

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That night, her cultural troupe performed for my dad’s battalion. Under the dim flicker of oil lamps, with the smell of gunpowder still clinging to the hills, my mom stepped onto the makeshift stage and sang with her clear, luminous voice. The moment she began, my dad knew he had been struck—by a bullet of love.

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And so began his campaign to win her heart.
Even with a rifle slung over his shoulder, even as fire and explosions tore the sky apart, he sought her out whenever a sliver of time appeared. Amid smoke and gunfire, he did everything tender and romantic a soldier could possibly conjure—each gesture his way of saying he loved her, fiercely and fearlessly.

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In a moment both young and recklessly tender, my dad proposed to her with what I still believe to be the most “insane” line of the decade:

“If you say no, I’ll… shoot us both and be done with it.”

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Mom used to joke that she married him because she was afraid to die, but we knew that was merely a curtain she pulled over a deeper surrender. When the love of her life no longer had a path back to her, she chose acceptance, chose to retreat from a wound that had never had the chance to close. Dad understood this better than anyone.

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In 1973, two years before the war ended, she gave birth to Sơn, their first child—her mirror in every way: fair skin, tall frame, thick black hair, a nightingale’s voice, and a charm as natural and effortless as hers.

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Still, uncle Trung found ways to visit now and then. His love for my mom, though years had passed, remained fervent—so much so that Cô Bông could only stand aside, and finally, with a quiet ache, agreed to let him follow his heart. He asked for a second chance at any cost, my mom was torn apart. She already held baby Sơn in her arms—how could she turn back now?

That day became the last time the two stood before each other on the battlefield. From then on, we barely heard mom’s laughter in the house, like a bird stopped singing after a forest fire.

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When peace finally came, half of my father’s unit had been left behind in the earth—most during the brutal defense of Quảng Trị’s ancient citadel. My parents were among the lucky ones who made it home alive, but my mom carried with her an invisible wound—Agent Orange seeping silently into her blood and bones.

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With nothing but their bare hands, my dad brought her and the family to An Khê, his native soil. She stayed with his mom and his siblings while he worked far away. War had not finished scarring her, her heart had not healed, when she was made to swallow the boundless cruelty of my grandmother and those siblings in law. 

Grandmother had once been a landowner, she gave my dad a taste of material thing, except love. There is a big scar on his knee he never explained, just as he never acknowledged his identity. We only heard from aunts and uncles that she used to string him from the rafters and beat him until her rage was spent. The same violence she later rained on my mother and us children.

The harsher grandmother was to mom, the deeper mother’s hatred for my dad grew, she became nothing but bitter. Old wounds barely scabbed over were torn open again, by grandmother’s whip, by my dad’s hands, by his siblings’ contempt—until they bled cold and endless. Mom has never forgotten those days.

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Yet every two years, amid hardship and tears, another child was born:

1976 – Sister Hà

1978 – Brother Hải

1980 – Sister Thu

1982 – Sister Đông

Five children bearing the whole sky and earth in their names: Mountain – River – Sea – Autumn – Winter.

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Mom thought her burden of childbirth was complete, until I arrived.

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I was born in 1987, one year after Đổi Mới, when the country began its economic transformation: ration coupons vanished, people were suddenly allowed to trade, the economy flickered with hope. My dad, having finished junior high, was assigned to the Forest Rangers; quick, hardworking, proactive, he rose a little.

In 1986 he moved the family to Đắk Lây so we could be closer, but closeness brought mom no ounce of happiness. ​In fragile hope for change, mom urged him to retire early, pooled their savings, and fled elsewhere.

In 1990 we landed in Pleiku.

​For a brief moment we tasted plenty: money filled the drawers, business flourished, the townhouse rang with lambada and Modern Talking, photographs of handsome Brother Son in sharp clothes lined the walls.

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But fortune's grace for our family, like mist, evaporates swiftly.

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In the space of a single year everything collapsed. Trade failed. The house fell. Dad unemployed. Debts towered. They sold the townhouse and moved into a crumbling place close to the military compound, on a red-dirt road choked with dust.

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There, we siblings endured a childhood savage and unrelenting.

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From respected forest ranger with chauffeured kin visits, my Dad became a motorbike-taxi driver. Mom managed to rent a tiny stall at the wet market’s edge, selling bamboo shoots and water spinach.

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They ended up accumulating debts faster than money they could make. Poverty clung to us again, stubborn, suffocating. When I close my eyes I can still smell that house: the stench of darkness, deadlock, and a despair so thick it strangled breath.

Son ran away, unable to stand the slow suffocation of poverty.

Hà laid down her schoolbooks because mom needed her more — needed her small, tired hands to help earn their keep, to cradle the youngest, to stitch the family’s fraying edges together in ways no child should ever be asked to do. Hai, wounded by my Dad’s temper and endless shouting, stopped after ninth grade.

Only Thu and Đông kept going to school.

And me, at three, cried every day demanding to be sent to school; every Sunday the family had to explain: “School is closed today.” My first spoken sentence was not “Mama or Papa but “Mom, please stop crying.” My first letter—age five, trembling crooked words—was to mom the day she fled after dad beat her. The letter never reached her, but perhaps out of love for her children she came back.

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Hà was seventeen then. She adored poetry, wrote in beautiful script, once dreamed of standing before a blackboard. But people kept saying she was ugly, her buck teeth would make pupils laugh. So despite her bright laugh, her smiling eyes, her handwritten poetry notebook, she abandoned the dream, learned to sew, and scraped together coins.

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Girls of sixteen, seventeen in those days usually had young men knocking in the evenings, sitting for tea, feeling each other out. Very few came for my sister. her heart clung to the neighbor lad: mild, reticent, good looking. Self-effacing, she muted her longings. Dad was old-fashioned; after seven p.m. grown daughters stayed inside. I became the secret courier pigeon for her love letters. One suitor did appear—the only one who ever proposed. His family judged them unequal, cause he was handsome, while she was not, and gradually grew indifferent, leaving her alone with her silent longing for the rest of her life.

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At seventeen, she wed. Four years old, I gazed as she ascended the bridal carriage, didn't understand why she cried. 

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Until very long, after.