Rain On The Red Flag Excerpt
Tchaikovsky. A White Butterfly. The Memory of Love. For seventeen-year-old Thanh (Frank) Nguyen, the official end of the war in Vietnam marked the end of his freedom and the beginning of a harrowing adventure.
Rain on the Red Flag details Thanh’s journey which begins on the day the communists plant their flag in homes along his street in Saigon. Thanh’s only chance of survival is to escape. Later, Thanh is tricked by an opiate dealer and captured by police. For four years, he is held in jails and labor camps; chained, starved and forced to do backbreaking work. Only his love for freedom, music, the memory of his girl and friendship with the other prisoners keeps him sane.
When Thanh is finally set free from a labor camp he returns to Saigon, a city which he then feels estranged from. He helps to build a boat which he unexpectedly captains to navigate himself and seventy five other refugees through tumultuous seas, and eventually, to their freedom in Malaysia. Rain on the Red Flag describes his remarkable journey.
My Surrogate Family
When I was a child growing up in Saigon, I never could have imagined that one day the idea of eating a termite queen would make my mouth water, that I would try in vain to snag that gelatinous morsel stuffed with sweet eggs from the center of the insect’s giant clay house. The delicacy was afforded only to the strongest guys at K-3 Labor Camp. Among the youngest, I was a nineteen-year-old kid with jutting hip bones even before being captured; I had to be content with barbequing the occasional lizard or frog.
“Are you dreaming? Wake up,” my friend Quang said, snapping his fingers.
“Why? It’s a nice dream. I got the queen for once,” I said.
Quang laughed his dry wheezing laugh.
We were near the barbed wire where we dried our ragged clothes on the top of Phuong Vi, Royal Poinciana, the name of the flower our hill was named after. As we peered out over the valley, to our right was the dense, green jungle beyond the wire. There lay the path leading into the bottom of the valley. That path was like a red waterfall, a line of guava-colored dust that zipped up the hill’s bright-green body. Behind it was the warm olive silhouette of the Chua Chan mountain.
“Have some water. You’re going to need it. Big d..day today.” Quang said, a slight stutter to his speech, as he shoved his Guigoz can toward me.
We were about the same height, though his hunchback made him a little shorter. Quang was about four years older than me. He’d been a college student when Saigon fell but had a babyface like I did. I admired the way he still kept his short dark hair well-groomed. He slept in the next bunk and we ate meals together. He was my closest friend.
“Take it,” he insisted.
Quang took my hand and placed the Guigoz can in my grip. I took a sip, swishing the warm water in my mouth, and then swallowing hard. A wave of dizziness engulfed me, the kind where my bowels threatened to give out. It had been happening all day. I leaned into a tree and put my free hand on it to balance. I concentrated on breathing through my nose, my face flushed.
Quang studied my agony for a second, looking at me with an odd head cocked, the poetic way he examined a silky corn husk or deer poop or the sunrise. Quang didn’t live in the same world as the rest of us guys at the camp.
“Are you homesick?” Quang asked.
I stared at him. The word homesick made no sense. Nobody at the camp believed we’d ever leave for home again. And it had been nearly a year since my mother had traveled all the way to the countryside to visit me. There was no such thing as home anymore. But a tenderness in Quang’s voice tugged at me. Quang was sensitive. He listened deeply.
“Thanh,” Quang said quietly.
The sound of my own name already sounded strange to me.
“It’s so clear out there. Beautiful. Take a look,” he said.
I looked into the valley below. Women worked the farmland, carrying bundles of wood on their heads. Cooking smoke drifted above the thatched roofs. Down there was family, real life, freedom.
“Don’t be so stubborn. You are no good to us if you get yourself blown up,” Quang said. Then he laughed hysterically. He was teasing me. It was the first termite mound I’d been assigned to clear. Clearing the mound was the most dangerous job at the camp.
I looked down the hill toward the dense jungle. Gnarled plants compete for light. Sticky vines climbed stumps. Roots spread furiously under the earth, undermining ancient hardwoods.
In the center of the plants was the long, clear field we had spent the month preparing with our machetes and hoes. We were getting them ready for planting corn, cassava, and peanuts. Our work would provide food, barely sufficient, for the three thousand former scientists, doctors, soldiers, lawyers and politicians in danger of starving to death.
Just beyond the edge of that field was the fifteen-foot-tall red clay mound the termites created out of their spit and tenacity for their queen. We would soon be dismantling it.
Quang and I were positioned in the place where our people, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, ARVN for short, had base camps during the war. The termite mounds jutted above the bamboo and shrubs and provided good hiding spots for the Vietcong and Communist forces. That was the reason the land around them had been rigged with land mines. Approaching the mounds required great vigilance.
“Is your hoe good and sharp?” Quang asked, protectively.
“Yes,” I said.
Our hoes were a source of personal pride, one of the few possessions we were allowed to keep. We lay them in the fields at the end of the day and reclaimed them the next dawn. Their sharpness could determine whether we worked smoothly or we injured our backs toiling. The mound was the ultimate test.
A few months before, a man tripped a mine. It was soon after lunch, when the dry air squeezed the saliva from your tongue like water wrung from a washcloth.
While chopping stalks, we’d all heard the explosion— and felt the loud boom in the bottom of our shoes, so strong we could practically taste the metal in our teeth, feel the shrapnel in our own heads. The sensation never left my body.
“Then there is nothing to worry about,” he said.
“I’m not worried.”
Quang walked over to me, in a way that reminded me of Charlie Chaplin. I had seen the comedian on the black-and-white television in our living room with the American soldier who rented a room in our house during the war. I remembered how tiny I’d felt among the giant man.
Sometimes, I felt just as out of place at the camp. The majority of guys had been in the military and had seen combat. I wondered if those guys had been toughened before they’d gotten to the camps—if that somehow helped them.
I looked at Quang. Like me, he’d never really been in the military. Somehow, after Saigon fell, he was involved with the underground resistance, was captured, and wound up at K-3, a few years before me. Despite his nervous manner of speaking and his funny walk, people trusted him.
“Anyhow, you will love it. You aren’t going to believe the place where the queen lives. It’s like a spaceship. If you are lucky, you will crack it yourself and get to eat it,” he said.
“I won’t get the queen,” I smiled.
“Why not? It happened in your dream,” Quang said.
The air was dry and the hill quiet. There was a chattering sound in the distance, coming from behind the trees that could have been a human or wild animal.
Quang began to sing, in quiet, halting English.
“When I find myself in times of trouble … hmmm…
how do the words go again, Thanh?”
I smiled. I knew what Quang was trying to do. Here at Phuong Vi, in the place where the future was forbidden, memories of our past could keep us alive. My memories were guided through song. I was a popular rock-and-roll guitar player in camp, and playing yellow music, the kind Communists forbid, was an act of bravery.
Under the circumstances, it was the best I could do.
“Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be,” I sang as low as I could.
Just then, a guard began howling at us to get back to work.
*******
I stared at the guys’ feet. Sixty feet, many of them with thick crusted nails and deformed toes. All wearing sandals we wove out of salvaged rubber truck tires. All sunk into the red dirt. The feet were side by side in a long line stretching from the mound to where the guards stood in the shade, wearing puke-colored uniforms and funny, spherical-shaped Communist hats.
I raised myself up and looked at the mound. The gargantuan, red-dome-shaped termite house looked as hard as concrete. We were dwarfed by it.
The heat was a haze that wavered in the air like grease over a grill. That air, perfumed with the sap of rubber and redwood trees, stung our nostrils, as did a rush of small bugs. Sweat dropped from our foreheads into our eyes.
Some of the guys were excited to start the attack on the mound. I’d noticed myself how I’d started changing inside, becoming more primal. The previous week I’d watched a group take the body of a guy who’d died from malaria down to the cemetery. For the first time, I didn’t dwell on how terrible it was.
For some guys, walking over mine-rigged land was a way to feel a rush of endorphins, a break in the monotony. It caught their minds with the same excitement of meeting a beautiful girl. I was not one of those guys. The fistful of dry gritty cassava I’d eaten for lunch came up sour in my throat. I swallowed it back down.
The guard barked an order. We advanced. We tread slowly, with practiced steps, sweeping the earth with long hoes, slashing the ground to look for mines.
And in my hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of me
We worked in unison, felling the tall trees first and then the larger ones. We cleared the ground to eventually let new things grow. We got closer and closer to the mound.
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
In the distance, the guards were shouting, a mechanical sound somewhere between encouragement and disgrace. They would yell when something was accomplished, as if they had to prove they weren’t slacking off, sitting in the shade and chattering.
Let it be, let it be. Whisper words of wisdom, let it be…
The song stopped as we made it to the mound, men clapping each other on the back in encouragement. We no longer were in danger of getting blown up by a landmine.
Still, there were other dangers hacking a termite house to bits. The mound was so hard, the hoe often bounced back and smacked us. We knew what else awaited us – thousands of termites furious that we invaded their sanctuary. Plus an equally angry collection of snakes, rats, squirrels, lizards and larger insects.
“Don’t low, don’t low, placate,” the guards barked, urging us on.
In our row between Quang and me was the strongest among us, a tall, fit, dark-skinned guy. We called him Ms Dan because he sewed and cooked as well as any woman. He was a people pleaser, always volunteering to help others carry water or start fires. Even though he never had a visitor, he always wound up eating meals with the richest guys at the camp. It was a selection process as intimate as marriage. Even the guards liked him.
Ms Dan was a mystery. He’d graduated college with a degree in political science, but he rarely spoke about his past.
We knew Ms Dan would likely get the queen. We also knew he would do the most strenuous work, using a delicate force to swing his hoe while we were breaking our own backs.
Personally, it didn’t matter to me. I was content to gawk at the treasures inside the mound. I was still a city boy at heart, and the sights of the jungle still astounded me.
My shoulders ached with every swing of the hoe so bad they were nearly cramped. The impact made my knees turn to jelly and made me want to cry. Even though I wouldn’t be the one to get the queen, I kept swinging, getting lost in the rhythm, until we broke through.
Two Cambodian guys, jailed for joining the resistance, ran off chasing a large green snake. When roasted, it would taste like leeks. I’d watch them roll its slimy, bloody body against their bare backs because they believed it would strengthen their health. Another went after a squirrel, always impossible to catch.
The termite mound insides were hollow. It looked like a futuristic city---with cavities, secret tunnels and passages linked together by the spit-dirt. Insects were scurrying about, crumbs on their backs and things in their mouths, traveling like harried pedestrians in a city.
We focused on the center and the ultimate prize, suspended by bobbing clay strings. It was a thick, rounded dome with holes and windows that looked like a spaceship. It housed the thumb-sized queen, her plump body stuffed with hundreds of tiny eggs.
Sure enough, Ms Dan reached in and cracked the ship with one chop to expose the queen. He dropped the hoe and reached his hand in, beating out two others who were grasping wildly, ignoring the thousands of tiny red creatures that covered them, stinging. He pulled out the queen, his arm swarming with the tiny red insects.
“Ms Dan’s got it,” someone screamed.
He opened his palm and dropped into his mouth the globular white queen, which burst and popped. He swallowed.
We cheered and laughed. Ms Dan cleared off his arms and we all returned to work, flattening the rest of the mound.
Excerpted from Rain on the Red Flag, copyright © 2022 by Frank Nguyen.
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