Page 53 - Thorn In The Heart

Chinh Nguyên

Nguyen kept silence and followed his grandpa into the
house, while his eyes always paid attention to the Viet-Minh
soldiers' actions. He ran his eye to everything that Viet-Minh
soldiers had brought into his grandparent house area.

He looked at the serious face of his grandma and found
some things very important secret that his grandma could not
talk to the words. It might happen to his family. Or the people in
the village. Therefore Nguyen wanted to know why his parent
and youngest uncle were hiding in Hanoi Capital? Why they had
no time to call him back from school, and left him living with
his grandparent without a word? Why his parent will get the
trouble by Viet-Minh people? These things were rolling in his
mind, but he kept silence to watch the Viet-Minh soldiers'
actions in his grandparent house and learned about them from
his grandpa.

The people in the village had changed the way of their living
rapidly, after the battalion of Viet-Minh soldiers was staying
three days. School had closed to let the children be home with
their families. All the business and a little squatting market in
the village had slowly to take their turn going down and closed.
Few poor farmers tried to work on the field to keep up their
living families. The people in the village lost the smiles and
happy faces. Instead, the war atmosphere had covered over the
village at day and night long, and the refugees of war were
moving in the village. They had talked about death, wounded of
civilians on the battlefield and some areas were destroyed totally
by bombs and canons of both sides.

A lot of civilians stuck among the bullets of both sides while
they were running out of their homes for away from the war
zones. They die everywhere in some places of fifteen, or ten
miles away from the North and Western sides. These utterly
miserable were much more level of age. They were dirty, and
ribbon clothes are lurching on the field banks toward Thanh-Lap
village or another to seek the safe places.
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