Page 79 - Thorn In The Heart

Chinh Nguyên

He left his wife's hand and slipped away from a bamboo’s
bush to another. He tried to keep a silence beside the bush
woods as possible to get far away from French militarist and
Viet-Minh soldiers. Also, he paid attention to anything around
him to take a step by step to moving forward.

Sometimes he raises his ears in quiet to listen for a strange
noise by accident and opened wide his eyes to look through the
dark for his checking at a noisy place. Few times he laid on the
ground beside a hiding bush of a moment to pay attention at the
moving things or the animal ran in the dark. Then he sat up with
carefully, bent his back walking in stoop slowly and toward the
sweet potato field of a distance from his house.

At 3:00 A.M., he was back with a bag of cold sweet
potatoes, gave it to Nguyen's grandma and lay down on the
ground and said:

"There were Viet-Minh soldiers' dead bodies lying in the
sweet potato field. Some of them buried in a hurry by their
friends while fighting. Therefore some dead bodies' hands and
feet were out of the ground!"

"My God...! What did you do for them?" Nguyen's Grandma
interrupted.

"Nothing...! I was afraid of French and Viet-Minh soldiers.
They will shoot at me if they see me in the dark, and I had no
time to recover them."

Grandma sighed.

"Yes, I know... They did not care about the people!"

Grandpa looked at a bag of potatoes, he continued:

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