“March in the Tay Nguyen” (central highlands): an excerpt

Abstract

In Saigon I know a family of teachers. The wife was a teacher of English and the husband was a law professor. They were both about my age, yet still seemed quite young and attractive. If you were to scribe a line around that family, limiting your consideration to their home, without considering anything having to do with a land and its people, then you would have to believe it was a small paradise. They have an older daughter and a younger son, so they did not have to worry about the military, about the war. The war was taking place in the newspapers, on TV, through stories people told-in other words “out there” somewhere. Within this house no one thought much about the war, no one talked much about the war. Nor did their work have anything to do with the Americans, with the government, with the war. “All we know is our love, our friends and our relations,” the wife said to me. And I believe that is really the way things were.