ABSTRACT
The fame of Cao Xuân Huy (1947–2010) in the Vietnamese expatriate community stems from a uniquely vivid book he wrote concerning his experiences as a combat marine prior to the fall of the Southern Vietnamese Republic. His distinctive quality resided in the fierce positivity with which he embraced the ethos of a combat soldier, and the gaiety and resilience with which he faced all of life’s situations, including the illness that at length killed him. This article begins with a long quotation from Mr. Huy’s preface to his war memoir, proceeds to an appreciation of his work by Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng, a colleague, continues with an account by Dr. Vinh concerning the nature and stages of his final illness, and concludes with a valedictory poem by Huy’s friend Trịnh Y Thư. — Eric Henry.
KEYWORDS
Cao Xuân Huy, Vietnam War, ARVN Marines, war memoir, ocular melanoma, chemotherapy
Figure 1. Cao Xuân Huy in everyday life. (Trịnh Y Thư, personal archives).
The writer Cao Xuân Huy died on November 12, 2010—so now, as I begin to write this memoir, six years have passed since then. What appears below is an article written jointly by Ngô Thế Vinh, Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng, and Trịnh Y Thư to remember the author of My Gun Broke in March on the occasion of his sixth death anniversary.
Cao Xuân Huy was born in September 1947 to a northern family: his father’s family was from Bắc Ninh, and his mother’s from Hà Nam in North Vietnam. In October 1954, Cao Xuân Huy emigrated to the South with his mother. Here are some of the highlights of his life: In February 1968 he enlisted in the Marine Corps of the Republic of Vietnam. In March 1975, he was arrested and imprisoned by the Communist victors in the Vietnam war for having acted as an opponent to the new regime. In September 1979, he was released from prison, and in December 1982 he escaped from Vietnam by sea. He reached the United States in October 1983, and settled in South California in 1984. In 2005, he became the editor of the journal Literature (Văn Học), remaining in that position until April, 2008. He died on November 11, 2010 in Lake Forest, South California. His major works are My Gun Broke in March (Tháng Ba Gãy Súng), 1985; and A Few Small Matters (Vài Mẩu Chuyện), 2010.
Personal Elements in Cao Xuân Huy’s My Gun Broke in March
Excerpts from the Preface to his war memoir, My Gun Broke in March (Tháng Ba Gãy Súng), first published by Văn Khoa in 1986, and republished by Văn Học in 2004. It is the most frequently republished war memoir in Vietnamese expatriate communities:
“I’m not a writer, just a soldier, a combat soldier, in the literal meaning of that expression, and the things I write about in this book are simply events, events that are a hundred percent true, recounted in words. I write about the things that we soldiers have directly taken part in, but which no one has written about, whereas things that many people have written about, have never been experienced by anyone.
“Among people about the same as me—people who were less than ten when they emigrated from the North to the South—except for a few who had close family members who had been killed by the Việt Cộng—almost no one really hated the Việt Cộng, because who, among the youngsters my age and younger, had the slightest idea who the Việt Cộng were? A similar observation can be made with regard to people who were less than ten when they emigrated with their parents to the United States after 1975 and now live here. They hate the Việt Cộng to be sure, but it is merely a hatred passed down in the family: Their mothers and fathers hate the Việt Cộng, so they do the same, but there is nothing intense about their feeling.
“So, when I grew older, and had some ability to judge things on my own, there was a disadvantage I could not get over: The Southern Republic’s system of propaganda had more the effect of “anti-propaganda” than of propaganda proper. So, when I entered the armed services, I volunteered to enter a unit that engaged in actual combat, not so much because I hated the enemy, but more because my surging, youthful blood was stimulated by battlefield situations.
“Nevertheless, because I was in a unit that regularly engaged in combat, I shared in its dangers, and in its common experience of life and death. I felt bound to my comrades-in-arms, as if we were all blood brothers. I loved my unit, and I loved the colors of my cap and shirt. I loved my superiors and I loved our unit commanders. I calmly accepted all the bad habits of my superiors and commanders, and I myself had a great many bad habits.
“But when my two commanders—a colonel in charge of a brigade and a lieutenant colonel in charge of a sub-brigade including four combat battalions plus supporting units, amounting in all to about four thousand men—ran to save themselves when their troops were hard-pressed, I was overcome with rage. I kill the Việt Cộng without the slightest hesitation, but not because I hate them. I do so because there is a clear line between us and the Việt Cộng, we are on opposite sides of a war front, when the two meet, they must use every means in their power to kill each other. But when one’s leaders turn into deserters, one must lose belief in them and be overcome with shame, because these are people whom one has respected and whose orders one has striven absolutely to obey.
“The captain of a ship must live and die with his ship; the commander of a unit must live and die with his unit. What I wish to speak of is a commander’s spirit of responsibility. A person who possesses power but is devoid of a sense of responsibility, is no different from a traitor. We lost, not because the enemy was strong, but because there were too many traitors and cowards. It is due to my hatred of the cowardice and irresponsibility of our commanders that the images of the final days before the brigade dispersed and was captured, due to terror inspired by a company of guerilla soldiers in the last half of 1975, are like a film clip lying in my memory—all I have to do is press a button, and the scenes unfold with complete clarity accompanied by all the thoughts and feelings I was subject to at the time.
“I have carried all these pain-filled, shameful memories for a dozen years now, throughout my years of imprisonment, and my passage through refugee camps. And now, in the United States I read in a newspaper a statement made by a former Vietnamese general, that was more or less as follows: ‘Losing the country was everybody’s fault; those in high positions must be considered greatly at fault, and those in lesser positions slightly at fault.’ It occurred to me immediately that those who stabbed the warriors in the back, and the warriors who offered their backs to be stabbed by their chiefs, were equally at fault. This was the button that set the film in motion and impelled me to relate this story.
“What I want to say in this book is that there is no one who does not turn to look at the place where he has just tumbled down, and also there is no one who does not turn to look at the shit he has just excreted. To take a spill is one’s own fault, and if one’s shit stinks, the shit is still one’s own—so why, for the past dozen years, has no one turned to look at the fault that caused him to fall into his own pile of shit, but has only given vent to curses and tirades against others. The unusually courageous ones admit only to a generally shared offense: ‘those in high positions are greatly at fault, while those in minor positions are slightly at fault,’ in the manner of the saying that ‘the nation’s survival or destruction is the responsibility even of the lowliest commoner.’ If the lowliest commoner is at fault, then who is without fault? Thus, I too must admit to being at fault.
“I forget who it was who said the following: ‘The rulers and officers of a former dynasty need have no shame for anything whatsoever, because when they had a lord and held power in their hands, they were unable to accomplish even the slightest deed, so now that there remains to them only a shelf for their robes and a bag of rice, how can they accomplish anything aside from the clothes-shelf and the rice bag?’
“Our land is not a chessboard which, once a game has been lost, can be swept clean in order to set up pieces for a new game in which the generals are still generals, and the troops are still troops. It is not as if all the slaughtered chariots, horses, and pawns can be set up again in readiness for a new battle.”
Figure 2. The cover of My Gun Broke in March.
“That those who lost their intellect and were devoid of courage as well, and were capable of nothing but the contemptible ability to use the courage of others, so that they at length had no recourse but to flee the country, deceiving everyone so that the millions who had the courage to fight had to enter prison camps—that such people should still have been so shameless as to appear before the public as ‘fathers and mothers of the people’—is simply too much to be borne. Though their contemporaries may be able to overlook their stinking and cowardly past, history will be incapable of absolving them. Even the words “anti-communist” once borne by the high-ranking ones are no longer appropriate; the expression must be saved for a generation that will replace them. Only those adopting a new stance will be worthy of the term. Only when names are correct and language is fitting can the Việt Cộng be vanquished and the nation recovered. Only the mute and lowly pawns who were sent here and there with bowed heads, and the new leaders of today are qualified to assume such roles.
“This volume is not a novel but a memoir. This is because I have never been a writer, and because I have no expertise with regard to arranging events in a narrative structure. As for the word ‘March,’ everyone will know what that means. As for ‘my gun broke,’ I wish to speak of a matter painful to any soldier: a gun with no ammunition has no more value than a piece of rotten wood—I myself have led assault companies to their objectives with nothing to fire with but my mouth. Could our guns have been broken if ammunition had still been supplied to us? This is what I wish to express with the words ‘my gun broke.’
“And I call My Gun Broke in March a memoir because I accept full responsibility for everything recorded in it, for all the place names, for all the names of individuals, and for all the names of military units. All the accounts of what happened are true, one hundred percent true. I have not introduced even the smallest fictional detail. I have no doubt forgotten a great deal, and because of the lowness of my rank and responsibilities, there were no doubt many factors that I was not aware of. I have included everything that I saw with my eyes and heard with my ears, as well as all the orders that I was given, and all the orders that I carried out.
“If My Gun Broke in March were a novel, I would have to place a disclaimer at the beginning, saying: The characters and events in this book are all the imaginary creations of the author; any resemblance they may have to real persons or occurrences is purely coincidental. . . While the fact of the matter is that the only thing contrary to my wishes is that I may have insufficient skill to write all the things I must write.”
Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng Reads Cao Xuân Huy (excerpts from an article posted on Talawas)
“My Gun Broke in March.” What initially attracted me to the book was its title. It was a simple title. A gun breaking in March was a simple and attractive idea. March was the month the Central Region met with disaster, when the red tornado from the north whirled southward. Some more time had to pass before the horde could pour into beloved Saigon on the miserable and fearsome occasion known as “Black April.” Cao Xuân Huy raises the question: “Who wrecked the guns of our army, the guns of our courageous soldiers, so full of experience and strategic skill? Who tied their hands, when they still had guns, but had nothing in their ammunition bags?”
The author allows us to see that the things done among the lower ranks of the people reflected a loss of faith in a number of people in positions of command, “elder brothers worthy of respect” who when hard-pressed deserted their troops and ran away to save their skins, without concerning themselves about whether those they left behind lived or died!
My Gun Broke in March portrays a gigantic flood that took place in a pitiless war, and submerged the destiny of an entire people. On the sandy banks next to the upheaval, people heard the sounds of skulls cracking beneath the tracks of tanks.
It is a book with very few smiles, but with great quantities of blood and tears. The element of happiness is slight and dry, whereas that of pain and misery is richly abundant; cruelty and hatred are commonplace, while mildness and correct behavior are distant things.
The writing style of My Gun Broke in March is simple, natural, and luminously clear. But the reader knows full well that to be able to produce all those words that appear so natural, Cao Xuân Huy had to pay a rather high price; he had to duel with the God of Death in hairs-breadth situations in order to maintain his human dignity. One can say that My Gun Broke in March was written in passion before being polished by a practised literary pen. This fact does nothing to diminish the vitality of this work.
Anyone fond of reading books knows that world-famous authors, such as Flaubert, Hemingway, Dickens, and Tolstoy all employed a simple and natural style when they wrote.
Once when I met the author, I asked him why he characterized My Gun Broke in March as a memoir rather than as a story (truyện kể) or a historical narrative (truyện ký). He replied, “Because I refrained from putting the slightest fictional detail into it. Everything I wrote in the book were things that my eyes saw and my ears heard. I regret only that my abilities are not sufficient to write everything I need to write.”
It is true enough that fiction is essential to literature, but reality is itself so huge and deep that a modest imagination is sometimes poor and shallow by comparison. Or, putting it another way, we can say that though fiction is necessary to art, reality must always provide the basis required for fiction to assume a firm and stable form.
It is this element of reality that has endowed the pen of Cao Xuân Huy with such special color, and has filled My Gun Broke in March with a fiery freshness that no work of fiction could hope to achieve.
And the art of Cao Xuân Huy lies in his ability to endow his work with a persuasiveness stronger than that of reality itself.
What most appeals to me in My Gun Broke in March are its bits of dialogue. They are unedited, but neither superfluous nor commonplace. They have not passed through the filtration system of “literary theory.” They are alive and sharp. And they are very close to us, the readers.
*******************************
Before taking up his pen and writing of the days and months in the history of a battle of which he himself is one of the witnesses, Cao Xuân Huy was a warrior in a branch of service known to all; the Marines.
In terms of lived experience Cao Xuân Huy has all that it takes to convey the realities of the battlefield in his pages of fiery prose.
As Cao Xuân Huy observes, “Our land is not a chessboard which, once a game has been lost, can be swept clean in order to set up pieces for a new game in which the generals are still generals, and troops are still troops. It is not as if all the slaughtered chariots, horses, and pawns can be set up again in readiness for a new battle.”
But this thought of his is not a place where he wishes to come to a halt. It is offered rather as a thought that can make us wish to reflect further.
After turning over the final page of My Gun Broke in March, the reader feels that there is something still unfinished. The final period of the story of the nation’s destiny can only appear on the page of a subsequent volume.
But in any case, the cruel and horrifying images, and the feelings of anxiety and fear, remain in us like a sediment.
And in that sediment there also remain place names, local scenes, familiar venues in withered regions of the rural countryside, including the weather conditions in those regions which our own bodies have withstood and, above all, there remain in us the images of people—including ourselves—enshrouded in the bleak and lonely destinies brought upon us by violent historical upheavals.
All these people and events seem to have appeared only yesterday as we read this book, and seem to be still moving and evolving somewhere around us.
In My Gun Broke in March, Cao Xuân Huy has pages of prose that describe human beings in an honest and simple way, a thing that Ernest Hemingway said was “the most difficult to achieve in the world.”
- Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng, Santa Anna, April 1986. (Source: Talawas http://talawas.org/talaDB/show/File).
We are informed also that My Gun Broke in March has been reprinted fourteen times, and that there are copies of the book in all the libraries of the world. There is perhaps no other book in overseas communities that has been reprinted so many times or which has been sought by so many people. The book has also been introduced in its entirety in the novel, A Season When the Ocean Stirred (Mùa Biển Động) by Nguyễn Mộng Giác.
A Different Cao Xuân Huy (Ngô Thế Vinh)
Based on my friendship of many years with Huy, and having obtained the consent of his wife and his two daughters, Chúc Dung and Xuân Dung, I will now turn in this article to medical matters and speak of a different Cao Xuân Huy, a man afflicted with illness, a man perched vertiginously on a path leading to death, who fought with all his strength against his illness until the final seconds and minutes, and departed this life with all his dignity intact.
Figure 3. The book, A Few Small Matters (Vài Mẩu Chuyện), a short story collection,
published by Văn Học in 2010.
Figure 4. Cao Xuân Huy was full of gaiety and laughter throughout a signing session in a meeting room in the offices of the Việt Herald in Little Saigon, Orange County, California,
on July 10, 2010.
Melanoma is a type of cancer that develops from melanocytes—cells that produce the pigment melanin—the element that determines the skin colors of the various races. Usually, melanoma is a type of skin cancer, but the eye also may be the place where this type of cancer develops, though this is somewhat rare. Eye melanoma is not as easy to identify as skin melanoma. When discovered, it is often too late. That was Cao Xuân Huy’s situation. He suddenly found one day that when he closed one eye, he saw nothing with the other. He informed me of this right away.
When one suddenly loses vision in one eye, one thinks at first of other urgent factors that might have this result (such as retinal detachment, stroke, migraine, or glaucoma) instead of eye cancer. A Vietnamese eye doctor who was the first to examine Huy and make a clinical diagnosis said that this might be the result of a rare mushroom-like growth on the retina. But a few days later, before much time had passed, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) provided Huy with an accurate diagnosis: ocular melanoma. From this point on I shall refer to his condition simply as eye-melanoma.
For unknown reasons, there are greater numbers of people who suffer from eye-melanoma among those who, unlike Huy, are white-skinned and have blue eyes. But perhaps another explanation can be considered: the oncogenic (cancer-causing) effect of prolonged over-exposure to sunlight—Huy might be considered “over-qualified” for this, due to his long years as a soldier in all four corps military districts (bốn vùng chiến thuật), and after that, his years of heavy labor in Vietnam’s tropical prisons. We might further postulate that his condition may have been due to a “mutated gene” that issued a random order for all his melanin cells to keep multiplying instead of successively growing old and dying, as normal cells do. Medical science has identified molecular markers found in chromosomes that may be used to identify metastases.
Eye-melanoma is a rare and insidious type of cancer that, when discovered, has produced metastases in more than fifty percent of cases, so the life expectancy of the patients concerned is very short: from two to seven months. Only about fifteen percent of such patients live longer than twelve months. The reason for this is that eye-melanoma with liver-metastases resists every sort of treatment.
Eye-melanoma may at first present no symptoms whatsoever, and when symptoms do appear there may be nothing unusual about them—they may consist simply of flashing lights, blurred vision, aching in the eye from glaucoma-caused pressure, or, as in Huy’s case, loss of vision; and its clinical progression is very uncertain prior to the appearance of metastatic symptoms in the liver, lungs, brain, or bones.
Figure 5. Cao Xuân Huy’s smile.
Investigative and diagnostic methods for this illness include blood tests to determine liver function, ultrasonic tests to discover growths within the eye, ocular blood-flow tests with contrast agents, and possibly biopsies to see if any growths in the eye are cancerous. These tests must then be repeated at intervals, and followed up by further blood tests, lung X-rays, and CT and MRI scans so as to catch any metastases at an early stage. UCLA applied nearly all of these standard procedures to Cao Xuân Huy.
But the decisive factor is still time. Tests sometimes show that liver function is still normal even after the illness has invaded that organ in the form of micro metastases, or very small groups of cancerous cells.
Skin-melanoma and eye-melanoma have a shared designation, but they are actually two different “beasts.” Chemotherapy can be an effective treatment for skin-melanoma, but it has almost no effect on the other illness. Little data has been gathered on the treatment of metastases coming from eye-melanoma. Treatment of metastases is considered effective if the tumors concerned shrink by fifty percent or more. Shrinkage of fifteen percent or less is no different from what might occur with a placebo, and in such cases chemo treatments are generally discontinued, since they serve no purpose and would only increase the physical misery of the patient in the short time still remaining to him.
Cao Xuân Huy was not a candidate for surgery. He was given radiation therapy from the start in the afflicted eye in the form of brachytherapy, or the implantation of radioactive seeds.
After receiving this treatment, Cao Xuân Huy continued to be closely followed by UCLA. Because he could only see with one eye, his depth perception was significantly affected, but he calmly continued to live as usual, driving every day the fairly long distance from his home in Lake Forest to his place of work in Little Saigon in Orange County, California. He found that it was more difficult to drive when he returned home after dark.
Chemotherapy is used to treat melanoma both of the skin and of the eyes. The chemicals are fed into the veins and carried by the blood to the cancerous areas, where they quickly kill the “enemy” cells. An unavoidable side result, however, is that healthy cells are killed as well. And so there are endless side effects that compel quite a few patients to terminate their treatment. These effects may include depression, fatigue, nausea, weight loss, and a reduction in the quantity of white blood cells, leading to a reduced ability to fight off illnesses that may themselves cause death. Advances in treatment have led to the introduction of new medicines that can reduce the severity of these side effects. Only about twenty per cent of skin-melanoma patients respond to these treatments. We do not yet have any type of chemotherapy effective in treating metastases resulting from eye-melanoma, as in the case of Cao Xuân Huy.
Figure 6. Left: The soldier Cao Xuân Huy with his aged mother in 2007. (TQLC, Australia, archives); right: Cao Xuân Huy and his wife and two daughters Chúc Dung and Xuân in 2007. (Cao Xuân Huy family archives).
Figure 7. The green beret Cao Xuân Huy (left) meeting with his RVN marine comrades. (Marines of the Republic of Vietnam, archives).
The metastatic tumors resulting from this type of melanoma are of more than one kind, and since many of them appear throughout the liver, surgical resection is not an option in these cases.
To sum up, some types of cancer can be cured, but one can only say that eye-melanoma with metastases is not yet on that list; it is among the most malignant of cancers, and remains a challenge to medicine in the twenty-first century.
Just as in his writing, in which Cao Xuân Huy calmly set down all that was good and bad in his experiences, he now spoke with the same calm of his eye cancer, while those who listened to him could not escape feelings of sharp concern and alarm. After meeting with Huy, a close friend of his said, “his illness is a desperate one, but he acts in such a way that he is a source of comfort to others!”
As I followed the developments in Huy’s condition, I came to realize that he might be termed “a model patient.” He gave up alcohol with ease, and acted with strict personal discipline in all phases of his treatment. He received the most advanced care available, as was his due. And in return, he supplied to medicine a perfect “case study” to use in the effort to conquer this savage type of eye cancer.
Huy courageously bore everything, rising serenely above the miseries resulting from treatments that held little promise of victory. He was warned in advance that if he accepted treatment, the quality of the days and months he had left might be affected, and might even be reduced in number.
Huy and I continued to communicate with each other on a weekly basis by cell phone. This would usually take place on Thursdays after his return from an appointment at UCLA. I was usually the one who made the phone call, but on one occasion Huy called me first to inform me that a CT scan at UCLA had revealed the presence of a small tumor in his liver. With eye-melanoma, this can often be the result of a metastasis, but it also could have been a “primary tumor”—the incidence of hepatitis B among Vietnamese and other Asians was quite high. In any case, his condition was very hard to treat.
The following week, Huy’s daughter took her father into UCLA to get a biopsy, and didn’t hear her father make the slightest complaint during this painful procedure. The biopsy confirmed that the tumor was a metastatic growth caused by Huy’s eye-melanoma. This could not be treated with surgery, and radiation and chemotherapy were of no use in treating this kind of metastasis. The battle that lay ahead for Huy was fiercer still. He was thoroughly aware that the prognosis was dim, but he nevertheless accepted a round of chemotherapy, the first, that would involve receiving a dose each Wednesday for six weeks. Huy endured the first round with ease, though he of course experienced various side-effects from the chemicals. During this period, he continued to drive to work and meet with his friends on weekends. The evaluation after this first round showed that the metastatic tumor had stabilized; it had not grown or spread. It was like a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, but it still could not be said that the treatment was successful. In this very unequal battle, the first victory was not one of elimination, but one in which the enemy is made to “halt in his tracks.” Huy accepted a second round of chemotherapy that would also involve weekly visits to the hospital for six weeks.
The losses suffered by the enemy in this second round cannot be known, but it was plain that Huy began to pay a heavy price. After his first treatment, Huy let the people with him know that, aside from the familiar side-effects, he felt pain in his whole body this time, as if his “flesh was being torn apart”—his own words. Huy had never been accustomed to cry out in response to pain—it appeared that his pain threshold was quite high. Even pain on the order of 10/10 did not tempt him to give up the battle. When the second week came Huy insisted on continuing the treatment, even though the staff was hesitant. Again, he felt that his flesh was being torn apart, but this time the pain was greater and lasted for several days, so that he needed to take pain suppressants. This marked an important turning point in his treatment. It was a decision reached by the staff treating him, not by Huy. His hardihood and strength of spirit was out of all proportion to his physical condition. He needed a period of respite before another course of treatment could begin.
Then the third round of treatment began. Huy was informed that the metastatic tumor was bigger, and that there were now more such tumors in his liver. Huy himself felt that the region around his liver was bigger and harder than before, and that eating and drinking was difficult. From that point on, Huy lost color and weight, and became rapidly weaker, though his spirit was still resilient. He was calm as always, and did not appear to regret anything.
Once when I met Huy, he was already too weak to stand steadily on his feet—he was close to collapsing on the floor, but he still was unwilling to grasp the hands of people next to him.
There was thus nothing UCLA could do anymore, and they sent Huy back home with his family doctor. Rather than entering a hospice, Huy continued to live at home, cared for lovingly by his wife and two daughters.
Sunday, November 7 of 2010 was the marriage day of Huy’s second daughter, Xuân Dung. It was organized earlier by the family so that Huy would be able to share in his daughter’s happiness. I later became aware that that though Cao Xuân Huy was a bold and manly fellow, he was not devoid of fear—he was very fearful of his second daughter. He was sometimes able to ignore bits of advice that I gave him, but anything that Xuân Dung requested of him he received like an order—I knew for sure that he would do it.
After that day, Huy’s waves of pain would make him curl up like a fetus, but he still didn’t want to take many pain suppressants. He finally needed morphine in quantities that were increased every two hours every day, but this only partly suppressed the savage assaults of his pain. Huy still bore up against it stoically, never groaning or complaining, and still at moments smiled and laughed when close friends or associates who revered him came to visit.
Figure 8. Cao Xuân Huy with friends, from the right: Hoàng Khởi Phòng, Hoàng Chính Nghĩa, Cao Xuân Huy, and Ngô Thế Vinh. (Photo by Phạm Bích Hoan, 2006).
Figure 9. From the right: Cao Xuân Huy, Hoàng Khởi Phòng, Hoàng Chính Nghĩa, Khánh Trường, and Phan Nhật Nam. (Khánh Trường, personal archives).
Five days later, on a Saturday afternoon at 4:53 p.m. on November 12, 2010, Huy died peacefully and with fulfilled wishes, still in the loving care of his wife and daughters, as well as two other people who were close friends; one of them, Dr. Nguyễn Đức, had just arrived from Florida; he had been close to Huy since childhood. The other, Trần Như Hùng, was a friend from their days in the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam; he had just arrived, barely in time, from Australia.
Traversing the vertiginous road that leads to death, pitted against an enemy much stronger than himself, Cao Xuân Huy behaved always like a model patient, fought his final battle with spirit, and departed this world with all his dignity intact.
A Poem in March, Trịnh Y Thư
I received Trịnh Y Thư’s email message on November 12, 2016, the sixth death anniversary of Cao Xuân Huy. It included a poem he wrote on the night of the day that CXH breathed his last. The photo attached to the message was one that Trịnh Y Thư took at the moment when CXH’s ashes were released at Laguna Beach a hundred days later.
Figure 10. The scattering of Cao Xuân Huy’s ashes in the sea by Laguna Beach,
one hundred days after his death.
SURRENDER TO THE WAVES IN MARCH
In March the heights of heaven are the shade of blood,
And vultures strike the knell, a spreading pall of death,
In March the corpses of the young and old
Lie cold and still together listening to the whistling wind.
Along the reedy bank of Cửa Việt, the waves emit a roar;
The city’s unfamiliar; the advancing waves are homeless;
Names and deeds are lost like wisps of hair;
Night descends, and rains pour down as in a dream;
The wine is red, the blood adheres, there’s nothing to be done;
A haggard yellow orchid waits my coming by the gate.
The bitter bullets of the past still swell our wounded flesh.
March returns to red and sandy shores,
March drifts off like mountain mist,
The soil strange, the resting place all strange.
Beyond the peaks one hears the caves still roaring
Dull and dark at night beneath the moon,
He sees approach the day his flesh will change to ash
He lies in realms all strange and sees the former sea,
the sand all white, the houses browned with coconuts,
Oh carry him away in March.
(Trịnh Y Thư, November 11, 2010).
- Ngô Thế Vinh, California, November 12, 2016.
