Hung

Not bad, he thought. Fifty-two push-ups was not bad at all for a man in his forties who spent his days sitting behind a desk reading documents and writing reports. But there was no small conceit, he recognized, in this private daily contest with the push-ups. Mat goc, losing Vietnamese roots, he reflected with a smirk of self-amusement. He should be performing the dance-like kung-fu warm up routine he had done as a boy with his father, Flip-fling-flick! Joooug! Had he grown up in Binh Dinh, the home of Vietnamese kung-fu, rather than near Vinh, he could never have forgiven himself this Americanism. Nor the American style breakfast his wife served him six days a week. Just a few years ago, who would have believed it? Fruit, cereal, and orange juice... in Saigon... amazing! The physical jerks and monkey motions were easier to understand... He had been snapping them off regularly for more than ten years, ever since arriving at Fort Benning, Georgia to attend Infantry School in early 1956... Ah, what days those early ones were, eh. And what strange twists his life had taken.

Images floated on the surface of his wandering awareness as the warmth of the morning sun penetrated his sweating flesh. He could see himself, as a young man, desperately loping past the huge cotton mill, fleeing the dying city amidst the roiling smoke and leaping flames that spread through the abundant wooden buildings like a virulent storm spit out, bellows-like, from the mouth of an angry dragon. As he skirmished through the streets seeking the countryside, past river front buildings marked proudly with the letters 'MF' -- for Marine Française, the French Navy, which had elements in the city to patrol the Red River -- he stripped off the uniform of a lycée student and donned the garb of a peasant. In late 1946, he had been ready to complete his baccalaureate part two in a French school in Nam Dinh when the city was burned by the Viet Minh in accord with their scorched earth policy. There was no real option but to join the Viet Minh League; he had no desire to fight for the French in the emerging war, no desire to bear arms against his own people if he could avoid it. Then came the prolonged epic interlude of the tieu doi, the evenings and days and years with a Viet Minh squad: time lagging in knots and tangles and shrouds, long waves and crawling, slow-rolling, yawning flocks of undulance, a crumpled ribbon impossible to get under an iron. Twilight daily brought fear prowling into the darkness of nocturnal raids. . . interminable nights of wonder at the edge of death and tears. Swir! Swir! Shrill whistles from the other side of time where the moment is caught on a sprocket, spun slinky through a spur gear. Harsh commands and cruel, taunting laughter, O-o-o-o-i! O-o-o-o-i! leading into the maw of battle. The mot hai rhythm. One-two! One-two! The assault group's dance step in movement, with the tempo ever increasing till the moment of CONTACT...