After Vietnam's war with Japan, Ho Chi Minh was exempt to assist in the disarmament of the Japanese Army in his country. For a short time, at the end of World War Two, Japan still occupied Vietnam. They armed themselves through a British Commander named General Gracey. Supplied by the British, French combatants landed in China in 1945; the French moved into Vietnam and imposed martial Law on the Vietnamese citizens. With the aid of armed Japanese prisoners-of-war the law had become enforced. Ho's government officials forced from office, his government controlled press closed; an unpopular colonial government established itself. Martial law added proverbial insult to injury.
Arming the Japanese to enforce French law, while a British supplied French Army reclaimed its colony for France, was the last straw for Ho Chi Minh, who had fought to drive the Japanese out of his country. Vietminh, soldiers still allied to Ho Chi Minh, hurled themselves against the British and American-supplied French Army, forming death squads aimed at the French Colonial Government. War raged for years, with Ho Chi Minh retreating northward. Eventually Ho forced the takeover of North Vietnam, after the battle of Dien Bien Phu, leaving behind his National Liberation Front in the South. In 1954 the Geneva Conference granted Vietnam independence from France, but divided it into two countries. Once North Vietnam established itself above the seventeenth parallel, the National Liberation Front and People's Liberation Army continued an underground war in South Vietnam, taking instructions from Hanoi and receiving their supplies from North Vietnam.
When Su was fourteen years old she left her mother, the refugee camp, and the destitute living conditions that darkened her adolescence. She existed in the midst of displaced proletariat masses forced from their homes by the war. Su moved among an overflow of refugees. A huge influx of people moved into the capital city of Saigon in 1968. She traveled south to Saigon along Vietnam's National Route 13, then north to Bien Hoa, relying on allies composed of friends, countrymen and former playmates in small villages along the way for food and refuge in times of need. Soon after Su left Phu Loi, activity increased among the Vietcong forces in the Saigon River Valley. Their action followed the '68 Tet offensive. Consequently her mother relocated, by direction of American military advisers, to the temporary safety of still another refugee city set up in Xuan Loc about thirty-five miles east of Bien Hoa.
Living conditions in tent cities near Xuan Loc, set up for refugees after Vietcong stormed south from Khesanh, were worse than those provided at the end of the Cedar Falls operation in Phu Loi. Long rows of tents provided by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and the United States provided shelter for distribution of food and medical supplies. Makeshift covers became fabricated of any available material to house the refugees. Cardboard, bamboo and palm leaf, or parkas and blankets that stretched over elastic clothes' lines sheltered army cots and shabby hammocks. Small children clung dirty and naked to their mothers who stood barefoot in ankle deep mud awaiting medical attention and food rations, while swarms of flies covered their bare skins. This was the environment into which Su's mother moved.
Meanwhile, after several years in Saigon, Su was doing her best to settle into her own, unbidden, environment. Early one morning she was resting; as she rested she dozed; and as she dozed she dreamed
Su's dreams were of Mahayana mysticism. Their cloudy realism brought to her a much-needed serenity as she floated tranquilly in a state of subconscious discontinuity. The Buddhist mind sees what others cannot see. Extending to the world and its entire people, her spirit probed with compelling curiosity in search of contentment.
She envisioned her death; it was sudden, abrupt and violent, the result of another person's greed. The pursuer persisted. In the vision was an old man, a storekeeper, cleaning the street in front of his shop with a broom and dustpan. He laid the dustpan down before returning to his shop to consume bahn bo (rice-cake). He pondered the importance of cleaning the cobble stone street. The unaffected act of beautification benefited his fellow man; and he became pleased. The thought soothed his mind in the manner that bahn bo appeased his hunger.
Su Trang passed the shop. She stopped to talk to a monk, who sat, reverently praying, beside a stone wall.
"Can I help you," asked the holy man with a look of questioning interest?
He enticed her with an inquisitive gaze. A sudden realization came to her. As she stood before him, she knew she was in the presence of a man who had approached fullness in the ultimate knowledge and understanding of life.
"I have journeyed to be counseled by your enlightenment," Su responded. Somehow assured that the holy man was a spokesman of Lord Gautama, she dreamed on.
Su envisioned a soft, quiet light that beckoned her to accompany it. In solemn acquiescence she followed its supernatural resonance. She became confined within its depth and brightness. Abruptly she became consumed by a fear that had become placated by a being of light. Without warning she had become called to appear before the benevolent providence.
The "justice" an apparition of supreme power beckoned from the spirit world of her subconscious. While she slumbered, it demanded an accounting of her for her style of life.
Its attention focused on her, questioning, probing every appreciable detail of any ordeals she had experienced. Why had she left her mother? What would she do with the beauty that she possessed? How would she follow the Eight-Fold Path believed the true trail to salvation? Questions followed questions. Su Trang virtuously answered its surges of vibrant thought, free of malice, so that her innocence established itself. Her day to day existence had become absolved. In considering love and understanding she became released from an experience of being outside her own body.
No hate, deceit, or malevolence existed, upon which ego could feed. No fuel advanced to feed an evil flame; Su's soul dismissed itself to float in the eternal and infinite cosmos. Her spirit, she dreamed, passed into Heaven, but there it deemed itself insufficiently pure to remain. Her soul returned to Earth where her subliminal self wandered, striving for re-consolidation in her earthly body.
She turned restlessly in her sleep, drifting toward consciousness and then back again into her dream world where short, seemingly unrelated reveries rushed at her.
Su continued to dream: an exiled spirit in search of a body. Soldiers and men who shared intimacy with her existed in varying degrees of clarity within the subliminal purgatory of her hallucinations. Su carried out her life in the service of gratifying men through sexual pleasure. She became cast therefor, due to that mortification, only into the shadows of earth.
Her own life, she knew, was not so iniquitous as to deny her the reward of reincarnation. There was hope and happiness in the prospect of finding one of her friends who had led a life that benefited other people. This person's existence was a refuge to her as she traveled, in her fantasy, through the spirit world.
Abruptly, she awakened. She breathed in short gasps as she tried to shake off the fear and confusion that had beset her in her dream. Slowly the chimera of faces faded, and she began to relax.
The passion concealed in Su Trang's appealing personality seemed never quelled; her beauty was enticing. Her charismatic personality had eminence with nightclub owners in Bien Hoa who knew very well how (and through whom) quick profits passed.
Working for a nightclub of the city, she donated minute portions of the proceeds from her work to Buddhisattvas. Those destined to becoming enlightened were architects of the Buddhist religion. Su's own possessions never included more than a few articles of clothing and toiletries. Although, by most of the world's standards, she was immoral, she was not greedy. By her own standards, she was reverent.
One of the main tenets of her faith was that all that she did in her lifetime would follow her in a form of karma. Su felt that people's destinies resolve by their actions in their lifetime. For those who lead devout lives, all actions bear out in the name of love and understanding toward their fellow men. The effects of what people do in their lives continue after death.
Habitual wrongdoers who found pleasure in killing would experience after their deaths the pain and terror they inflicted on humanity during their lifetimes. She felt love and hating followed people after death and magnified within them to consume them eternally.
Su Ann's beauty was a considerable asset to her as, with honest passion, she dealt out sensual gratification to men. Her breasts were large, and softly delicate, sweet complements to a pleasurably narrow waist, and accompanied a healthy, inviting posture in compounding an accessible seductiveness. Unparalleled beauty, along with a provocative, gentle motion as she walked, aroused the sternest of individuals. The smooth curves of her waist and hips provided the most sensuous imaginable outline to men. The smooth, almost hairless silken flesh of her legs and soft belly enhanced her stimulating elegance; and it was for some forsaken men to discover between her thighs an oasis of warm moisture, both delicate and fascinating. All this made up the gratifying entrapment that Sergeant Bradley experienced during his second tour of duty in Vietnam.
Stan Bradley met Su for the first time and danced with her in the club in which she worked. The organizational structure of the Army had hardened Bradley; but nonetheless the sodden heat of the Vietnamese climate tormented him, never allowing perspiration to evaporate and cool him, during the humid evenings.
As he sat at a table, he thought with a mixture of discomfort and longing about his wife and children. Later, when he lay next to Su, sweating and aspirating with laborious effort, waiting out the hours until the war would resume, an overpowering infatuation with her dominated Stan's thoughts, like being exhilarated without drinking. They made love in her tiny one room house. Outside her hooch was the rest of the horrible world; inside there was only her love and beauty. There was something interminable about Su Trang's oriental spirit. It set her apart and set Sergeant Bradley outside himself when they met in the nightclub.
Su talked and the sergeant listened. Her soothing tones provided an inner happiness for the two of them, a bliss that, along with their physical intimacy, almost obscured the daily torment of war. Her attention gave Stan the will to survive continual conflict. Apart from love, Sergeant Bradley felt only two emotions that motivated his daily activity while he was away from her: a strong willingness to live, and an almost equally strong desire to see his family again.
Bradley lay back. He thought about the horrible conflict going on in the country. He thought of his desire to be with his wife and children in the United States. He reasoned that the only way to see that family was to survive the war.
Their lovemaking was a long, passionate lull between military actions, to Bradley, a prelude to the next battle. The tender emotions that he felt in the mornings as he departed from Su sustained him through days and weeks of fighting. She was a gentle lover who was able to absorb the impact of the brutality related to his occupation involving serious physical hardship and intense emotional strain. Her gentle, persuasive emotions, which propelled their lovemaking into ecstasy, formed an ephemeral bond between them.
Their passion constituted an equivocal gaiety before a tortured backdrop of war and human anguish. Their emotions reflected poignant desire. Gradually Bradley came to know about Su's devastated family life, and he became lost, helplessly entangled in tropical heat, military conflict, and Su Trang's tribulation. He sadly engulfed himself, for this brief portion of his lifetime (that seemed painfully lengthened by the war) by her particular predicament. His sympathetic interest held him emotionally bonded to her throughout the war.
