Part 1, Chapter 6

[A single leader: Pétain. A single duty: Obey. A single motto: Serve.]

This iron-fisted display was the work of Decoux, the fascistic admiral appointed as Governor-General by the Vichy government.[50] Charged with defending the “interests of the white races” against 25 million Indochinese, he had ordered villages to be bombed and the rebelling peasants of Cochinchina to be massacred.

For my illness I went to see Dr. Pham Ngoc Thach, a well-known opponent of the colonial regime. My X-rays revealed opaque nodules at the top of my lungs. He prescribed injections of calcium and rest, and did not ask for any payment.

I absolutely had to find a job. But I didn’t even bother to look for work at the French hardware firms, since shipments from France had ground to a halt due to the war. French firms survived by collaborating with the Japanese. My friend Lam Thanh Thi, who had set himself up as a commercial agent during those hard times, found me a job in a Japanese firm, Dainan Koosi. My job was to sort buffalo hides destined for export to Japan. Considering the state of my health, working among all the dried skins impregnated with arsenic in an atmosphere of unbreathable dust was almost intolerable. An elderly, opium-addicted male nurse whom my friend had gotten to know in the opium dens advised me to take crisalbine, a type of gold salt used at that time as a remedy for tuberculosis. I managed to get some on the black market for an exorbitant price. The old man gave me intravenous injections with it and refused to let me pay him.

I kept going in this way for several months until I was overcome by exhaustion. Finally, my Japanese boss moved me to the accounts department. From time to time, I had to travel to the provinces to check the accounts of the brickworks installed all along the Mekong River. It was a unique opportunity to get to know western Cochinchina a little better, particularly Vinh Long, Can Tho and Sadec. In the course of these journeys, with the driver’s help, I was able to practice driving. I had had a license for about twelve years without ever having touched a steering wheel. I still had the idea of studying in Paris one day and of paying for it by driving a taxi.

Then Dainan Koosi opened an office in Can Tho and I was transferred there. My lung disease seemed to be stable even though I got out of breath easily. In the small brickworks I was able to observe the superexploitation of the proletariat by a rapacious rural employer class, in total complicity with the local notables. The wretched peons — men, women and children alike — were paid by the piece. Covered in mud, they ground up clay from dawn to sunset. What they earned was often not enough to pay off the loans plus interest advanced to them by the boss. Sometimes whole families were condemned in this way to a lifetime of slavery. Those who tried to escape were caught by the village notables and beaten by their exploiter as long as he felt like it. I will never forget the solid whip with its stingray cords hanging on the wall behind the owner’s desk at the Van Xuong Brickworks in Vinh Long.

One day as I was at work at Dainan Koosi, I had a strange visit from a stocky, scar-faced man with a handlebar mustache and a mane of iron-gray hair. It was Nam Lua (Fifth Fire), feared leader of a well-known guerrilla gang in the Can Tho region. He had become a fervent convert to the “Mad Monk” sect and felt threatened by the French, so he was seeking the protection of the Japanese. That was is how I found out about the existence of the Hoa Hao religious sect, named after the native village of its founder, Huynh Phu So. This young visionary, commonly referred to as “the Mad Monk” [le Bonze Fou], had begun in 1939 to preach a new kind of Buddhism marked by simplicity and ancestor worship that was well suited to appeal to the poor peasantry. The global slaughter currently under way seemed to confirm his prophecies announcing the end of the old world. His Litanies for the People alluded to the approaching end of the French occupation, and his prediction of the coming of the Buddha King promised the troubled rural poor a future of universal happiness. In their distress, many poor people found solace in this religion, or nourished their spirit of revolt with its mysticism. When the cult began rapidly spreading up and down the Mekong River, the colonial regime became apprehensive. The French Sûerté interned the Mad Monk as a mental case in the Cho Quan hospital ... until he converted his doctor! He was then forced to live in the far west, at Bac Lieu. Then the Japanese police took him under their protection.

I learned that Chi Nam Thin, my partner’s elder sister whom I had run into a few times at the My Tho prison, had been put under house arrest in Ben Tre after three years in detention. I knew she was on her own with two children. How was she managing? I decided to go to Ben Tre.

On the way there, on the ferry across the Mekong, I ran into Duc. We had met in the Central Prison in 1936. I was happy to be able to share a few piasters with him. He belonged to the Communist cell in Ben Tre, and gave me news about his comrade Tong, with whom I had become friends in prison. Little did I know that not long afterwards, in October 1945, this same Tong, promoted to be an agent in the Vietminh secret police, would try to capture me in the Thu Duc area. How is it possible to imagine that someone who faced the enemy together with you, who lived side by side with you in prison, could one day want to take your life?

During one of my trips to the brickworks along the Mekong River I came across yet another former fellow prisoner, Pham Van Kinh, a Stalinist party worker and veteran of Poulo Condore. He was wandering around at loose ends, living clandestinely. I got him hired at Vinh Long, and he set himself up in a straw hut on the bank of the Mekong. One evening, who should I see in the hut but Tran Van Giau. He told me he had escaped from the Ta Lai camp in Bien Hoa. He seemed to be relaxed and carefree, as though he was enjoying the state of being an escapee. We bathed together in the Mekong, then he disappeared.

It was balm to my heart to learn of the arrival of my friend Tran Van Thach, who had been exiled to Can Tho after his return from Poulo Condore at the end of 1944. He was the one who had gotten me the proofreading job at Le Flambeau d’Annam when I got out of prison in 1937. He was living in a room on the bank of the Mekong. I brought him some soap — and my deep affection. In the evening we would often go for a stroll together by the river. He once confided his dream to me, in English: “I would like to go abroad after the war.” It never happened. In October 1945, while in the resistance movement in Ben Suc, he was shot by thugs hired by the Stalinists Tran Van Giau and Duong Bach Mai.

During this period I also ran into my old friend Ho Huu Tuong, who was also in exile in Can Tho after being released from Poulo Condore. This was a troubling reunion. He told me that he had broken with his past after years of “meditation” during his imprisonment. He now believed that the emancipation of humanity by the proletariat had been the biggest myth of the nineteenth century, and the revolutionary potential of the European and North American proletariat the biggest myth of the twentieth. I could find no words to refute this haughty, detached position of the very man who had initiated me into the struggle so long ago. I felt as though I had already been erased from his past. Our friendship slipped away before my eyes, like the flow of the Mekong.

On March 10, 1945, Can Tho woke up to martial law. As astonished crowds gathered in front of huge posters put up during the night, I saw the proclamation by the Commander in Chief of the Japanese Army, which ran roughly as follows:

In view of the developing military situation against the Anglo-American attacks, the Greater Japan government feels obliged to assume sole responsibility for defending Indochina, while declaring that it has no intention of territorial conquest. The Greater Japan government will do everything possible to help the peoples of Indochina, hitherto toiling under the colonial yoke, to fulfill their ardent desire for independence. The Japanese army will annihilate only the present colonial government and its army, and does not consider native soldiers as enemies....

During the night the Kempeitai (Japanese police) had imprisoned the French Administrator and all the French Sûerté agents and police. They had also rounded up all the French people and put them in large centers inside guarded perimeters.[51] The French colonial regime, after eighty years of crushing with terror, violence and corruption all the attempts of its slaves to break their chains, had collapsed in a single night, March 9–10, 1945. The Japanese replaced the French at the head of the system of oppression, presenting themselves as liberators. The Commander of the Japanese army, Tsuchihashi, replaced Decoux as Governor-General of Indochina. Under the egis of the Japanese, Bao Dai, the Emperor of Annam,[52] proclaimed the “independence” of Vietnam on March 11, 1945, and called on Tran Trong Kim, a retired school inspector, to form an imperial government in Hue.

One evening, Lu Sanh Hanh turned up at my doorway. I hadn’t seen him since Phnom Penh. He recounted his adventures during his five years underground. Having escaped the enormous roundup at the beginning of the war in September 1939, he went into hiding in the extreme west of Cochinchina, where he took a position as tutor to the only daughter of the brave farmer who hid him. I was moved by the story of his romance with this girl from the ricefields, and his heartbreak when he had to leave her.

Lu put me in contact with Nguyen Van Linh, an older comrade who had played a significant role in the Indochinese Left Opposition group in France. He had returned to Cochinchina at the beginning of the war, and was now teaching in a private school in Can Tho. It was a warm and stimulating encounter. We gathered at his house to discuss the political situation, without yet formulating any plan of action. Finally back in the company of people who shared my ideas, I came to life again. Lu Sanh Hanh wanted to bring together the surviving comrades and reconstitute the League of Internationalist Communists.

In Saigon, the nationalist groups, which had been outlawed under Decoux, began to stir. The National Party for the Independence of Vietnam, led by intellectuals, joined with the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao mystico-religious sects in calling for a demonstration “to express the nation’s gratitude to the Japanese army for freeing us from our French enemies.” But the Japanese banned the demonstration. The Cao Dai sect, which commanded a paramilitary force of several thousand peasant followers trained by the Japanese, had participated in the coup alongside the Japanese troops. The Hoa Hao, until then relatively unknown, came on the scene at the bidding of their leader, the Mad Monk, who had emerged from his hiding place in the Japanese zone. In 1945, in their fief of Chau Doc, the Hoa Hao followers forged spears, knives and sabers and underwent military training. The sect set up its own security force and wielded a certain amount of de facto power. In July 1945 many of its members enlisted as auxiliaries in the Japanese army.

In April 1945, with the blessing of Minoda, the new Japanese Governor of Cochinchina, Dr. Pham Ngoc Thach and a handful of intellectuals launched the JAG (Jeunesse d’Avant-Garde/Thanh Nien Tienphong) [Vanguard Youth]. Imbued with a jingoist ideology of the Stalinist Komsomol and Hitler Youth type, this movement contributed to the maintenance of order by the Japanese and to civil defense. In the remotest countryside as well as in the urban areas, it mobilized everyone over the age of thirteen into brigades that demanded an oath of unquestioning obedience to superiors. Uniformed and armed with sharpened bamboo sticks, these boy scouts marched under a yellow flag with a red star, singing “On the March,” an anthem praising the ancient heroes who had defeated the Chinese at Chi Lang and at the Bach Dang River. Those who failed to join this organization were accused of not loving their country. A parallel organization of “Vanguard Women” was set up to carry out a similar role with female youth. In the cities, the movement soon became the de facto power in every factory, every office, every workshop and every school. Branch sections were in every area of the public services. It was the same in the countryside, from the main county towns to the smallest hamlet. At the beginning of August 1945 the JAG held a mass swearing-in ceremony in Can Tho.

During this period there was a huge Anglo-American air offensive. In the west, I had been far away from the war. But one day when I had come to Saigon I got caught in a bombardment and ducked into a ditch. After the piercing whistle, followed by the explosions, I felt the ground tremble. The large trees bordering Boulevard Norodom were literally cut to pieces. The neighborhoods of straw huts were in flames. The dead and wounded lay everywhere under the onslaught of shrapnel and fire. JAG teams gathered up the corpses and cleared away the rubble. These massive air attacks were a daily occurrence. The B-29s flew at very high altitudes so as to evade the Japanese antiaircraft guns. Sky-high flames blazed from burning fuel depots.

When I went to see my mother and brothers in the village, my peasant friends showed me the cartridge cases they had picked up after low-flying planes had strafed the villagers, in the belief, perhaps, that they were Japanese troops in camouflage.

“Your boys are in danger,” my prophetic Brother Seven had told my cousin, who thought that Brother Seven had foreseen the misfortune because the Japanese had concealed antiaircraft guns under the trees surrounding the house. But nothing disastrous happened until later, after the Japanese retreat, when soldiers of the French Expeditionary Corps, in a “mopping-up” operation, rounded up all my cousin’s sons and shot them at the place called Cau Sat (Iron Bridge) and threw their bodies into the river.