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Letter to the Wall, from Le Ly Hayslip

From the Unknown Soldiers Gravesite on Route 9, Ho Chi Minh Trail…

Dear Names On The Wall, In Washington, D.C., USA,

I just returned from Vietnam, our Motherland, where you lost your lives. You are so much luckier than my countrymen in Vietnam. At least your names are here on these beautiful black marble walls, standing right in your capital near the White House where they made the decision for your life to send you away to Vietnam.

Since I was a young girl growing up in my village I heard the name “Dãy Núi Trường Sơn” (Annamite Mountain Range) to describe the many mountains around us in Danang. Later when the war against you and your country broke out Trường Sơn become something very sensitive and secretive. Our parents always looked at the mountains with sad faces and told us there were so many people from the ethnic groups living in the mountains who died. We saw the smoke rise up after some airplanes dropped something on them.

I came to the U.S. in 1970 and learned from the English language news that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was in the Trường Sơn Mountains, where the US carried out heavy bombing and killed hundreds of Vietnamese almost daily. They are tall mountains with deep jungle covered with heavy vegetation and forests extending over 1,100 km in length. These mountains extend from north to south Vietnam and were used by the north to infiltrate troops and supplies into South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during the U.S. war in Vietnam.

For the last 32 years I learned from people in Vietnam who traveled on foot for months from south Vietnam to the north to study in Hanoi. Some were badly wounded and had to be carried by two men on a stretcher walking for months before reaching Hanoi for treatment. I also talked to people like my brother, Bon Nghe, and countless cousins who left families and villages in 1954 to join Uncle Ho’s army in the north. He was only seventeen years old and walked most of the way.

In 1972, Bon Nghe and our cousins walked from the north back to central Vietnam. They walked for four days, stopped for a day of rest, then continued on amidst heavy aerial bombing, mortars and artillery fire from every direction and watched human beings killed like ants. It took brother Bon and his comrades years to arrive near our home where they fought to liberate the south. On the way they buried as many dead comrades as they could.

On March 28, 1975 they achieved their goal: Danang, Quang Nam and all of central Vietnam were liberated. Bon shared with me many stories of bravery and horror about the Trường Sơn Mountains and Ho Chi Minh Trail which Bon and his comrades witnessed on their way. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was used by the National Liberation Front from 1959-1975 during heavy fighting and bombing.

After 1975 until about ten years ago, Vietnam opened up tours for world visitors to come and visit old battlefields and hot spots all over Vietnam in places like Khe Sanh, Dien Bien Phu, Hamburger Hill, Hue city, Phu Bai, etc. They widened the old Ho Chi Minh Trail into a big highway from south to north for tour buses to carry veterans from the U.S., France, Japan and many other countries so that veterans who fought there could return to show their families and friends the places and battlefields where they experienced that terrible time and saw so many of their comrades fall.

For a long time I wanted to visit these places to capture the experiences that my brother Bon and others told me about while they walked in the Trường Sơn Mountains. Many advised me not to visit, worried that I could not take it! So I resisted this urge until my trip to Vietnam last April, when people invited me to join them on two major spiritual events that I could not resist.

The first event was to honor the memory and sacrifice of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thay Thích Quảng Đức on the 56th anniversary of his self-immolation at a busy intersection in Saigon on June 11, 1963 to protest against the war.  The ceremony was held at the famous Linh Mu Temple in Hue, and I was one off 10,000 national and international guests on that day, April 23, 2019.

After a huge ceremony and lunch for several thousand monks, nuns and guests, by noon there were just ten monks and thirty of us headed to the Trường Sơn Mountains to the location of the Trường Sơn Martyrs’ Cemetery on Route 9, where most of the unknown soldiers’ gravesites are located. It is the largest national military cemetery of the Peoples Army of Vietnam. Without knowing what I was getting myself into, I was shocked when we reached the gravesites.

While monks and disabled people were working and praying for the souls of those fallen comrades to be released from earth to heaven, I walked around to see the full expanse of this gravesite and how many graves were there, but that would have taken me days to complete.

I have visited many of the largest military cemeteries and sites of massacres in the world, including US Civil War sites such as Andersonville National Cemetery in Georgia, the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz, the Passchendaele battlefield in Flanders, Belgium, Battlefield 1 in Australia, the site of the Battle of Okinawa, the atomic bomb site in Hiroshima, Japan, just to name a few, but nothing was like the Trường Sơn National Cemetery. Not only was it so large, but the powerful spiritual force present there deeply affected me both physically and mentally in that moment. No matter which country or military cemeteries I visit, they are all victims of war.

I walked and walked, crying in the hot sun; finally I sat and meditated under a tree to let my soul be with the spirits in the mountains, the frost and the death. Their spirits spoke to me, I prayed for them and asked for the release of their souls. I was deep in meditation when a vision came and showed me the story of human struggle in battles and the aftermath of wars as deep as the waters in the sea. Seemingly never-ending fighting.

When forced to choose between life and death, we always choose life. A voice came to me: “Against all odds, we chose to be heroes and recognize our destiny to protect our Motherland by following our government’s demand to make a sacrifice. That is why we are here at this lonely military gravesite on Route 9 of the Ho Chi Minh Trail not far from the DMZ (demilitarized zone). We never did make it to the south.”

Then I heard a song coming through the winds above, the song “Mẹ Việt Nam” which every single Vietnamese mother can relate to, including myself.

The monks and disabled ones prayed hard in the four hour ceremony in hopes that all the souls in these mountains be released from earth and move to a higher realm, to be with their loved ones, ancestors and their God to find peace. I joined the monks and the group praying and asked those souls to forgive and be forgiven, and to move on.

*****

There was a soldier who left home in springtime

He left his poor family and their bamboo hut and never returned

His name is now engraved in the mountain stone

Clouds cast a shadow on the yellow flowers by his grave

Clouds in late afternoon cross the blue sky

Old mother still waits for her son to come home

Old mother keeps looking at the path where her son walked

Oh Mẹ Việt Nam, Oh Motherland Vietnam

Tall mountains just like the love of our mother

The four seasons have whitened her hair

Still, she looks for her son to return

Oh Việt Nam ơi, Oh Motherland Vietnam

Fire is burning in the mountains where you fell

Red flowers bloom there

Showing the beauty of the evening sunset

*****

Our mother waited for my brother, Sau Ban, for thirty-eight long years, but he never returned. Mother carried her patience with her to the grave, and hopefully reunited with him in the afterlife.