May 10, 2009
Eight Postcards from Vietnam
A former VC, Mr. Hanh, told me about Bay Dom, an ARVN general who was in charge of the Chau Doc area during the war: “Bay Dom could not be shot with a bullet. Once he dared an American advisor to shoot him several times, point-blank, with a pistol! But the American missed him each time! The only way you could kill him was to shoot him in the eye!”
“Which eye?” I asked him.
“Either eye! The eyes and the asshole! But it has to be a bullet aimed right into the asshole. Once Bay Dom sat on a hand grenade but it would not explode!”
I thought it strange that Hanh would elevate a former enemy to a mythical figure. A scrawny man in his early fifties, he wore a gold earring in his left ear and talked with a vast repertoire of hand flourishes and facial expressions. His wife told me later that her husband had become gay after a recent blood transfusion.
“You mean he’s HIV positive?”
“No, just gay.”
By Linh Dinh, in the Literary Review, n.d.
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Wow