By the foot of a sand hill at dusk, a man plants smoking joss-sticks in front of the small graves and touches their numbered stones.
He points at a grave and says, “This is my first child’s.”
As the joss-sticks burn down, the man rests his head on a grave and begins to cry.
Do Duc Diu is puzzled by his tears. He said he cried so much over the years that after he buried his ninth child, no more tears would come.
Losses
Diu lives in Quang Ninh District’s Vo Ninh Commune. He became a soldier in 1972 and during the war he was sprayed with Agent Orange in Mo Tau, an area in Thua Thien-Hue Province’s A Luoi District.
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Do Duc Diu, who fought as a soldier in 1972 during the war in Thua Thien-Hue Province, takes care of the small graveyard behind his house – where the veteran buried most of his children who died in early infancy. |
“At that time, people saw enemy planes scatter a white powder and a few days later they found a vast forest had withered,” Diu recalls. “But no one knew it was Agent Orange.”
When the country was liberated a few years later, Diu returned to his homeland and married Pham Thi Nuc, a girl from his village. He went back to the army after their wedding day and waited for the birth of their first child. They had already chosen the name of Do Duc Hoa.
Both were shocked when their son died two days after birth. Before his death, his head suddenly swelled, his skin turned yellow and a thick fluid oozed from his skin.
Diu and Nuc considered the child’s death an accident and hoped for another baby. In early 1981, they were happy to have a second child. The girl was healthy and was named Do Thi Binh.
A year later, the couple had their third child. The baby died after repeated convulsions.
As Binh continued to grow and enjoy good health, Diu and his wife believed that they could continue having children.
But their next 10 babies all died in early infancy. Many of them died before being named. Diu and his wife could not remember their names, so he wrote their death dates in a notebook and numbered their graves to make it easy to hold their death anniversaries.
The patch of land, roughly 20 square meters, behind the couple’s house became a family cemetery where they buried their children.
Diu says almost every month he has to organize “dam gio,” according to the Vietnamese tradition of celebrating the anniversary of the death of a loved one.
Diu and his wife tried to conceal their problem from villagers. His relatives thought Nuc was to blame.
Diu loved his wife but he went away to live with another woman in order to have a son. After two years of separation, he returned home and confessed to his wife, “I had a child with another woman but it also died. The problem is me, not you.”
Because of her love for her husband, Nuc welcomed him back.
Diu then went to Hanoi to take a medical examination and was told by doctors that he had been affected by Agent Orange.
The living children
After this diagnosis, Diu and his wife considered their daughter, Do Thi Binh, a miracle. However, they hoped they could have more healthy children.
Luck smiled on the couple when they had their fourteenth child, a healthy girl they named Do Thi Hang.
A year later, Nuc gave birth to the fifteenth baby, a girl. Do Thi Nga survived – their last “miracle.”
Of the couple’s living children, Binh is relatively OK. She is married but occasionally suffers convulsions.
As for the other two, they began having convulsions around the age of seven or eight. “When the weather gets bad, they begin to drool and their bodies convulse and twist, making them look like animals,” Diu says, as more tears roll down his cheeks.
Source: Tuoi Tre |
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