Every morning, Ông Năm swept the dirt yard outside his home—slow circles of straw broom against clay, the same earth he once dug through as a boy of sixteen with blistered hands and no fear left to lose.
Back then, they called him “chuột đất”—earth rat—for how fast he could crawl through the narrow tunnels, shoulders brushing mud, lungs holding breath as American boots thundered above.
He dug with a rusted hoe and his father’s army shovel.
Dug at night. Dug in silence.
Tunnels to hide, to fight, to vanish.
“Đất che mình,” he would say.
The earth hides us.
Now, at 78, he walked slow, spine bent like a tree too long under monsoon winds. But his fingers still remembered the cold of soil, the feel of bamboo reinforcing walls, the way the air turned thin in chambers ten meters deep.
Tourists came now—young, flushed faces with cameras and sunhats. They crawled through widened “tunnels,” took selfies, laughed nervously in the dark.
Sometimes they asked, “Did you fight?”
He would smile gently. “No gun. Just shovel.”
They didn’t always understand. That was fine.
Not everything needed explaining.
At dusk, he sat by the tamarind tree, drinking weak green tea from a chipped cup.
Above, the sky turned the same color it had the night the bombs fell,
when he and five others held their breath in the belly of the earth,
not knowing who would see morning.
He was the only one who did.
And now, every time he touched the ground—sweeping, planting, praying—
he remembered them.
The earth had swallowed their names.
But he carried them still,
in his silence,
and in the tunnels no map ever marked.