Mme. Duong Van Khang: It was such a long time ago that this happened.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: I have forgotten much.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: I will have to tell you what I can remember, if that’s alright.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: At that time, when I was allowed to participate in the attack on the French military post, I had to go out there to the fields and stayed there for three days.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We built a big earthen model of the post out there, complete with electric lights and everything, so that we could see what it was like.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Each of us women who served as guides for our fighters had to be responsible for a certain section of the post.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: My job was to take the soldiers from this intersection over here straight into the post.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: The men dug a foxhole for me just outside of the post so that I could take cover there while they went ahead to attack the fort.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: It was not until 12 p.m.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: that they opened fire and blew up the fort.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: When a section of the post collapsed, I rushed into the fort along a trench.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: When I came in I heard people yelling.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: “Here is the magistrate! Here is the magistrate!”
Mme. Duong Van Khang: But the district magistrate had escaped, and the French began to shell their own fort.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: So the brothers said that there was no need to remain in the post, that we should withdraw to the outside and wait.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: And so each of us girls had to take the men home the same way we took them there.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Then we went to take shelter because the artillery rounds began to come in.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: But what we actually had to do was to change our clothes before going home.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: If we did not go home and the French came to our houses and found out that we were missing they would have us arrested and killed.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: They usually had us under observation.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: When I arrived home I found out that four members of my family and a still born baby had been killed.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: My husband, Mr. Khanh here, and I had to sit in the house with the corpses.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: The authorities refused to let us bury the dead.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We waited until noon when we attempted to bury these bodies, having already borrowed the necessary implements such as hoes, shovels and pickforks.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: But they still refused us permission until late that evening.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: So five members of my family died that day.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: The French came in droves to the village after the attack on the post and saw us sitting with the corpses there.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: The French were extremely angry, but they did not know that we were guerrilla fighters because we had already changed our clothes.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: So that’s all I can remember about that attack on the military post.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: I also worked for a long time as a contact person, gathering intelligence on the French and the military post.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We had a person working inside the post.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: My job was to get in touch with this person and pass out any information he managed, through his skill, to obtain.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: This man would pass pieces of paper to me and I in turn waited until nightfall in order to sneak out of the village to give them to our guerrilla fighters.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Now it was very difficult getting in touch with our man inside the post, it was quite dangerous.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We had told him that on the night that the post was attacked, we would flash a light in the direction of a certain tree three times so that he could take cover.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: This man is now dead.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: I worked with him for a long time.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: He passed out to us every little bit of information on the post, how many guns, how many troops and so on.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Now, whenever our guerrilla fighters on the outside had any message to give to our man inside the fort, I was also the person to pass it on.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: I used all kinds of tricks to make this possible.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: I pretended, for example, to go near the fort to cut grass.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Our man inside the fort would then yell at me and tried to chase me away.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We would then have a shouting match, heaping insults on each other.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: In the course of pushing and shoving, we got our messages passed to each other.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: At other times I would go out there and yell at him, saying that he had owed me money and that he intended to cheat me of my money.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: He would then come down, after a lot of insults, to pay me some for this supposed debt.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: He would then give me a ten piasters bill, for example, with a message fold inside it.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: I would then give him a five piasters bill as change.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Again, there would be a message folded inside, saying, “Here, I’ll give you some change this time.” Without employing these tricks, the French would have found out and we would have all been killed.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Many times I had to pass on bundles of documents to our fighters on the outside, rolls of documents as big as my arm here.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: So I put the roll inside my shoulder carrying pole and pretended to go collecting excrement.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: In this way, I managed to slip documents to our men in the fields, even as far as Ngoc Tao.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: In all these cases, I either had legitimate pretexts or had built up infrastructures there.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Sometimes, in a place where I did not have any infrastructure, I would carry a bottle with messages inside saying that I was going to get some medicine.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: In this way, not even the village people knew.
Interviewer: In 1945, what kind of things did you see? What it was like with all those people dead on the road?
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Now, I’ll just have to tell you what I remember as I go along.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: I was already here in 1944.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: In 1945 the French imposed particularly high taxes and heavy corvée labor on us.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: On top of that we were forced to plant hemp for the Japanese.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Lots of people died then, lots of suffering.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Things are so much better now, thanks to the fact that we have taken back power and are having economic plans.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: At that time so many people died, corpses were strewn all over the road.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We did not have enough wood to make coffins for them.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: So we wrapped the corpses up in mats or in bamboo mattings to bury them.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Those people who died, some dropped dead under the trees, others on the road and still others in their own homes.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: I just saw so many dead people myself.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: It was so miserable then.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We had to eat gruel mixed with all kinds of greens.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Even so, many people did not even have this to eat.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: So many miserable people came to our house then, and we had to share our food with them.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: These were relatives, neighbors or co-villagers.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We just could not keep our food to ourselves.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We had bran in the house then, the kind of bran you feed pigs with, and everybody was so hungry that we had to eat it and shared it.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: So many people died.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We just did not have enough wood to make coffins for them.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We had to wrap the corpses up in mats and bamboo mattings to bury them.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: As for the Japanese, they forced us to plant hemp.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: It was really miserable for us to have to plant hemp for them.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We had to use all our ricelands to grow hemp for the Japanese.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: As a result, we could not produce any rice at all.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: We had to use all our ricelands to grow hemp.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: But after we harvested the hemp and carried it to the Japanese, they did not give us any rice in return for all our hardship.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: So the inhabitants here were extremely miserable.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: They suffered so much in 1945.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Small children like these here, so many of them died.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: They had to go around begging.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: But few people had any food, and so the children died.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: Sometimes, when a certain household still had some food, the children would be given a bowl of gruel.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: But most of the time they got nothing and so they starved.
Mme. Duong Van Khang: I saw all these myself.