I became a second-grader after the long Summer vacation of 1943.

My teacher , Mr. Kim, was a devoted Buddhist and a stern educator. He seldom smiled, or to be more exact, he sometimes smiled with his fellow teachers but almost never with his pupils. Moreover, he did not talk much, using gestures instead of voice whenever possible.

His second child was our classmate, who often told us how rigid his father was at home and how hard is father punished him and his younger brothers. 

At that time, Vietnam was still a French colony and we had to learn French right since the first grade. It was rather difficult to us to learn a new language that appeared to have nothing in common with our mother tongue at our age. I tried my best but always unable to memorize the gender of a noun and the difference between an adjective and an attribute despite my teacher's efforts to simplify his teachings. 

Twice a week in my second grade, Mr. Kim gave us a simple "orthographe" in French. He would write a text on the blackboard in beautiful handwriting. The text usually contained about four or five short phrases, taken from a French text book that he had already explained in details to us.  

He let us read and memorize the chalk lines on the blackboard for five minutes without taking notes. Then he covered the blackboard with a cloth before reading aloud the dictation and we began writing.  

When the dictation was over, I went gathering all notebooks and brought them to his table to be graded. His rule was one lash of his rattan rod for each mistake one made in the dictation. 

In the first week of the 1943-44 school year, Mr. Kim appointed me the "rod keeper," but later our classmates called me "Executioner." The frightening rod was hung beside the blackboard when it was not in use. 

The procedures went on routinely two mornings a week for my nine months in our second grade.

After gathering more than 30 notebooks and placing them on the teacher's table, I stepped to one side of the blackboard, took down the rod nearly 3 feet long and about 1/4 inc. in diameter. As Mr. Kim was reading and making corrections on the notebooks, I stood beside his desk with the rod in my hand, my face emotionless and my eyes were looking straight at nowhere, awaiting for each of his "ruling." 

After having graded a notebook, he put it to his right hand side and announced the "verdict," very clear and always with only a three-word sentence, for example, "Hoang, trois fautes!" (Hoang, three mistakes!). My classmate Hoang would say "Yes, Sir," then walked to his desk to pick up his notebook. He would step to the blackboard, obediently bent down and put his head under the board.

I would lash his buttocks three times with the rod. Hoang would happily stand up after the third lash without waiting for an order because Teacher Kim did not required us to do so, and return to his seat. He would smile as if he thought that "it could have been much worse."  

A pupil would be extremely happy if the "verdict" was cut short to a single word, only the pupil's name, without the other two words stating the mistakes. Our classmates dubbed it "acquittal." The lucky pupil would quickly approach the teacher's desk and back with the notebook and with a radiant smile and a face blushed by happiness. Some could not resist boasting, "You see how good I am." 

Among pupils in the class in the first quarter, about ten often had from "no mistakes" to one or two, the other fifteen or so frequently had between two to three, and the remaining usually had about three to five. As far as I can remember, no one always had no mistake and no one had more than ten. 

In the first few days on the job, I was unable to determine how hard I should "execute the sentences," because at that age, we did not have enemies to be revenged on. Moreover, we were rather friendly to each other though many years later we became enemies fighting on both sides of a long and bloody civil war.  

The first time I carried out my duty with a hesitating arm on a boy who was sitting next to me since we were in the first grade. Mr. Kim was busy with the notebooks suddenly stopped and looked at me, a dagger look that was much more threatening than that of my Daddy in his anger. 

He slowly rose from his chair and walked to us - me and Khe, the "convict" - and snatched the rod from my hand. Mr. Kim showed not a bit of anger, his face calm as usual when he talked to me in a toneless voice, "Not hard enough, let me show you how it must be." He motioned me to put my head under the blackboard. He lashed my buttocks with a forceful blow that I still remember the painful feeling after so many years. 

From then on, I dared not perform my task with light hands on any classmate, except for the 6 girls in my class. Girl pupils at the time wore black or white trousers with "ao dai" (Vietnamese female's dress) made of fine materials, smooth and thin.  

Even at 7 years old, I felt something wrong if I hit a girl classmate as hard as I did my male friends. When a female pupil came to put her head into my "guillotine" as my classmates called the blackboard, I could not help treating them with no more than half the strength I applied to the boys.  

Though Mr. Kim seemed to have noticed my gallant behavior towards the fair sex, he acted as if he had not been aware of the fact. Fortunately, only one or two girls had ever made mistakes. After that, all of them always got "no mistakes." They might have been doing better than us boys in French, but probably the teacher felt uneasy seeing the young females punished so hard and so he always "acquitted" them. 

Then came my turn. My notebook always was the last to be graded by Mr. Kim. This was the worst time in the sequences. He graded my dictation, then without a word, only ordered me by his head motion.

If he motioned me towards the pupils' tables, he meant that I had no mistake. Otherwise, if he motioned me towards the blackboard, I would hand the rod to him instead of hanging it onto the blackboard holder. I put my head under the blackboard and waited. Mr. Kim himself handled the "execution" and I never hoped that his lashing would be more lenient than mine.

A few days after starting my job, I made some mistakes. When he gave me two lashes, I was still bending with my head under the blackboard, waiting for more lashes. As he turned his back, he realized that my dead was still under the board, he snarled with a few words, the shortest possible as usual, "You want more?" So I got two more.

From then on, while I was undergoing the punishment, I had to watch him by looking through my two legs. If his feet turned to step toward his desk, I had to stand up quickly to get my notebook before returning to my seat.

What I suffered was much more painful than my classmates, and at the time, I was too young to analyze my feeling to tell my friends, who thought I must have been happy with my "powerful" job.

They did know how many lashes they would receive, so they could be certain at when the painful suffering ended. I was not so lucky. Before putting my head under the blackboard, I did not know how many lashes I would get, so the pain seemed endless to me. The feeling tortured me so much that I did not feel relieved when I knew it was the last blow, and the time waiting for the last seemed endless. Fortunately, I never made more than four mistakes in a dictation.

At last, as we were beaten into learning the language, we made less and less mistakes towards the end of the year. By January 1944, more than half of us often made "zero faute."

***

I grew up during the war of resistance when French Army soldiers terrorized Vietnamese people everywhere they came. They were free to take anyone prisoner in operations. Those who were classified as Viet Minh guerrillas were sent to POW camps.

The others whom the S-2 interrogators found innocent were thrown into war labor camps. Here they were well fed to serve French units in operation, carrying military supplies and ammunition. After about 2 years, they were released when the camps received newly captives to replace them.

As I was living in the provincial city, sometimes I went to one of the camps to visit some villagers who were held there. In my first visit, I was stunned when an old woman talked to his 17-year-old son in the other side of a barbed wire fence separating prisoners from their visiting relatives or friends.

"Sonny, you'll be free in three months, so try your best to stay here. I'll pay the bribes if it is not too much. Your dad left me some gold... Try not to be sent back home. Our village is between hammer and anvil, you might suffer by both sides..." she said with tears tricking from her eyes. Then I understood why very few prisoners here flew the coop. Only years later, did I realize that the French treated their prisoners not so brutally as the Vietnamese did to their compatriots.

In 1956, I became an officer in the South Vietnamese Army. Once in 1963, I participated in a monthly meeting at the province headquarter, representing my division tactical area G-2. The meeting was about a dozen peasants suspected of being Viet Cong and were detained under a decree establishing the so-called "administrative measure."

The decree delegated the provincial security committee of about five members a power to vote for detention of those suspected as Viet Cong but there were not enough evidence to bring hem to formal trials. If the committee voted an extension, a suspect would be jailed for 6 months, and the successive committee sessions could imprison a suspect no more than 4 terms (i.e. 24 months). If then the police department still had no evidence to send him to a martial court, the suspect must be released and automatically recovered citizenship.

After the South Vietnamese republic collapsed April 30, 1975, I was imprisoned along with hundred thousands of former members of the South Vietnamese government and military, members of political parties and anti-communist notables.

We were given terms of three years. The North Vietnamese Resolution 49 in 1961, which was applied to us, allows the chief of district Public Security office to give anyone unlimited 3-year terms in prison without trial in a court. The prisons are called "laokai" in Mainland China and "re-education camps" in Vietnam under Communism. And the inmates are not informed of the terms they have to serve. So we did not know how long we would remain incarcerated.

I have not felt animosity towards the Communist cadres running the camps who mistreated us. I thought they only acted as instructed by their top leaders. Their role was somewhat similar to mine in my second grade.

But during 7 years in 7 different camps before released, I often recollected my feeling I had had when I put my head under the blackboard waiting for the last blow of my teacher's rod nearly 40 years before.

***