In an effort to track down a married couple who saved his life in 1967, an old veteran from Hanoi sent many letters to the hamlet of his rescue for some thirty years. The job was almost hopeless, as the man did not know the exact names of his saviors nor where they lived.
 |
| Some of the letters written by Yen to Tien |
Nguyen Dinh Yen was caught in an enemy raid in Lam Thuy Hamlet, Hai Lang District, Quang Tri Province in late June 1967, where he was fortuitously rescued by a married couple.
Although he had not received any reply from the married couple after so many years, Yen said he never lost heart.
He added that without them, he would have been dead, as he was severely wounded after the raid.
It was late in the evening, and after the raid a strong smell of gunpowder hung in the air.
It was also the wedding night of Nguyen Tri Tien, a local guerilla, and his bride Le Thi Don.
After putting on the new dark brown shirt that his wife had made for him, Tien and Don began to cook dinner. Suddenly, they heard a shout from outside their thatched-roof house.
Tien and his wife quickly ran out of the house and headed to the nearby field where the shout was coming from. Found on the path at the edge of the field – some 15 meters from their house - was a young soldier who had lost a lot of blood, with a large open wound on his right thigh.
The newly wed couple hurriedly carried the injured soldier home and put him on their narrow bamboo bed.
Don used old clothes to wipe the soldier’s wound, but blood kept pouring out. Since they did not have any cloth in the house, Tien took off his new shirt, tore them into strips and used them as bandages to dress the wound.
Knowing that the enemy would come back soon, Tien left the injured solider to the care of his wife and went into the garden to dig a dugout to hide the injured soldier.
Two days later, the enemy came back to conduct another raid as predicted. They searched every house thoroughly but did not discover the dugout. Yen was safe.
After nearly one month taking shelter from the enemy, Yen was well again and ordered to a safer place.
Before leaving, Yen told Tien that he was a soldier of 812 Regiment garrisoned in Hong Linh District, Ha Tinh Province. He also gave Tien and Don a photo of him as a souvenir.
Since Tien could not tell Yen his real name for security reasons (Tien was head of the special task force team of Hai Lang District), he told Yen a nickname instead.
The two men hugged each other firmly, swore an oath to be brothers and promised to find each other again after the country achieved unification, if they both survived the war.
Tien said, “Yen left our house, and not long after I heard that he was caught in an ambush while crossing the Vinh Dinh River. Believing that he was killed, I chopped down a large jackfruit tree in middle of the garden to make an altar. I put the photo of Yen on it so that I and my wife could offer incense to him every day.”
Tien continued to offer incense to Yen every day for almost thirty years until…
Yen’s endeavor to track down his life savers
After leaving Tien’s house, Yen was transferred to a hospital in Hanoi for further treatment. Afterward, Tien was honorably discharged, as he did not recover adequately to continue fighting.
After the country achieved unification in 1975, every month, Yen wrote a letter and sent it to Lam Thuy to track down Tien and his wife.
The first letter was a long one because Yen put all of his emotional feelings in it.
He wrote, “I’m still alive and live in Hanoi. I trust that you are both safe and sound, too. I always think of my debt of gratitude to you and don’t know how to repay it […]
“When receiving my letter, please send me a reply at your earliest convenience, I’ll be very much happy to hear from you again.”
 |
| Tien with the photo of his late wife |
Since he did not get any reply from the couple, Yen wrote again and again. He said, “I trusted that they, or at least one of them, were still alive. The point was that I didn’t know their real names and their accurate address. If one of my letters could reach one of them as by an arrangement of fate, I believed that Tien or Don would write back to me immediately.”
One day in 2004, while Tien was feeding fish in the pond, the postman stopped his bike in front of him, held out an envelope and said, “The post office has received a lot of letters sent to a man and woman named Chien and Don. I haven’t been able to deliver the letters, as no place in the hamlet has such an address.”
The postman persuaded Tien to open and skim through the letter to make sure whether or not it was intended for him. He said, “The name of the man sounds like yours and the name of the woman is exactly the same of your wife’s.”
Tien opened the letter, held it in his hands spattered with mud and read it. He then trembled with emotions and shouted, “Oh my goodness. Yen is still alive.”
He wrote back to Yen immediately, ”I’m so happy that you are still alive and that I can hear from you again after all these years. We are going to see each other soon, shall we?”
Yen cried when he got his reply at last. To get a return coach ticket to Lam Thuy, Yen had to save every penny from his monthly war invalid benefit.
When Yen arrived at Tien’s home in 2006, he was hoeing land in the garden.
That night, the two old men lay on the bamboo bed where Tien and his wife had put the young injured soldier 39 years previously. They talked themselves hoarse, catching up on all the news.
The happiness of reunion was sadly not a happy ending, as Don was not there. She was killed by enemy torture in 1973.
But wherever she is, she must be happy to know that her husband has been reunited with the man whose young life they had both saved. | 
