After a year he was released and ordered to a communal village as part of a government project to forcibly relocate four million Vietnamese families into the hinterlands. When the rains fell, he worked the paddy, a frayed conical hat on his head, the silt clinging to his bare calves like stockings. Phuong, his wife, arrived and set about coaxing beans, potatoes and tomatoes from the cracked gray earth and cooking the weedy vegetables over an open fire. During the dry season there was little enough water for drinking and none for crops. In growing desperation, Tam was soon willing to do almost anything to feed his family.

Every morning at four he rose to hike deep into the forest. There he applied his machete, chopping the fallen trunks into one-meter segments. His wife followed to cook his lunch and bring him water from the distant well. Eventually he shouldered the heavy logs for the hike home, where he hacked them into kindling and carried them four kilometers to the tracks. The train stopped for less than two minutes on its journey south - just time enough for his wife to clamber on board while he passed the bundle through an open window. Five hours later the train lurched into Saigon. She sold the wood, purchased a few necessary items with the proceeds, and bedded down on the filthy station floor to await the four a.m. train that would return her to Tam and her son. For three years and through the pregnancy and birth of their second child, the routine never varied.

Until Phuong fell ill. The sickness - malaria - lingered for months, consuming her body and their scarce financial reserves. The doctor was seventeen kilometers away, far beyond their reach and the nearby nurse could offer nothing but sympathy and empty shelves. Without the income from the sale of the kindling, starvation loomed. In desperate times they made a desperate decision - to escape to Saigon. Tam peeled a few precious bills off their dwindling resources to bribe a local official to let them go. In the darkest hour of the night, they fled.

They arrived at the crowded station in Saigon with only their two children and a bag of clothes. Tam was an illegal alien in his own country, without the permits necessary to live in the city. He stood a slim chance of finding work.

For the second time he was forced to send his wife and children back to her family to survive.

THE WAR · GIVING BLOOD