Name: Bùi Đình
Gender: Male
Nationality: Vietnamese
Ethnicity: Viet
Appearance: Đình is a wizened old man, weathered by the weather and the sun, but a wiry man. He stands at about 5’6 and has had the fat scoured off him by the years. He remains spry as a goat and able to run people that aren’t used to the highlands to the ground. He has very few teeth left and has to chew meat carefully, but he has endurance for days. It’s also notable that he has scars – he’s lost two fingers to war, and has shrapnel burns on his arms and chest. He’s also taken two bullets, one Japanese and one French, and is still here to talk about it. He’s gone gray in the hair and a lot of that is gone but for a stubble up top.
He’s only 44 but he looks twenty years older, as people from industrialized countries might reckon it.
Notable souvenir: He has an Iron Cross 1st class around his neck, with some beads on leather string. He doesn’t realize that the symbol means quite something else to Europeans. He does know he took it off a blonde legionnaire early in the last war and likes having a keepsake like that around.
Uniform: Black pajamas, a checked peasant scarf, peasant sandals and a rice hat, albeit his is wrapped in brown cloth to keep it from sticking out too much in the underbrush. He also has a bedroll strapped to his back and a waterskin. All in all, he travels light.
Armaments: - Mosin Nagant 91/30 with a homemade sling from braided French parachutist scarves. The rifle is well-worn, but kept in very good shape.
- A locally-made machete with a wooden handle and wooden sheath. Wickedly curved and his is well worn.
Specialization: Local Guide/Viet Cong
Personality: Đình spent some quiet years after Dien Bien Phu and the partition farming pigs and raising kids with his wife, but now he’s getting older. He moans and groans about creaking joints, but he’s mostly just putting on. It’s true, he’s not 22 anymore. All the same, he’s a lifelong nationalist and thinks that Ho Chi Minh has always stood up for his people. Ngo Dinh Diem is a northen catholic Mandarin and a suckup to the French. If he’s going to fight for one side or the other, at least he can relate to Ho Chi Minh’s ambitions. In his youth, he fought for fiery passion. Now he’s putting himself out there because he’s old—his sons are adults. His daughters are married. His wife is taken care of. He’d rather be the one out there taking the risks than his sons. They know how to shoot, but they’re too damned impetuous.
Owing to his experience in two previous guerrilla wars, Đình understands patience. He feels a bit of paternal feeling towards these young men coming down, and is therefore patient with their eagerness to fight; they’ll see what it’s all about soon enough.
History: Đình was born in Kontum, grew up there, and learned to fight the Japanese there, when he was a young man, in his 20’s. The Japanese were not very welcome, they knew what the Japanese were doing to the Chinese in the North and they quickly demonstrated that they learned a little too much from the long noses; they looked down on the Vietnamese people and sought merely to supplant the long noses as imperialist masters. So he fought them, and learned the hard way. The Japanese were brutal and effective jungle fighters, but they had some help. The Americans, in those days, sent help. The British armed them cautiously, perhaps fearing that victory would bring a new set of problems to grapple with.
They were right.
Before that, he was interested in resisting the French, but the real war got underway the day that the British came in after they kicked the Japanese out and said that the French were taking over again. That’s when Ho Chi Minh decided to start their war against the colonialists and Đình was fighting among the Viet Minh. During la guerre en Indochine, he worked with mules to help smuggle equipment around, laid booby traps and fought the French in that vicious war. He even helped haul Vo Nguyen Giap’s artillery into place around Dien Bien Phu, helped load the artillery that fired down on the paratroopers and joined in the fighting when the time came. He was wounded in the fighting.
After that, he settled back home, slipping in carefully from the North as the partition happened. He maintained his allegiances, but he was quiet. He got to know his kids, he got to have a few years of peace while Ngo Dinh Diem decided to flout the accords that the Viet Minh had fought for. When word came down through friends and the couriers that he had some orders and they were starting up the war again, he told his eldest that the farm was now his and got his rifle. He and some others started up the war in the hills again, slowly working to build themselves to fight the next bunch. Older and wiser, he also knew that his family didn’t need him to provide anymore, and he knew he could be of use.
Oh, sure, he heard the Americans were on the side of Diem now. But there was always someone to fight, and they were always bigger and more powerful than they were. Still, there they still were, like water passing by a rock.
