Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
A Japanese Army
Cap
“A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”
-Kipling
Long, long ago in a land far, far away I met a little boy
who was wearing a Japanese army cap. Our boats were upriver along the Cambodian
border on routine patrol and to land Sgt. Thuey and me in a little village for an
hour or two of propaganda and medical care.
Among the children I saw that little boy proudly wearing
an old army cap left from the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China. It was
a practical cap made of cotton, with a neck flap as further protection from the
sun and mosquitoes.
I offered the kid an American dollar for that little bit
of history, but he grinned and shook his head.
I offered him five dollars, but again he grinned and
shook his head.
Finally I offered him twenty dollars for the cap, and it
was still no deal. The cap was important to the little fellow, and I imagine
there was a family story about it worth more than money from yet another transient
foreign power.
Numerous small states were absorbed into the French
empire in the 19th century and ruled as French Indo-China until 1954
[What Was French Indochina? (thoughtco.com)]. Japan
occupied the area during the Second World War II and, like France, exploited
the land and its people for its natural resources, food production, and manufacturing
capacity.
The situation during the war was always complicated, and
grew worse at the end, with some Japanese soldiers joining the Viet-Minh and
others working with the British Army (mostly Indian) in Saigon, numerous
nationalist groups, Free French, Vichy French, die-hard imperial Japanese,
Chinese, Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, and some Americans, most everyone fighting everyone
else. On one occasion American planes shot down three British bombers, claiming
to have mistaken them for Japanese. Every power group made bad decisions, and
thousands, mostly Vietnamese civilians, died in the fighting, from massacres
and mass executions by Japanese, French, and Communist authorities, and from
starvation.
Communist China invaded Viet-Nam in 1979 and was quickly
defeated with great loss of men and weapons. I imagine that somewhere around
Cao Bang in the north a little kid is wearing a Chinese army cap and telling
stories about how his grandfather took it from a dead or captured soldier.
Which leads us back to the kid wearing a Japanese army
cap in 1970, and the question of whatever happened to the young Japanese soldier,
probably little more than a kid himself, who was issued that cap as part of his
tropical service kit for duty in Indo-China. Was he killed in the war, or did
he finally get home to his mom and dad?
I don’t think I lost a cap, but maybe I did, and some
little kid even now is wearing it while playing with the other kids, telling
them how his grandfather snatched it from a running dog imperialist lackey.
-30-
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