A Small Dream for the Year 2000 was written 30 years ago (January 1995), and is now included in the anthology The Colors of April: Fiction on The Vietnam War’s Legacy 50 Years Later. This title will be released on March 25, 2025 on Amazon and bookstores.
The man, a farmer, was formerly an ARVN soldier. Twenty years had passed since his days in the military, and he was now a middle-aged person. Though not yet fifty, he had been made pallid, old and decrepit by a life of unrewarding hard labor. He had lost his left foot, ironically after his military service had terminated, when stepping on a mine right in his own rice field. One did not have to be a doctor to know that his body hosted various illnesses and diseases: malnutrition, chronic malaria, and anemia. Whatever energy and dignity he retained was revealed in his bright though rather sad eyes, eyes that always looked directly at those of the person he talked to. Today, he came to this field dispensary for another kind of complaint. It concerned a bluish-black lesion on his back which was not painful, but had been oozing an ichorous discharge for a long while. He had sought various treatments, but found no hope of a cure. First, he had been made to wait in a district's health service station where a communist doctor had eventually given him a few Western medicinal tablets; then a doctor of traditional medicine had treated him in turn with an herbal concoction and acupuncture. Despite all that, the disease refused to go away, even as he was steadily emaciating. Hearing that a group of healthcare workers from overseas had come to offer volunteer services, he decided to come to them at this dispensary and try his luck. With good fortune, he hoped, he might even be able to again meet the doctor he used to know – the chief surgeon of his Airborne Ranger Battalion in the past, who presently lived and worked in America. But it turned out that all the faces he saw were young and unfamiliar. Nonetheless, he showed them his back for examination. From the team of young doctors came an audible gasp of surprise. The heart of Toan, the team leader, seemed to miss a beat. Without the necessity of engaging in complicated diagnostic procedures, he immediately recognized a form of malignant melanoma, which certainly would have had metastases spread to other parts of the body. The disease, of course, could have been cured if discovered earlier. Unfortunately, this present case, being at an advanced stage, could not be treated even with the most elaborate and sophisticated medical technologies available in the US. It was not the patient, but the young doctor who expressed sadness: "You've come too late; this disease otherwise could have been treated successfully." Betraying no embarrassment, the soldier-turned-farmer patient looked directly at the young doctor, his eyes darkened with anger and sternness: "I've come too late, you say? It’s you doctors who have come late, whereas myself, like all my compatriots, have been here forever." Flatly refusing to wait for anything else from the group of unknown doctors, the man turned his back on them and walked out, limping along on his bamboo crutches, his eyes looking straight ahead, accepting his miserable lot with the same courage he had shown as a soldier in a time past.
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