When Heaven and Earth Changed Places #3

Le Ly Hayslip was once a hero in her childhood. The Viet Cong, a group of fighters who were fighting agianst the Republicans who belonged to the north, had adopted Ky La, Hayslip's city as a center for their operations in that area. Ky La had many skirmishes and the people of Ky La were told that if they told the Republicans any secrets they would kill them and all of the people they loved. Already in the book, many people had been killed execution-style for associating with them or just be seeming suspicious. At one point, Hayslip had just come back from a notoriously dangerous prison very fast, and her family was under house-arrest because the Viet Cong thought they were suspicious. The act of seperating them from the rest of the village like that just gave them more reason to be suspicious because since they weren't seen with the obviously guilty villagers, the Republicans treated them better and avoided harming their house. After the house-arrest was lifted, Hayslip did another thing to cause the Viet Cong to suspect her. As she was walking to the field to farm, she accidentaly lead Republican soldiers to a place where two Viet Cong members were hiding, which ended with the two Viet Cong dead and her facing absolute death. After some time, though, she looks back on why she didn't even think of "tattling". She says that "Back then, we didn't even know anything about the world going on beyond our small area, Saigon seemed like a world away to us, never mind America (151)." The people in her village didn't know much else besides farming and the only reason they sided with the Viet Cong was because they had practically brainwashed them with propaganda telling them they were doing something good, so if she had told anybody, she wouldn't have done it because she thought it was "right". What she was doing at that time wasn't something she needed to go against, no matter how bad the treatment became.