In spite of living in Saigon, remote lands always attract me. In recent years, I have become aware of the slender frontier between gains and losses, between career success and the stability of normal life values, I decide to overcome ties of ‘small profits’ and travel to those lands.

In my travels, I have seen flowers with simple and pastoral beauty and youth volunteer women with sad life stories.One of these women is Vo Thi Phuc, former youth volunteer, who was thought by people to have passed away in the war against the US.

Thanks to the relations section of the Youth Volunteer Force on 1C Street, I knew that Phuc was living at Ho Thung Hamlet, Dong Hai Commune, Duyen Hai District, Tra Vinh Province.1C Street was established in 1966 to transfer arms from the southeast of Vietnam to Ca Mau Province, the southern tip of the Mekong Delta.

I found the way to her house, a low-roofed building that lies in the sunny and windswept land of Tra Vinh. The motherless girl, Vo Thi Phuc, from Tay Yen Commune, An Bien District, Kien Giang Province participated in the 1C Youth Volunteer Force.

In a violent raid in Nam Thai Son indigenous forest, Hon Dat District, Kien Giang Province, Phuc bravely saved her comrade under a hail of bullets and was injured.After her treatment, the leader of the Revolutionary Organization prepared documents for her to become a scout. In this new document, her name was changed to Tham.

Sometime after this, Phuc met Danh Van Trat, a Khmer youth volunteer. The Organization helped them to become married.When the war ended, she followed her husband to Ho Thung Hamlet. Life was hard because she had not only brought eight children but also suffered from a disease that made her lose her memory.

Her husband promised to take her back to her hometown but could not because of the hard work and poverty in which they lived. She was unaware that in her hometown, her family worshiped her as a martyr. For 40 years Vo Thi Phuc had been dead in the minds of her family and friends. They did not know that Phuc was still alive and had brought up eight children in Tra Vinh province.
 
I was very touched by her life story, I thought that perhaps I could help her by attracting the attention of benefactors by writing her story.Just a few months later, a house was built for Phuc’s family to show people’s gratitude. A benefactor also offered to pay to drill a well for cultivation.The day I came back Ho Thung to meet Phuc in her new house, I found that wild flowers in this coastal region had become more colorful.

During my travels, I have come across many stories of youth volunteer women who had passed away in the war but survived through the memories of their living comrades. When I am met by the sun and wind of the southern region, imposing central highlands and gloomy mountains of the northwest, I recognize that the brave women are incarnated in the beautiful wild flowers. I stop to take photographs of these flowers and wonder about their souls hidden in the wild flowers beside roads through the country that I pass.