SAMARITAN IN LOS ANGELES / CHINESE SOLDIERS /A6 AND WOLVES

Samaritan in Los Angeles

     At the beginning of Summer, 1970, I was hitchhiking through Los Angeles to drop in at Mike Taylor's wedding, then head for Mexico for a summer of reading John Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, then hitchhiking to as many of the locations mentioned in the book as I could get to. I wanted to learn as much about Zapata’s life as I could. I'd just finished my first year in graduate school, was startled to find I had a little money left over from my first year scholarship, and figured if I was really thrifty I could survive a summer in Mexico without working.

     It was rush hour and I was stranded on some little traffic island in the midst of what seemed like an intersection of all the freeways in California. I couldn't even see a way to cross a street without getting hit, and didn't know which street to cross if I could. 

     A pickup swerved out of traffic and bumped onto the curb. "Git in..." the driver yelled. I did. "... “fore we both git run over!" he said as he rammed the pickup back into traffic. He turned to me, grinning: "Are you as lost as I think you are?" I said I sure was. I told him where I was trying to go, and he drove me to a less frantic street and told me where to catch a ride. 

    I thanked him for bailing me out of a difficult situation, and for going out of his way to do it. I climbed down and retrieved my knapsack from the floorboard. As I bent to pick it up, I noticed the muzzle of a .22 rifle just sticking out from under the seat on the passenger side. I looked up at him, trying to formulate a question about what there was to hunt in urban Los Angeles. 

   "That's my niggergitter," he said, his smile as friendly as before. 

  I didn't know what to say. I'd just had my faith in humanity sent to both ends of the spectrum, in a couple of minutes, by the same man. 

     "Git many?" I asked. I actually wanted to know if he used the .22 to shoot at black people, but now I think it came out like we were two country boys talking about hunting cottontails.

     He shook his head, still grinning. "Nah." He drove off.

Chinese Soldiers

     Back at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1970, I got a job as teaching assistant in Political Philosophy for Professor Sheldon Wolin, a nationally known professor and writer whose best-known book was Politics and Vision. 

     During the winter quarter, Wolin had decided to include works by Asian writers, because the Vietnam war was still such a big factor in everyone's lives. Readings from the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung were on the list, in particular On Protracted War, Mao's treatise stressing the importance of the relationship between political and military factors in conducting revolutionary or anti-imperial war. 

     I had devoured much of that material - obsessively, as usual - along with People's War, People's Army, by Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who had commanded the forces which defeated first the French, then us Americans. As Wolin and I talked, he decided that, although he always lectured to the entire class and the job of teaching assistants like me was to lead discussion groups of a smaller number of students, in this case I should give the lecture to the class as a whole, because of the combination of my experiences in Vietnam, reading, and journalism in Southeast Asia.

     I re-immersed myself in the writings of Mao and Giap, even going back to Sun Tzu's thousands-of-years-old classic, The Art of War. When the time for my lecture came, I think I was too overwrought to do as good a job as I might have. What I tried to say was that Mao and Giap had invented a new calculus, which performed a new kind of summation of historical factors to make the answer come out in their favor. I drew on the blackboard a rough outline of the map of China, then put in symbols to represent the massive buildup of Japanese military power there during the 1930's. The map showed that the Japanese Navy controlled the coastal waters of China, and had strong garrisons guarding major port cities, rail lines, highways, etcetera. The Chinese fighters for independence, which at that time - the buildup to WWII - included both Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Nationalists), had a tiny fraction of the weapons the Japanese possessed. 

     But, in spite of Mao's famous saying that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he taught that guns weren't the whole story. With the proper political organization, political will, and military strategy and tactics, China's huge population could overcome the Japanese occupation. Since they didn't have enough weapons but had so many people, they'd use people to get the weapons. Attacks would be planned on isolated Japanese outposts, with all the weapons the Chinese could gather in the hands of the leading attackers, who would overwhelm a small number of well-armed Japanese and escape to fight again, next time with more weapons.

     I used, as an example, Gunny Rogers' tales in boot camp of waves of attacking Chinese soldiers being slaughtered by U.S. Marines' machine guns at the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, noting that although the Chinese took huge losses, they drove Allied forces back south of the 38th parallel.

     I don't know what effect my lecture had on the class. But soon after I gave it, I had this dream:

      Dream: A6 and Wolves

I am sitting at the top of a mountain of wolves. Its surface writhes as they attack me. Though they are so numerous as to form a moving mass that stretches down the hill as far as I can see, I do not experience them as a mass, but rather as an infinity of giant individual wolves, each of which is making a heroic, fiercely intentional effort to kill me. I see each wolf with perfect clarity. They are all identical. They are bigger than any wild or domestic canine, the size of a horse colt too tall to walk under its mother's belly. And all are of that perfect obsidian blackness that absorbs most light yet throws off highlights like electrical sparks. Their heads are the size of a bear's head. Their jaws are all open wide enough to take my head inside, which is what they are trying to do. Their teeth are pure white, and throw off glints of light like the highlights thrown off by their churning obsidian bodies. Their fangs are the size of my fingers. Their eyes and tongues and the tissue in their open mouths are crimson, like arterial blood. I am firing a machine gun at the wolves. It's a U.S. model A6 .30 caliber, aircooled, tripod mounted weapon with a pistol grip, the kind used in the Korean War by people like Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers, one of my drill instructors at boot camp. It is also the same machine gun I'd used as a pillow in the hut in the jungle in Laos, that summer of 1968. The hill itself, and the way it's covered by waves of wolves attacking me, also spring from the pictures my imagination painted when Gunny Rogers told about human wave attacks against Marine positions by Chinese soldiers at the Chosin reservoir, and the slaughter that ensued. I am killing the wolves like those Marines killed the Chinese. They are piling up in front of the gun. Each time I kill a wolf, it drops, snarling, on the pile of its dead brothers. Before I have time to recover, a new lead attacker takes its place, climbing the pile of dead and writhing wolves with that swift, murderous intentionality I once saw in the movement of the legs of a pit bull terrier that was chasing me as I passed a farmstead on a bicycle. I am allowed to waste no instant. Each wolf moves so that the death of his brother shields his approach, and he is springing for me even as I swing the gun. No wolf dies until I see his wild red eyes up close, until I feel the shock of his great teeth snapping shut barely in front of my face, until I look into the cavernous red maw, open now to take my face inside it, until I feel his hot breath, until I see the bullets slam into his throat and mouth and skull, just in front of the gun's muzzle. So it goes, into the night, wolf after attacking wolf, each attack a new mortal emergency, made more urgent by requirements to change ammunition belts and to unscrew and replace overheated barrels with my bare hands, with never a moment to make a slip, to waste an instant, or to call for help; and no help to call for.

     I awoke from the dream, dressed, rode my bicycle to campus, and told Professor Wolin that I would be leaving at the end of the quarter. The evening before the dream, I'd had no inkling that I would be leaving graduate school. The dream had blasted me bodily out of the life I had known, the academic future I had planned.

     I lived in a tiny apartment in San Francisco for a month, got rid of everything I owned except what I could carry in a backpack and two small boxes of books I stored with my friend Peter Balcziunas, and hitchhiked to Oregon.