DREAM: DANCE OF THE ARROWS

Dream: Dance of the Arrows

I'm standing alone in the center of a wide, barren plain that stretches to the horizon in every direction. The sky is clear, and sits like a hemispheric blue cap over the plain. I look at the horizon, follow it around. It is featureless... but wait: there is a solitary figure, a speck on the horizon. That figure and I are the only visual interruptions of the universe bounded by earth and sky. I'm invigorated by the feeling of spaciousness, but recognize that I must be watchful. Sure enough: the figure on the horizon is an archer. He draws a powerful bow. Alarm, my warrior's antennae say. The archer shoots an arrow into the sky. The arrow's trajectory says that it is perfectly aimed at me. The arrow disappears from sight, but I must track its flight. I do so by moving my head as though my initial observations had actually programmed the arrow's trajectory into my nervous system. I track the arrow forward, from the point where it disappears in the sky until it reappears, a deadly dot in the blue, now on its way down to kill me. I jump around. I try to dodge it. But it never wavers: no matter how I move, I feel the tingle of its anticipated penetration just below my navel. The arrow swoops toward me, visually accelerating in the way I've seen machine-gun tracers appear to speed up as they come nearer, after having seemed to be moving quite slowly toward me as I observed them from a distance; or the way the ground swoops up toward a parachutist during the last seconds of fall. Just before the arrow hits me, I make one final, quick sidestep. The arrow's feathers brush my belly; it thunks into the earth. Alarm. I look up. Comes another. Again I am able to dodge it only at the last instant. Again the feathers brush my abdomen. Again the arrow stabs the ground at my feet. There is an infinite succession of them. I have figured out that the arrows, while seeming to remain perfectly aimed at my center, never waver in flight, no matter how I jump and dodge. This, I learn, is because the arrow simply knows where I will be when it arrives three and a half feet off the ground, and is aimed there. So my jumping about as the arrow descends is irrelevant. I learn that, with each shot, I am given one, and only one, chance to save my life. This is what Japanese martial artists call suki, or "opening": that tiny window in time - often far less than a second - when an opponent's attention is interrupted or distracted, when only an instinctive, forceful, and unhesitatingly intentional motion will be quick enough and sure enough to enter the opening. So I must watch each arrow as it leaps out of the sky to kill me, and I must wait. I must let it come. As the arrows continue to come and I tire from exertion and fear, I must force myself to relax so that in dodging one arrow I don't overexert and fail to recover in time for the next. Each time, I must wait, closing out the fear that tries like a pack of howling dogs to crowd my mind, to panic me. I must wait until the steel of the broadhead is about to puncture my belly. Then I must perfectly - without protest, without excuses, without appeal to fairness or justice, without asking for help -execute the one quick movement I'm allowed for dodging that arrow. Then I must forget that arrow, allowing no thought of relief or victory or pride in accomplishment, and be ready for the next. The arrows come in a perfect rhythm. So my sidesteps adopt the same rhythm, thereby becoming, of necessity, a dance. I'm never released from the mortal urgency of the situation, but it begins to strike me as funny. At the end of the dream, I'm still dodging the arrows, which never relent in accuracy or intention. But I'm laughing, as at something in a Chaplin movie, funny but urgent, as I dance my dance of survival.

A MANCHILD OF AN TAN

An Tan

     An Tan was the nearest village to our base at Chu Lai. Now and then a junior officer would organize an afternoon liberty detail, and we'd round up whoever wasn't on duty, jump in a six-by, and head for the ville. It wasn't that great, just a little Vietnamese town with hot dusty streets - or muddy, during the monsoon season. But, except for five days of R&R which each of us got once during his 13 month tour, this was about all we had to cut the drudgery of life in the compound, and the nights of sentry duty in our machine gun bunkers on the perimeter which alternated between sheer drudgery and moments of surreal terror.

     Word had come down: don't even think about trying anything with the women. The village mayor was unusually strict about prostitution, and for some reason, he'd been able to make it stick. But at least we could buy Cokes and "33" beer, though we were pretty leery of them because we'd heard rumors of VC putting broken glass in drinks sold to GI's. We'd stand around filtering Coke and beer through our teeth, hoping to catch any broken glass in our lips instead of our throats. Sometimes they even had ice. 

     There was a spectrum of what we wanted when we visited a village. First, of course, we wanted to get laid. Since that couldn't happen in An Tan, we'd move down the list: something to drink besides warm, heavily chlorinated water; something to eat besides B ration chow; someone to talk to: human contact outside of You got midwatch in the bunker; You got DASC 0800 to noon. 

     I met this kid on one of our trips into An Tan. His mother, who looked ancient but was probably in her thirties, had a little kiosk on the side of a dirt street where she had a piece of plastic stretched over bamboo poles for shade, and sold sodas and beer and mysteriously-wrapped things to eat that most of us never touched. I was standing in the shade swigging a beer when this little guy wandered over and looked up at me.

     The kid was a mess. One eye was radically crossed. He had open sores on his face and body that the flies wouldn't leave alone, and his hair, though cut short, was patchy like that of a dog with mange. His arms and legs were skinny, and his belly was beginning to show that swelling which comes with malnutrition. 

     His mother introduced him to me proudly: "Ong," she said, pointing at him. Actually, the sound was a cross between "ong" and "om". "Hello, Ong," I said, and pointed to my chest. "Dean. My name...Dean." That was the extent of our verbal communication, except that I had learned Vietnamese numbers well enough to bargain with his mother and the other merchants. I found out later that Ong wasn't his name; it was Vietnamese for "man" or "male". His mother had been telling me, with pride, that her child, the one who had taken a liking to me, was a boy. So I spent those liberty afternoons walking around with this kid saying, "C'mon, Manchild," thinking I was calling him by name.

     That first time we met, he took some packet of food from his mother's little store of stuff and approached me with it and a questioning look. We were all accustomed to being inundated by pushy kids and had built up defenses against them. But this little guy was actually very shy, and I could tell he was hungry. I bought it for him. His mother seemed grateful. 

     I had my guard up, twice: once against the hidden grenade or satchel charge which VC had been known to strap to children (or so we were told) who would then walk into a group of GI's and detonate; once against forming an attachment that could only end in separation. 

     The next time we went to An Tan I went over to Ong's mother's kiosk and gave him and her some cans of C ration food I'd stuffed in my pockets. Like a lot of Americans, I would gather up cans of Ham and Lima Beans, or "Ham 'n' Slimeys," bartering or making points with the Vietnamese. In my four years of service I think I met only one American who would actually eat Ham 'n' Slimeys if he didn't absolutely have to. It was the thick layer of congealed grease that greeted you when you opened the can that revolted us. But they seemed popular with the Vietnamese, most of whom were so poor that meat in any form was a luxury.   

     After that, Ong would always know when our truck had come to the village and would run up to it and greet me and grab my hand and drag me back to his mother's stall. Then he began to take me through other streets in the village. At first I thought he was proud of the village, and was showing it off to me. And sometimes I thought that he was proud of me, and was showing me off to the people of the town. 

     One afternoon he took me by the hand and led me away from the center of the village and down some narrow back streets where there were no GI's or even any businesses that catered to us. We got odd looks from people there; I wasn't sure if it was hostility or just surprise. I disengaged my left hand from Ong's and put his hand on the flap of the big cargo pocket on my left trouser leg so he could still feel like he was holding onto me. I swung my rifle around in front of me from where it had been hanging under my right arm by its sling, and cupped its forearm with my left hand. I felt safer now.

     So did Ong. I'd come to realize that the other kids in the village picked on him because of his odd eye and his weakness and who knows what else, and that there were parts of An Tan where he never went, except when I was with him. I could sense a change in him, a hint of gloating, as we passed a group of tough looking boys who glowered at him as he passed with his personal Marine bodyguard.

     Word came down that An Tan would soon be put off limits for liberty. VC activity, or some such. Anyway, we would have one more visit. We were told that if we'd made any acquaintances there, this would be our last chance to say goodbye. I took in some extra food this time, and spent more money than usual at Ong's mother's stall. When the Lieutenant herded us to the six-by to head back to the base, Ong followed me. I knelt down and looked into his one good eye. How do you say goodbye to someone whose language you don't speak at all?

     I just said it the best I could, in English and with my hands: Goodbye, take care of yourself, I won't be seeing you anymore. I climbed over the tailgate as the truck took off.

     I looked back. The truck raised the usual thick cloud of red dust above the street. There was Ong in the dust, running after us. The truck got a slow start out of town because of its low gearing and because there were people in the way. Ong was able to keep up, staying close behind for a long time. We could see his face through the dust. He was crying, screaming, holding his arms up in the air as he ran, reaching for me, pleading for me to pick him up and take him with me. He'd understood goodbye.

Dream: Guts

Dream: Guts

I'm driving on a freeway. There is an awful wreck: explosion of impact, screech of rubber, accordioning collapse of metal, shattering of glass. I stop, get out, run over. I'm inside the vehicle, a smoking hell. The driver is a black man. He is lying on his back, his belly ripped open, his intestines spread out over him and spilling into the wreckage. I see colors in his guts: yellow fatty tissue, transparent and translucent shiny membranes, blue veins, red arterial blood, brown shit. His eyes. He says nothing, but his eyes implore: Please help me. He begs me with his eyes to put his guts back in his body. I try, putting one hand on the guts still in his body, trying to keep them there, reaching with my other hand for the guts that have spilled farthest from him, trying to bring them back into his body. I try again and again. Every time I try, they spill out of my hands. He is begging me to help him, but I can't.