DALAT

Dalat

Another story from my summer of journalism in Southeast Asia, 1968. My friend and I won a small grant "to visit and study an undeveloped country." So we decided that Vietnam, then at the height of the war that was to kill 4 million people - give or take - was certainly undeveloped. We applied and won the grant, and away we went, to spend the summer between our junior and senior years at Colorado College. We were both veterans, Jim of the Navy, and I of the Marine Corps. That summer of '68 I also hitchhiked up the Mekong river, from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to Vientiane, Laos. (See my chapter "Spook-Hunting in Laos," in RATTLESNAKE DREAMS.

     In the story below, Jim and I have dinner with a CIA officer at his very nice rented house in Dalat.

     Jim Martin and I got together in Dalat, a lovely French colonial town in the highlands that was still clean and mostly intact, having had its first taste of the actual shooting war during the recent Tet offensive. Dalat was a favorite place for journalists, and for the few military personnel who could wrangle a few days there, to go and rest up from the war. (I should say that this applied both to the journalists who actually went out to see the bloody business for themselves, and to those Saigon-bound briefing rats who were feeling a little, but not too, adventurous.) The only piece I was able to publish in a major newspaper was one I'd put together from interviews with students and faculty at the university in Dalat. It ran in the Denver Post. Essentially, it said that the students didn't want war or communism, didn't want to have to choose between the two, and really just wanted the problem to go away and leave them to the pleasures of life on the primly landscaped rolling hills of the campus.
     Jim had run into an American civilian who worked in Dalat. The man, a slightly overweight bureaucratic type in his mid40's, invited us to dinner one evening. The place he'd rented, a relic of quieter times, was a two or three story white stucco house with lots of windows that opened onto well tended gardens and remained open most of the time to let the highland breeze cool the interior of the house. Awnings above windows on the sunny side protected the interior from direct sun, without blocking the view from within of the gardens and the clean, winding street.

     Jim and I were both just back from the boonies. Jim had been out on a night patrol with U.S. Special Forces people when they had walked into a serious VC ambush, and it had been a squeaker for him. I'd been up north in I Corps with the Marines, and had come under fire once with them. We were both ready for a taste of civilization.
     This was more than we'd expected. We crossed a cool, immaculate tile floor and were invited into the dining room where we sat at a long table with a clean white tablecloth, neatly and correctly set with china plates, silverware, and matching water and wine glasses at each of the three settings.
     It wasn't really opulent. It was just damn nice. Which, in a country where war was present always and everywhere, amounted to a certain opulence after all. We sat and drank decent red wine and talked about the war. A MacDowell piano concerto was playing on the stereo.
     Our conversation was pretty subdued, especially as compared with some of the heated interchanges we'd heard, and been involved in, in rougher surroundings with rougher men. It was as if the genteel setting itself affected the way we talked, if not the way we thought, about the war, changing it from a life and death struggle to a topic of intellectual interest. After all, we were dining. A couple of days earlier, both Jim and I, in separate circumstances, would have said that we were “eatin' our chow.”

     Dinner was served in several courses, each on a clean china plate, by the quiet, friendly Vietnamese woman who cooked and kept house for our host. One of us asked - delicately, of course - just what it was that our host did in Dalat? Oh... he worked for the government. Doing what? Oh... this and that. Administrative stuff. You know.
     Sure we did. Our host's knowing grin, quick upward roll of the eyes, and slight shrug were, we'd been around long enough to recognize, a nonverbal code meaning, I'm not supposed to say because of security reasons, so I have to play this game and so do you but what does it matter because we're all wise to it anyway.
     In other words, he was CIA.
   We sat over coffee after dinner, and all agreed that these neocolonial niceties had a certain appeal. That is, if one is on the receiving end.  
     After coffee we took brandy snifters in hand as our host showed us the rest of the house. Upstairs, he pointed out marks on two walls left by a couple of stray shots that had come in through the window when the VC had entered Dalat during Tet a few months earlier. He seemed pleased to have evidence that he was indeed involved in the war, involved enough to justify his comfortable role in it. He also seemed pleased that his involvement with the shooting part of the war had been limited to that one incident.

   This morning, a pre-dawn hour. With my wife asleep in my arms, I had cause to remember a class in Chinese language I audited at Cabrillo College, in Santa Cruz, California in the 1970s. The instructor was telling us about the written language. It consists of characters which are, or began as, pictures. He said that the original characters - the building blocks of the language - were 4,000 years old.

   So some combination of memory and imagination flipped my homemade kaleidoscope: ancient cave paintings in France; now come the pyramids of Egypt with thousands of slave laborers first carving massive perfect blocks of granite, hauling them overland by hand, forcing them up the pyramids' walls also by hand, levers and rollers, worked to their nameless deaths; the Bamiyan Buddhas carved into the stone of a cliff in Afghanistan in 6th century, then dynamited by the Taliban in 2001...
   As my selective memory/imagination flipped the pictures, trying to build a moving picture of human history - here comes the awful 20th century, the infantry vs machine gun slaughter fields of WWI, the endless columns of refugees, the Nazi death camps of WWII, through all history's mindless carnage the suffering of civilians... I remembered our Chinese teacher, here's the figure for "woman," and the teacher chalks it on the board, it's a picture he says, originally a drawing of a woman... and she's not stirring a pot of food, she is not hauling water, - this woman, drawn 4,000 years ago to represent womankind, is not doing history's heavy lifting, as women always have.
   She is dancing.