ZEN WARRIOR BASS PLAYER

Zen Warrior Bass Player

     Annie and I were out one night in Capitola, a little beach town near where we lived. We were walking past a small Victorian house when we heard music coming from inside. It had been made into a coffeehouse, and a jazz combo was playing. We went in.

     The space was tiny. There were only three or four tables, with a few extra chairs against the walls. A spinet piano was wedged into one corner. A drummer with a small trap set and an acoustic bass player were crowded close to the piano.

     They were pretty good, and we liked being that close to the musicians. Everyone in the room was listening, keeping voices low, except for one man who obviously had quite a bit of alcohol aboard. He kept talking in a voice loud enough to interfere, in that small space, with hearing the music. Pointed glances bounced right off him. Someone tried to shush him, at which point he made a belligerent retort, and carried on all the louder. 

     Finally the bass fiddle player, a stocky, balding, kindly looking man in his fifties who reminded me of Claude, the barber who had helped me pull the old woman from the canal in Klamath Falls when I was a kid, stopped playing and just looked at the noisemaker. The other two musicians stopped playing. The bass player, with as much civility as he could muster, posed a general question to everyone in the room: Did we want to hear the music? Everyone nodded, saying Yes (some emphatically), except the noisy one. The bass player looked at him, asking him basically How about it, can you go along with the majority?

     The noisemaker took all this as a challenge. He bawled out that they could go ahead and play their fucking music if they wanted to, and he would go ahead and talk if he wanted to. It was a fucking free country. Unless, of course, the bass player wanted to try and shut him up.

     The bass player shrugged, with a combination of resignation and disgust, and said, Well then, would you like to step outside? We were all startled. The loudmouth was big, obviously a violent type, and a good twenty years younger than the musician. 

     He leaped from his chair. You bet, he said. He stepped to the door. The bass player carefully laid aside his instrument, stood up, met him there. The bass player opened the door, bowed in mock chivalry. "After you," he said. We were all agape. He was actually going through with it. 

     The loudmouth puffed up even further and stomped out the door. The bass player calmly closed the door behind the other man, locked it, walked back to his chair, and picked up his fiddle. We all cheered and clapped. The man outside banged on the door and rattled the knob. But he could see through the door's glass the reaction of all of us. Realizing he'd been beaten, he cursed his way down the steps.

SAIGON 1968: AMERICAN COP, VIETNAMESE KIDS

Saigon 

1. LA Cop

     Some things from that summer are a continuum in my memory: I recall traveling to the place, who was there, where I went next. Other things are isolated, like one of those oldfashioned photographic portraits with just a face in an oval: no background, no past, no intimations of the future. 

     This story is like that. Somewhere in a hallway of MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) Headquarters in Saigon, I was talking to a man, a stocky middleaged American. He wore civilian clothes and a sidearm. He was telling me that he was a cop; he'd been walking a beat in Los Angeles when opportunities opened up for American policemen to go to Saigon and work as advisors to the police there. 

     I told the man I was a journalist. He gave me this strange look, from deep within himself, then said something like, "...huh. You want a story...." and hinted that he knew one that would curl my hair. I said I was all ears. He said he couldn't really tell it, that it was secret. But he wanted to tell it, I knew by the way he stayed rooted where he stood, the way he quickly and repeatedly engaged and disengaged my eyes with his. I said we could go somewhere and talk. I said I could keep his name out of it. He said he couldn't do it. But he wouldn't move to leave, and I wouldn't either, so we both just stood there. I leaned against the wall. Casual. I gave little prompts: "So, police work?" That kind of thing. He would shift his weight, start to turn away, then turn back and say one more thing. This went on for a while. Police work, well, yeah. They would go out at night. They would go to villages, towns. Just a few men. They had a list. Suspected VC. Big shots. Sometimes names get added to the list. He paused, shifted, spoke to me with his eyes, pleading with me to understand what he was saying but not saying: Lotta names get crossed off the list. 

                     

2: Kids

     I was walking alone in Saigon, in the outskirts of the city where refugees had put together shanties from the heavy cardboard sleeves that bound cases of C rations, wood from ammunition crates, and other detritus of war. It was hot. No. It was hot: the sun seemed a huge cymbal from the devil's own band, clanging out waves of molten brass that all but banished blue from the sky. The sun, and foot and vehicular traffic, had pulverized the dust of the street into the finest powder, which, with the passing of any foot or wheel or furnace-breathed breeze, rose in gritty ubiquitous clouds and hurried to stick itself to anything that claimed kinship with moisture: skin, eyes, teeth. No young men were present. (In Vietnam, it seemed you were mostly in places where there were no young men, or only young men.) The eyes of women caught just enough sunlight to reflect it from the shanties' dark interiors. Children owned the streets.

     I came upon a little girl standing alone in a wide dusty street. She wore filthy bib overalls, and a plastic bracelet on her left wrist. Snot was running from her nose; tears from her eyes. She was holding Black Label beer cans to her ears with both hands, in the way kids all over the world will hold sea shells to their ears, listening to the ocean. She held the pose as I photographed her; the picture has been published several times.

     I was walking down a very wide street, if that is what we should call a flat dusty strip bounded by refugee shacks. Children rushed out from within, between, behind the shacks in twos, threes, hordes. They surrounded me, shouting in shrill voices in the language they'd learned from GI's: "Hey, you! Fuck you! You give me money!" Small hands curled into claws worthy of predatory birds and tore at my wrist watch, skin, clothes. My notebook was yanked from my hip pocket. It was important. I wheeled and bent over to retrieve it. Business cards of journalism contacts fell from my shirt pocket; a child's hand darted in and plucked my pen from the same pocket. They worked together like coyotes, front and back. 

     Later that day, a friend and I caught an Air Viet Nam Boeing 727 to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. That night, I dropped into an exhausted sleep in my bed in the Hotel Mondial, and had a nightmare about the Vietnamese children. Like a two part television special, it began with a recap of the day's events, then continued beyond what had happened that afternoon.

Dream: Vietnamese Children 

I'm walking down the Saigon street. A few of the children are running up and tugging at my hands and clothes; then one stops squarely in front of me on the sidewalk and cups his hands and sticks them in my face and says, "You! Fuck you! You give me money!" I say no but they won't step aside so I just keep moving through them. There are so many now that I am wading as in hipdeep surf, and there is more tugging and I push them away and yell "didi!" and they yell back at me with their shrill angry voices and more of them come and they get closer and finally one of them snatches the Vietnamese phrase book from my back pocket. I turn quickly and it falls to the ground. The kid backs up. I bend over to pick it up and a notebook and a pen fall out of my shirt pocket and some loose papers begin to scatter as the wind flips the pages of the notebook. I reach for them quickly but the children are all over me grabbing for my things. A kid behind me has my wallet almost out of my back pocket and I drop everything else and turn to grab him and, turning, I fall. I'm on my back now in the deep dust of the street, clutching the wallet to my gut with both hands. Smaller, clawed hands with terrible strength wrench it from me and the sky is lost in a cascade of leering children's faces. Sticks and rocks come at my face from among those smaller faces and the sticks get bigger and the faces blur together and I see nothing else and feel only the now painless thudding about my head and the dust in my lungs, and the children's shouts fade into a cacophony of shrieking laughter and that stops suddenly and there is only the thudding and then the barking of a dog out in the darkness. 

TELL THE MEN (POEM)

Tell the Men              

                                                                 

                                                                   ©2012 Dean Metcalf

I.   I am the dream commander.

All around me

along the smoky runway

men fall, strafed

spinning

                bloody

               down.

I scream, but

they will not believe:

our own

     top‑secret

     quiet‑rotor

     radar‑guided

     night‑vision

     heat‑seeking

     dream‑metal dragonflies

have returned

to kill us.

II.  "But they're ours!" men scream

as they stand, are hit, and fall

     spinningbloodydown.

Running, my body floats above the runway

among thumb‑size neon‑red tracers

borne upon their own wind: puffs of it

pass between my ribs.

III. In this dream, only I know:

words

are weapons.

All around me, men see,

trying not to see.

Men fail to aim their words

at the real enemy.

Men drop their books

or read absently

standing in the open

as if life were not dangerous.

IV.  Sergeant!

Work your way along the line.

Tell the men:

Fill sandbags with words.

Build a parapet to fight behind.

If they are the right words

you live.

Tell every man:

Dip each fifth word

in your own blood,

so your shots will glow red:

tracers to find your targets

in the dark.

Tell every man to sharpen one word.

Say, You must choose:

"yes" or "no."

Snap it onto your rifle,

for when this gets down to bayonets.

Tell all the men:

It's not the men of darker skin

who broadcast our blood upon the land

as a poor shopkeeper tosses water

from a red plastic pail

to settle dust on an unpaved street.

Tell the men:

We toss our own blood in the dust

where crimson arterial spurts of it

roll into powdery skins

like water in flour

no longer recognizable as blood

it could be any dark liquid:

it could be used crankcase oil.

Tell them:

We live and die

     by what we think

     by what we write

     by what we say

     by what we do.

Tell the men:

     Get your words.

     Get in the trenches.

     Here they come.

                                                               Dean Metcalf

                                                               P.O. Box 548

                                                               Joseph OR 97846

                                                             3dmetcalf@gmail.com

This poem was first published several years ago in the online journal RIVEN, edited by Michael Spring. Tell the Men© 2012 Dean Metcalf

DA NANG

      Danang

     I loaded my rifle, seabag and 782 gear (a Marine's pack, web gear, canteens, etc.; so called for the number of the receipt form we signed when it was issued to us) aboard the truck that would take me to the airstrip at Chu Lai, where I'd catch a C123 or C130 to Danang, then another plane to Okinawa, then another plane back to The World. The guys who weren't on duty over at the DASC came out to see me off. They were envious, but they were also glad for me. They asked me to study for them, and of course to get laid for them. I promised to do my best. 

     The strongest thing they said to me came when somebody mentioned student antiwar demonstrations back in the States. They said to tell those fucking jerkoff wimps just what the war was about, on behalf of the guys who were fighting it. Everyone present, including me, loudly agreed that I should do that. 

     But there was another moment. It was more private, in fact intensely private. Along with the awareness that had come as I lowered my rifle just before firing on the Vietnamese man on the beach at Ky Hoa, and the shift in awareness that had come over me when the transparent veil dropped in front of my eyes as I was guarding the women and children and old man at the well in Tho An, this slap of suddenly shifting awareness that entered my skull as I climbed aboard that truck were among the experiences that I brought home from Vietnam that have most determined the course of my life during the forty-odd years since then.

     I was angry. I was angry about losing the young Marine when his buddy told me “You’re too late” getting the medevac to them. I was angry about our loss of those Recon boys who’d fought all night, hand to hand, on Howard’s Hill, as I sat in a relatively safe place and tried to send them help. I was angry about being too hot and too cold and too wet and too hungry for too long, angry about being terrified too many nights, and about having my body invaded by ants and mosquitos and rats and snakes and centipedes like horror-movie monsters. I was angry about the loss and the guilt. I was angry about having kept the faith with people who did not keep it with me. With us. 

     So what is still with me now, at this moment in late June, 2008, in my 12’x16’ log cabin three miles outside Joseph, Oregon, is the promise I made to myself as I climbed over that tailgate to begin my trip home. That promise was to study and study whatever it was I had to study until I understood the causes of the misery I had been a part of. And then I would fix it.

     Yup, that’s the promise I made to myself. This book is the result, whatever that’s worth. Of course, the problem isn’t fixed. If anything, it’s worse. No wonder I’m so angry. That’s a lot to carry, and a long time to carry it.

     At the staging area in Danang, where Marines who had finished our tours were being processed out of the country, I got a cot in a 12-man tent, and turned in my rifle and 782 gear. I suddenly felt naked, but tried to reassure myself that I was going where I wouldn't need a weapon. 

     All this, and waiting for the scheduled bird to Okinawa, took a few days. We sat around the tent and talked about what we'd do back in The World. Women, cars, jobs, school. Student demonstrations came up again. Others in the tent had heard more about them than I had. One guy said he'd heard about a vet who got to the States, thinking he was safe at last, and was followed into an airport bathroom by several civilians who beat him up just because he'd been in Vietnam. 

     The tent pounded with anger. One Marine, who'd seen more combat than some of us, was furious. "I'm takin' a piece back with me," he said, meaning a pistol. He deserved to be done with danger, he said. But if those pukes wanted a fight, he'd show 'em one, by God. He'd kill 'em. Period. 

     I was the only one of the group who would be going straight to a college campus. The guys expressed concern for me; they said to watch my back. I'd be unarmed, and there'd be no Marines to back me up. And those cowards always ran in packs. 

     That was what I took to school with me, mixed with the elation of being able to live my own life after one thousand, four hundred and fifty days of following other people's orders; and a focus, tinged with rage, on studying just what had caused this whole mess and others like it, and trying to find a way out. I fully intended to study so hard that I could answer, at least for myself, the question Why war?