In
my cabin, two
guitars. Wood fire flares. Outside -
dark
fir spires, bright stars.
©1998, 2013 Dean
Metcalf
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
CRUZ COVER STORY
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Cruz story
RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: COVER STORY
In the early 1980s a group of veterans, artists, musicians, poets and ne’r-do-wells would hang out, drink beer, and tell stories. Some were true, some were not so true… and some were too true to be endured, but unforgettable all the same.
Chris Matthews was the owner of our meeting place, the Poet and Patriot Irish pub, in an alley just off Cedar Street in Santa Cruz, near the mall.
He was a beefy Irishman with a booming voice, a giant heart, and a well developed political consciousness. He was also a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division, which he never allowed us mere mortals to forget. RIP, Chris. Also among us was Tim McCormick, who had been a Navy medical corpsman patching up wounded Marines near the DMZ in South Viet Nam. Kenny Walker had been a Marine Sergeant in Nam, and was also one of the best natural artists I’ve met. He once mentioned in passing that he’d been standing next to a buddy during an NVA attack on their position when an enemy rocket, sparks trailing, came into their position. Kenny stood up to find his friend still standing, but without his head, which had been taken off by the rocket and replaced by twin crimson fountains spurting from his carotid arteries.
There was Bill Motto, a wiry, intense, scraggly-bearded two-tour Nam vet (one with 173rd Airborne), who read more books and articles about the kind of US foreign policy failures and deliberate deceptions of the sort that had led us into Viet Nam, than anyone else we knew. He died too soon (he was about 39) in a fall off a beach cliff near Santa Cruz. RIP, Billy.
There was Cris DiMaio, who is part Cheyenne, and who as a young Navy doctor had the incredible bad luck of being assigned as Battalion Surgeon to 1/9, 1ST Battalion, 9thMarines. 1/9 was reputed to be the infantry battalion that took the highest casualties, among Army and Marine units, in that war. Chris was in our rap group of 7 or 8 vets who met once a week and spilled our guts and hearts and our rage out in a small room in the Vets Hall in Santa Cruz. He wasn’t in the group as a health professional; he was there like the rest of us, trying to heal his own wounds. I had the good luck to visit him, along with my wife, in Santa Cruz in 2012. It was very fine to see him, in his home on the beach near Santa Cruz.
It had been through Chris DiMaio, by way of one of his Native American connections (Michael Joseph, of the Santa Rosa Ranchería near Fresno) that I was connected with Maco Stewart, the oil millionaire who financed a trip by some North American Indians (and 3 mercenaries) among whom I was included as a journalist in January 1985, to Contra camps in southern Honduras. We made a couple of illegal armed crossings into Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua, crossing the Río Coco in Miskito Indian dugout canoes. (There’s a large section (“Rus Rus”) of stories from that trip in Rattlesnake Dreams.)
I was one of the vets, occasionally one of the poets, often enough among the ne’r-do-wells, storytellers, and beer drinkers, who met often at the Poet & Patriot.
Another regular was Cruz Ortiz Zamarrón, a Chicano artist who was about half Chris’s size, but with booming voice and heart and political consciousness to match.
And talent to over-match.
My wife and I split the blanket in 1994. We’re still friends; we both have married again). I moved to Oregon, near where I’d grown up. (There are several Oregon stories, from both before and after the war, in Rattlesnake Dreams.) Chris Matthews, the founding owner of Poet & Patriot, died a couple of years ago, from a lifetime of smoking cigarettes. We could always hear it in his gravelly bass voice. Many of us drifted apart… but not really. Now we had the Internet, and gradually we found one another again.
Also in the ‘80s, I began writing the stuff that had been clawing at my insides to get out into the air since I’d thrown my gear into the back of the truck to leave Chu Lai in 1966.
With the writing came the dreams and nightmares.
They pissed me off. No. They terrified, enraged me. They scalded my soul. Hah. I’ll show ‘em: I’ll capture them and use them. Those nightmares were kicking my ass on a regular basis, and like all combat vets, I wanted to escape them.
Sometime in the early 1980s, after waking too many times drenched in sweat and terrifying my wife with startling transitions from sleep to wakefulness, I decided two things: One was that I would train myself to turn, in sleep and during a nightmare, and confront my pursuers, instead of continuing to flee them.
And I would learn to write the dreams down.
For a few years, the process of forcing myself to remember and record the dreams made things worse. Convincing myself that in the long run it was worth it to capture the dreams instead of fleeing them is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, given the fact that I had lived through the Viet Nam war and, in any case, I could not escape it.
I do not know of, nor have I read of or been told about, any combat vet who has actually reached the end of his string of post traumatic dreams. I’m sure there are some; I just haven’t met them. This is why I say – perhaps more often than people want to hear – that I’m the luckiest combat vet I know.
Cruz Ortiz Zamarrón, our artist friend from Poet & Patriot days, had grown up in San Antonio, Texas. He now had relocated to Lake Tahoe, on the California/Nevada line. I had been writing all the time, and a book was shaping up. It was the project I’d promised I would do, as I tossed my gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai. It had stories about growing up in Oregon, because I had begun to see that soldiers – or, in my case, Marines – didn’t come out of nowhere, but were boys who came from American homes, broken or otherwise.
I had many dreams. Some I remembered, captured, wrote down. Some I lost. But sometime during the Poet & Patriot days, while working as a carpenter and contractor, I had a long dream which was clearly from the string of post Viet Nam nightmares. But it was also different. It was very long. It was very clear. In fact, translucent. It was very powerful. It told a story. And it ended well, for me, as one of the two central characters in the dream.
The other main character was a rattlesnake the size of my arm, but much more powerful. And it spoke to me in the dream. We talked, eye to eye, as the howling circle of my people urged me to kill the snake with the pistol they had given me, and which I now held in my hand.
That dream is the title piece for this book: Rattlesnake and Pistol.
I got in touch with Cruz. We exchanged email addresses. I sent him the narrative I’d written about the conversation between the rattlesnake and me, told him I wanted that to be my book cover, and asked him to paint it. He said he couldn’t do it. His body wouldn’t perform; he could no longer hold a paint brush properly with his right arm. I begged him to do it, because of what I knew about him and his art, his relationship with art and life. Please, I said.
He said he’d try to do it with the computer.
He exceeded my expectations, surprising me in a revelatory way: his painting depicts me, as a young Marine with a pistol, confronting the grandaddy of all rattlesnakes, being urged on by the crowd behind me… all reflected in the rattlesnake’s eye.
OH, BY THE WAY: look at me. I mean, look at the dream image of the young Marine holding the pistol. That's me, reflected in the rattlesnake's eye, with my people, crowded around behind me, urging me to "Shoot the snake!" Now look at the figure of Dean, as painted by Cruz. Look at my hair. See the letters Cruz painted into my hair, starting over my right ear: "P..E..A..C..E"
I didn't see that, until he told me: PEACE. Cruz told me before he published the painting, so I could have the option of taking it out. I threw back my head and laughed at the sky: "No, Cruz...leave it in. Leave it in!"
That's our cover. Thank you, Cruz.
Rattlesnake Dreams is available in paperback from Amazon - 398 pages, $22; or as ebook from createspace.com, $8; or ebook from kobo.com, also $8. Your choice.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: 3dmetcalf@gmail.com
Sunday, September 1, 2013
MARINE CORPS HISTORY
Marine Corps History
Most of the time in boot camp we spent handling weapons and sweating and running and yelling. But we had classroom lectures, too. One subject taken most seriously by our trainers was History and Traditions of the Marine Corps.
We learned that the Marine Corps was older than the country we served, having been founded in 1775, the year before the Declaration of Independence, at Tun’s Tavern, in Philadelphia. Mostly, we learned about Marine battles and heroes, like Lt. Presley O'Bannon, who led a detachment overland through what was thought to be impassable desert to surprise from behind a pirate garrison that had been impregnable because it was on a high seacliff and had complete control of its approaches. O'Bannon and his men made history by taking the fortress after all other attempts had failed, and got a line - "to the shores of Tripoli" - added to the Marines' Hymn.
We learned about First Sergeant Dan Daly, who got his boys to charge into heavy firing during the Battle of Belleau Wood in World War I by growling "Come on, you sons o' bitches, do you want to live forever?" Marines were so ferocious in that war, we were told, that the Germans nicknamed us "Teufelhunden," or “devildogs.” There was Smedley Butler, hero of countless engagements in Haiti and Nicaragua and China, the only Marine besides Dan Daly ever to win two Medals of Honor. There was perhaps the most legendary Marine of all, Lewis B. Puller, winner of five Navy Crosses, the nation's second highest award for military heroism. "Chesty" Puller, like many officers of the generation that was to lead the Marines in WWII in the Pacific, learned his trade and made his reputation fighting "bandits" in Nicaragua in the 1920's. Then he achieved the status of legend on Guadalcanal fighting against the Japanese in World War II, and led the First Marine Regiment's historic withdrawal from Chinese encirclement at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea. ("Retreat, hell. We're just attacking in the opposite direction.") Sometimes at night, when we were lying at attention in our racks and the Duty Drill Instructor was about to order "lights out," he'd have us shout in chorus, "Goodnight, Chesty, wherever you are." The disrespect involved in recruits calling a retired Lieutenant General by his nickname was forgiven; this was a higher form of respect.
The names of the battles became our mantra: Guadalcanal, Tarawa (where Gunny Rogers' older brother had been killed), Peleliu, Saipan, Bougainville, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. And the men: O'Bannon, Daly, Butler, Puller, Manila John Basilone... and there was David M. Shoup, the Colonel who had the bad luck to be assigned as commanding officer of forces ashore at Tarawa, when some planning snafu had sent the assault waves, first in amphibious vehicles and then wading, into chestdeep water, wave after wave across an open lagoon into the teeth of interlocking machinegun and artillery and mortar fire. Shoup, seriously wounded on the beach and with the issue in grave doubt, staying at it, all those men not quitting when almost any human would have quit, carrying the day, taking Tarawa, that shitty little chunk of Betio atoll, writing its name in history forever. Shoup now wore four stars and was Commandant of the Marine Corps, our highest officer except for the President of the United States, who didn't really count because he was a civilian. These, we were taught, were the breed of men in whose footsteps we had asked to follow. Only the best would do.
The Marine Corps motto was "Semper Fidelis": Always Faithful. This signified more than duty to God and country. We heard it over and over. The simplest expression of this faithfulness was Gunny Rogers' “Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die.” It meant that we were to believe, without question, in who we were as Marines, in the non-coms and officers who gave us our orders, in those orders themselves, in the reasons for those orders, in the national leaders who gave them.
It meant, to judge by the symbols and trappings and language that accompanied the motto's presentation to us, and interpreted its meaning for us, that being a Marine was at its core a holy thing, that the mission was holy, therefore worthy of those two attributes normally reserved for religion: it was beyond question (indeed, beyond our ability to understand), and it was worth dying for.
Sundays we'd be marched to, and into, the base chapel. A man would take the podium, a chaplain in ceremonial robe. He wore rank insignia on the right point of his shirt collar, indicating its seniority over the small gold cross on the left collar point. The placement of these two small pieces of metal on the chaplain's body showed how much distance we placed between the holy and the warlike: about three inches if the collar was buttoned, slightly more if open.
The chaplain stood in the focal point where the very shape of the building directed the attention of all who entered: in front of the altar, which was in front of the huge cross on the wall behind him, and directly beneath the huge eagle, globe and anchor that is the emblem of the United States Marine Corps.
We sat on command (“Ready, Seats!”), and listened. We were told that our work as Marines was blessed because we fought for a righteous nation. Quotations from the Bible proved this.
We stood on command, and sang: "Onward Christian Soldiers," the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." We grinned as we sang the second verse of the "Marines' Hymn" (what other service calls its anthem a hymn?):
If the Ar-my and the Na-a-vy
ever look on Heaven's scenes,
they will find the streets are guar-ar-ded
by United States Marines.
And we prayed our own Rifleman's Prayer:
Dear God, my Father, through thy Son
Hear the prayer of a warrior son
Give my eyes a vision keen
To see the thing that must be seen
A steady hand I ask of thee
The feel of wind on land or sea
Let me not ever careless be
Of life or limb or liberty
For Justice sake a quiet heart
And grace and strength to do my part
To God and Country, Home and Corps
Let me be faithful evermore
Amen
The "why" was somebody else's job. If we as combat men got to wondering what we were fighting for, we'd die sooner rather than later. We had to trust that the men whose job it was to figure that out would do their jobs as well as we must do ours.
Semper Fidelis was shortened, among Marines, to "Semper Fi." They told us we would be hearing, and saying, "Semper Fi" for the rest of our lives. That was truer than we knew, though they didn't mention the layers of irony that would attend its use, by some of us, in years to come.
There was a whole canon of lore. Salt and pepper and sugar and ketchup were "sidearms." Rumors were "scuttlebutt," so named because a scuttlebutt was a drinking fountain, which was where a lot of rumors got passed. We (once we became Marines, should we be so lucky) were called "jarheads" because of our haircuts, and "leathernecks" because of the high leather collars worn by shipboard Marines in the times when Marines were still used to board enemy ships during naval engagements. The collars were worn to shield against cutlass blows, and were progenitors of the high buttoned collar of the modern day dress blue tunic. The wide crimson stripe down the blue trouser legs of that uniform, the stripe which could only be worn by officers and noncommissioned officers, was a commemoration of the blood shed by Marine officers and NCO's at the Battle of Chapultepec, during the Mexican-American war.
It would be twenty years and more before I learned the darker side of some of those stories.
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