The page below is the magazine editor's introduction of my friend JIM MARTIN and me. That editor was Barbara Arnest. I've decided not to edit her intro; this is the way she wrote it in 1969.
In the Colorado College Magazine issue of Winter 1969, the page below ran shortly after the cover, which you may have seen on this Blog as my photo taken late one night as Julian Manyon and I hitch-hiked along the one lane Indo-Chinese colonial road that ran along the bank of the Mekong River, through the jungle from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to Vientiane, Laos.
We both caught rides from a pair of rug merchants driving Jeeps in tandem, through the night, with rolled-up rugs inside their cabs and tied across the tops of their vehicles, from Stung Treng, the last town in northern Cambodia. They would travel across the border, fifty kilometers ahead, and drive on to their destination in Laos.
I perched myself on the hood of the first Jeep. Manyon rode inside the cab of the second. We were the only traffic on the one-lane road. It was already late on a dark night when we pulled out of Stung Treng. It was still 50km through what amounted to a tunnel through the jungle foliage, to the Laotian border. A cacophonic animal presence visited us as we sped through the night. It came as a series of
sound waves keeping abreast of us, each segment of the wave handing us off to the next, or so it seemed to me. I decided after a while that it must be a community decision among the monkeys who lived in the treetops, announcing by greeting, or warning, our presence in their world to the monkeys we were about to awaken as the Jeeps rolled on into new territory. The drivers didn't care, as long as the monkeys weren't armed. It was, after all, 1968: the Indo-Chinese war was at its height. Most of the shooting was a few klicks (kilometers) next door in Viet Nam. It was very soon after the 1968 Tet Offensive which marked a turning point in the war, because it was a turning point in American public opinion about the war. It was also soon after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in April. Racial tension was palpable among the troops as we traveled. Moving between units of American troops, our press passes entitled us to free food and lodging, as available, at military bases where we stopped. I had to grin when I read my pass: I had been assigned the rank of "Major" by the powers that be. Pretty good step up for one who'd recently been a USMC Corporal. But these two drivers didn't care about the war, as long as it left them free to sell rugs. We sped through the night and the monkeysong - if that's what it was. The colonial road swerved and undulated, avoiding larger trees and cutting through copses of the smaller ones. Sometime on one side or the other of midnight, the two drivers pulled up at a board cabin where Manyon and I dismounted. The jeep drivers/rug merchants - apparently frequent travelers - continued across the border into Laos.
Julian Manyon and I went inside the small single-wall board cabin which constituted the International border station to have our passports given the once-over and twice-over and thrice-over scrutiny by the lone border official, whom you see pictured above (HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS 1) as he was giving my passport a microscopic examination. There was nothing in the place that resembled a copy machine, nor was there space for one. But the man had his log book, and he took his sweet time making entries about Manyon's and my travels. Both must have been interesting: Julian had traveled overland from Europe, then through Asia to Viet Nam to now, finally, Cambodia.
He was a British subject, therefore seemingly not very interesting. But I was American: a citizen of one of the belligerent nations now at war a few kilometers from where we waited for the wrapped-to-the-waist bureaucrat who was at that moment staring at pages, one at a time, in my passport. The official took so much time scrutinizing my passport that he gave me an idea. The only light in the tiny cabin, artificial or otherwise, was provided by the kerosene lantern on his desk: he was using its light to read our documents.
It dawned on me that I should do whatever was within my power to get a photo of what was happening in front of me. It was a very long shot: I didn't even own a flash attachment, and wouldn't have known how to use it in any case. It was a dark night, inside and out. There was a kerosene lantern, that was all. I remembered some of Mike Taylor's instructions about length of exposure: f-stop was important, and I had been experimenting with that in my travels through Viet Nam, then along the Mekong in Cambodia. The longer the exposure, the more light you allowed to enter the lens. BULB: if you held this button down, light was continuously allowed to enter the lens as long
as you held it down. I took a couple of steps backward to where a file cabinet stood against the wall, and set my small Japanese camera on top. I looked through the view finder until I saw the border official, naked to the waist and clad only in the traditional Cambodian wrap-around garment which covered him from waist to knee. The man wasn't watching me. I really wasn't doing anything except waiting for him to read my passport. So I held down the shutter release, as Mike had showed me on the lawn of our rented house on Cache la Poudre street in Colorado Springs, a few short but crowded weeks ago. I took 3 or 4 pictures, guessing with each one how long to hold down the shutter release.
Julian Manyon saw what I was doing, and held his camera up for the official to see, asking in French "may I take a photo?" "Non," the man said, and that was that. But I hadn't asked, and already had the shot (whatever it turned out to be) in my camera. Back in Colorado Springs, Jim and I showed our 35mm film to our editor, Barbara Arnest. We both wrote articles for the magazine. (Mine was much longer than what's presented here; she had to edit it considerably because there wasn't space in the magazine.) I consented to that, and was content to let her choose what to run. Presenting my blog posts, now, 40+ years later, I will use all of my original piece, including some notes about things I've learned, since I wrote the original piece in 1969, about people, places, and policies since then. The only thing I didn't like was Ms. Arnest's decision to run my whole piece past our Political Science professor who was also a lawyer. He would be our censor, and I had no say in the matter. He advised her to cut my remark about playing games with some of my language in conversation with some US military people in Viet Nam and Laos, where I played stupid, then said "that fools all Army officers," or words to that effect. Arnest, and the faculty lawyer, cut that out of my text, saying it "might offend some alumni." To my offended eye and ear, what that really meant (and still means, now in the days when Lynne Cheney (a fellow alumnus of Colorado College) has lately appeared, was "it might offend one of our wealthy and powerful alumni". Well. I love Colorado College. I deeply love the education I was so fortunate to have received there. Friends I first met there, in the years from 1966 to 1969 - like Mike Taylor and Jim Martin, along with our housemates of "the Shell House" on East Cache la Poudre - remain after 4+ decades, among my dearest friends. Tom Gould, Mark Streuli, and Tori Winkler Thomas and Melanie Austin and Judy Reynolds and C. John Friesman, also joined all of us during recent months to celebrate old and new days. But that doesn't prevent me from saying this: to me, there has always been present at CC, just below the surface but never out of reach of the levers of power, a culture among some citizens of our beloved institution that among all of us, some people's opinions mattered more than others. Sometimes - as in the case of our honored teacher, friend and colleague Bill Hochman (whom we also visited on campus in October 2013) and other among those great teachers who taught and served us all, decade upon decade, still were not allowed to reach beyond those levers of power that looked down upon all of us with varying degrees of benevolence - that I understand - but also with varying degrees of forthright honesty. Or so it has seemed to me, as a poor kid who came to the campus straight from Chu Lai, Republic of (South) Viet Nam. As I continue to study the human condition with all its complex and perplexing variables, that one question - who among us does behave, consistently, according to what is truly "the right thing to do," in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. and a few others of the great magnanimous souls among us?
Early in 1969, Jim and I (and the student body and faculty), received copies of the Winter 1969 issue of Colorado College Magazine. My almost-accidental photo, by "bulb" setting, otherwise in full darkness, mounted on a black background, was the cover. That's what you see here.
PHOTOS: THE TWO PHOTOS ON THIS PAGE - ONE OF ME, AND ONE OF JIM MARTIN -
WERE BOTH TAKEN BY JAMES MARTIN. THANKS, JIM.
THE PHOTO OF THE BORDER OFFICIAL READING OUR PASSPORTS BY KEROSENE
LANTERN IS BY DEAN METCALF. IT BECAME THE COVER OF THE COLORADO
COLLEGE MAGAZINE FOR WINTER, 1969. IT LEADS OFF THIS ENTIRE SECTION OF
STORIES ABOUT "HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS 1968."
NEXT: HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS 1968 (3)...
