REFUGEES OF LASA TINGHNI

This is an excerpt from the chapter "Lasa Tinghni" of my memoir Rattlesnake Dreams. I was there along the Río Coco, which is the border in that area between Honduras and Nicaragua, in January, 1985. The trip was planned and paid for by a Texas oilman named Maco Stewart, who was trying to influence events in the war then going on between the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, and the
contras being armed and supported by the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Through a pretty odd series of circumstances, I found myself invited along as a representative of the Tachi group of North American Indians from around Fresno, California; and as a journalist.

     A new group of refugees had just crossed the river from Nicaragua. They told – some through MISURA [acronym for a group of Central American Indians from the Miskito, Sumo, and Rama tribes] fighters who would translate Miskito or Sumo into Spanish for me to retranslate, some directly to me in Spanish - of being driven from their homes by Sandinista soldiers, or by fear of the war's increased incursions into their lives. These stories were not canned: facial expressions and body language were obviously unrehearsed. Desperation was palpable. Women, dressed in trailweary clothing that was already becoming rags, crowded around us, pleading with their eyes, even more than with their voices, for help. A few had a little Nicaraguan money. They were in Honduras without benefit of any immigration process; they had crossed the border – the Río Coco – in dugout canoes. They had no way of dealing with any sort of paperwork. We had been told to leave all our money in camp. I had disobeyed, so started to change what Nicaraguan currency they had. Finally, the four North American Indians and I just gave them the Honduran lempiras we carried in our pockets.

     I got busy taking photographs: a young boy and girl sitting in the dirt under a hut's raised floor, only occasionally trying to brush flies from the open sores on their faces. The flies had more energy than the children. There was an old man, his pants and shirt filthy and in shreds, holding a listless infant; an emaciated dog, soft brown eyes bulging from taut skin, too weak to plead for food, waiting to die; a teenage boy in a Houston Astros T shirt; a striking looking young Miskito mother, one child on her hip and another clinging to her filthy skirt, wearing an old T shirt with the Playboy Bunny emblem on the front. (Apparently CMA had organized, or cooperated with, some church based relief organizations in the southern United States to collect clothing and transport it down to the people in these camps.) 

     The four North American Indians in our group were visibly stricken. The hour or two we spent in Lasa Tinghni was the first of several times that week when I would see this change in them: a visible identification with other Indians and with their suffering, a too-easily tapped reservoir of blood memory, of being hounded and starved and killed by agents of the white man's government. It affected Gary, Larry, Bill, and Mike physically: some circulatory change would visibly alter the skin color in their faces. I have a photo, which I think is one of the best I've ever taken, of Larry Pino holding a Miskito or Sumo infant at Lasa Tinghni, holding the child close to his chest and nestling the child’s head next to his chin, bending his own head down, his own eyes staring deep within himself, remembering stories of his own people. 

   "Just like what happened to us," one of them murmured.

This is the cover art for both the paperback and the ebook for my memoir,
RATTLESNAKE DREAMS An American Warrior's story. The art work you see is by
Cruz Ortiz Zamarrón, an artist who is also a friend of many years. When it was time
to do the cover, I sent him my text version of the dream that was the genesis of this
book, and asked him to read it, then paint it. He exceeded my expectations. He painted
the entire story of the dream (long dream; long story), as reflected in the eye of the
giant rattlesnake with whom my young self was having a heart to heart talk in the
burning Vietnamese village of Tho An... that dream, which I've called "Rattlesnake and
Pistol," occurs at the end of the book. The young man in the painting, with the pistol, is the Dean
from the dream....

SAIGON: L.A. COP

Saigon 

1. LA Cop

     Some things from that summer [1968] 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.