PROLOGUE

Prologue

Tho An

Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began; others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the F-4 Phantoms - sharks of the air with high triangular tails and turned-down black snouts - finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.
Attached to “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, I was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements, or attempts to flee.
They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot Company's combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C4 from the blast. A sergeant cursed the engineer for using too much explosive. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.
I'd imagined battle, but I'd never imagined this. The children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers' arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, yet feared my rifle and bayonet more. They wailed in awful concert with their children. The older women joined.
But the old man: he didn't wail, cower, try to flee the explosions or shrink back from my bayonet. He just stared at me, afraid but with that resigned, calculated, limited fearfulness of one who is going to die before too long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I had ever seen on a human face.
Something happened, as I looked down my rifle and bayonet at the old man and the women and children I was holding captive, which would determine the course of the rest of my life. I looked at those people, then looked around me. I saw, in the bright noon light, a veil dropping. There was a feeling of the veil's movement having a direction: top to bottom, sky to earth. The veil seemed transparent, leaving the artillery-blasted fronds of the palm trees, their napalm-charred trunks, the flaming thatch and skeletal bamboo frameworks of the huts, the urgent movements of the Marines of "F" Company, the terrified people at my feet, all looking exactly as they had a moment before. Yet they also looked completely different. I can't explain that, except to say that suddenly, and ever after, I saw the world through different eyes.
But it wasn’t just my present and future which I saw differently. That day in Tho An, a process began of re-seeing my entire life, from as far back as I could remember, and of realizing that a gradual accretion of boyhood experiences, beginning long before I entered Marine Corps boot camp, were what had made me a warrior.

II. Learning War
I first saw the world on January 23, 1943. Pearl Harbor was 13½ months in the past; the United States was at war with Japan and Germany. The 1st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal( ) 5½ months earlier; Americans had invaded North Africa 2½ months earlier. The Soviet Army had counterattacked Axis forces outside Stalingrad, trapping 91,000 German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian troops inside a pocket. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would surrender all those troops a week after I was born, and the Japanese would begin evacuating Guadalcanal a day later. Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term as President of the United States. The blockade of Leningrad was in its 502nd day, of 872. Tatyana Savicheva( ) was 5 months dead. Treblinka( ) had been in operation 6 months, with 10 gas chambers working full time. In October of that year, Jewish slaves at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland, would stage a sufficiently successful revolt that the Nazis destroyed the camp for fear that the escapees would tell the world what had happened there, which they did.( ) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.


NEXT: Table of Contents, and a story or two from childhood.

WOUNDED KNEE

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2011

WOUNDED KNEE

December 29 is an important date for me, in my history as a writer. It appeared earlier today on a friend’s page, and I included some of the following information in my comments. But I don’t see it any more; maybe just another Facebook mystery.

         On December 28, 1890, troops under the command of Colonel James Forsyth, US Army, moved about 350 Lakota Sioux into an encampment near Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

         The following morning, the encampment was surrounded by a superior number of soldiers (Wikipedia’s report says 500) who had four Hotchkiss guns among them, strategically placed on high points overlooking the Lakota camp. A Hotchkiss gun was a light, mule-portable mountain artillery piece (1.65”, or 42mm); or, depending on the model, a rapid-firing 37mm early machine gun.

         At daybreak, Forsyth ordered the Indians to surrender all weapons. As the story goes, one old man, who was either deaf or did not understand English, or both, was struggling to keep his rifle, which went off in the struggle and killed a soldier.

         Little more than an hour later, 150 Lakota men, women and children (mostly women and children) lay dead on the snowy prairie (it was December in South Dakota), along with about 25 white soldiers. (Some of whom may have been killed by friendly fire; it was by all accounts a chaotic day.)

         Sometime late in 1990, I asked my editor at a small weekly in Santa Cruz, California, if I could write a review of the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” which was coming to town. He said “Write it, and let me see it.”

         I went downtown to a store that rented VCRs and video tapes, and asked the proprietor if he’d let me sit in the store and watch “The Wizard…” as it was coming to town and I wanted to write a review.

         Hm… no-brainer: more business. “Sure,” he said, “have a seat.”

         I sat through the movie, took lots of notes, and went home and wrote a piece that said Dorothy’s neighbor had every right to call the Sheriff because her dog Toto had been tearing up the neighbor’s garden, and anyway the Sheriff didn’t shoot the dog, just scolded Dorothy. So then, in the movie, the neighbor lady, who was only trying to protect her garden, metamorphoses into the Wicked Witch of the West.

         Later, the Wizard turns out to be a bullshit artist, the Cowardly Lion has his affliction cured by pinning a medal on his chest, and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man receive equally phoney solutions to their problems. When Dorothy wants to go home, all she has to do is click her red shoes together.

         I called bullshit on much of that: is this the stuff we want to raise our kids on? Tread on our neighbors’ rights, then send in troops when they get uppity about it?

         That editor usually accepted what I wrote -  typically an article about Reagan’s interventionist policies in Central America, mainly Nicaragua and El Salvador – without objection. But as I waited for a reaction to the review of Oz, none came. Finally I went in to see the editor: “Did you see my review?”

         He reached into a drawer, took out a manila envelope containing my manuscript, and tossed it rudely across the desk toward me. He didn’t say anything, but when I picked up the envelope, I saw he had scrawled across the front “Wizard of Odd.” I turned and left the room, to the accompaniment of snickers of my fellow staffers, the same people who were usually very supportive of my antiwar writings, and which were generally well received in that town which would later elect at least one Socialist mayor, and which was often lumped together with Berkeley as havens for leftists.

         Some weeks later, in late December, I was driving in four lanes of heavy traffic on Soquel Drive, at the end of the work day. Traffic was so heavy it just inched along, but I was content to listen to “All Things Considered” on NPR.

         A report came on which noted the 100^th Anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29^th, 1890. A woman historian was being interviewed. I didn’t catch her name, but she said that a few days after the massacre, a South Dakota newspaper editor wrote in his editorial advocating the extermination of the Sioux.

         That editor, she said, was L. Frank Baum, who was later to write and publish “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

         My shout was so loud it drew surprised and frightened looks from drivers and passengers across the four lanes of stalled traffic: I knew it! I FUCKING KNEW IT!!

         My shout, not understood by the alarmed motorists nearby, was an expression of self-righteous delight at my take weeks earlier on the story content of the “Wizard of Oz,” before I knew anything about L. Frank Baum, or very much about the massacre at Wounded Knee. It was all right there, in a story which millions of American families read to their children.

         I had seen it, looking at the story with the eyes I’d had in my head since I left the burning village of Tho An, over twenty years earlier.

WOUNDED KNEE

December 29 is an important date for me, in my history as a writer. It appeared earlier today on a friend’s page, and I included some of the following information in my comments. But I don’t see it any more; maybe just another Facebook mystery.

         On December 28, 1890, troops under the command of Colonel James Forsyth, US Army, moved about 350 Lakota Sioux into an encampment near Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

         The following morning, the encampment was surrounded by a superior number of soldiers (Wikipedia’s report says 500) who had four Hotchkiss guns among them, strategically placed on high points overlooking the Lakota camp. A Hotchkiss gun was a light, mule-portable mountain artillery piece (1.65”, or 42mm); or, depending on the model, a rapid-firing 37mm early machine gun.

         At daybreak, Forsyth ordered the Indians to surrender all weapons. As the story goes, one old man, who was either deaf or did not understand English, or both, was struggling to keep his rifle, which went off in the struggle and killed a soldier.

         Little more than an hour later, 150 Lakota men, women and children (mostly women and children) lay dead on the snowy prairie (it was December in South Dakota), along with about 25 white soldiers. (Some of whom may have been killed by friendly fire; it was by all accounts a chaotic day.)

         Sometime late in 1990, I asked my editor at a small weekly in Santa Cruz, California, if I could write a review of the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” which was coming to town. He said “Write it, and let me see it.”

         I went downtown to a store that rented VCRs and video tapes, and asked the proprietor if he’d let me sit in the store and watch “The Wizard…” as it was coming to town and I wanted to write a review.

         Hm… no-brainer: more business. “Sure,” he said, “have a seat.”

         I sat through the movie, took lots of notes, and went home and wrote a piece that said Dorothy’s neighbor had every right to call the Sheriff because her dog Toto had been tearing up the neighbor’s garden, and anyway the Sheriff didn’t shoot the dog, just scolded Dorothy. So then, in the movie, the neighbor lady, who was only trying to protect her garden, metamorphoses into the Wicked Witch of the West.

         Later, the Wizard turns out to be a bullshit artist, the Cowardly Lion has his affliction cured by pinning a medal on his chest, and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man receive equally phoney solutions to their problems. When Dorothy wants to go home, all she has to do is click her red shoes together.

         I called bullshit on much of that: is this the stuff we want to raise our kids on? Tread on our neighbors’ rights, then send in troops when they get uppity about it?

         That editor usually accepted what I wrote -  typically an article about Reagan’s interventionist policies in Central America, mainly Nicaragua and El Salvador – without objection. But as I waited for a reaction to the review of Oz, none came. Finally I went in to see the editor: “Did you see my review?”

         He reached into a drawer, took out a manila envelope containing my manuscript, and tossed it rudely across the desk toward me. He didn’t say anything, but when I picked up the envelope, I saw he had scrawled across the front “Wizard of Odd.” I turned and left the room, to the accompaniment of snickers of my fellow staffers, the same people who were usually very supportive of my antiwar writings, and which were generally well received in that town which would later elect at least one Socialist mayor, and which was often lumped together with Berkeley as havens for leftists.

         Some weeks later, in late December, I was driving in four lanes of heavy traffic on Soquel Drive, at the end of the work day. Traffic was so heavy it just inched along, but I was content to listen to “All Things Considered” on NPR.

         A report came on which noted the 100^th Anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29^th, 1890. A woman historian was being interviewed. I didn’t catch her name, but she said that a few days after the massacre, a South Dakota newspaper editor wrote in his editorial advocating the extermination of the Sioux.

         That editor, she said, was L. Frank Baum, who was later to write and publish “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

         My shout was so loud it drew surprised and frightened looks from drivers and passengers across the four lanes of stalled traffic: I knew it! I FUCKING KNEW IT!!

         My shout, not understood by the alarmed motorists nearby, was an expression of self-righteous delight at my take weeks earlier on the story content of the “Wizard of Oz,” before I knew anything about L. Frank Baum, or very much about the massacre at Wounded Knee. It was all right there, in a story which millions of American families read to their children.

         I had seen it, looking at the story with the eyes I’d had in my head since I left the burning village of Tho An, over twenty years earlier.

ISCHEMIC HEART DISEASE 40 YEARS AFTER EXPOSURE TO AGENT ORANGE

December 8, 2011

         On November 15, 2011, my wife and I were seated aboard a Continental Airlines flight at El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá, Colombia, waiting to take off for Houston, Seattle, and Walla Walla. It was to be a short trip to Northeast Oregon for the first public reading of my just-published memoir, RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: An American Warrior’s Story.

         Our trip was suddenly shortened. I lost consciousness, just sitting there. When I came to, flight attendants and my wife, Patricia, were huddled around me. The flight attendants were urgently questioning Patricia and me: what was my name? what had happened to me? had I been sick recently? How did I feel right now?

         Patricia explained to them, and to me, that she had been asleep in her seat, waiting for takeoff, when she was wakened by me, noisily gasping for breath in the seat beside her.

         Paramedics came aboard, took my blood pressure, found it elevated, gave me a medication or two, then brought a wheelchair, helped Patricia collect our personal belongings, asked her for our personal data so they could retrieve our luggage from the belly of the aircraft, and wheeled me off the plane, Patricia walking behind.

         They took me to a clinic at the airport, then by ambulance to a hospital. A lot of questions, blood tests, electrocardiograms, more questions.

         We were there 2 days: more tests – especially more electrocardiograms – more questions. One young doctor there was especially notable for her throroughness, her knowledge, her obvious caring, and her efficiency without seeming impatient with my slow answers in Spanish. This doctor mentioned the possibility of my condition being “isquemia (Spanish), a word which I didn’t know in either Spanish or English.

         Nov. 19, a couple of days after we arrived in Oregon, my friend Walter Smith forwarded to me an email of an artile titled “How Agent Orange Led to Ischemic Heart Disease in Veterans.” “Ischemic” would be the the English pronunciation of the adjective for “isquemia.”

         BINGO.

The article Walter had sent me was a wake-up call, but was very brief, and sent from a website I didn’t recognize. After we got home and I had two more attacks and more treatments, my wife got on the internet and found an informative article on “isquemia” in Spanish, which she urged me to read immediately. When I got to the end, it turned out to be a pretty informative piece from the New York Times, translated into Spanish. The original English is here:

file:///Users/deanmetcalf/Desktop/Desktop/Agent%20Orange%20-%20NYTimes.com.webarchive

         Some more treatments, some more medications, an appointment scheduled with a cardiologist in Bogotá, and now I’m home, working some but mostly resting. First priority is to finish this note and send it to friends – especially veterans – so you’ll know why I’ve been so absent these past few days, and especially so that vets will know about ISCHEMIC HEART DISEASE CAUSED BY (APPARENTLY) TRACE AMOUNTS OF AGENT ORANGE INGESTED 40 YEARS AGO.

          In my case, this explains a few things previously unexplained.

         But for now, this is long enough to be AN ALERT TO VETERANS: WATCH YOUR BODY. IT MAY CONTAIN INFORMATION YOU DON’T YET KNOW ABOUT, REGARDING THINGS WHICH MAY VISIT YOU LATER, AS YOU GET OLDER.

For decades, I was a serious athlete (ultramarathons, martial arts) and continuously active construction worker. But there were strange, infrequent episodes of unexplained weakness, to the point of not being able to walk. I once had to turn myself into an emergency room in Santa Cruz, California. I had to walk there, and though it wasn’t very far, I had to sit down several times on the sidewalk in order to regain enough strength to continue.

         There were others, isolated, unexplained by doctors.

        

         “The most common of the three illnesses, ischemic heart disease, restricts blood flow to the heart, causing irregular heartbeats and deterioration of the heart muscle–from the New York Times article noted above, which was published Oct. 12, 2009, and reported by James Dao.

The Veterans’ Administration recognized ischemic heart disease in October 2011 as being caused by toxins in Agent Orange, which was sprayed widely over Vietnam to kill foliage and deny the enemy cover; also to kill their rice crops. Vietnamese people are experiencing 4^th generation birth defects from Agent Orange.

         You don’t want to see the pictures of these children.

VETERANS' DAY POST: POEM BY WILFRED OWEN

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.--

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Owen was a WWI Conscientious Objector. At the same time, he was a Lieutenant in the British Army. Lines in this poem about dreams remind me of some of my own – which is not to put myself in the same league with him as poet or writer. He was killed in combat a few days before the Armistice on 11/11/1918, which we now celebrate as Veterans’ Day. He was about 24 years old. The last two lines, with Latin translated, would be:

The old lie: sweet and proper it is/ to die for one’s country.

ALMOST A COWBOY/ CANAL

Almost a Cowboy

     Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank got Darrell and me hired on for the hay harvest at the Wellman ranch on the Powder River near Baker, Oregon. Bessie and Lank had lived in Baker since they'd come west from Missouri in 1940, except for a brief return in the 1960’s. Stan Wellman was Lank's hunting partner and all-around sidekick. Stan's father, Les, owned the ranch; Stan was the foreman. Les, still vigorous, was over seventy. 

     Most of the work was done with tractors, but Les had kept his horsedrawn sickleblade mowers and dumprakes. At a time when most ranchers had acquired baling machines, he still stacked his hay loose. The process of getting it from standing hay to stacked hay had several steps. First it was mowed, mostly by mowers attached to his big John Deere diesel tractor or one of the two or three others he had around - I remember a Massey Ferguson, an Allis Chalmers and maybe a small Case. But sometimes, partly just to show off, Stan said’ Les would hitch a single horse to an old steelwheeled mower he had and clean up along fences or along the willows by the riverbank where it was dangerous to drive a tractor. Claimed he had more control with the horsedrawn rig, and when you saw him working it you had to admit he was good. 

     After a field was mowed, the freshcut hay lay out over it like a tufted quilt whose cover was woven of threads of every possible shade of green. Another tractor would come along pulling a windrower, leaving the cut hay in neat, parallel curving rows up and down the length of the field. Then it was our turn with the dump rakes. I drove the team, and Darrell drove the single horse, pulling twelvefoot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twentyyear lives. Darrell's single bay horse would walk alongside the row he was bunching. The curved, two and a half foot spring steel teeth, distributed a few inches apart along the width of the rake's carriage between the two large steel wheels, would slide along under the windrow, rolling the loose hay into a bunch until the teeth at the center of the rake were filled to capacity. Then we'd kick a lever to engage a cog out at one wheel, and the whole row of teeth would rise with the turning of the wheel and drop a nice bunch of hay on the stubble. We'd release the lever and the teeth would drop into the windrow in front of the fresh bunch and start the cycle again. 

     Pete and Bill were my team. Bill was the older of the two, a rangy bay who wasn't much to look at, but who did most of the pulling. Pete was a sleek, pretty black horse with white stockings, part Percheron, who even seemed to prance a little as if he knew he was good looking. I still think of him every time I see the Budweiser clydesdales on TV. But as long as I drove the two of them, Pete would hang back just a little, while the ugly, faithful Bill leaned into his collar and got the work done. 

     Darrell and I had hired on at three dollars a day, plus meals at the harvest table and cots in the bunkhouse. We'd start our day before dawn, walking to the pasture in the dark while it was still soaked with dew to catch the horses and get the halters on them and lead them into the barn and buckle on their collars. Then while they were chewing their grain we'd step up to the post where each horse's harness hung on a long peg, and slip the rump end of the harness up onto our shoulders like Les had taught us, sliding each new strap down until the entire harness was arranged along the arm. Then we'd reach up and grab one of the hames in each hand and walk over to the horse and throw the whole business out along the horse's spine with a motion like coastal fishermen use to cast their nets. Next, it was step back alongside the horse and distribute the straps along his back until the rump strap dropped in place. Then grab his tail and free it from that strap  the one that took the pressure when you backed up the rig  so the horse could use his tail against the flies. Then go back to his neck and slip the hames into the grooves in the collar, making sure they were seated, and buckle them together in front of the horse's chest. Then there were just a couple of straps to buckle loosely under the belly. The bridles would go on after breakfast, when we were ready to back them to the rig and hitch the doubletree to the horses' collars, and the tugs to the dumprake.

     But first we'd go to the house where Les' wife would feed the crew a huge breakfast which we'd finish in time to hitch up and start the tractors and be headed out through the gate as the first light slanted across the fields. 

     Les Wellman lost no time getting his three dollars a day's worth of work out of us. The first morning, he showed us how to catch and harness the horses, drove to the field with us and showed us how to operate the dumprake, and turned us loose. We thought we'd died and gone to heaven, getting to drive real horses like that, doing real ranch work, just like we'd heard about from the grown men and seen in movies.

     The romance was quickly tempered, at least for me. Returning from the field the first evening, feeling sunburnt and exhausted and hungry and thirsty and full of myself, I was driving along the edge of a field next to a barbedwire fence when a horsefly - an attack bomber of an insect - spooked my team, and they bolted into a full runaway, with me bouncing on the steel tractor seat and holding onto the reins for my very life. The world spun and jounced and became a huffing clanking juggernaut on which I was stuck like a confused flea, which could destroy me equally easily if I stayed perched on the tractor seat or if I tried to get off it. I remembered the old hands' stories of what a man looked like if he fell under a runaway dump rake and got perforated by a dozen or so of the giant steel teeth and then dragged over rough ground. I decided to try to stay on the tractor seat, using my hold on the reins to stay upright. I heaved my hundred ten pounds against the ton and more of galloping horseflesh, trying to make my desperate whoas heard above the roar of hooves and horsebreath and machine. 

     I'd just about gotten them slowed into a manageable run, when the rig hit something and the tongue broke between them, and they spooked again. Somehow the rake's teeth stayed locked up in the traveling position, and somehow I stayed in the seat. But it was a long ride. Every time Pete and Bill started to settle down and began responding to my desperate pulls on the four heavy leather reins, the broken point of the tongue would stick in the ground and break off and cause the rig to lurch violently and they'd spook again. Finally there was no more tongue to break off, and they ripped the tugs loose from the rake and took off and the universe was suddenly still as I sat looking at the strands of the barbedwire fence in front of my nose. 

     Les Wellman came driving up on the "Johnny popper," which was what we called the John Deere because of the noise its diesel engine made. He throttled it down and looked me over. By the time he spoke, Stan and some of the others had come up as well. Les actually had a hell of a sense of humor, but you'd never know it until you'd been around him awhile. His way with a joke was to get other people to laugh till their sides hurt without ever cracking a smile himself. So, did he ask if I was alright? Nah. What he said was, "Well, don't just sit there, boy. Go catch yer horses.”

     One day when the harvest was nearly over, Mom came out to the ranch to visit Darrell and me. We showed her around, trying our best to act like old hands. We'd walked her out to the pasture to introduce her to the horses, and were back in the barn showing her the harness and other tack and how we did this and how we did that. There was a steel grey horse in a box stall at the end of the barn. We knew little about it, except that it was a stud colt. He was as big as a good sized saddle horse, because he came from larger draft stock, like Pete and Bill. But they were gelded, and the colt wasn't, which explained why he was so full of beans. 

     Les came into the barn and went to the colt's box stall. We walked over and introduced Mom to him. The colt was loose in the stall, which was large enough for him to range around and bump the sides and stamp, even rearing back on his hind legs and pawing the air like Roy Rogers had his horse Trigger do in the movies. Pure male, pure power. Les spoke to me, all business: "Dean, take this halter and get in there and put it on that horse and tie him up to that ring in the corner post, while I go get my farrier's tools. I got to work on his hooves." He turned and left the barn.

     I quartered an apple with my pocket knife and took the halter and stepped between the rails of the stall. The horse reared back on his haunches and pawed the air and stamped the ground and laid his ears back and whinnied loud. "Son, are you sure...?" Mom sounded worried. But sons, of course, delight in worrying their moms, and in going ahead with what worries them even when the sons themselves realize that what they're doing is stupid. Besides, I couldn't back down from something Les had told me to do. "It's all right, Mom," I said, expressing more confidence than I felt. 

     I moved slowly. "Hoa," I said in as steady a voice as I could muster, wishing my voice would hurry up and change so I could make that deep, calming, almost crooning sound the older men made when they walked up to a horse. "Hoa, boy." I kept talking, slow and easy. I don't know if it was the apples or my voice, but he settled down some. He let me approach, feed him one slice and stroke his nose  "Slo-ow now, easy, easy, fella"  and his neck and shoulder. I raised the halter and got my arm around his neck. He threw his head, lifting me off the ground like some toy human. I talked him down again and gave him another piece of apple and used another to back him into a corner of the stall with me at his head and fed him the last of the apple and while he was chewing it I slipped the halter over his nose and up over his ears and reached under his throat and buckled it. 

        All the while he fidgeted, knocking me about with his head. I turned him around and walked over and got one end of the rope through the snubbing ring in the corner, then used its mechanical advantage to take up whatever slack I could every time he moved his head. Now when he threw his head the rope jerked hard against the steel ring, and the halter strap cut into the back of his neck. He'd let off, and I'd gain some rope. We repeated that dance until I had him snubbed up in the corner with two half hitches.    

     I was stepping out between the slats of the stall, carefully out of range of the colt's rear hooves, when Les came back into the barn carrying his rasp and nippers. He leaned over the top rail and looked at how the colt was tied in the corner. 

     He actually showed surprise. "Goddamn, boy. Don't you know that horse ain't even broke?" His little joke, which I hadn't gotten at the time, was supposed to have been that I would get in the stall, and the colt would rear and snort and terrify me into climbing back out in a hurry. I guess he'd forgotten what a boy will do when a man has challenged him, or when his mother is watching.

Darrell and I had never worked so hard in our young lives, but we hated to see the haying season end. A few days before we finished, Les had put me up on the Johnny Popper - the one with the hand clutch that you leaned way forward with a dramatic motion to engage -  and turned me loose bucking the hay that Darrell and I had bunched with the dump rakes. Was I something! 

     Then the hay was all up, and Darrell and I had to get our stuff from the bunkhouse and put it in the old blue Studebaker. Les came around and asked if I wanted to ride fence for a while on some pasture land he had out on the Virtue Flats sagebrush country on the other side of Baker.

     Was he kidding? Ride fence? On a horse? A saddle horse?! Mom! Please, Mom! M-A-A-A-M! I must have sounded like a scared lamb.

     It wasn't to be. It was late August; she had to be back to work in Klamath Falls, and Darrell and I had to start school. We left Baker, unhappy to go but thrilled at what we'd done that summer. Wait'll we told the other kids some of the stuff we'd heard in that bunkhouse. I still remember one verse the older boys sang to the tune of "The Old Chisolm Trail":

          Last time I seen 'er,

          ain't seen 'er since,

          she was jackin' off a nigger

          through a bobwire fence,

          gonna tie my pecker to a tree, to a tree,

          gonna tie my pecker to a tree.

     We stopped at a gas station to fill up for the drive home. Mom asked me to pay for the gas. Huh? I said. Darrell and I were rolling in dough: three dollars apiece for every day of the haying season – about eighteen days - and we'd had no time to spend any of it. We'd never had close to that much money in our lives.

     "Son, that's all the money we have," she said. In fact, she needed for both of us to give her all we'd earned, until she got us back home and got back to work herself. She was sorry, but that was just the only way. 

     We gave her all our money. We knew she was sorry, and that she wouldn't lie to us and just take our money for herself. She said she'd try to save us a little spending money out of it.    

Canal

     I’d just turned 15. We had moved across town to a little rented house on Coli Avenue, a dirt street one block long overlooking Klamath Lake. It was just the three of us again; Mom had divorced Bill Gano before we left the project, as she would later do with her fourth and fifth husbands.

     When it was time to get a haircut, I'd take a bus across town to my favorite barber shop near the project. It was at the far end of a bridge across the big irrigation canal that ran through town. 

     People were always drowning, or nearly drowning, in that canal. It was wide and deep and its banks were steep and hard to climb out of, not like most river banks. It was late winter the time I went for this haircut; the water was muddy and thin ice lined its edges. Everyone knew that old cars and other junk lined its bottom, ready to snag any kids brash enough to ignore their parents' warnings. Of all the stupid things we did in those days, I never knew anyone who swam in that canal except this one person, this day.

     The barbers were three older men. I liked them, and the place, and the customers. It was a man's place, where boys were welcome. Stories were told: fish stories, hunting stories, work stories, war stories, brokendown pickup stories, stories about women. They kept it pretty clean when kids were in the shop, but had a way of telling one another what they had to tell without coming right out with the fourletter words. Not too many, anyway. It was: Here, boy, here's your peek behind the green door. But if your mom asks, we didn't say anything that bad. 

     I was sitting in the chair with about half my head cut when a woman burst into the shop, gasping "There's a woman in the canal, she's goin' under!" 

     We all ran out. A crowd was gathering on the bridge, pointing downstream and towards the levy that formed the opposite bank. Some of us from the shop ran across the bridge and down the road that formed the top of the levy. Everyone was pointing and jabbering, but no one was going down the bank. Before I knew what was happening, Claude, the barber who’d been cutting my hair, and I were out front. Then I was down the bank, trying to reach the woman as she drifted past, and trying to keep myself on the bank by grabbing at tufts of grass. She was too far out, and the grass didn't hold. 

     I turned, looked up the bank. "Gimme somethin' to reach...." But nothing came: no rope, no 2x4, no long stick.

     The next thing I saw is what I will remember for the rest of my life. I saw the way the people had arranged themselves, the way their line of faces welled in my vision as I looked up, my feet down at the waterline, beseeching them for help.

     Most of the people were back on the bridge, standing safely behind the rail, pointing excitedly, not moving to help. They were watching something happen to someone else, like spectators at a ball game. Others scurried about on top of the levy, talking with adrenalinejerked movements about what was happening, what should be done, looking for something I could use to reach the woman.

     And there was Claude, the kindly, slightly overweight, nearly bald barber in his late fifties or sixties who'd been cutting my hair. He was just over the cusp of the bank, holding the hand of someone above him, holding my hand with his other. My feet were in the water. The universe, which had been wheeling, slowed wonderfully, narrowed, focused. The next time I would have that feeling would be eight years later, in a Vietnamese village named Tho An. 

     I looked at Claude. Up to that instant, it had seemed that each time my eyes met a face in my desperate search for help, that face had simply rejected my gaze, thrown it back at me. But now as I looked up at him, he looked back in a way that was different from everyone else on the canal. My vision took on a cinematographic effect: everything to either side of us, especially all the other useless faces, became blurry. His face came into sharp focus in front of mine, and seemed to move closer than the two armlengths still between us. It seemed inches away. He spoke calmly. His meaning was transmitted more by the way his eyes looked into mine than by his words, which were: "There's only you and me. I'd go in, but I got a bad heart. I'd be dead as soon as I hit that water." Then he just looked into my eyes. At that moment I loved Claude for his clarity, and knew that he wasn't lying or making excuses, that he really would have gone in the water if he thought there was a chance of ending up with two live people instead of two dead people. 

     It was good enough for me. I scrambled up the bank, ran along it till I was a few yards downstream from the woman, whose head only now and then broke the surface, and jumped as far out as I could. The water was cold, but I scarcely felt it. I swam out to her. She was too far gone to struggle, which helped. But she was overweight; it felt like trying to tow a waterlogged stump in a dinghy. 

     I got her in to shore. By now there was more help. We horsed her up the bank. I remember thinking how undignified she looked, and hoped she didn't mind how we were handling her. An ambulance came and took her away.                 

     

Somebody gave me a ride home, so I could shuck my wet clothes and dance off the shivers in front of the oil heating stove. I changed into dry clothes and the man who’d brought me took me back to the barber shop and Claude finished cutting my hair. I was the talk of the barbershop, but Claude and I didn't say much. We just looked at each other, feeling a little apart from the others. He didn't charge me for the haircut.

     The woman lived. She never bothered to thank me. She had jumped, not fallen, into the canal. She had mental problems, and apparently had made other attempts at suicide.           

     A good thing I got out of that afternoon was what I learned about time: when it's time to move, don't fuck around. Everybody on the canal that day except Claude and me had milled around in what I considered a deadly mixture of fear and incompetence. Even I had waited too long. As I have relived the experience over the years, one thing jumps out: those few seconds right after an emergency happens are the richest time, the time when a simple, well-directed movement can save lives, can turn the course of events. A fire that can be put out with a shovel and a cool head one moment can become, in a minute, a huge and killing thing. What will seem recklessness to some can actually be the safest thing to do, to snuggle right up to the danger, to seize the situation in its early seconds and turn it towards life and away from death.

SUNSET OVER KLAMATH LAKE

Sunset Over Klamath Lake

     Coli Avenue was a dirt street two blocks long. (Thirty years later, it still was.) Our house sat on a knoll between the highway's north entrance to Klamath Falls and the southern end of Klamath Lake. The Cascade Range rose against the sky beyond the lake to the west.     

     One day in 1960 I walked to the mailbox and took out a form letter addressed to me from the Veterans' Administration saying my father was dead. I read it standing by the mailbox. It didn't seem to affect me much at the time. I was seventeen; I'd last seen him when I was eight. 

     One evening after the VA letter came I went behind the house and stood on the knoll and looked out over the lake. It was sunset. The Cascades were an uneven indigo line against the western sky; Mt. McLaughlin still had snow draped around its shoulders. Wind moved clouds around the sky above the mountains; the sun's afterglow played with shades of red, palest pink to crimson of arterial blood, even on to purple. There was enough rain about to punctuate the burning clouds with strokes of grey. 

     The pulsating sky sent tremors through me. An electric arc seemed to jump between my past and future, not distant in time but perhaps in place. The sky seemed to be a signal from that future, a call to go places and do things. It thrilled and frightened me. I couldn't wait to get there. 

     Years later, studying Russian, I would learn the word toská which means, primarily, longing. It combines longing for something one is separated from with sadness at the separation. It can be a longing for something which once was but can never be again, or something desired for the future but which one knows can never be. 

     Now, on the rare occasion when I encounter the word toská, I remember the evening I stood looking across Klamath Lake at the sunset over the Cascades. I also remember how short was the time between that evening of longing and my arrival on the far side of the world in situations far less beautiful, far less calm, far more violent.