HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS 1968 (3)
Traveling with Julian Manyon/Pakse/Nicholas Lawrence Lieuw of
Kotakinabalu, Borneo/Saravane/Air America/Pakse airstrip/Jeep caught
us/Colonel and General/USAID and American girls/IR8,IR5 rice/hitching on a rice truck
Manyon and I
got along pretty well, but were a ways from being soulmates. I was
astonished at his physical weakness, and, in my typically intolerant
fashion, more than a little put out by having to help him hoist his pack
to the top of a bus, or even to push him up over the side rails and
into the back of a truck. Ours was a pragmatic arrangement: I had a
strong back and military experience; he spoke French.
Kracheh
was the end of the line for the riverboat; from there we took a series
of rural buses, and hitched the odd ride with truck drivers. That got us
as far as Stung Treng, the last sizable town in northern Cambodia. From
there, we hitched a ride with two merchants in their jeeps to the
Laotian border.
Pakse was our first Laotian town. It lay on the
east bank of the Mekong at the end of a hectic four hour ride in a tiny
bus over a road periodically interdicted by bridges which had been
hastily blown by the Pathet Lao (cousins to the west of the Viet Cong)
and just as hastily repaired by government road gangs spending money
furnished them by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
I remember Pakse for a couple of reasons, the first of
which was a very good, if not overly clean, Chinese restaurant where
Manyon and I stuffed ourselves on sweet and sour pork, shrimp, steamed
rice, fried rice, salad, and beer for less than a dollar each. We talked
about Chinese expatriots around the world, how there is a remarkable
consistency about the way they move into a place with hardly a
possession, and manage to set up some kind of business by means of which
they transform wretchedness into dignity. Often when success comes to
them, it is at the expense of the less ambitious Vietnamese or
Cambodians or Laotians around them, so they form islands of Chinese
society in indifferent or hostile seas; they draw into themselves,
endure the envious stares of the locals, and await a friendlier day. As
we spoke of this, I remembered Nicholas Lawrence Lieuw, a Chinese
Catholic from Kotakinabalu, Borneo, and how he had been able to converse
in Mandarin with the restaurateurs in Phnom Penh, and how that was the
only time I saw a spark of emotion in the one old man's face - the one
who ran the restaurant at the Hotel Mondial - during the time I was in
that city. He and the other waiters in the place seemed to get along
with the Cambodians, but it was more like respectful tolerance of
customers than real warmth.
In Kotakinabalu, Lieuw worked as a
travel agent. He was on an extended Asian vacation, a benefit of his
job. His main interest seemed to be to sample the women in the brothels
of each city he visited.
For Manyon and me, Pakse was the
location of our first contacts with the American and Royal Laotian
Government establishments. We began looking for evidence of secret air
operations. If American pilots actually were conducting military
operations, this would be a violation of the 1962 Geneva accords on
Laos, which stipulated that Laotian soil be neutral, and that the
presence of foreign military personnel was prohibited. The U.S. was a
signatory. Of course, the thousands of North Vietnamese troops
infiltrating through Laos into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh trail
would be illegal as well.
From the beginning, our trip
through Laos was a series of experiences which were so contradictory
that we began to get a feeling of otherworldliness about the place and
about the war that was supposedly going on there. We had as yet seen
nothing to confirm the presence of an actual shooting war, except for
the blown-and-repaired bridges we had crossed and the well guarded
checkpoints we had passed through on the road up from Cambodia.
One afternoon Manyon had a long talk with an old Laotian doctor in
Pakse. He asked the doctor if there was really any fighting going on in
the country, and was informed that there was at that moment a fierce
battle in progress at Saravane, about fifty air miles northeast of Pakse
toward where the Ho Chi Minh Trail snaked through the eastern part of
the country on its way into the northern provinces of South Vietnam.
Apparently the RLG (Royal Laotian Government) garrison was completely
surrounded and in imminent danger of being overrun. The doctor also said
that there were many American aircraft, including fighters, flying in
and out of the place. He said that some of the airplanes were marked
"Air America," an ostensibly civilian aviation company contracted to
USAID in Vietnam and Laos which some Americans in that part of the world
admitted off the record to be a CIA front.
We had heard
that there was an airstrip outside Pakse where such flights might be
originating, so we took a shuttle taxi out the highway and got off at
the first of two gates to the airfield. We knew that the hangars and
office buildings were near the other gate, but wanted an excuse to
wander along the airstrip and take a look at some of the hardware of the
Royal Laotian Air Force and its American "civilian" benefactors.
The Laotian fighters were T28's, an earlier model of the A1
Skyraider with which the U.S. had outfitted the South Vietnamese Air
Force. Some were marked with the threeheaded elephant (actually four,
when seen in three dimensions) which was the seal of the government, and
some were unmarked. There were only a few American aircraft around;
most were C123 cargo planes used widely by the U.S. Air Force and Marine
Corps in Vietnam. It is originally a military aircraft; the ones we saw
in Laos were all plain silver and identified only by the words "Air
America" stenciled in very small black letters under the wings, and by
equally small black numbers on their tails.
No one
accosted us before we got to the hangar area, so we looked around for
some Americans to talk to, and encountered another strange phenomenon of
the "forgotten war": the Americans received us with a coolness which
bordered on hostility, which seemed to deepen as they noticed our ages,
as they found out that we were college students, and particularly when
we told them we were journalists. It is customary for countrymen who
cross paths in out of the way places to greet one another at least
civilly, but this almost never happened to us in Laos. It was a strange
feeling, after spending several days without seeing a Caucasian, to pass
on the street some cleancut type in civilian clothes, of stern
demeanor, who is obviously an American, who just as obviously recognizes
you as being an American, and who then averts his glance and passes
without a nod.
In the office building there were a
switchboard operator and a couple of pilots in civilian clothes who were
about to leave for the day. They were carrying flight helmets and flak
jackets, and were not particularly anxious to sit and chat with us. We
asked them if they had any aircraft going out to the area of Saravane
where the fighting was going on, and if so, could we catch a ride?
The answers were short and polite: Air America didn't carry
unauthorized passengers; besides, there were no aircraft going out to
the area of Saravane because nothing was happening there. There hadn't
been any fighting anywhere around for months because of the rainy
season. (We knew better: that was when VC and NVA mounted many attacks
because it limited the effectiveness and range of their enemies' air
support.)
We walked back along the flight line toward the gate
where we had entered. Since we were unsatisfied with the information we
had been given, Manyon and I decided to see if the Americans at Pakse
were as much on the up-and-up as they would have us believe. If they
weren't doing anything to be touchy about, they shouldn't mind if we
took a few pictures of their little ol' unmarked airplanes....
The jeep caught us at the far end of the flight line. There was a
Laotian Brigadier General in the passenger seat and a U.S. Army
Lieutenant Colonel, in full dress green uniform, in the back seat. The
driver pulled up alongside us and skidded the jeep to a stop. The
Colonel was excited.
"Hey, who the hell are you?" he yelled from the back seat.
"Oh, hello, Colonel. We're student journalists. He's British, and I'm American. We were just...."
"I saw what you were doing. You were taking pictures, weren't you?"
"Yeah. What's wrong with that?"
The guy couldn't believe his eyes and ears. I had on a pair of
faded, dirty Levi's, an old cowboy shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and
a few days' growth of beard; Manyon looked like a London street urchin.
And we called ourselves journalists.
"Well, there's nothing
secret about them or anything, but you're just not supposed to take
pictures on the flight line, any flight line. It's just military
security. You guys got any identification?"
We showed him
our press credentials from Saigon, which he did not recognize, but which
were obviously legitimate. He cooled off a little. We acted dumb, and
that fools most American army officers, including this one. He showed
our press cards to the General and spoke to him in Lao. Then he asked us
just what sort of story we were after, and we replied that we had
thought it would be interesting to do a feature story on the Royal
Laotian Air Force for the students back home who seldom get to hear
about this sort of thing, and did he have any suggestions?
"I think you'd better go see the head of USAID," he said. "This is highly irregular."
He spoke again to the General and the General got out of the jeep
and the Colonel climbed out and let us into the back seat and then got
into the General's seat, and we drove off leaving the General standing
at the end of the flight line.
The two secretaries at the USAID
office were American girls about my age, fine-looking to two of us just
in from the wilderness, but about as friendly as the Colonel and the
pilots had been. They gave us coffee and we waited for the official who
was the local head of USAID.
When he came in we could
tell that the Colonel had spoken to him at some length about us, because
he looked us up and down carefully, and because he already knew all
about the business at the airstrip. But we did the harmless act again
and started asking about rural development and about how the new IR8 and
IR5(
) rice strains were doing in Laos, and he loosened up somewhat
and began to answer questions. We got around to asking him if there
were any way he could help us with transportation as we went about our
research, and he got careful again and said that we'd have to go to
Vientiane, the capital, and talk to the press officer at the embassy
there. He emphasized that this was a requirement, not a request; and
that the press officer would be expecting us.
It was about
noon when we got our packs from the hotel room. (This is how we lived in
Laos: a cheap hotel room would be 600 or 700 kips at 500 to the dollar
so since Manyon had more money than I, he'd pay 500 and sleep on the
bed, and I'd pay 200 and sleep on the floor. He hated discomfort; I was
more worried about food.) We took a taxi out of town a ways and caught a
ride on a rice truck.
It was a jolly ride, sitting atop
the load of rice bags as we passed primitive frontier outposts where a
soldier and his family, living in a pole shack at the end of a bridge,
would be its only security. Several of the bridges were recently blown,
and we'd have to leave the road and drive through the woods until we
came to a ford. It was all the same to the driver; he'd bounce along
through the trees until he got back on the main road, then drive like
hell for the next crossing.
The mood of the countryside began
to change. There were more outposts, with more barbed wire and
revetments, and more soldiers with weapons more in evidence.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Sunday, July 6, 2014
HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS (1)
 |
another of Jim's and my house mates at Colorado College, Michael Taylor, offered to coach me in basic photography skills, about which I knew basically nothing. I bought an old second hand Japanese camera and a hand held light meter. I had my start as a photo journalist at the height of the Vietnam War. Or so I thought.
Through most of that trip in Cambodia and Laos, I traveled with a young British student named Julian Manyon. Though Prince Norodom Sihanouk didn't allow American journalists to work in the country, Manyon and I both had told his countrymen in Saigon that we were just students on vacation (which, from the look of us, was apparently believable). Julian did the talking for both of us, and we both left the British Consulate in Saigon with tourist visas to enter Cambodia.
We started on a large riverboat at Phnom Penh, and moved downstream on the Tonle Sap River. The deck was crowded with people who carried baskets of food and extra clothing and bedrolls. And children. Some were also peddlers who sold fruit and bread to other passengers. We slept on the deck, with whatever of our clothing we could fluff out to cover ourselves. Most of the Cambodians were better prepared, but it didn't matter much because the boat was long, and wide enough for several people to sleep abreast. Most of the deck was covered by a canopy of thatch. Besides, it was a warm night and didn't rain. I decided it sure as hell beat sleeping on the steel plate deck of the
USS Pickaway in the South China Sea three years before with a lot of smelly, snoring grunts. Like me. I rolled up in my military surplus poncho, and let the low growl of the riverboat's
engine lull me to sleep.
The Tonle Sap widened as it flowed downstream until it merged with the great Mekong. Some passengers walked down the wide plank and got off the riverboat. Others climbed aboard with a great rustling of baskets, bedrolls, and sleeping mats, all amidst a chorus of calls to children and other family. The time came for the river to diverge from the highway that runs north into Laos. We took buses where they were available; we hitched rides on trucks otherwise. This was where I started getting grumpy about Julian's physical weakness, when I had to hoist both our packs to the top of a bus or truck when there was no more space space for such things inside. I grumbled, but mostly kept my mouth shut. He was fluent in French, which we needed every day, whereas my college level Spanish and Russian were useless. I don't suppose either of us was ever completely at ease hitch-hiking through Cambodia (and later in Laos) in 1968 with the presence of the war around us every day, but we never found ourselves actually in a place where a firefight was in progress. I at least already had one war under my belt, so to speak, and his French was indispensable. We needed each other.
It was after dark when we pulled out of Stung Treng, the last town in northern Cambodia, and headed north towards Laos. Sometime around midnight of a night in June, Manyon and I caught a ride with
two Laotian rug merchants headed for the Laotian border with newly purchased rugs draped over the cabs of their Jeeps. I rode on the hood of one jeep; Manyon rode inside the other one with the driver.
The old Indo-Chinese colonial road was one lane of macadam through the jungle that arched over the ribbon of blacktop from both sides. Some sequential cacophony kept pace with us, again on both sides. I finally decided it was a wave of monkey calls undulating through the jungle abreast of us, sounding the alarm (or greeting) to their relatives ahead of us. But who knows? I'd never been there before.
Click here to continue reading HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS (2)
Saturday, July 5, 2014
HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS (2)
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)...
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
This is to invite readers of my memoir, RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: An American Warrior's Story, and/or readers of my poetry; and people interested in my next book, "A Veteran's Dreams."
Please join my new group of people interested in my writing, which will include Rattlesnake Dreams, many of my poems, and the new book, "A Veteran's Dreams."
https://www.facebook.com/groups/655830691152472/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/655830691152472/
Saturday, January 4, 2014
TWO SERGEANTS
TWO SERGEANTS
Sergeant Vance
Sergeant Vance was a recruiting poster Marine, a redhead who wore his hair so short that what little was left blended with his skin, leaving the impression when he wore his Smokey the Bear drill instructor's hat that he had no hair at all. Can't get any neater than that.
He had stood some serious sentry duty. One day he was instructing us on how Marines went about doing this. He told us of having a prestige assignment in Washington, DC, where he'd been posted at gates and doorways used by high - ranking government officials to attend important meetings. There was this high muckety-muck conference, he said. It was more important than usual, and it was even more important that no one but people with this certain pass be allowed to enter. Some would try, he was told. They might even be legitimate government officials. They might try to pull rank on you. But if they don't have this pass, you stop them, period.
Vance was put on the gate because his appearance was always impeccable and because he could be counted on to follow orders and to not be intimidated by powerful people trying to go where they didn't belong. Sure enough, here came this long black limousine, with the driver in a black suit and tie, and a very authoritative-looking older gentleman in the back seat, dressed in a tuxedo. Sgt Vance thought he recognized him from news photos, but wasn't sure. He didn't spend a lot of time with newspapers.
The driver stopped at Vance's guard shack and rolled down his window. Vance asked for the pass. The driver said he didn't have one, but it was okay because his passenger was Senator So-and-so, whom everybody knew. Vance told him he was sorry, sir, but his orders were not to allow anyone to enter without a pass. The senator rolled down his back window and spoke to Vance, saying he was in a hurry and indeed had a pass but had forgotten it and didn't have time to return for it, or he'd miss this very important meeting.
Vance said, "Sorry, sir. No pass, no entry."
The senator had had enough of having his authority usurped by a lowly Marine Sergeant. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to drive on through the gate.
The driver barely had the limousine in gear when Vance's .45 service pistol was out of its holster, he'd jacked back the slide and chambered a round, and touched the pistol's muzzle lightly against the driver's temple.
"You move this car one inch, and I'll kill you," he said softly.
The driver and the Senator both turned pale. The limousine turned around and left. The senator squawked like hell, and tried to get Vance busted. His commanding officer said he'd done the right thing, and quietly transferred him to another unit.
When Vance had finished his story, one of the recruits raised his hand. Vance nodded: "Yes, Private?"
"Sir, would you have shot him, Sir?"
Vance looked the kid in the eye, letting the tension in the Quonset hut build as if he were conscious of only that one recruit and not the other seventy of us who fretted around the edges of the seconds he waited to speak.
"Yes," he said quietly, with a slight shrug. "And so will you, if those are your orders. The point, Privates, is this: nobody gets by a Marine sentry who's not supposed to."
Gunny Rogers 2: The Most Powerful Weapon
We were on the platoon street between the tents that were our billets at Camp Matthews, sitting on our upended buckets cleaning rifles. Each of us had a towel which had been designated part of our rifle cleaning gear spread out between his feet in front of the bucket. M14 rifle parts were laid out on the towels. Toothbrushes scraped blued steel. Hoppe's #9 solvent crowded other smells from the air.
Gunny Rogers was supervising. He stood quietly, looking us over. Of our five drill instructors, he was the one who really took it upon himself to disabuse us of the romance so often tagged onto war stories, to forge us into warriors. One phrase we heard from him often was "Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die." That was what we were here for, he said. Kill or die. And since some of the people we'd be going up against were very good killers on their own, and wanted to stay alive at least as much as we did, we had to be better at killing than they were, or each of us - or, what would be worse, the comrades who depended on us - could die. And that would be against Marine Corps regulations. Sometimes he would paraphrase General Patton, who was the only Army general who was ever worth a shit, as far as Marines were concerned: Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to make that other poor sonofabitch die for his country.
"Listen up," Gunny said. Buckets and boots scraped; rifle bolts and operating rods clinked onto towels. Silence.
He waited a long time to speak, looking up and down the rows of us, letting us look at him. That was his signal that what he was about to say was important, real Marine Corps "straight scoop" rather than "petty shit," and we had goddamned well better pay attention. He didn't raise his voice. Once in a while he would bellow, but more often he would let his medals and scars and combat record and personal charisma - the whole totemic package of his stature as a warrior among warriors - speak for him. At such times he would speak softly, and we would lean forward and scoop up his words like a dying man just arrived at a desert oasis scoops water, which was what he intended.
It came as a question. "What is the most powerful weapon in the world?" he asked softly. It was repeated in urgent whispers to recruits at the ends of the formation who hadn't heard. Necks craned; glances danced.
It was always better to avoid answering a question unless you were sure of the answer. These were the times when abuse and extra duty were handed out if you guessed wrong. But this was an easy one; the answer was obvious. A recruit raised his hand. "Yes, Private," the Gunny recognized him. The kid stood to attention. "Sir! The most powerful weapon in the world is the atomic bomb, sir!"
Gunny waited another of his long pauses, paced slowly, shaking his Smokey the Bear campaign-hatted head in an expression that was intended to come across to us as a mixture of profound disappointment and disgust. How could they ever expect him to make Marines of such imbeciles, his body language said.
He turned and faced us. His face would have made the four on Mount Rushmore look like a bunch of wimps: car salesmen, or the like.
"B-u-l-l-s-h-i-t." The word rolled out like far-off thunder. We looked at each other in puzzlement. My mind flipped through everything I knew, looking for the answer he wanted. One of two guys in the platoon with some college behind me, I had actually read quite a few books. Aha, I thought. He must mean the hydrogen bomb. I was about to raise my hand when Gunny gave the correct answer, parsing out his words: "The most powerful... weapon...in the world...is a Marine...and his rifle."
Pause.
"Think about it. Carry on, Privates."
Each of us, squatted there on his bucket, bore a look on his face of perfect astonishment. We looked at one another, whispered. "Gaww-awwd damn!" Delighted grins appeared as we went back to cleaning our rifles.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
TUMALO
Tumalo
I hitched a ride eastbound in central Oregon. Maybe I’d go visit my aunt Bessie and uncle Lank in Baker. Mostly, I just wanted to breathe the thin, dry air that had felt so right to me as a boy and younger man. Unspoken, and perhaps unthought, was also the desire to touch and feel something which I had known before the war as clean and beautiful and…normal, and healthy. Every day in grad school, and too many of the nights during and following the weeks of preparation for my lecture on the politico-military writings of Mao Tse-tung and Vo Nguyen Giap, had wrapped the war back around me like a bloodsoaked blanket.
I was broke, but had a little food in my pack: oatmeal – my grad student’s stay-alive staple - and some brown sugar and dried milk to mix with it, and coffee. I lived from campground to campground. Fine with me: I was back in Oregon.
Settled in the back of a rancher’s pickup, I was watching the juniper, sage, and Ponderosa pine flit past, when I saw a small road sign with an arrow pointing down a gravel road to Fish Lake.
Fish Lake! I squirmed around and thumped the top of the pickup’s cab, told the driver I wanted to camp here, and lowered my pack to the ground and thanked him as he rolled to a stop.
It was the same Fish Lake where Mom and Bill Gano and Darrell and I and Bessie and Lank had spent a weekend fishing for bullheads, when Darrell and I were still young kids, a few years ago. A lifetime ago. I carried my pack, and the cheap guitar in its gig bag which I’d bought in San Francisco, and settled into a campsite with a picnic table and fire ring near the water’s edge.
The next day a young couple with a daughter 2 or 3 years old drove up and settled into the campsite next to mine. As dusk turned to dark and the family were setting up camp, the man walked into the sphere of light from my fire. “My name’s Jack,” he said, holding out his hand. Jack and Gloria and their baby daughter, Christiann, and I hit it off pretty well and sort of became a little tribal unit. I was good at scrounging firewood, and with the camping stuff they’d brought in their old Chevy, our two campsites became a homey little village. Even my inexpert guitar-thumping seemed somehow right in that time and place. I started writing a little song:
All these green rivers
are followin’ me
trying to carry me
home to the sea…
The next day, Jack and Gloria asked if I wanted to move with them to a favorite campsite back to the west, closer to Bend. It felt good hanging out with them, and the move would put me closer to the coast. I needed work in order to eat, and had been seduced by rumors of the good money to be earned crewing on albacore boats off the coast. So I gladly joined their family troupe.
Tumalo Creek was somewhat more than a quiet mountain stream when we got there. Its steep gradient at that point in the foothills of the Cascade range, and the June snowmelt which was then at its heaviest, combined to make Tumalo a roaring, tumultuous river when we unloaded the car and made camp on its southern bank. It was beautiful. Little Christiann played nearby in the woods between our campsite and the riverbank as we set up camp. Jack and Gloria kept watchful eyes on her, lest she go too near the water, but seemed to have reached a parental agreement not to discipline their child harshly: “Christiann, be careful now. It’s not safe near the water.”
Our shared campsite was in pretty good shape by dark, and we made a meal together. I roamed the woods bringing in dry twigs for kindling, and larger limbs to hold the fire into the night, while Gloria and Jack busied themselves cooking and Christiann darted happily around all of us.
By late the next morning we had settled comfortably into life in our “homestead.” Christiann was playing as if she’d grown up there, and Jack and Gloria and I were relaxing in the June sun…
“Jack! Where’s Christi?!! We all ran to the water’s edge – not there – and searched quickly among the trees nearby. Not there either. “If she’s in the water, we have to get her NOW,” I said sharply, my veteran’s instincts telling me that the child’s life was, in these few seconds, in the balance.
I ran a few yards downstream and jumped in, close to the bank: if she were trapped under the bank, there was still a chance… the unforgiving current, only recently melted off the shoulders of the mountains immediately above us, was pure ice water. And its strength! - the current yanked me sideways with a power I hadn’t imagined, even after looking at and listening to it up close for a day. It was impossible to straighten my legs enough even to touch the bottom, three or four feet deep. I tried for a while to grope under the bank, hoping I would touch something soft. But no: everything was cold, rough, and moving violently. My situation changed: having at first thought only of getting to Christiann in time, I now realized that Tumalo Creek could easily kill more than one person in these few minutes. The bank blurred past. Jack and Gloria were already out of sight upstream. The current was too powerful for me to search in it. I reached for something on the bank strong enough to hold me as I climbed out. My first two tries yielded handfuls of gravel and broken sticks. Then I grabbed with my right hand onto the root of a large tree that grew back from the water’s edge. The current yanked me violently downstream, my grip held – I now realized I was holding on for my life – and my momentum flopped me up onto the bank like a large, terrified fish.
Jack went for help while Gloria and I kept searching the nearby woods, shouting often, “Christiann…Christiann!” and listening after our shouts for any timid, or playful, or pained, reply. We heard only birds and squirrels.
Jack came back with an old man who lived with his wife in a cabin near the bridge which crossed Tumalo Creek nearby. His name was Bob Hendrickson. He seemed a very level-headed man, and knew the surrounding area because it was National Forest, and made his living partly in those woods, cutting and hauling dead timber and selling it for firewood. He said we needed more help, and hurried back to his cabin to phone the Sheriff’s Office. They would put together a search party.
Vehicles and people began to appear. Deputies’ wives and neighborhood women who lived along the river, and those of their husbands who weren’t working that afternoon, or could get off, organized themselves into a search party. Women brought potato and macaroni salads and set up propane stoves to prepare hot dishes for the searchers. They’d all done this before.
In a short time – it was still early afternoon – Deschutes County was mobilized in a way that rural Americans have always done, with people stepping into a breach when one of their own is in serious trouble. This time, it was a two and a half year old girl. No questions asked.
County agencies organized around their leaders. Smoke jumpers arrived from their base near Redmond, a few miles away from the county seat at Bend. Men who were accustomed to being in charge took charge, organizing all of us into search details, communications details, and groups to feed all of us.
All except Jack, Christiann’s father. The head of the local Search and Rescue unit had instructed Gloria to stay at our campsite, which became base camp for the search. If Christiann was found by any of the searchers, she would immediately be brought to her mother at our campsite, which had also blossomed into a paramedics’ station.
But Jack had become useless. Gloria quietly let us know that Jack had previously had a drug problem, had been recovering pretty well, but also kept some pills on hand. She told us, her face a tortured mixture of worry for her child and worry and shame about her child’s father – they weren’t married – that as soon as Jack returned with Bob Hendrickson and the search began to get organized, Jack had taken some pills. Quite a few of them, she said. She called them “reds.”
I joined the search. Jack was flaked out on his sleeping bag, barely conscious, not speaking. At first the search leaders thought I was the father, because I was trying to be part of the effort, and was obviously worried. Gloria and I finally made it clear that I had known them only two days, that Christiann’s father was the man lying on his sleeping bag, seemingly incapable of speech. Eyes searched Gloria’s face and mine, and the camp scene. Shadows crossed all our faces as glances and stares first probed, then were averted.
A team of divers had been called in as soon as the search was organized. One man equipped with wet suit, a belt of lead weights, and rubber boots sealed at their tops, entered the rampaging creek tied to a safety line with one of his teammates holding the other end of the line around his hips and following along on the creekbank.
That effort lasted only a few minutes. The water was too swift, even for a man so equipped, to actually search the creek bottom and under the banks. As the divers conferred with the Search and Rescue leaders, the reality of the situation showed itself: they were now searching for a body, not a live child; and any person, however well trained and equipped, who tried to work in the stream was in immediate danger of losing his own life. The calculus was unavoidable: the risk of losing a second life was not worth the chance of finding a corpse – not even the corpse of a young child. The dive team packed up and left, saying they’d return when the water lowered. The rest of us continued searching the woods.
We searched all night, shouting “Christiann! If you hear me, make some noise, please… Christiann!” Our shouts into the darkness took on a pleading tone, as if all of us were begging God to send some alternate message besides the one that was forcing its truth upon us. During one of my return trips to the campsite during the pre-dawn hours, when I grabbed something to eat before heading back out into the woods, the Sheriff’s deputy who was head of Search and Rescue also appeared at our campsite. He spoke to Gloria, telling her the news: everyone was still searching, but there had been no sign of Christi: not a thread of clothing… nothing. Not a clue. Then he looked across the campfire at the prostrate Jack, looked at me, looked at Gloria, inhaled sharply, and spoke: “Lady, I’ve never said anything like this before; never had to. But I gotta say it now: You’re with the wrong man.”
Gloria stayed quiet, bending her head lower under this new flood of grief.
Dawn brought a reorganization of the search. But it did not bring Christiann. Jack, who had been essentially unconscious all night, began to stir as noon approached, and even to speak a little in quiet tones to Gloria. He’d recovered enough to move himself around some, and he and I were sitting on opposite sides of Gloria, on one of the heavy timbers which constituted the main structure of the bridge across Tumalo Creek. Bob Hendrickson stood beside us as the head of Search and Rescue approached and knelt in front of Gloria and Jack and me.
He spoke to Gloria: “Ma’am, I’m sorry to have to tell you this. We’ve done all we could do, and there’s just been no sign. Not a thread… nothing. A few people will keep searching the woods in daylight, in case something turns up. But we’re formally calling off the search, as of now. I’m very sorry.”
The news cudgeled Gloria and Jack and me and Bob Hendrickson into a long silence. Then Jack spoke softly to Gloria, using some of those words people sometimes use when there are no words, something like, “She’s at peace now...”
Gloria’s grief erupted: “NO! ..NO!..OH PLEASE GOD NO!” Jack and I were on either side of her, both just lending a shoulder as best we could. It seemed to me then, and I remember it now, 41 years later, that the power of her grief was actually making the bridge tremble beneath us.
I stayed and worked in the woods with Bob Hendrickson for two or three weeks. He taught me how to fall a tree with his chain saw, and I would fall snags and buck them into stove lengths and split them with his maul and wedges and haul them to his cabin until we had a load to take to town and sell. For a while Bob and I kept looking in the underbrush as we worked, on the tiny chance that we’d see a colorful flash of child’s clothing pinned under a tree, but finally giving up as we realized that if we found something, it would be something we did not want to see.
A few weeks later Bob gave me a lift to a highway junction, where I unloaded my pack and guitar, shook hands with the man whose friendship I had earned in sadness, and stuck my thumb out in the wind, hitching toward the coast.
I drifted to Astoria and hung around the docks unloading albacore boats for food money, until I met Dick Mathews on an adjacent barstool in the Mermaid Tavern and he took me aboard the Anna Marie, a fifty-six foot converted purse seiner out of Juneau, Alaska.
Dick couldn't afford to pay me. I worked for meals, figuring that the experience I gained could later get me hired on a different boat for a share of the catch.
The wolf dream had been the war's long arm yanking me out of graduate school. I guess I thought the war would leave me, or I would leave it, if I quit the situation where I spent so much time thinking about why humans went to war. But the war followed me to the boats - not, of course, in any way I would have expected.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
BATHING BEAUTIES (poem)
Bathing
Beauties
Del
Mar Beach,
California
I.
Slipping
sideways under Cinzano umbrellas,
afternoon
sun hammers ice
through
thin walls of tonic glasses,
extruding
beads of lime sweat.
Greased
bodies sizzle,
layed
out along the griddle
that
is the continent’s edge:
so
much sexual bacon.
In
the outdoor shower,
bikinied
teens preen.
At
the steps to the beach,
where
everyone can see,
a
couple stand
so
everyone can see.
He
is tall, blond,
tan,
seventeen.
His
muscles are from play,
for
playing with:
not
from work,
not
for working with.
She
is shorter, blonde,
nubile,
fourteen.
She
wears four small triangles
of
blue cloth.
She
wears her self-assurance
as
if she had already done everything
the
older men under the Cinzano umbrellas
are
wishing they could do with her
and
found it amusing.
She
tosses her hair,
turning
to devour
the
stares
that
are devouring her.
II.
She
is eighty.
She
walks with a cane.
She
has trouble with the sand.
At
the other end of her life,
the
soft girl’s bones of her feet were
broken,
toes bent back under the arch
to
form the desired opening
for
a highborn man’s erection, then bound
to
heal, if that is the right word, into
a
different kind of foot.
They
are still bound,
her
childhood trapped there
like
butterflies pressed
in
a book.
You
can see
she
loves the sun.
She
walks carefully
past
the perfect couple
past
the sizzling Californians
lifting
her withered face
pushing
the cane with withered hands
down
to where the salt foam
washes
her shortened feet,
down
to where one wave’s foam
smoothes
the sand with its coming,
withers
the same sand with its leaving,
the
withered sand a mirror to her skin.
She
lifts her face
smiles
into the sun
smiles
toward the West,
toward
China.
©2012 Dean Metcalf
P.O.
Box 548
Joseph
OR 97846
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)