HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS (2)

You may want to read HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS (1) FIRST.

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)...

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/

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.

                    

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.

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

SAIGON: LA COP

Saigon 

1. LA Cop

    1968: a housemate from Colorado College and I took off the summer between our  junior and senior years, and spent it as student journalists in Vietnam, and in my case, also Cambodia and Laos. Some things from that summer   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 in a shoulder holster. 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. 

SLOW BREEZE HAIKU

Slow breeze, slant light. Shh:

               aspen leaves rub, laugh silver.

                        Sunset. Thoughts of you.

                                    Dean Metcalf