Yes.
Amazing life!
It's a wandering book. Writing as a way of being. It's got juice.
Creative nonfiction. Literary journalism. System analysis. Social autopsy. Global storytelling.
Omar napped. Little Wing wove.
She looked up from threads. Want to take some signal equipment up to our ops at Firebase Lolly?
Sure.
Pick it up at 1000 hrs. Someone will drop you off at the chopper pad. Stay up there two days.
Lolly was a firebase ten miles from Camp Eagle and the 101st. I climbed into a Huey, the door gunner wearing fly goggles gave me the thumbs up, strapped myself in and we lifted off.
Rotors thudded through air fighting gravity lifting off at an angle and forward as the pilot kept the momentum steady, increasing speed out over the perimeter. A winding river reflected sunlight in a gleaming stream. Mountains and hills blended elevations.
The gunner sat over his M-60 staring down and out at the green canopy below us with belts of shiny ammunition feeding into his machine from an open ammo box at his feet. Nestled inside the rounds was a cold unopened can of Bud's beer. Each ammo belt layer resembled a meticulous package wrapped to his exact specifications. He knew if he turned his quiet metal into a chattering signature of death he'd have no jamming worries.
A red mail sack lay in the corner.
I wrapped a faded green scarf around my face in the cold air, sat back and relaxed.
All fire base vegetation had been cleared to the peak. Staggered machine gun placements fortified with sandbags lay submerged inside layers of razor wire wrapped around the hill decorated with claymores.
On top was a small landing pad, commander’s post, miniscule mess hall, hootches and 105mm artillery positions in deep pits surrounded by stacked sandbags. Gunners rotated pieces by degree of slope and calibrated for firing relying on infantry patrol coordinates. Sunburned kids and pot bellied sergeants manned isolated mortar pits.
Fire in the hole, said a chicken fucking a GI.
Firebases allowed artillery support, infantry patrols into jungles and military intelligence was close to Viet Cong traffic patterns.
We set down on a PSP steel-landing zone in a swirl of dust. I got out, grunts heading for the rear climbed on, I gave the door gunner a high sign, turned and lugged the machine to the ops conex.
Ben, the African-American Vietnamese linguist had been there six months and planned to finish his tour at Lolly.
I love this shit, he said opening a can of peaches after we installed his machine. Better than the Eagle routine.
I know what you mean.
He was respected for his ability to decipher and transmit language information. He intercepted and processed good traffic. Grunts regarded him as a magician. They used his information to strike and intercept Cong units, harass them and stay alive in the jungle.
A grunt’s life expectancy was six months. 180 days.
He lived and worked in a small conex buried in the ground near the command post with electronic wings on his sandbagged roof. Wearing headphones in dim light he hunched over radio equipment writing on a sheet of paper. Spinning the dial. Dialects, frequencies, verbal traffic.
He reminded me of a resistance fighter in a film noir. A sewer rat with brains needing excitement content to spend a long year on top of a hill buried in a box.
ART, Adventure, Risk, Transformation
Gonzo journalism. Creative nonfiction. Jazz prose poetry.
Life experience. System analysis and social autopsy.
Genius kid friends share adventures and stories.
This is a flawed masterpiece.
Everything you need to know is in this book.
This work incorporates stories from Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet, Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia and Utopia.
ISBN: 9798859766413
![Book of Amnesia Volume 3 by [Timothy Leonard]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51f7dEEiE6L.jpg)
Ready! yelled a girl off stage.
Camera! said a boy.
Action! said a stunt person named Altman in the role of director.
Where are we going? asked a child named Magic.
Down a road, counseled a tribal elder. A long and dangerous road. A path filled with adventures, steps, stumbles, waterfalls, clogged rivers, blue sky, and heavily mined paths. We will face detours, tales, diversions, cliffs, fragile rope bridges, animal habitats and playful parallel narratives. We will explore rivers, valleys, mountains, passes, and edges of consciousness beyond anything we’ve known or dared to dream.
We'll learn from extraordinary people, explore distant places, smell new fragrances acknowledging our authenticity, said a woman storyteller.
Burmese writer in exile
*
We'll study 26,000 year old paintings carved on stone walls, travel into children’s voices and become old bleached bones of our ancestors, said a child. We'll live in Spanish crypts with names, dates, family histories chiseled in sharp gray mountain rocks that will cut you like a knife. Our blood will coagulate in time’s river.
You will see the word eternity scrawled with ink on a stained white napkin held up to a forty-watt light bulb in Cafe Paradiso by an old toothless man with a knit cap pulled down over his eyes. He will burn this word, said an elder.
Tribal voices spoke.
Think of it as a small sacrifice, an offering, a form of suffering.
The river of life will wake you up, said an elder. You go up river and reach pools. They are as quiet as your mind in deep meditation. No people. Nada. Zip. Zero Homo Sapiens. You are water, stones, vegetation, soft green moss, animal skulls, blue sky, nature and sound. The sound is water. It is soft. It is all you know.
You sit in the middle of everything pure and simple. It is all you will ever need. Water is the first thing an infant needs and the last thing an adult requests. To satisfy thirst for your dying father you will smash ice with tools. You will inhale his death and exhale his life. He was appointed to have you. You selected him to pay for their sins, to accept the responsibility of their life.
You will memorize every silent sound and carry it with you. It is light and very portable. It will divide and multiply its flowing vibration around rocks in the stream. You are a rock and a stream. Amplification of clear water sound is a single bird throated song. Short immediate. It is heavy deep and real. HDR baby.
It will wake you up, as I said. You pay attention. You fly away and we will never see you again. We know where you are and see you’re safe, blessed by the sound, pulse and flow being part of the river. Its magic spirit is strong. It’s flowing through civilizations, its adventure down, down, down. It’s distributing itself along the way. The stream is never ending, never beginning. As above so below.
It is the stream of life.
Listen to the energies. They will swallow you. You will be absorbed into the flow and you will be still. Stones sing with water. They sing their softness, their wildness, purity unimpeded, reflecting deep pools below open shadows. You are the flow.
We move forward. Living in the past is time consuming. Nothing behind. Everything ahead. We pay attention. The road gives us our fate. Fire begins with one ember.
Funny, said a child. Someone along the way said it wasn’t the mountain they thought was difficult but the pebble in their shoe.
True. We will meet people and establish a mutual form of simple heart-mind language.
Is it paved? asked one, this so called road of language?
With good intentions, phrasal verbs, grammar, and simple present continuous obscure contextual meaning, answered one.
I’ll believe it when I see it, said someone in shadows.
Is that a detour sign up ahead? said a forward observer. He was so far forward it scared some of the tribe. He was out there, testing frequency shifts.
They suspected he had a psychic ability to see stuff that hadn’t happened yet and they were at a loss, trying to figure it out. They had to trust him. They released their fear, healthy doubt and uncertainty. It was beyond, well beyond their comprehension. He mumbled things like, You can’t step in the same river twice, sharing stories, histories, legends myths, dreams, and illusions.
Omar, Ahmed, and tribal survivors didn’t know if he just made the stuff up out of sheer boredom or if it was the truth of history. Much to their amazement while others carried a lot of stuff like emotional baggage, fear and genetic uncertainty, he kept it simple.
His pen sketched and scribbled notes. Pencils and colors danced across Moleskine pages. They noticed in their simplicity and sympathy he carried a kid’s watercolor set. He used river streams and tributaries to mix paints. He splashed pigments left, right and center.
He loved making Fibonacci spirals. They couldn’t figure him out with their subjective abstract sense data perception tools so they relied on trust, instinct, blind faith and a crazy thing called love. Love, a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor drove bus #11.
Passion created and destroyed.
They were blessed by their limitations. He used life to create art and used art to criticize life.
Many adults in the tribe being programmed and conditioned cynical skeptics didn’t get it. Indigo kids were clued in to his natural wild mind and trusted him. Implicitly. Their collective language transcended words. There were 6,912 known living languages on Earth and he spoke every one.
He was cognizant a spoken language on the planet perished every two weeks.
We have a huge responsibility here. No language no culture, whispered Ahmed. Culture is what you are and nature is what you can be.
They sang oral traditions.
They experienced seasons, celebrations, ceremonies, rites, and magic.
They created and exchanged clan and tribal myths. Children heard, memorized, chanted, and recited songs of their ancestors.
An eight-car train from Yangon to Mandalay rumbles past. Lonely whistles blow. Ain’t nothing but the blues sweet thing.
Horse cart traps jingle jangle hoof tarmac music, prancing and dancing along dirt paths - On Comet, On Cupid, Dasher and Dancer.
The peripatetic facilitator of English, Courage, Creativity and Fun is here until 12 February on a three teacher team from Mandalay.
He arrived in early December to prepare the English program for 365 G 10 students. Two additional teachers will arrive for one month. He’s here for the duration.
His sleeping room is spacious, light, leaf shadows. He salutes the sun and burning stars every morning through leaves of time.
Food in the family kitchen prepared by a smiling auntie is delicious; spicy curries, chicken, fish, pork, fresh veggies, soup, rice, fruit. Everyone is soft and attentive.
Native barbarian speaker focus is English exposure; Writing, Reading, Listening and Speaking with respect enabling Courage.
In addition to text stuff - artists, writers and dreamers explore and discover their infinite beauty and potential with Creative Notebooks. SOP. Mind map yourself. How to be more human.
How did I grow?
Chess lessons, strategies, and tactics improves their critical thinking skills, planning, logic, accepting responsibility for their actions, visualization, time management, and teamwork.
Learn. Play. Share.
Students live in separate dorms at the school. They’ve come from distant Shan state villages and Myanmar areas. They are their parents’ social security.
The school has an excellent reputation for matriculation results.
Segregated classes. Walking on campus, girls shield their faces from distant boys. No social testosterone distractions.
Zero gadgets.
They study Burmese, math, history, physics, chemistry, science, biology and Magic and Potions from 6-11, 1:30-6, 7:30-11 p.m. Sonorous voices echo daily.
They leave school one day a month with parents. Freedom.
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