Die Twice

Before going to Cambodia I discovered a Saigon museum named for Uncle Ho.

He’s the patron saint of Diehard Marxist Mania. It is a popular location for virginal couples posing for wedding photographs using expansive interior halls and sweeping stairways. Happy grooms escorted joyful brides in rented sparkling jewelry trailing gowns, frozen on stairs, in corridors, on window ledges. Jump!

In a dusty display case along a forgotten corridor were piles of medals, stamps, currencies and Zippo lighters. A Zippo was ubiquitous among soldiers with engraved inscriptions. One lighter said:

There are two times you face death.

Once when you’re born and once when you face death.

Hala, a Muslim girl I knew in Lhasa said, There are people who are born laughing and people who are born crying. I was born laughing.

Parked outside the museum was a U.S. Air Force F-16, ambulance, jeep, Huey helicopter and the tank North Vietnamese forces commanded to flatten gates and liberate the South. Rows of antique French cars used to ferry the wounded and ammunition around Saigon during the war collected dust in meticulous gleaming historical automotive fashion.

Hexagram 34 - The Power of the Great

Perseverance furthers. Ask what is right. Be in harmony. Movement. Not stubborn. Yielding quietly preserving work to remove resistance.

Spiral Foundation

In Hue the Healing The Wounded Heart shop has colorful woven baskets. Baskets are made of recycled plastic food snack wrappers. Brilliant reds, greens, blues, all the hues.

Shop with your heart. Shop to give back.

The Spiral Foundation is a non-profit humanitarian organization in Nepal and Vietnam.

            Spiral. Spinning Potential Into Resources And Love.

At the SPIRAL workshop they make bowls using discarded telephone wires. They work with the Office of Genetics and Disabled Children at Hue Medical College. All net proceeds from handicraft sales are returned to Vietnam and Nepal to fund primary health care, medical and educational projects. Projects employ 1,000 participants with fair hourly salaries.

Projects have provided for more than 250 heart surgeries and treatments for children with life threatening diseases.

Hue Help, an educational charity, works with an orphanage, mobile health care units and supports volunteers creating educational vocational projects. They work with the visually challenged. They have three schools providing supplementary education.

The Vietnamese attitude is to be perfect in school so they fear failure, said the short-term British volunteer coordinator.

How do you survive here? I said. Always incorporate a condom in your lesson plan, hide your money and trust only 10% of the people.

The Hue Embroidery Center on the bank of the Perfume River has a fine art gallery.

*

The House of the Artist at Night with 12 Emotions

30 breaths whisper leaves changing color

invisible dialects dance mysteries

open heart women do embroidery

30 Japanese tourists in wheelchairs with guidebooks

behind a white haired woman in a rickshaw dawns attention span

30 single-minded awareness diamond minded white butterflies flutter

Perfume River flows as women laugh at unknown possibilities

30 singing girls on 30 bikes under 30 trees on 30 paths see

30 lightning bolts escape 30 clouds inside 30 central nervous systems. three o boy o

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

lanterns

Hoi An women unload the night catch of screaming silver fish into baskets, weighing, selling, slicing and frying protean. I wander through the market smelling fish, meat, vegetables, inspecting fruit in broken light.

I am Lucky Foot. Wherever I am I bring good luck to universal money exchangers, manicure salon girls, banana woman, schools kids, tailors, cloth sellers and craggy faced Dan the local boat captain who worked as an interpreter at MAC V during the war.

I bring good fortune to the 125cc motorman, water seller girl, barber, high-heeled sandal seller, massage love sock girls, noodle mama and rent-a-life companies. HCE – Here Comes Everybody.

A girl searches Tailor Town for magic silk, linen, cotton cloth and an invisibility cloak. Everywhere every day everyone on their quest meets the old woman with a basket sitting outside the cloth market discovering the exact threads they need.

Everyone has a quest. Some have quests for air, water, food, sex, shelter, clothing and money. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs feeds the sheep. Someone else owns the grass.

I stop at a salon. I ask for a pedicure. The women are shocked. They are familiar strangers. Everyone smiles and laughs. Ha they chatter in musical frequencies. The old snake wants to shed his skin.

It’s good to know all the walking, treading movement and sole memories are so easily erased as curling epidermis falls away.

How slow can you travel?

You discover ice in the market. It is a floating world of light and shadows.

Ukiyo-e.

In the old town past the Japanese bridge is a serene shady street lined with trees, homes and shops. An abandoned temple once used as a school is jammed with jumbled desks and dusty forgotten Communist party political posters. It is now a workshop for bamboo lantern production.

Hoi An is famous for circular red bamboo lanterns. Their reflections line the river at night and decorate streets and homes. Boys carry long bamboo poles into a courtyard, set them on a chopping block and split them lengthwise with a machete. They cut long pieces into ten-inch sections and split them into the thin fragments. Three women chat while shaving the narrow green bamboo pieces.

Boys drill holes in the pieces using a simple punch machine. Girls and women assemble wooden lacquered bases for tops and bottoms by wiring pliable bamboo staves into bases to shape and curve frames with circular dialogue.

A young girl does her homework using a chair for a table as her mother works. An old frail woman arranged lines of fresh lacquered staves to dry in the sun. Every generation has their role to play.

A boy loops piles of round bamboo skeletons on his bike for merchants who’ll wrap diaphanous red cloth skins around frames.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Phu Bai

In Phu Bai I shared my story of arriving when I was older than yesterday and younger than tomorrow. I arrived from Saigon in 1969.

I stayed at the 8th Radio Research Field Station for a couple of days and volunteered to join the 265th Radio Research Company supporting the 101st twenty miles north. Screaming Eagles. Chicken Hawk. Saigon bar girls called us the Chicken Fuckers. They were the chickens.

Going north was a wise choice. The 8th enjoyed stateside amenities. Rosie cheeked donut dollies from O Hi O gave crochet lessons on Saturday and banged officers.

The 265th was a life lesson in teamwork, respect, trust and relationships. People rotated in. People rotated out. I put in my time and paid my dues for 364 days.

I returned to the world and became a happy ghost on a flight from S.F. to Colorado in 1970. Traveling became my mistress, motivation and meditation. I collected and invented stories about life’s ebb and flow in a long film with diverse characters, fate, chance and opportunity.

I put my Nam experience in a memoir called ART, Adventure, Risk and Transformation, a memoir published in 2019.

I discovered a piece of paper in the parking lot at Phu Bai airport. I turned it over. It was from a Vietnamese Airlines container/pallet cart. In big blue letters it said EMPTY. I slipped it into my Moleskine.

A perfect Ah Ha moment.

*

In 1970 three of us drove over the Perfume River and through the Ngan Gate into the Citadel in Hue. It is a masterpiece of Nguyen architecture. Five massive stone slabs with Five Phoenix Watchtowers and nine yellow glazed tiled roofs resembled five birds in flight.

A benevolent Blue Dragon sculpture guarded the East. The aggressive White Tiger protected the West. Harmony. We passed through the Southwest Ngo Mon Gate (Noon), one of five into the Imperial City.

The citadel was built in an auspicious location preserving the harmony of heaven and earth, man and nature. Welcome, said a Vietnamese intelligence liaison officer. He led us through a courtyard to the Thai Hoa Palace, or the Palace of Supreme Harmony, constructed in 1805 for ceremonies, coronations and receiving foreign ambassadors. It glowed with red and gold lacquers.

There were once large bronze pots and urns in this courtyard, he said. During the Tet offensive in 1968 they were melted down for ammunition.

Twenty-five days, including ten days of house-to-house combat killed 5,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, 384 Southern troops, 142 Americans and 1,000 civilians. Described by one journalist as the bitterest battle of the war. War is hell.

A two-story building with pink paint was divided into classrooms for artists studying music, art and sculpture. Painters created behind easels as a young man posed as a Greek archer. Off a verandah sculptors worked around a kiln with tables of bronze warrior figures.

Music students tuned delicate instruments creating soft melancholy sounds, weeping energies, ancient cultural memories. It was the perfect place to meditate and inhale venerable music in a calm way.

The Swiss and I visited eight ostentatious tombs south of Hue. Ancient sites with pristine carvings of dynasties. We climbed stone steps and wandered corridors seeing gilt carved thrones and photographs of kid emperors. History was guarded by statues of civil and military mandarins, horses and elephants.

Hard to imagine they built all this for one little emperor, said Sam.

In twilight we explored old tombs, thick forests and an ornate wooden pavilion extending over a lake where 108 concubines recited poetry to a lucky little emperor once upon a time.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Lolly

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

Loom

A character said with a secret JOY you have returned.

Yes, she says, my dream of you is unfolding. She caresses silk threads on her loom of time. Your sensitivity and serenity calms me, he says.

Before dawn. The Mekong river is water. Fog obscures distance. She stands at a window looking for him. He is on the river. His net flies over still deep water. Threads and knots of jungle vine land on the surface. They sink into silence.

She hears the Mekong sing. She returns to the source. Sleep. She dares dreams, aware of voiced whispers in silence. Silence becomes her sense of desire. She follows desire. Gratitude, her awareness, calms her tortured heart. A leaf leaves the tree of life.

Transparent water bowls sing. A purple lotus grows from mud.

She is at her loom. Her pattern begins with purple silk. This is her base. She runs threads through thin lines of balance. Twin bobbins spin out golden threads for new diamonds. Weaving is her meditation. Her voice. It is her heart-mind, hands, fingers and feet.