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.

Hand Wings

She spoke with her hand wings. Short, fast and deadly.

She dreamed of writing a short story, perhaps flash fiction.

Nervous, she selected a pen. She unscrewed the black ebony summit. She opened a black notebook. She made a pot of green tea. She started with flowing calligraphy letters.

My life began in a village. I don't need to leave my village. My village is the world.

Her story emerges from nothing. Discover a point of departure, a direction.

She drew a picture. It looked like this.

An illusion of a mirage - the soul filled with silence, an abyss in which the whole world disapears beneath the pressure of a single thought, memory, look.

Meaning and Sense.

Meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself.

Sense cannot stay still radiating out in directions that divide and subdivide. The sense of every word is like a star hurling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic perturbations, afflictions.

 

Tribal Narrator

After they cut out my tongue I started writing script.

I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire. I added a little water to a gray stone surface and placed the ink in the center.

Using my right hand as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me I turned the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid. A drop of water rippled a pond.

I picked up my bamboo brush with pure white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper.

I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, my left palm flat on the table with fingers spread.

I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink then slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess.

I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality character. There are at least 5,000 characters in my written language.

I have much to learn and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth.

I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness.

I centered my unconscious on the paper filled with nothing. My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus.

I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit.

Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

My useless tongue flapped in the cold December Himalayan wind. Stories and songs were birds. I heard children laughing and singing. Playing with strings of word pearls they greeted each other in the babble of nothing,

They dreamed with eyes open.

When we are asleep we are awake.

I memorize ancient chants with black ink soaking through parchment skin.

I am not of this world.

I sit with a diamond in my mind. It reflects 10,000 things.

It is free of the three dusts: desire, anger and ignorance.

I sing my tongue-less body electric.

Where do I park this empty vehicle?

I have paintings, poems, stories, translations of oral traditions to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

If I had more time I’d make them shorter.

Wat Bo 22 May 2020