Hanoi Memory

A shattered mirror reflected Pho’s fragmented identity.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown bard wire encircling his social network domain avatar easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

Vietnam massacred them back to Manchuria.

The French introduced excellent wines and installed intricate glass mosaics in Dalat garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them as fragments of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic minimal musical microcosms and colonial ideology.  

At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs back to De’ Arc of Triumph.

They kept the language and baguettes. Yellow colonial buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day. 

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, death, suffering and chaos unleashed their blind idiotic military-industrial ambition on peasants gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family through dynasties encroaching on walls and shrines inside meditative brown temples celebrated silent stories.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing and napalm.

Agent Orange extended misery for generations. 

“Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.”

- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

“Quick into the tunnels. Run.”

Sitting, crying and praying they heard the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded tremors shredding forests, jungles, paddies and lives. Bamboo homes danced in flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat.

They traveled deeper following interior earth trails until their unconscious became conscious. Earth swallowed breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

Sweet silence comforted the crying and wounded after foreign devils fled in terror, guilt, shame and loss.

Survivors streamed down mountains, emerged from caves and tunnels, poling rivers, walking on water, drinking oceans in creation myths, forcing devils into the sea. Blue green seas ran red.

Vietnam forced Americans back to Guam in 1975.

Voices in Hanoi flowed between crumbling sand and haphazard red bricks. Cement walls blocked wailing anger. Frustration's repressed bitterness adapted survival instincts in the reality of life’s twisted fateful truth.

Their memory was fiction.

Fiction created their memory. 

Weaving A Life (V1)

ART

I discovered an engraved Zippo lighter in a dusty Saigon history museum cabinet.

“Most people are born alive and then slowly die. I was born dead and then came to life.”

“Ha. Ha. Ha,” said Laughter Therapy, an antidote to the illusion of suffering.

I rolled snake eyes in life’s crap game. Reptilian id brain matter shredded old skin and identity theories. Retinas discerning space-time energy as light wave particles travelled on microscopic fibers to the cerebral cortex where data is received and analyzed for meaning. Meaning is a truth-value. Interpretation.

“Truth has few friends and they are suicides,” said Fernando Pessoa author of The Book of Disquiet.

Overloaded synapses crashed in psychotic bliss. Interpretation demolished nonrenewable resources in space-time fourth dimensions. You enter another dimension beyond sight and sound.

My hourglass sand approaches empty. I reversed it catching up to fiction-memory and truth-story. Weave on.

Leaves left winter’s tree in an airborne tag dance. They do not fall far from the Tree of Life. Frayed Tibetan Lung-Tao prayer flag horses beamed air current prayers. Perception and sensation ceased. I dissolved in the wake. Up.

“Time is a flock of nightingales,” said Albert Einstein. He added one plus one - “Experience is your education. Everything else is just information.”

A pulsating vein needle sang disconnected photons.

A three-act Greek play craved characters.

Her daughter in intensive care sang, “I feel free,” while carving her death mask.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Laos

Life Gift

To feel better, clean my heart, purge old fears and improve the quality of life I climbed down to donate a pint at The Blood Bank. Good old hemoglobin.

Suffering from cancer, a hospitalized child I will never meet, know, or love needs platelets more than I do. It’s been sixty-four clicks of Earth’s rotation between donations. It’s the best re-cycling program on the planet.

Give the gift of life that keeps on giving.

My calmness meets a scared mother pacing sterile emergency rooms at Sacred Heart Hospital wondering if her daughter will receive essential ingredients in time. 

A solemn-faced, stressed out cardiovascular lab tech with his personal set of challenges and opportunities, said to her, “At this moment we have no matching donors. We’ve released a global search engine to see what’s available on the market. People are selling short to cut their losses. It’s all about supply, demand and the fear of poverty. Scarcity. There are indications of further interest rate cuts to stimulate consumer confidence. We have no immediate indication of a stimulus. We will keep you informed.”

The mother doesn’t need to hear this prattle from a white lab coat.

Fingering her bone prayer beads, skeleton heads shake, rattle and roll. Fingers caress thorns. Everything happens by accident on purpose in her life, speaking of destiny, fate and chance. Life for her and millions in the land of the free, home of the brave and broke is free will versus random chance.

Everything’s already happened. People need to experience it while confronting their shadow and alienation, loneliness and loving community in a corrupt, cynical, hysterical greed-based world where people try to Control their fear.

Write FEAR & ANGER on a paper napkin.

Burn it.

Let go.

Citizen sheep believed in fear and unsustainable consumption because they were afraid of being lonely and poor.

Happiness is a myth. The wish of desire said so.

Humans were willing victims of their fear, healthy uncertainty, and doubt. Their amygdala, a small almond shaped brain structure creating fear and emotional response fired up. Fight or flight?

Are you the hunter or the prey?

Manipulated by the collective unconscious and a pervasive system of socialization control mechanisms, consumer sheep were happy. The subtle influence of right wing conservatives and media addiction bought idiots. Facing their mind-numbing daily grind with heart breaking choices sheep needed someone/something to Control them.

Accepting responsibility for their freedom was scary.

Intelligent centered ones feeling gratitude and empathy in their heart danced with Death. Everyone lives and dies.

“You work, breed and get slaughtered,” said an Asian child with a junior philosopher badge.

It’s essential to die once while you’re alive. Get it out of the way.

Saigon amputee, knife sharpening man.

*

I carried a copy of Omar’s book, A Century Is Nothing from Turkey to Indonesia to Nam in 2009.

Together with Omar we used fire, this crucible of alchemical combinations, diversities, sweat, blood and tears to create it so I’d use fire to release it. Save books, build a library.

Books are universes of ideas, experiences, feelings, visions, paths, and destinations obliterated through discovery, reminding memory. They are worlds of dreams, stories, dramas, plays, songs, histories and guides into new visceral experiences.

Pages sing their laughter with wisdom, song, and poetry. Preserve memory. Live forever with paper’s tactile voice. Voices of reason, comedy, and tragedy are skintight drum stories. They are oral transmissions recorded on parchment, vellum, and illustrated manuscripts in Irish Gaelic talking tongues, Sumerian clay and Asian scrolls.

I didn’t burn it, a way of sacrifice offering and letting go. Down the road in Saigon I gifted the brick to three Asian women. They had Chinese ancestry from Hong Kong and lived in Australia.

I said a friend wrote it so I signed it and laughed letting it travel with them. Thanks for the book. You’re welcome. I hope you enjoy it. It took all three to carry it. They staggered up guesthouse stairs with the tome.

After breaking down a wall they struggled to get it through an opening. People need to break down before they break through. Maneuvering it into a bag they discarded cheap Vietnamese souvenirs. We’ll have to check this monster all the way to Sydney.

ART

Saigon piano practice

Samuel's Truth

"The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer, am I than I was yesterday? Have I fulfilled my possibilities, made the most of my potentialities? What a marvelous world if all would - could hold this attitude toward life." - Edward Weston, photographer.

*

November 1969.

Leaving 101 into Eagle we passed white memorial shrines to dead Vietnamese. Farmers and boys grazed oxen near gravesites.

50,000 soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division lived at Eagle.

Mick drove along winding dirt roads past the main post office, barracks and a church. Buildings, clothing and landscape were brown. Eagle would be my residence for the next year if I survived.

Mick turned off the road and downhill to a small shipping container marked MAIL. I climbed wooden stairs to the company clerk’s office and commanding officer’s headquarters. The room displayed pictures of a president, defense secretary and hierarchy.

“Welcome,” said the first sergeant of the 265th Radio Research Company.

“Thanks, it feels good to be here.”

“I understand you volunteered for the 265th.”

“Yes. I looked at the 8th RRFS, talked to some guys and decided this would be more interesting duty.”

“It’s definitely more interesting. Not as plush as down south. Our mission is electronic code breaking, linguistics and traffic analysis. We provide critical intelligence to the Screaming Eagles at headquarters and in the field.”

“Fine. I’ll do my best.”

“I’m sure you will. Samuel will show you around, get you settled. Welcome to the 265th.”

“Thanks Tops.”

“That’ll be all.”

Samuel, a small wiry African-American company clerk was a virtual resident of Nam having extended his tour for five years.

“Better money to be made than going home to abuse, derision, scorn, apathy and unemployment,” he said issuing me a sleeping bag, M-16, ammo, gas mask, helmet, flak vest, Boonie hat and survival knife with a serrated edge for tearing flesh.

In - out dialogue.

“I know what you mean.”

“No you don’t. None of you white guys have a clue about real life in America. Better drugs in Nam cheap and good quality control. Let me know if you need a little weed.” Access. He pointed to my hooch up a hill.

“Top will meet you there. Take you on the grand tour.”

“Thanks Samuel. Nice to meet you.”

“See ya around.”

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A memoir.

*

Spike Lee co-wrote and directed a film released June 12, 2020. Da 5 Bloods follows a group of aging Vietnam Veterans who return to Nam to find a fallen commander and buried treasure. It received excellent reviews.

Ghost in exile

After 364 days an officer pinned red and yellow campaign ribbons on me. I caught a freedom flight from Saigon to Alaska, ran across a frozen tarmac in thin khakis for java and flew to the City by the Bay.

“Anybody want a steak?” said a sergeant processing arrivals.

“Screw the steak. Give me a new dress green uniform. I’m out of here for a flight to Colorado.”

I became a ghost in exile. No one spoke to me. I understood their reticence, fear, guilt and awkwardness seeing me in a military uniform.

Passengers were anesthetized by their life and media propaganda and TV images seeing the dead come home in black body bags. Prime time madness sold soap.

I remembered Samuel at the 265th, “Better than going home to abuse, derision, scorn, apathy and unemployment.”

I’d seen things they would never believe. They averted their eyes with social indifference and I understood. They’d remained static in their work, eat, and sleep routines.

I’d shifted my consciousness with quantum precision. I survived a transforming life experience.

You die twice. Once when you’re born and when you face death.

Surviving a year in a macabre police action zone where an imperialist government tried to impose a Catholic leader on a Buddhist people gave my life new meaning.

It taught me impermanence.

One life - no plan - many adventures sang with clarity and awareness. I create or destroy my freedom.

In my dream I hike past a crude sign hanging from rusty concertina wire at a deserted firebase:

Normal is a cycle on a washing machine.

I locate normal in my portable lexicon.

Normal is someone you don’t know very well. Like yourself.

I used to be somebody else but I traded him in.

ART