Hanoi

I arrived in Vietnam from Indonesia. It felt excellent returning to Asia.

I wandered with a notebook and camera. One life, no plan, many adventures. I explored crowded streets, back alleys and remote zones getting a feeling for the energy and language. Orientation.

I started at The Temple of Literature, one of the oldest universities in the world. Carved steles with names of scholars on the back of turtles lined the courtyard. Confusion emphasis on filial piety. Local woman in white silk ao dais played stringed instruments in a timbered brown hall under circular red lanterns.

The Museum of History had fire, tools and agricultural development. Visual stories illuminated hunters-gatherers, pottery, clay, axes, wood, bamboo and sharpening stones.

The Museum of Ethnology illustrated hill tribes with nine reconstructed authentic home styles, agricultural tools, textiles, weavers, baskets, pottery, bows and arrows. Old pictographs of pre-writing focused on Lao-Thai-Khmer-Burmese and Tibetan script.

Diagrams showed Chinese expansion from the north. Maps depicted human migration establishing languages and cultures with extensive Champa and Khmer civilizations from central and southern Vietnam into Cambodia.

On a beige wall hung Marxist means of production:

 1. knife

2. hoe.

3. scythe.

4. axe

5. hammer

6. control elephant stick

An ancient bowl of carbonized rice sat in a glass case. Let’s Eat.

Shirts were made of tree bark. Huge wooden drums. Brass cymbals. Musical culture.

Be the drum.

The Fine Art Museum contained patriotic oil paintings of Vietnamese fighting, dying, pulling artillery through jungles, being welcomed in liberated villages, people screwing for the motherland, blue silk paintings, red lacquer art, pastel dioramas of ship battles on curling tsunami waves, bronze and Champa clay sculptures, leather and wood skin drums, Buddhist meditative statues and Red Communist party flags.

The history of collective artistic efforts depicting work, education and communal efforts laughed.

The Old East Gate in Hanoi is hard to discover. The walls are gone. The oval entrance is covered with graffiti, weeds and black spider electric lines.

In a narrow market alley an invisible caged eagle sang it’s revolutionary song, How did I get here?

Women hawk fruits, veggies and fish, slice pineapple and haul cardboard. They load bikes with anything and everything they can move and sell.

This is my serenity, sanctuary and simplicity.

Wabi-Sabi - imperfect, impermanent, incomplete.

Bamboo sleepers wear cotton face masks. Pale Vietnamese women protect their skin with latex. The world of commerce and economy rides a motorcycle loaded with STUFF swerving through swarms of bees selling honey.

A bike woman canvases sidewalks from dawn to dusk selling bouquets of red roses.

Petals drift along congested Hanoi streets named for medicine, gravestones, tea, funerals, jewelry, spices, silk, nuts, coffee, musical instruments, flowers, incense, altars, glass, calligraphy, barbers, stone workers, bamboo, hairdressers, toys, food, fire, air, earth, water, wood, authors, kites and love.

Rubies and sapphires come from Nam and Hong Kong, imperial green jade from slave labor mines in Burma. Glitter eyes. Keep walking. Court the vagabond mistress.

A pinyin sign in a Chinese herbalist shop with battered brown drawers spilling herb aromas sang, Make it new day by day make it new. The journey is the destination.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Vietnam Wall

Omar said, In silence 58,235 angels sing as hammers and chisels work on a long black wall gouging earth. A team member cleans dusts off the name of Captain Harry G. Cramer of the 14th Special Forces Operational Detachment, October 21st, 1956. He was the first.

Maya Lin was 21 when her Vietnam Veterans Memorial design was selected out of 1,421 entries in 1981. Her entry was #1026.

I thought about what death is, what loss is, she said. A sharp pain that lessons with time but never quite heals over.

She visualized a knife cutting open the Earth and the Earth healing itself. The black granite wall is 493 feet long rising from the ground to a height of 10.1 feet bending at the center at a 125.12 degree angle.

Monument shadows lie heavy over men and women with memory tools. Slivers of black granite are collected by museums. They catalog memories for future generations. The exhibition goes on a Rolling Thunder tour.

Students receive questions on final exams pertaining to names, dates, places, over-sense of space and the under-sense of time’s prayer beads massaged by whorls leaving fingerprints on cave walls, Buddhist deity stones, tools and discovery evidence. Hammer music, chiseled symphonies and soft brushes sing forever.

As long as forever is, said Eternity.

After the orphanage Tran discovered a dingy roadside cafe along the Perfume River in Hue. He sat at a wooden table under a torn blue plastic awning protected from searing mid-day sun. He ate animal tongue with eel extract and monkey brains while savoring thick noodles mixed with spicy red peppers, spinach and broccoli. Green tea and snake blood.

He needs the antioxidants.

He hears melodious NOM dialects filled with 25,000 characters as men pole boats loaded with bananas and onions toward floating markets on a velvet surface. A girl in white silk rolls dough into noodles. She drops them in boiling water fired by wood in a red brick stove. Another girl chops vegetables and fish. They stare at him laughing and talking.

Keep staring, I might do a trick, said Tran.

Trucks, tractors and herds of water buffalo crowd the dirt road. Illiterate boys bank an eight ball in dust. An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a Communist party stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green bank walls.

Play the angles you idiots, she shouts, elevating her Marxist CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with landmines. She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention.

She releases repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me, she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization grammar rules in fear.

Famine survives in green paddies below heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming white oxen past orphans selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated obese white tourists.

  

Lovers sleep on teak furniture abandoned by Rohingya fleeing a genocide promoted by the Burmese Army. They stream across streams into Bangladesh where they languish forever.

Across from the restaurant behind a spaceship made of mud is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare as a stranger with one good leg squats over a holy toilet.

Tran shits fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan.

Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

Book of Amnesai Unabridged

Nam to Cambodia

By Omar

It feels soft here after the mercenary rush of Saigon, said Happy Ghost. Vietnam’s population is 93 million. Cambodia has 18 million. Vietnam is about hustle and money. Cambodia is about survival. Memory. Hope and work for a better future  ... heavy weight  ... no one talks about the past … memories are dead  ... gentle smiles and resilient people.

An emotional IQ level of -7 lives in Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Do the math. Perpetual adolescence is an epidemic endemic disease.

That’s what happens when you kill all the educated people, said Rita. It will take a generation and then some until we get our heads and hearts adjusted. It explains our reality and ground truth.

Vietnam is a smaller version of China and Cambodia is a small version of Nam.  

Vietnamese plant rice, Cambodians watch it grow and Laotians hear it grow.

What does this say about sensation and awareness in three separate cultures, asked Rita. Everything.

One day it felt great to put on solid walking boots at 0515 as narrow Saigon alleys stirred to life. How the gentle soul and metatarsal support pressure delighted the skeletal structure. Roll the bones. It’s a walking meditation … Posture … Alignment … It’s a long walk … Walking makes the road.

At 0600 Tan San Nut airport was deserted below a soft orange sky. Outside or inside a terminal we are all terminal cases. I met a Vietnamese woman, 60, widowed now for a year returning home to Perth after visiting her son and grandchildren. She shared pictures of her standing by the ocean, with friends when she was 38, with her son, at a party. She talked how she and her husband were farmers for ten years in Australia. How she misses him. How she remembers her son. She looked wistful and resigned to her fate. She’ll grow old with friends in Perth remembering.

In the departure area a woman working for the U.N. in Geneva and her boyfriend were visiting Cambodia for two weeks. She planned to visit her girlfriend, another U.N. worker in Phnom Penh, the capital. Agrarian. Rural. Her friend’s been there three months working on the trial of a Khmer Rouge leader.

She does admin work. She says it’s a real mess. The other international legal representatives bicker and fight amongst themselves. Nothing gets done. The trial lasted 1,001 years. It cost $100,000,000. That’s a lot of zeros for the Year Zero legal campaign. A lawyer said, it’s not about Justice, it’s about Procedure.

A Swiss woman in Siem Reap worked for the U.N. in various African assignments. She said, I went to a U.N. gathering in Africa. All they did was argue and promote their specific turf and agendas. The internal squabbling was pathetic. It was pitiful.

Imagine, said Rita, You live in Cambodia. One day you wake up. You have money and opportunities to provide everyone with clean water, free high quality education, medicine, safe well-managed shelters for orphans and abused women and all the essentials for everyone who needs it. NGO businesses scream. Shocking! They’d be out of work. They’d have to go somewhere else, like North Korea or Burma. The Cambodians would be completely empowered to run their own country free of outside influence.

Yeah, said Rita, Don’t hold your breath. Why learn how to fish when the fish is free?

Storytellers flew into Cambodia on a prop-jet seating 100 jaded travelers on the one-hour flight. Low and slow. Whir.

A caustic European woman said to her husband, Where are we flying today? Siem Reap? Oh how tedious.

Like thousands of visitors they’ll stay for two or three days in a guesthouse or four star hotel, hire a tuk-tuk driver and DO Angkor, eat in tourist restaurants staffed by bored, happy children pretending they are mature and sensible.

Look at all the people European tourists say, how sweet. They will tour 8th century Khmer civilization with their mechanical cameras, not their heart. They’ll dance under stars with lightning. Tourists zoom around and leave. We came, we ate, we drank, we toured, we slept, and we left. Hail Caesar.

We skimmed west over the mighty Mekong, brown snake rivers, rice fields, strong lush green land, water and islands with southern mountains looming through low grey clouds. The baby plane soared, floated, turning north over the Tonle Sap Lake. It is the largest lake in Asia fed by water flowing from Tibet through China and Laos.

All the way down to the delta, said Gravity.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Fly

Ireland.

One night a Donegal fly arrives while I’m typing.

It lands on the lampshade.

A muse watchdog fly, one eye, many eyes.

It rubs its feelers together in anticipation of finishing off someone’s meal. Flies have lived on Earth for 93 million years. They symbolize death and decay.

There is no food lying around, only papers, magnifiers, books and clothing.

The fly’s aware of magic power and pure intention drawing it to the writer. The lamp is hot. The wind is cold. The fly reads my mirror mind, sees bleeding fingers, feeling the loneliness and freedom.

Fly appreciates and comprehends this must go down just as it must land to rub it’s feelers together sitting on the precipice of light beams with wonder, fury, delight, ramifications, responsibility and repose. Karmic fate.

-I saw you from a foreign window, said fly. -You were on a path.

-True. Suffering is an illusion. It’s a grand precious adventure. The road is made by walking. It’s a long walk.

-Seems full of fools, dead ends, bookends, trails, trials, tribal ramifications and tribulations. Where is the beauty and truth in this tale? Where is the narrative structure? Where is the plot of formless form?

-We live in a world of forms. It’s in the exposition. The big show. It’s in the thread of fates’ fabric. How do I know where it will go? Part of my job is to gather material, get out of the way and allow a writer to organize it. I’m lucky to get it down and figure it out later. I’m a conduit. I’m a figment of your imagination.

-So it would appear, said fly, -who lives it, writes it, rewrites it, polishes it, reads it, kills it, ignores it, abandons it. I am a drop of water on your mirror. Feed wild birds daily crumbs. Water flies from sky. It explodes into earth. I disappear into dust. Burn baby burn. Cry baby cry.

-You’re a fly. An insect. Short attention span, like some humans I’ve met. No attention span? No problem.

-Hey. Take it easy. Listen. Stay focused. Stay on task. You were in the jungle, the real deal amigo. You were dazed and confused, stupid, naive, dressed in green, following blind orders. Blind led the blind. You were the willing doing the ridiculous for the ungrateful. You survived to tell the tale. Give me a break. Start with one true declarative sentence. Punctuation is a nail. Write what you know. Write the ending and work backwards. Center ripples out. Use verbs and nouns. Murder adjectives and adverbs. Use active tense. Give me dirty realism. Surface. Write with passion. Keep it simple. Seduce the reader.

-It was hot and humid. It was November. I was a climatic cinematic spotlight-floodlight focus. I was a thick stream of gracious fear, healthy doubt, glorious uncertainty, wild adventure and unlimited surprise. 

-How did you feel?

-Shit, I was young and scared. Apprehensive. We were all young and petrified & naive packed into a tin can flying low over green jungles. I smelled the green lieutenant’s shit next to me skimming jungles before they opened the doors, before some sergeant got on yelling at us to get out and get going. We walked down the stairs into heat exploding off pavement. A brown and white striped tent waved in the distance. We walked toward it. There were hundreds of guys yelling and screaming at us.

-So what. Kinda Blue by Miles Davis

-Man it was weird, I gotta tell ya. All these guys in earth  brown uniforms, caked with dirt laughing, smiling, yelling, crying, taunting us, thanking us for bringing in their plane, yelling “man we’re going home, what’s your honey’s name jack and I’ll take good care of her, man am I short,” all kinds of verbal incantations.

-So what. (take 2)

-You don’t get it do you? Man we were just getting there and I said, shit here I am at 19 and I’ve got 365 days to go. These guys are done, finished, out of here and it was the biggest longest looking instant of future time in the immediate present tense sense you could imagine. I couldn’t even begin to see it, 365 what? Are you kidding me? Others went into shock knowing they had no idea what was in front of them, only seeing 365 days staring them in the face. You knew life expectancies disappeared fast being a numbers game maybe, at the most six months if you were lucky and then after surviving 180 days you stayed on edge trying to make it through the rest. We swallowed salt pills three times a day. The weak dropped like flies.

-Not funny.

Weaving A Life V1

Director of Brooms

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