I wrote this over six years ago for a reading at the Chelsea (NY) Horton Gallery opening of a sculptor friend's works, which were based on what I had shared with him over the many years I've known him...My memories, nightmares and dreams. I've shared it before, but on this 11/11 I feel it important enough to share again.

***

At night, rivers of memories, images swollen as if by rains of the monsoon. I'm drawn into a torrent, dragged downstream...impossible to grasp onto branches of ‘Now’ to pull myself safely to shore. Fog overcomes me. Smoke smelling of gunpowder, diesel, burning hair and flesh. Mere pinholes of light burn indelible images onto the camera obscura of my soul.

I'm on a mountainside looking through field glasses at the valley below. Nine men in NVA uniforms are walking single file along the berm of a rice paddy. I adjust artillery. A marking round pops 100 meters in front of them. They turn and run the opposite direction. An explosive round falls 50 meters in front of them. They turn and run again. I'm downright giddy. It's ducks at the carnival. Explosions rain on top of them. Arms and legs separate from torsos.

On a small forward support base, a landing zone above the ville of Hiep Duc. It's my duty to receive grid coordinates of suspected enemy targets and check to be certain there are no friendlies located there. The radio crackles, the warble of a chopper pilot's voice requesting clearance to engage "three military aged males with packs and weapons evading". I've heard that terminology so often, standard jargon. Shorthand. Usually a cursory glance of maps reveal it’s clear and I give my permission to fire. This time I hesitate. I ask the pilot his altitude. He says, "three thousand feet, over". I ask him to take a closer look and call me back. A few minutes later he tells me to disregard his previous transmission. I ask the true nature of his intended target. "A mamasan and two babysans, doing laundry by the river." My heart pounds out of my chest. How many times had I given my permission to kill mamasans and babysans? How many?

Asleep in my 8 by 10 ammo box and sandbag bunker. My first night on this hill. A blast sends sand into my eyes. I sit bolt upright with a deafening ring in my ears. Grabbing bandolier and rifle I dash out of my hootch toward a large boulder. Rounding the corner I run smack dab into another man/child. Vietnamese. The enemy. His eyes mirror the terror in my own. Running away from each other, I hide behind the rock. All hell has broken loose. Machine guns on the hill outside the perimeter are firing for the other team. The wire has been breached. A man is on fire, dead on his feet. An aircraft named ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ is firing mini-guns indiscriminately downward, killing, wounding without regard of faction. My rifle remains silent. By dawn's early light, our flag was still there. Bodies laid out like trophy deer at hunting camp. Grinning men pose for polaroids with the kill. I stumble about, staggering, gagging...my senses numbed. I seek the chaplain, himself stumbling and staggering...dressed only in his olive drab boxers and steel helmet, dogtags and crucifix. I ask the meaning of all this. "Where is God?"... He, a father figure, an officer...a man of the cloth...he surely must know. But he stares, vacantly, into the distance...shaking his head and repeating, over and over again..."I don't know, I don’t know!” I realise, at that moment, no one knows.

Out of these nightmares, these screams, I found solace when I returned to the world...but not in the cities' streets of my youth, or an alliance with our nation state...but off, into the countryside, where I'd learned from the peasants in that foreign land a connection to the earth, to the cycles of the seasons...the rains, the droughts, the wildness of the forest creatures. Without a piece of land on which I could build a simple dwelling out of the natural materials on hand...the logs, the stones...I would have been homeless, continuing to wander as I did when I first returned. I found that the myth of the rugged individual, man as an island, is a lonely, bitter existence. So many others had emigrated away from cities and into the countryside in those days of turbulence...some were victims of police brutality during war protests, others abused by the system or by their families. They arrived in rural areas of America, seeking a simpler existence and some semblance of true freedom. The immediate actions of chopping wood and carrying water locked me into the present…seeking shelter and food, learning from others that which had been forgotten by my kinfolk. I shoed logging horses in Oregon, cut firewood and fabricated western shirts on a treadle sewing machine in the mountains of Arizona, cleaned chimneys and restored log cabins in Minnesota. I was in and out of relationships, struggling with my memories...drugs, alcohol, anger. Only a sense of place and the home I built, dug into the womb of the earth, with its simplicity and soft, interdependent harmony… the gardens, fruit trees and flowers, brought me SOME stability, SOME sanity, and a partnership with a woman who walks in grace…herself a veteran.

Four decades have passed…40 years! Yet I often awaken to the sounds of my own screams...I wonder and ponder, still. What IS it all about? To me it is about the directness of my needs, and to the needs of others in the greater community. The dying trees we cut to make firewood for heat or cooking. The solar panels we have added over the years to replace kerosene lamps. The music we make around campfires and the meals and work we share.

The angst that is felt by so many because of wars and intrigue...the rhetoric of politics...has become the history of the countryside...and is not unique to our nation or time. Waves of a new generation of warriors and wanderers are, even now, finding their way to their own sense of place, from their own private wars

Bears have been active

 Tore the feeders down yesterday while we were at the lake at our community pot luck.  Scared Obi, the cat, terribly.  He was safely inside with his cat door locked, but he saw from the large window and heard the noise.  Bears are known to be noisy.  

On another note, we have new fawns, goslins and sygnets.  And the bucks are growing back their antlers.

 Within the past two weeks we have lost two of our very dearest of friends.  Judy and Lori were both naturalists who taught us all a lot.  They walked their talk.  I loved them both dearly.  

It's surreal.

 Bears repeating:

Vietnam, 1969:

As an advisor and liaison I led native troops but nonetheless was looked upon as the "supreme local power", way too much power for a very young man, just out of adolescence. I used my power as a good soldier at first, fighting who was perceived and inculcated in me as the enemy. . .and if I didn't do it, I had the definite impression that very little would get done. . .However, after nine months I had an epiphany in the form of a chopper pilot asking for permission to engage, "Three military aged males with packs and weapons evading"...rote, scripted, common parlance. For some reason it was too pat, too familiar. I asked for his altitude, to which he replied some distance which would make identification of packs and weapons or gender nigh on to impossible. I suggested he go closer to find the true nature of his target. I didn't hear back from him for an inordinate length of time. So, I keyed the mike and asked if he'd identified his intended target. He responded, "Yes, disregard...it was a mamasan with two baby sans doing their laundry by a river." How many times in the past had I cleared requests to fire? Never again in any time of uncertainty would I be so gullible. I became the meanest bastard in my area of operations...unless there was contact, I generally denied requests for fire. I became very anti-war at that moment...always before it had been a song at summer camp, an idea...not a mind blast of reality. I was forever changed.

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Shared with Your friends and Cheryl's friends

The temperature outside when we awoke this morning was minus 24° (F) which is minus 31° (C), without wind chill. The sun is shining brightly now, the PV panels are pumping a good charge into our batteries, and the wind is fairly non-existent. Still, the cats wrinkle their nose when the door is opened and the cold hits them square in the face...they turn around and head for their respective hibernation spots. Tigger on the settee in front of the fireplace. Goldie is on the sunny south window ledge in Cheryl's work space, the Baby Buddha is practicing downward facing dog on the Bali bed and Pogo, true to her name, has jumped up onto her loft, where she can look out the back windows and have an overall view of the sunny rooms and other cats. Cheryl handed me a wonderful dark aeropressed cup of coffee which is now gone...I don't usually do this, but I am about to have another cup. (Monkey see, monkey do...Cheryl had another half cup earlier, which is unusual for her, as well.)

Reflecting on how peaceful it is here, quiet and (perhaps) mundane in its Earthly pleasures. How the snow that has accumulated dampens sounds, but still allows the chickadees spring songs to waft through. A cat is lightly snoring, I believe it's Pogo....

Why is this not common? Why is there so much fussing and fighting, divisiveness and discontent?

We are under siege

 The Gravy Seals, untrained, unfit but highly paid, many of whom, I suspect, are pardoned January sixers, are creating chaos in our state, specifically in Minneapolis.  As of this writing, 6 or 7 of ICE "agents" murdered an ICU nurse who was armed, yes...but his weapon was holstered and he had a permit to carry which is legal in Minnesota.  The "disarmed" him after pummeling him and spraying him on the ground and THEN they shot him multiple times.  The video doesn't lie.  Even Bondi, Noem and Bovino did not say the pistol was being brandished, but merely that he was armed...which is his second amendment right, and yet they say that he was attempting to assassinate ICE agents...and that they were the victims.  Clearly the video shows and agent removing the weapon and running from the space...before they opened up on the nurse.  

It was murder.

The second murder of an innocent in Minneapolis by the hands of ICE agents.  American citizens.

Anyone who believes in the right to bear arms and the second amendment certainly should not be supporting this administration.  This is what you've all feared.  A govermnent over reaching.  Fascism.

 Rummaging through writings from 1988/89

11 Dec 1988

Riding on horseback up steep mountains and through ravines carrying UNICEF medical bags to a distant gathering village along the northern border with Honduras. Our mission is to provide first aid, vaccinations and various medications to try to cover for clinics and medics who have been killed in Contra attacks. Clinics and schools, medics and teachers are the primary target of US backed and advised Contra forces. I accompany two Nicaraguans, a doctor trained in Canada and a nurse trained in Germany.

Beautiful country, Contra infested. Parrots flutter from tree to tree.

12 Dec 1988

A four hour ride yesterday, one way into the cloud shrouded mountains. The war (and its effects) is omni-present. Visual manifestations of damage to objects and people, teachers...schools...first aid stations. We were shadowed by a platoon of the FSLN, the Sandinistas...but that almost seems to ensure attack. RPGs, AK-47s send me into flashbacks.

It was dark on our return. The moon just a sliver and the stars bright as bright can possibly be. The sounds of the jungle immensely powerful. We left at 0800 and it is now past 1800. The truck which was to pick us up at a rendezvous point wasn't there. The horses had been taken to a way station and we waited. The truck arrived an hour late, it had broken down in a ditch and had to be recovered by oxen. I took the driver's seat. The mud from the rain made the clay road slick as ice. I said, "This is how we drive in a Minnesota winter"...The soldiers in the back hung on for dear life. Slipping, sliding, careening from side to side...slowing then accelerating...we kept moving forward. Someone banged on the roof of the cab. The soldiers wanted out...there was a contra base very near. They feared attack. Fanning out, the doctor, nurse and I were left alone in the truck with the headlights still on, engine running. We were apprehensive to say the least. Time stood still. Lights off, engine off. Quiet was deafening.

The soldiers returned...no sign of the contras. We continued our journey back to my tent by the river. Back to a perimeter.