Most of the time up on that incredible rock amounted to amusing myself from the boredom. I remember reading a dog-eared copy of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 I'd found laying around. I'd also climb down from the rock and walk into the woods, where I'd sit on a log and just listen and look around, amazed that I was on a huge mountaintop along the Cambodian border in the middle of a bloody war zone. The forest along the ridgeline atop that mountain felt peaceful. I'd hear little critters scurrying around. I saw flying monkeys soar from one tree to another. I ran into lizards and peculiar insects. I saw a strange-headed, very large predator bird gliding over us and riding the wind currents. It was not until the 1990s and a reading of The Sorrow Of War [3], the magnificent novel by Boa Ninh, that I realized, for the Vietnamese, the forests were animated by spirits and ghosts. I'm not sure if the spirits Ninh's character Kien speaks hauntingly of inhabiting the forests of the Central Highlands stayed in the valleys and avoided the mountaintops or whether I was, again, too dumb to be aware of them. Or maybe they just left me alone, figuring (erroneously) that I was harmless. Here's how Ninh describes the forest and the ghosts from the 27th Battalion in The Sorrow Of War:
"It was here, at the end of the dry season of 1969 that his 27th Battalion was surrounded and almost totally wiped out. Ten men survived from the Lost Battalion after fierce, horrible, barbarous fighting. ... [Ghosts] were born in that deadly defeat. They were still loose, wandering in every corner and bush in the jungle, drifting along the stream, refusing to depart for the Other World. From then on it was called the Jungle of Screaming Souls. Just hearing the name whispered was enough to send chills down the spine."
Like Ninh has done with his American War, I've written fiction about my Vietnam War. My fiction was two short stories in Penthouse magazine in the late 1970s. "Polyorifice Enterprises" was modeled on the black humor of Catch 22 and satirized the prostitution that spread like an epidemic in places like Pleiku; for security and health reasons, the Fourth Division supervised bordellos just outside the base camp gate. Everything a horny 19-year-old American soldier wanted was catered to by entrepreneurial elements among the South Vietnamese. We were young American males feeling great power as part of a massive army, and we had money burning holes in our jungle fatigue pockets. Young peasant girls were an attractive commodity to be exploited. It's worth noting that the most famous work of literature in Vietnamese -- the narrative poem The Tale of Kieu written by scholar Nguyen Du around 1810 -- is about a young woman who becomes a prostitute to save her family from ruin in a period of war lord rule. She eventually becomes a guerrilla chieftain and prevails. The first stanza of the poem ends with these lines:
One watches things that makes one sick at heart.
This is the law: no gain without loss,
and Heaven hurts fair women for sheer spite.
Later, a character says this of the protagonist, Thuy Kieu.
She is a woman much ill-used by fate!
But then it's nothing new beneath the sun.
A poetic sense of stoicism and the dignity of life in times of disaster and trial are the core of this great work. When I came home from Vietnam, I submerged and began haunting used bookstores, reading things like The Tale of Kieu and books like Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall and his other books on the French war against the Vietnamese and the insidious transition to the American war. Slowly, I began to understand what I'd been floundering around in in my charmed youth. I began to feel a sense of mission to tell this story, which to this day is like pissing up a pole in our mainstream American culture.
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