BLOG POST: COVER STORY and LLOVIZNANDO EN CHINAMECA

     A few weeks ago, thinking about what this book PACHAMAMA should be like, what it should cover and what it should say, I had what was, for me, something of a revelation. I have been studying and writing about History and Philosophy since I left Viet Nam in August 1966,  not long after that fateful day in April, in the village of Tho An. I arrived on campus the same month I left Viet Nam: the Marine Corps actually allowed me to finish my enlistment a few days early! My 4-year enlistment was due to end September 3, 1966, but by the end of August I was already on campus at Colorado College, beginning the new life for which I had been waiting one thousand, four hundred fifty days. Yes, I had counted them. I’m sorry I don’t still have my short-timer’s calendar; chalk that up with the other things I’ve lost, and won.

     This book, PACHAMAMA: A Veteran’s Dream,  will contain previously unpublished excerpts from Rattlesnake Dreams, my first memoir. This is one such excerpt:

   

RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: COVER STORY

     In the early 1980s a group of veterans, artists, musicians, poets and ne’r-do-wells would hang out, drink beer, and tell stories.

A little more than 20 years ago I was involved in a theater group of Viet Nam veterans in Santa Cruz, California.. In that process, I discovered the poem by Bryan Alec Floyd which I’ve reproduced below: “SERGEANT BRANDON JUST, U.S.M.C.” The poem, and its author, have been important in my life since then. Then recently my esteemed friend and author Wayne Karlin sent me (and others) a copy of that same poem. Wayne and I often agree on things which have to do with Viet Nam. BRYAN ALEC FLOYD is the author of this poem; it comes from his book THE LONG WAR DEAD.

     Some were true, some were not so true… and some were too true to be endured, but unforgettable all the same.

     Chris Matthews was the owner of our meeting place, the Poet and Patriot Irish pub, in an alley just off Cedar Street in Santa Cruz, near the mall.

He was a beefy Irishman with a booming voice, a giant heart, and a well developed political consciousness. He was so a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division, which he never allowed us mere mortals to forget. RIP, Chris. Also among us was Tim McCormick, who had been a Navy medical corpsman patching up wounded Marines near the DMZ in South Viet Nam. Kenny Walker had been a Marine Sergeant in Nam, and was also one of the best natural artists I’ve met. He once mentioned in passing that he’d been standing next to a buddy during an NVA attack on their position when an enemy rocket, sparks trailing, came into their position. Kenny stood up to find his friend still standing, but without his head, which had been taken off by the rocket and replaced by twin crimson fountains spurting from his carotid arteries.

     There was Bill Motto, a wiry, intense, scraggly-bearded two-tour Nam vet (one with 173rd Airborne), who read more books and articles about the kind of US foreign policy failures and deliberate deceptions of the sort that had led us into Viet Nam, than anyone else we knew. He died too soon (he was about 39) in a fall off a beach cliff near Santa Cruz. RIP, Billy.

     There was Cris DiMaio, who is part Cheyenne, and who as a young Navy doctor had the incredible bad luck of being assigned as Battalion Surgeon to 1/9, 1ST Battalion, 9th Marines. 1/9 was reputed to be the infantry battalion that took the highest casualties, among Army and Marine units, in that war. Chris was in our rap group of 7 or 8 vets who met once a week and spilled our guts and hearts and our rage out in a small room in the Vets Hall in Santa Cruz. He wasn’t in the group as a health professional; he was there like the rest of us, trying to heal his own wounds. I had the good luck to visit him, along with my wife, in Santa Cruz in 2012. It was very fine to see him, in his home on the beach near Santa Cruz.

     It had been through Chris DiMaio, by way of one of his Native American connections (Michael Joseph, of the Santa Rosa Ranchería near Fresno) that I was connected with Maco Stewart, the oil millionaire who financed a trip by some North American Indians (and 3 mercenaries) among whom I was included as a journalist in January 1985, to Contra camps in southern Honduras. We made a couple of illegal armed crossings into Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua, crossing the Río Coco in Miskito Indian dugout canoes. (There’s a large section (“Rus Rus”) of stories from that trip in Rattlesnake Dreams.)

     I was one of the vets, occasionally one of the poets, often enough among the ne’r-do-wells, storytellers, and beer drinkers, who met often at the Poet & Patriot.

     Another regular was Cruz Ortiz Zamarrón, a Chicano artist who was about half Chris’s size, but with booming voice and heart and political consciousness to match.   

     And talent to over-match.

     My wife and I split the blanket in 1994. (We’re still friends; we both have married again.) I moved to Oregon, near where I’d grown up. (There are several Oregon stories, from both before and after the war, in Rattlesnake Dreams.) Chris Matthews, the founding owner of Poet & Patriot, died a couple of years ago, from a lifetime of smoking cigarettes. We could always hear it in his gravelly bass voice. Many of us drifted apart… but not really. Now we had the Internet, and gradually we found one another again.

     Also in the ‘80s, I began writing the stuff that had been clawing at my insides to get out into the air since I’d thrown my gear into the back of the truck to leave Chu Lai in 1966.

     With the writing came the dreams and nightmares.

     They pissed me off. No. They terrified, enraged me. They scalded my soul. Hah. I’ll show ‘em: I’ll capture them and use them. Those nightmares were kicking my ass on a regular basis, and like all combat vets, I wanted to escape them.

     Sometime in the early 1980s, after waking too many times drenched in sweat and terrifying my wife with startling transitions from sleep to wakefulness, I decided two things: One was that I would train myself to turn, in sleep and during a nightmare, and confront my pursuers, instead of continuing to flee them.

     And I would learn to write the dreams down.

     For a few years, the process of forcing myself to remember and record the dreams made things worse. Convincing myself that in the long run it was worth it to capture the dreams instead of fleeing them is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, given the fact that I had lived through the Viet Nam war and, in any case, I could not escape it.

     I do not know of, nor have I read of or been told about, any combat vet who has actually reached the end of his string of post traumatic dreams. I’m sure there are some; I just haven’t met them. This is why I say – perhaps more often than people want to hear – that I’m the luckiest combat vet I know.

    

   Cruz Ortiz Zamarrón, our artist friend from Poet & Patriot days, had grown up in San Antonio, Texas. He now had relocated to Lake Tahoe, on the California/Nevada line. I had been writing all the time, and a book was shaping up. It was the project I’d promised I would do, as I tossed my gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai. It had stories about growing up in Oregon, because I had begun to see that soldiers – or, in my case, Marines – didn’t come out of nowhere, but were boys who came from American homes, broken or otherwise.

     I had many dreams. Some I remembered, captured, wrote down. Some I lost. But sometime during the Poet & Patriot days, while working as a carpenter and contractor, I had a long dream which was clearly from the string of post Viet Nam nightmares. But it was also different. It was very long. It was very clear. In fact, translucent. It was very powerful. It told a story. And it ended well, for me, as one of the two central characters in the dream.

     The other main character was a rattlesnake the size of my arm, but much more powerful. And it spoke to me in the dream. We talked, eye to eye, as the howling circle of my people urged me to kill the snake with the pistol they had given me, and which I now held in my hand.

     That dream is the title piece for this book: Rattlesnake and Pistol.

I got in touch with Cruz. We exchanged email addresses. I sent him the narrative I’d written about the conversation between the rattlesnake and me, told him I wanted that to be my book cover, and asked him to paint it. He said he couldn’t do it. His body wouldn’t perform; he could no longer hold a paint brush properly with his right arm. I begged him to do it, because of what I knew about him and his art, his relationship with art and life. Please, I said.

He said he’d try to do it with the computer.

     He exceeded my expectations, surprising me in a revelatory way: his painting depicts me, as a young Marine with a pistol, confronting the granddaddy of all rattlesnakes, being urged on by the crowd behind me… all reflected in the rattlesnake’s eye.

     Thank you, Cruz.

The second part tells about the killing of Emiliano Zapata:

LLOVIZNANDO EN CHINAMECA

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013. My wife and I were having coffee this morning in our apartment in Chía, Colombia. We saw a few tiny raindrops speckle the concrete outside the window before us. “It’s starting to sprinkle,”  she said.

       Her words slapped my mind back to the moment I first learned the Spanish phrase for “it’s starting to sprinkle.” Summer 1970, I’d just finished the first year of graduate school, and discovered I’d hoarded enough from my fellowship to get me the 300 miles to Mexico, maybe even stay there for the summer, if I didn’t eat much, and traveled “a ventones,” which we usually expressed by the universal gesture of sticking one’s thumb out into the wind: hitchhiking.

       I carried one book: John Womack’s masterful history Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. I read the book as I hitched around Morelos, the state south of Mexico City where “El Caudillo del Sur,” the Chieftain of the South, El General Don Emiliano Zapato, had lived, fought, and died.

       What had jolted me back in time was a moment from that summer of 1970 when I had been sitting in the dirt beside the highway that crossed Morelos, waiting for my next ride. A Mexican peasant squatted beside me, also waiting for a ride.

       A few sparse raindrops made tiny puffs in the dust and disappeared, leaving not enough sign of their arrival to moisten anything, including us. My campesino acquaintance spoke, casually announcing the raindrops’ simultaneous arrival and disappearance into the roadside dust: “’sta llovisnando, he said.

       The moment didn’t seem significant, yet has stayed with me for 40+ years, because of the details it carried: sitting in roadside dust beside a Morelos highway, reading Womack’s book about Zapata’s life and death in and near the places were he had lived and died. Libraries are good, but this was better.

      

     A couple of weeks later, I had been to Zapata’s birthplace (Anenecuilco), and followed his hoofbeats  about Morelos. (He was a horseman, a general of the rebel cavalry. I don’t think he walked much). I spoke with some of the viejitos, the old ones, who had been alive during the 10 year conflagration that was the Mexican Civil war, 1910-1920. (I have moved many times since then, including losing my home in Oregon to the bank, in the process also losing nearly all my books, including Womack’s. So I apologize for not having those names at hand.)

       But Chinameca stuck. Buses didn’t go there, because few travelers did either. But trucks hauling livestock did, and one slowed beside the stockade while I stepped down with my mochila and waited for the dust of the departing truck to clear before walking up to the gate. The fort was something out of an old western movie, still very much in use. It was a square structure built of logs, big enough to enclose the soldiers’ barracks, a cookhouse, a tack room, and a stable, as I remember.

       A sergeant was in charge of the entire establishment. I approached him with my questions, told him I was a student following and studying the trail of Zapata’s life, and asked his advice about where I might find a room to rent for the night (while hoping he would offer something that was free). The answer to my question about a rental room was visually obvious before he answered: there was no hotel, rooming house, or anything of the sort in sight. The Chinameca stockade stood alone in the Mexican countryside. It was a military fort, and nothing else.) I then asked his permission to spread my GI poncho on the ground doutside the stockade wall.

       Without losing his friendly demeanor, the sergeant shook his head. He said it was a bad idea for me to sleep outside, because of “los borrachitos,” drunks who hung around the stockade and mooched enough tortillas and bottles of oh-so-cheap muscatel wine from passers-by to keep them alive. He made it clear that their behavior couldn’t be vouched for; that thievery was the gentlest thing I could expect from them, and that as the night wore on, weapons would likely appear. Didn’t sound like a good night’s sleep to me. He said I should bring my mochila inside the fort, and spread my poncho on an empty cot in the soldiers’ quarters. I happily complied.

       Chinameca was not a tourist destination. But the sergeant seemed mildly pleased with my interest in the history of the place, and not at all threatened by my inquiries. While he had nothing like a bookish preparation for questions about what had happened there, every Mexican who lived in the southern part of the country knew, or at least had a close idea about, what that history had been.

       On April 10, 1919, Zapata rode with some 100 of his men to Chinameca, to keep an appointment to negotiate a peace with opposing forces. The two sides agreed on a pact which promised safe passage to soldiers of both sides. Zapata and his men camped just outside the walls of the fortress. Unknown to them, the very rooftops of the fort were covered with opposition soldiers, lying flat on their bellies with loaded carbines, at point-blank range from anyone inside the fort, with the added military advantage of firing down on their targets.

       Shortly after dawn, at a pre-agreed signal, Zapata and his men rode through the gate of Chinameca. But instead of remaining open, per agreement, the gate was quickly shut behind them. The “neutral” opposing forces opened fire (enfilade, in military terms) from their advantageous position on the rooftops just above Zapata and his soldiers.

       They were slaughtered. That included their noble chieftain, El General Emiliano Zapata, El Caudillo del Sur: the Chief of the South.

       The night I spent in Chinameca, I slept on a Mexican Army cot, protected by the fortress walls, beneath the same roof that had hidden Zapata’s killers. (Between 1919 and 1970, that roof had probably been replaced once or twice.)

     That evening in the barracks, I read Womack’s account of the ambush that had taken place, literally, where I sat, walked, and lay down to sleep that night.