D. Brown's, Vietnam veteran, stories of Vietnam.

Vikings VMA 225

The last remnant of Marine Aviation in Da Nang is about to be lost forever. The old hangars of Marine Aircraft Group 11 are still standing but the only squadron name still visible in faded white above the hangar doors is "Vikings". It will soon be painted over with light green paint. I noticed the new paint on some of the old hangars as I was being bussed out to my flight to Hanoi last Saturday. I have looked across this airfield to those hangars every time I have gone to and from a commercial airliner here in Da Nang. It always gives me a twinge of nostalgia, because whenever I see that one painted name above those hangar doors, I go back to my first visit to this remarkable country 35 years ago. I really hope they run out of paint.

I had been to MAG 11 in Da Nang many times while stationed at Chu Lai with VMFA-115. When I arrived in Chu Lai in June of 69, Uncle Ho had the summer heat stoked up to MAX for us. The summer heat which is the current weather in Vietnam, is unbelievably oppressive to anyone who has never been here before. I remember my first days there as if it were last week. I had to check into my squadron, get a hootch assignment, get linen, pick up my 782 gear, bring my medical records to Sick Bay and have a chat with the Sgt. Major, to name just a few. I remember walking around the area looking for all the places on my tenth generation mimeographed list. The summer sun was beating down through a cloudless sky and reflecting off the beach sand that made the 'ground' at Chu Lai. The brim of my Marine Corps cover offered no relief but only funnelled the brilliance from the sand into my eyes. My Marine Corps green utility uniform absorbed every BTU of solar gain. Within a few short hours this city boy from Boston was ready to find a hole to crawl into and die. The heat and humidity drains every once of strength from you. I can still hear my leather Stateside combat boots clanging on the metal pallet sidewalks being unable to see. I remember stumbling about in a daze being unable to speak. This was my welcome to beautiful Chu Lai by the Sea and the beginning of a long, unforgettable, life changing year.

Unfortunately for me, I was an Ordnanceman and would spent 12 hours of every day, of the next year, forever it would seem, in the revetments loading F-4s. Hard tail bombs, Snake Eye bombs, big rockets, little rockets, gun pods, cluster bombs, missles and my favorite; napalm were loaded all day long. I really had a thing for napalm because of the cute little fuses and the white phosphorous boosters. The little paddle propellers on the fuses were just cute to me, I don't know how else to describe it. But seriously folks, when it comes to napalm, it's always better to give than to receive.

Loading bombs was a serious of very simple tasks. None of them required much intellect but to get good at it and fast required finesse and grace. It was not dangerous as you might imagine but you could get hurt if you were careless. Working under aircraft with exposives always makes you careful. The flight line environment felt like we were working above the fires of Hell. The dark green bombs sat on trailers in the sun all day. They became so hot as to be untouchable but we still had to get intimate with them. For example, tightening the sway braces on the lower, center bomb on a 3 bomb rack required you to become like Gumby. You had to snake your arms around the upper and lower bombs to reach the sway braces of the lower bomb in such a way as to not contact either of them with the skin of your arms. Then the sway braces had to be tightened to the right feel of tightness. After that, the sway brace lock nuts had to be cinched with a large 1" box end wrench. If the sway braces were too tight the bomb wouldn't release. If they were too loose, they could shake and damage the bomb rack. There were other similar tasks but speed was of the essence. Our Marine and Army brothers needed the product and they needed it to work. There was no room for error. Close air support was usually a mission of life or death.

The aircraft, many of which had already flown missions, also emitted gobs of heat from the twin General Electric J-79s. These monsters were directly above the aircraft belly skin which was directly above us. Not only was I burning in hellfire, I could barely see from the constant stinging of sweat that would run down my forehead and into my eyes. The heat came down from above, it came up from below and it was radiating from the work material. Luckily for the Marine Corps there wasn't an OSHA rep onsight. But if there was and he worked for Mr. Dietz, he'd probably by out there too; cutting arming wire, cleaning cartridges from the bomb rack guns or something. The only antidote for working in this environment known at the time was to drink large quantities of beer at the Enlisted Men's Club every night after chow.

I never could figure out why my Marine Corps made me, a 5'4", 108 pound, skinny little kid from the City of Boston, an ordnanceman. I couldn't understand why I had to lift, roll and shake very heavy objects that were filled with high explosives. It never squared in my little military mind why the big moose from Minnesota got to be a Radar Technician and sit at a bench or the punk from New York got into the Seat Shop only to sew flight bags. Didn't I go into the Marine Corps with an Aviation Guarantee to learn a marketable skill? Didn't anybody know this? Didn't my recruiter tell anyone? I finally had to rationalize that a 500 pound bomb was heavy to everyone and if you weighed 108 lbs. or 208 lbs. it was still going to be a serious day's work. Through all this drinking and thinking, I kept the faith. I knew, deep in my heart; that the great minds in the Marine Corps upstairs office; those highly trained and professional personnel specialists; those masters of the craft who poured over the test scores, deciphered the personality profiles and matched men to MOS knew that this was what I had been born to. It was the mission after all that made it all worthwhile. I knew I was supporting the guys out in the boonies and because of this one immutable fact and against all the odds, I got good at it. We all got good at it.

The result of working in all this heat and dirt was the adolescent skin on my face erupted with a Biblical plague of boils and pimples. Every morning I would go to the showers and head in my flip-flops. I would carry my mirror, razor, soap. I would wrap my Marine Corps Green towel around my naked butt and go down and do the three 'S's. I did them just like our beloved Drill Instructors taught all of us to do. But the last 'S' the one called Shave, turned me into a bloody sacrifice every morning. It took me so long to stop the bleeding I often rushed to catch the last of morning chow. This was a bad thing because morning chow was the only antidote known at the time for a Marine Corps hangover.

Those ever sympathetic Navy Corpsmen at sick bay knew exactly what I needed; a 'No Shaving Chit' and a visit to the dermatologist at the Navy Hospital up in Da Nang every 6 weeks. This 'No Shaving Chit' exempted me from doing this one 'S' of the three 'S's. This allowed me to grow a little beard. A beard is actually a part of our great Navy's tradition which the Marine Corps has been a a part for centuries. I'm sure the Navy Corpsmen saw it that way and had no idea what sort of reaction would come of it. But it made my Ordnance Shop OIC (Officer In Charge), Mr. Dietz, very unhappy with me. Making Mr. Dietz unhappy was not a good thing. There was no room in his Ordnance Shop for one of his Marines perpetuating and especially revelling in any Navy traditions but that is another story for another time. That story is called "3 Months at the Dreaded Bombdump".

Every six weeks, as directed by those friendly Corpsmen, I would take my medical orders and check out of my shop for my 3 day medically necessary excursion to paradise. Without any remorse whatsoever, I would forget all about those nasty hot bombs, the Hot Pads, the hot re-arms in the fuel pits, the Daisy Cutters, the cute little naplam fuses, the sweat and the pain and take my seat on that old Hummer, and fly up to Da Nang. There, after spending about an hour and a half getting to the Navy Hospital near Marine Corps Air Station Marble Mountain (right near where I'm living today) and visiting with the dermatologist, I would make good use of the remainder of my three days. I found myself shopping at the Air Force PX, hanging on China Beach, and more importantly, partying with my ordnance brothers of Marine Aircraft Group 11. Those days and nights in Da Nang was the only antidote known at the time for a year in an Ordnance Shop at Chu Lai.

Now, everytime I look across the Da Nang International Airport, over at those old MAG 11 hangars and see the faded glory of the 'Vikings', I remember those times. I remember how sweet it was to feel I was getting over on the Marine Corps. I remember the work, the pain and the comaraderie. I remember my old friends and hope they are alive and well. I remember and hope the sons and grandsons of Uncle Ho and Mr. Charles run out of paint.

Another Day in Da Nang

A stake bed truck was backing out of a driveway onto Tran Phu Street to the electronic tune of Jingle Bells. It's warning has a dual message for me, being both cautious of backing trucks in Vietnam and Christmas. The flowing one way traffic on Tran Phu Street in front of the Binh Duong Hotel looked the same as yesterday. Most traffic in Vietnam looks the same but now I can recognize indivduals.

The people going by are becoming familiar. The same French looking guy goes by on a motorbike with an Ao Dai clad woman riding side saddle facing away. The policeman on the large Honda turns out of the side street and powers up Tran Phu on some mission. The motor bike taxi guy who has been working the hotel for years arrives and gives me a short wave of recognition. There are cyclo drivers with large loads of fish and crab, all resembling the scene of yesterday. Yesterday, I was here too, standing in the entry way of the hotel. Then, I was waiting for Thu An to convince her son to get dressed and get ready to go to school. Today, Thu An had left ten minutes earlier to take her son to school on her bicycle. His school is the Viet - English bi-lingual Catholic school just up the street. Also up the street, before you get to the big River Han Market, is Christie's Cool Spot, the ex-pat bar and hang out. Yesterday, he didn't want to go or walk to school as well. This was a new tactic to get cooperation and seemed to work.

It was the first morning since my return he didn't go to school yelling and screaming. Until now he didn't want to go to school, he just wanted to stay with us. He used every trick in the book to grow roots into the hotel room floor. After four days he was starting to realize I wasn't leaving. As I am starting to get concerned about her return, she pops around the corner on the side walk.

Today we met with the people renting us a house at My Khe Beach. It is in a nice coffee shop between two buildings. Above the space, a huge tree makes a thick canopy above the tables. Around and enclosing the leafy canopy is corrugated metal roofing and a few tarps. The trunk of the tree making the shade comes out of the poured cement making the walk way. There is not any ground to allow watering. It has grown thick but is pruned like a large bonsai with no other branches or leaves under the canopy. It is shaded and cool under it and creates a scene of tropical serenity.

It is in places such as this that business is conducted. Over coffee or a beer, the slow give and take of conversation is the turf where deals are made or broken. Its too early for lunch but at the other tables, under swirls of cigarette smoke, other meetings were taking place as well. I let my wife do the talking for obvious reasons but it is her demeanor and style that works best whether its police business or buying oranges. I have watched her a few times in the police and government offices smoothing a path over obstacles most people need cash to overcome. This meeting was clearly a continuation of the one we had a few days ago when we were looking at the house. I drink my tea and listen to her tell the two gentlemen about me and how an American has come to sit before them. I know enough Vietnamese spoken by her to know what she is talking about but not enough to understand much of anyone else.

The two men listen quietly stirring their coffees or interjecting with short utterances. As long as they are looking engaged, I know she is doing well. They look at me from time to time and smile politely. At the conclusion, we are invited back to the house later today to sign papers. Thu An looks satisfied, so I guess we're in.

The Wheel of Life

The wheel of life seems to spin round and round quickly in Vietnam. One day I was with Thu An and her two brothers while they chose a gravesite for their mother and the next day I was at a wedding. Talk about whiplash.

Thu An and I took a taxi out into the countryside to meet her brothers at a crossroad. We almost didn.t make it. The taxi kept stalling. Every place the car died had an ad hoc mechanic who tinkered with our old KIA. None helped much but they did drop what they were doing to investigate. A piece of tape here and a rap with a hammer there and with broad smiles and a thumbs up, they inched us forward until we stopped at a motorbike repair shop. These guys quickly discovered we had water in the fuel and helped the driver remove the fuel filter. They all took a turn blowing the fluid out of it. Before long we were actually back on the road to the meeting point.

It was an unmarked and non-descript intersection like thousands out in the country. As we waited, I watched a crew of young men lining a trench with newly quarried granite rocks. A large backhoe moved the rocks from where they were dumped by the side of the road to a built up mound of dirt above a drainage trench being lined. They moved the rocks by hand from there to the trench where they were merely dropped. It appeared by the way they were aiming their load; they were filling in between other rocks they had been dropped before our arrival.

I watched them as a study of social interaction. There were more than a few of them but only a few were really working. It wasn.t long before you could tell the supervisor, the expert, the malingerers and the workers. It was a public works project for sure.

Much to my astonishment, her brothers arrived exactly on time. We followed their motorbikes down an ever-narrowing concrete strip that snaked through small hamlets and by farms. Up a washed out dirt road we came upon the cemetery. It was spread over a large area. Most of the above ground crypts appeared to be forgotten. Life is so full of necessity here, I was pretty sure few people came to visit on a regular basis.

Low walls, low enough for the local kids to jump over, defined groups of graves. There were groups of small ones that could only be those of children. There were other elaborate ones with boat like round walls and little temple like structures protecting the gravestone. These could only have been for the better heeled.

Thu An.s brother Hoi new exactly where we were going. For a moment we stopped at a lone small one. Thu An told me this was Hoi.s daughter. I was set back with surprise. She told me she was 6. She tapped her cheek, and said beautiful in Vietnamese, followed by a jerk of her head and a little thuck sound made from her teeth pulling away from the back of her teeth. The sense of loss of something wonderful from people who have nothing but their children was instantly communicated.

The brothers didn.t hesitate for ceremony but were about surveying the other open plots. Next to another that was identified as Hoi.s wife.s brother they described to me the final resting place for their mother with outstretched and sweeping arms. The ground they were looking at was still covered with brush. I nodded respectfully.

By now the cemetery people showed up and serious discussion began. Before too long, some kind of agreement was struck with handshakes. I spent most of this time goofing around with some of the children that were clearly intrigued by the foreigner. Kids in Vietnam are always easy to fool with and a little smile gets them grinning from ear to ear and whispering to each other. Their innocence is always refreshing and it was appreciated on this day.

Back in Da Nang, Thu An.s mother looked worse than the day before. Her skin was very yellow and her lips getting purple. We could still talk in the Pidgin English of our common time but it was clear she was running out of steam. The doctor told me she needed regular transfusions of whole blood to keep her going but whole blood was scarce. The whole blood would give her the blood factor needed for coagulation. The bleeding was killing her faster than the liver was failing. Thu An.s family and friends had no one with A+. Regardless of donor availability, there apparently is a lot of fear and superstition around giving and receiving blood. I offered to donate a pint, no big deal to me. I thought my wife would be proud her husband wanted to help but was only met by .the look., which isn.t really a look in Vietnamese but more like active ignoring. It also means the subject is not currently available for discussion. Since I need her language skills to help navigate to the blood donation station and ask other pertinent questions, I knew we were done with that one, for a while anyway. If I wait and bring it up again later, by not forgetting, I communicate to her I.m serious. She will then happily help me. People always wonder how we communicate without a common language and this is one mode. It.s really no different then other people except there isn.t a lot of talking about the .issues.. It.s just streamlined because to each other we are easy to understand.

Next morning, I found my suit and tie in their bag still perfectly unwrinkled, ready to provide the cover of elegance to the ambivalent. I put on my suit, the one I got married in 11 months and 25 days before and called a taxi. I actually liked it. How she got a suit made to fit without measuring me is one of those little Asian mysteries.

At the reception, the bride and groom met us standing next to a poster of them blissfully smiling out at infinity. She had that look of satisfaction. Not from catching a good man necessarily. But from the sense of success of being allowed to follow in the narrow footsteps of her mother and the mothers that came before her. The groom, who had probably sang karaoke shamelessly hundreds of times, now had to really get it right the first time. This impending performance had planted that unmistakable look of terror firmly on his youthful face. I didn.t know these people but I thought he looked familiar.

I took my seat at a table somewhere near the middle of the hall next to my wife with people I now know are her old opera friends. I couldn.t get into the spirit but kept thinking back to Thu An.s mother silently dying in a cold, dark room in a building with off again on again running water and no toilets. I looked around and into the eyes of these people I didn.t know and little understand. I marvel at their strength to keep going under the weight of unbearable loads, to dance along the edge of the precipice never looking down and for their ability to make joy whenever possible. I realized these two young souls were now accepting the responsibility of keeping the wheel of Vietnamese life spinning round. I raised my glass with them and toasted the good luck and the new hope of the two families and of them all.

Fun And Games

The Buddha

Vietnam is a great place to practice Buddhism. I have been coming here to visit my wife for over two years now. Everytime I come, I always ask her if we can see some traditional Vietnamese music. My requests, in either language, are usually met with blank stares. I decided to take matters into my own hands and check out the daily papers. I am now able to look through the newspapers and get a feel for the ads. I figured that performances would be advertised and I would find something in the paper. Sounds reasonable doesn't it? I discovered there are no entertainment sections and there really is little advertised except consumer items. The only places you can find anything about entertainment is at tourist offices.

While strolling around the hotel district in Sai Gon, we found a performance being offered at the Opera House. This is THE Opers House in Sai Gon. There was a huge banner telling the world there would be a concert of fall season traditional music. I knew I hit pay dirt. We climbed the stairs and went to the window. A young woman in the ticket office informed us it was invitation only for one night and since we were inquiring, we hadn't been invited. After not taking NO for an answer she finally said, if we were lucky, we could come back on the night of the only performance half an hour early and see if there were any open seats. I thought that was fair enough.

On the night of the Opera House performance we tried to get on a river cruise to a village that was advertised as offering traditional music during dinner. We tried to locate this mysterious village office only to finally find it was actually 'Saigon Tourist', a huge tourism concern in Vietnam. They run the Rex Hotel which is one of the best in the city. We got to the office at 5PM for the 530PM cruise, only to find the cruise booking closed at 430PM. We sat in their office for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do next. Thu An didn't seem to be bothered by the difficulty of all this but it really was getting to me. I really felt we were getting close. We decided to go out and walk down the street to the Opera House. We climbed the stairs and leaned over at the ticket office window to see if anyone was in there. The performance was at 8PM and it was just getting to be 530PM. Two guys were hanging around and started talking to Thu An. After a few seconds, they produced what looked like tickets to the show. Thu An didn't look happy and kept shaking her head no. I asked her if they were tickets. The guys picked up on my interest and showed me long ticket looking things that were exactly like the big banner over our heads. I asked 'how much' to Thu An. She said 100. I asked $100? They laughed and shook their heads no. 100,000 Vietnamese Dong they all said together. I thought that's only $7. I asked, for each? They said no, for two. I thought, that makes this almost for free, $3.50 each. I opened my wallet and Thu An quickly pulled out a 100,000 VND note. The deal was done and I thought how wierd this is to buy invitation only tickets from a scalper right in the foyer of the venue. Stranger things have happened to me here and I thought, if these turned out to be bogus they would make a good story.

It was off for a quick bite and then back to the Opera House to wait. People were showing up with the same tickets sticking out of their pockets. I was really feeling lucky. The doors opened and our tickets were accepted by the door man who gave them a partial rip through the middle. We went down to the third row and took the first two seats next to the left of the center aisle. As the place filled, the mood music being played went from Midnight In Moscow to some other Russian military sounding instrumentals. My sense of luck began to fade.

The hall was full. The curtain rose and the first few numbers were Vietnamese songs delivered by beautiful women in ao dias. The musicians, all women, were two guitarists, two keyboardists and someone playing a device that simulated drums. After them, a man sang two Russian victory songs with a great amount of emotion. I knew the Russians had been based in Vietnam and some Vietnamese knew Russian but the image of this Vietnamese guy singing Russian with the same gusto as a returning veteran of the Great Patriotic War signaled to me I would not be getting what I have longed to see.

We stayed for the duration. Thu An seemed happy to be having any kind of live entertainment and I should have too. I'm sure for her it was a treat to be in this wonderful space but for me it only means the search goes on.

One can not come here with expectations of finding what you want. Money can get just about anything accomplished here but you will rarely get exactly what you thought was the bargain. In many ways, you have to just go with the flow and see what happens. Getting angry accomplishes little. After a while you will find that the road and the destination are really the same. Its taking the trip that matters.

Feet Don't Fail Me Now!

I didn't start thinking it was a really dumb idea until I was sitting at SFO. I was on my way to Taipei where I had to change airlines to Vietnam Airlines then fly to Ha Noi, change planes again to finish with a flight to Da Nang. It was then, while waiting in the peaceful and sleepy inducing departure hall, the future unfolded in my mind. I needed to get off in Taipei, go through passport control, get my bags, go through customs and then find my way to the Vietnam Airlines ticket counter and then check-in. After that, it was another run through security and then a mad dash to the gate. I had only an hour and a half. In Ha Noi, I needed to do it again, plus; I needed to buy a ticket.

At first, I rationalized this would be no sweat for the experienced world traveler. But deep down in the back of my mind I knew I would be busting my ass to get out on the same day.

EVA is a class outfit and I slept well on the flight. As we approached Taipei I got my shoes on ready to sprint out the door. It didn't matter I was in the back near the freight; I was ready.

We landed exactly on time but the taxi to the gate seemed long. My stuff was spread out around in the overhead bins because I was sitting in an emergency exit row. I stood up and looked down the aisle over an endless throng of motionless Chinese heads. It seemed to take forever for the jetway to get to the door. I could feel the seconds melting away never to return.

Out on the jetway I got caught behind two ageless Chinese women who, if were American, would have requested wheel chairs. I was already too far behind the crowd to warrant just jamming past them but as soon as I cleared the jetway, I made up for lost time. I still wasn't sure if I needed a visa.

At Immigration, most everyone was heading for the 'citizen' counters. A good break, I thought. The two non-immigrant lines had only a few people in them. The Immigration official turned away the person in front of me for some unknown reason. They had a few words, then I watched her make tracks towards a window marked .Visa. across the hall. He waved me forward and took my passport and embarkation form. I scrutinized his face looking for that faint twitch of, "got another one.' I knew if I needed a visa at this point I was screwed. He stapled my embarkation form to a page in my passport and handed it back to me. I thanked the guy for doing his job.

Now on the other side of immigration I paused for another wasted moment looking for directions to the baggage claim area. The signage at Chiang Ki Shek was unconventional, bizarre even. They were short, yellow, with black letters, internally lit and attached to the ceiling. The English and Chinese characters had such little space between them that it made it difficult to read the English letters.

Down in the carousel area not much was happening yet. I yanked out a cart and quickly rolled it up to the assigned belt. A few bags were in orbit and the people from the .citizen. lines were starting to trickle in. I walked over to the belt delivering bags up to the carousel from outside. There was a light beam trip that would stop the feed process if there were going to be a bag collision on the carrousel. Once I figured out what was going on, I became annoyed at this ridiculous display of politeness. I wondered whether they received the same treatment from the rampies. I still had an hour to go.

It seemed like everyone was leaving except me. I started thinking what all airline passengers worry about; my bags and me were on different planets. Finally, they came up together. Wham bam on the cart and now, how do I get to check in? I followed a couple out who were joyously met by their family including a photo shoot. But soon I was alone; I went out into the center of the hall and looked for a sign to departures. There were no signs but I guessed departures would be found upstairs. At the up escalator, carts were not approved. I looked around for the man but saw an elevator instead.

Around a pillar was the elevator. I got in and pushed the door close button. The door closed and then I pushed the up button. The door opened. I pushed the door close button again and then pushed the up button again. The door opened again. It became apparent I was in a down only elevator. I was starting to get a little unhinged by the rapid consumption of time getting into stupid situations. Around another pillar was another elevator and inside there was one word above one button, Departure. Up we went.

I pushed my cart with the four bags into the check-in hall. I rolled out into a throng of random motion and unintelligible voices. Kids were running around, old people were motionless and there were no clear spaces between people. It was also a shock to go from the tomb-like quiet of downstairs into this mad-house of up here. I went from being in a space where I could only think too much to a space where I couldn.t think at all.

Now I only had to find the Vietnam Airlines check in counter for success, but which row? I looked around for a big sign with the current departures then I noticed and made a beeline what resembled a registry. None of the flights on the registry started with a VN or contained a 925. I looked it over two more times before I realized I was in the wrong terminal. Vietnam Airlines must be over in the domestic terminal.

I didn't even want to know what time it was now. At the end of the hall was a sign for an airtrain. Around the corner was another empty room but on the opposite side was a row of waist high steel columns with spaces only wide enough to walk through. It was here that I had to leave my cart behind. I put on my backpack, attached my briefcase to the suitcase with the pull up handle and flipped up the little handle on my old hard-shelled Samsonite. Through the cart-pass-not columns and into the maze. This part of the building was surely build around something else because of all the turns. To my utter joy an airtrain was waiting with open doors.

The empty airtrain had three minutes to go. I waited patiently catching my breath.

Outside across the garden in front of the main terminal building, I could see the other wing and destination of the aitrain. The airtrain was quick. It slowed to a stop in its little station. I watched the two layers of safety doors open in front of me. I stepped out and bolted into the hall and then around the corner. The corridor started a slow descent. I realized I was going downstairs. I just couldn.t believe this. I was going back to an arrival hall. I turned around and saw the airtrain leave the station. Across the tracks was the other platform. I turned around and kept going.

At the end of another maze-like corridor was another empty arrival hall. The effect of gravity on my bags was starting to make me sweat and my heart to beat hard. This hall was older than the international side and the signs more arcane. I asked a security guard where Departures were? He gave me one of those long looks of the totally confused and then pointed to the door to the street followed by a broad sweeping gesture with his arm. Outside, I took a second to get a breath and see what was going on out there. I walked on and asked a porter looking guy for Departures. In pretty fair English he told me to go into the next door and go upstairs. I did.

The check in floor was just like the other side, pure chaos. Vietnam Airlines was in row 2. I chugged up to the row and saw a couple of ladies at a China Airlines counter in under a VN925 sign closing up shop. The small carpet in front of the bag scale rolled up under my suitcase. I pulled out my ticket and handed it to the gal.

Without looking at me she said only one word, .Passport.. In a few moments, I was handed my ticket stock back, a beautiful yellow boarding pass and watched my two suitcases drop onto the bag belt and go away. It was ten minutes to flight time. I asked her if my bags would make the flight. Yes, of course. She then said, go through security and then to gate A1. As she spoke she pointed to over there somewhere. She then pointed to an A1 on the boarding card but without my glasses on I couldn.t see it. I just believed her. .Go . now., were her last words.

I cleared the row of check in counters and turned left. There were no signs directing traffic to the gates but I kept going anyway. I believed her. I believed she wanted me to make this flight. I had a boarding pass. I knew I had it made but the momentum had me going as quickly as I could without breaking into a run. I got in a line of about twenty waiting to go through the only x-ray machine. After x-ray there were only long halls past other people.s gates and duty free shops with Chinese girls imploring me to stop and buy. Gate A1 was at the end, naturally. I made best use of the moving walkways. The agent at the jetway looked happy to see me. He seemed almost to know me as he took my boarding card and said Mr. Brown. I just smiled at him.

I put my briefcase in the overhead bin, slid my backpack under the seat in front of 9E and sat down. I took a deep breath, put my seat belt on and started to relax. As I watched them close the cabin door, I remembered I had only an hour and a half in Ha Noi to buy a ticket to Da Nang and do this all over again.

A Real Toilet

It was clear as a bell yesterday morning. I had just returned from a few days in New England and was still trying to get my head screwed back on straight. Because I had taken a day flight back to Asia the jetlag had me good. Normally it’s pretty humid in Da Nang, around 80%; and hazy, even in the morning. Today though, as we crossed the Han River Bridge, I could look north across the bay and see Highway 1 going up to the Hai Van Pass. I could even make out the old concrete bunkers up there that used to protect it. It was remarkably clear and that made the mountains seem almost touchable. The remarkable beauty of the surrounding mountains energized me and dispelled the fatigue, at least for a few hours anyway.

Thu An and I were riding on our new electric motor scooter with her son and a small load over to her old apartment building. Thu An was sitting behind me with a couple of bags of freight and Huu Tuyen was sitting between my legs on the horn of the seat in front of me with his hands on the handle bar. This is pretty normal fare here. I have seen families of five and six teenage boys together tooling along on motorbikes. But this is an electric motor scooter and this was going to be good test of its range under load. Last week it had passed the rain test after we rode it home during the tail end of a thunderstorm. Now it had a serious load, around 120 kilos and I wondered if I could get it back across the bridge later. I rolled the ‘throttle’ back a little from max and coasted more. I have been told the motor-hub generates electricity when it’s coasting but I really don’t know anything about it. Anyway, I didn’t want to have to push it over the bridge later when it would be seriously hot, so I took it slow and easy.

After we traveled past the north end of the Da Nang Airport’s runway on Dien Bien Phu Street we then went west around the roundabout that has the statue of the Mother of All Viet Minh. The old Freedom Hill appeared off to the left. The rock quarry where the Freedom Hill PX and Marine Corps processing center used to stand was so clear I could see individual boulders loosened by the blasting. The lush green vegetation hung tightly around the scars of broken rock and you could make out individual trees. It sounds strange but this was a really unusual day.

Behind her old building, some of the folks were spreading out the red dirt with shovels and trowels. The dirt was being used to fill in the low spots where water makes life difficult for Mrs. Uc. During the rainy season the water collects behind the building and floods Mrs. Uc’s kitchen. She has a small fireplace set up on some old bricks against the back wall where she cooks for her family. During the rains she must wade through and stand in the water to get this simple task accomplished. Everyone else must wade through this water to enter the building.

The dirt was coming from a small excavation inside the house under the stairway. Two guys had ripped up the floor tiles and were making a deep hole. Thang was watching and supervising the dig. Thang is a civil engineering student and seems to be in his element running this toilet renewal project. He now lives in the room Thu An and Huu Tuyen used to sleep in. This was also the room Thang’s parents lived in before they went to Sai Gon three years ago to manage their cousin’s coffee shop. It was probably the room he grew up in when everyone was still in the opera company. Thu An’s mother now lives in the room adjacent to this. This is the room Thang lived in until we rented the house near the beach. Moving Thu An to the beach created a small round of musical rooms. Above these rooms on the roof is the location of the small makeshift shower room I have written about in the past. This building, which is owned by the government, houses almost 25 people and has no inside facilities.

I went upstairs with Thang. He showed me where he was going to put in the toilet and how the pipes were to run under the floor to the hole being dug under the stairs. He pulled out a bag of PVC elbows and laid them near the toilet location. The toilet was going in the defunct shower room that is now the storage area in Thu An’s mother’s room. The wall separating these had been torn down long ago when the shower room went defunct. They will rebuild the wall to separate the toilet from the bedroom, replace the wooden wall in the hallway with a new door or accordion screen and run water in from somewhere unknown to me. He told me how he was going to accomplish this but I didn’t get it and that’s ok. I don’t need to get it and will have it all understood when its done.

Out back, against the outside wall were four concrete pipe sections about three feet deep and about three feet in diameter. With them were two round concrete plates that appeared to be a cover plate with a hole to accept a four-inch pipe and a bottom plate that was just blank. I assumed the end of the system was going to be a septic tank that would be placed in the hole under the stairs.

While we were poking around, Thu An told me the back, downstairs room; the room Mrs. Uc, her husband, two girls and two dogs are living in now used to be a Viet Cong safe house. She made a face that could only be interpreted as eating something distasteful and told me they used to sleep and cook in there. I looked around and realized how close to the MAG 11 living area we were. From the roof you can see the ‘quag,’ the small stream that became the Marine Corps communal toilet and the pine trees where MAG 11 used to be. I’m sure they had a good visual command of all sorts of traffic from this location and could eat dinner without much worry of being caught. I wondered if the old guy, the neighborhood committee chairman used to live here. I didn’t dwell on this too much though but reflected on the irony of the situation.

I was damn impressed with the whole operation. I knew this one inside toilet installation was going to make the residents of this old, rat -trap building pretty happy. I knew Mrs. Uc was going to be happy too because she was going to keep her tail feathers out of the water this coming monsoon season. Thu An’s mom, who is recovering from surgery and doesn’t have a lot of energy these days, wont have to go downstairs and find a toilet someplace else. Yes, there was a little pragmatism on my part, I wont have to practice mind of matter when we come over for visits. All in all, I felt like we were really accomplishing something and for only $200 to boot. It’s a good thing they don’t have rigorous code enforcement around here. Hell, I don’t even know if they have codes. Not my problem.

More when there is more
Hope all is well
db

Compressor Wash

The bus ride to Da Nang can only be described as pure torture. Highway One, even where it has been freshly paved and striped, isn’t smooth. In the back of the bus each bump and ripple is felt because the shocks are probably dead. They were probably dead before they left Korea, Japan, and China or wherever else these tanks came from. I can’t imagine the Vietnamese bus bosses overly concerned about the ride. The only real objective is to make it to the destination.

In the back of the bus we had five seats. None of the seat bottoms were attached to anything. As we rolled on, the seats not being held down by the gravity exerted by a person or a dog, bounced around. The dog, who would change her position to maximize changes in the breeze coming in from the open window two seats up, would try to turn around or move on these loose seats. As she would shift her weight and move on the seat bottoms they would slip around under her paws. The dog kept miss-stepping and falling through the cracks. I found myself constantly pushing the seat bottoms back into position and trying to jam them with some of our luggage. None of this worked for any length of time.

The dog slept peacefully some of the time and other times I could see her head just kind of bobbing to the crazy rhythm of the road surface. My attempts at sleeping through this, ended after short fits, with a backache and a sense of futility. I would find myself nodding out from time to time, then waking to watch the shadows of hills and mountains go by outside. I thought 20 hours this after the 30 hours of crate time was going to be bad for the dog. It was certainly bad for me.

Thu An was sleeping stretched out on the double seats one row up. Her head was lost in darkness near the window, her legs were folded over the armrest and her feet splayed on some of the cargo piled up in the aisle. How she slept through all this and in that position I haven’t a clue.

At gas stops and meal breaks, I hooked Tips up to her reel leash and let her clamber over the cargo ahead of me. I usually let the people up front go out first. Some people obviously thought this was a circus. They thought it was the coolest thing to watch her go by and would stick their faces over the armrests. Then, when Tips would try to sniff them, they would pull their heads back like surprised turtles. Outside I would take her to any patch of grass to let her relieve herself. If I made a head call, I brought her into the stall with me. Between and shared by each stall was usually a bathtub sized tank of water with a few large cups floating in it. I assumed the water was for flushing the toilet. Tips enjoyed sticking her face into these tanks and slurping the water. If there was someone next door, they usually made some kind of exclamatory sound after seeing Tips’ big dog head coming out from under the dividing wall. Then it was back on the bus.

Around five o’clock in the morning just after getting back on the road from a fuel stop, we stopped. The crew all got out and started looking at something. Then we started backing up to the gas station. There, we all got out. I knew we weren’t going to get into Da Nang on time and hoped it would at least be today. I had a hard time imagining someone coming to our rescue, with parts, within the next few hours. I couldn’t force myself to be hopeful that there was an emergency road service. After an hour though, the bus started. A couple of new guys covered in grease stepped out of the bus looking pretty satisfied. I knew the look. It was the look of knowing your shit, but actually being lucky and acting like heroes for it. The bus was running and the crew was trying to give them money. They didn’t take it. They must have been Good Samaritan diesel mechanics on their way home or to work or who knows what. They were heroes to me because the sun was coming up and I was already tired of keeping Tips out of this huge fountain next to the road.

All of these busses have a crew. We had two drivers and two guys to help with the loading, especially the loading of the roof. One of the loaders is also the money collector, the Purser you could say, but he doesn’t wear white gloves or one of those snazzy hats. The other loader really liked Tips. He would come back every half an hour or so when he wasn’t sleeping or screwing with some of the young kids to pat Tips’ head. He was incredibly filthy and Tips declined to sniff his hands, which he would stick in her face. Normally, Tips will lick your hand to get the very last residue of your lunch smell into her mouth for analysis. Tips wouldn’t smell his hands and would even turn her head away. He continued to try to get Tips to do something about his hands. He never thought to put something in it. I just watched what could eventually become a bad scene. When Tips kept looking away, he then started to try to close her eyelids, playfully I guess, but I wasn’t sure. I knew from little motions Tips was making that it wouldn’t be long before her extraordinarily long patience with human weirdness would soon be depleted. I really didn’t need my dog to start copping an attitude about Vietnamese people. I wagged a finger and warned him with my best snappy Jaws imitation that this wasn’t cool. His eyes got real big and went away for a while. Later he returned and just looked at Tips, I guess he liked her big brown eyes. Then he offered to buy her from me. Thu An started to laugh while I was still interpreting his words. I just smiled and said in Vietnamese, old friend, not for sale.

After getting to Da Nang and taking a taxi home, Tips was destined for another bath. Thu An found the little mystery vial the vet in Sai Gon had given her. She filled a large plastic washbowl with about two or three liters of water and drew the two cc’s of this honey colored liquid into the syringe. When she squirted it into the water. It turned milky white. It smelled kind of familiar, too. It smelled like really familiar. I brought my face right down to it and pulled in a good one. It was BB-3100. There was no doubt about it.

For those unfamiliar with BB-3100, this is the standard liquid solution for cleaning the compressor sections of gas turbine aircraft engines. People like myself who have worked on or around Pratt and Whitney PT6 turbo prop engines and probably a lot of other engines have used this stuff regularly, nightly even. It is either sprayed or dribbled into the inlets of these engines while the starter motor is cranking. Then there is a rinse cycle with fresh water. After the rinse, there’s another cycle just to blow out all the fluid. Turbine engine compressors blades over time will get dirty from the crap that’s in the air. As this dirt builds up it changes the shape of the blades causing them to get inefficient at moving air through the engine. Washing them with BB-3100 is called a Power Recovery Wash. In the vernacular it’s just a compressor wash. Most of the engines I ever worked on needed a whole lot more than a wash to restore their power. But, we did it anyway because it was part of the program and we didn’t want to go to jail.

I was a little reluctant to wash down Tips with the stuff but I was sure it wouldn’t hurt her. If it took off some of her extra hair, probably through degreasing, then it might help her deal with the heat and, more importantly; it would relieve my wife of chasing dog hair all day. I felt a little ridiculous giving my dog a compressor wash but in this country, they have developed solutions to problems we don’t even know the names of yet. And besides, it wouldn’t be the first time I learned something new here.

Cheers
Dick B

Mopping Up Action In Da Nang

Over the centuries in this part of the world, doing anything, even waiting for a bus, necessitates getting into the squat position. When my wife does her work, her butt is usually just an inch or two above the floor. She could be doing the wash, taking a shower, peeling fruit, bathing the kid or washing the floor, almost anything. Some of these activities could be done at the dining table and others have tools produced specifically for the task but it doesn’t seem to matter.

During the war and more recently, I have observed people in the squat and wondered how they can do it for so long? I have tried it myself with various degrees of pain and failure. I assume it is a resting type of position but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just a way to move the load of gravity off your joints and onto your ligaments. Maybe for the lack of tables and chairs, squatting is all there has ever been. I don’t really know but I do know; if I ask someone why, I will not get a well-considered answer. I might not get any answer because it’s just the way things are. I feel relieved knowing I do not need to do this skill to live here.

Now that we have a dog and tile floors, certain affects of the dog can now be seen with remarkable clarity. The ambient daylight that pours in through the front doors and reflects off the tiles has made small round spots of dried dog drool and who knows what else self-consciously obvious. Shedding hair, which seems to be the dog’s only bad habit, over the course of a few hours, makes the shiny tiles softly matted. I guess this is why my Grandmother never wanted me to have a dog. She must have known that dogs had these disturbing characteristics. I am sure though that she was not aware of dog eating preferences, which are head and shoulders above hair and drool as doggie disincentives.

My wife is a meticulous cleaner of things. She isn’t obsessive about cleaning but she seems to have a threshold of acceptability for spots and fur on the floor. Her normal approach to this problem isn’t to blame the dog; it isn’t to complain to the dog importer; and it isn’t to point out the problem to anyone who will listen. Her normal approach is to first sweep the floor, both floors I might add, with a short reed whiskbroom. The whiskbroom is just short enough for someone my size, and I’m short in just about every culture, to need to bend over just a smidgee. Then she will fill the bucket in the bathroom half full of water and with a rag, start at one end of the house squatting on the floor and rag mop the floor clean. She will do this in the squat until she needs to refresh the water in the bucket.

It didn’t take more than a couple of weeks for this to produce pain. She didn’t tell me about it but when she would get up to change the water she would put her hand on her lower back and wince. I pointed up to the ceiling, in reference to the upstairs back porch; said we have a few and pantomimed my best mopping technique because I didn’t know the Vietnamese word for mop. She said, “No, I don’t like.” I nodded my head in agreement. Then, I reminded her gently she wasn’t getting any younger. She laughed.

Yesterday, she came home with a threaded plastic pole, a small, circular, rope mop head and a cone thing that hooks to the inside rim of a bucket. I screwed the pole to the mop head for her. The plastic cone thing was for a smaller bucket so it got parked under the sink. She dipped the mop into the bucket, pulled up a dripping virgin mop head and then gave it a hard rotating squeeze.

The mop hit the deck and danced across the floor. She rinsed out the head, squeezed it again and did another three or four square yards of floor. She gave it another rinse and looked to me with a broad, beaming grin.

Ah, technology; you gotta love it.

All be well
Dick B

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