The Insanity of Kwan Foo Mong

“My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy,

And when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure

The violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine”

-Mary Shelley-

Early up AM.  Not to vote; to perform a Houdini outta the damn night-night from the straight jacket of weighted sheets holding me firm in place.  Lessee—Scooter + Clancy + the Goofalator = 120 tons; with Stick and Jypsi as bookends: one to the stomach, one to the butt.

Skipped the dangle, straight to the pot, next to the other pot, on to the keyboard; suck nasty smoke and listen to the percule-gurgle and the considerations of cerebral musings that are shit moving on to Shine-ola.

Iz my irritation showing?  Do you think these Capri pants make my butt look too big?

OK, here’s the deal: went to the doctor yesterday to learn nothing that I didn’t already know.  The diabetes is holding its own.  The erectile dysfunction is a mystery since I don’t have anywhere to put one if I had one.

The VA doles out two Viagrows a month; to be split in two for a total allowance of four hard-ons from one full moon to the next.  I put in my monthly prescription request; and have accumulated a nice little collection so far.  If I should ever have a passing fancy to off myself, I’ll just swallow all them blue pills whole and go out in an explosion of ecstasy.  Maybe.

It was fun, telling my new primary physician the truth for a change.  Yes, I smoke three-plus packs a day.  No, I don’t want to enter some damn program for smoke cessation.  Yes, I eat like a bird these days.  No, I won’t cut a deal to have my insulin increased if I promise to eat more. Gawd-almighty!  Doctors!

Greg House repeatedly asserts in the television series that patients lie.  When I suggest this to Dr. Madam-typing-away, she rolled her eyes (a frequent enough mannerism to suggest a permanent tic) and retorted that patients don’t really lie.  They just play to their denial!

Geehoseafat, medical school and detective school all rolled into one!  I’m so glad they’re learning something besides medicine these days.

This recently acquired attitude of telling you that in fact those Capri Pants do exagerate your bootie is a natural progression of the promise I made to myself to tell all--of my Viet Nam--to the best of my recollection. 

Rigorous honesty, at the end of the day, can be a real motherfucker for both the adherent and the recipient.

As I see the light at the end of my personal tunnel and run dry of memories, the Viet Nam Monologues will come to a final destination.

Unfortunately (or not), I have added a new addiction to my repertoire of obsessive habits—writing.  That will continue until I run out of cigarettes and coffee.  Pray, each of you hungry readers that such a conundrum never comes.  Pray.

I’m going to use one last allusion to Apocalypse Now, and let it retreat back into cinematic history.

The character played by Robert Duvall—Lt. Col. Kilgore of the 9^th Mobile Air Cav—was typical of many people who fought in Viet Nam.  They engaged the enemy with ruthless overkill and did not think for an instant that what they were doing had any moral consequence.  The Kilgore’s never wavered in the conviction of the true believer; never questioned their own attitudes...or methods.

Kilgore indeed ‘never got as much as a scratch over there’ and returned to the world with his sanity intact. 

Why?  Because only a person bearing the inherent goodness of humanity can go insane.  That would account for all the rest of us.  Home again, home again, our noggins just a mite askew.

Except me.  I went insane standing there before my barracks after Hong Kong with 60 days left in-country.  This is what I did:

First, I did not share my experience with Christina Kwan…with anyone.  I didn’t even speak to Frosty, who had been witness to most of it.  Like the good addict/alcoholic who squirrels his stash away, I hid my thoughts so that no one could steal them, or sour them with reality.

I would not accept reality; I wanted to stay lost…in her.  I convinced myself that when I returned, I would simply not be customer number 3,024, up a hundred men from my time before.  She would see me sitting, waiting, as she entered our bar; her face would light a million candles in smiling recognition of the one, the only Petruchio, who kept his promise and returned for her.

Second, I began immediately to plot my return to Hong Kong.  I went so far as to scour the Camp Library for material related to jobs in the Crown Colony: American companies with offices, U.S. Government facilities, airline ticket and operations in Hong Kong.

I thought of hiring on with a shipping line; perhaps joining the Merchant Marines.  I even thought of just taking my accumulated pay upon the immediate separation from active duty awaiting me at Long Beach, buying a one way air fare to Hong Kong and working out the details when I got there.

The fly-myself-back scheme was marred by an imaginary phone conversation:

“Hi, Mom? Yeah, I just landed at Norton.  Yeah, I’m happy to be safe.  Yeah, is Dad on the extension?  Hi Dad!  Listen, I need to tell you both something.  As soon as I get seps in about a week, I’m going to fly back to Hong Kong. What? No, I am serious; I’m very serious. What?  Well, I’m going back there for Christina.  Who? No, Dad, she’s my girlfriend. I met her there on R&R.  What?  No, I met her at a church social.  I think she’s a secretary or a translator or something. What? Well, I’m going to ask her to marry me and come back to Rockville to live.  I was hoping we could put up in the upstairs bedroom across from Linda’s. We’d only be there until I could get a job and maybe Christina too.  No, I’m sorry.  My mind’s made up! Listen, they’re calling us to the ground transport.  I’ll call as soon as I can with more details.  I love you! Bye-bye.”

As I composed this exchange with my parents, I already knew it was never going to happen.

While the glamor and intricacy of these myriad machinations played to Johnny Mathis love songs in my head, my delicate psyche struggled to protect me from the heart-breaking truth.  I had no job skills to offer any prospective employer.  I had no language skills to boast.  I had no degree to hold up as symbolic of my abilities.  My ignominious exit from University was accompanied by a glut of hours with a grade point average so low that completing my education was close to a mathematical impossibility.

I was nothing.  I was nowhere.  I was without an oar and without a rudder to steer.

While my poor overwhelmed mind attempted to shield me from the hopelessness of my grandiose plans, day-to-day life became a contrast that was more and more intolerable, as time in-country plodded its painfully slow way towards Freedom Hill.

To a man, every Vet who sees this remembers and feels his own agony at being short.  It was the same for everyone, regardless of place or position: counting the days; and denying the fear of death, in relentless pursuit of us all.

I had never felt clinical depression before.  The identifiers were all there, but there were no psychologists, no friends, and no strangers on a bus bench to either hear me or to observe my increasingly bizarre behavior.  Acting and sounding crazy in Viet Nam gave no one cause for alarm.

Lost in myself thus, I became only marginally aware of how profoundly my situation had changed from just a few weeks prior.  When I came out of my daze, down on the Service Craft Causeway, my small comfortable daytime village had been transformed from familiarity to a fairly good rendition of Dante’s descent into Hell.

That I was to survive this coming ordeal still perplexes me all these years later.  The madness wasn’t over; it had simply become another reality.

More tomorrow.  I can’t do this anymore today.

 

To the Rescue!

This is embarrassing.

Scooter, making his submission display while I was lifting him off the night-night, pissed on my hand.  I took the desecrated appendage to the kitchen sink, holding it away from the rest of me; while feverishly scrubbing it like a surgeon preparing for the operating room.

Gawd!  Shot at and missed and pissed on and hit.  That should be everyone’s start to the new day. Quite humbling, really.  Each morning should bring a similar moment of clarity as to how little control we exercise over our own existence.

The tumultuous thunderstorm that brought the entire Mutt Brigade to bed for the reassuring comfort of comforter and Daddy has passed us by.  The pre-dawn sound of pouring rain is the end of Thor’s Sky Bash.  Daddy and Dorks are settled once more in the office cave, dogs to resumed slumber; Ish to the keyboard.

And who the hell forgot to tell me about the fallback of daylight savings time?

Shit.

I’ve half a mind (!) to leave the fricking house clocks, stove clock, watches and microwave just as they are.  I don’t need an extra hour of daylight to harvest the sorghum and slop the hogs; in fact, daylight savings time has as little impact on my tiny universe as whatever hapless schmuck won the lottery last night.

Or who wins the election.

Do I note the Republicans sounding a bit shriller in these closing days of the campaign?  Do they have a nervous wavering doubt that perhaps they have backed the wrong horse’s ass? Are they caving to the impending doom of an Armageddon-in-the-offing? 

Really now, regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, politicians do not affect the economy or world events any more than that idiot despot king who had his throne placed on the beach and commanded the tide to recede.

The last time we experienced such a din of temper-tantrum wailing and kicking of little heels upon the kitchen linoleum was when Franklin Roosevelt brought in Social Security and back-to-work programs like the WPA and CCC.  There were Republicans back then who darkly predicted the end of America—and the world--as they saw it; when FDR did the things that he did.

Did those huge government initiatives put an end to the Great Depression?

They did not.

In actuality, the Depression finally ended with World War II.  You see, war is the excrement that will fertilize economic growth like no other.  One could quite easily propose the argument that war has sustained our country and our enemies for the last century and into this one.

In my sophomoric youth, I didn’t see this logical flow of History’s River.  From the limited vantage point of my hippie hovel, marooned on the River banks, I only heard the anti-war rhetoric and assumed it was the failure of politics to make things OK in Southeast Asia. 

One of the most cryptic slogans of the day was, ‘War is good business.  Invest your son.’  I’m sure the military and defense contractors agreed whole-hardheartedly with that concept.  Making death available for 58,000 Americans made a few folks a lot of money, sitting in their corporate buildings; or at the 19^th hole--back safe at home.

How’s about one more rousing cheer for trickle-down economics, you profiteering-policy-making-pentagon-geek sons of bitches?  All together now…

If you get the idea that I am cynical about the American War in Viet Nam, then for the sake of my 58,000 fallen comrades, I will be a cynic.

That I did not become a name etched in black marble on a Memorial deep in the heart of political Washington was only a matter of the Divine Plan having other plans for the blonde yeoman of yore.

What lingers to this day for me were the close calls with death.  These, according to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, were not combat-related; therefore not the sort of trauma that induces PTSD.

On that score, I beg to fucking differ. 

Here is the story of how BM-2 Dickhead came close to killing me a second time:

Although many stories have been interwoven with the monsoons, I have said naught of the weather systems themselves.

The East Asian monsoon affects large parts of Indo-China, Philippines, China, Korea and Japan.

(Skip the italicized paragraph below.  It is boring and won’t explain the monsoons any better.  This is Wikipedia’s copy-and-paste on nasty-

weather Asian monsoons)

“The onset of the summer monsoon is marked by a period of premonsoonal rain over South China and Taiwan in early May. From May through August, the summer monsoon shifts through a series of dry and rainy phases as the rain belt moves northward, beginning over Indochina and the South China Sea (May), to the Yangtze River Basin and Japan (June) and finally to North China and Korea (July). When the monsoon ends in August, the rain belt moves back to South China.”

OK, for the (at least) one reader out there who is a) as dilatory as I am about looking up facts and b) is still obsessed with wanting to know them anyway:

When the ocean ambient temperature is higher/lower than the land temperature, the imbalance causes turbulent weather in direct proportion to the extremity of the dichotomy.

There! Satisfied?  Gosh, I hope so.

One afternoon late in November, we could look out from the Boathouse and watch the storm beginning to build.  If the monsoons had not been so devastating, perhaps it might have made for an entertaining interlude.

But monsoon storms bore no resemblance to the colorful buildup of thunderheads on a mid-April afternoon, far away in the Texas Hill Country.

As the dark clouds boiled and broiled, the air would become somewhat electrified; with the near 100% humidity ever present.  It was a tactile sensation, but not at all pleasant.  The fast approaching weather was not going to be to anyone’s idea of amusement.

God!  Can I remember that now, here in the quiet office cave, in the glow of my monitor—the feeling of impending threat as those clouds grew darker and the winds began to howl; the sea starting to keep rhythm with the tempo of really nasty weather descending on our miniscule patch of causeway.

As the swells increased out in the harbor, the anchored fuel barges began to bob and yaw.  After a while, it became increasingly clear that the six or eight barges out there were not only loose from their mooring, they were not properly lashed together as they should have been.

Scott peered out the window, turned and glared at Dickhead, returned to look at what he could see was coming disaster.  Adrift in the storm, the barges were free to bash into anything; a speculation much like seeing a loaded Semi lose its brakes and start rolling down a steep incline.

Unlike any Semi, these floating gas tanks contained thousands of gallons of fuel.  They were as threatening as mines out there.  Yep.  A goddamned disaster in the offing.  Dickhead’s failure to do his job once again was about to become mayhem.

I remember that he began to cry, to add a touch of sincerity to his wailing perplexity as to how this situation could have come about.  Scott was largely unimpressed with this outpouring of apologies; as unmoved as the rest of us staring out the windows.

My feelings wavered between disgust and inexplicable pity for the wretched prick.  This fuck-up could be the showstopper for him; the last straw on a straining camel’s back.  The end of skatin’ duty followed in short order by a plunge into oblivion.

For the moment, Dickhead’s discomforting emotional outburst was ignored as Scott seized the situation and barked at me to go out and fucking fire up a skimmer; he nodded at Jerry who understood what the nod implied and was in motion to the locker to grab nylon line for the job ahead.

The three of us converged; they joined me in the boat and I brought the skimmer about headed out on the choppy water, straight for the barges, about 200 yards out from the causeway.  None of us were wearing rain gear—no time to dress for the occasion.

As we drew near, the bobbing mass of metal tanks made me think of toys in the bathtub.  I thought of this innocuous distraction to calm my terror at the impending job at hand.  Tying on to the nearest barge, we alit onto what can only be described as a pitching bucking undulating fairground ride…from Hell.

I don’t have much recollection of what happened next.  I do remember the wild ride and seeing Scott and Jerry working the lines, through the sheets of rain on the farthest side of the barge.

I stepped backwards, and suddenly my left leg had disappeared up to my crotch.  I had broken through a rusted patch of metal—one more testament to Dickhead’s benign neglect.

I can remember feeling a sort of displaced embarrassment at my predicament.  I was wedged so firmly into the hole that I could not extract myself; and with the unchartered feelings of human emotion, I felt chagrin instead of fear.

Shouting for help over the wind, Jerry saw and came as quickly as he could move on the tipsy surface below his boots.  He grabbed under my arms and hauled me up and out.  He told me through the rain and shriek of wind to sit down and stay the fuck where I was; then went back to help Scott finish lashing the barges back together.

I watched them hopscotching from one heaving surface to another until they were lost in sight to the driving rain.  It didn’t take two seasoned boatswain’s mates very long to complete their task.

We made for the skimmer and the return trip to the causeway.  Without the distraction of frantic activity, I became aware of how much my leg hurt; as I limped into the boat.  They lowered me down on the front seat and Jerry steered us back home.

Outside the Boathouse, the monsoon reaching its crescendo, it was as dark as night in the middle of the afternoon.

Dropping my torn pants, Jerry began using the contents of the first aid kit to clean and dress my leg.  My left leg was raked with scrapes and cuts from my upper thigh to ankle.  Jerry swabbed the bloody mess with Mercurochrome.  That was fun.

I limped up to the hooch to put on dry clothes and came back to the Boathouse to finish out the workday.  Just another quiet day in service to my country.

When I was a teenager, Mom would take one look at similar wounds (Little boys injured themselves with the antics of youthful males well into adulthood and beyond).  She would tell me I should go get a tetanus booster; an admonition that I invariably ignored.

The trip next morning to the clinic would have made Mom proud that I was finally heeding her words of caution.  At the time, the cuts and the scabs were nothing to compare with my imagining what might have happened had I fallen overboard.  In the turbulent water I could have drowned.  Or a barge could have crushed my skull like a ripened cantaloupe.  That these fears were not real didn’t make them any the less intense.

I thought it a pity that the previous day’s event had not included a red alert for a rocket attack or some other enemy-initiated shit.  My wound could thus be considered a war wound, entitling the bearer to a Purple Heart.

Hey!  Guys had received theirs for less.  Urban in-country lore had it that one individual was bitten deeply on his cock whilst getting a blow job from a whore, who turned out to be a Viet Cong operative.

He may have gotten a Purple Heart for his action while engaged with the enemy, but you can damn sure bet that the ‘action’ wouldn’t be the same one he disclosed to his people back in  the world!

As to Dickhead, nothing came of the incident of the unmoored barges.  He blamed it on his work crews, failing to take notice of his own supervisory role.

Lifers.  What would the world be without them?  A better place--of that I had not a single doubt.

 

Red Bird

GEEEEZUS JAHOSEFAT TAA MURGATROID!!!!!!

You want hypocrisy?   I’ll give you hypocrisy! 

I didn’t write one word of today’s monograph until Thursday-go-to-meeting time.  Later, back here once again (Once AGAIN entrenched in my office cave!), I will be finishing the Sacred 2000+ Words of the Day around teensy-weensy o’clock.  Even that possibility is slim and none; considering my need for beauty rest and the demands of the Mutts and all.

And why? (I want to hear a crashing resounding rhetorical WHY?? From all you reader-snarkers out there!)

Because I couldn’t ‘think’ of an intro prologue to the storyline.  That’s like saying I couldn't think to breathe when I got up this morning.  I have a nuclear-powered thinker in my skullcap: It must be—it never turns itself off.  When I sit up for a 3:00 AM smoke-and-dangle, I can hear it rehearsing the chatter and idiocy it intends to emote with the coming dawn.

I blithely allude to the Muse Brothers, Ed and Holden, as the source; but from daybreak till night-night, it’s my nurtured insanity that fuels this sticky keyboard.

‘I’ll clean today’--another lame stupid excuse.  I did a Costco run for shit I didn’t immediately need, I did two loads of laundry, a day ahead of schedule.  I drank a potful of coffee and smoked about 30 cigarettes (Who’s counting?).

And I sat here at this fricking 42” monitor the livelong day, going to e-mail every time my genius I-phone chirped and running to my blog for the daily reader’s count (Oh, Yes!  I’m watching you!)

I did consider re-hashing some of my jaded remarks directed at Eisenhower, Dulles, the Bush-Men, or Mittens-Lyin’; but had to reject this idea as redundantly repetitive.  Crapadoola!   If I can’t practice my personal brand of demagoguery on the Republicans, who then would make an equal candidate to use as foil for barbed wit?

Well, time for the truth:  I am coming at last to the monographs I have postponed. These are the ones that will truly expose me as postal-chaotic-crazy Corky.  Wrap-him-in-a-rubber-room-and-throw-away-the-key Crazy Corky.

I mean, did you know that Bill Gates celebrated his 55^th birthday this week?  Did I say squit about that?  Shit no.  I could write a book taking pokes at that guy and yet I let that golden opportunity slip right past. Who am I kidding?  No prologue fodder?

Later, I will write 100 times on the blackboard after school, ‘I am a lying scut. I am a lying sack of doo.  I tell fibs and wet my pants.’

And now, to procrastinate yet one more day, I will tell a story with less grit and more hysteria:  Come-I-now to speak of the Big Red Byrd.

My relationship with EN-1 Byrd began on Day One of the Boathouse.  I was sitting there at the radio when the chief snipe of the Division came swaggering in, his perpetual burnt stogie an appendage out one side of his mouth, his cover cocked at a rakish angle.

He was big.  He was freckle-carrot-colored.  He was walleyed to the point of looking as a chameleon does when it looks in two different directions.  He had what I thought of as a pugilist’s face gone to middle-aged pudgy.

He was one mean-looking motherfucker.

In our first once-over look, that peculiar thing that men rarely do, of two stranger dogs sniffing asses, we came to the mutual realization of our intense dislike for one another.  I was prescient on the acceptance that this guy was to spell trouble for me one day.  My intuition was to prove accurate in time.

He smelled Wise-ass College educated privileged middle-class punk on me.  I smelled lifer from Hellfire on him.

Since the age of ten, I have known military people and have lived in the middle of military life.  My parents had only their brief time during the Big War when Dad was in the Army Air Corps and Mom had a job at Ft. Sam Houston.  As such, neither of them was well versed in the ways of the military.

When the family followed my father to the United Kingdom in 1955, Mom and Dad, not cultivated in military custom, befriended enlisted and officer with equanimity.  All ranks were welcome in our home and mingled freely at the holiday parties frequently held in our big house.

The enlisted men I came to know in my parent’s domain were all intelligent industrious career-minded individuals.

The enlisted men I came to know in Viet Nam barely rose to the level of sentience.  In writing about them as I have done, giving them the label of Lifer Caste, I have bestowed upon them more class than they ever deserved in reality.

To a man, they were uneducated crass louts intent on preserving themselves for a future retirement that would likely be as devoid of human feeling as all their years in uniform.  People teach us how to regard them; the lifers taught me repeatedly how drink, sloth and arrogance could despoil themselves and those around them.

One day, two months into my service at Service Craft, Red Byrd and I came to the defining confrontation that was never a matter of whether; only a matter of when.

One of the reefer barges was on the blink.  No one but Byrd had any experience with refrigeration systems, so one of the duty boats gave him a lift out there, and then went off to berth a recently arrived bullet boat.

At this time, Sierra Charlie Two had imposed strict orders that the only pusher boats out in the harbor were to be the duty boats.  All others were to remain tied to the causeway—no exceptions.

I have decided not to roast our second in command, not because he doesn’t deserve it; rather to preserve the dignity of his Alma mater, the United States Naval Academy.  How in the hell and under what bizarre set of circumstances did he achieve a Congressional appointment in one of the most competitive arenas in American Education?

That was Holden Caulfield matriculating at M.I.T.  It was Alfred E. Newman awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

Back to the Boathouse.  I had the radio com that morning.  After about two hours out on that floating refrigerator, Byrd came across the net, wanting a boat to come pick him up.

My own skimmers were unavailable, the reason now lost in the time tunnel.  I radioed back that there were no boats here at the moment; but at sight of the first free duty boat, we would come get him.

Then, inexplicably, the duty boats got very busy—receiving one job after another.  I broadcast to Byrd  that it was going to be ‘some time’ before he could be rescued from his big metal island.  We could see the reefers out about a quarter mile from the causeway.  At that distance, the silhouette of a man was indistinguishable through the waves of heat coming off the water.

We called the hole-in-the-wall, but Sierra Charlie Two was out (He was perpetually ‘out’, that turd) and Rambo was on R and R.  No one in the front office had the authority to override the standing order.

We sat there in a muddle, not knowing what to do.  A short quiet ensued.  Then came a voice on the air that we could all recognize as an enraged Red Byrd: “This is E…N…One…Byrd!  I want a boat…a BOAT!!!”

It was Oertling who shook off the paralysis that had infected the rest of us.  With a clipped acknowledge of Byrd’s ear-shattering demand, he jumped on the nearest pusher boat, fired the 671’s and tore out headed for the reefer.

I couldn’t decide what terrified me more: Bobby disobeying an order, or Byrd coming back to the Boathouse after his intolerable imprisonment.

It very quickly became an uncontested decision.

Big Red Byrd loudly crashed down the causeway and burst into our Boathouse.  He was a darker hue of red than I have ever seen on a man.  We could smell the rage coming off his body like a torrent of sweat.  There was soaking sweat as well, after his three hour wait on a radiant heater.  The interior of the reefer may have been cold, but the exterior was not.

He loomed over me, for once both eyes boring into mine.  This was not a time for the wide-eyed distraction of…what?  What is the problem?  What part did I play in your humiliating powerlessness out there?

He was honed in on me.  I caused this.  Reason was completely absent.  I kept my smart mouth shut and offered…nothing.  His intense glare was window dressing for the trembling shaking brink of an irascible lava explosion barely contained.

For the twinkling of a moment stopped dead, I thought he was going to light into me.  He could quite easily have beaten me to a mass of raw hamburger.  The moment passed; he turned on his heel and tromped back down to the Snipe Shack.

I want to believe that it was my shining mail armor of Skimmer Coxswain that spared me that day.  I think the more plausible explanation for my deliverance was that Byrd could not bring himself to an impulse that would violate the code of the Fleet: no one can strike another with impunity.  Yeah, that was it.  There it is.

Arriving back at the Division towards 1700 hrs with no excuse of where he had been the fucking day long, Sierra Charlie Two was apprised of the incident.  Airily dismissing the whole thing, he said, “Well, I didn’t mean no boats out for a situation like that!”

The fricking goddamn dweeb.  I had accumulated the bright notion of ‘making a command decision in the field’ in R.O.T.C.; meaning: do whatever is expedient. The license it promised did not extend to running a taxi over to deliver one pissed off snipe from his discomfort.

Byrd never found an opportunity for retaliation against this blond headed prick of an un-billeted sailor.  When the Division was dismantled later in the year, he was one of the first to go: re-assignment in-country, retirement.  Back to his beloved Fleet.  I never knew for certain.

The one thing I do know: is that of all the lifers that touched my life during that long year: Scott, Jerry, Joe, Dickhead, Smee, others…Big Red Byrd left the most lasting impression.

Excuse me while I go brush my teeth and take a purgative.