hung up on the words Jew and Racist, when “Jewish Racist” is a combo dinner for “Jewish Zionist Racist” which is a cloak for “most Jews in the world are 100 Percent for Israel”

Here, don’t get hung up on Hamas and the fucking heroics of Oct. 7, though they should have x-ed them all out, those fucking military fucks at the rave concert: [Photo, 2016! Supporters of an Israeli soldier, Elor Azaria, charged with manslaughter after he shot a wounded Palestinian alleged attacker as he lay on the ground in Hebron in 2016]

In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Israeli army is responsible for controlling the lives of more than three million Palestinians through hundreds of checkpoints, raids of villages and homes, trial of civilians in military courts, demolition of homes, suppression of protests, and the killing and injuring of civilians, to name a few.

To sustain the occupation industry, Israel makes it mandatory by law for Israeli citizens, excluding Palestinians and Orthodox Jews, to enter the military at 18. Men have to serve just under three years while women serve two years.

Read more:

Vardi: Getting out on mental health is pretty easy. Today about 12 percent of the Israeli population that’s supposed to be conscripted – Jewish and Druze – either don’t start or don’t complete their military service based on mental health issues. That’s huge. I’m going to assume that not 12 percent of Israeli society is mentally ill.

Well, I beg to differ. I’d say 98 percent of Jews in Israeli Society are deeply mentally ill with co-occurring mother fucking DSM-V fucked up dianoses.

And the Jews and the Wailing Wall White House and Zyklon BLinken and Clinton-Biden-Obama Jews do not want the rich to be mocked!

[The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.]

A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at the Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing before President-elect Donald Trump.

Ann Telnaes posted a message Friday on the online platform Substack saying that she drew a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing before Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticize “billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.” Several executives, Bezos among them, have been spotted at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations.

Telnaes said that she’s never before had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press.

+—+

More Mother Fucking SIck Goyim News: Arnault was raised in a devoutly Catholic household. According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, Arnault’s net worth dropped from $231 billion to $178 billion between April and the end of 2024 – a $53 billion drop. The dip in Arnault’s net worth coincided with a nearly 40% shakeout in LVMH shares.

+—+

Working together as a global kumbayah, NOT. Thank a Jew near you!

Back on the Insanity Front: ‘Ironic’: climate-driven sea level rise will overwhelm major oil ports, study shows . . . Ports including in Saudi Arabia and the US projected to be seriously damaged by a metre of sea level rise

Oh shit, hold the crude and the OJ.

While Yemen and Gaza and Lebanon and Somolia and Haiti burn: According to Food & Drink, catastrophic flooding in Spain in October severely impacted the nation’s crop yields, resulting in estimated damages of around $205 million.

Valencia, in particular, was hard hit, leading many in the market to seek out alternative suppliers. Similar low orange yields in Brazil and Florida have made the situation worse, and the British Fruit Juice Association noted that orange juice availability is at its lowest level in around 50 years.

+—+

Nazi Greens on Parade. Seig Heil.

Julani’s Telegram channel blurred the picture of the German Foreign Minister for not wearing a hijab. Meanwhile, they continue chanting ‘free Iranian women.’

These psycho-preachers seem to be struggling to maintain their puppetry and propaganda at the same time, unable to navigate such situations effectively. So; If crypto-Caliph Julani can see her without headgear, then why not his crypto-Zio-Muslim Ummah? First class idiots!

+—+

Zyklon BLinken getting a few more trillion in the pipeline for Mother Ship Israel before he goes off into the multimillionaire sunset . . .

The State Department has informed Congress of a planned $8 billion weapons sale to Israel, U.S. officials say, as the American ally presses forward with its war against Hamas in Gaza.

Some of the arms in the package could be sent through current U.S. stocks but the majority would take a year or several years to deliver, according to two U.S. officials Saturday who spoke on condition of anonymity because the notification to Congress hasn’t been formally sent.

The sale includes medium-range air-to-air missiles to help Israel defend against airborne threats, 155 mm projectile artillery shells for long-range targeting, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 500-pound bombs and more.

+—+

Back to the fucking neanderthals: Prominent politicians have recently increased their attacks on workplace programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. They claim that initiatives that seek to be inclusive are divisive and lack merit, using the term diversity hire.

But the fascist cunt, the retrograde fuckers, all those right-wing perverts, they know differently: Assault on DEI: Critics use simplistic terms to attack the programs, but they are key to uprooting workplace bias

Evidence suggests that successfully implementing DEI is central to professional and societal well-being and success in a multicultural society.

Recent research by the author Melinda Epler, for example, shows a clear connection between employees’ sense of safety, belonging and satisfaction and how much their employer prioritizes DEI. Scientists also find that diversity is key to creative, productive and efficient scientific teams.

+—+

Fucking Patriarchal Mother Fucking (and killing) clerics. DIE>

The clerics discussed issues related to the Syrian Constitution, democracy, and equality. Al-Sharaa responded by citing his long years living alongside Christians in Damascus and Daraa. He affirmed that Christians are an integral component of Syrian society.

When asked about al-Sharaa, Elias remarked: “It is ambiguous — we cannot discern his true intentions.”

+—+

Back to the fucking perverted Jews and their economic and labor outlook: But according to billionaire tech titan Mark Zuckerberg, there is one strategy that is always guaranteed to fail. “In a world that’s changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk,” he told OpenAI’s Sam Altman in a 2016 interview.

“For any given decision that you’re going to make there’s upside and downside,” he added. “But in aggregate if you are stagnant and you don’t make those changes then I think you’re guaranteed to fail and not catch up.”

Things are moving at a blistering pace in the American economy, with the rate of change accelerating with no sign of slowing down.

McKinsey believes up to 30% of work hours could be automated by 2030, NASA could land people on the moon as early as 2026 and quantum computers could be just a decade away from disrupting the Bitcoin blockchain.

Don’t miss

• Rich, young Americans are ditching the stormy stock market — here are the alternative assets they’re banking on instead
• Famed economist Larry Summers issues dire inflation warning to Americans after Trump’s White House win — 3 ways to help protect yourself in 2025

These 5 magic money moves will boost you up America’s net worth ladder in 2024 — and you can complete each step within minutes. Here’s how

+—+

And so a LT, in the occupation and murdering forces of Isra-hell has a new book out? The fucking ENTIRE Jewish societies here and there are fucking brutal, beastial, backward.

‘Apocalypse Now’ in Gaza: Israel Seems to Have Its Own Unhinged Officers

In a new book, a lieutenant colonel in the reserves tells about crazed soldiers and wayward officers who espoused the credo that ‘revenge is legitimate in this war’.

+—+

Capitalism, a Fucking Polluting Death Spiral.

Hanoi declared world’s most polluted city, authorities seek action

+—+

I saw it unfolding in the 1990s. GoOing back back back.

Bat Caves and Vietnam – More than Just a War Log

Paul Haeder: Still, over the years it’s difficult to really engage Americans around the lies of this country, the murdering in that country, the entire rotten episodes of US invading and deploying bioweapons, napalm and all manner of bombs and machine-gun fire into that country.

I want you to guard against those who demand that you die just to prove something. It is not that I advise you to respect your life more than anything else, but not to die uselessly for the need of others… for you still have many years ahead of you. Many years of joy and happiness to experience. Who else but you can experience your life? ― Bao Ninh, author of Sorrow of War

We toast with Huda and Su Tu Trang (White Lion) beer. I am with Brits, a Canadian and two Vietnamese biologists. We are in Central Vietnam near the Laos border, in a park now called Pu Mat.

There are nine of us in this camp. We are on a transect to record biological wonder and caches for this part of Vietnam. I am also here on a bat transect biodiversity blitz.

I ended up getting hired on (no pay, but that’s part and parcel of the earth sciences and ecology world – MS and PhD students paying their own way to research, living on the cheap) because of skills sets.

Not that I am special, but I have the scuba diving, survival school, journalist, and motorcycle mechanical attributes that make for a good team member. Photographer, and a big knapsack of proverbial ecology and environmental activism in my background. Rough travel pedigree. And more.

At age 36, I am the oldest one in the camp. Twenty-three is the youngest. I am digging up much to help build our latrine.

Oh, and my amateur reptile and herpetology fun as a youth and into adulthood puts me to the top of the list of blokes who will look at, measure, and catalogue all the cool snakes we run into.

At the latrine I get to study one great specimen, with my jury-rigged bamboo snake hook.

The mythological Malayan pit viper was referred to as a thee-step snake. The veterans from the Vietnam War talked about supposedly dying only three steps after being bitten. Not true, but our base camp is nowhere within days of a hospital or medical care, other than our own first responder training.

The bites from this snake can be extremely unpleasant (severe pain, swelling & tissue necrosis), the chance of death is minimal if treated. We are in no man’s land, so to speak. Everything is jungle primed, and we use iodine to disinfect our drinking water. We all got various gut aliments out here, including giardia.

A panga or machete cut while working here is a dangerous thing. We use panga machettes.

We hike through village after village – just a few homes (on stilts, bamboo, thatched and others dirt floors, all open to mother nature’s breezes, and many barely illuminated at night with homemade soda pop can lanterns). We encounter some of the amazing people who are considered members of the country’s ethnic tribes. Many of the local ethnic groups residing in mountain areas are known collectively in the West as Montagnard or Degar. The largest ethnic groups are Kinh (85.7%), Tay (1.9%), Tai Ethnic (1.8%), Mường (1.5%), Khmer Krom (1.5%), Hmong (1.2%), Nùng (1.1%), Hoa (1%_, with all others comprising the remaining 4.3%.

For me, although the bats, reptiles, birds, trees, mammals are amazing, it’s the people I gravitate to, as always. I’ve spent time in the Copper Canyon with Tarahumara, and at times in other parts of Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua with other indigenous ethnic groups. My own early teen days included friends with the White River Apache band and Navajo brothers and sisters.

This is the Frontier – Society for Environmental Exploration, with marching orders from the Vietnamese government, Bird Life International, Audubon Society, and World Wildlife Federation. This group is out of England – London – and it is a non-profit that helps science projects by finding support teams to help real science get done.

As I said, I’m 36, the exact same age my professional US Army soldier father was in 1969 when he was mucking about under orders with his crypto high-level clearance and signal corps encampments.

Bronze star, purple hearts, and then a total of 31 years in the US military – the exact opposite of everything I stood for. In Vietnam, he was shot in the shoulder about two inches from his heart.

The slug sliced through the Huey (UH-1) aluminum shrouding and the helicopter pilot lost half his skull from another slug.

I have an old beat-up Chinese carbine at home in Oregon that is the same weapon that pierced the Huey and my old man’s chest cavity. I have his two purple hearts and the actual slug that was removed from his body in Japan after he was air-lifted from where he had been shot.

They sent him back after recuperation. He was 100 percent medically disabled (meaning he got more on his retirement package) because of the wound, arthritis, and lack of strength in the arm and shoulder.

(The irony is some 25 years later I was a social worker for a non-profit in Portland working with mostly disabled veterans in a homeless center for vets and their families. Most of my clients were disabled in boot camp or in training. Those in the Middle East wars were hit with PTSD and again, training exercise injuries. My job was to help them write and attend disability claims, many times rejected not once but twice before a third board hearing got these homeless vets something.)

My old man’s helicopter went down, and then, the reinforcements with Air Calvary came in and set up a new LZ and got the surviving army guys out of harm’s way. He was the CW4 who carried the communication codes and a thermite grenade to use in case of enemy capture.

Fast forward 25 years.

I am here in Vietnam working with science teams, and it’s 1994 and Clinton just normalized relations with Vietnam.

I am the lone American, or Yank in the parlance of the Brits. We are men and women, and many of my compatriots are constantly asking me questions right and left about America’s war with Vietnam, the pulse of this society in 1994, approaching the 20th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Scientists like their beer and rice wine whiskey, so there are a lot of loud and passionate talks after a hard day’s hiking.

Even inside these bat caves, while waiting for the rush hour of returning bats, we drink and argue. I find the Brits more defensive of the war effort by US and its allies than most of my colleagues back home. I am a Marxist and anti-imperialist, so I am like some new species to these Brits.

I love many things about my Irish and Scots roots, and spent time in the UK, but in the end, most Brits are arrogant, patriarchy, patronizing, and, well, rather shallow when it comes to the things I have learned in deserts, on reefs, and in myriad of Latin American countries.

They can’t fathom a Che Guevara supporter like myself having a few weapons back home. I won’t go on about my spin on the Anglo Saxon here, but I have written about that side of the pond a lot.

I’m a deep socialist and ecosocialist, so I easily notice how the Brits come at things much differently than a socialist and wobbly as I consider myself. Even though they are cool, existing somewhat on the edge, living in mud and doing biodiversity studies, they have colonized minds from a half a millennia being an empire. They are naturally arrogant, patronizing, and they believe the hubris of their nation as a land of good. They are also quick to quip about how the Vietnamese we work with being backward or too disconnected to the Western concept of ecology.

In fact, repeatedly they talk about how the word ecology is not in the language of the Vietnamese. Which is of course not true on so many levels, but when it comes to the natural and jungle world, yes, the Vietnamese go into areas to trap, kill and butcher things to eat. This is not a Marks and Spencer and Safeway land.

Vietnamese starved under so many invasions, so many wars, so much austerity and broken economic systems. Anything to stay alive. Including eating deep fried bats. Which I have tasted in Hanoi.

The Brits have leveled their island and Ireland’s as well, I remind them. There are no original natural ecosystems in England. The fox hunt is big. The fact that England imports everything including their own vaunted tea and coffee, well, we are sometimes hiking through villages that have had jungle cleared so tea can be grown. I run into coffee plantations.

So, for every high tea and coffee klatch in the UK, there are real world consequences thousands of miles away. Wood for homes, cement for foundations, and on and on, the British Empire does not stand on its own.

It’s not that the Brits are daft, because I am with well-traveled blokes, and many are working on post master’s science degrees. However, I have always been in a world of night and day around academics, albeit some ecologists who are living it rough and tumble with me in the middle of jungle.

Our base camp is all self-made; there are no tents (I am the only one who has a small alpine tent); we dig our latrine and make our lean-to’s; we cut word for our fires where we boil water to soften up our rice while we throw in tins of tuna and bamboo shoots gathered in the forest.

I have known US and multinational military bivouacs and encampments since I was in the Army and around it many years as a teacher and with friends in “the service.” We have no phone service, no gas-flame cookers, no nothing. This is roughing it. Even hippies I once hung out with in Guatemala and Mexico had a shit load more amenities in their Jesus and God encampments than we do.

We have two laptops for which to type up reports and a small generator that gives us that capability and runs two 60 watt light bulbs, though we mostly use Chinese made kerosene hurricane lamps.

I know how my dad lived in Vietnam. They had Army-Navy football games flown in on reels of tape. Castle Rock burgers. Blue bunny ice cream. Stereos and cameras and all sorts of generators and a load of mess halls and they even hired local workers to do their laundry, cooking, and latrine cleaning.

Only deep long-range sappers and special ops went into the fold of jungle and mountains, and even they had communication equipment for home base logistics.

Briefings

Hanoi is amazing, and we are here for orientation, language classes, getting a look at the general lay of the land, and working on finding supplies and learning the tools and parameters we are going to use for the biological survey.

We get briefed by WWF Audubon, Bird Life International and a few other international outfits. Some agencies want us to look for pygmy rhino scat and others want to see if we find any Indochinese tiger scat. However, our basic job is to get into primary rainforest and conduct basic transect stuff, and get as much of the BioBlitz done in a few months.

There is time to explore the city, and I end up hanging out with Viet, who is actually, a PhD in biology who lives in Hanoi and speaks some English. He is amazing and kind, helping me get shots – I have my Nikons with me and plenty of 35mm film. He is amazed at how intrusive I am, but notices my aplomb and sleuth manner of getting photos. The things I want shot – in marketplaces, close-ups of hands, odd angles, and the like – he assist me in finding.

I am not doing a travel log postcard thing, and eventually, Viet gets my artistic and photojournalistic bent quickly.

I have a motorcycle I rent, and I drive it with Viet on the back as he directs me to Buddhist monasteries, farms, food production plants, rice fields, and any number of places he thinks I would get some decent shots of.

We drink strong green tea, get up early, get on a bicycle, drive through Hanoi and find a place to eat croissants, drink strong coffee. Sometimes we eat pho for breakfast. Viet knows I am a vegetarian, and he knows I will not refuse home-cooked food from family or anyone. He also knows I am not afraid to sip anyone’s rice wine or whisky — sometimes home-brewed concoctions with added delicacies like green sniper heads, centipedes and any number of botanical fauna put in each family’s batch.

A year later, when I returned to El Paso as an English teacher and journalist, I’ve hosted photo shows of my trips to Vietnam, through the jungle and into the cities wherein I spent time. I have helped to host big conferences to bring the Vietnam War into perspective in relationship to the people and the country the US and dozens of other countries invaded.

Sure, I helped spearhead Vietnam War themes film series, landing historians on campuses to talk about the war from a geopolitical point of view. I’ve helped spearhead playwrights, Vietnamese artists (including friend and former student Thomas Vu), other artists and my own photographic art in group shows. I have organized nurses who were in Vietnam and others, like soldiers and officers, to give symposia.

Still, over the years it’s difficult to really engage Americans around the lies of this country, the murdering in that country, the entire rotten episodes of US invading and deploying bioweapons, napalm and all manner of bombs and machine-gun fire into that country.

Even my own adventures in the jungle and primary rainforest and elfin forest, well, most Americans then (in the 1990’s) and now, 2020, have little bandwidth for this sort of stuff. You know, this isn’t Steve Irwin kinda gimmicks, but I certainly have been in some pretty interesting and challenging ecologies.

Just going from base-camp high into primary forest to resupply with rice, food, beer, cigarettes and the like, it was 26 river crossings, on Russian motorcycles, Minsks. Breakdowns, mud slews, raging waters and leeches sticking to unmentionable parts of the bodies and on our eyes.

Cobras and vipers. Fifteen-mile hikes into the forest to conduct surveys. Gibbons tossing their feces at us from high above the canopy. Butterflies by the dozens of species. Birds and civets.

I remember one time looking at the heavens and the setting sky light, leaning on a tree. I thought it was a breadfruit tree or something of the sort. Darker and darker the air got and I jerked, coughing a couple of times on hot green tea.

Then what I thought were fruit pods exploded above me with unfurled wings.
More than 20 flying foxes, AKA fruit bats, took off in the dusk after my pulmonary spasms.

Shit like that happened daily. In Vietnam.

Trekking into small villages looking for limestone mountain tops. Asking families if they had any idea about where caves were. Hikes where the people offer food and rice whiskey, and we exchange cigarettes and tins of tuna.

We end up on some bat cave hike looped from all the sit downs and toasts the villagers demanded. With their home brew. Their moonshine.

They want to know what this scraggly band of white men and women with a few Vietnamese scientists from Hanoi are doing way out in the middle of nowhere near the Laos border.

“We are here to study your country’s wildlife. We are here to help your government understand what you already know – this is an important part of Vietnam to know and to preserve.”

Variations on a theme. Dr. Viet is there and he helps with the translation. He helps to explain what ecology is not only as a scientific field but as a concept.

I am in a place – spiritual, emotional, intellectual – my old man could only dream of.

He is already dead and buried. Age 58, from sudden coronary death.

I know what he would say to me upon my return from Vietnam. I know how he would react to all the activism I undertake for years all tied to the history of his war with the country, our war with Vietnam, and my own travel to the place where our own people wanted to bomb back to the Stone Age.

“Holy moly, Paul, you are doing things I could only dream of. I know you didn’t agree with what I was doing in the army, but, no matter what, the sins of the father at least are being washed away by his son. Up there with the bats. There in the rice paddies. On China Beach. It is like a dream I could never have.”

+—+

Part Two:

Deep Country, Bats, the Riot of Life in Viet Nam’s Cities

Paul Haeder: Even though the year before most of my time was deep into ecology and animal and plant life, I still had strong connections to the American War against the Vietnamese.

Part two of three parts — re-conning Viet Nam for April 30th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. See Part 1: Bat Caves and Vietnam – More than Just a War Log

It’s 1995 and I have Dan Yen, former vice mayor of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Le Ly Hayslip, author of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and John McAfee, author of A Slow Walk in a Sad Rain, in our living room.

El Paso, Texas. I am in the midst of coordinating a huge several month-long look at Viet Nam and the Viet Nam war (America’s war against the Vietnamese people) and all those attendant issues tied to USA invading and killing, from 1960 to 1975, (disregarding the killing through secret bombings and proxies and CIA maleficence) several million Vietnamese.

It’s been a year since I was in Viet Nam essentially running like a demon through several BioBLitzes and my own search for truth (my own internal truth) as well as photographing the country.

For all intents and purposes, the defeat of the USA was pronounced April 30, 1975, with the Fall of Saigon, also known as the Liberation of Saigon. The capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, was captured by the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Viet Cong.

Even though the year before most of my time was deep into ecology and animal and plant life, I still had strong connections to the American War against the Vietnamese.

Le Ly was portrayed by Hiep Thi Le, a Vietnamese refugee, who starred in the Oliver Stone 1993 movie of Le Ly’s life, Heaven and Earth, the last of his Viet Nam War trilogy films (Platoon & Born on the Fourth of July).

In El Paso, the three are my guests for the Viet Nam War retroactive I helped spearhead and organize in El Paso, then a city with a super large number of retired military, former military and then of course the Fort Bliss and the Biggs Field Sergeants Major Academy bringing in many military, as well as the White Sands Missile range and Holloman Air Force base in Alamogordo.

I teach at several places, including UT-El Paso and the community college system. I write for the two dailies, the El Paso Times and the Herald Post. My photography of my work in Viet Nam the year before and now have been in several shows.

Le Ly and Dan both live in California, and John is a teacher in Ashville, North Carolina. All three want to know how I liked Viet Nam, what it was like, and of course I had some crazy wild lie narratives to tell them.

Nothing as harrowing as Le Ly’s life as a village girl by day and recruited by Viet Cong at night. Dan had taken John Steinbeck through parts of Vietnam December 1966 through May 1967 when he was working for Newsday. A book, Vietnam: Dispatches from the War came out after he died.

Steinbeck was supportive of the war, and Dan Yen was a lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese Army.

Le Ly is obviously the more controversial figure in this interesting confab in our El Paso house. My wife then is six months pregnant with our daughter, and both Le Ly and Dan bless the baby with their respective prayers.

It is an amazing moment – John, a Green Beret soldier in Vietnam, Dan, a LTC, and Le Ly, a woman who was decried by all actors in the Viet Nam war and struggle. She ended up getting hitched to a US contractor (in the movie, he was depicted as a Marine played by Tommy Lee Jones) and immigrated to the United States.

Her book is highly compelling and much different than Stone’s movie narrative. Accused as a spy by the South, imprisoned, set for execution, raped by two Viet Cong soldiers. She was a drug courier and sex worker and supported her mother and a son.

For obvious reasons, I have McAfee (former West Texan) and Le Ly in several readings and panel discussions. Dan Yen also is there to talk about his experiences.

All three admire my large photographs of places they all recognized and then others shot deep in primary rain forest and way far out of the main spots near Laos.

I have my old man’s bronze star and two purple hearts and the slug the military hospital dug out of his chest on a mantel place next to a dozen kachinas. My grandfather the World War One German pilot was framed in a collage of his childhood, Navy days and as a bread truck driver in Iowa, along with his Maltese cross and other medals for that meat grinder war.

Even though the year before most of my time was deep into ecology and animal and plant life, I still had strong connections to the American War against the Vietnamese

Even though the year before most of my time was deep into ecology and animal and plant life, I still had strong connections to the American War against the Vietnamese: in village after village, when the local farmers and shopkeepers found out I was the only American in our team, time and time again Dr. Viet helped me communicate with amazing men my dad’s age and older who told me of their long-long conscription in the military before, during and after the US was defeated.

Strong levels of respect these men had for me. It was many times Dr. Viet and me and two dozen villagers drinking wine, the sun setting, and a brilliant patchwork of two dozen greens as a backdrop.

I had no idea one year later, in 1995, I would be heading up a very large and comprehensive Viet Nam War retrospective. Unborn daughter blessed by Le Ly, and Dan Yen and John McAfee singing songs from Vietnam.

John, of course, was not pro-war, but he had been a captain in the special forces. His novel, Slow Walk in a Sad Rain demonstrates both the ugly reality of special forces virtually murdering civilians (the ends justify the means in war, also known as collateral damage) and the sheer trauma of being part of the US forces in a country not their own and in a culture way out of their range of understanding.

John and I talk a lot about the life of a writer, about his own journey as a playwright and high school drama teacher in North Carolina. He really admires my writing, and even writes a jacket blurb for a book that never made it past a couple of editorial board meetings at St. Martin’s Press. He is sure I am going to be the next great American novelist.

How the world turns in very opposite orbits. Maybe I sabotaged my life as a novelist, as some have accused me of doing. I still don’t know about self-sabotaging, but alas, I have gone from wild and crazy journalist, college teacher who supplemented income by smuggling Valium and other prescriptions over the Juarez-El Paso border, to union organizer for part-time faculty, Occupy Seattle activist, social worker for adults living with developmental disabilities and memory issues, to case manager for just released prisoners, foster youth and homeless veterans.

Le Ly tells me I am an old good soul, and that I will do good for people. We all toast on some 400 Rabbits Mescal and crank up the fireplace and dance and laugh. I knew then something was in the wind for me, but definitely not an Oprah moment or even third rate literary creative writing teacher with tenure. My life course never put into place those stepping stones to get anywhere, really, not in this capitalist and co-opted world of Brave New World silliness and surrealness.

I still write things down as all three of my guests talk a lot and I write about them, about this experience with them in 1995, about all the things that happened before and after the Twentieth Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Even a few people in the large crowd that showed up for Hayslip’s presentation stand up and turn their backs on her. Many stand up and turn their backs on me, too, when I moderate a few panel discussions while also self-describing myself as against the war, even when my old many was in the jungle getting plugged through with a slug from a Chinese carbine.

For you see, the face of destiny or luck or god that gives us war also gives us other kinds of pain: the loss of health and youth; the loss of loved ones or of love; the fear that we will end our days alone. Some people suffer in peace the way others suffer in war. The special gift of that suffering, I have learned, is how to be strong while we are weak, how to be brave when we are afraid, how to be wise in the midst of confusion, and how to let go of that which we can no longer hold. In this way, anger can teach us forgiveness, hate can teach us love, and war can teach us peace.

— Le Ly Hayslip, talk, University of Texas- El Paso, Nov. 4 1995.

In Vietnam

One full year before . . . I am here with Meg, Rod, Mike, Dr. Viet, Jon, and a few others in the middle of primary rain forest at base-camp, along a river bend. I had just spent the night studying civets and these incredible bats that scoop fish out of the water.

Rattan harvesters are just arriving in our camp – some of the few people coming into these mountains are rattan men and hunters looking for pseudo oryx, barking deer, tigers, gibbons, hornbills.

We ask them about caves, about guano, about places we might venture to with backpacks, bird nets and gear. They draw maps on the wet ground, share green tea, eat bowls of rice and Raman and stir-fried duck eggs.

Mike the science leader pulls out a map, and we start putting down grease pencil marks on areas where the rattan men say are up thrusts of limestone where bats roost. They wonder if we are in the game to collect bats to eat.

We show these four hardy fellows our equipment and some photos we’ve got uploaded on the computer. Dr. Viet helps us with our rudimentary language skills. They inspect our camp, which is scattershot with my tent and then a main living and sleeping area made out of bamboo, a mess area, another large lean-to, and our three Minsk motorcycles and extra gasoline. The latrine is hand-dug and enclosed with tarps.

That’s where I find and capture a green vine snake which is diurnal and mildly venomous. This arboreal snake is a constant in and around our camp, feeding on frogs and lizards. It has binocular vision to hunt.

I show the timid Brits (our Canadian, Josh, is not so timid) this snake, and since it is not happy being held by me, it expands its body when revealing black and white scale marking. A sign of even a more venomous species in the jungle.

An hour later, two of the fellows bring us a gallon glass jug of rice whiskey. Inside the container are herbs and roots and, alas, one of those vine snakes.

We sip, we talk, we laugh, and the guys show us how they cut through rattan-canes quickly. We decide to follow them the next day into the forest where they gather the rattan, which is used in basket making, furniture and flooring.

One day to the next, and we make hikes into the forest, set up rudimentary transect, and start recording what we see – insects, fungi, plants, reptiles, anything. We end up doing a lot of bird watching and recording, and the number of butterflies up here is surprisingly high. We do what the British and Americans have done for centuries – we capture-kill one species of each we see.

We are not any sort of Charles Darwin team, though at times the Brits tend to have that attitude.

Before our trip into forest, we aree in Hanoi talking to scientists and researchers from the institutes of biology and forestry. One small museum has all these birds in drawers. A few rare species taxidermized into lifeless pathetic poses.

The rare barking deer is here, in a bizarre standing pose. That rare creature had been captured and taken to the institute. The biologists didn’t know what to feed it. They gave it shoots and other things they found from the Hanoi market. Eventually, the rare deer perished. Not leaving anything to go to waste, the scientists stripped the animal of its flesh and had a barbecue. Then some fellow took the carcass and hide and bones, and reconstructed it based on photos and his own instinct.

Flash forward to London, after the months and months of work in the jungle and then debriefing back in beautiful Hanoi. I am there with my wife who flew over from El Paso for Winter Holiday in London to rendezvous on my way back from Viet Nam and my debriefing in London.

Plenty of snow at Hampton Court and all the other tourist sites. We end up getting into the play, Miss Saigon, in the nosebleed seats.

Then and there, I begin writing and taking notes. I end up four month later back in El Paso with a three-act full play called Tiger Cages.

I review the American movies on Viet Nam – the three from Stone, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter. The Scent of Green Papaya is one way outside the strictures of Hollywood. “Miss Saigon” is reviewed.

We have films shown as part of the Vietnam retrospective in 1995. My play, Tiger Cages, is performed as a read and stand play.

All of this Viet Nam – Fall of Saigon – retrospective steels me, motivates me. My former student (in basic composition) Thomas Daniel (he goes by Vu now) and I collaborate and he uses 13 of my Viet Nam images, blows them up, and imbeds them into his large canvases called “Napalm Mornings.”

Vu was a child during the America’s war War on Viet Nam. His father was in the military. His father was killed. He became a refugee with his mother and three sisters. He ended up in New York, then Los Angeles and then El Paso.

He is now in his late fifties teaching at Binghamton University. He is an incredible print maker, designs and makes clothes, and he has embraced his Vietnamese self, re-appropriating his father’s name after having a stepfather with the name of Daniel.

Here is an amazing story about the woman who plays Le Ly in Stone’s Heaven and Earth. The LA Times piece was written in 1993, right after Stone even thinking about the movie. In fact, he looked at around 16,000 Vietnamese Americans before ending up with Hiep Thi Le as the lead and staring role.

Hiep Thi Le says that even though she was only 9 years old, she can still see the look on her sister’s face that night in 1979 when a fishing boat captain grabbed her screaming 7-year-old sister and put a knife to her throat.

“Tears rolled down her face, but there was no more crying,” says the now 23-year-old Le. “I thought her eyes were going to fall out of their sockets.”

Le and her sister were hidden in a secret compartment behind a galley pantry on a fishing boat carrying them and about 60 other refugees–boat people–toward China and Hong Kong. Their father had made the trip the year before, and the girls thought their mother was sleeping with them. She wasn’t–she had stayed behind with her three other children.

“Sometime during the night, just as we arrived at a Vietnamese checkpoint, my sister woke up and started screaming for our momma,” Le says. “Everyone thought we were going to die.”

Sometime during the night, just as we arrived at a Vietnamese checkpoint, my sister woke up and started screaming for our momma … Everyone thought we were going to die”, she says. That night, a fishing boat captain grabbed her screaming 7-year-old sister and put a knife to her throat. Le witnessed it and it scarred her for life. “Tears rolled down her face, but there was no more crying … I thought her eyes were going to fall out of their sockets”, she says. Her sister survived, and when they both reached port, they stayed in a Hong Kong refugee camp. They eventually reunited with her father in Hong Kong. Le’s entire family — her parents and five children — were eventually reunited in Northern California. – Jack Matthews, LA Times

That same year, 1979, Thomas Vu came to the US as a refugee, with his family. He was 12 years old.

Those BioBlitzes still stick with me, sometimes ending up in my short fiction, other characters in novels I am writing.

The tropical lowland rainforesttrees of the genus Dipterocarpus are still in my dreams, over 150 feet above me while gibbons launch through hand over hand like running track stars.

Then the bats – as my friends, true chiropterologists — have studied all over Viet Nam, north and south, are now counting several taxa new to science, two of which were described as new species. The bat faunal list of Viet Nam is up to 120.

The demons of Vietnam – and ironically other demons all those veterans I would end up working with later almost 23 years after these trips into Viet Nam, as a social worker – are the monsters of my country, of the wicked war lords, of all those pigs in high office with their Military Industrial Complex brownshirts leading more and more acts of terror against brown and black people.

Every load of stench in Central America, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Panama, wherever, is the stench of the Viet Nam War’s legacy. This “not another Vietnam” bullshit from the soldiers of fortune and mercenaries that define the US military, I have heard it all on military compounds where I taught college English, to the highlands of Guatemala where mercenaries and ex-military were doing their dirty wars School of the Americas shame to more brown farmers.

Each step into the primary forest with hornbills above me or pangolins below is dream time, a whole other part of my brain and heart separate from my old man’s war. Separate from my older friends who have missing legs and burned faces. All those people I know who committed suicide because of Viet Nam. Viet Nam for me is people and the faltering landscape which has undergone massive bombing and napalming and razing, and even after the wars, so many starving people going into the dark jungle for food. Anything they could their hands on.

Yes, the same bats we aree studying while sleeping and eating in bat caves are the same species big and small cities sell as deep fried delicacies.

In that reality is the dichotomy and the ever-flagging spirit of what it means to be an American in this land we invaded. To be a judgmental American working with scientists who are judgmental. Beauty and poverty, nature and unnatural acts, landscapes made for Van Gogh and inner cities in a layer of sadness.

But people in huts and along the Mekong near Hanoi, in Hue, in Nha Trang, those are my people in a sense – the people I want to talk to. Thanks to Dr. Viet, I am able to have more than a basic restaurant conversations.

The story continues, of course, with specific encounters, specific moments, time frozen in 35 mm film strips, enlarged and mounted on walls.

You know Paul, it takes someone like you to bring this all together. You are kind of a dramaturge pulling all these artists together, seeing this vision. It can only happen via someone like you who sees my world through different eyes. You were there but not there as Le Ly was or Dan or me. I can’t thank you enough for pulling this together. I hope there is healing as well as learning. — John McAfee tells me over some tequila.