Plain of Jars: and Other Stories

Plain of Jars

$ 45 $ Plain of Jars I’m getting to be an old man now, but the memories of that earlier war now three and even four decades old, I am astonished to discover, are quite easily triggered these days by the constant verbal and visual barrage attending this new one that is on everyone’s lips and on the tube and in the newspapers day in and day out. But four decades are nothing in the memory recesses of the aging, given that we can recall such long ago events as if they had occurred only yesterday, while at the same time being virtually unable to recall what we had for breakfast yesterday. I’m sure it’s the same for everyone else as he or she finds himself or herself hurtled into their sixties. I say hurtled because that is exactly what it is. One certainly doesn’t take a ticket for a smooth comfort ride on the way toward it, old age, on a preselected easy road, nor does one slouch into old age, much less to a silly Bethlehem. Rather, it is as if one is cannon-shot through time, with no yea or nay that matters any. In my mind’s eye, at this precise moment, I see myself, in 1962, standing in the dawn light of a cold, early March morning atop my machine-gun emplacement on the Mekong River in northeastern Thailand, looking with dazed eyes at the destruction of the previous night on the Laotian side—and by today’s light, despite my stunned and confused state then, that scene is much more vivid and real to me than the faculty meeting I attended yesterday afternoon in which I waged my usual hopeless battle against the demands of a missed naptime, and once again elicited condescending smiles from my colleagues. Life somehow accelerates after the age of forty or so, with 46 $ geary hobson twenty years sometimes and somehow unfairly encompassed in a single year. Or so it seems. It’s all this new Iraqi war news—the “just war” shibboleths of a half-educated president, a violent man, a bully exemplar, who has never himself pulled a trigger in war, dropped a bomb, or administered fatal fluids into a strapped-down man’s arm, but who has directed countless others to do these things, and who himself spent the Vietnam era dodging the draft like many other over-privileged and party-hearty white boys at the time, and as they still do these days by serving in the Air National Guard—that I find my memories of that much earlier time, and the beginnings of another ugly little war, set off like a runaway train or other stampeding bodies. How to stop such juggernauts? Or should we try? My Indian elders and medicine people would caution not to attempt such, but rather to stand off to the side, with all of your relatives and cared-for ones with you, and let the damned juggernaut run its headlong, destructive course as it will. Yes, George the Second’s warmongering tirades sound all too familiar. I’ve been there before, I think, and not for the first time. It all sounds a hell of a lot like that other Texas bully who came up with the Tonkin Bay scare to get himself reelected while at the same time irrevocably committing his country to full-scale war. Is it the old American fear of black hair and nonwhite complexions that is once again rearing its pointy little head? Or is it rather the irresistible aroma of faraway petroleum? Is it both of these, and much more? $ $ $ For months, while on Okinawa, we knew that sooner or later the sporadic shooting being waged in those lands once called Indo-China, and now called Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, was going to intensify. Too many careless cigarettes thrown into forest and jungle lands that Americans are likely fated never to ever understand or to negotiate, making small brush fires that, by the nature of them, you put one out and another starts up—not because you aren’t a good firefighter and know how to keep them out once they are extinguished, but because you are just that damned careless about how additional ones are allowed to follow along in the trail of the previous ones. Yes, we knew it was only a matter of time. We knew it from Boot Camp, from our sergeants and gunnies weaned...