God Bless Cambodia by Randy Ross

Author:Randy Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781579625252
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2017-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX: VIETNAM

In darkness, be not unkempt by life’s cacophonous hex.

—W. PITTMAN

Two hours after leaving Bangkok, my flight lands at eleven p.m. in Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport. Like Thailand, Vietnam is a Buddhist country. But when I scan the terminal there are no smirking deities or sexy, welcoming statues. The decor is late Soviet Union: no billboards, advertising, or color. The walls are painted in a palette of olive drab and olive drabber. Exposed metal beams adorn the ceiling. The room looks like a hangar or a detention center.

A grim, uniformed man scrutinizes my papers. According to the guidebook, my passport will be popular reading in Vietnam. When I check into a hostel or hotel, I’ll have to surrender it for review by the local authorities. When I check out, it will hopefully be returned.

Unlike Thailand, Vietnam is a communist country. I think of police states and labor camps. I think of China and North Korea. Creepy. Invasive. Titillating. I feel an adrenaline rush. Counterphobia.

Exiting immigration, I spot an Asian guy holding a sign that says “Burns.” In Venezuela, I was “Mr. Randall Burns.” In South Africa, “Randy Burns.” Now I’m just “Burns.” A reflective person might think: I’m just a vestige of the man I once was. I think: Let’s do this, Charlie.

I follow the guy outside the terminal.

He points to the curb. “You wait me here.”

There are few lights outside the building and fewer people. Leaves rustle, humidity swirls. Beyond the parking lot, I imagine chest-high elephant grass, rice paddies, and palm trees, lots of palms trees. Not the clean-cut, lawn ornaments that grow in Florida. Southeast Asian palm trees, jammed together and unkempt, fronds shooting off in all directions like a punky, jungle hairdo. I imagine running around in this jungle with cousin Joey, flamethrowers on our backs.

As kids, Joey and I played war after school. Our jungle was the woods behind my house. We were heavily armed with air guns, cap guns, squirt guns, ray guns, tommy guns, guns that could shoot around corners, guns that launched Styrofoam grenades. We watched Combat and The Rat Patrol.

For my tenth birthday, I got a chemistry set. The gunpowder recipe didn’t work, so Joey and I filled the Pyrex beakers with household chemicals and lit them on fire. For his tenth birthday, Joey got a model rocket kit with engines and fuses. We lit the projectiles on fire and launched them flaming into the woods. Take that, you Krauts. Eat shit, you Japs.

No one in our family had ever seen action in the military, but we were going to be airborne rangers, parachuting into enemy territory, dispensing death from above. But along the way to our eighteenth birthdays, we got distracted with daring daylight raids of his parents’ medicine cabinet for Valium and Seconal and that was it. But to this day, Joey and I never miss a war movie.

In addition to the war, Vietnam has other attractions:

• Wine made from fermented cobras.

• Six-hundred-pound catfish that locals catch using dead dogs for bait.

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