Muddy Jungle Rivers, a Vietnam War memoir, thrusts the reader into life in the Brown Water Navy onboard an armor troop carrier with the Mobile Riverine Force. Like Karl Marlantes, author of the novel Matterhorn, and the nonfiction What It Is Like To Go To War, I lived with this story for over thirty years before I started putting it on paper twelve years ago.
Today, a few Vietnam veteran friends and I meet occasionally for breakfast. The last time we were together, Mike said, “When I think of myself, I’m still that twenty-year-old Ranger. I look in the mirror, shocked at the old man staring back.”
I believe that’s true for many of us. Our psyche froze in a dimension we shy away from, deny, yet unconsciously embrace; a dimension of youth that forged our identity. Several years ago in a post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) vet’s counseling group, the psychiatrist said that our last conscious thought as we die—a peaceful old age—will be back to our time in Vietnam: it will be a coming home.
The men in Muddy Jungle Rivers necessarily froze, also. The voice and tone and those intangible nuances that are singular to an individual are in the minds-eye, but not the exact words. Dialogue flowed as memories resurfaced; dialogue is, of course, reconstructed.
Over decades of sleepless nights, operations blended, at times became composites, details blurring, like shifting sandbars beneath silty currents.
As a twenty-year-old cox’n—river assault boat driver—I was not privy to operational details. My world was limited to the view through one inch slits in the armor surrounding the cox’n flat. To jungle-covered riverbanks and the next curve in the river. Others who were there might say, “That’s not how I remember.” But Muddy Jungle Rivers is not a historical document. It is a memory journey from a twenty-year-year-old cox’n’s point of view about life on the boats—about the fallibility of people; their successes and failures.

Muddy Jungle Rivers will be available in print through Hawthorn Petal Press info@hawthornpetalpress and Amazon Kindle in May 2012.

Snowshoes whisper through reed canary grass, and wolves howl on the far side of the meadow on this northern Minnesota night. The full moon–some say it’s a blue moon–illuminates the snowscape. Bare oak branch shadows seem to dance as trees crack in protest to the 30 below temps. The new year starts with such promise.

Eight years now I’ve been retired. For thirty years, while working, stories from my youth haunted me—everybody who’s been to war has stories, I’ve listened to thousands from the old men who fought in the Good War—and I came to realize that I had to tell mine before I joined those old men. Dawn walks across dew-covered meadows watching days awaken—seasons change, blending with treelines, silently, as deer and geese, squirrels and spiders accepted my presence—awakened urgency to tell those stories.

I began taking writing classes at our local university. As semesters passed, essays accumulated. About the third year, I discovered poetry and a new world—a world of condensed images, actions, senses—a world that explores the moment. Walking my meadows, sitting silently in the treeline notebook in hand, images and long-buried memories pour onto the page. Universal symbols of changing seasons, storms, drought, nature’s design (or lack of it) in watching the food chain at work—deer/wolves, foxes/rabbits, owls/mice, swallows/flies, spiders/moths, and crows and ravens; always the raucous caws of those scavengers—open doors for me.

This past spring the “Healing Wall” came to Bemidji, Minnesota. While it was here some friends and I went to see it, then went to breakfast. Mike said he wished it hadn’t come—it opened old wounds. Jim and Lyle agreed and we talked about who it was healing. I was surprised at their sentiments—I felt the same way but didn’t want to admit it, like a betrayal to those on the Wall. Anyway, I went home and wrote this poem.

After the Funeral

It’s called “The Wall That Heals.” But Robert Frost’s words gnaw:
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Taps and 21 Gun Salutes

echo through wind-blown purple petals from wilted bouquets.
At the service I listen to elegies, worn clichés, old war stories

and know nothing has been learned except we jump higher at the rifle fire.
To the uninitiated, tanks and APC’s are symbols of omnipotence;

today as offered penitence, I’d rather see white doves set free.

Sharing a friend’s anguish, I wonder again how Walls heal as

we turn our backs to black granite. My arm shelters quaking shoulders

as he whispers a prayerful curse — his loss fresh again—

all that’s missing is a hearse. Recalling my nocturnal visit…

I came in dark of night, roles reversed. Stars whispered through powdery mist
and again I saw six river sailors disappear in dawn’s water-sprinkled burst—

others; sniped, accidents, ambushed—fingers gently brushed etched names;

not unlike baby granddaughter’s tears when big sissy’s crushed her heart.

This morning I go home, change clothes, pet the dog,

wander my meadow aimlessly, clean bluebird houses (spring is here),

and remember scattered purple petals blown into the Wall.