Zaltho Foundation

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"Frozen Moments"
Claude AnShin Thomas

People were crying, chaos pervaded the emotional landscape, drenching it, muddying it like the feet of all those villagers being herded in one direction toward riverboats, in another direction toward Huey's, in yet another toward a Chinook.

All those feet in sandals made from discarded tires or naked with the mud squishing up between the toes who were lower in some socioeconomic hierarchy that I wasn't aware of but instinctively understood in some very private, intimate way. You see, growing up as I did in the foothills of appalachia I would often be witness to black faced coal miners bent over from the conditions they worked in and caste repression , walking to the company store accompanied by their barefoot children and the hissing of their breath being sucked into lungs permeated with coal dust. Walking to the company store to be robbed of dignity by having to go deeper in debt in an often vain attempt to support and feed his family in the most meager way. Going into debt to make the payments on the boss mans Cadillac or the store owners daughters 13th pair of shoes.

It was the rainy season, the monsoons, and the river was rising, drowning the bamboo huts, sweeping them away to fast to be saved. When the rains came after a scorching dry season this whole country was a baked adobe swimming pool. The earth too hard to absorb the water -- powerful, savage, claiming everything in it's path. So, in keeping with pacification and relocation we were evacuating.

There was never for a single moment any sense of organization only a surreal sense that was Vietnam. There was pushing,shoving, crowding; the attempt to put 1 pound of peanut butter into a 1/2 pound container. There was the constant inundating noise of the rain -- torrential, deafening. There was the sound of rotors and blades cutting through this wall of water that was the monsoon rains -- shouu, shouuu, shouuu, shouuu, shouuu, shouuu. There was the throaty rumble of diesel engines @ 3,000 RPM's struggling against the onslaught of this monsoon river flooding while they were being loaded. And the conversations having to be hollered and hollered and hollered to be only vaguely understood above this din -- they were there, villagers being forced (in their eyes I'm sure) from their homes, their sanctuary, their ancestors in a confused, dazed. hysteria dealing with impatient, insensitive, and emotionally numbed military cadre who knew no difference between friendly Vietnamese or V.C. (because there was none) bent only to the task of getting these squawking, fucking gook's outta here. There we were, to disparate groups attempting to speak to each other in different languages through the roar of this starved monsoon beast.

Families were being separated -- wives from husbands, fathers from children, people from their ancestors, their land. There was screaming and struggling and the flailing of bodies and spirits against the arms of some PFC, some specialist, some platoon sergeant. There was a scratching a and clawing against the forces of detachment but by strength and at gun point these people were herded just like frightened cattle, into the waiting boats and helicopters to be SAVED!!

I was there, part of the heavy fire team (helicopter gunships). We were there to provide fire support, fly cover for this evacuation, or mass kidnapping, I couldn't tell which. We were at a refueling point near to where the boats were being loaded. As I was topping off with JP-4 I became transfixed by a scene being played out before me on a too full PBX.

A Vietnamese women, I could barely see her through the haze of falling water, was being boarded. She was stuffing herself into the riverboat. She was carrying a large cloth bundle on her back, it seemed much larger than she, a child/an infant in one arm and a pig under the other all the while fighting and struggling with a soldier who kept yelling at her "you have too much, you have too much" while at the same time attempting to wrestle the pig -- squealing and squealing , from under her arm. In one frozen moment she looked into that soldiers eyes deeply, pirouetted from his grasp and held her infant, with one arm extended from her body in what seemed like a position of offering, then with deliberate action, released her child, her baby, dropping it into the river. The water, muddied from this rain, rising (so fast), stampeding, surging and swirling, swallowed that baby (like some kind of starving demon) faster than a thought. And in that same moment I knew for sure that the soldier who was herding her into the boat, weapon suddenly at the ready, was going to shoot her on the spot, but the other Vietnamese on the boat swallowed her as quickly as the river did her child, into their humanity and the boat was gone.

Some years after the experience, 11 or 14, I was recounting it with a group of other guys who had all served in combat in Vietnam. I was recounting it in the cold and detached way that most combat veterans touch their worlds when unencouraged to be alive with the feelings of a thing. In flat voice, unwavering, one of these guys responded between the inhale and exhale of a drag on a cigarette -- "you know man it ain't no big fucking mystery, she could have another fucking kid but she might not ever be able to get another pig!!"

I started to cry, not knowing why. I ran out of the building into a steamy July night in Boston crying, uncontrollably sobbing for that frozen moment.

< Back | Short Stories & Essays | Next >

"Frozen Moments"
Claude AnShin Thomas

People were crying, chaos pervaded the emotional landscape, drenching it, muddying it like the feet of all those villagers being herded in one direction toward riverboats, in another direction toward Huey's, in yet another toward a Chinook.

All those feet in sandals made from discarded tires or naked with the mud squishing up between the toes who were lower in some socioeconomic hierarchy that I wasn't aware of but instinctively understood in some very private, intimate way. You see, growing up as I did in the foothills of appalachia I would often be witness to black faced coal miners bent over from the conditions they worked in and caste repression , walking to the company store accompanied by their barefoot children and the hissing of their breath being sucked into lungs permeated with coal dust. Walking to the company store to be robbed of dignity by having to go deeper in debt in an often vain attempt to support and feed his family in the most meager way. Going into debt to make the payments on the boss mans Cadillac or the store owners daughters 13th pair of shoes.

It was the rainy season, the monsoons, and the river was rising, drowning the bamboo huts, sweeping them away to fast to be saved. When the rains came after a scorching dry season this whole country was a baked adobe swimming pool. The earth too hard to absorb the water -- powerful, savage, claiming everything in it's path. So, in keeping with pacification and relocation we were evacuating.

There was never for a single moment any sense of organization only a surreal sense that was Vietnam. There was pushing,shoving, crowding; the attempt to put 1 pound of peanut butter into a 1/2 pound container. There was the constant inundating noise of the rain -- torrential, deafening. There was the sound of rotors and blades cutting through this wall of water that was the monsoon rains -- shouu, shouuu, shouuu, shouuu, shouuu, shouuu. There was the throaty rumble of diesel engines @ 3,000 RPM's struggling against the onslaught of this monsoon river flooding while they were being loaded. And the conversations having to be hollered and hollered and hollered to be only vaguely understood above this din -- they were there, villagers being forced (in their eyes I'm sure) from their homes, their sanctuary, their ancestors in a confused, dazed. hysteria dealing with impatient, insensitive, and emotionally numbed military cadre who knew no difference between friendly Vietnamese or V.C. (because there was none) bent only to the task of getting these squawking, fucking gook's outta here. There we were, to disparate groups attempting to speak to each other in different languages through the roar of this starved monsoon beast.

Families were being separated -- wives from husbands, fathers from children, people from their ancestors, their land. There was screaming and struggling and the flailing of bodies and spirits against the arms of some PFC, some specialist, some platoon sergeant. There was a scratching a and clawing against the forces of detachment but by strength and at gun point these people were herded just like frightened cattle, into the waiting boats and helicopters to be SAVED!!

I was there, part of the heavy fire team (helicopter gunships). We were there to provide fire support, fly cover for this evacuation, or mass kidnapping, I couldn't tell which. We were at a refueling point near to where the boats were being loaded. As I was topping off with JP-4 I became transfixed by a scene being played out before me on a too full PBX.

A Vietnamese women, I could barely see her through the haze of falling water, was being boarded. She was stuffing herself into the riverboat. She was carrying a large cloth bundle on her back, it seemed much larger than she, a child/an infant in one arm and a pig under the other all the while fighting and struggling with a soldier who kept yelling at her "you have too much, you have too much" while at the same time attempting to wrestle the pig -- squealing and squealing , from under her arm. In one frozen moment she looked into that soldiers eyes deeply, pirouetted from his grasp and held her infant, with one arm extended from her body in what seemed like a position of offering, then with deliberate action, released her child, her baby, dropping it into the river. The water, muddied from this rain, rising (so fast), stampeding, surging and swirling, swallowed that baby (like some kind of starving demon) faster than a thought. And in that same moment I knew for sure that the soldier who was herding her into the boat, weapon suddenly at the ready, was going to shoot her on the spot, but the other Vietnamese on the boat swallowed her as quickly as the river did her child, into their humanity and the boat was gone.

Some years after the experience, 11 or 14, I was recounting it with a group of other guys who had all served in combat in Vietnam. I was recounting it in the cold and detached way that most combat veterans touch their worlds when unencouraged to be alive with the feelings of a thing. In flat voice, unwavering, one of these guys responded between the inhale and exhale of a drag on a cigarette -- "you know man it ain't no big fucking mystery, she could have another fucking kid but she might not ever be able to get another pig!!"

I started to cry, not knowing why. I ran out of the building into a steamy July night in Boston crying, uncontrollably sobbing for that frozen moment.