When he was 8, he once fell down and skinned his knee.
He cried and Grandpa came running.
"Now, now, big boys don't cry," Grandpa used to say every time the boy cried.
But when Grandpa died, the boy cried again.
Grandpa's was the first of many deaths the boy witnessed.
In Vietnam the value of life was never high.
One day the boy was coming out of a movie theater.
Boom! There was a deafening explosion.
A bomb had gone off.
There was sheer madness and some people died, but the boy couldn't remember how many.
He remembered the dismembered bodies around him, though.
An arm was hanging from a power line above.
By the way, the theater was showing a John Wayne movie.
His mother's favorite brother, Uncle Du, was killed in the war.
Uncle Du was a dashing, charming Air Force pilot with a smile that embraced life.
He was to be married soon.
His plane crashed and the only way they could identify him was through his dental chart.
His fiancee never married.
The boy's cousin died, too.
He had a good mind they all said.
He was intelligent, suave, and girls swooned over him.
"He had everything going for him," they used to say.
He graduated from an officers' academy.
They shipped him back in a body bag that same evening.
Everything he had going for him ceased to exist.
The girls stopped swooning.
The war also indirectly took lives.
Scenes of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire imprinted searing scars on those who watched.
The boy once saw one.
A group of veterans protesting the war drew straws to see who would be the first to go.
One was picked.
While a crowd watched in silence, the man poured gasoline on himself and lit a match.
Instant immolation.
"Ashes to ashes.
"On one Armed Forces Day, the boy sat on the beach and watched the Air Force display its prowess with real stuff.
The ocean out-shined the sun as jets dropped napalm on the water.
It was an oddly beautiful thing to watch -- definitely beats a parade.
There were temporary escapes from the war, though.
He and his friends used to go to a deserted is land on weekends, where palm trees carved silhouettes on the white sand, and the ocean, inland lagoons and the sky shared the same shade of blue.
They called the island "Sanity"-- an asylum for the sane.
His father had a library at home.
There, the boy traveled with Jules Verne, fished with Ernest Hemingway and read the poetry of Jacques Prevert.
Things were simple in a romanticized world.
The boy left Vietnam the day before the fall of Saigon.
He was 11.
Today, the boy is old enough to drink.
And does.
But the memories of the war linger like the lasting effects of Agent Orange on his home land and its people.
He and his fellow refugees have adopted a new life style, trying out new ways to earn a living.
Many have succeeded, but they merely exist.
It's like fornication without desire.
These Vietnamese expatriates are a new Lost Generation.
Lately, the boy has been watching television programs about the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
The fields of Vietnam are still green, the flowers still bloom, the people still speak the same language.
But something has changed.
That happened when Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City.
The boy wants to cry.
But big boys don't cry.
[ back to Golden Gater Online May 2, 1986 ]
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