A Tree by the River

by James Dunn

  We scampered down to the fence and ducked under it into the meadow. Campfires and music and most of the people in the valley were already there. We tried to appear nonchalant and still be on the lookout for our parents, but there were so many people we never saw our folks. We had no trouble finding the huge wagon and team of horses that were tied to the hayride.

  Within a moment we were in the wagon and over in a corner. I nodded to some older kids I knew. One girl scolded Myrna. "Your momma finds out you're here, and she'll tan your hide."

  Myrna smiled sweetly and said, "If my momma finds out, we'll all know who told her, won't we." The older girl blushed and turned away as the wagon lurched into motion. The gentle bouncing of the wagon seemed to draw Myrna to me as if our bodies were magnets, and she was one charge and I was its opposite. Her leg was so close to me and her breasts were pushed against my shirt. I was almost afraid to breathe for fear of breaking the spell. So I just let the motion of the wagon rock me, with its gentle swaying. What a beautiful night, with the motion of the wagon rocking me...

  For some reason something didn't seem right. It didn't quite smell like hay in the wagon, and I no longer felt Myrna against me. It smelled more like jungle.

  Jungle? My eyes flew open! Dark night in a dark jungle greeted me. The swaying was not a hay wagon, but some sort of a stretcher. And I was tied into the stretcher, flat on my back. My hands were even tied to my side. I could only see the person just past my feet, gripping the rails of my stretcher. Was it a woman with a baldhead and a bare brown shoulder?

  My heart sank as it dawned on me that I was back in the jungle. I was back in Viet Nam. And I was tied hand and foot, and being carried off in a direction I didn't know, and to a place I couldn't even imagine.

  I had heard stories of the POW sites in Nam. They were mostly pits dug into the earth, with iron grates as doors. Most POWs didn't survive because they fed you nearly nothing, and dysentery stripped most of the guys of their will to live. My mood got as dark as the darkest part of the jungle night.

  I was way too weak to think, and too tired to try to get up a plan of escape. And I was incredibly sore, with a fierce fire consuming my belly. I weighed my options and decided that being carried still had the advantage over walking, and I might just as well relax.

  I was about to close my eyes when I realized that they had stripped me of my field uniform and put one of those orange robes on me.

  I tried to process this information. Orange meant Buddhists. Buddhists were supposed to be pacifists, but most soldiers strongly suspected that the Buddhists were just a VC disguise. I remembered one grizzled Staff Sergeant from Special Forces telling me, "I just shoot 'em all. Let God sort it out." I remember him vividly because he also told me he had a Hmong wife, and that chewing beetle nuts was a great way to stay stoned and not lose your edge. His teeth were nearly black, and he drooled an almost constant stream of black juice down the side of his mouth.

  I tried to move to get more comfortable, but couldn't. My uniform was gone, my belt was missing, and even the chain that held my dog-tags was gone!

  "Hey, shit-heads!" I hollered. The articles of war,.. Geneva con..."

  A firm hand clamped across my mouth. Above it a baldhead appeared. The old monk with the wispy goatee. He raised his other hand to his lips and whispered "Shhhh". The column came to a stop. I was pissed! I tried to speak through the hand that clamped on my mouth, but all that came out was a muffled something like "Gmmmmmmmmm".

  The old man shook his head no, holding his finger over his lips and trying to shush me. I looked into his eyes, which seemed surprisingly young on such a weathered old face. His eyes held a sadness that seemed to plead with me to be quiet. He took his left hand from his lips and pointed off to his left. Then his index finger pretended to point at my head. He dropped his thumb as if the hammer of the pistol had snapped. He may not know English, but he was a great communicator. His hand went back to his lips for a final "Shhhh". I got real quiet.

  In a couple of seconds that skinny young monk shuffled into view. He placed his hands together with his fingers pointing up and made a deep bow.

  "Greetings," he whispered. "I am to tell you that we are all in great danger. We must be quiet. Soldiers are all around. If they see you are a foreigner they will shoot you for sure, and perhaps all of us too."

  The old man finally took his hand off my mouth. “Where are you taking me?" I whispered hoarsely.

  "We go to a temple.” He answered, “You will be safe there as long as no one sees you." You must stay until you are strong enough to leave. Then the Abbot will decide about you."

  "Are you Viet Cong?" I asked.

  The young man smiled, "We are Buddhists. Buddhists do not participate in war. Buddhists practice harmlessness." He looked around conspiratorially. "Very difficult when you don't take sides. Both sides distrust you."

  "What about me? I'm an American soldier?"

  Putting his hand on the orange robe on my chest, he straightened it. "For now, you are a badly wounded monk who cannot talk. It's lucky for you that you are shorter than most Americans, and that you were born with brown eyes.

  He winked and walked away before I could ask him anything else. The column started again, and the gentle swaying went on and on. For a while I tried to figure out which direction we were going, but the night shadows told me nothing. My mind couldn't seem to get a handle on any plan, or any idea how to get out of the restraints. So I decided to relax and enjoy the fact that I was not walking.

  A deep "gong" sound awakened me. I could feel myself reluctantly coming up and out of a dream I wasn't quite finished with. I tried to return to the dream, but now there was a sound of singing or something. When I finally opened my eyes I saw a flickering candle near the head of my bed. The fragrance of incense filled the room. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that old monk standing at the foot of my bed. He was saying or maybe singing something, and then the rest of the monks repeated him. This went on for a while, with each message repeated again and again, first the old guy, then the room

  I lay there for a while, just taking it all in, and then I tried to sit up, but couldn't. I realized that I was still tied down.

  "This is really getting old!" I croaked.

  The room was suddenly silent. Only the whispered sound of the candle hissing and spluttering could be heard.

  "Kind sir," a voice somewhere near my feet said, "You must not move too suddenly or you will burst the dressings on your wounds. It is only for this reason that you are restrained."

  "Who are you?" I asked, blinking and trying to focus my eyes on the silhouette that now appeared beside the old monk.

  Again the skinny one brought his hands together and bowed. "I am Troung."

  He was all of five feet tall, and probably weighed less than 90 pounds.

  "I want to be untied. I need to move and stretch."

  He came to stand beside me and placed a hand on my forehead. I was hot and sweaty, and his hand seemed cool.

  "You were severely wounded. Actually, you were impaled in a tree. Our physician has determined that you must be restrained. Also your ankle is swollen. If you try to walk and fall, you might bleed to death."

  I let his words sort of roll around in my mind. "Shattered? Swollen? Bleed to death?" Not the kind of ·words I liked to hear when the talk is about me.

  "Impaled in a tree?" I finally managed to say. Vague memories of wispy ghosts and long tunnels and...and...light. Was I remembering a dream, or what?

  Troung removed a blanket and I could see my bloody and bandaged right foot. The old guy with the goatee and another even older one began unwrapping the blood soaked bandage.

  The young monk smiled and bowed again, showing a five o'clock shadow on his shaved head. A flicker of a smile crossed his face. "We were afraid we would never be able to get you out of the tree. You were up nearly three meters, and you would strike out at us when we tried to help."

  "What about the guys in my unit?" Another hau
nting memory fleetingly crossed my mind. I somehow knew they were all dead, but still I hoped I was wrong.

  A shadow of sadness crossed the young monk's face. Just for a moment his eyes lowered. He drew in a long breath. Thirty-four souls departed their bodies. You and another one were the only ones who's spirits were intact."

  "The other one, was he, uh, an American?"

  The stubbly baldhead shook left to right. "She was a young Vietnamese.

  She lost her foot. We may be able to save yours, though."

  I knew that, although I didn't remember exactly why I knew it. Again I tried to clear my head. The memory of my First Sergeant instructor popped into my mind. He used to tell me over and over, "Get your head back in the game. Don't allow your mind to wander! Stay focused on what is real!"

  My problem seemed to be a shifting perspective about what "real" was supposed to mean.

  "You have been unconscious for many days." Troung said quietly. "We have had to restrain you each time we changed the dressing." He smiled. "It took all of the monks to hold you down. I shall return to shave your head. We must continue to present you as a fellow monk, in case we are visited by the soldiers.

  Truong backed up and bowed and left. Now I was alone with the two older monks. They gently examined my right ankle, carefully unwrapping the soiled bandages.

  After the dressing on my foot was changed, the two older ones removed the bandages from my belly and examined the angry red wound. They gently poked and prodded, and then rubbed some foul smelling potion on it. A new patch of old rag was taped across the wound and then they both bowed and left. I was alone. Alone but still tied up.

  The guys in the squads used to sit around and talk about being captured. Basically there were two schools of thought. Some said you were better off being killed out-right, so start planning an escape attempt. The second idea was that staying alive was the main task. Keep a low profile and put all your energy into staying alive.

  As I lay there in that damp bed, I tried to get a sense of my predicament. Either I had been rescued by the Buddhists and spared the horrors of letting the VC find me, or this was a temporary holding pattern, and they planned all along to turn me over to the enemy.

  Technically I'm not a prisoner, although I am tied up, and pretty well not able to move about freely. Maybe they are conning me, and I am a prisoner. But then, why the robe and the shaved head? Maybe they were just trying to save my life.

  The more I thought about it, the more confused I became. Finally I decided not to decide anything, and just see what happens. With that handled, I had some serious sleeping to do.

  The next days and weeks I had long bouts of unconsciousness, with wild and weird dreams in which I soared and sailed and rose and fell with the music of chanting voices and flickering candles.

  Visions of my mother feeding me soup and spilling it on the orange robe were all mixed in with seeing the old goatee guy and Truong, and flying down the tunnel towards the light but not quite ever getting there. Once I heard my dad's voice calling me from the kitchen, "Get ready tonight, we're going duck hunting in the morning!" Then dad's face would melt into the face of the kindly old monk.

  I would come awake when soup was poured into my mouth, and open my eyes to see if it was my mom or Truong. Later I would awaken with fever and chills and searing heat all around me. Sometimes, I woke myself up by peeing in my bed. At first I would worry that my dad would be furious at me, but the monks were so gracious, they just smiled and cleaned up the mess.

  They would say things in Vietnamese, and I came to understand they were saying, "It's okay, just lie back and don't worry." I remember thinking that if this is how they treated prisoners, then we must have had some really bad intel on them.

  The rains came with a vengeance, and weeks and maybe months went by with rain all day and most of the night. There are two monsoon seasons in Viet Nam, the first begins in late March to early May. The other one comes around October. I had no clue which one this was. Once a week they came and shaved my face and head, and I took to gauging the passage of time with the shaves.

  Truong was there every day, and he coached me on the language. Soon enough I had a rudimentary feel for the language. It amused me that the same words meant differing things by the tone in which they were said. But I caught on quickly.

  One day he came in and started speaking English and I raised my hand and stopped him. "Speak only Vietnamese," I requested in Vietnamese. "I won't get better unless we use it."

  He laughed and pointed out that he wouldn't get better in his English unless he used it, so we agreed every other day to use one or the other, but never both.

  Some days it would rain so much that I could hear the roar of the rainfall all day and all night. I was getting better and trying to walk back and forth as a check on whether my belly was healing or not. At first it hurt so much that I would quit after three or four steps. My ankle seemed to hurt the more it rained, and it was raining almost continuously.

  Then one day I woke up and knew that I had to strengthen my body to prepare for my departure. I got carefully get out of bed, and tried walking with my bad right foot. The first steps I nearly passed out with the pain, but as I came to anticipate it, I was able to manage better. I knew I had to get back the use of the foot if I ever planned on leaving.

  The rain continued. Certain days it would roar on the corrugated tin roof so loudly that my ears hurt. I would get up and shuffle around, trying to put more weight on my right foot and ankle. I hobbled across the room to the door, and turned and headed back to the bed. When I turned again towards the door, I was startled to see the old Abbot standing there with Truong. I was surprised, but managed a deep bow and a formal greeting in Vietnamese. He smiled and took in the view of me walking and bowing.

  "Perhaps," he said softly, "you would like to accompany Brother Truong the next time we discuss the Sutras." He bowed deeply and smiled and turned and left. Truong watched him go and raised his eyebrows to me.

  "An invitation from the Abbot is nearly a command. Tell me you will join us. Today after the mid-day meal."

  I nodded. Truong bowed and left me to my thoughts. I paced the floor all morning, ignoring the pain.

  By the time Truong showed up, I was nearly worn out. I hobbled to the Great Room, where the main services are held. The old Abbot sat on a small pillow and bowed a greeting to us as we joined a circle of several monks.

  I bowed to the other monks, and was shown a pillow at the far edge of the semi-circle that faced the old monk. For a while I just listened, trying to determine just how much of the language I understood. For the most part I was able to follow the discussions, and after Truong slipped me a pencil and a note pad, I scribbled down words and concepts that confused me. I found out that like Christianity, Buddhism has many denominations, or what they called schools.

  This group was of the Zen tradition, and today's lecture was about the Bodhidharma's strong words. Strictly speaking, this teaching was outside the scriptures. We were urged to focus directly on the human heart. The Abbot spoke of continuous meditation outside the framework of sitting, in which a monk was to cultivate a choice-less and non-interfering awareness of simply noticing his thoughts. The key, as we were told, is to grasp at none of the thoughts. Notice and release. The simplicity of it reminded me of the state of mind a soldier carries into combat.

  In combat the unfocused mind would allow for a peripheral vision and a noting of the activity, without ever directly allowing any subject to become the focus. This allowed the soldier to be open to everything, and respond without thinking.

  The Abbot must have noticed the look on my face, because he asked me directly if I would like to comment. I stood and bowed, as is the protocol, and stammered that I was relating that kind of awareness to the mind of the soldier.

  "Please give us an example," said the Abbot.

  I spoke of the state of mind that came over me when I was in a combat situation. I had to keep asking Truong for word
s that I'd never learned, but the group waited with great patience until Truong and I found the word or concept, and then I would begin again in Vietnamese. Beloved Abbot, as the other monks referred to the old one, assured me that this was indeed the choice-less and non-interfering awareness that was referred to in the lecture. He mentioned that the Japanese had incorporated it into the Code of Bushido, or the warrior's code.

  By the time the session was over, I was exhausted from the sheer effort of trying to explain complex ideas in a new language. When we finally stood and bowed and left the room, each of the other monks came to me and thanked me for being there. The old cook, with his scarred head and many scars, said, "You are welcome anytime to visit the kitchen and speak. I am an ex Viet Cong commander, and we share the way of the warrior."

  He smiled knowingly, and bowed twice before he left. Truong walked with me back to my room and told me that he was sure the Abbot enjoyed my presence. "Would you join us again tomorrow?"

  I wasn't sure that I didn't need a direct invitation from the Abbot, but Truong assured me that he would have been told if I weren't welcome.

  And so I came to spend my days discussing philosophy or religion. One huge surprise came when I apologized for my faltering speech. The Abbot turned to me and quoted a passage from First Corinthians. He spoke in Vietnamese, but I easily recognized and translated these words: "And I, my brothers, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech, nor did I talk to you with learning of the mystery of God."

  My jaw dropped, and I asked him where he had learned that quote. "Truth hides in every great book," he answered. "The trick is to find it and make it your own." The Sutras are revered commentaries on the teachings of the Buddha. I found plenty of similarities and plenty of differences between Buddhism and Christianity. Many a long discussion followed one of my questions. I got plenty of chances to perfect my Vietnamese, and ask tons of questions. The Abbot patiently answered and explained in detail the philosophy of Buddhism. But he seemed to be just as familiar with the other religions as he was with his Buddhism.