I can honestly say that I am 100% ashamed to be an American. It is beyond my comprehension how my country could partake in the massacre and not punish any of the men who took part in this. I still keep hope, however, that America will learn from its mistakes & instead of killing will work to help the world and bring peace. Thank you for making this site; I will use my tears to educate those @ home.
My guess is that Jennifer is in her early twenties, idealistic, and never had much exposure to those dark areas of U.S. history that school textbooks don’t deal with very well. She is open to new information and has good intentions, and she was shocked by what she saw here. But I hope she isn’t really 100 percent ashamed to be an American since the United States is more than the My Lai massacre. But even if she were, I think to be around her would be easier than to be with Dottie Payne, who had visited a couple weeks before Jennifer:
I am an American and I remember March 16th well. I fought hard against the Imperialist war my government waged against the heroic Vietnamese people. I pray I will be able to always.
Do not forgive them Lord, for they know what they do. They know.
Dottie and I would agree that U.S. policy has sometimes been poorly, even immorally, made and carried out, contributing to the deaths of millions around the world. But while she felt the liberty to borrow the words of Jesus and alter them, I would not. I imagine that those who killed Jesus were quite aware that they were killing him—they too knew what they were doing. On another level, though, did they? Did they truly know what evil they were committing? Did they ever glimpse enough truth and light to realize just how dark their actions were? Perhaps in one sense they didn’t have a clue what they were doing, and this is why Jesus asked that his killers be forgiven. I will never be an apologist for the crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in My Lai and in other, less famous hamlets around Vietnam, but I cringed at Dottie’s approach for it assumes that there is a great gulf between those who murdered in My Lai and those of us who did not and think we never would. Oppose wrongdoing, yes. Understand the difficulty someone may have in forgiving another, certainly. Ask God himself to deny forgiveness to another, never.
Chung came into the room to refill my cup, and also to play a thirty-minute video about My Lai that included footage of Thompson and Colburn’s return in 1998. They had a chance to meet some of the women they saved, and it was only as I watched Colburn begin to cry as the women grabbed his arms that tears welled up in me as well. And how could they not? I was now sipping tea served by Chung, holding the cup with a hand caressed by the grandson of a survivor; my elbow sat on the guest book, filled with so many entries that expressed arrogant anger and no humility; and on the table behind me were two other papers, certificates belatedly presented by the U.S. military to Thompson and Colburn for heroism in 1996. They left them behind on their 1998 visit to My Lai.
Here I sat, an American in the fields of My Lai, moved by both the past and present, and reminded for the thousandth time that this is a broken world. But I was also moved because the world is home to such beauty, unexpected gifts of grace, and opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to save, to do good, to love, to reach out.
I do not usually leave messages in museum guest books, but now I felt it would be wrong not to. And so I wrote:
There are no clear words. But there is loss, sadness, anger, evil, and pain in this beautiful place. At the same time, today there is peace and hope…and such wonderful people in the towns and villages of this province, as I’m sure there were also in 1968. Thank you for preserving this ground and the memory of those who were murdered. And thank you for your kindness toward me, an American who is in love with Vietnam. Peace to us all, and may we indeed not just have nice sentiments about peace but have the creativity and courage to concretely contribute to right relationships and to justice—to peace. Joel Carillet, Washington D.C., January 18, 2004
I climbed back on my motorbike, ready to explore more of this stunning land.
Joel Carillet, a Tennessee-based writer and photographer, is the author of 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, World Hum, and The Best Travel Writing 2008. For more of his writing and photography visit www.joelcarillet.com or www.istockphoto.com/jcarillet.
DEBORAH TAFFA
The Year We Bought Our Hitchhiker
They left the reservations in which they were born, and made everywhere their home.
ONCE SIMONE DEVELOPS AN OBSESSION, THERE IS NO hope that he will change his mind. Looking back, I believe his obsession with living on the road is directly linked to one of the first family vacations he took as a child. In 1974, when he was a six-year-old, his parents took him on a monthlong road trip all the way from their summer home in Como to the toe of Calabria. They towed a tiny 3.2-meter camping trailer, about the length of a VW bug, behind their family car. They called their rolling home the “Roller,” pronounced in a stiff north Italian accent. His father says it was the perfect way to see Italy in the ’70s; it freed them up to explore remote areas that had no hotels. The tortuous Mediterranean Coast thrilled Simone and they stopped in village after isolated village, swimming, camping on beaches, and exploring the shoreline. It was a major adventure, unforgettable despite his age due to the natural beauty but also because they had to stop every ninety kilometers for his little brother Matteo to be carsick.
The Nuway Hitchhiker we purchased outstretched the “Roller” his family took to Calabria by thirty feet. It was an American behemoth, a super-size version of his childhood trailer, with white siding, red stripes, and pink frilly curtains. There were two entrances to the trailer. One door opened out from the living room, the other the kitchen, where we squeezed past each other to cook and prepare meals. It was like living in a long hallway and we spent every bit of warm weather outdoors, underneath an expandable shade-awning that could be opened and shut (and eventually ripped when it filled like a sail on a blustery day). The Hitchhiker featured a pull-out sofa and a wooden cabinet for our small black-and-white TV, a table that folded down into a bed, a bathroom with a step-flush system, and an accordion-door-closing bath-shower, but my favorite part was the “upstairs” bedroom.
To imagine us in our first family home, it is important to understand that our Hitchhiker had a unique design, referred to by industry insiders as “a fifth-wheel.” A fifth-wheel is towed behind a truck like a trailer, but it doesn’t connect to the bumper, it sits in the middle of the truck bed on a hitch. The portion of the trailer that sits above the truck is usually the bedroom. It bends like a zigzag, an upper-branch sprouting off the main trailer. Thus a fifth-wheel is not the average rectangular trailer, though the lower portion is stable on four wheels like a trailer. Neither is it a motor home with an engine, a converted bus, or a collapsible pop-up.
A fifth-wheel has steps inside, leading from the normal “trailer” portion of the home, in which a person can stand up, into the upstairs-bedroom portion that rests over the truck bed when the trailer is being towed. Once you climb the four steps from the main level bathroom into the upstairs bedroom it is impossible to stand up straight without bumping your head. This design lends a comfy feeling to the bedroom. It’s like a camping loft and makes the bedroom feel like a small hideout or cave. When there’s a storm outside a fifth-wheel, the raindrops on the aluminum roof sound like a thousand tiny feet dancing. The organic rhythm of raindrop music is especially peaceful at night. It makes you feel cozy and safe. This feeling of safety is important because when you are moving to a new state every three to four weeks, awakening in the morning sometimes means a moment of confusion before you remember where you’re parked.
It seems to me that one need only compile a list of Recreational Vehicle names through the decades—the Road Yacht, the Nomad House Car, the Palace Expando, the Aerocar, the Jungle Yacht, the Redman Trailer Coach, and the Rolohome—to see that the desire for road travel is closely tied to
the imagination as well as a craving for mobility and freedom. The Palace Expando, for example, sounds like a magician’s trick: “Ladies and gentlemen, watch me as I place this tiny 3.2-meter Roller in my top-hat and slowly pull out a Long, Long Trailer.” The marketers of the Nomad House Car might have easily called it the Gypsy Caravan with the added slogan, “There is no such thing as home.”
Even prior to the official Recreational Vehicles industry, in the early decades of the automobile, people in America used their creativity to independently fuse their living quarters and their transportation. The earliest versions of Recreational Vehicles were do-it-yourself systems. I’ve seen several RV Hall of Fame photos circa 1920 that were fascinating: one do-it-yourself weighed eight tons, stretched two-stories high, and was modeled on an English manor. Another do-it-yourself model used the body of a hollowed-out tree trunk. The stump in the picture is enormous. It was easily as big as the car that towed it. The inside of the stump-home was obviously round, with sloped inner walls. I imagine one had to stoop to get inside.
Our Hitchhiker years took off quickly. The impetus for the purchase was our first pregnancy, a wonderful gift as it turned out, but unexpected at the time. Simone and I had planned to be rounding the corner of West Africa, specifically the Ivory Coast, and instead we were on a plane back to the United States, where we would head to my parents and break the news of our recent addition.
My parents were anxious to see us. It was 1990 and they had been (in our minds) foolishly worried about us traveling during the first Iraq War, especially in Muslim countries. We didn’t think they had guessed why we were returning early because they were distracted by the fact that I had been hospitalized with malaria in Italy. Simone had had to change our return flight plans twice while I convalesced near his parents’ home and though his parents knew about the pregnancy, they couldn’t speak English, didn’t know my parents, and therefore could not have informed them of our situation.
Simone was twenty-one-years old. I was twenty. We were married, but without degrees or careers. We were unprepared for parenthood. We had eloped a mere nine months prior, the summer of 1989 when we were roaming in our own do-it-yourself system, indulging Simone’s (then) obsession with lakes and the great American West. My father teased, “You’re the only guy I know who has his house in a trunk.” The joke was a gentle prod to settle down.
The summer of our wedding, we were on the road in my old college automobile, an Isuzu I-Mark. Our living quarters were, of course, in the trunk. When it rained we leaned back the driver and passenger seats and slept in the car. We prowled dirt roads in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, California, Oregon, and Washington. We slept off the highway, in rural places, while we drove. We were always looking for free places to pitch the tent. Simone’s tourist visa expired. He was an illegal alien in the United States and so we stopped in downtown Winnemucca to be married.
We pulled into town and went to the best-looking of the three wedding chapels. They said we had to have a witness and wanted us to pay extra for one. Not knowing anyone in Nevada, and not wanting to waste ten bucks, we invited a man off the street to attend the ceremony. His name was Todd W. Bell. Mr. Bell must have been in his thirties. He wore a leather jacket and grumbled when he realized he had to sign paperwork. When his signature was done he gave us both hugs, went out the door, and disappeared down the street in his beat-up sneakers. To celebrate, we went to eat Mexican food then we jumped in the car and headed to Lake Tahoe where it rained and we slept in the car.
The woman who married us used road-trip lingo during the vows, “You’ve made a special promise to travel down the road of life together, etc.” We guessed by her condescending attitude that she didn’t bet on the probability of our staying together—it didn’t matter—we told ourselves a wedding’s size was no indicator of future happiness. We had chosen a private ceremony on purpose; standing in front of a room full of loved one would have felt too mawkish, besides which we didn’t have time to stop and plan. Yet here we were, cut off after only a month and a half in West Africa, standing in my father’s living room, expecting a baby. We had no idea what to do next. My father said he could offer Simone a temporary position on a welding crew at the Four Corners Power Plant if Simone could learn how to pipe weld well enough to pass the X-ray test. (High-pressure pipes are dangerous if air bubbles are left in the metal.) After nine months of stuffy and stagnant apartment living in Phoenix, Arizona, Simone had a pipe welding certificate and we had added a baby daughter to our team.
Simone passed the pipe X-ray test at the Four Corners Power Plant and was hired for the temporary chromaly position. A temporary welder is hired for industry “outages,” maintenance moments when electricity production stops for repairs to be made. He was paid twenty-five dollars an hour. It was now 1991 and we were both twenty-one-years old. We told ourselves it was fine, welding was a temporary situation, something to hold us over until our genius struck. What was really important was building capital for a future business investment and what we referred to as our ultimate goal: the financial freedom to travel to places off-the-beaten track. Four weeks later Simone was laid off.
We knew this would happen, my father had warned us that “turnarounds,” or “outages,” as they are called, are simply temporary shut-down periods for annual maintenance. Not knowing where to go next, Simone made friends with a few Navajo welders (the Four Corners Power Plant is on the Navajo reservation) and they told him where the next outage was: Yuma, Arizona. I say “next” because a welder can keep busy year-round if he is willing to relocate every month. Of course, most migrant welders leave their families at home while they travel, so their kids can attend school, play in Little League, and take part in religious and community activities. Migrant welders sleep in hotels and mail their checks home. They support their families from afar.
We refused to be separated. Simone became fixated on building a do-it-yourself style RV. He walked us through junkyards and used car lots looking for the perfect shell, an old school bus that could be rebuilt and painted over with soulful expressiveness. Though we talked about it constantly, nothing ever came of his dream to build a do-it-yourself RV because the right vehicle and engine never appeared. We packed up our bags, buckled our new baby daughter Miquela into her seat, and went to the Yucca Power Plant in Yuma by car, for the outage the Navajo welders had told him about. There was another X-ray test, as there would be prior to each new outage we went to, but at least in Yuma we didn’t worry where we would stay. Despite having spent the bulk of my childhood in the Four Corners region, Yuma was my birthplace and I had relatives living there: both in town and on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation.
Yuma also happened to be the RV Capital of the World. In 2009, a family willing to shell out fifty thousand dollars for a 400-square-foot “apartment” minus real estate and with a motor on wheels, is a family longing, perhaps ironically, for a return to simple living. They are often Americans seeking a set of old-fashioned values that include independence from society. They are sometimes on a quest for Nature. I say this because I believe that the average Recreational Vehicle consumer wants, at least in the beginning, to drive away in their purchase, rather than park it on a slab of concrete with full hook-ups, water, sewer, electric, and cable. They want to abandon, at least for a time, the urban lifestyle, the mundane and repetitive day-to-day tasks, their immersion in work, their child’s immersion in commercials—“I want to buy that!” They dream of exiting society, taking the off-ramp away from the interstate. They dream of embarking on small, country roads, and parking their rolling “home-sweet-home” in a National Park.
The enduring trend of RV ownership in America, the sight of those behemoths rolling down the highways, is evidence of the imagination modern families still have for freedom and wilderness. Perhaps this is the reason many people refer to Recreational Vehicles as “Winnebagos,” even when the make and model of their purchase is not from Winnebago Industries. The etymology of the world is r
ooted in the Sioux language and refers to the indigenous people of eastern Wisconsin. The word translates as “people of the murky water who eat fish,” an allusion to Fox River below Lake Winnebago. It did not appear as a term for Recreational Vehicles until 1966. It seems fitting—what could be more suggestive of wildness and freedom then living in a vehicle named after a tribe of American Indians?
After arriving in Yuma for our second outage, this time at the Yucca Power Plant, we headed down to the RV Peddler, a dealer on the frontage road along Interstate 8. We were living at my aunt’s house and hoping to buy some privacy. I was worried about the price tag, but Simone was very persuasive. He noted that the trailer-style RV’s without motors were much less expensive than the Winnebago, or motor homes. He ignored my obvious concern: we did not own a truck to tow a trailer and wanted to look at every used fifth-wheel on the lot. He asked question after question until the baby cried, my feet hurt, and I was desperate to go back to my aunt’s house. “You mean the refrigerator can work on propane or electric?” “How much extra for one of those swiveling hitches?”
We were exceedingly proud to pay nine thousand dollars—cash—for our Nuway Hitchhiker. We had saved for it and our new home was a jewel, pre-owned but clean. It had no smoker’s smell like some of the other used models we’d seen on the lot. The dealer at RV Peddler delivered it to the small thirty-space, horseshoe-shaped trailer park we’d picked out at the edge of town, and near the border with Mexico. The only existing Yoga Ashram in Yuma County sat next door. Their peacocks, considered sacred by Hindus, strutted over to our trailer park often and paraded through the court with their tail fans spread.
The Best Travel Writing 2011 Page 25