Thang Nguyen 555

The WHO (not the band) started using it – unprecedented – early in 2020.

Then it’s been a string of “to mask or not to mask, that is the question”…

Then “Happy Birthday” (X2) to wash one’s hands long enough to scrub out the exposed virus…

Unprecedented…The whole world now understand care workers and essential workers…how they prep for their work (of operating a patient – however urgent).

Many of them died during the process…unprecedented.

Then the firefighters…underpaid, overworked…up in Portland and out West.

Unprecedented.

This week, instead of “We all live in a Yellow Submarine”, we all Iive under the heat dome.

Unprecedented.

You would think people charge out of the gate like Spanish bulls, right after the virus get under control.

No, no, no. Unprecedented, due to the variant (and perhaps boosters).

Plus the force of habits (staying in, and staying socially distant).

We end up on facebook and post our grievances and grief.

Delayed and prolonged grief. Unending five stages…(albeit some people still get stuck in stage two: denial).

America gets split in two, not Red States and Blue States, but vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Precedented and Unprecedented.

People even took a seasonal flu shot at the nudging of a Walgreen near them. But not this.

Science under attack. Since when it hasn’t been!

The Church (Catholic) beheaded early-day scientists, astronomers in particular.

Then the greed and ambition to “subdue the Earth…dominion over the seas” led to pooling resources for an expedition. Many shipwrecks behind, Columbus ended up (unprecedentedly) in the Americas.

I’d rather the tale of Papillon with his unprecedented escape from the French colonial prisons (plural…that guy, married both sisters…since a butterfly needs to have two flapping wings).

That’s how we have lived….precedentedly…until recently.

Until this past year, when Trump and Floyd, Covid and Climate Change all converged to make a oh-well unprecedented year. Plus the Olympics without spectators (not short of protestors though).

Japanese normally stay quiet. But this time, unprecedentedly, they come out, holding Hell-No signs.

I have stayed home more than any other year in my entire short bi-pedalist years.

God gave me two feet. To pedal, to walk and run, to push the pedal to the medal… But I stay put.

I wash my hands, stay away from people, and find myself with new habits: anti-social.

They should start investing in Baby World….for after this past year, birth rates should shoot up.

To replenish the Earth…then to subdue it…

The instructions have been more than clear: in a normal year, go out and conquer the World, …keep your Oath (of lording over everything, woman and child, especially) and be Proud…move in formation, and charge….

Floridian man got charged and sent to jail (unprecedented). Now the rest of the bunch, 500+ recognizable faces shared on social media during the Insurrection, get plea bargains and sentences….”I will walk with you to take back”…”I will be with you in the end days”….All those promises, not kept. After all, most politicians I despised found themselves ducked in hiding – draft deferred – due to one reason or another during Vietnam, a war, per early estimate (Simulmatics) could be won in six months..just like the Bay of Pigs, just like Afghanistan…

Unprecedented prediction…”it will go away when it’s warm”…oh well, the Dome is here and damn Delta are rampant.

Keep bleaching and preaching!

Our 21-st Century witnesses a new phenomenon: card-board people, card-board cutouts (from Amazon discarded boxes)….from homeless folks using it for make-shift signs, to faces cutout at empty stadiums, least of which, the Tokyo Olympics…

We perform still…like comedians with the aid of laugh sound-tracks, and red-dot cameras sans operateur. In short, talking to ourselves…tweeting to ourselves.

Narcissistic society with speech and thought-masturbating. Found in our political and social divide: rich vs poor, Black vs White, the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated, space travel and foot travel.

One would think with the profileration of “social” media, we would come together, like at Woodstock 69.

But the reality is far from it. Tribalize and trivialise, Taliban (vs US-trained defence forces) and Taiwan (vs China).

The Olympics were supposed to bring nations together in pure sports and competition (no cheating and no kidding). But it is less than its perceived ideal. The World Health Organisation, formed to eradicate diseases world wide…now sees the inequity of 1:170+ ratio (poor vs rich countries’ vaccination rates).

Meanwhile, arms and drug dealers are thriving, with Opiod pushers settled out of court at the tune of multi-billion.

Easy money, chicken feed.

Profits from those sky-rocketed sales have already stacked away, invested and grew multi-folds.

That’s the way it is.

Our card-board society, cut-out in shapes of figure heads, to protest on empty streets already ravaged by the pandemic.

No need to speculate. Already the Cheese man in Cuba is joining our Tunisian vendor in street protest.

People got nothing to lose.

People with grievances.

Rightly so.

The right to live, to pursue happiness in which ever way they see fit and can afford without doing harms to others (setting himself on fire). Yet, there are those who prefer to occupy hospitals…in their different form of protest: hell No, we won’t go (to get a shot).

Baffling, yet it’s happening.

To contrary evidence, in the face of indisputable science.

5 million dollars (tax-deducted expenses of organising etc..) to refute “My Pillow” guy.

but,….(there is always a catch, like Publisher Sweepstakes…keep buying, you will win….Oh, one more thing, and on, and on…hook, line, sinker).

Oldest trick in the book.

America sucks up to it. To find an empty promise in an empty box.

Boxes that can be recycled, to make card-board people, who protest, who march and who mis-direct their God-given energy to promise unfulfilled, to platforms undelivered and to a god whose manifestation is akin to a mirage (keep going, it’s next month, next year, next pay day…).

BTW, my kid gets her $250. Good for school supplies section, already on display and sold at a Walmart near us.

Now, that’s a lot of cardboard for her Art classes. On those cardboard and art papers, she will paint a future of America: Red, Blue and White….and while at it, perhaps many coloured faces to fill an empty Olympic stadium. All we need is the sound track of audience cheering. Then we get our footage for Google digital archive about the year of 2021…about a pandemic that we all thought contained…about a world that we once thought we were (We Are the World)…..

Woodstock 69. Real audience. Raw music. Rowdy crowd. When do I get to see it before I myself turn to join creatures of extinction…whose faces captured and retained on….oh well, cardboard….what a journey, from Boat People to Cardboard People. Quite an integration, an odyssey and a journey to America, Land of the Free – to Not get a vaccine.

The boy in a Black-and-White picture stared back at me, his future self. He was standing in a Saigon slum, wearing a pull-over shorts and a striped shirt. His flip-flop completed his tropical daily wear.

I tried to tell him Not to grow up, not to be in a hurry and that he was in a great spot i.e. with parents, siblings and cousins/neighbors who cared. Never mind the infrastructure, the concrete and the heat. All things must pass.

But your childhood only lasts for so long.

Look at me – your future self – who is approaching “maintenance stage”, brain cells stop growing, intelligence far reaching.

Best you can do is to connect those dots, to fill in the missing pieces of puzzle..to know who truly cares.

Even life-expectancy cannot be relied upon to continue its trajectory…due to illness, pandemic and other variants like drug overdoses, natural or man-made disasters.

Human are our worst enemies. We kill, maim, hurt, speak ill of others, “commenting” and dismissing. We fight for causes and non-causes. We struggle and sin, strive and suffer.

There is not an evil thing we spare and try not to do. War and conflict just draw out the extremes in human being. During WWII and its aftermath, if you had a PX card, you have enough currency to do whatever you want. A pack of Luck Strike? no problem.

Now, it’s vaccination. And ironically, more in the US believe vaccines pose more risks than the variant itself.

Among the risks, I am sure it does not make one more brain-dead.

Although listed among advanced countries, the US has seen its people being conned, tricked, and goaded into avoidable disasters and deceptions. Let’s say, there are still a segment of society who keep entertaining the return of a King., who will reign on Earth for a thousand years….

That God only reveals his latest secret to White Folks in Utah…presumably more so, if you sleep on “My Pillow”… than the dream will come into sharper focus, and reality more likely come true .My heart aches for Southeast Asia, for Vietnam…for regions of the world where the virus are now rampant. People are not set up for long-term sustainable social distancing. In fact, it has been a tourist attraction feature e.g. crowding, bustling with life and night life.

Now lays in ruin…empty streets (very much like NYC in April of 2020). Ghost town Asia. Silence. Stillness. Suffocating. City walls turn tomb stones..human turn animals in cage, with labels like in a zoo….Chimpanzees live here, lions over there…oh, and here, the crocodiles….vaccinated but isolated still.

We have had our freedom. And we turn it on its head, ourselves into inmates. I meant to tell my past self: “We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun”…Go, skin your head and skin your knees, hurry not…it’s all troubles.

With adulthood and old age, come responsibilities and no respite. We came, we conquered and we left behind ruins and rubbles. Our “Lucky Strike”; don’t stop believing… in the goodness of people…especially when they are in trouble…Then, tomorrow, everyone gets up, and forgets…life is like a dream…especially when you sleep on one of those “Pillows”…Breakfast is over…childhood over….

I turned over the picture of myself at age 6 or 7. It’s on grainy Black-and-White paper. But inside my head, I know the alley and its contour, the shape of my past and how contorted its folding future has been. I am living its projected future ( unconceivable back then). I can’t say I like it, but have come to accept it. Its version, its portion and its allotment. After all, I am still here, vaccinated and eager to bellow:” Get your shots”.

None of us can lay claim to monopolising post-war pain and suffering…

Dante might…People who existed before novocain might.

Human cry out from the depth, like animals, might…

But war and aftermath…loss and betrayal…disbelief and feeling vain….

We have yet measured its full weight – veteran affairs or civilian affairs.

WWI was supposed to end all wars…

Then the first cut wasn’t deep enough. The Great Depression and Hitler rise got us right back into the ringer.

Subsequent wars….among them, Vietnam, crashed right out of the gate; post-VN USA vowed “No more Vietnam” i.e. unless one can dominate from the get-go, then don’t get involved (this Powel Doctrine helped with the first Iraq War).. Like an addict and his “last” fix before rehab, the war apparatus gets pulled right in…

Right after 9/11, the war on terrors was “open-ended”… (budget surplus)

Even after lost limbs and lives….of “Hurt locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty”…our Coliseum spectators still haven’t got enough blood-sports, nor are they fully grasped the costs and consequences of war ( from its initial conception to its balloon-up completion.)

Many of my countryman have tried, to throw paint on the canvass, to sound the alarm bell, to be the lighthouse… – I have yet read “Things we lost in the water” – to no avail.

Most Vietnamese writers have tried their best…but faced a dilemma: ones with verbal ability to convey the pain did not fully exhaust and exploit the depth of separation and suffering, while the authentic remain maimed and numbed…(after all that betrayal, who cares about “educating” the ambivalent public on chapters and causes of war).

So we end up all the poorer…with Apocalypse Now, an adaptation from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or the Deer Hunter ( pre-existed script meant for a Las Vegas Russian roulette saga).

Let next generation keep marching into sunlight…to die or get killed, out there or in here e.g. on Jan 6, through the jagged-edges of Capitol broken window – now enshrined as Joan of Arc in our culture war? .

Can’t stand it when people kill in the name of this god and that god, the Holy Wars and the Crusades, for the latest revelation and Dead Sea Scroll…(to my knowledge, no revelation arrived in time to save Jim Jones, the Heaven’s Gate techs, or UA 93 passengers)…

Leave us/me alone.

Enough loss in the air and in the water.

Enough suffering that last a lifetime.

No more “God spoke to me last night”! All the powers to you…. Go ahead and speak in tongues to Alexa…. or try Google translation and help machine learn…

The world has moved on. Our era is the aftermath of an aftermath of an aftermath….

We live in cyber world, wireless and frictionless.

More broadband and fewer face-to-face.

Warfare is moving online, leaving past pain off-line…

Zoom it…(Zoom has just bought some cloud company at the tune of multi-billion dollars to scale up to enterprise levels).

Forget it. Past pain is for old timers, an older version..in Star-Wars time. Now it’s Cyber-Wars time, of multi-Billionaires in space race….”Ask not what your country can do for you”…

We still can’t stand six-feet apart, while they socially-distant planets-apart.

No one, neither the Afghan interpreters nor the Vietnamese ones, can claim monopoly of pain and suffering.

Live with it. Get a broadband connection….and join us in cyber space….It is what it is…War to end all wars…open-ended…out there..but on Earth and off-line, pain and suffering are still real and still count, with or without novocain.

“Strumming my pain with his fingers….Singing my life with his words…”

On 9/11, Bush hand-scripted his notes to assure a befuddled nation, to project calm and control. He – from his Decision Point memoir – ended up off script, repeating what his Dad, former President H.W. Bush had said, that “terrorism against our nation will not stand”. pg 128 (the exact quote that he “plagiarized” was “this aggression will not stand” after Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait).

The point is, when we allow our unconscious (per Jung, more than 90 per cent of our thoughts) to trigger, we repeat patterns of history.

Bolton of “In the room where it happened” casually remarked that DJT did not have a capacity for long-term strategic thinking….in other words, DJT is not OBL. If he were, we would be in much deeper troubles than we already are.

And we wouldn’t see a slew of pardons, since all that cast and character are still now in charge in a “strong man” State, where neither virus nor the rule of Law reigns.

“I can kill someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it”…quite Positive Thinking…Norman Vincent Peal 2.0

Back to the interpreters of Afghanistan who are being air-lifted.

Decision point and people repeat themselves (Cheney and Rumsfeld – and their 2.0 version of the Ford administration) shaped the narrative after their own image.

46 years ago, out of Saigon – the scene was very much like today’s Kabul…cash out of ATM’s, gold-bar hoarding, US dollars (and US abandoned facilities and subsequent looting)…

Long lines at the Embassy (yours truly got yanked out of line along with my best friend….we were too young to be seen standing in line applying for a visa…the sentry figured the order from Ambassador Martin came down,…was to avoid a city-wide panic and await for a negotiated settlement).

Oh well….I am here now…Every time I passed by President Lyndon Johnson Library, I recalled his picture, the one of him slumping over the Oval Office conference table “torn between two lovers” —- “bitch of a war”. and his” Great Society” (do you see Biden’s stepping into that track)….

Soon, the US History shelves will give way to Afghan books, to revisionist school of thoughts.

From 0% school girl participation in Kabul, to 40% ( one of the unintended positive effects of the 20-year war i.e. to complete George W. Bush reading session to Elementary Sarasota, FLoridian school girls).

The Talibs will be back in charge, with abandoned salvaged Toyota trucks and left-behind ammunition.

People shape history after their own image – re-write after re-write….

Western-style Democracy (and demagogue), of Capitalism and Christianity, of Civil Religion and Deism.

21st-century US finds itself confused (the US – back to the lab – is still working out the bugs – as David Brooks’ 7/16/21 NYT).

But then the world can’t wait. It attributes to the US perfect qualities it doesn’t yet possess, such as freedom and equality for all (not to mention, prosperity).

If I had one wish, I would magically issue PX ration cards to world’s 9-billion. Come to this massive warehouse, take what you need – in a can . When peanut butter and jelly are distributed, and people have a taste for it….things will be all right from there.

The Afghan interpreters…our newest American neighbors, will then brush up on their American English (versus British usage)….will then follow the news, of distant war(s) and mission creep, of humane intervention, of data point and Decision point, of Russia interference and China aggression…

The 21-century vocabulary of war and peace…and they will find that despite its ugly and unavoidable side, human condition hasn’t changed that much… i.e. we still act out the script…e.g. H.W. Bush had blurted out his Phillips Academy and Naval scripts – written during WWII … George W. Bush with his interrupted Sarasota school session..(or Dan Quayle’s misspelling).

This reminds me of The Note:” All men are created equal….” At some point, when I am stuck and speechless, you might find me subconsciously let it slip out…since the pursuit of happiness (not war) coincides with my ultimate goal.

To my Afghan new neighbours, welcome to the land of the Free where young-girls participation in school is close to 100 per cent (except for the 1.36 million homeless).

We will never get another 9/12, the day after 9/11.

That day saw even cut-throat media agencies share film footage, Texan barbecues for free 24/7 on Ground Zero and the Wall-Street hustlers help carry a disabled lady and her wheelchair down 46 stairs….to be loaded onto an emergency vehicle (to later retell to CBS) before the tower collapsed. Office workers or street people, Black and White, all covered in dust, all wanted to get out of there to fight another day.

We will never get another day of being One (even after we have completely rebuilt One-World Tower).

Those days, even kids had their hands on their chests saluting and paying respects as firefighters’ funerals passed by.

Who said America is all bad!

But then, things had a way to unravel….

Anchor (of ABC) died of lung cancer.

Football idol enlisted, served and died.

The aftermath… took our Peter Jennings and Pat Tillmans.

The exploitation and mis-handling of our new century crisis e.g. waterboarding, wmd….

Instead of optimizing the good will of nations, instead of putting forth long-term and sustained strategies to avert and proactively deal with future crises (such as home-grown terrorists); we ended up digging ourselves in longer-term quagmires, ones which made NAM like midgets in comparison (the rise of ISIS, the return of the Taliban).

Talking about repercussions.

Of course OBL went into hiding (as it turned out, in plain sight – in a prominent Pakistani neighborhood ….his exit strategy).

Had it not been for the tenacity and persistence of “Dark Zero Thirty” types, OBL would still be at large, his pictures still on the most-wanted list.

We need closure. We need to bookend this thing: 20 years for four planes, 5 years per plane.

The plus side: US Armed forces more integrated, more agile, more outsourced and high-tech (night vision, drones….)

(my own opinion: China enjoyed its decades-long peace time, not squandered even a minute to become world’s indispensable and advanced manufacturing and supply-chain). Opportunity missed.

It’s as if a crisis on Wall Street flared up an opportunity on Main Street, unfortunately, Main Street, China.

Meanwhile, Main Street USA welcomes tent cities, homeless people, and many young men of opioid, hash, ammo and porno, conspiracy theories, fast foods and fast cars both sides of the financial crisis (2008) and the pandemic (2020).

Nobody seems to notice the 24/7 crowd-sourcing ghost work to aid machine learning, of AI, of Climate Change…. and kids growing up, going to college ( an inflated proposition) where tuition hike is at its peak, and quality of instructions and employability at its lowest ( e.g. ITT or Trump University).

What is going on with doctors who can’t communicate (with empathy), stock traders with no ethics, athletic trainers who sexploited young female gymnasts and priests choir boys?

Do we need another proverbial 9/11 to shake us to the core, to help us rediscover our souls and compassion for the less fortunate? Do we stop mid-flight, to help carry that disabled lady and her wheelchair, when all around are jumpers?

Our memory needs re-set, and our compass re-calibrated. I might lament and feel a bit melancholic and melodramatic.. for the untapped potential of America…for the wasted opportunity of America…and for our compassion fatigue which I have seen and received, and I in turn have passed it on.

We can do better. It lays there, dormant. Any time now, full throttled humanity and unity could show up once again, like a long lost friend, to shepherd us through and beyond crisis of any proportion.

When other nations (Haiti, Cuba, Syria, South Africa etc..) confront their own 9/11, they look up to America ( by forming a line in front of US Embassy) for help, for vaccines and for leadership. A house divided (like Texan Democrats vs Texan Republicans – or infrastructure bill that faces hurdles) can and will go nowhere, except for pot holes and grid outage.

It’s ironic that our resolve to revenge is stronger than our resolve to do the right thing rightly at the right time.

Now is that time, to emerge from the bunker…to breathe in and say “Let’s roll”…(and take down those who are harming us…in flight or online, foreign or domestic). P.S. Todd Beamer’s last words and his death not in vain when he and other passengers rushed the UA93 terrorists who tried to set the hijacked fourth plane on course to symmetrically crash Washington D.C.

For me, some images just stick….In long-term memory; there was childhood flooding, night thief, day bully, monk-burning and later, nuclear-power-plant melt-down. But two events never elude me, amnesia withstanding: the last scene from the Saigon river the day I fled Vietnam and 9/11 Twin Towers collapse.

I have spent the whole year (pandemic-bound) to do justice to the former (see Fleeing, my other blog). This summer, I want to mourn (with a two-decade interval) the latter.

It has not been easy for the US of A and myself; certainly for those whose loved ones died in America’s longest war (which officially and ceremonially ended today).The pipers who attended firefighters’ funerals the days after 9/11 said it was like Groundhog Day, over and over again: Amazing Grace and America America…over and over and over…the 9/11 loop, known knowns.

Those two bookend optics and accompanied sounds have competed for the real estate of my head, stereo….ly.

On the one side, it’s the choppers (PTSD right there). The other, OMG…the second tower got hit…deliberately, it must be.

For those who survived an aftermath of a catastrophe, he/she understands that, at times, one feels one doesn’t deserve it (the privilege to breathe and go on unscathed). It’s called survivor’s guilt.

To the extent that one identified with 9/11 victims, one bonded with them – in a silent promise of avenge and justice to be sought and served – Monte Cristo style. Poetic style.

We did. We fought. We rode (those horses with the Northern Alliance). We bled ….again and again.

Kids needed school? No problem ( The “Transporter” can always go off-script, to buy an OJ for his “cargo” despite having promised to be on time, and never looked at what’s inside the trunk etc…yet in a slip of humanity, violating his own professional rules).

While at it, we should have trained young Afghan girls with guns and self-defense, so they can be far along in self-determination, as is their sovereign country.

9/11 imprints and under-currents are still with us: from foreign policies to foreign currencies, succession of presidency and premiership have conducted joint campaigns, Trans-Atlantic, in the conduct and interests of war.

It’s as if we were there to avenge the once failed Soviet excursion in the late 80’s (enemy of my enemy is my friend?) – after all, Afghanistan has been known as Imperialist burial ground, even for the British ( I remember it was called Soviet’s Vietnam back in the 80’s).

For now, I am just glad to have spot Todd Beamer bio on Wiki, to know he graduated from the same school, working for Oracle (a decade more junior but internalised the same ethos: when push comes to shove, one needs to lose that which he cannot keep, to gain that which he cannot lose), boarding United 93 from Newark to SF, only to find himself hatching a plot to rush the four terrorists on their fourth plane of terror.

“Let’s roll” were Todd’s last words.

Let’s take down those who seek to destroy us, our way of life, and other innocent people.

It’s not a matter of right or wrong, truth or falsehood.

It is the thing to do under the circumstances, by nature/survival instincts and by reflex.

Rush them. Take over…Enough Evil in one day (a precursor to that 2015 train to Paris).

I hope in Todd’s shoes, I can act the same way, with selflessness and bravery.

On that flight before it went down, both sides prayed to their god. On that day, the whole world prayed to God.

Mono-Theistic God and Pantheistic Gods, Allah and Buddha, Mary and Jesus.. Then the chanting (sadly, opposite emotions on opposite side of the world – supposedly Global World, flat world) and sermonising, prayers and pipe band (firefighters’ funerals), again and again….

Just like Groundhog Day.

Just like today.

Never forget.

Never again.

That’s what I heard, for a decade and a half, from 1975 to the 90s. Never again, NAM.

Then memories, however painful and pedagogical, receded into the collective far corner.

Then we knee-jerk back to taking up arms, to. outsourcing the logistics and the hunt…first for OBL, then mission-creep, then nation-building.

When I heard stop police-funding, I thought it meant stop the funding for world-policing.

Just zoom out. What’s your territory, area of responsibilities and domain? God’s whole Earth?

Global and civil society? or just Western trans-Atlantic alliance? Trans-Pacific? or Israel and the Middle East?

The US and by extension, us all, needs to take a measure e.g. how tall, how heavy (a burden) and how far our arms can reach.

It’s been hunky dory right after the WWII mop-up. But like anything else, the adrenaline level subsides. Can’t get steroidized and pumped up for every conflict that presents itself…(for there always will be one)…Haiti, Syria and S America etc…

I did not know PTA (Parent Teacher Association) was a prelude for Veteran Affairs ( Army funerals and service benefits of our enlisted graduates). I did not say goodbye to a war, only to be in between a rock and a hard place, albeit with plenty of identification and empathy for my second home.

9/11 has been a time stamp on our nation’s history. It is our inheritance as much as it is our insistence to never forget.

Indelible in my mind: Hotel Majestic on the Saigon River and those no-longer-there Twin Towers. Twin optics.

First was the ball. Then the radio. Last but not least, the guitar and the Larousse (French-Vietnamese).

Water needed to be hauled in.

No fridge. No TV. No nothing.

By the time the walls got another coat of paint, and the paintings up, then it’s time to flee.

A lifetime of memories – clustered around school and after-school, with the elephant (war) in the room.

Boom! our next-door neighbour came home in a casket.

Bang! a friend lost an eye in the front.

And “Tous les garçons the mon age, se promène dans la rue”….”Ce sois, je serais la plus belle pour aller dancer”…

I have just learned today that our flamboyant X-VP once came back for a visit to our high-school; red-carpet home-coming.

Must be proud all around.

One of us. Not without a few jinks.

From the black/white photos (things we lost in a hurry) to the appetite for reading (foods for thoughts), we willed ourselves not to “live by bread alone”.

We came from an all-male school ( later, co-ed on the third shift).

The school itself was relocated, inter-and-intra regionally; with multiple name changes.

Analog childhood.

PE time was far away, shared ride and shared facilities. Activities were off-site and outsourced: at the beach, at a stadium and shared auditorium.

Television itself was low-tech engineering…with the whole city waiting for the show to start . And when it did, it was not without the flag and the anthem “Calling on all citizens,,,,stand up and respond to the call, from the sacred mountain to shining seas”… Even at the movies, we couldn’t fast forward those Ministry of Propaganda documentaries to the main feature.

One needs to be told and retold of our national mythology i.e. we were descendants of Dragon and Fairy Angel. Half went on to be mountaineers. The rest, seafarers.

It’s the latter that escaped by seas, by boat, and now their descendants are Boat People’s VietAms.

Meanwhile, the Montagnard, Hmong and other ethnic minorities were left behind, despite their helpful assistance to the American allies.

An Analog childhood. Some even slept next to the dictionary, learning a page or two for sedatives. Instead of I-phones, I made toy telephone out of condensed milk cans. Instead of drones, it’s newspaper airplanes and kites.

Hunger and heat were constant companion.

So was hope. That some day, we will prosper, morphing and adapting to full digital future in foreign land (Australia, Europe and N. America)

We would self-transform to become leaders we were meant to be.

So will our children and children’s children. Just like those Europeans on the boats, bigger but slower ones.

They, despite their shortcomings, and humble beginnings, had an early start: from the Hudson River to the Hoover Dam.

From the Gold Rush to Rush Hour.

But give us some time. It takes time. To go full digital. To go Prime.

A picture which triggered this blog: my analog counterparts, browsing the children book section in our town bookstore. We were all eager to read, to learn, to discover for ourselves: shades of lie and versions of truth.

We heard propaganda on the radio. We heard instructions that urged “Farewell to arms”..

By then, having witnessed the Burning Monk, the execution of a VC, the assassination of our 1st President, and successive military coups. In that context, we grew up quick and finally, we bolted and bailed.

No more lies. No more of our needless offerings as sacrificial lambs. No more “honorable” (delusional) settlement.

Our alumnus/VP-Premier knew this, then landed on the USS Kirk, then handed over his handgun (John-Wayne gift)…No red-carpet there. Just the stripping process (from army to civilian).. vetting and immigration process (finger printed).

“We have been waiting to hand over the government since this morning”…..1963 Big Minh had been waiting til 75 for the hand-over part…only to be publicly humiliated (You guys don’t have anything left to hand over). One-upmanship.

Oh well, I have been waiting all my life to hand over my analog childhood in exchange for full digital future.

To hear and see everything that is out there: truth and lies. Reality and Alternate Reality, classified or de-classified.

Fool me once, it’s your fault. Fool me twice, it’s my fault.

I have tried my best, given limited tools and times. Growing up analog was hard.

Growing up analog in war, with tiny PX-issued peanut butter cans was doubly hard.

Yet somehow we managed. My friends have done me proud. Now, it’s my turn to face my own spreadsheet (see it’s an analog analogy again). See where the bottlenecks lie, what the clusters of data indicate and run a SWoT analysis on my near-term future.

I won’t look back. Passe. Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, etc.. don’t even look at themselves any longer.

Instead, I cherish those selective memories, with a heart full of gratitude for the many hands that have extended to me. Thank you WordPress, for instance…Mac Pro, Spectrum internet, contact lenses manufacturers…and most of all, the vaccines.

When we start counting the blessings, they are like stars dotted our sky..and we know, we are just dust…can’t be more analog that dust.

“When I was young, I listened to the radio, waiting for my favourite song..I sing along, I made me smile”.

Just a radio, then a guitar and finally the Larousse.

Soon…just like the Vietnam Memorial….WWI and WWII Memorial…Windows of the World looking for missing persons (9/11). Commander-in-Chief, Comforter-in-Chief, Consoler-in-Chief…

The world inflicted pain on the US; the US rightfully struck back, or has been up until now (July 9th, 2021). a long knee-jerk reaction.

We are more united in grief.

More determined for closure, for justice, for war than for peace and harmony.

The cowboy riding into the sunset.

(After Django had massacred the whole town full of bad dudes).

Except this time, 20 years later, the bad guys grow heads and beards…like Jason of Friday the 13th.

Too many of them. They just switch sides, pick up abandoned weapons and turned (Taliban).

With financial help from our own habit – addicted to oil and ammunition/PX supplies (from our tax dollars).

War without end.

Arlington Memorial without space.

Names of the missing, the dead, and the near-dead.

In 20-year time, we have all lived through the disintegration of a once-united nation (9/12).

9/11 triggered deep fear and reaction: that the world is both envious and empathising with America.

After all, it’s an idea, an experiment and a New World. An imagination, conceived by Disney and Hollywood.

Of what’s it’s like to live free, to speak free and to die free.

From sea to shining sea.

A city on the hill.

A Twin-Tower collapse then rebuilt. Stronger and more resilient.

Not just architecturally, but with agility.

No central command, but distributed, like the Internet.

More groundswell from Ground Zero.

More ghost work, less ghost war.

American troops are coming home. Contractors are coming home.

Afghan allies are also applying for visas, seeking new homes.

Second-hand clothing, second-language instructions.

New beginnings, new starts.

New Memorial erected. Memory not forgotten.

At least we’ve got the right Comforter-in-Chief to bookend America’s longest war, not necessarily the most successful one.

Things have a way to fizzle out, like an opened bottle of Champagne. An AA flight that cast a quick shadow right before its own oblivion, taking thousands with it.

Lifetimes of struggle, striving and saving.

World without end, but war must end.

Everything has its time, fullness of time.

Peaks and valleys, anger and resolve, beginning and end of war (on terror).

He who is wise knows his range, his time, and his limits.

There will always be a tomorrow, to re-stage one’s battle, to fight another day.

Afghan Memorial, our Memorial: Focus on the Future from Ground Zero.

Look for the missing, but also those missing pieces that constitute humanity: warmth, helpfulness, empathy and compassion. Life is full of known knowns, yet we chose to spend our prime years on Unknown Unknowns.

Friendship, love, nature, arts, excellence in entrepreneurship and leadership, faith, charity, mentorship, coaching, tutoring etc…unpaid volunteerism, donation and advocacy….the list keeps growing – unattended to still, while we were away on multi-tours ; only to come home, races run, passion spent; emotionally wrecked, weary and wounded.

From Arlington Memorial on out, we squandered our emotional currency and good-will capital to buy time for the Talibans of the world – emboldened them in their recruit and resolve.

Structurally and by nature, something just isn’t compatible. And we just have to leave it at that. Justice served.

P.S. sorry, no Hollywood Happy Ending.

The left-behind, ghost towns, abandoned air fields and ammunition supplies, heaps of them: pick your weapons.

Kabul! Ka-boom!

Warlords, landlords leaving in droves (the elites, the elite wanna-bees – just like those orphans flights out of Saigon decades ago. What we feared most – the end, the destruction etc.. ended up materialized, self-inflicted.

Back then, those C-130’s were seat-less. We squatted on the floor, of barges, boats and buses.

Summer without end, waves and waves of homesickness and hopelessness.

Khanh Ly (our Joan Baez) sang for free on Wake Island (that was, if one cared to board intra-island buses to her side of the Island).

“Band on the run”….I overheard from a neighbouring refugee barrack, then

“la la la la la” Minnie Riperton with her high-pitch vocal in “Lovin you”….

The irony of clear voice and clean beach, yet clouded heads and muddy future.

When we got to Indiantown Gap, PA…things resumed e.g. wedding daily in chapel, and volleyballs daily out in the court.

I got busy, right away. The eagle did not need a push: one unaccompanied minor, then “next” then another one (Child Welfare Bureau interpreter).

Then one toilet to clean, then “next”, then another one (Student Union Building janitor).

Even those jobs are now hard to come by.

Summer 1975. With war (and by extension, homeland) behind, and uncertain future ahead.

Culture shock and future shock (Alvin Toffler). Technological invention for use and misuse. For good and evil end.

The folks on campus who dressed up on Sundays approached a lonely refugee in their cafeteria:” Hi” “how would you like to hear how to get to Heaven – you would like Heaven rather than Hell, correct” (nodding to induce mimicry – Sales trained).

Oh well. Sit down.

Let’s hear. Let’s talk. Anything, but the war.

Anything, but the silence.

Anything, but the loss, and resulting perceived betrayal.

Anything but me, janitor at night, and student by day.

Like used-car salesmen, those students never wanted to make friends. They wanted to make a mark, a number.

Their Crusade Numbers game.

The more doors you knock on, the more critical mass. Like a Billy Graham Crusade, like John Wesley tent preaching.

Ends of Earth (heck, I had just arrived from that other end, which later, Sylvester Stallone uttered “what they call Hell, I call Home”…in subsequent Rambo filmocraphy.

If people tend to repeat themselves, there will be a slew of films about Afghan wars, post-wars and post-scripts….of Honorable Exit, of Decent Intervals…of Presidential revisionist history, of the origins of species and of war….

“in the paper today, there were news about war. and of waste..but you turned right to the TV page”….like in a Six pence none the richer “Don’t dream it’s over”…Hey now, hey now….hey Jude hey Jude….don’t be afraid.

I woke up from a long flight (C-130) just to find my childhood, my innocence, my country, my ideal, my family and friends gone, like a blur – all turned black-and-white without any colors.

Then the bus out of Harrisburg airport, with a STOP sign in the Army barracks turned refugee camp, then the Red-Cross bulletin board (today’s facebook equivalent – perhaps you might know this or that person) and lush-green Pennsylvania meadow.

Here…your section (a dozen toilets)…clean, baby clean…Don’t dream it’s over….Hey now, hey now….

Afghan neighbours….perhaps I can dig out my old manual…the survival manual, for America….

Unless you want to self-actualize right away, before you finished the climb up the Maslow scale i.e. survival, security, love, self-esteem,….(then self-actualize).

99 percent of us don’t even get past stage 3….we’re still figuring out the rope, the climb and the ladder.

No time for the view on top. Long ago, if any, it was from the last helicopter out of Saigon, your today’s Kabul.

Bonjour tristesse! Morning in America, night in your world and mine.