Uptight

Uptight

You slept well last night, despite the stress and the anger and the disappointment. You got up when the sun was almost at the zenith. You felt good, recharged, and ready to take on the world once again. You got to the bathroom and looked at yourself in the mirror and were pleased at what you saw. You looked years younger than your age. This morning, you even sported a nice ruddy complexion. You did some Yoga while telling yourself that you would need to go to bed at reasonable hours in order to preserve your looks.

Monkeys irritated you yesterday. All those constant screamings and scratchings at the armpits in order to get attention, in order to be heard bored the shit out of you.

Today you wonder why there are such creatures on this planet, why there are so many of them, why they don't have any self-awareness. But then you realize they are only monkeys, only animals, for Christ’s sake. What do you expect? Monkeys are funny animals, unwittingly. In other words, they make a mockery (a nice phrase: monkeys make a mockery of themselves!) of themselves and don’t know that. All those banal yelpings are tiresome, however. You can't stand them anymore. They nauseate you. You can't reach the “Delete” button fast enough.

One more thing: the more you know about monkeys, the more you despise them. They all try to show their best side to the world first, but sooner or later their base, despicable, contemptible, brutish, crude, animalistic side surfaces; that’s when you feel nauseous when you see their stupid faces and their antics. Your disgust has reached the point that you regard them as monkeys with advanced stages of leprosy.

Another thing (and another, when you have time to think more of these stupid simians): monkeys love to talk about sex or forward sex materials. While mouthing off nonsensical yet couched in cryptic, oracular pronouncements on out-of-sync, refuse-to-retire tendencies of people in their 60's, the monkeys love to engage in titillating the viewers with sex-laden materials. You wonder why the monkeys don't see the irony of their act. The spectacle of seeing a monkey in its 60's, busy gathering sex materials so it can post on the Internet is so ridiculous, so contempt-inviting that it renders you awestruck with the ludicrousness of the situation. You would love to defenestrate the monkey along with its out-of-place sex materials.

Yes, you are ululating against these monkeys because they offend your sensibilities. You are thankful that despite the onset of Alzheimer's illness, you are still lucid to command enough words to portray your disgust. Being able to vent in this deliberately highfalutin fashion delights the hell out of you. You are not shy. You are not habituated to voice your displeasure in susurrant sounds. In fact, your ability to write this blog today in this manner has brought you a great whimpery happiness, not unlike passing a clear urine.

Wissai

Tears in the Rain

You woke up this morning feeling good and refreshed after a much-needed sleep. The flashbacks involving BF and the sense of humiliation and impotence and rage associated with the years when you were a farmer seemed small and easily managed. You know they will roar back and demand attention. And you know you will handle them the same way: they are nothing but a reflection of your mind’s growing recognition that it is all about money and survival. Of course, your clumsy, impractical disposition towards love has something to do with it. You are getting older with each passing day. Death is grinning at you when you open your eyes in the morning and it follows you every step along the way during the day. It is on your left; it is on your right. Sometimes it even dances right in front of your eyes. So, you try to take care of your health and your looks while trying to regain your money. You are the hunter now. The hunting has been arduous but you feel alive and filled with a mission. Love is no longer a preoccupation because finally you don’t believe in it anymore. You have become crass and cheap and unromantic like so many others whom you have despised in the past. You only care about money and health and survival. You are learning to be taciturn and circumspect, but since you are what you are, you occasionally can’t help but to display your wit, your gift of gab, your instantaneous ripostes and repartees like you told a fellow hunter the other day that while with you there’s a very fine line between genius and insanity, in his case there’s a big divide. You cackled after you said that, all very pleased with yourself. And why not, you have to feel good about yourself, somehow. The world has tried to make you feel small, impotent, and lonely. You know you are not good at the games farmers play. So, you opted for hunting, instead. So far, you are doing all right as long as you don’t get cocky and get shot by an irate fellow hunter. Occasionally, far into the night, when sleep plays hard to get, out of the depths of the immature past, words arrived and you wrote something like the following:


Tears in the Rain

The wind and the rain
The air and the land
One summer evening by the sea,
You and me
Hand in hand
Walking on the sand
We finally met once again
After so many years.
The eyes, the smile, the hair,
They were still there, including the tears.
You asked, “So, have you been good?
Have you been true?”
I said, “As good and true as I knew.
There were many others,
But nobody was like you.
You are like the stars in the sky.
The light of my night,
The fire of my loins,
The love of my life.
I once said I would love you forever.
Forever means ever and ever,
Not even the end of time.
So, what happened?
Did he finally die ?
Or did he leave you for somebody else ass I said he would?
You looked at me and said nothing.
Tears kept coming without end.
Tears in the rain.

Wissai 8/06.

So, Baby, I wrote words like these to ease the pain, to come to terms with the innocent past, to deal with the impossibility. I, of course, no longer love you because you have revealed to me that you are crass, cheap, and unromantic. I no longer harbor the desire to show you the countless poems, some of them in French, I wrote because of you. I no longer wish to ask you for explanations and clarifications. I only want the past to cease tormenting me.

The Heart is the Lonely Hunter

Sex and Love

To Apple Two


We humans like to talk about sex and love. Sex is easy to know because it is a physical act. Love, on the other hand, is complex and has myriad forms. Everybody has their own definition of love. Saint-Exupery once said that love does not consist of two people looking at each other, but at the same direction. And Eric Segal is famous with the corny line: Love means never having to say you are sorry. Roberto, the infamous half-Italian wannabe fiction writer, disagrees whole-heartedly with Segal. To Roberto, love means you say you are sorry all the time because you don’t want to hurt the feelings of your beloved, because you put her own feelings and welfare before yours. But how often we do that, Roberto wonders. We almost always love ourselves first and foremost.

Sex is coarse and animalistic. We come up with sex jokes and talk about/practice rough sex or group sex. We don’t talk about rough love or group love. Romantic love is almost always about tenderness and exclusivity. And romantic love is what Roberto mostly wants to ruminate about today. He should be an authority on the subject because he has a “big heart” and has fallen in and out of love so many times that he has lost the count. Today he decided to venture into this mine field of the heart because he is seeking solace and understanding while a teaching from Buddha is echoing in the back of his mind. The biggest debts are those of the heart.

He passed by her former house today. He had to. He was in town and he wanted to confront his own heart. So he asked the cab driver to make a detour on the way to the hotel. And there it was. The old villa was still there. He recognized it right away, even with newly planted trees and a new gate. In a flash, memories flooded back and overwhelmed him. His heart felt constricted and tears formed in his eyes. The biggest debts are those of the heart, indeed. He no longer loves her, but he cannot forget her, not for long anyway. A scarred heart has long memories. He does not want to meet her in order to ask her some questions so he can shut the door to the past because he is afraid of the answers he might get. He would rather spend the rest of his life speculating on the reasons why she left him. The speculation would do him more good than bad because he would be gnawed with the uncertainty, the sorrow, the anger, and the distrust of all women who arrive after her. And all these unpleasant feelings would drive him to write.

Nguyen Cao Ky Duyen, a celebrity in the Vietnamese diaspora, was dumped by her second husband. She was in so much pain and full of public humiliation that she sought catharsis by posting an article in a forum in which she movingly and eloquently bared her anguish. Roberto was dismayed to see a disparaging comment posted on the internet with regard to Ky Duyen’s article. Where is the compassion? Where is the empathy? In this forum, some bloggers have a penchant to post x-rated sex materials. While some of the materials are funny, most of them border on bad taste and that makes Roberto wonders about the sexuality of the bloggers. Sex is meant to be private. Constantly telling sex jokes or posting sex-related materials in public is an indication of something quite amiss in the “state of Denmark”. Love, on the other hand, can be talked about in public because love is universal and has been one of man’s deepest longings. In addition, talking about love can bring catharsis and transcendental feelings. No wonder we always have an endless supply of songs and stories about love throughout the ages while stories about sex are of limited circulation because sex by its nature is short-lived and boring if not sustained by love. For the first few years of his youth, when he was making love, he had to focus hard not to think of her. Sex rarely kills unless one engages in some severe sadomasochistic act or one has a weak heart, but love kills. During his recent travel, Roberto heard of the following heart-rending story. A male radiologist was courting a female obstetrician-gynecologist. The latter was interested but played hard to get. Then the former met a vivacious, charming cavaliere. He fell under the sway of this woman and lost interest in the ob-gyn doctor who later hooked up with an engineer. The radiologist married the cavaliere who promptly dumped him after managing to get almost all of his money. In a moment of despondency, he hanged himself and died. After Roberto was told of the story, he shook with fear and sadness and anger. Suppressed memories came back. He once almost died of love. You don’t really know what love is until you are willing to die in the name of love. Maybe at one time in your life, you got close to the abyss, looked down into it, and it looked back at you invitingly. But you were strong enough to resist the temptation to jump. So you stepped away from the abyss. During the walk back to your car, back to reality, you suddenly realized that nothing in life could hurt you more and that you would endure and survive. From that moment on, life has a special meaning and so does love. Love is no longer absolute to you. You can talk and write poetry about it, but in your heart of hearts, you know you have lost the innocence and the purity of youth.

Roberto walked around the city and saw her name everywhere, the name once was beautiful and almost sacred to him. Now it brought him pain, but not enough to make him cry. He recalled in his first year in college, a woman’s name appeared all over the campus, written by a man obviously in pain. Roberto always wonders what happened to that man, whether he could survive the pain of love. Roberto didn’t write her name anywhere after she was gone. He did write in his last letter to her that in this whole wide world, nobody would love her as much as he did. For years, he suppressed all memories associated with her. He didn’t listen to love songs in her native language. He listened to Spanish language radio stations, instead. And whenever his mind turned to her, he would shake his head vigorously for a few seconds and try to focus on something else.

He stayed in the city for four days and tried to shut everything associated with her out of his mind. Yet, no matter how hard he tried, the sight of young couples on motorbikes reminded him of the three years he was with her when he used to drive her around on his Honda. He wondered if he could ever stay in the city this long if he traveled all by himself. The group tour helped alleviate much the sorrows caused by the invasion and intrusion of indelible memories. There were usually fellow travelers around him to occupy his thoughts. Only at night, the ghost came back and tormented him. Love was short while memories were long.

On the morning he had to check out of the hotel, he felt numb and listless. He came down to the restaurant and had his usual buffet breakfast. The beef noodle soup still tasted good. As he started on the fruit dessert, a couple walked by and an unmistakable voice rang out. He was jolted out of his lethargy and looked up at the couple. By this time, she was walking to the section of the restaurant facing the street. There was only one woman in the world that would walk like that, but he had to make sure. He got up and followed them. They had reached their table. She put down her purse and turned around and headed for the food section. That was when she saw him. Their eyes locked. He was dead sure that it was her. The dimples, the split chin, and the high cheekbones gave her away. He was nodding at her. She looked at him with puzzlement. Then her eyes hardened and she turned to the European next to her, put her hand in his, and led him to where the noodle soup was being served. He got back to his seat, gathered his briefcase, and walked out of the restaurant and straight to the restroom where he promptly threw up his breakfast’s contents. And he sobbed uncontrollably in the confines of the stall. True love never died. And it hurt like hell. No wonder Ky Duyen bared her soul and the radiologist killed himself.


Wissai
February 3, 2009

China's Aggression at the Sino-Indian Border

TAWANG, India — This is perhaps the most militarized Buddhist enclave in the world.
Uneasy EngagementEnclave of Hostility
This is the second in a series of articles examining stresses and strains of China’s emergence as a global power.

Related
Uneasy Engagement: Australia, Nourishing China’s Economic Engine, Questions Ties (June 3, 2009)

Perched above 10,000 feet in the icy reaches of the eastern Himalayas, the town of Tawang is not only home to one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most sacred monasteries, but is also the site of a huge Indian military buildup. Convoys of army trucks haul howitzers along rutted mountain roads. Soldiers drill in muddy fields. Military bases appear every half-mile in the countryside, with watchtowers rising behind concertina wire.
A road sign on the northern edge of town helps explain the reason for all the fear and the fury: the border with China is just 23 miles away; Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, 316 miles; and Beijing, 2,676 miles.
“The Chinese Army has a big deployment at the border, at Bumla,” said Madan Singh, a junior commissioned officer who sat with a half-dozen soldiers one afternoon sipping tea beside a fog-cloaked road. “That’s why we’re here.”
Though little known to the outside world, Tawang is the biggest tinderbox in relations between the world’s two most populous nations. It is the focus of China’s most delicate land-border dispute, a conflict rooted in Chinese claims of sovereignty over all of historical Tibet.
In recent months, both countries have stepped up efforts to secure their rights over this rugged patch of land. China tried to block a $2.9 billion loan to India from the Asian Development Bank on the grounds that part of the loan was destined for water projects in Arunachal Pradesh, the state that includes Tawang. It was the first time China had sought to influence the territorial dispute through a multilateral institution. Then the governor of Arunachal Pradesh announced that the Indian military was deploying extra troops and fighter jets in the area.
The growing belligerence has soured relations between the two Asian giants and has prompted one Indian military leader to declare that China has replaced Pakistan as India’s biggest threat.
Economic progress might be expected to bring the countries closer. China and India did $52 billion worth of trade last year, a 34 percent increase over 2007. But businesspeople say border tensions have infused business deals with official interference, damping the willingness of Chinese and Indian companies to invest in each other’s countries.
“Officials start taking more time, scrutinizing things more carefully, and all that means more delays and ultimately more denials, “ said Ravi Bhoothalingam, a former president of the Oberoi Group, the luxury hotel chain, and a member of the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi. “That’s not good for business.”
The roots of the conflict go back to China’s territorial claims to Tibet, an enduring source of friction between China and many foreign nations. China insists that this section of northeast India has historically been part of Tibet, and should be part of China.
Tawang is a thickly forested area of white stupas and steep, terraced hillsides that is home to the Monpa people, who practice Tibetan Buddhism, speak a language similar to Tibetan and once paid tribute to rulers in Lhasa. The Sixth Dalai Lama was born here in the 17th century. The Chinese Army occupied Tawang briefly in 1962, during a war with India fought over this and other territories along the 2,521-mile border.
More than 3,100 Indian soldiers and 700 Chinese soldiers were killed and thousands wounded in the border war. Memorials here highlighting Chinese aggression in Tawang are big draws for Indian tourists.
“The entire border is disputed,” said Ma Jiali, an India scholar at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a government-supported research group in Beijing. “This problem hasn’t been solved, and it’s a huge barrier to China-India relations.”
In some ways, Tawang has become a proxy battleground, too, between China and the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetans, who passed through this valley when he fled into exile in 1959. From his home in the distant Indian hill town of Dharamsala, he wields enormous influence over Tawang. He appoints the abbot of the powerful monastery and gives financial support to institutions throughout the area. Last year, the Dalai Lama announced for the first time that Tawang is a part of India, bolstering the India’s territorial claims and infuriating China.
Traditional Tibetan culture runs strong in Tawang. One morning in June, the monastery held a religious festival that drew hundreds from the nearby villages. As red-robed monks chanted sutras, blew horns and swung incense braziers in the monastery courtyard, the villagers jostled each other to be blessed by the senior lamas.
At the monastery, an important center of Tibetan learning, monks express rage over Chinese rule in Tibet, which the Chinese Army seized in 1951. I hate the Chinese government,” said Gombu Tsering, 70, a senior monk who watches over the monastery’s museum. “Tibet wasn’t even a part of China. Lhasa wasn’t a part of China.”

Few expect China to try to annex Tawang by force, but military skirmishes are a real danger, analysts say. The Indian military recorded 270 border violations and nearly 2,300 instances of “aggressive border patrolling” by Chinese soldiers last year, said Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research, a research organization in New Delhi. Mr. Chellaney has advised the Indian government’s National Security Council.
“The India-China frontier has become more ‘hot’ than the India-Pakistan border,” he said in an e-mail message.
Two years ago, Chinese soldiers demolished a Buddhist statue that Indians had erected at Bumla, the main border pass above Tawang, a member of the Indian Parliament, Nabam Rebia, said in a session of Parliament.
Tawang became part of modern India when Tibetan leaders signed a treaty with British officials in 1914 that established a border called the McMahon Line between Tibet and British-run India. Tawang fell south of the line. The treaty, the Simla Convention, is not recognized by China.
“We recognize it because we agreed to it,” said Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile. “If China agreed to it now, it would be a recognition of the power of the Tibet government at that time.”
China has grown increasingly hostile to the Dalai Lama after severe ethnic unrest in Tibet in 2008. This year, it turned its diplomatic guns on India over the Tawang issue. China moved in March to block a $2.9 billion loan to India from the Asian Development Bank, a multination group based in Manila that has China on its board, because $60 million of the loan had been earmarked for flood-control projects in Arunachal Pradesh. The loan was approved in mid-June over China’s heated objections.
“China expresses strong dissatisfaction to the move, which can neither change the existence of immense territorial disputes between China and India, nor China’s fundamental position on its border issues with India,” Qin Gang, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a written statement.
In May, weeks after China first tried to block the loan, the chief of the Indian Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Fali Homi, now retired, told a prominent Indian newspaper that China posed a greater threat than Pakistan.
Another official, J. J. Singh, the governor of Arunachal Pradesh and a retired chief of the Indian Army, said the next month that the Indian military was adding two divisions of troops, totaling 50,000 to 60,000 soldiers, to the border region over the next several years. Four Sukhoi fighter jets were immediately deployed to a nearby air base.
Since 2005, when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China visited India, the two countries have gone through 13 rounds of bilateral negotiations over the issue. A round was held just last month, with no results.
“The China-India border has got to be one of the most continuously negotiated borders in modern history,” said M. Taylor Fravel, an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is a leading expert on China’s borders. “That shows how intractable this dispute is.”

Death in the Afternoon

By Alfred De Montesquiou and Julie Jacobson, Associated Press Writers –
DAHANEH, Afghanistan – The pomegranate grove looked ominous. The U.S. patrol had a tip that Taliban fighters were lying in ambush, and a Marine had his weapon trained on the trees 70 yards away. "If you see anything move from there, light it up," Cpl. Braxton Russell told him.
Thirty seconds later, a salvo of gunfire and RPGs — rocket-propelled grenades — poured out of the grove. "Casualty! We've got a casualty!" someone shouted. A grenade had hit Lance Cpl. Joshua "Bernie" Bernard in the legs.
A Marine and son of a Marine, a devout Christian, Iraq war veteran and avid hiker, home-schooled in rural Maine, Bernard was about to become the next fatality in the deadliest month of the deadliest year since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
The troops of Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines had been fighting for three days to wrest this town in southern Afghanistan from the Taliban who had ruled it for four years. As dusk approached on Friday, Aug. 14, things had quieted down. The Taliban seemed to have gone. Another day had passed in the long, hard slog for U.S. troops serving on the parched plains and mountains of Afghanistan, in a war that has steadily intensified.
Then, as the Marines were enjoying some downtime, reports of mortar, machine-gun and sniper fire sent them scrambling again. The 11 Americans and 10 Afghan soldiers edged their way into the town's abandoned bazaar. With them were Associated Press correspondent Alfred de Montesquiou, AP photographer Julie Jacobson and AP Television News cameraman Ken Teh.
Eyes scanning rooftops for gunmen and the ground for buried bombs, the patrol pushed past shops still smoldering from U.S. mortar shells, past Taliban posters on the walls exhorting the populace to fight the Americans. Bernard, his face daubed in gray and brown camouflage paint, was the point man.
A young Afghan in front of the family store showed the patrol a patch of upturned earth in a ditch. It was here that insurgents had fired their mortars a few minutes earlier.
"But don't say I told you, or they'll kill me," the man said.
As he spoke, the Marines got word of the ambush being readied nearby. Two Cobra helicopters circling overhead fired Hellfire missiles at a mortar position. The Marines weren't sure this had settled the matter with the Taliban. They pushed on.
Then they reached the pomegranate grove.
___
At first Jake Godby thought Bernard had stepped on an explosive device. Godby, a 24-year-old 2nd lieutenant from Fredericksburg, Va., quickly regrouped his men and directed the returning fire.
The squad found itself stuck under sustained and heavy fire with a wounded man on a narrow crossroad — buildings behind them, insurgents hidden in the orchard in front of them, and a large puddle from a broken water pump in the middle. Godby had the troops advance to the cover of a mud wall and an irrigation ditch. The orange streaks of bullets whizzing in every direction grew visible as the light faded.
"That's when I realized there was a casualty and saw the injured Marine, about 10 yards from where I'd stood," Jacobson would write in her journal. "For the second time in my life, I watched a Marine lose his. He was hit with the RPG which blew off one of his legs and badly mangled the other. ... I hadn't seen it happen, just heard the explosion. I hit the ground and lay as flat as I could and shot what I could of the scene."
Bernard lay on the ground, two Marines standing over him exposed, trying to help. A first tourniquet on Bernard's leg broke. A medic applied another.
"I can't breathe, I can't breathe," Bernard said. Troops crawling under the bullets dragged him to the MRAP, the mine-resistant armored vehicle that accompanied the patrol.
"The other guys kept telling him `Bernard, you're doing fine, you're doing fine. You're gonna make it. Stay with me Bernard!' He (a Marine) held Bernard's head in his hands when he seemed to go limp and tried to keep him awake. A couple more ran in with a stretcher," Jacobson recalled in the journal.
"Another RPG hit the mud wall on the other side of the street from where we were, about 5 yards away. It was a big BOOM, and I just lay my face in the dirt and everything went quiet for about 10 seconds. It was just silence like I was wearing noise-canceling headphones or like world peace had finally descended upon the earth. The air was white with sand. Then I started feeling the rubble fall down around me. And I thought, `Is this what it's like to be shell shocked? Am I all still here? I can't believe I am.'
"I was fine and surprised at how calm I was and that I could actually still hear."
___
The rocket-propelled grenade exploded in a powerful pinkish blast, lighting up the scene and briefly knocking out de Montesquiou and Staff Sgt. Alexander Ferguson. When Ferguson recovered, he helped haul Bernard inside the vehicle. Bernard was driven back to base some 500 yards from there, receiving first aid along the way. Minutes later, a helicopter evacuated him to Camp Leatherneck, the main Marine compound in southern Afghanistan. His vital signs were stable when he left.
At the ambush site, the fighting continued uninterrupted for 10 to 15 minutes. The men could see the grenades coming in at them, and even some of the machine gunners. They estimated they were facing six to eight fighters.
Adding to the confusion, an Afghan soldier with the troops fired his own grenade at the insurgents, but he hadn't checked whether anybody was close by. A Marine was knocked out by the back-blast.
Another grabbed the Afghan by the collar. "Once he stopped shooting, we were able to get control of the situation," Russell said.
Some Marines are uneasy patrolling with the Afghan National Army. For one thing, there's a language barrier. During the shootout at the orchard, the patrol's Afghan interpreter disappeared and took cover, leaving the Marines unable to coordinate their moves with the Afghan soldiers.
"They're not lacking courage, they're just lacking training right now," said Russell, 22, from Stafford, Va. "At least they were shooting in the right direction."
The fighting ebbed with nightfall. Godby and some of the Marines equipped with night vision glasses pushed deeper into the orchard, but the insurgents were gone. Intelligence pointed to three enemy dead, several Marines said, but it could not be confirmed.
That night, officers assembled the platoon in a darkened room of the run-down house where the Marines had camped after taking Dahaneh two days earlier. There the officers delivered the news: Bernard had died of a blood clot in his heart on the operating table. He was Golf Company's third fatality since arriving in Afghanistan in May.
Bernard was the 19th American to die in Afghanistan in August. Fifty-one Marines, soldiers and seamen lost their lives that month. Of the 739 Americans killed in and around Afghanistan since 2001, 151 died last year and 180 so far this year.
___
Down a rural dirt road in New Portland, western Maine, John and Sharon Bernard sat on their porch and talked about their son.
Joshua, they said, loved literature and showed early interest in the Bible and Christianity. "He had a very strong faith right from the beginning," his mother said.
His father described him as "humble, shy, unassuming — the very first to offer help." He didn't smoke or drink, and always opened the door for others. His main friends were his church group, whom he would visit when on leave, and his sister Katy, 20.
Bernard's father is a retired Marine 1st sergeant. Three weeks before the Aug. 14 ambush that killed his son, he had written to his congressman, Rep. Michael Michaud, expressing frustration at what he described as a change in the Afghanistan rules of engagement to one of "spare the civilians at all cost." He called this "disgraceful, immoral and fatal" to U.S. forces in combat.
Joshua loved videogames and snowboarding, and hiked parts of the Appalachian Trail with his father. He hoped to become a U.S. marshal.
"Service and personal honor," is how his father summarized his son.
___
Three days after Bernard's death, as his belongings were being packed for shipment to his family, Cpl. Joshua Jackson, his squad leader, was still referring to him in the present tense.
"He definitely doesn't hesitate," said Jackson, 23, from Copley, Ohio. "He's very good, he definitely has the nerves to do what he's needed to do."
He called Bernard "a true-heartedly very good guy ... probably one of the best guys I've known in my entire life."
The hardest part is "just wondering if there's something that I could have done different, or maybe prevented him from dying," Jackson said. "But that's something we've all got to deal with."
"I think it's got to do with being a Marine; you just carry on," said Godby. That night he got two hours of sleep. Before dawn, his platoon took part in a raid on a suspected Taliban stronghold.
Bernard was determined, his comrades said. That's why he was chosen as the squad's point man and navigator, moving at the front of his unit.
Lance Cpl. Jason Pignon, 22, from Thayer, Ill., was his close friend. They had been in the same platoon since 2007 when they joined "the Fleet," as Marines call the units preparing to deploy. They served together near Fallujah in Iraq in 2008, and again in Afghanistan.
During the firefight, Jacobson had wrestled with a question every war photographer faces: whether to offer to help save a life, or keep out of the way of the professionals and go on shooting pictures. She wondered whether the Marines would be upset that she went on photographing.
Some of Bernard's comrades asked to see the photos. In her journal she described them flipping through the images she had captured that day:
"They did stop when they came to that moment. But none of them complained or grew angry about it. They understood that it was what it was. They understand, despite that he was their friend, it was the reality of things."
___
It had all gone very quickly. It was late afternoon when the Taliban fired their first RPGs. It was dusk when the Marine was driven away in the armored vehicle. And it was night when the patrol returning to base saw the dark silhouette of the helicopter that flew him away.
Lance Cpl. Joshua "Bernie" Bernard was 21 years old.

_____
The above report was taken from the New York Times dated September 4, 2009. Imagine you are the cameraman or the reporter of this scene. What a vignette, huh? The scene will be played again and again in many months, maybe years, to come. More lives will be lost. More families will suffer. Don’t forget the fact that Taliban died also. In fact, more Afghans have died in the war than the soldiers from NATO forces. And what’s for? Eventually Americans will leave and things are back to what they were before the Americans came. The same thing happened during the Second Indochina War. Americans came. A lot of them, over 500,000, and then they left after over 58,000 died. The Vietnamese lost almost 4,000,000 people, including the civilians. Now Vietnam still has a totalitarian regime as government and the people still suffer. Worse still, China is now poised to take over the country and most overseas intellectuals that I know personally don’t give a fuck about that. They turn their backs to their country of birth. Meanwhile, every fucking day they mouth off nonsense or harp on trivialities and juvenile jokes. It reaches the point that I now experience feelings of nausea when I see their names and their words in the forum and I can’t reach for the delete button fast enough.

A person without pride or dignity does not deserve to live.

A person who repudiates his roots deserves nothing but contempt, and possibly more.

All talking and yelping and not a single action. No wonder Mao once said that intellectuals are worse than shit. At least shit can serve as fertilizer.

And now is the follow-up to the news report above:

Mike Allen – Fri Sep 4, 10:38 am ET
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is objecting “in the strongest terms” to an Associated Press decision to transmit a photograph showing a mortally wounded 21-year-old Marine in his final moments of life, calling the decision “appalling” and a breach of “common decency.”
The AP reported that the Marine’s father had asked – in an interview and in a follow-up phone call — that the image, taken by an embedded photographer, not be published.
The AP reported in a story that it decided to make the image public anyway because it “conveys the grimness of war and the sacrifice of young men and women fighting it.”
The photo shows Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard of New Portland, Maine, who was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade in a Taliban ambush Aug. 14 in Helmand province of southern Afghanistan, according to The AP.
Gates wrote to Thomas Curley, AP’s president and chief executive officer. “Out of respect for his family’s wishes, I ask you in the strongest of terms to reconsider your decision. I do not make this request lightly. In one of my first public statements as Secretary of Defense, I stated that the media should not be treated as the enemy, and made it a point to thank journalists for revealing problems that need to be fixed – as was the case with Walter Reed."
“I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard’s death has caused his family. Why your organization would purposefully defy the family’s wishes knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish is beyond me. Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right – but judgment and common decency.”
The four-paragraph letter concluded, “Sincerely,” then had Gates’ signature.
The photo, first transmitted Thursday morning and repeated Friday morning, carries the warning, “EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT.”
The caption says: “In this photo taken Friday, Aug. 14, 2009, Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard is tended to by fellow U.S. Marines after being hit by a rocket propelled grenade during a firefight against the Taliban in the village of Dahaneh in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. Bernard was transported by helicopter to Camp Leatherneck where he later died of his wounds.”
Gates’ letter was sent Thursday, after he talked to Curley by phone at about 3:30 p.m. Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said Gates told Curley: “I am asking you to reconsider your decision to publish this graphic photograph of Lance Corporal Bernard. I am begging you to defer to the wishes of the family. This will cause them great pain.”
Curley was “very polite and willing to listen,” and send he would reconvene his editorial team and reconsider, Morrell said. Within the hour, Curley called Morrell and said the editors had reconvened but had ultimately come to the same conclusion.
Gates “was greatly disappointed they had not done the right thing,” Morrell said.
The Buffalo News ran the photo on page 4, and the The (Wheeling, W.Va.) Intelligencer ran an editorial defending its decision to run the photo. Some newspapers – including the Arizona Republic, The Washington Times and the Orlando Sentinel – ran other photos from the series. Several newspaper websites – including the Akron Beacon-Journal and the St. Petersburg Times – used the photo online.
Morrell said Gates wanted the information about his conversations released “so everyone would know how strongly he felt about the issue.”
The Associated Press reported in a story about deliberations about that photo that “after a period of reflection,” the news service decided “to make public an image that conveys the grimness of war and the sacrifice of young men and women fighting it.
“The image shows fellow Marines helping Bernard after he suffered severe leg injuries. He was evacuated to a field hospital where he died on the operating table,” AP said. “The picture was taken by Associated Press photographer Julie Jacobson, who accompanied Marines on the patrol and was in the midst of the ambush during which Bernard was wounded. … ‘AP journalists document world events every day. Afghanistan is no exception. We feel it is our journalistic duty to show the reality of the war there, however unpleasant and brutal that sometimes is,’ said Santiago Lyon, the director of photography for AP.
“He said Bernard's death shows ‘his sacrifice for his country. Our story and photos report on him and his last hours respectfully and in accordance with military regulations surrounding journalists embedded with U.S. forces.’”
The AP reported that it “waited until after Bernard's burial in Madison, Maine, on Aug. 24 to distribute its story and the pictures.”
“An AP reporter met with his parents, allowing them to see the images,” the article says. “Bernard's father after seeing the image of his mortally wounded son said he opposed its publication, saying it was disrespectful to his son's memory. John Bernard reiterated his viewpoint in a telephone call to the AP on Wednesday. ‘We understand Mr. Bernard's anguish. We believe this image is part of the history of this war.
The story and photos are in themselves a respectful treatment and recognition of sacrifice,’ said AP senior managing editor John Daniszewski.
“Thursday afternoon, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called AP President Tom Curley asking that the news organization respect the wishes of Bernard's father and not publish the photo. Curley and AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll said they understood this was a painful issue for Bernard's family and that they were sure that factor was being considered by the editors deciding whether or not to publish the photo, just as it had been for the AP editors who decided to distribute it.”
The image was part of a package of stories and photos released for publication after midnight Friday. The project, called “AP Impact – Afghan – Death of a Marine,” carried a dateline of Dahaneh, Afghanistan, and was written by Alfred de Montesquiou and Julie Jacobson:
“The U.S. patrol had a tip that Taliban fighters were lying in ambush in a pomegranate grove, and a Marine trained his weapon on the trees. Seconds later, a salvo of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades poured out, and a grenade hit Lance Cpl. Joshua ‘Bernie’ Bernard. The Marine was about to become the next fatality in the deadliest month of the deadliest year of the Afghan war.”
The news service also moved extensive journal entries AP photographer Julie Jacobson wrote while in Afghanistan. AP said in an advisory: “From the reporting of Alfred de Montesquiou, the photos and written journal kept by Julie Jacobson, and the TV images of cameraman Ken Teh, the AP has compiled ‘Death of a Marine,’ a 1,700 word narrative of the clash, offering vivid insights into how the battle was fought, and into Bernard's character and background. It also includes an interview with his father, an ex-Marine, who three weeks earlier had written letters complaining that the military's rules of engagement are exposing the troops in Afghanistan to undue risk.”

Wissai
September 04, 2009

Unhappiness

Unhappiness

If I stress the various facets of unhappiness, it is because I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully. This certainly is no time for any one to pretend to be happy, or to put his unhappiness away in the dark. You must watch your universe at it cracks above your head

Paul Bowles, author of the famous novel The Sheltering Sky

This is the darkest time in Vietnam in the 21st century. The historical enemy, China, took away land at the northern border, took all of the Paracel Islands and most of the Spratly archipelago, occupied the Central Highlands, flooded the land with its cheap consumer goods--- legally through trade and illegally through smuggling, built dams in the upper reaches of the Mekong River and thus slowly is strangling the economy of Vietnam. Instead of mobilizing the people against the pending full scale invasion planned by the enemy, the Vietnamese Communist Party is busy arresting those patriotic and concerned Vietnamese who dare voice their displeasure at the activities of China. The Vietnamese Communist Party, the actual ruler of Vietnam, is signaling to China that the door is wide open, please come on in and take away Vietnam.

This is certainly the unhappy time to be Vietnamese, unless one is a member of the Vietnamese Communist Party or one is a China’s lackey. The Vietnamese people, in Vietnam and overseas, are watching the universe as they know it is cracking above their heads, the country as they know it is being sold away to foreigners to line up the pockets of the corrupt ruling elite, the Vietnamese women being given away as brides to foreigners--- mostly Chinese merchants, and the East Sea as they have known it for thousands of years being confined to a narrow body of water close to shore.

This is certainly not the time to pretend to be happy if you are a concerned Vietnamese. Nor is it the time to put away your unhappiness away in the dark. If you must cry, you must cry out in the open, and ask the question “why?” and then ask yourself the next question “is there anything you can do to reverse the horrendous situation facing the survival of the Vietnamese as a separate people and Vietnam as a sovereign country?”

Ah, the above “dissertation” is about political matters, something most humans find themselves uninvolved because they feel powerless in effecting a change. They prefer to let the political activists take care of those matters and they would go along for a free ride. I don’t really blame them. Politics is a game which is at once dangerous and dirty, not suitable for the faint-hearted or the high-minded people. I am not really made for politics although I studied Political Science at graduate level in college. I studied it because it was the only subject available for a person of my background in the liberal arts when I applied for a scholarship to study overseas many, many moons ago. I studied it without distinction or enthusiasm. I didn’t find much pleasure in it. Meanwhile my heart was shattering into hundreds of pieces. I was unhappy and very much so. Today, a Spanish song on the radio brought to the surface long-suppressed memories. My unhappiness was revived. On top of that, anger walked in and courted my unhappiness. Together they tormented me. Together they forced me to confront the age-old issue of love, the issue I would rather forget, bury, or, better still, kill. I am too old to talk or think about adolescent love. As time passes by, it is becoming a stranger to me. I am too hurt, too jaded, and too unhappy to believe in romantic, adolescent love anymore.

Love is a comedy for those who are not involved and a tragedy for those who are in the thick of it. Let me regale you with a story with comedic overtones.

A young Vietnamese woman of twenty without much education but plenty of wiles met an American colonel of Greek descent, aged forty-five, in one of the infamous Saigon bars during the height of the Vietnam War. He was not just a run-of-the mill colonel, but of the military intelligence branch and twice divorced. He was also an ex-pilot. Somehow he fell for her, but the military regulation was that he was not allowed to fraternize with local women. He had to go through hoops to convince his superiors that the woman was not a spy. The army investigated her thoroughly and finally gave him the OK to marry her after she already gave birth to a baby girl. When Saigon was in the throes of being overrun by the Communists in the last days of April, 1975, the colonel had to risk his own life to go here and there to secure the evacuation papers for the woman, their daughter, and twenty eight (!) relatives of the woman. They got to the States and lived in Florida. Although the colonel doted on his daughter, he didn’t give his Vietnamese wife much freedom or money. She had to use all her skills to survive as a business woman in the restaurant and later jewelry business. She made enough money to retire when she turned sixty. By that time she and her husband had moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, a nice upscale city near Phoenix. She was used to being independent during those tough years when she first got to the United States where she encountered language barrier. She was accustomed to doing things her way. When she retired from business, she and her husband had drifted apart emotionally, though not physically. She spent a lot of time with her female friends gambling in the local casino, leaving her husband at home watching TV or associating with his old military friends. One fine day she came home and found a note from her husband that he had found a new love and was filing for a legal separation. Shocked and angry, she tried to get a hold of her husband but he didn’t come to the phone. Finally, Oanh—that was the woman’s name, had to hire a detective who tracked her husband (Pierre) down. It turned out that Pierre had moved into a house of a Vietnamese woman in Las Vegas whom he had met over the Internet. Overcome with anger and humiliation, Oanh flew to the house of the other woman and made a big scene by shouting and uttering all kinds of profanity. Promptly thereafter, a cop showed up to her house and presented her with a restraining order. Depressed, Oanh couldn’t sleep. Her heart had all kinds of palpitations. That was when she came to me because I moonlighted as a counselor specializing in untangling the convolutions of the heart. The following was a partial transcript of the sessions I had with her.

-What should I do? I want my husband back.
-Let me ask you a question. Do you really love your husband? Or do you want him back simply because he is now shacking up with somebody?
-What kind of question is that? What kind of a counselor are you?
-A very good question. A very good counselor, also.
-I beg your pardon?
-I’m saying my question to you is a very good one. I’m also saying that I am a very good counselor.
-Ah, I see.
-Do you really?
-What do you mean?
-I mean do you really love your husband or is it the question of the ego here. From the way you described to me, you took your husband for granted. You ignored him. You neglected him. You assumed that since he is an eight-three year-old man, no pun intended, nobody is interested in him. But you were erroneous in your assumption. Now you want him back, but it is a bit late, don’t you think?
-I came to you for help, for getting my husband back, not to hear you putting me down. I don’t know why my friends said you are very good. You certainly are a very strange counselor.
-Strange but good. You will see. Listen, I help people deal with reality, naked reality, unvarnished reality. That’s my mission in life. Nothing but reality.

(To be continued)

Wake Up!

Wake up!
By : Abduxaliq Uyghur (who was killed by the Chinese in 1933 for writing poems like this)
Turpan, 1921

Hey, poor Uyghur, wake up, you have slept long enough,
You have nothing, what is now at stake is your very life.
If you don’t rescue yourself from this death,
Ah, your end will be looming, your end will be looming.

Stand up! I said, raise up your head, no more slumber,
Behead your enemy, spill his blood!
If you don’t open your eyes and look around,
The end of your frustrated existence is certain.

Already, your body looks lifeless,
Is that why you are indifferent to death?
You remain unmoved by my calls,
Do you want to perish this way, without coming to your senses?

Open your eyes wide, look around,
Think well about your future,
If you let this one chance escape,
Tomorrow will be nothing but sorrow, nothing but sorrow.

My heart pities you, o my Uyghur,
My companion, my brother, my relative,
With a burning soul, I am calling out to you,
But you are not hearing me, what is going on?

One day will come, and you will regret,
That day you will understand the reason of my calls.
You will say “alas!”, but it will be too late,
Then you will realize what Uyghur (the poet) meant.




DẬY ĐI EM!

Nầy Việt Nam thảm hại, tỉnh dậy đi, em ngủ đã đủ rồi,
Em mất mát quá nhiều rồi, hiện tại chỉ còn mạng sống em thôi
Nếu em không tự cứu thân em,
Ngày tàn đời em sẽ đến rất gần.

Nghe anh đây, đứng dậy nào, ngửng mặt lên, không ngủ nữa
Chém đầu giặc thù xâm lăng, làm máu giặc tràn ra!
Nếu em không bừng tỉnh và nhìn quanh em,
Cuộc đời tủi nhục của em cũng sẽ mất đi.

Thân xác em, trông như đã chếl rồi,
Vì thế em thờ ơ, phaỉ không?
Em lặng thinh trước lời kêu gọi của anh,
Em muốn chết như thế hả, không bao giờ tỉnh dậy?

Em hảy mở mắt lớn ra, và nhìn quanh em
Hảy nghĩ đến tương lai,
Nếu em để cơ hội nầy bay đi,
Tương lai em sẽ là đau buồn, đau buồn sẽ là tương lai.

Tim anh đau xót vì em, hởi Việt Nam yêu dấu,
Người em đồng hành, người bà con cùng một dòng máu,
Anh đang kêu gọi em đây, lòng anh sôi tràn
Tại sao em không nghe anh, chuyện gì đang xẩy ra?

Một ngày nào đó, em sẽ ăn năn hối tiếc,
Một ngày nào đó, em sẽ hiểu lý do anh kêu gào em tỉnh dậy.
Em sẽ thầm bảo “Tiếc thay!”, nhưng muộn màng rồi em ơi,
Lúc ấy, em sẽ hiểu tại sao người thi sĩ cũng tên là Việt Nam đã kêu gào
thảm thiết tên em


người dịch Ngô Khoa Bá
1 tháng 9, 2009
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