The Nam Diaries

Michael:  I'll tell ya one thing, if I find out my life had to end up being in the mountains, it'd be all      right, but it has to be in your mind.                                                                                                       Nick:  What?  One shot?                                                                                                                         Michael:  Two is pussy.   

                                                                      -The Deer Hunter  

The last time we checked in with Karg, he was navigating his way through Bac Ha, a cloudy hilltop village in the northern mountains of Vietnam.  Once again Karg shares, through his personal journals, the delicate balance between the hunter and the hunted deep within the Heart of Darkness.  National beer and Homemade corn wine are his only protection from the unexpected coldness of the climate.  The damp, chilly air at this altitude is reminiscent of the weather on the mountains of Western Pennsylvania in the late 1960's during deer hunting season.  Despite apprehensions, Karg travels even further into the mountains with Jimmy, the bartender from Wisconsin.  What fate awaits them amidst the mountain dwelling Hmong?  Do they make it back alive or does Jimmy play Nick to Karg's Michael?  This is our one chance to find out my friends, so put three bullets in the chamber and *click* the jump.  We only get one shot at this and Sleeping Horse Pills ain't gonna hunt with no assholes.

                              





Bac Ha pt. II  by Eric Karg

In the morning we are roused with some difficulty and made to sit in the back of a Russian Jeep with the bravest driver I've ever met, Mia.  Mia (pronounced My), drives for hours in zero visibility at about forty miles an hour on one lane roads of mud and streams.  We travel up the sides of mountains that literally have small cataracts splashing into the windows.  A large truck suddenly appears out of the mist ahead of us.  Mia slows and floats on the clouds that are his namesake.  Anyone who has been driven through the mountains of Vietnam I suspect, has the same feelings of fear and apprehension when the memory is invoked.  Mia drives us up the back roads to a small hillside suburb of this tiny mountain town, a Hmong neighborhood.  The morning is so cloudy I can only see maybe twenty-five yards.  We step out of the truck when Mia thinks it's appropriate and he stands in the clouds at the side of the road in silence.  After a minute or two a small boy leading a water buffalo walks past disappearing back into the clouds, then just behind us two more boys appear.

The boys stand proudly for a picture but refuse to speak.  Jimmy and I look at each other for a second to determine what it is we are supposed to be doing.  Mia is not visible to us and Ang, our teenage guide, is delivering a constant flow of trivial information on these particular hillside dwelling Hmong.  There is so much we will never understand.  It is impossible to comprehend the sum-total awesomeness of these people, who are much less important compared to the King People of the Red River in the north.  This being about the third time we have heard Ang's speech, we keep our heads on a swivel and don't respond to his no doubt well intentioned, but racist monologue.  Mia appears and beckons us to follow him into a nearby hut.  As we move from the dark morning light, cold and wet into this simple home, our invasion seems natural.  The family is sitting on the floor around a fire making food in a small collection of pots.

Jimmy has mannerisms, or a tendency to move his arm like a large bear would.  This stylized movement is exaggerated by the fact that he broke his hand the day before we left the United States. 

Inside we sit and try to appear pleasant to our hosts.  It is a little odd to walk into a strangers home and invite yourself to dinner.  I was told by a friend a year ago to skip getting hotels and just stay with the locals.  The very idea made me blanch at the time but here we are doing something quite akin to this and we will repeat it throughout this trip.  It's warm and dry in the hut and through the door the water buffalo occasionally sticks his head in.  The gray-blue cold of the outdoors seems to keep its place and does not invade the hut as we have.  The room feels like a museum approximation of what a hut on a hillside in Vietnam would feel like.  The husbands of the area usually marry adult females ten to fifteen years older than themselves.  Ang and Mia think this is pretty funny stuff.  Quietly in the Hmong language, with their three year old son helping with the tending of the fire, our hosts explain that this is perfectly reasonable as the women mature much earlier than men do.  Even I rebel a little at this idea but upon refection it does make me think how much more comfortable my relationships could have been.  The wife says little as they add pots to the fire.  Jimmy and I keep smiling up at our hosts as a steady stream of corn wine makes the rounds.

The old Chinese motorcycle sits off at an angle to the fire.  Steam rolls upward as green and root vegetables are lovingly covered in sprinklings of a white crystallized substance of unknown origin.  It is unknown to us until the mother notices our looks of confusion.  Apparently it’s the same in all nations.  This is a bag of MSG.  They smile as the bag is held forth for our inspection.  Bad?  Well, yes probably but in this case it seems to impart an almost sweet saltiness that propels the greens into such an agreeable state that we have the already standard, American sized portions.  This behavior doesn’t seem to appall the hosts.  I am now wondering just how random this visit is.  As is often the situation as a foreign guest in Vietnam we will leave at a later, foggier date which I won’t quite remember the particulars about.

Crisp, cool morning the coldest thus far in our trip splits the darkness against the will of crusted eyelids.  The two double doors to our room are closed as are the windows but the dual personal braziers ran short of coal hours ago and it is distinctly not sub-tropical in the room.  Everyday we are ordered to awake at some impossible early hour, and everyday we ignore those orders.  No guides in sight.  This morning is no different but we have yet to get used to this behavior.  Jimmy gets to the bathroom before me and he's making noises that tell me I don’t want to enter for a long while after he finishes.  My insides have not found time to acclimate to the local cuisine, to say nothing of the moonshine made of corn we've been introduced to in such prodigious quantity as of late.  I stomp angrily and without effect on the cement floor as I make my exit.  I open the south facing doors to reveal beautiful Bac Ha from four stories up.  It looks.... the same.  Same overcast sky, same light content.  It must be like this under the white nights in the northern climbs.

The air temperature outside does not differ from that of the room.  I make my way down the stairs on unconvinced legs to try and find a hole in the ground with some degree of privacy and perhaps a cup of coffee.  At the front desk I order coffee and then make for the closest convenience.  What I find is not unlike the stalls at an old fashioned car repair station.  Cinder block walls covered with generations worth of petroleum smoke, greasy metal parts of indistinct machinery are heaped in corners with the ubiquitous hole in the ground.  Back in the main lobby my Viet Nescafe awaits me on one of the long dining tables, heavily sugared.  After this and several more like it I am able to enjoy at least a little, some stale cigarettes.

My collar is pulled up to my ears.  The newly acquired Bomber hat that stinks of old Montagnard and smoke, is pulled tightly down to my eyelids.  I am greeted by Ang and Jimmy, both are in a better mood than I.  Breakfast is served.  First, a thin pile of green onion pancakes and a light broth made of some bird.  This is probably the trips only indulgence of chicken (the Avian Flu is hitting the country hard).  Then steamed rice, beans and mandarin oranges.  Despite putting my right leg into the brazier under the table I still shiver desperately.

Off to market, determined to buy some warm clothing.  I buy, after heroic negotiating by Ang, a down-like jacket that is thin and stinks of plastic injection molding for a ridiculous $80.  Shopping here is as exciting as trying to cross the road in any giant city save that here, instead of cars coming at you from every conceivable direction, it is a mass of tiny humanity.  I am repeatedly left behind in an organic eddy at the front of a shop stall or in a ditch between rows where one can breathe fresh air for a moment beneath an ocean of blue tarp.  I am taught to negotiate with the local merchants, taught that any politeness in these dealings is a sign of weakness and will cause the business owner to simply keep raising the price of the object.  So you just walk away.  That is, for a couple of feet, with the understanding that he will immediately come down in price the second you do so.  I score a pair of criminally thin black “leather” gloves for a sum not worth mentioning in American moneys, so trifling is the sum.