Going Back into the A Shau

Sixty years after the fact, I returned to my old barracks at the Presidio of San Francisco. It was part of a journey arranged by Brian and Melanie to celebrate my Eighty years of pondering life’s ‘what ifs?’ Our journey began where my military life was born and ended on the beaches of San Diego a week later.

Fast forward two years from that Kerouac-inspired Road trip and I once again ventured back into the A Shau (pronounced A-Shaw) Valley in South Vietnam. This return journey was precipitated by a phone call from out of my past, the decision to reread the novel (part autobiographical) that encompassed that part of of my life and the thought of giving birth to yet another storyline wrapped in the same mid-Sixties environment.

Funny how things turn out. After writing the first version of “Love in the A Shau,” I assumed I had put that part of my fictional past behind me. I was done falling in love freshman year, feeling the exhilaration and angst of that first romantic entanglement, harboring wonderful fantasies of our future together and ultimately experiencing the painful realization that it wasn’t meant to be.

That long, monotonous bus ride from Minnesota down to boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood Missouri was but a dark spot on my collective memory. Yet I can still feel those emotions in the middle of the night when my sweetheart and all my friends were safely ensconced in their beds, dreaming of their bright collegiate futures ahead of them.

But much to my surprise and chagrin, my journey as author and protagonist was relived all over again with that reread. For reasons that gradually began build in my subconscious, I slowly came to realize that returning to the A Shau was an exhilarating experience and I was sorely tempted to go there again…in the form of yet another novel. Perhaps my journey back in time wasn’t over yet.

Standing in front of the barracks with my two kids brought up a plethora of mixed emotions. I was still around; a lot of my barracks buddies weren’t. Some were brought down by the conflict overseas, others made their eventual escape back to civilian life and the rest simply disappeared. But what if, I asked myself, a different scenario had played out. That thought then became the genesis for another possible novel that had long been percolated in the far reaches of my back brain.

‘Presidio Adieu’ is the working title for yet another novel from that same time period that has been percolating in my brain for some time now. Its birth is very tenable considering the numerous other projects screaming for my time and attention. While I don’t envision its creation anywhere in the near future, it has still gotten my imagination going into overtime once again.

Readers loved so many of the segments of that first book. This was especially surprising coming from my female readers. I worried that the graphic descriptions of war and the profanity of military talk would them turn off.  I feared they might see it as just gratuitous profanity used for shock value. But the opposite was true. As one friend mentioned out to me, quite pointedly. “Oh, come on, Denis, give us credit. We’re much smarter than that. We understand the violence of war and the profanity-laced dialogue that comes with the territory. It just added to the flavor of the moment and painted a vivid picture of the profound changes your protagonist was going through.”

It might be a tough trip back because I tend to get very vested into my characters. Yet it’s not often that I get to go back in time and revisit San Francisco of the mid-sixties. It was a world of barracks banter, office intrigue, sexual liaisons, cunning and stealth and all culminating in the bloody battlefields of the Nam.

To be sure, this proposed novel would have a totally different storyline with a different cast of characters. It would be more of a mystery novel than a story of combat. Yet the same emotions captured, lost, gained and lost again would be present. Whether in the post newspaper office, the barracks or the streets of San Francisco, it would be a world where only a few of the women were virgins and manual dexterity with the boys didn’t refer to their working on car parts.

It would be an interesting journey that I and my characters would love to travel. Proving once again that in fiction you really can go back to what once was and change it for the better or worse.

As I mentioned the odds of ‘Presidio Adieu’ starting anytime soon are remote. But if I do find the time, I think it would be an interesting journey well worth the effort if I can keep my fear of dying in battle and conflicting emotions of love in tack. It would be another trip back to the barracks again. Older and only slightly wiser this time around.

The Great Escape

It probably began with the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other Greek tales of adventure. History tells us that Homer wrote about one of these first epic journeys. As a budding writer of western novels, I was aware of the fact that in western fiction, there are only three or four main story lines. One of these is the epic journey or the great trek. Hollywood captured these formula stories with two classic westerns: ‘Red River’ and ‘The Searchers.’

Later on, there were movies like ‘Escape from New York’ and ‘Road Warrior’ that followed this same story formula. Sharon and I recently lived our own epic journey ripe with a deadly virus trailing us cross-country, closed or seemingly haunted motels, nearly empty roadways and miles upon miles of late winter drabness. It was a forced road trip for two very asphalt-allergic folks.

Like the rest of the world, Palm Springs experienced the COVID-19 epidemic/pandemic recently. Rumors exploded along with misinformation, misunderstanding, and panic in the toilet paper aisle. All the OMG folks were going crazy and driving those around them in the same direction. Hotels, motels, restaurants, and worse yet, nightclubs were all ordered closed down.

Our situation on the home front was tempered by the fact that over a four-week period, Sharon had experienced three bouts of a serious sinus infection that she just couldn’t shake. With every new round of antibiotics came an upset stomach and digestive interruptions. She was tired and her immune system compromised. It wasn’t safe for us to board an airplane and go anywhere. Yet I wasn’t about to stay in Palm Springs until May 1st as we had originally planned to do.

Compounding the situation was a ‘lock-down’ and ‘Stay in place’ order from city government in Palm Springs. That was quickly followed by a similar ‘stay in place’ order for the city of Los Angeles and finally on March 19th, a statewide ‘lock down’ for all of California.

Just about everything was closed down. Coffee shops, retail shops, golf courses, any and all gathering spots, were now out of reach. The Canadians, probably 30-40 percent of our winter population, were rushing to get back north before their borders closed. Snowbirds were leaving early and Palm Springs was fast becoming a ghost town.

The last straw for me was when they closed the library and then my exercise room at the Saguaro, our local hip hotel. By mid-afternoon, waves of flotsam would sweep over the berm where I walked every day. These interlopers had discovered my treasured walk along the wash. Dog walkers, bikers, sightseers and other newbies to outdoor exercise were crowding the gravel pathway. I had to resort to walking early in the morning before the crowds arrived.  It was time to go home.

In the past, we would have jumped on a plane and flown home. Now our options were to drive our own car home or get a rental. Truth be told, I’m not a road warrior. Driving to the end of the block is about far enough for me. Now we were facing the prospect of driving almost two thousand miles to get home. We opted for a one-way rental, got an SUV on steroids, secured a date in April, and prepared to hunker down until it was time to leave.

What we quickly realized is that while in the past we had been limited with our luggage by the astronomical airline charges and UPS fees to ship things home, now we were limited only by the storage capacity of our Greyhound bus. Sharon was in seventh heaven. All those estate sale goodies she had collected over the years could now be taken home at no additional cost.

Our cargo load was impressive even by Walmart standards:

            Four boxes of oranges

            Six boxes of lemons

            Ten boxes of food

            Six bottles of wine for Brian and Amy in Denver

            Water and snacks to last us well beyond our senior years

            Four boxes of my writing files

            Five novels and several writing reference books

            A new Bose/clock/alarm radio

            Tons of magazines (for summer reading on my porch)

            A complete set of Time/Life History of the Civil War (for Sharon’s brother)

            Ten newly recorded CDs of my favorite music in the desert

            Dell laptop, Macbook Pro laptop, two Amazon tablets, iPad, Kindle, Verizon tablet

Lots of Sharon’s art work

Sharon’s paints

Select clothing & shoes

Two twenty-five pound weights (what the heck, we had the room)

Fortunately there was still room in the Titanic for Sharon and me in steerage so we were good to go. I had promised the grandchildren in Colorado and Minnesota that if I could catch a coyote or two or some Jack Rabbits, I’d bring them along. I never did but they (and I) thought it was a great idea.

We had two basic routes to follow, the Northern route and the Southern route. The first leg of both routes began in Palm Springs and ended in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From there, the Northern route went north toward Colorado while the Southern route went east toward Oklahoma and Kansas. Weather determined that we ultimately took the Northern route. The scenery alternated between spectacular and drab as hell.

Since neither Sharon nor I are road trippers, we were totally unprepared for our existence day upon day on the road with nothing to listen to except the hum of our new tires. Neither one of us is a techno-geek. We don’t have a blue tooth between us, few apps and Sharon has only recently started to Zoom. So we ended up listening to a lot of religious radio stations and reflecting.

But that’s another story entirely; reflections of my relationship with the Catholic faith.  I’ve entitled it ‘God as My Co-Pilot’ and it will appear as a new blog in the near future.

If I were to break our trek down in simplistic terms I’d say that parts of the country between Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado were barren and bleak. It was miles upon miles of nothingness.

Once we left Eastern Colorado and hit the Nebraska – Iowa corridor, the trucks started to bunch up, filling the right hand lane. Civilization had returned. I stayed in the left hand lane and continued flying at near mock-one speed. God and country music filled my ears with distractions from the long road ahead.

Brian insisted we stop by to see the Colorado kids and pick up the Rat Pack. Therefore, after twelve hours on the road, we arrived with lemons, oranges, and special gifts from California to give our grandkids.

We had a wonderful SD (socially distant) gourmet dinner that night. Then we loaded up the ‘Rat Pack’ and left the next morning for Minnesota.

When we left Palm Springs, our cactus were in full bloom, the roads ahead mostly empty and when we got home, snow had fallen on our front lawn.

After ‘six hours’ of dancing over asphalt the first day, then’ twelve’ the second and finally ‘fifteen’ the third day, we finally arrived home late Wednesday night; Rat Pack en tow.

It’s a worn cliché, tired but true. There is no place like home.