It must have been somewhere around eight-thirty; a moonless night in Libya had plunged the Sahara desert into near-total darkness, at least seen from the cockpit of my plane. In insane Gadhafi-land at that time, it was strictly prohibited to fly at night, but there is always a volunteer to fly a last errand for the oil company and, in this case, I am, of course, referring to myself. After all, they pay a hefty price for the services of aviation contractors willing to put up with the harshness of life deep into the desert for four to six weeks at a time.

I was flying in the dark, without navigation lights, a mere hundred feet above the sand keeping an eye on the fires blazing on the oil rig illuminating the otherwise black horizon. I knew that as long as I could see the lights and the fires I wouldn’t hit a sand-dune.

Departing from the isolated outpost that went by the colourful name of R-82 in the dark was tricky enough, returning in case of trouble however would be impossible as it was hidden between large dunes and wasn’t equipped with any form of lights, apart from the stars. The trick to avoid the Russians, who at that time manned the radars, was to fly low enough to collide head-on with a truck. Quite frankly, I counted on the fact that the Russians in faraway Sarir, even further south into the desert, probably couldn’t care less about a lone cargo plane braking insane Gadhafi’s rules, as long as it wasn’t a formation of fighters coming from Egypt flying at Mach Two.

Werner was quietly sitting near the sandy runway in the other aeroplane, manning the radio... and waiting for me. I called him the “Squirrel”, a smallish thin young man with loads of flying experience, both in the jungles of New Guinea and the desert, and dependable. The dispatchers of the oil company probably liked ex-military pilots because they knew they may be willing to push the boundaries a bit further than others, but not always. Squirrel was not an ex-anything, he was a farmer’s son and an extraordinary person who was totally reliable. That night was no exception as he was patiently waiting for the last plane to come in from the dark, check the wind and then at the last moment turn on the landing lights among all the other blazing lights and burning gas fires, all of it illegally of course but I doubt anyone cared.

How had I gotten there? As a child, I used to build small model planes, mostly WW2 fighters of course, and of course, I imagined myself in one of those Douglass Dauntless dive bombers, plunging towards a Jap battleship and help send it to the bottom of the Pacific. With time, however, the child’s dreams faded away and reality sets in. University followed school, maybe a job as a photo-journalist or whatever it is that one does with a study of political science and English literature. At some stage, I applied with the Royal Dutch Air force considering I was. after all, a Dutch citizen and after a week of testing was finally rejected.

As an alternative I first ended up on Centurion tanks in the Netherlands and Germany; but who likes the freezing cold in some godforsaken Cold War Joint Army camp facing Eastern Germany. A transfer to the last of the Dutch Colonial Army, an all-volunteer outfit in the Amazonian jungles, seemed like a good option, and of course, there was the lure of adventure. The dream, of ever flying an airplane seemed to be further away than ever.

Later in the early seventies, soldiers with loads of jungle and intelligence work experience were in high demand in some parts a world where war was a way of life. Somehow someone, or more likely an Agency noticed me and I was recruited for a six months tour in Vietnam towards the end of that endless war. Instead of leaving when my time was up, I stayed on long enough to witness the near destruction of more than half of a platoon of Vietnamese Rangers along with everything we believed in and fought for. I frequently searched the sky, hoping to see the all saving formation of South Vietnamese Douglas Sky Raiders, flying so low, one could see the pilots wave at us… but that day, none came.

When I returned I vowed no more mud and blood. Me too I wanted to get into the nice and clean environment of a cockpit and see the world from above and once more I tried, older and possibly wiser, although that is a matter of opinion. To my surprise, after a series of exams, it was not the Dutch that accepted me in one of their academies, but the Americans.

After two years of academy, I signed on for a further six years in the Air Force Reserve. It is rather ironical, that yet again I was wearing another nation’s uniform but I will forever be grateful for the opportunity because at last, the child who built model airplanes so long ago and dreamed of flying was now also sitting in a cockpit; the dream had become reality.

That night in a faraway desert, however, in a place called Alpha One-Hundred, it was not an Army or Air Force Buddy waiting for me making sure I would return safe and sound in the dark. It was an ordinary but dependable young Swiss farmer’s son. Werner Wyder was the only survivor of a kidnapping in West Papua, ex Dutch New Guinea that went wrong right from the beginning. His story goes back to March 1984; not so long before we were stationed together in the Libyan Desert. When he set his plane down on a bleak jungle airstrip, somewhere deep in the country, members of a Papua resistance group were waiting for them and the first thing they did was execute Werner’s two passengers; they were Indonesian officials, and therefore occupiers as far as the Papua were concerned.

Werner, however, was spared and taken prisoner by the Papua guerrillas. He was forced to walk through dense jungles and up and down, mostly up, along endless mountain trails. I don’t doubt that he experienced his harrowing ordeal with the same calmness and dry humour he always portrayed. But this is a story that is best told by the man himself.

The way I remember him, he never complained, he just got on with it. The truth is, he was no squirrel at all, more of a lion really who didn’t have to roar to be respected.

James Delahaye.

This is an excerpt from the book I wrote about our time in Vietnam towards the end of the war: The Girl Who Ran With Black Tigers. End of chapter four and the beginning of Marlyne on the scene.

Far away from the Mekong Delta, in Saigon, a young woman with blonde hair stepped out of the Majestic Hotel, situated just in front of the Saigon River. Casually dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt and holding a tennis racket under her arm, she glanced at her watch. She estimated how much time she had before curfew. Enough time for a game of tennis, grab a bite to eat and meet some people. The blonde girl hailed one of the blue and pale yellow taxis.

‘To the Cercle Sportive please…’

This is starting to bore me silly, she thought, looking out the window of the small ageing Renault 4CV as she watched the busy, polluted streets glide by. The taxi waited for the traffic to pass, then took a left turn in front of the Continental Palace Hotel onto Le Loy Street. Never been in there she thought, it’s big; wonder what kind of people stay in that lovely colonial building.

Saigon - Honda city - I've been here for over three months now, and all I’ve seen is Saigon. Nothing… just the city. Nearly time to go home for me, and I haven’t even seen the Delta, she thought unhappily. Before I go home, I want to do something different, something worthwhile, something I will remember… yeah, something worth writing home about.

She sat silently cramped in the back, her long legs uncomfortably squashed against the front passenger seat.

The young woman observed the usual bustling late afternoon activity among the numerous colourful market stalls that occupied Saigon's sidewalks.

She smiled. What’s a sidewalk for, eh? To put a market on, of course, what else could it be for?

Honda motorbikes surrounded her little taxi, noisily and chaotically driving along in the same direction. Hundreds more were parked along the road, their owners having disappeared among the maze of busy stalls and shops.

How they will ever find their bikes is a mystery to me.

Her thoughts drifted back to her dilemma. How to get out of the city? Most sane people wouldn’t dream of leaving the relative safety of Saigon for the much more dangerous countryside. At night, when she walked along the waterfront, where the Saigon River flowed to the South China Sea, she peered into the dark countryside across the river, wondering, what’s out there? She had seen the green, red and white tracers fly back and forth, and it was not uncommon to hear the guns.

A few stray bullets had crashed onto the pavement close to her hotel a few weeks ago. At the end of their range, they had ineffectually smashed against the wall of an adjacent building. People had scattered nonchalantly as if it was nothing more than a hail shower. They had even giggled about it. She had tried to pick one up in her innocence only to burn her fingers on the hot, heavy calibre projectile. She had screeched in pain and dropped it. Someone had laughed at her stupidity.

Marlyne, for that was her name, had looked embarrassed; how could she have been so dumb? The magnesium inside had burned white-hot, and the object had travelled beyond the sound barrier before it had finally run out of velocity and range to drop onto the pavement unceremoniously.

She looked out of the side window of the small Renault, no longer paying attention to the buzz on the street. The traffic, the stalls, and the people milling about all went into a blur, and then a thought came into her head.

Hmm, I might know the person who can get me out of here - I just need to have the courage to ask.

Marlyne’s morose mood gradually improved as she thought about it; all I’ve got to do is ask.

Steven was a good tennis player, she gave him that. But then, why wouldn’t he be? He seemed to spend a lot of time at the Club or the court if he wasn't at the Embassy. At the pool or the bar, he would chat up the pretty American or European embassy girls in the hope of getting lucky, which he probably did regularly. Everybody was at it in this town.

Marlyne wasn’t sure where to begin as she plopped herself down on a chair. She wiped her forehead with a towel, observing Steven from the corner of her eye, wondering when would be a good time to broach the subject. She began casually. ‘Thanks for the game, Steve. Jesus, you do make me run all over the place, you know.’

‘I know, and I love watching it.’

Marlyne guessed what he meant and ignored the remark. Then, armed with her natural charm, she continued. ‘While we’re here, I uh… I need to ask you something.’

Steven looked at her, probably thinking: here it comes. ‘Why sure, fire away.’

Marlyne looked away for a fleeting moment, gathering her courage. ‘Well, I’ll be leaving in about a month, you know.’

Steven perked up, wondering: Was she finally going to offer him a night of passionate sex? Like most men, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her breasts, and it didn’t seem to bother her. He wondered if she was intentionally provocative when, after a game of tennis, she wore that little bikini at the pool, a bikini that, for all practical purposes, did a bad job of hiding what was on offer, both below and above. Her breasts would bulge out for all to admire or criticise, depending on whose opinion one listened to. Jealous women thought she was exposing far too much of her luscious flesh. The gossip machine made all sorts of assumptions, primarily unverified rumours, but not all, perhaps.

Seemingly unaware of his desire, Marlyne continued, ‘I hear you have a lot of contacts around the place, right?’

‘Yeah, I suppose so; why? What are you after?’

His hopes began to fade, and if Steven had dreams, he was in for a rude awakening. It was more like she threw a glass of water in his face to sober him up after a night of heavy drinking.

‘I want to go on a helicopter ride into the field.’ Marlyne stated bluntly.

Her enigmatic smile had thrown him completely off guard, and for a brief moment, he had to compose himself.

‘You mean a ride on an Air America chopper? Well, um… shouldn’t be that difficult; where to?’

‘No, no. I mean, I want to go with the Army, the Vietnamese Army. You know, like when they go somewhere where the action is. Nothing too crazy, just going out there, into the countryside - on an army helicopter.’

Steven was dumbstruck. ‘What? Are you nuts? Who the hell wants to go looking for the shit? What’s the matter with you? There’s a war out there, you know? Is the occasional boom and bang around here not enough for you?’

Marlyne laughed at the unintended innuendo. ‘If you are referring to my “so-called” sex life, then no, it’s not enough.

Steven could only laugh at her quick wit. ‘Oh, so you do have a sex life then.’

‘What if I do?’ She teased. ‘Come on. I know you’ve been out there quite a bit from what people tell me.’

‘Yeah, and they’d have to drag me into the damn chopper today. I mean, you, being a nurse or whatever it is you are, should know that people out there get hurt or worse. One moment, you think everything is nice and dandy, and suddenly, all hell breaks loose. Shit happens - and you want to go for the ride?’

‘Look,’ Marlyne said impatiently, ‘Journalists, press photographers and who knows who else always ride along on those choppers, so what’s the problem?

Yeah, and have you looked at them? Half of them are smoking that funny stuff so they can blank out the truth; the others are manic adrenalin junkies drinking themselves into a stupor and then coming back for more. And you wanted to do what you said?’

‘I want to go for the ride.’ Marlyne stated once again calmly. ‘Look, if it’s too much of a problem, forget about it, I’m sure one of those Vietnamese officers can help. Jeez, I just thought you could do it.’

Steven looked blankly at her for a moment. Then he cocked his head, his gaze resting on her breasts. ‘Yes, of course, I can do it, it’s not that big a deal, but… what’s it worth to you?’ he asked with a sudden annoying grin.

Marlyne opened her mouth and looked straight at him, digesting what he had just said. ‘Did you just tell me you’ll arrange a ride for me if I let you have a ride between my legs? As in - you want to fuck me?’

Marlyne’s higher upbringing did not prevent her from using crude language, and the words came out slightly louder than he had hoped for. Steven’s eyes quickly scanned left and right, hoping no one had overheard the blunt remark. But to his relief, everybody kept to their own chats.

Marlyne might have brushed the suggestion off, but there was more to come.

‘Jeez, Marlyne, everybody’s doing it, and you’re a gorgeous girl. It’s not like you haven’t done it out here, right? I mean, Doug’s been talking…’

But she cut him off. ‘Oh I see, Doug, yes, but of course, I should have known.’ By now, Marlyne had switched into mocking mode, she was determined to make him suffer for what he had just suggested.

‘Before he left, he, of course, had to kiss and tell. Or, to be precise, he had to screw me and then tell - you and who knows who else he told. Sure, why not. Just what people wanted to hear to feed the local gossip machine.’

Steven looked down at the table and chuckled.

‘It’s not funny, Steve.’

‘Ah, but it is true then, right?’ Steven asked.

‘So?’ Marlyne knew she could not fight rumours. In fact, she didn’t really care much what kind of reputation she had, but it did annoy her that Steven thought he could trade a favour for sex. She was going to make him suffer for it. With a mischievous little smile, she decided to rub it in as hard as she could, just to annoy him.

‘Yes, it’s true. I took him to the Majestic, and we had a lovely time. I'm not sure who screwed who, but I do remember sitting on top, and a little later, I was lying on my back, but I may have passed out by my third orgasm.’ Marlyne said, looking at a whirling ceiling fan. ‘Oh yes, and I seem to remember, I gave him a blow job too.’

To increase the agony, she slowly ran her tongue along her upper lip, continuing all the way around till she had done the tour of her mouth. Marlyne then took a sip from Steven’s glass of whiskey. With her eyes closed and her head slightly tilted back, she swallowed some of it with deliberate slowness in an embarrassing imitation of incredible erotic pleasure. Then, with a flick of the tongue, an accidental amount of whiskey flowed back out her mouth over her chin and dripped down along her neck. The suggestive innuendo was lost neither on her nor Steven. She quickly wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and burst out in uncontrollable laughter.

Steven put his head down, covered his forehead and eyes with his hand, fingers open pretending to have gone into hiding, furtively scanning his surroundings, praying no one was watching.

‘Well, I guess you got the picture right? Happy now?’

Steven looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Christ, Marlyne, I didn’t ask for the whole porn show.’

Marlyne laughed. ‘I’m just teasing you. It was just a one-night stand, for Pete’s sake, that’s all. It was nice, but we don’t have to write a thesis about it now either.’

‘Very funny, Marlyne. You know, you can be downright embarrassing at times.’

‘Like now?’

‘Yes, like now.’

‘Good. I’m glad you enjoyed the show.’

His discomfort was quite hilarious for her devious little mind. She continued. ‘The thing is, you see. I didn’t come here to get laid. I just wondered if I could get a ride out of this dirty town with all its intrigue. I'm bored, and I want to do something different.’

‘So not even a tiny one-night stand then, just for fun?’

She smiled one of her cheeky yet enigmatic smiles. ‘You don’t give up, do you? If I want to get laid, you’ll know all about it… I’ll be the one doing all the seducing, all by myself like a big girl.’

‘Really? Well, when can you start?’

She put her elbows on the table, resting her chin on her intertwined fingers, looking straight into the eyes. More than one had mistaken her sensuality for being easy and available, and more than one had collided with the sharp edge of her brain instead of being rewarded with a night of passion.

With a seductive purr, she went on the offensive.

‘Well, you see, there’s a problem with that. If I’m not mistaken, that shiny ring on your finger tells me you have a wife sitting somewhere in faraway Melbourne or wherever she lives.’

Again taken aback, Steven looked at the ceiling, blowing air. About to say something, she again cut him off.

‘The problem with wives is, you never know when they suddenly take a notion to check on their philandering husbands, and it would be quite embarrassing if she finds you in my bed. Mind you, maybe Sheila would like to join us for a threesome - I’ve never tried it, but I’ve been told it’s great fun.’ The smile on her face was unbearably mocking.

Steven rolled his eyes at the ceiling in despair. ‘Jesus, Marlyne, are you through? You don’t know when to stop, do you.’

‘No, I’m having a wonderful time just thinking about it.’ She said with exaggerated dreaminess.

Steven’s eyes were throwing daggers.’

She threw up her hands. ‘OK, you want me to stop? Fine, no more.’

Biting her lip, she momentarily looked out into the garden, beyond the pool, into the darkness. Then, in a more serious and much gentler tone, she continued. ‘Look, Steve, I mean, I like you, really, but platonically, and that’s exactly why we shouldn’t sleep together. People are unkind, people talk, and we shouldn’t hurt anyone - and - I don’t want to get hurt, OK? I have my own reasons, Steve. Let’s just keep it nice.’

For Steven, Marlyne was both sensual and puzzling, but it suddenly struck him that she may have secrets. He wondered if, behind the façade of bravado, there wasn’t something fragile hiding deep inside her. Why else would she be out here, in Vietnam, of all places? He decided to leave it alone for fear of stepping on a raw nerve.

Across the table, he took her hand, she did not draw away. ‘I’m sorry,’ he began, ‘I shouldn’t have pushed you. Look, um… forget about it; I’m sure you’re right. Just friends OK?

‘So, you still want to hitch a ride out there?’ With his other hand, he made a gesture indicating the world, somewhere far away.

‘Yah, I do.’ She answered softly.

‘Jesus… Marlyne, people are beginning to leave the country; there’s a bad omen hanging in the air. But you want to go out there and see for yourself.’ He hesitated and then continued. ‘You’re a bit of a mystery girl, you know. You waltz in, play some tennis, join a party sometimes and disappear. The gossip machine springs into action when someone finally makes out with you. But no one knows anything about you or what goes on behind those beautiful eyes. No one knows where you are during the day or what you do. And now suddenly, you want to join the war party -Jesus Marlyne, I worry about you.’

She gave a barely perceptible shrug with her right shoulder; the expression on Marlyne’s face could have been interpreted as Well, there you have it. But she remained silent.

‘I’m going to get a piece of paper.’ Steven said. I’ll write down what you must do to get your ride.’ He walked to the bar, ordered two more drinks, and returned with a pen and blank paper. He began to write down a few instructions and several names. When he was done, he shoved it over the table to Marlyne.

‘Here you go, good luck.’

Marlyne read the note carefully and then looked up. ‘What? That easy? That’s all it takes?’

‘Well, a smile might help.’

‘And what do I do if the officer in charge also expects a bit of satisfaction behind the shed?’

Steven laughed. ‘You’re not their type, honey. They’re not into Western women. You’re too tall, too voluptuous, too fit, and big tits scare them.

They both laughed.

Marlyne finished her drink and then got up. ‘I should go home. Thank you, Steven, you’re a good sport.’

‘Yeah, and you’re a tease.’

‘I know. I’m a tease when needed, and you deserved a good tease.’ She then briefly but firmly placed a kiss on his lips.

Looking up, he smiled a sad smile. ‘Be careful. Look after yourself, Marlyne. It’s not a game out there, you know.’ He shook his head slowly and repeated the last words. ‘Not a game. Don’t become an adrenaline junky. It will come back to bite you later in life - providing you still have a life.’

‘I’ll be alright; I know how to look after myself.’

‘Yeah? Well, start by going to the market and buy everything you can find. Jungle boots, American Olive Drab shirt and trousers, the Vietnamese ones won’t fit you, belt, water canteens,and flashlight. Buy it all. Don’t stand out. Look just like one of them. Tie your hair back and hide it. And when someone shouts: incoming! You don’t stand around like a dummy. You hit the deck fast, you hear.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

‘I’ll miss you.’

‘I know… I’ll remember that too.’ Marlyne turned round, and as she walked out, despite the heat, a creepy chill crept over her, like a premonition that she may never be back, for her life was about to change.

Late at night, in her bedroom, she stood in front of the window after the curfew sirens had wailed their morose warning. Looking out over the river, she saw a flash, and then, after a short while, she heard a faint but unmistakable boom. She followed a few random tracers hugging the pitch-black horizon. Marlyne closed the curtains and glanced at the paper in her hands, and the uneasy feeling came over her again. My god, what have I done? But she knew that the piece of paper she held in her hand was more than a ticket-to-ride; it was a magnet drawing her into the unknown.

If we have to believe in the art of astrology then we may well be predestined to follow a specific path in life because allegedly, our “destiny” is written in the stars; one day you’ll get there whether you want to or not. Fate doesn’t seem to care much about the potholes along the road or the bridges that have collapsed along the way; apparently, fate simply goes around it or swims to the other side.

And so December 1970 would be the last time that I climbed out of the turret of a Centurion tank destined for the Iron curtain in West Germany. It would be another seven years, however, after a lot of blood, sweat and tears, before I would, at last reach my destiny and climb into the cockpit of an airplane. Yet, before that was allowed to happen, the stars had suddenly realized they had missed out on an entire chapter and they quickly arranged for a few serious potholes and collapsed bridges along the road. Jupiter, shining bright, looked down on me saying something like, “What are you complaining about boy? You’re the one who at school was always dreaming, no let me correct that, fantasying about Africa or the Amazon or whatever, deep impenetrable jungles, adventure and all that sort of things; now you’re there, so enjoy it and stop annoying me by pretending you don’t like it, you’ll get used to it, they all do.”

‘Yah well,’ I said, ‘you don’t have to take everything serious you know, we were just teenagers for Pete’s sake, it just looked romantic from a distance.’

‘Oh but it is romantic… and deadly.’

In the back I heard Venus say; “Yah, just like you are dreaming of Claudia Cardinale or Annita Ekberg right?”

‘Well we can dream, can’t we? Who rattled your cage anyway? Do you too have a plan for me? like a cross-eyed fat blob girlfriend just to piss me off or what?’ I answered full of defiance.

‘Oh no, not at all darling, on the contrary, along your road I have scattered a few very interesting specimens, both blonde and dark-haired, but before you can hold her hand you will first have to survive… because you see, my friend Mars too has a plan for you, but for now, that can wait – meanwhile, have fun, enjoy the ride, it’s going to be interesting.’

‘That’s very comforting, thank you.’ I answered sarcastically.

Thus ended my private conversation with the stars and I was now hanging over the railing looking full of wonder at the Atlantic Ocean gliding by under the troop-transport ship taking me to a faraway Dutch colony called, “Suriname”, nestled between French Guiana and ex-British Guiana… most of it covered by Amazonian Jungles. How had that happened? Well, it all began sometime in 1969, just after I had finished a stint of fourteen months in Israel, another adventure I should perhaps write about one day. But all good things come to an end, at some stage life gets in the way; it was time to get a job. Through a Dutch friend of mine, dating back to our school days in Switzerland, I somehow landed a job in a thriving import-export company in Amsterdam. Now Amsterdam might be a fun city with great Indonesian food, glamorous restaurants, great bars and fast women and I’m sure the job would have been interesting, but deep in there, somewhere hidden in the back of my head, I felt that I belonged in the cockpit of an airplane. Flying a desk was not quite my idea of fun, no matter how promising.

“Oh you want to fly?” the recruiter said. ‘Well, you’re not the only one nor can I promise you’ll even get close to an airplane but sign here boy and we’ll call you for the selection program… you do realise only the best get in right.”

‘Yeah, yeah of course, now, can I borrow your pen please?’

Hah, when we were young we were so full of shit and of course, we knew everything and we knew nothing. Well, after four days of rigorous testing, mainly academic, a Sergeant Major called me in and announced I had not made the grade, I wasn’t going to go on to the next stage - the physical. Another broken dream I guess - at least for the immediate future.

‘You can re-apply in two years from now boy,' he said, 'gives you time to grow up. Say, while you’re here, why don’t you join up in the meantime?’

Yes why don’t I? I’ve got nothing better to do anyway, or do I? And so in the late spring 1970, I found myself in Amersfoort in the Prince Willem III barracks and its prestigious cavalry school. At the back of the building, there were still rings on the walls where once upon a time soldiers had attached their horses. Of course, the cavalry soldiers had long since traded in their horses for Centurion and Leopard tanks and armoured personnel carriers.

After six months, during a conversation with a Master Sergeant, talking about the Korean War his memories drifted towards the colonies, faraway places like Indonesia, New Guinea and - Suriname.

I must have sighed, ‘those were the days eh? But those places are all long since gone now right?’

‘No, not all, we still have a few.

‘We still have colonies?’ I asked surprised. ‘You mean like Curaçao or Aruba and those islands?’ ‘No, No sir, those are for the Navy and the Marines, sissy stuff, white beaches and warm water. No, we’re talking about Suriname here, pure jungle and adventure, this is for real soldiers. They are the last of the Colonial Army; no one gets sent out there you know, it’s an all-volunteer regiment, completely different from the regular army. Guys going out there have to be motivated and have a taste for adventure.’

Unfortunately, today I can’t remember his name but if there is one thing I do remember about the old sergeant, is that he certainly was a “motivator”. Throughout the time I spent in the Cavalry, he was always looking to get the best out of us, sniffing out leadership qualities, never shy to bestow praise and reward on us. It was no accident that thanks to Sergeant “Motivator”, within a month I had signed on for a minimum of twelve months of service in the Colonial Army.

After spending Christmas with my mother, in my home town Lausanne, I took the train back to Holland and reported for duty at the Isabella Military Barrack in Den Bosch. Ten days later, on the fifth of January 1971, our transport ship, the Oranje Nassau left the port of Amsterdam, to the tune of a military band. Parents and probably a few tearful girlfriends were frantically waving their soldier boyfriends’ goodbye for at least a year. I suspect some will have received a “dear John” letter at some stage during their long separations, but that’s the risk of joining Her Majesty’s Colonial Regiment for a lengthy service in her overseas dominions; most, like myself, were unattached.

Soon we crossed the North Sea for a short stop at South Hampton and then for fifteen days nothing but the Atlantic Ocean.

The two platoons with several individual soldiers, chauffeurs, cooks, mechanics and such, were quartered  somewhere down there on lower decks of the ship, in, what once upon a time was called - steerage. Officers, none commissioned-officers and a few others were billeted in cabins on the upper decks.

Four of us occupied the last cabin at the stern of the ship adjacent to the nursery. If I recall well there were two ladies taking care of half a dozen children and by the time we reached the Gulf of Biscay – in the middle of the winter – the ladies were going to have their hands full, as all hell broke loose. All-round windows allowed an almost hundred-and-eighty degree view from the nursery to what lay beyond, and the view it offered was both beautiful and scary; while the bow of the ship plunged head-on into the waves, the stern heaved out of the water and all we could see for a short moment was the grey clouds hanging low over the ocean; simultaneously we heard the propellers turning into thin air before crashing back down into the water - then all we saw were the waves, a raging ocean in full turmoil. One of my roommates, Ed, was seated in the lotus position in front of the door in the corridor in a state of catatonic meditation pretending it wasn’t happening. Another guy whose name I can’t remember managed to fall asleep on his knees with his arse in the air waking up the next morning in exactly the same position.

I went on deck for some air and was rewarded with generous amounts of seawater in my face. One of the soldiers, who had somehow managed to climb the stair from the inner bowels of the ship, was ostensibly experiencing the ultimate show of his life as he repeated over and over howls like, ‘Wonderful, wow, look at that one, beautiful’, and contrarily to various other landlubbers, there was nothing wrong with his stomach. I think he could have spent the entire day up there on the deck admiring the fury of nature if it wasn’t for members of the crew ordering us inside for safety reasons. The show lasted about four days and then one morning we woke up to a far calmer sea with sunny skies and we began sailing from winter into summer and eventually into more tropical latitudes; the remainder of the voyage was a lot more like a pleasure cruise.

But, good things seem to have the annoying habit of coming to an abrupt end, and so after fifteen, perhaps sixteen days at sea, the Oranje Nassau at last, slowly sailed up the twenty-kilometre long estuary of the Suriname River. As we passed Nieuw Amsterdam, the south bank of the river appeared green and dark, our first glimpse at "jungle". The gentle tropical sea breeze had now been replaced by an all-encompassing humid heat that clung to us like a hot wet cloth.

After an hour on the river, the ship moored on the Waterkant near Ford Zeelandia. I don’t remember much about the arrival but I’m fairly sure there was no military band welcoming us, there was, however a line of three-ton trucks awaiting us and our belongings for transport to the military camp (PBK – Prins Bernard Camp) in Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname.

At PBK we were welcomed by the commander of the Colonial Troops in Suriname, a Colonel, who without any doubt told us that contrarily to appearances, we were not an occupation force, on the contrary, we were here to protect the population and the realm, consequently, we were expected to act accordingly. However, under this thin veneer of respectability, it was clear that above all we were here to keep order, discourage revolt and dissuade hostile neighbours from invading the country to get their hands on the lucrative bauxite business that anything from beer cans to airplanes is made out of – aluminium.

To achieve all that with a minuscule armed force of less than a thousand men in a country of 163,821 km², we occupied a small number of Forward Operating Bases, some of them looking suspiciously similar to FBO bases in Vietnam during that same period, complete with sandbags and watch towers. The welcome speeches were followed by some colourful advice from the medical officer who instructed us on personal hygiene and to change underwear and jungle fatigues every day, ‘Don’t worry about using up jungle boots and uniforms, we’ve got plenty of them. Oh, and for those of you who are destined for the infantry you won’t spend much time in the city but if you feel the urge to visit the “ladies of the night”, you may find them not particularly enticing. Should you nevertheless feel that you have to put this to the test then don’t be surprised if, during the act of copulation, you feel something dripping on your back, more than likely the lady is peeling an orange simultaneously between two pretended ooh’s and ah’s.’

After some good-natured laughter, we were off to supplies to be equipped with a rather long list of everything we were going to need for our year-long stay.

At the supply facility, Captain De Bruin, our company commander, later promoted to Major, was seated on a swivel chair perpendicular to a desk, leaning back with his legs straight in front of him and lazily tapping the cursor of a typewriter like a machine gun. He had that light around him, that aura, almost like a film star, like John Wayne. He was a big guy, with broad shoulders who looked everything like a leader. He had that slight air of amusement, calmly observing every man standing in line soon to be equipped. He must have been thinking, ‘You poor suckers, you have no idea what’s awaiting you, have you?’

By the time we came out of the supply depot we looked a lot more like World War Two soldiers on our way to fight the Japs or Indonesian guerrillas than a modern army, heavily laden with a long list of equipment, from backpacks, mosquito nets, to helmets, machetes, a stack of fatigues and Khakis, and oh, and a lightweight semi-automatic carbine, the legendary .30 calibre M1 Carbine. Mine was made by Winchester; others were manufactured by car companies like General Motors, all of them manufactured during W.W. II. Many of them were later used in Korea and Vietnam – and now by us.

Meanwhile, I had now officially become a member of an all-volunteer crack infantry battalion, for the time being, attached to the 4^th platoon of the Alpha Company, a black beret, a tank boy without a tank on my way to becoming a jungle fighter and a green beret. At that time most of the boys had no idea how special they were; only a minuscule fraction of the armed forces was selected to go to the colonies and all of them had to volunteer for at least a year, and when their time was done and the last of the last would leave in December 1975, just like the Indonesian Colonial Army (KNIL), they too would become “The Forgotten Army”, relegated to the dustbin of history.

But we weren’t there yet, instead, once again we boarded our designated trucks for the journey to our first destination: Zanderij, BBZ, a jungle training camp situated right at the edge of the Jungle and the adjacent savanna. Apart from a training facility, Zanderij also had another function; it was strategically situated very close to the main airport; clearly its secondary function was to protect the airport in case of trouble. After a trip of about ninety minutes, (?) the trucks suddenly stopped in the middle of nowhere and we were politely but urgently asked to get the hell out of the vehicles and leave our belongings behind except of course for our weapon. The road on both sides was surrounded by thick jungle and nowhere to go. In Paramaribo however, a sergeant first-class, one of several Dutch Indonesians had joined us and he was now clearly taking the lead, officers present or not.

He led us along a narrow path till we reached a railroad track laid down on sand surrounded by thick forest on all sides, a bit reminiscent of the railroad featured in: the “Last train out of the Katanga”.

We began moving in a long single file towards the darkening tunnel of vegetation where the track seemed to disappear swallowed up by the jungle never to be seen again. Just at the moment, however, when everyone began to feel relaxed, a machine gun, hidden a mere hundred meters ahead of us, opened fire on us with a deafening roar. Untrained soldiers stood around doing nothing. Lieutenant Moone of the 3^rd platoon and I were the only soldiers that had been under fire in other parts of the world and both of us began yelling to get troops moving up the berm and into the forest. I had nothing to command at all because that should have been the job of another lieutenant in charge, but old habits kick in instantaneously. After a little moment of noise and smoke the gun ceased firing and the Indonesian Drill Sergeant yelled, ‘It’s all right now ladies, you can all come out of hiding, that was just the camp’s welcoming comity. By the way, obviously, those were blanks but many of you are dead anyway because most of you stood around doing nothing… Now line up and continue.’

It may have been another kilometre, or it may have been less, but somehow, we reached the famous Zanderij Military Camp where we were welcomed with a lukewarm soft drink, called a “Soffie”. It was the tradition on arrival, to empty our “Soffies”, a sweet drink in one go.

‘Gentlemen,’ Captain de Bruin said in a calm voice, ‘welcome to your new home for the next two and a half months. You are now members of a unique regiment, the only true Colonial Regiment left; tomorrow you will begin your training, you will learn how to live and survive in the jungle, you will learn how to patrol and fight in a challenging environment. At the end of that period you will come out as true jungle fighters just like the previous colonial troops in Indonesia and New-Guinee and those who fought the Japs during World War Two – make me proud, and above all, make yourself proud.’

Thus began the first day of our four-hundred and fifty days in various camps and the jungles of Suriname, including the sea voyages – many of us counted the days but for all of us, it was also the greatest adventure ever.

Excerpt of Chapter 4, "The mission That Never Was"

‘So, you still want to hitch a ride out there?’ With his other hand he made a gesture indicating the world around them somewhere far away.

‘Yah, I do.’ She answered softly.

‘Jesus… Marlyne, people are beginning to leave the country; there’s a bad omen hanging in the air. But you, you want to go out there and see for yourself…’ He hesitated and then continued. ‘You’re a bit of a mystery girl really, you know. You waltz in, play a bit of tennis; join a party sometimes and disappear. When someone finally makes out with you the gossip machine springs into action. But no one really knows anything about you or what goes on behind those beautiful eyes. No one knows where you are during the day or what you do. And now suddenly, you want to join the war party… Jesus Marlyne, I worry about you.’

She gave a barely perceptible shrug with her right shoulder and the expression on Marlyne’s face could have been interpreted as: Well, there you have it. But she remained silent.

‘I’m going to get a piece of paper.’ Steven said. I’ll write down what you have to do to get your ride.’ With that he walked to the bar, ordered two more drinks and came back with a pen and blank paper. He began to write down a few instructions and several names. When he was done he shoved it over the table to Marlyne.

‘Here you go… good luck.’

Marlyne read the note carefully and then looked up. ‘What? That easy? That’s all it takes?’

‘Well, a smile might help.’

‘And what do I do if the officer in charge also expects a bit of satisfaction behind the shed?’

Steven couldn’t help but laugh. ‘You’re not their type honey. They’re not into Western women. You’re scary to them; too tall, too voluptuous, too fit, too much tit and too much down there.’

‘Too much of what? Oh I see…’

They both laughed.

Marlyne finished her drink and then got up. ‘I should go home. Thank you Steven, you’re a good sport.’

‘Yeah, and you’re a tease.’

‘I know. Sometimes when needed I’m a tease and you deserved a good tease.’ Marlyne said and then firmly but briefly placed a kiss on his lips.

Looking up he smiled a sad smile. ‘Be careful. Look after yourself Marlyne. It’s not a game out there you know.’ He shook his head slowly and repeated the last words. ‘Not a game. Don’t become an adrenaline junky. It will come back to bite you later in life… providing you still have a life.’

‘I’ll be alright; I know how to look after myself.’

‘Yeah? Well start by going to the market and buy everything you can find. Jungle boots, American Olive Drab shirt and trousers, the Vietnamese ones won’t fit you… belt, water canteens, flash light. Buy it all. Don’t stand out. Look just like one of them, tie your hair back and hide it and when someone shouts: incoming! You don’t stand around like a dummy. You hit the deck, fast, you hear.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

‘I’ll miss you.’

‘I know… I’ll remember that too.’ Marlyne turned round and as she walked out, in spite of the heat, a creepy chill crept over her, like a premonition that she may never be back, for her life was about to change.

Late at night, in her bedroom, after the curfew sirens had wailed their morose warning, she stood in front of the window. Looking out over the river she saw a flash, then after a short while she heard a faint but clear boom. She followed a few random tracers hugging the pitch black horizon. Marlyne closed the curtains and glanced at the paper in her hands and the uneasy feeling came over her again. My god, what have I done? But she knew that what she held in her hand was more than a ticket-to-ride; it was a magnet drawing her into the unknown.

Just a bit of fun.

Monday night, thanks to a little virus going by the dubious name of Covid 19, was the last night restaurants, bars and cafés were legally open, at least for the foreseeable future. So, what better place to drown our sorrow than in our local pub in the company of friends? We welcomed them all warmly onto the deck of the Titanic waiting for it to sink into a distant memory of normality – consequently, we did the only thing one can do under the circumstances, namely, drink (copiously), talk and make merry; the only thing missing was the orchestra playing its morose tune while the minutes ticked away and the bow all too fast disappeared under the waves… fifteen minutes left to get into the sloops and row home.

The next morning we woke up in an empty world, a world of desolation with very little to look forward to. It hasn’t changed my nocturnal habits though. Late at night, after the usual TV session, movies or series, I go out for a short walk, a habit left over from the days when I walked my dog before going to bed, but he's long since gone, so now all I do is take myself for a walk in the calmness of the night, after curfew, when all are supposed to be confined to their homes – except for me of course.

I like the night, the night is my friend, whether in the jungles of South East Asia, the desert or here for that matter, the enemy can’t see me, but I can see him. I watch the empty streets in the distance, or the hotel, rebuilt and finished just in time to open during the first days of the pandemic and then shut the day after. Now no more than a dark blob on the horizon, it too sank like the Titanic beneath the waves – who knows, maybe one day it will find a new investor who will raise it out of the darkness like a Phoenix.

In the distance I watch the blue lights on a cop's car, prowling the streets but, already, he’s of no concern to me. Neither is the town on the other side of the bay, its lights already sparse and dimmed in surrender; instead, I lift my head and observe the eternal stars in the ink dark sky. I observe Orion, now dominating the Southeastern sky. The constellation observes me with cool contempt, as more than likely it observed the Pharaohs with equal contempt, or perhaps, with amusement. My thoughts wander and I ponder, what on earth made the Egyptians think the Pharaoh would sail to Orion? Then again they did not call it Orion; to the old Egyptians it was Osiris, and Osiris was a god, a god who would look favourably on his flock and welcome the Pharaoh in his midst. But, if the Pharaoh had known that Orion was a bloody hundred-and-forty light-years away, would he still be so eager to get there? He would have to sail at the speed of light if he wants to get there at all or it may take a lot longer. There again, he has all the time in the world – as far as we know, "being dead" is a rather lengthy affair. But don’t take my word for it. After all, many civilisations have turned being dead into an entire cult. If the Egyptians and the Tibetan Book of the Dead are anything to go by, then maybe there is something behind the bright light that everyone who comes back from the dead swears to have seen.

So were our ancestors onto something? Something that is lost to us? Did they really know what lies beyond “the light”? Do we sail on? And then there is that other thing, that thing that Hinduism is quite fond of – reincarnation. Oh dear, I never liked that term, as I may already have mentioned in my short story, “The Miller’s Wife”, but neither can I discount it. If it exists, regrettably I have no memory of a past life. Having said that, it is entirely possible that as a Centurion in Rome’s ill-fated Ninth Legion I may have crossed Hadrian’s Wall in pursuit of a wild tribe and disappeared forever from the pages of history never to be seen again, which of course may explain why I don't remember it... Ave Caesar!

And so, with so many questions and no answers – for the time being – it may be better to follow Alice's advice while wandering through our own Wonderland, “Keep your head!”

Retreat.

We had found the militia soldier slumped forward over the wheel of his jeep with the engine still idling. For how many hours had he sat there? For how many hours had his lifeless eyes been looking at his equally lifeless wife and his mother, or perhaps his mother-in-law, lying in the doorway of what may well have been a house of a certain standing, now of no further use to anyone. The few remaining Rangers unceremoniously dragged the man from behind the wheel and dumped the body alongside the two dead women. After what had seemed like hours of artillery bombardment, it was now eerily silent . The only sound that disturbed the silence was the crackle of slow-burning fires consuming the wood in nearby houses, now no more than ruins.
Six of us piled up into the jeep, and another five or six remaining soldiers squeezed into the little trailer, and we left the pathetic scene behind forever - or perhaps it was not forever. Occasionally, without asking for permission, my brain revisits the silent scene and watches the man who had hoped to escape the onslaught with his wife, still sitting slumped over the wheel, maybe he too he had hoped it was all an illusion, it never happened - but it wasn’t, it was all very real.
We drove out of the side street and joined the main road out of town. There, too, there was only silence now; The North Vietnamese were probably still busy trying to get around their disabled tank through the rubble that they had created with their hours of bombardment. The overloaded jeep and its trailer must have been a sight to behold had anyone alive witnessed it. He would have seen arms, legs and weapons sticking out on all sides and men with blank faces staring into nothingness. It was all that remained of a hastily put-together platoon of Rangers, Strikers and National Police; over half of them now lay among the rubble, presumed dead or “missing in action”. But even of that, I couldn’t be sure. “Leave no man behind” was not an option today; the North Vietnamese had quite literally bulldozed us out of town.
The scene on the road to salvation was even more pathetic; along both sides of the road lay the bodies of refugees who had not managed to reach the helicopters we now heard whirling in the air. They were mainly the elderly, women and small children. Here and there, among the small gardens of the houses adjacent to the road, South Vietnamese soldiers who had stood their ground lay among the rubble. A water buffalo dragged by a rope by an older man lay dead along the road with all four legs strangely pointing towards safety, but he never got there.
Walking among the dead, perhaps the most poignant sight was that of a South Vietnamese soldier, still wearing his helmet and flak jacket but no weapon; instead, in his arms, he delicately carried a dead child rolled in a rattan mat with only its little legs sticking out, dangling and swinging with each step the soldier took on his aimless journey through a wasteland of destruction. We watched silently without seeing… or maybe we did see, but we did not want to see it.
And Lucifer said, ‘Give me your hand, walk with me for a while, and I’ll give you a glimpse of my world.’

This memento also features towards the end of the book I wrote about our experiences towards the end of the Vietnam War. The original chapter is longer and tells the story how we got trapped in a small town/village of no importance and our rather dramatic escape.

James Delahaye.

Marcus Lucius walked into his office, opened the two clasps on his armour and removed the white cloak from his shoulders. Dorian, who until only two years ago had been a slave, approached and quickly, in a well-practised gesture, undid the three straps on either side of the front and backplate and then removed the Centurion's expensive armour and carefully hung it on the wooden stand. Marcus gave his servant a nod.

‘Bring us some wine, Dorian.’ glancing at the Praetorian standing in the doorway, he added, ‘him too.’

Dorian poured two goblets of watered-down red wine, handed one to Marcus, and then walked over to the Praetorian. When he returned to the table, he filled another earthen cup for himself and took a generous swig. Marcus and Dorian had been together in the Eastern provinces for several years, and when it was time for them to leave, Marcus set his slave free. However, Dorian had no desire to return to his native Macedonia; instead, he chose to stay with the Centurion and the legion and followed him to their new posting in Barcino. With time, Dorian had become more of a confidant and a friend than a servant. The same could not necessarily be said for the Praetorian soldier gulping down his wine as fast as he could.

‘What is your name, Praetorian?’

Plubius Cassius … Centurion.

‘And what brings you here today?’ Marcus already guessed the answer, more than likely, he and his fellow soldiers were here to enforce the latest laws of religious compliance laid down by Emperor Diocletian, who demanded a return to past Roman glory, and that included strict adherence to the cult of Jupiter and Venus, to name a few. Christians had been tolerated depending on which Emperor reigned and, above all, on the Christians' behaviour and allegiance to the emperor. But Marcus knew only too well that lately, fanatical Christians have been making a nuisance of themselves and Diocletian, just like Valerian and previous emperors, was going to put an end to it and demand strict compliance.

‘I have a prisoner, sir, a young woman. She was creating problems in front of the temple of Jupiter, something about there being only one god, and she refused to burn incense and honour Jupiter.

Here we go again, Marcus thought as he glanced at Dorian, who shook his head in a deliberately slow movement. Together during their tours in Phrygia, they had shared many philosophical discussions about religion, and the one thing they agreed on was that neither of them cared much about the gods, no matter which house, sect or cloud they came from.

‘And where is this prisoner of yours?'

The Praetorian pointed down with his fingers towards the floor.

‘Ah, but of course, in the dungeons. Well, go and get her - so we can all see how dangerous this Christian is.’

The Praetorian turned on his heels and left the room. Marcus slumped down on his chair behind the imposing oak table, placed his elbow on the table and sank his chin into his hand. He gave Dorian a sideways look but said nothing.

‘Something on your mind Marcus?’

‘Yes, you're slacking; it’s chilly in here; put a few logs on that miserable fire before the fire itself freezes over.’

‘Oh, sorry.’ Dorian jumped up from his chair and went to work, poking the fire with a stick and throwing a few logs on the glowing embers. Immediately, the fireplace sprang alive in a shower of sparks, and then the wood caught fire as the flames began their slow dance from log to log and then up into the chimney.

Marcus gazed out the window towards the forest-covered mountains, dark and foreboding. ‘Another damn winter in Barcino,’ he said, ‘can’t wait for spring to arrive and get a bit of heat from that sun.’

‘Well, it’s already February, it won’t be long now…’

‘Hmm,’ Marcus grunted.

But their discussion about the weather in northern Hispania was rudely interrupted when two Praetorian soldiers flung the door open, dragging a barefoot girl between them, wearing no more than a long-sleeved cotton tunic that did not quite reach her ankles.

The two soldiers placed the young girl in front of the desk facing the Centurion and took two steps back. Marcus looked her over, beginning at her bare feet and finally coming to rest, looking straight into her dark brown eyes. She had long black hair reaching the small of her back and an innocent-looking face resting on a slender frame. She was quite pale for a Mediterranean girl. Probably not a farmer’s daughter, Marcus thought.

Dorian was standing to the side of the Centurion’s desk with his arms crossed in front of his chest. ‘So, this is the girl who is going to cause the downfall of the empire?’ he asked with apparent sarcasm.

Marcus couldn’t help an amused smirk when he asked, ‘Yes, and where are her sandals... and surely she had a stole.’

The Praetorian shrugged, ‘Don’t know, maybe in the dungeons, or maybe we lost it.’

The second Praetorian seemed to find that funny as he slapped her head hard from behind, asking, ‘Yes, where’s your stole, little Christian?’

Marcus gave him a meaningful look and then leaned back into his chair. ‘Take off those manacles.’

‘Take them off, sir?’

‘Yes, she’s hardly going to jump on the desk and slit my throat now, is she?’

A moment later, the iron manacles clattered noisily on the marble floor, and the girl rubbed her painful wrists with her hands, but she remained silent.

Marcus addressed the Praetorian, who apparently was in control, ‘What’s the charge?’

‘She was standing in front of the temple of Jupiter arguing with citizens who wanted to enter, telling them that our gods don’t exist, that they are fake and false gods, and that there is only one God, something about a guy called Christ or maybe was it the other one, Jesus, I can’t remember. Whatever it is, she's in violation of our Emperor Diocletian decrees; she’s instigating subversion.’

Marcus leaned forward, resting his right arm on the oak table. ‘What is your name, girl?’

‘I’m Orelia from Merida, a citizen of Rome.’ She answered surprisingly sure of herself in perfect Latin.

‘Really, are you now? And how old are you, Orelia?

She looked at the ceiling as if trying to remember her age. ‘I’m thirteen years old.’

‘Thirteen,’ Marcus repeated, eyeing the Praetorian; he then repeated the figure, this time looking at Dorian, who raised his eyebrows while lifting one shoulder as if trying to convey, don’t look at me, I only work here.

‘So what have you got to say for yourself, girl? Are you telling people there is only one god? And, of course, conveniently, that happens to be your god, right? .’ If Marcus was hoping that she would reconsider her opinion he was going to be disappointed.

In complete defiance, she proclaimed there was only one God. ‘Yes, the Lord Jesus is our true God; Jupiter and the others are all fake.’

Marcus closed his eyes and cringed. As far as he was concerned, they were all fake gods, but in front of the accusing Praetorian, that was not the answer he had hoped for.

Of course, Marcus and Dorian were perfectly aware of this new religion that had been causing problems throughout the Empire, but he decided to see how much she actually knew about Christianity - was she a fanatic, or did Orelia just repeat words she had heard in her home?

‘So you are a Christian then, right?’

‘Yes.’

'Yes, Centurion!' The Praetorian said as he gave her another slap on the back of her head.

Marcus ignored it. ‘And this Christ, or Jesus, where did he come from?’

Again, Orelia looked at the ceiling as if the answers might be written up there or heaven itself may present all the answers. ‘From… em, from the east, I think they call it Judea or something like that… he was the son of God.’

‘The son of God?’ Marcus repeated. ‘So let's see, that’s two gods then?’ holding up his index and middle finger.

‘Em, yes, I suppose so, we all have a father, don’t we?’ Orelia answered rather boldly.

‘That is evident, at least for mere mortals like us. So, this god of yours, does he have a mother?’

‘Which one?’ she asked confused.

‘The son, of course.’

‘Oh yes, of course,’ she was eager to answer this question, showing off her newfound knowledge. ‘Her name was Maria.’

‘Ah, so Maria is the wife of the other god then.’ Marcus asked, knowing the answer full well.

‘No, no, she was the wife of a, uh… a carpenter… I think, Joseph, I think.’

‘Excuse me?’ Marcus said.

Dorian shook his head with a sympathetic smile. ‘But child, you just said the younger God, the Christ that is, was the son of the older God,  so we would hope that Maria was his wife, but now you’re telling us that she’s not; now she’s the wife of a carpenter. You’re confusing us.’

Perhaps equally confused, Orelia looked from one to the other and quickly said, ‘It was a miracle… She was a virgin when she gave birth to the Lord.’

‘I’ll say, that certainly was a miracle now, wasn’t it?’ Marcus mused as he placed his elbow on the desk and wearily rested his chin again on his open hand.

The two Praetorians sniggered and then burst out in laughter. ‘Give us a moment with her Centurion, and we’ll show her how it’s really done,’ and he made an obscene gesture by rocking his crotch back and forth.

Marcus frowned, ‘Thank you, you two, you’re dismissed, we’ll take it from here.

They waited till the two Praetorian guards had reluctantly closed the door behind them, and then Marcus gave Dorian a nod to refill their goblets.

He now placed his elbows on the table, intertwined his fingers, and continued his investigation.

‘Sit down on that chair, child. Now listen… do you have any idea how that sounds to the rest of us?’

‘What?’

‘Well, first you tell us there is only one God, but then you tell us he has a son who we must assume is, therefore, probably also a god, presumably from a union between the first god and a goddess called Maria, right? Or maybe she’s only a half goddess; there again, we can’t be sure of that because you said that she was, in fact, married to a carpenter? Despite that, she gives birth to a child that, in reality, belongs to a god… and she does all of that in spite of being a virgin? Interesting family - and you think our gods are weird?’

Orelia looked embarrassed.

Listen, child, I’m trying to save your life here but you’re not doing yourself any favours here now, do you?’

Dorian rolled his eyes at the ceiling while Marcus looked at the alcove on the right side of the large fireplace from where a life-size statue of Jupiter had been contemplating the whole scene in silent indifference.

‘He doesn’t look very impressed by your story, and Venus is even less impressed,’ he said, lifting his chin towards the alcove on the left side of the, by now, blazing fire. Unfortunately, the beautiful, stark naked Venus had been fashioned out of cold marble, or she may well have slapped a hand on her forehead and slowly shaken her head in utter despair.

‘Now you see, you are fortunate that the Tribune is on tour, and you have been brought to my office instead because you see, child, we don’t really believe in either god or goddess, and I don’t believe in yours either, it’s all just… make-believe and frankly… not worth dying for.’

Full of defiance and indignation, Orelia responded, ‘Lord have mercy on them. This is even worse, so you are a godless people then; only followers of Lucifer are godless.’

Dorian frowned, ‘Who? Who’s Lucifer?’

‘Marcus raised his shoulders and looked equally perplexed. ‘Yes child, what is he?’ Yet another god?’

Orelia looked ill at ease, ‘I’m not sure, but he’s powerful, and he rules over everything dark; he’s the enemy of God and those who love God.’

Marcus looked at Dorian and leaned heavily on the table with one arm, ‘So, he’s yet another god then, right?’

‘Dorian nodded, ‘Looks like it, and not very friendly by the sound of it.’

‘No, the Greeks have one of those too, Typhon, if I remember well,' Marcus said. ‘So let’s see, we have god the Father, a sort of Jupiter. Then we have the son who may also be a god, there again, we are not so sure about that. Then we have a half-goddess who may have fathered the child of the real god. Still, we can't be sure about that either because… well, she’s a virgin - and then… we have Lucifer, who clearly is also a god, but he doesn’t like the other god very much, and so he prefers to dwell in the underworld... have I got that right? Because I'm becoming seriously confused here with all these gods and goddesses.’

Orelia gazed at the floor, now becoming even more unsure of herself.

‘Listen, child, we’re getting nowhere here, in fact, you’re digging yourself in deeper and deeper. Every time you open your mouth, you bring in a new god or goddess, and none of them make the Emperor very happy. How can I save you like this.’

‘I don’t need to be saved, Christ will save me.’

‘Oh really?’ Dorian leaned over her chair, coming very close to her face, nearly whispering, ‘The last I heard is that “the one they call the Christ” couldn’t even save himself from a Roman cross nearly three hundred years ago. That’s a long time to be dead, so I doubt very much that he will come and save you today; what do you think?’

At last, Orelia turned to her left and looked at Venus for help while nervously playing with her fingers.

‘It’s not going very well, is it child? Your story doesn’t seem to hold up; something doesn’t quite stick, does it?’

Orelia slowly shook her head while fidgeting nervously.

Marcus got up from behind the massive oak table, walked around and then sat down on the corner of the table with his left leg dangling in front of the young girl. He gave her a long, penetrating look, wondering what he should do about her. If he’d set her free, it probably wouldn't be long, or she’d be in trouble again, but then one never knows – it was worth a try.

‘Now listen carefully, child, it is not important who you or I believe or don’t believe in, but I do believe in the Emperor and the might of Rome, and if it pleases the emperor that we offer or burn incense to Jupiter, Mars, Venus or Isis, well, then, so be it, that’s what we do… I don’t have a problem with that if that’s what’s needed to keep the empire together. Believe me, Orelia, no god is worth dying for.’

He produced a gentle smile and then held out his hand, inviting her to follow him towards the shallow alcove where the statue of Jupiter was still observing them with the same expression of cold indifference.

Dorian dipped two thin sticks from a pedestal in a jar of expensive Frankincense. He then held them over an oil lamp, waited till the smoke and scent began to swirl up towards the heavens and then handed one to the Centurion and one to Orelia.

Marcus said, ‘You may not believe in him, young girl, but trust me, today, Jupiter will save your life.’ So make the right choice because the other option is a slow death, and we don’t want that now, do we?’ He had already heard about enough Christians who martyred themselves, and he half expected her to drop the incense stick. To his relief, however, she placed the smouldering stick in the sand pot at Jupiter's feet where several other sticks had already long since burned out, briefly looked up in awe and mumbled, ‘I swear allegiance to the Emperor.’

Dorian and Marcus breathed a sigh of relief.

‘That wasn’t so difficult now, was it, child?

Orelia said nothing and just shook her head in agreement.

Like a concerned father, Marcus placed a hand on her right shoulder and looked deep into those dark brown eyes, ‘Now listen, I want you to go home and stay out of trouble, you understand? Those Praetorians are dying to torture someone to death; more than likely, they don’t believe in your or my god either; they just want to kill someone and make a show of it. So get out of here.’

Marcus nodded to his servant, ‘Walk her off the premises, Dorian and make sure the Praetorians don’t see her.’

Just as the two were about to leave the room, Marcus called after her,

‘Child, gods and goddesses don’t care whether you live or die or rejoice or suffer, nor will a god or goddess hurt you… but your own mouth will, Orelia, remember that, so go home and make yourself scarce.’

Marcus sat down behind his desk and served himself another cup of wine. He glanced out the window towards the hills and smiled; 'No one died today.' he raised his cup to Jupiter; 'Well done, old man, well done.'

But when Marcus silently peered out the window again, he did not notice that all-knowing Jupiter sadly shook his head ever so slightly, foreseeing a darker future for the Gods and their followers, no matter what creed they were...

James Delahaye.

Appendix:

I don’t usually write anecdotes, but in this particular case, I think I should:

A few years ago, during a visit to Barcelona, my daughter, my wife, and I visited, among others, the Cathedral of Santa Eulalia, named after a thirteen-year-old Christian girl persecuted and subsequently killed by the Romans during the reign of Emperor Diocletian. When I was standing in front of the crypt, peering down at the imposing sarcophagus, presumably holding her martyred bones, I can’t deny that I felt a sensation of awe; cathedrals have very cleverly been designed to have that sort of power over us mere mortals, and the story of her martyrdom is enough to put one off one’s dinner… But is it true?

I began to search where the story came from and embarked on a path with a lot of dead ends and few clear exits, a bit of a labyrinth, really. Apart from the "myth" written down by the Catholic Church, I found no other evidence; apparently, the Romans didn’t bother recording it. Stranger yet, why does this story stand out, and why did they only kill a thirteen-year-old girl when surely, at that time in history, there must have been plenty of other fanatical Christians to choose from? Unfortunately, the records remain silent.

So, my Orelia’s real name was probably Eulalia, at least if the Catholic Church is to be believed. There again, her name may also have been Aulaire or Aulazia. To add to the confusion, both Merida and Barcelona lay claim to her. There again, perhaps she is an amalgamation of both, no one is quite sure. Unfortunately, the church has a dubious track record for creating or inventing saints and martyrs that may or may not have existed. However, Eulalia's story may well have been based, at least partly, on an actual event. She was first buried in the church of Santa Maria de Las Arenes and Canonized in 633. In 1339, the girl was reburied in a brand new Cathedral named after her in Barcelona, the “Cathedral of Santa Eulalia”. Quite an honour isn’t it? An honour that is indeed only reserved for Popes or martyrs.

The problem with becoming a martyr for Christianity is that it seems to be customary that one first has to die, preferably as violently and obscenely as possible.

Therefore, contrary to my happy ending (who wants a sad ending), allegedly, it did not end very well for Eulalia. I will spare you the details, but considering that she was obstinate, it likely ended in a rather gory spectacle. The question, for me, however, is - why? What was so special about her? How could a thirteen-year-old be a threat to the Roman Empire? Unfortunately, no Roman records have ever been found to confirm or deny the incident; we only have the myth as recorded by the church.

The problem with the so-called persecution of Christians is that the Catholic Church has had a bad habit of grossly exaggerating, distorting or even inventing large amounts of casualties. To make matters worse, Hollywood movies have perpetuated some of these myths.

The baffled Romans, however, do have records of Christians intentionally offering themselves as martyrs, but how many is anyone's guess.

Let’s look at a few facts: Rome, Greece, Egypt, and most of the other powers of antiquity were polytheistic, meaning they worshipped various gods and goddesses; it’s a lot saver. After all, if one god or goddess doesn’t bring satisfaction, then maybe another one will come to one’s rescue. Rome, in particular, was relatively tolerant and even revered other religions as long as one also respected Jupiter, their main god. It was not uncommon for the Romans to include other gods and goddesses within their inner circle. Think of Isis, for example, much revered by both the Egyptians and Romans alike. Hadrian had his very own temple to worship her. Obviously, we are not talking here about the psychopathic Islamic extremist group misusing the name Isis; had they existed in antiquity, it is very likely the Romans would have made minced meat of them rather rapidly and with "extreme prejudice".

On the other end of the spectrum, we had the brand new Christian sect, a direct offshoot of Judaism - and back then, they were, and still are, not very tolerant. Monotheistic by nature, they venerate only one God, although that may be debatable, as Centurion Marcus pointed out. The Christians within the Roman Empire may have begun as quite a peaceful sect, but that didn’t last long. They flatly rejected the competition and wasted no time plotting the premature retirement of all other gods and goddesses by any means available, including violence. There is little historical doubt that some of those factions were causing trouble. Radical groups ransacked shrines and temples with the same zeal as Attila the Hun. They set fire to the temples and disfigured the statues of the defenceless gods. Apollo, Jupiter or naked Venus were disfigured with the greatest pleasure and zeal, encouraged by the battle cry: “Let them perish in disgrace”. That sort of destructive behaviour didn’t go down too well in Rome; consequently, from time to time, throughout history, the might of Rome lashed out and condemned a number of them to death.

In Egypt, Cyril of Alexandria encouraged a mob of Christians, led by a lector named Peter, to murder Hypatia, a much revered Hellenistic female Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician - and a follower of the Hellenistic gods. Not long after this cowardly act, they proceeded to destroy the temple. For his troubles, the Catholic Church rewarded Cyril with sainthood; Saint Cyril. So much for the peace-loving portrait the church has painted for itself.

It has been estimated that during a period of about three hundred years, no more than three thousand Christians died at the hand of Romans… or the teeth of hungry lions, another favourite Hollywood portrayal. Whatever the actual number is, and it is probably higher, the church seems to have had a habit of highly exaggerating the persecution of Christians by Rome. In fact, Rome was somewhat reluctant to pursue people for religious offences during that era. Intentional destruction by arson, however, carried an almost certain death sentence; one didn’t have to be Christian to be invited to feed the lions; the law was the same for everyone.

If one compares the alleged persecutions perpetrated by Rome with the St. Bartholomew's Day massacres in Paris and throughout the rest of France, then the Romans are at risk of looking like complete amateurs in the massacre department. During those days of religious hysteria, Catholics and Protestants killed each other at a rate of several hundred a day over a several-week period. It has been estimated that during that short period, between eight to fifteen thousand people died courtesy of religious fervour. And we are not even talking about the Inquisition and the numerous religious wars that preceded or followed these events. Tolerance was definitely not part of their vocabulary.

So where does all that leave Eulalia? The question is problematic because we only have the story as the church tells it, and that is not necessarily the complete truth. What did she do to trigger the wrath of a Roman Tribune, then in charge of Barcino? (Today's Barcelona) Did she just refuse to honour Jupiter and, therefore, insult the Emperor? Or did she commit a more serious crime? Did she knock off the nose and the arms of Venus or Isis with a sledgehammer and then carve a cross on her forehead? Unfortunately, we can never be sure what she was accused of or what happened to this unfortunate girl. Rome left no record.

Consequently, I took the liberty to put myself in the place of Centurion Marcus and lead an entirely fictive investigation. In the end, I concluded that she was just a misguided and indoctrinated girl, so I sent her home, hoping she would stay out of trouble. Alas, the truth is probably a tad more sinister; after all, I am Marcus, a Roman Centurion, and I know the cruelties we are capable of.

Alone in an alien world.

“This is the end my beautiful friend,

The end of our elaborate plan,

The end of everything that stands,

The end,

I’ll never look into your eyes again…”

The Doors.

I can’t quite remember with certainty, but I think it must have been sometime in the early afternoon when the Air Vietnam Boeing 727 hit the tarmac and then slowly taxied towards the main building of Bangkok Airport. Like many airports of its day and age, it was a simple-looking building, more akin to a glorified hangar than the modern glass and steel structures full of buzz and shops of our present age.

Nor did this particular plane have anything in common with the British Airways plane still painted in BOAC leverage, KLM, SAS or Lufthansa planes parked in the vicinity, disgorging tourists tired from their long journey yet full of excitement for their first taste of the Orient and all looking forward to what Thailand had to offer. In contrast, our plane was more like a reflection of where it had originated from – chaos.

I wondered about my co-passengers; some, still wearing olive drab fatigues and cameras hanging around their necks, stuck out as journalists. Others may have been embassy or consular personnel; some were South Vietnamese soldiers. Most, however, were women and children, refugees of all colours and all accents, speaking Vietnamese, French, and, of course, brash American voices. It took a long time for people to begin moving, mainly because most of the luggage and personal belongings cluttered the inside of the cabin instead of the almost empty cargo hold.

Finally, people slowly began to move towards the terminal building, dragging their heavy suitcases or duffle bags – or nothing at all. Inside, they joined the lines for immigration and mingled with ordinary tourists who had no understanding of what had hit them, nor did the Thai officials. There were crying women and screaming kids; Vietnamese soldiers and foreigners alike began unceremoniously to dump M16 rifles, M1 carbines, pistols, revolvers, ammo belts, helmets and flak jackets onto a heap and within no time it became pandemonium. Immigration officers and airport police alike panicked, not knowing how to separate soldiers and heavily armed Westerners from ordinary tourists watching the surrealistic scene with wide-open eyes and probably wondering if they had landed at the wrong airport.

Westerners were separated from Vietnamese, screened and eventually issued with a visa. At last, we got through, and suddenly, I found myself in the arrival hall. Soon after, I joined a Swedish air hostess, her mother, and an English couple with kids. We all climbed aboard a minibus and began our journey towards Bangkok and the Siam Intercontinental Hotel, an oasis of peace and tranquillity situated in the confines of a deer park sheltered from the incessant buzz of the city. The children – a boy dressed in shorts and an impeccable little shirt and a little girl with blond hair wearing an equally impeccable little dress – could not keep their eyes off my person and my camouflage fatigues, my jungle boots still covered in red dust and my flak jacket. People didn’t dare to ask questions; I was a Martian who had just landed on planet Earth, and one never knows with Martians… according to H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, they could be hostile. More likely, however, the Black Tiger emblem on my sleeve with the ominous word “Vietnam” written just above would have told them all they needed to know.

The first thing that struck me was the explosion of colour. Colours were everywhere: on houses, on the numerous Buddhist shrines, on vehicles, trucks and on tuk-tuks. There were flowers of all colours and smiling faces, happy faces, faces that betrayed no fear. Arriving in the hotel for the second time, for me, here too, the high-ceilinged, wood-panelled hall was adorned with an abundance of orchids and flowers of all sorts.

Thai waitresses and check-in personnel put their hands together and bowed as if I were the King himself. I really was a Martian who had just left his barren and ravaged planet behind, and I really had just landed on Earth. The Swedish air hostess, well used to the "real world", gave me a nod and, with a gentle smile, said, 'It’s alright, give her your I.D., she’ll get you a nice room.”

A little later, there was a knock on my door, and a Thai girl wearing an expensive-looking silk sarong presented me with a bowl of exotic fresh fruits of all kinds and smells; she smiled and bowed, and then she was gone. Standing in front of the window in my luxury room with its silk curtains, still wearing my South Vietnamese Ranger camouflage fatigues, I looked out into the lush and well-manicured garden. It must have been then that I began to notice the silence; there were no screaming people, no artillery shells flying overhead on their way to who knows where, and no automatic weapons clattering, distant or close by. Just silence, discomforting and scary silence. . . I was alone in an alien world.

James Delahaye.

The Continental Palace was one of those typical imposing, yet stylish French hotels in Saigon build during the colonial era at the end of the ninetieth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It is the hotel where Graham Greene wrote "The Quiet American". It did not stand alone of course; right across, the French colonials also built, what could arguably be called Saigon’s most beautiful building, The National Assembly – nowadays better known as the Opera House and more than likely used as such by the French and South Vietnamese upper classes during, “The Good Old Days”. Back in my days, however, in 1973 and ‘74, it was surrounded by a fence signalling that it was  off-limits to mere mortals.

On the other side, one would find the Caravel Hotel frequented by anything from journalist to spooks and part-time prostitutes. If one cared to walk down Tu Do Street, (today called Dong Khoi) down to the Saigon River, one would find the most prestigious of them all: The Majestic. It didn’t look like all that much from the outside maybe, but the inside with its mahogany wood panelling and stained glass was worth a visit. Even Catherine Deneuve has stayed there at one time or another.

But a hotel without visitors is like an empty shell, a sad relic of a glorious past no more than a memory. Saigon in the nineteen-seventies was a bustling yet drab and war fatigued city where tourists were a rare commodity, more like an extinct species really. So who then filled the void and occupied the rooms in those once upon a time prestigious hotels?

Looking back, I think there were two types of guest passing through the doors of the Continental Palace, the first category being the “comers and goers”.

The first “goer” I met was a man in his fifties and the distressed “Vietnamese love of his life”. Only now he was on his way back to distant Cincinnati, Ohio, and more than likely back to an equally distant wife who had never been any further than the local grocery store. I don’t even know if he really was in his fifties. Months of having been stationed in a shithole called Pleiku had maybe left his face prematurely aged by war. Then one day they were gone and I never saw them again.

My girlfriend and I were among the second category of guests; the sometimes colourful, and part of a perhaps mysterious assortment of characters that seem to occupy those old colonial rooms on a more or less permanent basis, all artfully busy avoiding one another. A more able author could probably write a book about them.

Take the room next to ours, for instance, it was permanently occupied by a Polish officer belonging to the newly and completely useless entity called the ICCS, or  International Commission of Control and Supervision, better known to us as: “I Can’t Control Shit.” He was a typical sour communist officer, never smiling, never saying a word, making sure he did not see us or even acknowledge our existence despite, my girlfriend’s concerted effort to annoy him by being as noisy as possible during intimate moments, a sure way to make enemies with the frustrated.

Then on the other side, the last room on the corridor was occupied by a Doctor belonging to the Norwegian Air Force, I think his name was Bjørg “Something”. Allegedly he worked for the International Red Cross. How that exactly worked is yet another mystery to me, because you see, the International Red Cross was neither recognised nor allowed to operate in South Vietnam on the basis that North Vietnam refused to recognise the Red Cross and considered them an instrument of the Imperialist West. More likely, it had a lot more to do with the Communists’ more than appalling track record for their treatment of prisoners of war.

Then on the other side of the building, if I recall well, there were a couple of rooms occupied by the news agency: Newsweek. They even had a copper plate on the door advertising their trade. But like most of the tenants of this prestigious hotel, they could prove to be as elusive as any of us. At times I would come across this young English freelance photojournalist smoking a cigarette outside, a tall slender sort of a man, rather like myself and it's likely some people may have confused us for one another. I think his name was also James. Then one day he did not reappear. I later read in a Newsweek magazine that he had been killed, another one gone.

Some rooms were intermittently occupied by people working for various NGO’s, or so they said. They were possibly the most colourful of our distinguished residents. One of them allegedly had been an officer in the Swedish Army while serving for the U.N. in Africa. He had been involved in some vicious firefights back in the days of the Congo crisis. Now, however, he was an overweight middle-aged man involved in providing some sort of aid down in the Mekong Delta, or so it seemed. But with people like this, things are not always what they seem. Other patrons had also served in African countries, Bangladesh or some banana republic in South America, either as soldiers, mercenaries or in relief agencies, but they were always the same people. Consequently, they had a saying among themselves: “First we patch them up, then we shoot them and then we patch them up again", and in a cynical way, there was probably some truth in that, shifting back and forth between someone’s army and then on to a relief agency, albeit not necessarily in the same order or country for that matter.

Without any doubt a number of our esteemed guests were spooks, military contractors and operatives who like ourselves, would disappear for weeks and then just as suddenly reappear calmly sipping a beer on the open terrace watching the animated activity in the streets five steps below.

My girlfriend Marlyne too, I suppose, should be counted as one of those colourful characters. She had come to Vietnam with the Canadian contingent as a nurse; although she was not a member of the ICCS. It did not take long for the Canadians to realise that with 18000 ceasefire violations within five months and an estimated 76000 dead, wounded or missing there was no peace to be kept and so they told the ICCS to stuff it and promptly left Vietnam to its own device. Marlyne however, did not leave, and after a disturbing first experience in the field she promptly moved in with me and and stayed.

Occasionally, coming back from a trip in the countryside, I had to park our big Land Rover, one of our three vehicles, in front of the entrance to enter the hotel as discreetly as possible - and failed miserably. She may have been wearing a simple little cotton dress hugging and accentuating her feminine curves and I may have worn jeans and a T-shirt but nothing could hide the two identical military rucksacks on our backs, my M-16 rifle and Marlyne's World War Two M-1 carbine hanging off her shoulder. “Round Eyes”, as Western men called Western women, could at times provoke envious, if not downright lewd looks from men sipping their cold beers on the terrace. Alas, her sporadic appearance may well have shattered more than one dream when they realised that she was in fact, “armed and dangerous”, and just like the National Assembly in front of them… off-limits.

The best chance to meet anyone or at least suspiciously scrutinise each other, was indeed on the terrace while enjoying a cool drink during the late afternoon heat.

There was Jean-Luc for instance, a French journalist, always dressed in a slightly sloppy tropical khaki coloured suit. At times we would discuss the degrading situation in the country, the corruption of the officialdom or to the contrary, the courage of the Vietnamese soldiers,  fighting on despite the odds stacked against them. There were also more philosophical questions lingering and sometimes openly discussed, such as - were we perhaps psyching each other up and slowly turning into adrenaline junkies, on a slow road of self-destruction as reluctant participants in a horror show where trouble can appear like a bolt of lightning out of nowhere? If so, then clearly we were becoming addicted to “The Lethal Beauty of War” not really wanting to miss the show no matter how obscene.

One late afternoon an object fell onto the terrace with a metallic clang; most patrons followed Jean-Luc’s example and threw themselves on the floor assuming that it may be a hand-grenade, my still innocent girlfriend wasn’t battle-hardened yet, but that would change; she looked around puzzled why people scattered and ducked. It turned out to be no more than a street kid throwing a discarded Coke can onto the terrace, maybe just to annoy and see what would happen. Not long before a member of the Viet Cong had thrown a hand-grenade in the cinema across the road, injuring several people; he was the only one who died though, shot by a guard. Such was the psychosis of a city surrounded by war.

Saigon was a fragile oasis where people went about their daily business living in the self-deluding illusion of peace. But one only had to take a walk down to the river at night to hear the sounds of war and watch the green and red tracers hug the horizon.

Just round the corner of the hotel, however, the famous pale yellow and blue Renault CV4 taxis would be waiting for clients to take them to their respective embassies or agencies, the Cercle Sportive, restaurants, nightclubs or anywhere else in the city as long as it wasn’t over the New Port Bridge; from there on things may become a little less secure.

Sometime in the summer of ’74 my girlfriend, under a degree of parental pressure finally boarded an airplane to take her home. Her family, however, would be in for a shock for their daughter was no longer the young girl her protective parents had said their goodbyes to at the Toronto Pearson International Airport so many months before in the spring of 1973. She returned as a scarred young woman just like every other normal person who had experienced and seen too much in a country on the other side of the planet, far away from home. Friends and family undoubtedly would have expected her to be the same sweet girl with the long bright blonde hair they had known all their lives - but that girl was gone, she didn’t exist anymore. Like many of us, she had become unbalanced and restless, stigmatized with Vietnam written all over her face; for her too, “coming home” and re-integration into normality would become a troubling experience – Mostly, for friends and family,  our experiences were too weird, too real; too far outside their comfort zone, consequently for us, there was always this lingering feeling: “When we are in the jungle we want to go home and when we are home we want to be back in the jungle and live on the edge.” Normality meant the rumble of distant artillery or the not so distant rattle of an automatic weapon; silence was alien and disconcerting.

My time hadn’t come yet but the room on the first floor had now become a lonely and sad place best to be avoided. When I wasn’t in the field I would buy pocketbooks from the little street girl sitting on the sidewalk in front of the hotel and when I'd read them I’d give them back to her so she could sell them on again; it was an excellent business deal; at least someone was happy.

In the autumn of ’74, “The Company”, whoever they really were, sent us into the hills of Phuoc Long Province to discreetly investigate reports of North Vietnamese troop movements. But it was already too late, we never quite reached our destination in the densely forested hills; instead, we collided head-on with a North Vietnamese regiment and became trapped in a small town of no significance. We hastily put together a miss-matched “War Band” of Vietnamese Rangers, Strikers and National Policemen holding the line for hours - not many went home; well over half  perished during the horrendous artillery bombardment and street-fight that followed, along with many towns’ people fleeing the onslaught. The road of escape was littered with the bodies of men and women, especially the elderly who could not run fast enough… and children.

Days later, in the morning, there was a knock on my door. It was a Vietnamese man and I realised I had seen him before but I wasn’t sure where. It could have been in The Cercle Sportive, a tennis and social club for those who wanted to be seen or maybe I had seen him at an Embassy or a private cocktail party. Whoever he was, I was quite sure he had to be a high ranking official.

‘Vous partez? – You are leaving?’ it was more a confirmation than a question. For a moment it must have flashed through my head, was he here to prevent me from leaving?

‘There is nothing here for me anymore.’ I may have added, ‘the group has ceased to exist.’ But I can’t be sure I had actually managed to pronounce those words of gloom.

‘I know.’ He smiled politely but I knew, it was a sad smile.

‘I have brought you something so that when you are back in your faraway country you may remember us and think about us from time to time.’

I'm not quite sure who he was but I do remember him, and all those, now long since gone.

Today the hand-painted lacquered box and the small vase he gave me as a farewell gift are still sitting on my desk in front of me where I wrote these simple words that don’t do enough justice to the extraordinary era we lived in.

The Continental gave us a flavour of old colonial-era comfort, but for us, it was also associated with laughter, love, sadness and death. Maybe just like the song about “The Hotel California”, you can check out... but you can never leave. Perhaps some of the ghosts of the colourful list of guests that once occupied the rooms in this unforgettable and unusual hotel are still wandering along the long corridors in search of the past.

Some stayed only for a few weeks, others for months on end and then there were those who seem to live there more or less permanently. Whoever we all were, we too were among those who called the Continental Palace:  “home”.

James Delahaye.

Today, The Continental Palace is called the Continental Saigon.

It was probably in 1960, yes I’m quite sure of that, and I would even say that it was sometime in the spring, but there again I don’t give a guarantee about the exact date but I’m fairly confident that it wasn’t “freeze your balls off” kind of weather anymore or I wouldn’t have gone out to finally try out my roller skates on this pristine, immaculately smooth Swiss road in front of our house. Now, we are not talking here about these modern in-line skates that move along silently and that have more in common with true ice hockey skates than the contraption I attached under my feet.  No, what we are talking about here is something more, how shall I say? something post-war but altogether more basic, more nineteen-fifties. No boots here; these things consisted of some adjustable steel brackets and leather straps to attach my shoes to an adjustable steel frame on four wheels, ah, and not just any wheels, these wheels were made of genuine steel. I leave it to your imagination the noise eight steel wheels can make on an otherwise silent Swiss road; a departing jet was nothing in comparison.

While I thundered up and down this road I had noticed this boy, maybe a few years younger than me, who had the rather interesting habit of sitting on top of a high wall at a road junction near our house. It is, of course, possible that he counted the occasional car going by, but the way he watched me like a hawk it is just as possible that he sat there to keep track of my skating progress. There again, perhaps he was just making sure I would not waken the dead with the racket caused by the eight wheels thundering along; because you see, this particular wall he was sitting on, was and still is, the wall that made sure  the dead would not rise and escape from the adjacent cemetery. I’m not quite sure how he got up there. Did he walk between the graves of monsieur Dunant and madame Favre, deceased since 1939 and politely excused himself as he pushed the bushes aside to take place on his throne or did he walk the entire length of the wall beginning at the lowest end till he reached his supreme view on the world below?

One day, gathering up my courage and testing my still mediocre French, I asked if by any chance he was the boy living next to me, and indeed, he was.

Since then we have probably played Indians and Cowboys in our gardens; we shared each-others bicycles and tried out our “Velo Moteurs” a sort of light motorbike popular in Switzerland and France at that time. Growing up we have listened to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Nights in White Satin. We hiked in the endless forests of Norway and swam in the warm waters of the Virgin Islands, and no, we did not find a single virgin but then, who wants a virgin?

We have boasted or shared our disappointments or successes with girlfriends and no… we have not shared our girlfriends or at least not that I know of. That would be surprising anyway because our taste in women is quite different; in fact, everything about us is different. He was a good student and finished University; I was not, at least not until sometime later in life. I chased adventure, the army, even a war, or was it two..? and then the Air Force, followed by being a contractor pilot, a vicious circle to get out of. Somehow they always seem to remember my name for a mission that may not necessarily have a return ticket attached to it. Meanwhile, the boy who sat on that wall so long ago made a career for himself, got married and had children. Our lives were so different that sometimes I feel, the polite thing to do would be to re-introduce myself and say: “Hi, I’m the other friend you never knew you had; if I look familiar it’s because the one you knew and the one who, at times lived in the shadow, crept stealthily through a jungle or cooked in the desert are really one and the same person.”

We were frequently separated by half a planet but it didn’t matter. Nothing broke the bond; we always managed to pick up there where we had left off. We shared both light-hearted fun and some of our deepest troubles, even the death of those we loved and I hope that in those darkest moments I was of adequate support.  Mostly however we laughed, we laughed till our cheeks hurt.

Today we are in the autumn of our lives but together in the company of our wives, we still share the ski slopes of Zermatt under the approving eye of the Matterhorn. We still eat oysters and share wonderful meals in France, mostly cooked by himself, accompanied by some of the finest wines one can wish for. And today, that boy who sat on that wall so long ago is still my best friend... and all that because of a pair of noisy roller skates back in 1960.

It was late in the afternoon, too late, in fact. With the setting sun in my eyes about to disappear over the endless horizon of the Sahara desert, landing an aircraft between the dunes would always be a risky proposition, not for the fainthearted. I had waited almost half the day for supplies to arrive and be loaded on the aircraft, but they hadn’t been very forthcoming. When the small truck eventually arrived, it took another hour for the plane to be loaded. I had no idea what all those mysterious boxes contained and, frankly, couldn’t care less. The only thing of direct concern to me was the distribution and gross weight of all this cargo so I could calculate the “Weight and Balance” for the aircraft; I suppose that made me a pilot and dispatcher simultaneously.

When they were finally done loading, I filed the usual compulsory flight plan, checked the time and figured I could still make it back to base somewhere deep into the desert before dusk would set in… just.

After two and a half hours in the air, scrutinising the empty horizon, I finally detected the lonely transmitter antenna sticking out like a forlorn needle in a haystack and, further away, in the distance, the tower of the Agip oil rig. I began my descent to fifteen hundred feet above ground level and, at last, flew over the concealed and abandoned airstrip to start a classic traffic pattern. This particular airfield is completely hidden from view at low levels, nestled on the only bit of relatively flat real estate available for miles.

From my left window, I glanced down at the wind sock hanging limply in the still evening air, placed next to the fuel tank, the only two objects on the field. The strip was surrounded by giant dunes stretching out as far as the eye can see, and in the desert, one can see over vast distances. I made a sharp left turn, keeping the runway on my left side at all times, and then backtracked on a perfect left downwind course. With the runway now behind me, I went through the usual approach sequence - flaps, gear and power settings and then turned base, followed by a final approach.

There was only one serious problem with this airfield; as soon I was on final, flying only just above ground level, if one can call the rolling sand dunes like the swell on the ocean ground level, I was no longer able to see the runway… at all; it was entirely obscured by a giant dune.

It didn’t help either that the sun was setting over the horizon like a huge orange ball at that precise moment, and that orange ball now sat exactly in my sight. Once I cleared this obstacle, no more than ten feet above the sand, the airstrip suddenly reappeared a hundred feet below, and one had to literally plunge the aircraft down into it. There is no second chance here; if one doesn’t hit the threshold, like on an aircraft carrier, one has to add full power and do it again… I’m not frequently proud, but I dare say I never missed it.

Every time, it was a challenge, and every time, it gave me a feeling of satisfaction to park the aircraft and think, “Well, we did it again.”… we being "me" because I was completely alone out here and seven kilometres from the camp; the terrain in this area did not permit an airstrip to be bulldozed any closer.

I tied the aircraft down, locked up, walked to my parked Jeep, jumped in, turned the ignition key and… nothing. The engine coughed a few times politely, but clearly, it had no intention of responding to my insistent request to get the hell on with it. Eventually, without any doubt, supplemented by some colourful language, I gave up and switched the big military-style radio on with its huge antenna. After yet another futile attempt to raise someone’s attention, it became clear that no one was listening. It is entirely possible that courtesy to the powerful radio I used, my irritated voice may have reached France or, who knows, perhaps even as far as western China courtesy of the radio signals bouncing off the ionosphere but only five  miles away, within my own sandy neighbourhood, no one was listening.

By now, the sun was gone completely, and the problem with tropical latitudes is, once the sun sinks below the horizon, it’s like someone just switched the light off… dusk does not linger around for long. The golden rule is “Don’t wander off in the desert at night; they may never find you”, especially if you’re the only pilot in the region.

I now had to make a decision; I either had to resort to sleeping in the aircraft and wait for daylight or… go have a look and see if I could find the trail left behind in the sand by the tyres of my jeep, only that was yesterday and a lot can happen in the desert in twenty-four hours. There was still a tiny bit of light left, but that wouldn’t last long. I walked towards the trail to see if nature had left the landscape exactly the way I had last seen it the previous day or if the wind had been playing games with my, by now, precious, tyre tracks. To my surprise, I could see the trail quite clearly, but that still meant I now had to decide if I would go walkabout into the desert or back off.

Now, some of you may have run up and down the dunes along the beach with your bucket and spade on a sunny afternoon when you were kids, but frankly, that doesn’t even come close to walking seven kilometres on an iffy trail in the sand in the dark. But then I thought, screw it… I can do it; seven K… pfff, it’s only a small matter. And so I began on my journey back to camp, keeping a relatively good pace. The first thing I noticed, not for the first time, was the immense silence, a deep, encompassing silence like most people will never experience in their life, a sort of peaceful tranquillity that, as far as I was concerned, was rather pleasant; to the average disco dancing teenagers however, that would probably classify as their worst nightmare, the more decibels, the better. Also, to my surprise, I could see the trail much clearer than I had expected, even though the light had been switched off once and for all. Much like the snow in the mountains, however, the pale sand was now reflecting a brand new light that had slowly begun creeping into the black night sky, a light that took my breath away, a light that has illuminated the heavens for billions of years and it now steadily worked its way towards its crescendo in the dry winter air. Above me lay a solid carpet of a zillion stars illuminating my path and ushering me on. Sirius, the binary star and Orion, mighty Osiris for the ancient Egyptians, dominated the eastern sky while directly above me, a stunning display of stars shone with such clarity that it gave me the feeling that I could nearly touch them… nearly. I forgot all about the damn jeep that had left me stuck in the desert, and for the time being, I also forgot that, evidently, no one manned the radios or that my flights, by now, should have been declared overdue. For the time being, all I could do was trudge through the sand with my nose in the air, marvelling at the display above. I must have walked along the sandy trail in a near trance for almost two hours; however long my nocturnal walk in the desert may have been, I didn’t notice time go by.

When, at last, the blazing lights of the camp began to appear, a brief feeling of anti-climax crept over me. Soon, I had to say goodbye to the eternal burning lights in the cosmos that had shown me the way back to camp and come back to Earth. It had been a long trek, a trek of pure beauty. But of course, it was almost ten o’clock by now, and I was hungry like hell and in a hurry to reach the mess hall in the hope to find some leftovers.

J.D.

Someone shouted, ‘Where’s the bloody barrel?’ Another called back, ‘What do you mean, where’s the barrel? You didn’t bloody lose it, did you?’

‘It must have come off when he went under.’ Someone suggested.

I had been listening to the frantic voices not to mention a fair amount of swearing that is the norm in the way of life for any soldier in the world, and the Dutch Colonial Army was no exception. Albeit for the “Cold War” era, the Colonial Army was considerably more self-disciplined than was the norm at the time mainly because this was an all-volunteer battalion. These young men wanted something different; like me, they had opted for adventure - the amazing experience of exploring and patrolling the Amazonian jungles.

‘All right, all right,’ I said at last, looking around where we had come out of the water, ‘If it isn’t here then it’s gone. There’s nothing you can do about it, don’t get your knickers into a knot about it now, it’s gone, end of story. I’ll write a report later.’

The barrel the distressed soldier was worrying about was a spare barrel for one of the Bren-guns, an old WW-II British machine gun; each group carried one along during the many lengthy patrols through the Amazonian jungles of Suriname.

It all began at four in the morning in the advanced jungle camp close to the airport. Wash, get dressed, then the last decent breakfast for at least a week and then lug our packs into the DAF Three-Tonner trucks, all of it becoming routine by now. The trucks were called “Three-Tonners” for the load they could carry. Apart from the blazing lights in the camp, the world around us was still steeped in darkness and mostly silent. Apart from a few funny remarks or the usual loud-mouths, and of course a few complaints about the ungodly hour, no one was particularly inclined to strike up a conversation at that time in the morning unless fuelled by a rather large cup of coffee. The timing was usually quite precise and by the time the trucks reached their destination point with their slumbering cargo, daylight would just about have appeared which should be somewhere around six in the morning. You could almost set your watch to it because this far down south into the tropics, just thirteen degrees above the equator, give or take ten minutes allowing for the seasons, daylight would break at about six, fast and practically without the proper dawn the way we like it up north; it’s like someone throws a switch and says, “Ok guys, daylight now until six, maybe quarter past six at night and then I’ll pull the plug.”

The trucks dumped us along the orange coloured bauxite road near the old railroad track surrounded by dense triple canopy jungle. The lieutenant consulted his plastic sealed maps. ‘We’ll begin here’, he said as he plotted out a heading towards who knows where or what. I carried my own map and compass and rather worrying, the maps were mostly white, only interspaced with lines, names of patches, streams, swamps and the occasional hamlet and headings, for the rest the charts were frightfully bare, full of uncharted territory.

‘This is where we’re going for today.’

‘Is that a swamp lying in our way?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.

‘Yep… and it’s too big, we can’t go around.’ The Lieutenant said not quite known for using too many words, especially not after a night of drinking beer and Bokma Jenever, a strong Dutch alcoholic drink that according to some, the Lieutenant could knock back in quantities that should have earned him a mention in the Guinness book of records as well as being mentioned in dispatches.

Without any doubt, knowing myself, I will in all likelihood have said something like, ‘Isn’t that lovely.’

A staff sergeant looked at me and rolled his eyes at the now rapidly brightening sky.

One of the young NCO’s had disappeared into the bush throwing up, obviously the result of a few beers or whiskeys too many the previous short night.

‘All right, here’s your heading,’ the lieutenant said quietly, ‘We’re wasting daylight hours… let’s move, and don’t try keeping your feet dry by dancing around puddles like damsels on the way to the disco, it’s a complete waste of effort.’

The sergeant who had just been emptying the remainder of his breakfast into the bushes stayed in the rear with his group and we moved the alpha group into point instead. Without wasting time they began hacking their way through the dense foliage.

In the early seventies, contrarily to the regular army in the Netherlands, the shrinking Colonial Army and Marines in the Islands were an all-volunteer force. After several months of training in the Netherlands, if they passed the rigorous selection, they signed up for a minimum of twelve to fourteen month away from home no matter what. People didn’t bitch much; rather the opposite, they all wanted to be here and they simply got on with it. In fact, for most of us, charging through the Amazonian forest was more like the adventure of our life, therefore finding soldiers to go up front and hack their way through with machetes was never a problem.

This was the sort of thing some of us had talked and fantasized about when we were teenagers still at school. During the sixties, in the town of Lausanne in Switzerland, where I grew up, there was this bar called the “Explorer”. A few of us would have a drink there after school and look at all the pictures on the walls of real explorers trashing through the jungles in Africa and South America, discovering hitherto unknown tribes, animals or plants. Today the only bit of exploring going on is probably on Google and in young men's wet dreams, but back in those days that sort of thing still existed.

Living in the perfectly clean environment of Switzerland, where not even the branch of a tree would dare to be out of place without permission or risk the chop, I always wondered what it would be like to be in a place of uncharted territory, wild and dangerous… and then one day, about six years later, quite unexpectedly, I found myself standing right there, in the middle of that huge, vast, enormous forest, a forest without end, they call the Amazon. And truly, it is an amazing experience and frequently full of surprises.

I took my two most enthusiastic bush hackers upfront and one soldier behind me to keep track of the number of paces while I kept track of our magnetic heading on the compass. But even then, I always had to hack with my own machete at the encroaching vegetation. When the jungle gets dense there is no space for anyone else except for the boys on point which means everybody stays behind, sometimes for hundreds of meters where they do nothing but wait, talk and smoke. When they are finally called forward to continue on, one can hear the sound of numerous machetes ringing like music in an almost futile attempt to widen the path. After an hour of slow progress, we changed the “pathfinders” and the four of us moved to the rear letting someone else have the fun of penetrating the wall of virgin vegetation.

I can’t remember if it was three or four hours later but suddenly we heard agitated voices coming from the front. The forest began to open up considerably and within minutes we found ourselves standing in a wide semi-circle in front of… the dreaded swamp.

It stretched out wide and long surrounded on every side by thick forest. Going around would not only be costly in time, probably at least a day, but it carried the risk of losing track of our position. I looked at the sky above and noticed that during the few hours we had spent under the triple canopy of the silent forest, the sun was gone. It had now been replaced by a thick overcast with faraway dark edges that surely would foretell a spell of tropical rain.

One of the young men, also dressed as a soldier, was a native Indian. For some of the lengthier or more difficult patrols in uncharted territory the army frequently hired local Indians to come along for their knowledge of the forest, for good reasons. It wasn’t uncommon for half a platoon to walk right past a deadly Bushmaster snake, locally known as a Makka Sneki until a shot reverberated through the forest. Only the Indian scout had seen the snake, everyone else had walked right passed. Three months in country, and we still had a lot to learn.

And so looking down at the threatening water with thick clusters of reeds and other vegetation sticking out of the dark water I asked, ‘so, what kind of lovely creepy crawlers can we expect in this wonderful… swamp?’

He did not look up when he answered maybe as apprehensive and weary as everyone else,

‘Boa Constrictor, and maybe an Anaconda or two lurking around. Bloodsuckers probably and the occasional caiman and stingray, but they’ll probably keep their distance with all the noise we make. ’

Without any doubt I will have uttered something cynical like, ‘Isn’t that wonderful… I always wanted to see a Boa up close and personal.’

With the distinctive clang that only a Remington riot gun makes the Indian scout slid the pump action of his shot gun back and let a cartridge slide into the barrel; clearly he wasn’t taking any chances.

First-lieutenant Brandsma broke open a pack of ammo. ‘All right, listen up everyone,’ every fourth man, take five bullets, you keep an eye out for each other and only use in extreme need. It will be alright guys, don’t worry about it… it’s just water.’

Slowly and reluctantly we began to wade into the dark forbidding water that lay before us holding our World War II M 1 jungle carbines in both hands, ready to keep them above our heads, high and dry. Everyone was a volunteer; they had all come out here of their own free will, for the adventure, and now was the time to prove it and just get on with it.

Within minutes I had water up to my waist, water of an impenetrable colour, like Coca Cola. All around reeds of a various heights peeked out above the surface making it difficult to see where the end of this lovely swamp might be hiding, if there ever was going to an end.

A long line of soldiers worked their way forward, from time to time halting, searching for a better or shallower passage. A soldier close to me pushed an ammo box in front of him, floating it like a toy boat. He smiled and said something like, ‘It’s easier like this, I don’t have to carry the bloody thing on my head. Necessity is the mother of invention. After half an hour the comments began flying back and forth as fatigue began to set in and then the bitching began. However, some, especially up front, seemed to thoroughly enjoy the adventure; I could hear their animated conversations over a long distance reverberating over the water. Another half hour and the water became deeper, reaching up to our chests and some faces began to betray fear, especially among the smaller boys.

With nowhere to sit having a rest was not an option. ‘How much longer Warrant?’ a worried face asked.

‘We’re nearly out, lad.’ I said. Listen, I can hear guys that have reached dry land.' It was true but we first had to cross a patch of tall overgrowing reeds while keeping track of our heading. The reeds and other wet vegetation became oppressive, at times hanging over us and pulling on our clothes. Mosquitoes were now feasting on every bit of exposed flesh and then just when we thought the end was in sight, the water became even deeper. I yelled, ‘Hold on to each other, no one goes under.’ I took the smallest one and held him under his arm and then… we did go under. 'Ah shit.' I moved as fast as I could under the dark water, pushing the boy in front of me and then just as sudden as we had gone under, we popped up again and simultaneously broke out of the reeds gasping for air. We laughed nervously and swore and laughed as we began to emerge from the dreaded swamp. Voices encouraged us along the last few meters and then up the steep embankment. Everywhere soldiers where lying among the shrubs exhausted mostly silently staring at the sky above and the cleansing rain. Some however never shut up and were enjoying the adventure of their life. Helping hands dragged the last stragglers out of the menacing water and then we began calling out names making sure no one had been left out there on their own.

When we were certain everyone had been accounted for, Lieutenant Brandsma had a morale boosting surprise in store when he pulled a plastic heat sealed bag out of his backpack and began to distribute the mail with a grin on his face. ‘Well done boys… No one panicked… really well done. I’m proud of you.’

J.D.

Excerpt from: The Girl Who Ran with black Tigers©

These are only short passages from the book I wrote relating to our time in Vietnam.

His right elbow leaning on the open window, DeWitt let the warm air flow over his arm. He should have been feeling relieved but somehow he also felt disappointed, as if he had been cheated out of something important. Deep inside he knew if they had managed to penetrate that hill, it would probably have proved sinister and maybe deadly.

‘Strange thing this war business, isn’t it?’

‘What you mean?’ Le Chan asked a bit distracted.

‘Well, if they send us out somewhere, we find all sorts of reasons to bitch… then if they tell us to piss off because the mission is scrapped, we bitch as well…’

Le Chan chuckled. ‘It’s the adrenalin… you expect something to happen, then it doesn’t. You deflate like a soufflé in your mother’s oven… makes you feel like you missed the show. You don’t know if you should feel happy or be pissed off… I’m happy.’

They fell silent. After a while, with the monotonous drone of the engine, and in the oppressive Delta heat, Le Chan nodded off. Forsberg had taken up position in the cargo bay with his back propped up against the rucksacks. He liked it that way; he could keep an eye on traffic behind him in case of trouble. Sergeant Van Nihn was lying down across both rear seats in the hope of catching some sleep.

DeWitt drove through the small town of Thôt Nôt, which consisted of no more than a row of houses on either side of the road. It was a town like any other along the Mekong River; there were probably hundreds just like it, scattered all over the Delta. Just another insignificant little town stuck between the river to the north, with fields and trees on the south side; they all looked the same to him. He gave the place no more than a fleeting glance. It appeared deserted. There was no sign either of the usual women working along the road, shaking out large baskets separating the rice from the stalks. Not even a curious face peeped out of a door or a window.

Very quiet around here, he thought, maybe too quiet.

As he came to the end of the row of brick houses, he drove the heavy Land Rover onto a bridge spanning over a waterway. For a brief moment he had a vision of the army truck lying on its side among the debris of the destroyed bridge back in Chau Doc province near the Cambodian border.

Instinctively he accelerated slightly. But no explosion came, nothing happened.

Of course not, he thought. It was a silly thought. Why would something happen out here?

When the vehicle had crossed the waterway, the road made an abrupt and sharp turn to the right.

DeWitt was about to a step on the accelerator again when he saw it, dark and threatening. There, right in front of him, stood the bulking hull of an M-41 Walker Bulldog Tank. The South Vietnamese tank had taken up position along the right side, blocking half the road. The turret was turned perpendicularly towards the south, and at that precise moment, its canon roared as it fired a round across a field into the tree line. Le Chan, who had been dozing with his chin on his chest, woke up with a start. ‘Putin de merde! What was that?’

‘Tanks!’ DeWitt said as he braked hard. Sergeant Van Nihn swore as he slid off the rear seats he had been resting on when the vehicle came to an abrupt halt.

Beyond the first tank, there were two other tanks parked at 100 metres intervals. Dozens of soldiers were huddling behind and around each of them. An M-113 armoured personnel carrier belched diesel fumes as it left the road, turning directly towards the fields. It then slowly moved down the shallow embankment and entered the dried out rice paddy. DeWitt put the Land Rover into reverse, screeching back over the bridge he had just crossed.

All doors on the four-wheel drive vehicle flew open as it came to a skidding halt just in front of the last house.  The four men scrambled out of the vehicle, grabbing helmets and weapons. They all struggled inelegantly into their webbing and belts, which contained ammunition pouches and canteens. Then they quickly slipped into their protective flak jackets. Forsberg, ever alert, knelt down beside the vehicle. He turned his M-14 rifle towards the row of houses, covering the rear and keeping a watchful eye on any space between them that could easily hide a surprise.

‘OK let’s go have a look,’ DeWitt said. ‘We’ll cross the bridge in pairs either side.’

‘Well, I’m not that curious,’ Van Nihn answered with a smile on his face that clearly meant to convey the opposite. DeWitt started for the bridge with Le Chan on his heels. The two other men followed five metres behind keeping to the left. On the other side of the waterway, they came across a small grubby boy who apparently found all the excitement rather interesting. Obviously, he didn’t see tanks very often in his neighbourhood and the fireworks were much more interesting than his daily chores at home. Just before reaching the first tank, the four men looked up at the sky when they heard the shriek of an enemy mortar shell on its way back down to earth.

Van Ninh shouted at the kid to jump down into the embankment.

‘He’s long,’ Le Chan commented looking at the sky, thinking he might get a glimpse of the object. The mortar was badly aimed as it overshot the road. It unceremoniously crashed into the opposite riverbank, spewing up black smoke, water and mud.

Le Chan peered into the ditch along the road, grabbed the little boy by the arm and pulled him up. He then hurried back along the bridge towing the child along by the hand. Halfway down the bridge he stopped and bent over the little boy like an angry parent scolding a naughty child.

‘Now get out of here, go home and stay indoors… it’s dangerous out here, it’s not a game, you understand?’

As the boy reached the other side of the bridge, a woman came running along the road. She grabbed the little boy by the arm and ran back along the line of houses, her baggy black trousers flapping around her legs.

When Le Chan again crossed the bridge he noticed a body lying on the embankment alongside the canal. The dead person was too far away for him to see if he was a Viet Cong or a local farmer.

The officer in charge of the platoon of tanks hung half way out of the turret. Leaning on his elbows, he scrutinised the tree line through his binoculars. He looked to his left, and as he spoke into his microphone, he waved the infantry soldiers on.  Soldiers, hiding behind tanks and vehicles, struggled to their feet. At first they slowly moved forward as they deployed into the field. Then the platoons quickly spread out, keeping an adequate distance between each man. Many young soldiers unsheathed and fixed their bayonets onto their rifles. Sergeant Le Chan walked to the side of the first tank.

‘What’s going on out there, sir? Le Chan inquired. The Vietnamese officer peered down from his turret through his gold rimmed Ray Bans and was surprised to see a Ranger looking up at him. He recognised the camouflage pattern: the helmet with the large frontal emblem of the black tiger’s head on a white star.

‘Not very much so far. There’s some VC out there in broad daylight, big mistake; if they don’t surrender we’ll put them through the meat shredder,’ the officer laughed grimly. He then held his hand up, indicating that he was listening to someone talking into his headset.

He suddenly took on a serious look again and, appearing very much like a World War Two Japanese officer, he shouted some orders into his microphone. The turret moved a few degrees to the right and up. Then, the cannon fired in a deafening blast of both fire and smoke. The high explosive shell crashed into a second tree line out of view of the road.

‘Shit, I wish he would warn us when he's going to do that.’ DeWitt swore, ‘My fucking ears!’

The officer on top of his tank turned sideways again. Looking down, he bellowed at Le Chan, ‘What are those Americans advisers doing here, sergeant?’

‘They are not Americans sir, and they are not advisers. They are properly registered Vietnamese Rangers… like us… sir.’

The officer observed the sergeant with some puzzlement, but probably thought better of it than to ask any more questions. ‘If you Rangers want to participate in a bit of shooting, you are welcome… The boys out there will like it if they see your helmets among them. It’ll boost their morale.’

‘Thank you sir, we’ll go have a look,’ the sergeant answered. He turned round and saw DeWitt raising his eyes to the sky. Le Chan shrugged his shoulders. ‘What?’

‘We’re gonna hold their hands now for a bit of shooting? It’s not our business,’ DeWitt said. ‘Shoot at what? Shoot at tree leaves? If I shoot at something, I’ll have to clean my rifle, and that will really piss me off.’

Instead he went in search of a cigar in his breast pocket as he reluctantly followed the soldiers into the rice paddy. It would have set a bad example if they wouldn’t join the regular Vietnamese troopers in the field.

The soldiers ahead of them were already spread throughout the partly dried up rice paddy. They were advancing towards the tree line. The soldiers appeared reasonably well trained as they covered each other, kneeling every 30 metres, while other squads moved forward. So far it looked more like a military exercise than war.

DeWitt watched the tree lines, anticipating all hell breaking loose at any moment. ‘I sure as hell hope they will charge if someone starts shooting at them.’

‘The commies will have scampered by then,’ Van Nihn said. ‘They’re not going to face tanks and infantry during daylight hours, that would be pretty unusual. Nothing to gain.’

‘Unless they’re trapped,’ Forsberg said.

Or they have a superior force… DeWitt thought.

A flash appeared out of the trees. A rocket propelled grenade hissed by in a flash, trailing white smoke as it flew towards the armoured personnel carrier. The RPG just missed, falling short by a few metres, exploding with a bang in the soft ground, spewing up earth and dirt.

The NVA or Viet Cong who fired the missile probably lost his nerve with the approach of the armoured personnel carrier. Most soldiers deployed in the field dropped to the ground for cover when they saw the RPG. An enemy machine gun opened fire, followed by several AK-47 assault rifles.To his left, DeWitt noticed that few hapless troopers were a fraction too late in diving for cover. But there was nothing he could do about it. A soldier sagged as he walked straight into the rain of bullets. One second, he walked up straight; the next, he lay motionless on the ground. It all seemed to happen so fast. Two others stumbled. The VC machine gunner could not possibly hope to cover the whole field. The ferocity of his fire seemed to concentrate mainly on the centre and on the near magnetic attraction of the armoured vehicle. Although DeWitt was half expecting the onslaught, it still came as a surprise. It always did. He did his best to outperform Earth’s gravity when he hit the ground harder than he intended, pressing his face as low as he could. Oh great… here we go again. It’s going to be fucking stupid if we get killed out here. This’s got nothing to do with us. We shouldn’t even be here… A sergeant lying in front of him was yelling into a radio, requesting suppressive fire from the tanks.

Behind him, the three tanks realigned their cannons, firing off several rounds of high-explosive shells into the trees. The 50 calibre machine gun mounted on the M-113 raked the edge of the field with heavy slugs, suppressing the communist soldiers.Soldiers yelled at each other, crawled forward or rolled over searching for more cover, but there was little cover to be found in the open field. NCOs barked orders.Then, suddenly, over 70 government soldiers raised their weapons, letting loose a barrage of full automatic fire at the tree line and undergrowth, stripping the trees of their leaves and branches. The noise of all those guns became ear-splitting. Enemy fire quickly dropped down to a trickle and then stopped altogether. Whoever was hiding in there was grossly outgunned by the South Vietnamese soldiers. ‘Not very convincing those commies in there,’ DeWitt said. ‘They’re making a run for it for sure. They’re just a blocking force. The main force will be disappearing into the countryside right now, count on it,’ Le Chan said. Officers and NCOs shouted orders. In an unexpected moment of zeal, the soldiers rose from the ground and began their assault on the first tree line, determined to engage the enemy.  

DeWitt and the other three Rangers were still almost a hundred metres behind when the first soldiers broke through the trees, dislodging the communist soldiers. Through the cacophony of wildly firing M-16 rifles, he could still distinguish the occasional slower cycle of an AK-47. ‘They’re still there, retreating but still firing. ’‘Yeah, let’s hope it’s not a trap with a second line of defence with a lot more firepower,’ Forsberg yelled above the noise, half expecting disaster to strike at any minute. DeWitt walked straight ahead with his cigar stuck in the left corner of his mouth, pretending not to be disturbed by all the commotion. He glanced behind him and noticed the tanks were now standing idle, waiting for new coordinates. A single mortar crew had taken up position at the edge of the field adjacent to the road. They were now firing their 81mm shells beyond the tree line. A mortar, good… that will shake ‘em up... To DeWitt’s left, near the middle of the field, medics were kneeling, attending to the wounded. They dragged one man out of a ditch, gave him a cursory look over and then left him to concentrate on two of the others instead. ‘Let’s go have a look.’

DeWitt felt a surge of excitement, and with his rifle in front of his chest, he began a slow run to reach the tree line. The four Rangers quickly reached a narrow embankment that would normally serve as a walkway for farmers when the fields were flooded.  They stepped over it onto soft ground with knee-high grass, then into the small forest. It felt pleasantly cool in the shade of the lush tropical vegetation. The forested area covered no more than 70, maybe 80, metres. Three soldiers stood perched over what looked like a dead NVA soldier, gazing at him with youthful excitement and curiosity.

It may have been sometime in 1957 or maybe it was in fifty-eight, maybe it was many nights or maybe just a single one, who knows and frankly it’s not very relevant. My brother and I, oh, and the dog; well, of course, he was always around doing whatever dogs do… where was I?

Oh yes, we were walking down a lane in the forest, with a perfect line of adjacent oak and beech trees just outside the gardens but still well within the boundaries of my mother’s estate. God, it was dark at night in that forest, but we knew our way around like no one else and we knew that just a little further, to our left there was the wide-open space covered with coarse heather and a wooden bench where we could sit and look at the heavens above. Back in those days, there was still little pollution and certainly no light pollution so I suppose the stars were bright enough for my first lessons of astronomy. You see, my brother was, and probably still is quite a bit older than me and he was familiar and on a first-name basis with the stars above.

I must have asked, ‘What’s that hazy band of light there right next to Scorpio then?’

‘Ah, that’s the Milky Way galaxy… it goes all around us.’

‘Milky Way? That’s a funny name eh.’

‘Well yes I suppose so; perhaps they called it like that because it looks like someone spilt a glass of mild along the sky.’

Children of course always ask extremely intelligent questions that can put more than one adult in a spot but not my well-learned brother and therefore I asked, ‘So what’s a galaxy? And why is it all around us… surely it can’t be in Holland and Australia at the same time now, can it?

‘Ah well yes it can because you see, we are all part of the same galaxy together with millions, no with billions of other stars systems just like ours. I must have looked up at the heavens with a new curiosity and may well have asked, ‘So are there any more of those galaxies out there or is that it?’

‘Yes, billions more, some of the stars we are looking at are not stars at all, some are distant galaxies floating around in the Universe.’

Perplexed I asked my big brother, who seemingly had all the answers, ‘So what’s beyond the Universe? Does it go on forever and ever?’

Little brothers, ones a conversation is in full swing, are full of curiosity to which not even big brothers have all the answers, and so wisely he said, ‘Oh for Pete’s sake… let’s get back to Earth and walk the dog, shall we?’

Years later, my childhood friend and I were watching the wild thunderstorms illuminating the night all around us, a bit like being in the eye of a hurricane, somewhere between France and Corsica on the Mediterranean. We were sailing on a ketch, a two-mast chestnut coloured wooden ship we leased whenever we were back in old Europe. With the wind having dropped from scary to almost nothing, those tall masts were now lazily swinging from left to right following the tugging of the tormented sea. While the thunderstorms raged all aroud us, with lighting racing through the sky or punching holes into the waves below, above us the stars shone with a brightness rarely seen by landlubbers; and right in the middle, there it was, the milky way strung out like a carpet along the heavens, self-illuminated like a road to, well, nowhere and everywhere really, and I remembered all those questions I had asked so long ago and needless to say, I was no further on. What’s beyond the beyond?

As the years passed by, my daughter always enjoyed a night time chit-chat about everything before going to bed, anything to delay the unavoidable bedtime.

Then one night she said, ‘You know dad, we often look at the stars and I know there are planets, stars and galaxies, millions, billions of them floating around there in the universe… but does it ever stop? It nearly gives me a pain in my head when I try to imagine the vastness of it all - like what’s beyond the Universe? Another one, and then another one again, or just emptiness?’

Learned people like Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and numerous others who have looked up at the stars have pondered over these very same questions, “What’s out there?” And now my daughter too asked that same question – “What’s beyond the beyond?” - she was only eight.

In the huge Messier 87 (M-87) galaxy, located a dizzying 55 million light-years from Earth, astronomers recently, confirmed that somewhere out there, right in the centre of that far away galaxy there is a black hole, and it’s massive, a monster in cosmic terms, and for the first time, they even managed to take pictures of it.

This giant galaxy holds trillions of stars and helps anchor the roughly 2,000 galaxies — including the Milky Way — that make up our local cosmic neighbourhood. It’s dubbed the “Virgo Cluster”. In turn, the Virgo Cluster is a primary component of the much larger Virgo Super Cluster.

Yet in this Universe, without any doubt it is no more than a mere speck of dust lost among billions of other galaxies and black holes all busy guzzling up stardust… out there, faraway, in the beyond.

J.D.

Warbands usually have a negative connotation, or at least it insinuates a group of unruly, predominantly tribal warriors roaming the countryside in search of trouble; Vietnam was no different in that respect. Many unofficial warbands were formed by Meo Montagnards deep in the hills and forest; others by ethnic Cambodians living in the hot and muggy Mekong Delta. As they were running their separate little wars and, therefore, ostensibly not associated with the US forces present in the country, they were rarely mentioned. The world was oblivious to them unless there was something negative to report. John and Jane Dough, reading the Washington Post or the Boston Globe in the morning, might choke on their coffee if they suddenly discovered that numerous of those so-called Warbands were armed and accompanied by American, Australian and even European advisors or military contractors. Some warbands were unruly and no more than bandits; others were highly effective, respected and feared. They were usually composed of soldiers and mercenaries attached to the army.

Vietnam, like all war zones, if one cared to pay attention, was full of rumours, some unsubstantiated, some more or less corroborated, mainly by prisoners or defectors. One of the rumours circulating was about a young American girl and her band of ex-US soldiers and Meo tribesmen hunting down the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese deep within their own sanctuary. Clearly, the communist soldiers were afraid of them. Supposedly, she had come over to visit a boyfriend who was stationed in some godforsaken Forward Operating Post. What happened after that is a mystery - but clearly, she and her band had become unsound.

We regularly listened to the radio, hoping to catch her voice at least once, but her voice remained silent. At some stage, the rumour train ceased as, more than likely, she had met her end somewhere out there, deep in those dark jungles. Sooner or later, rogue units meet a vastly superior force, and if they cannot disengage and retreat fast enough into the impenetrable jungles, they may well be destroyed.

It didn't bode well for us, considering that as a mix of Vietnamese and Western Rangers, we were, in effect, little more than a Warband or at least an irregular unit waging our own secret little war. Many times, no one knew where we were or if we were even still alive, and more than likely, no one cared.

One day, we caught a radio signal from just one of those isolated groups, and they were clearly in trouble: frantic anonymous voices requesting assistance somewhere far away, yet so close. In the background, one could hear the clatter of automatic weapons - and then suddenly only static. After a long wait, eventually, someone turned the radio off in an almost fatalistic gesture, and the signal died, never to be heard again. It would give you a cold shiver down your back. Battle-hardened soldiers would look blankly with tight lips, fighting back their emotions – another warband had ceased to exist. Nothing is more haunting than the ghosts on the radio… a voice that Jane Dough, sipping her coffee and munching on a Donut, will never hear.