a loosely improvised arrangement
recorded iin June 2024

Natural States

Watercourse

banjoman

VALLEY OF THE ANCIENT ONES

          With the passage of time,  I often focus on the memory that, while I was stationed in Vietnam, with the sound and fury of war all around...the place itself, was still incredibly beautiful.  I was moved by the grandeur and wide vistas along the Vu Gia river. It was in what we called  "I Corps."  USMC.

There was something in the gaze of the water buffalo with a child sleeping on its back, something in the gurgling sound of the river as it lazily turned around the sandy eddy where our nightly ambush team was hiding at the base of Hill 52 and something in the eyes of the simple villagers caught in the middle of it all. The voice of the eight inch howitzers and 106's in the night and our detonating the un-exploded ordinance every day in the paddies and along the road tended to drown out anything else.

 This composition is about that place. (Hill 52 and the valley 1970). The hill itself was completely barren on top from the Dioxin sprayed there. Not a blade of grass could grow in the poisoned ground there. The hill was our last Westward out post of the Marines before Laos. As an engineer, I would be sent there with three of my platoon for thirty days at a time. 

H52 sat between Charlie Ridge and a huge flat topped "mesa" or plain. We wrongly called it the "Plain of Jars" which was not near us at all.

 The escarpment face of that flat topped mountain was said to have many caves. Apparently, from one of the caves, a few nights each month, "Charlie" or the NVA would broadcast (over a loudspeaker) a kind of psycho propaganda tape, (like an NVA “Tokyo Rose”) of a woman saying things about our girlfriends "fooling around" back home and how the draft dodgers were laughing at us while we died. We would sit on top of our sandbagged bunkers, heat up coco and laugh. The howitzers would open up on the caves in answer to the taunts and pretend to know where their target was. 

There were a lot of Phantom Jet napalm strikes around the area as well as B52 "Arc Light" missions. It was never silent for long it seemed. 

 Hill 52 was, without us there, an idyllic looking place with beautiful clouds and lush green mountains around. I don't think there was much of a village there at the time...maybe a small hamlet. We had a CUP unit (Civilian Unification Program? If I recall correctly. 

We had a lot of big shells and bombs to blow up out there too. I think walking around on top of them setting charges seemed routine at the time. Not so much now. The road to 52 seemed to have a lot of small monuments and graves alongside of it. I am not certain they were graves or not now. I can't remember. Maybe they were religious shrines...in any case, if I knew, I don't know now for sure. They were all pock marked with bullet or shrapnel strikes from the years of war. Some of the little white mortar faced shrines looked very old. I assumed they were graves. We gave them no respect though.

 This music composition is about the feelings I got from seeing all that landscape and gazing at the mountains, sky and water. Not about the war. It's about the people and culture there too. 

The South Vietnamese did not want to be in that war any more than we did but, if a VC holds a gun to your wife's head and says," Plant this mine in the road next Saturday night or we will come back and kill her "...It gets done. I suppose the people for the most part did not like us much. They had little time to dwell on it though. They had to make a living off the land. 

 I will never sort out the feelings and emotions that are the legacy of the war. Music though, works out some unfinished things... perhaps. It all was, and is, forever...surreal.

naturally inherent original
fingerstyle acoustic guitar music

Natural States

Michael J Safran

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