Another of the things I have written which speak of a "violent wind". Reality itself might be called a violent wind...change and event are a kind of wind.


There is a constant current of power and fire all around us and within us. All living things are choking full, swollen with the silent imageless birth. The power is clambering and pressing upon us all the time. A great storm of swirling power..The silent storm is all around you, whispering.

There was once a man named Tinh Thuy,a Marine in the South Vietnamese military . This Marine was on a night patrol with his unit just before the fall of Saigon. Tinh was one of the men still fighting in a war even he knew was lost.
NVA ambushed Tinh's unit in the dark that night and Tinh was point in the column as it advanced under the dark trees. A command detonated claymore mine exploded close in front of Tinh and cut him in half. It blew both his legs off and emasculated him. It opened his abdomen so his bowels were spilled and he collapsed in a pool of his own blood and excrement in the mud.
Tinh should have died.

His men respected Tinh. They lifted what was left of him and put it in a poncho and carried what was left of him out after they had beaten off the ambush and could withdraw. They thought he was dead, but they were not going to leave his body behind.
Perhaps Tinh was dead. He doesn't remember the blast. He doesn't remember anything. His body was taken back and it was believed that he was dead. The body was cut in half and the bowels were hanging out.
God spoke. This one. His name is Tinh Thuy.

An American medical corpsman opened the poncho that was wrapped around the fly covered carrion of half a dead gook Marine. The poncho was warm and full of clotted jelly blood. The corpman knelt in the dawn light and examined the corpse. He was careful to guard his breath against the stink and to keep as much of what he touched off himself as he could. He could always wash his boots later.

This one. God whispering and the American corpsman nodded.

Against orders and against responsibility and against sanity...this one.
Lord, I hope you know what you are doing...because that is exactly what they are going to ask me. Lord, you are not going to have to answer for this..I am.

"Load this one with the living. " the corpsman ordered.

The helicopter gook replied,"Bac si! He is dead."

"Load him with the living, I tell you. Do as I command!"

Tinh Thuy remembers nothing. He was taken into surgery and they sewed his abdomen shut and restarted his heart. They closed off his arteries in his femorals and they put in a series of drains. He was injected with IV's for fluids and pumped full of whole blood. For a year he remembers nothing..or next to nothing.
Men from his unit came to see him and went away again. He does not remember any of it. His mother came and watched beside him for months in the hot intensive care unit where he was hooked to a machine which monitored his vital sign and carried off his wastes. The machine pumped him full of more fluids. Most of a year passed.

In the following year the communist NVA took the city.

That night Tinh remembers the sky full of darkness and the lines of tracers and explosions. One of his men came to Tinh that night and took him from the dark powerfailed hospital . Tinh lay in the dark ward, abandoned. But one of his men came and found him.

One of his men came and found him abandoned in the empty ward. Not knowing if it would kill Tinh or not the man unhooked all the tubes and lifted the half a man out of the crib which contained him. And carrying his friend's dripping stinking half a body... that single loyal soldier struggled aimlessly through the rubbled streets in a city that was falling.
There was a woman in the same city on that night...she was middle aged, but looked much older. She was a nun. But for some time the Church had not provided anything for her or for what she did. She was completely on her own.
This woman lived on a quiet back street in Saigon. She cared for retarded and feral children. She had remained behind when she knew the city was falling. There was no one to take care of the children except herself.

When the Communists came finally to lead the dance in a world without end , Tinh was set down in the street and he survived as a beggar.
He was cursed by some unknown U.S. Marine medical corpsman to be half a man, starving and crippled beyond belief....alive.
Lord, I hope you know what you are doing. This one is dead...but I obey you. He will go with the living. I obey.
Lord, I hope you know what you are doing....
"This one."



Tinh should have died within five years (99% with no care from the filth of their own body's wastes do) from kidney damage or starvation or infections.
Tinh picked through garbage and ate the vomit of drunks. He cut up a truck tire and fashioned a pad to support his lower body and his bowels which had no sphincters. He made pads for his hands from truck tires... and on his strong arms that were longer than his torso he went down the street like an insect below people's knees.
He was a man of the dust..a baodi... a man people did not see...because everyone who looked at him turned aside and looked away.

Even with no legs Tinh stood at attention. He didn't beg like a beggar. He took off his Marine cap and he held it out and he looked you right in the eye if you would look at him. There was nothing of pity in him, nor anything servile.

The Communists had their own problems. They ordinarily would have taken the time to arrest and kill any man who had belonged to an elite unit. But in Tinh's case they made him sign a statement that he had served the puppet regime which no longer existed and let it go at that. He would be offered no care . The street was where he belonged and was all he deserved as far as the new masters were concerned.

Tinh's old mother was taken to a re-education camp. She was old. The Communists put her in a pit with a bamboo lid. She died in her own excrement in the pit. There was nothing Tinh could do to save her.

The next Spring Tinh met the old nun who was caring for the feral street children. Tinh protected the children when they went to beg on the street. The old nun had no choice about getting food for the survival of the children. She dressed them as best she could and sat with them near a park. And they lived on what people gave them. Tinh was on the same part of the street. He defended the old woman and the children from anyone who would have made them move.
In return for his kindness Tinh was asked to come and sleep on the covered porch of the house where the old nun and the children lived.
And so the half a Marine who never slouched when he stood on no legs became the protector of the children whom no one wanted in the house of the woman who had nothing but her care. They did not live well, but they survived well.


There was a man who had known the nun years before when she was a bit younger. He was a U.S. Medical corpsman much like the one ( He was the same man, why lie about it ) who had first opened the bloody poncho wrapping the burst corpse of Tinh Thuy laying in a pool of his own guts. This corpsman in 1979 began trying to find a way to communicate inside Viet Nam. It was very difficult. The country was closed and mail was not even delivered from outside the communist domains. The country was in the throes of the worst of the reconstruction to communist standards.

There was a man who escaped from Viet Nam at this time. He was the same man who had come to the hospital that night when the power was off and the city was under bombardment. This man who had saved Tinh in a moment of desperation escaped his homeland and went by boat as a refugee onto the high seas...going anywhere and nowhere. Just away.
This single loyal soldier, Tinh's only friend, wound up in a refugee camp in Hong Kong. He nearly died there. Many did.

By the grace of heaven this man got a job as a cook in the refugee camp. From there he got a job buying supplies for the camp. He met a man who gave him a job working managing a small cooking factory near the waterfront which manufactured fish sauce and seasoning sauces for Asian foods.
This man from Saigon began selling the wares of this small factory and became successful enough that he took to traveling around Asia selling the Soy sauce and the Nuoc Mam sauce his employer made.
He was so successful over the years that he became a partner and opened his own manufacturing outlets. He still travels back and forth..into China...into Viet Nam...from where he lives in Hong Kong.

The corpsman in trying to reach inside Viet Nam met a man who knew another man who knew another man...and that man lived in Hong Kong and ran a small business which occasioned his travel inside Viet Nam to sell soy sauce.



The man who sold soy sauce often made trips to old Saigon, now renamed HoChiMinh City. The corpsman asked the man to perform a service for him. They came to an arrangement.

The man who sold soy sauce traveled with a trunk which contained his product samples and various condiments used in cooking. Among the condiments was a large salt can.
The corpsman took the salt can and manufactured a false bottom to it. Papers and money could be moved in the false bottom of the salt can through the communist customs. A lucrative business in black market foreign exchange was begun taking large denomination American money inside Viet Nam where it would have a high value on the black market as hard value foreign exchange.

The corpsman asked the man who sold soy sauce to visit two people in Viet Nam and to give those people the profits in the money smuggling operation. One of the people was the old nun.
When the man who sold soy sauce came to old nun's house he met the man, Tinh, whose life he had saved that night long before...Tinh was sitting feeding the children on the curb of the street that very night. The man who sold soy sauce came to the house of the old nun with his salt can. So with astonishment Tinh and his friend met once more after years of not seeing one another. Both had survived.

There was another person the corpsman wanted to receive money from the saltcan. Her name was Li Min.

Li Min was a young woman of eighteen that year. When the corpsman had first seen Li Min she was a street child of perhaps eight who lived in an abandoned building in ChuLai in Quang Ngai province with other children who were abandoned due to war's grace.
The corpsman went and found a house near the beach in an area which was abandoned because it was near the coastal perimeter of a US Marine firebase of 175mm guns. Being so close to a perimeter was dangerous. The houses on the beach were abandoned. The corpsman cleaned the house and got some things for the house so that the children could live in it.

He came and got the children in the building in ChuLai and he moved them into the house on the beach. He brought them food in quantity and he got little LiMin to cook for the other children. He collected money from the men on the base and came down every week to check on the children and he saw that they were at least fed. There was not much else he could do. He taught LiMin how to read and gave her a New Testament Bible.

The Corpsman had friends and they had friends and with time the years passed and the children continued to live in the house on the beach. Other corpsmen came and went over the years. And when the Americans left Viet Nam then LiMin had grown old enough to care for her "brothers and sisters". Over the years she took in children as some grew up or others left.

The man with the soy sauce was sent to LiMin and told to buy whatever the house and the family that lived there...sixteen children, needed. LiMin was eighteen when the Communists came and she remembers it as a bad time. But the Bac Si who could not come himself sent the man who sold soy sauce.... and the salt can.

LiMin is now thirty four and the house is still there. She has a houseful of children whom she has taken off the streets. Four hundred dollars a year is her share of the profits from the salt can. A dollar a day will feed four people with some left over.

Tinh's share is a like amount of four hundred dollars. The old nun's health is failing and Tinh is in charge now. The children are fed and do not need to beg. A $100 bill will get at black market exchange rates a buying power equivalent of $140 and this converted into the Viet currency will purchase staples at the equivalent of nearly $800. A one hundred dollar bill in US currency is worth 150,000 dong in Viet rice...enough to buy food for a year for the house.
Tinh sent me a gift for Christmas...his teacup. It is chipped but it was his own possession...at one time his only possession. We know one another now.
But he still does not know who to curse (and never will) for saying,
"This one, load him with the living."
I will never tell him he was dead.

LiMin has never married and probably never will. She is the new generation to replace the nun who will soon go on to God. LiMin is a nun who does not know she is a nun. I am the Bac Si she has not seen in 28 years. We have shared pictures, and we have shared something else which is beyond a name.

And the man with the salt can sent me a small figurine from China for Christmas. It is an old man sitting fishing, there is a bait basket at his bare foot. On a small pole he has a newly caught fish. The old man is Asian with a beard. The old man is bald.
This year he sent me another figurine of the same old man squatting reading a book, dressed as an old mongol in a skull cap and felt boots. I use both figurines as bookends.

The Emptiness speaks and says clearly, "This one!"
I listen and I listen and I listen.
"This one".

Little brother and sister, you too are "this one."

There is a constant current of power and fire all around us and within us. All living things are choking full, swollen with the silent imageless birth. The power is clambering and pressing upon us all the time. A great storm of swirling power..The silent storm is all around you, whispering.

This is really good!!! U are a great writer!!

Can I keep a copy of this, just as a reminder, this wud mean a lot

I will go and get my copy of the Koran, I have a couple of them. One is a paperback and very dogeared. I have a large rubber band around it and carry it in a leather pouch with rawhide tie tags. The other is a larger hardbound book given to me by the Egyptian wife of a Special Forces Officer. She is a deeply pious and very good woman whom I profoundly respect. Her faith is worth seeing and knowing. There is no harm in her. She is a good woman.
Surah al-Haaqah...got it.

The cells of the brain, I understand, are about equal in number with the stars in the universe. This analogy of gray matter and star matter suggests to me the nature of poetry as a form of human revelation.This effort of the mind of man to approximate the farthest extent of the universe, this seeking by the terrestrial to reach the celestial, is at the heart of all revelation.

Revelation, Fozley ,is not over. As long as birth happens and imagination forms then God will speak to us . The Book of reveal-ation is always a new book contained in the Final Scriptures and continually revealed in every new human life

All forms of revelation help to personalize the universe for us. In the modern world it is easier for many people to understand revelation in religion, history, or science, than in poetry.

But any sort of knowing...the solemn gaze of any child beside the road...is God speaking.

As members of the Judaic-Christian tradition, whether Old or New Testament style, or both, whether churched or unchurched, men like myself are familiar with religious revelation and prophesy. All people of the Book are more or less covanented; they acknowledge and obey the law of Moses, or the law of Christ..or the law of the Koran. Despite the tribulations suffered by religion in the past two thousand years or more, and despite the abuses by men of revelation in Scripture, the core of revealed normative moral principles remains unimpaired. These principles are the revelations of God to man in Western civilization, which all men of faith and right reason acknowledge. Religion contains the greatest and most inclusive of all revelations, because it involves the ultimate origins, nature and destiny of man.

to the forum man enjoy yo stay

I found your quote near the end of the Koran in among the shorter portions.
I have a tape I made once during a sandstorm, of the sounds outside the tent, the wind. I listen to it sometimes.

The term for Resurrexion is taken from the word for the sound of breathing...sussura..sarsarin seems to be a derivative of the same sound, a similar word.

I will have to consider a nick for myself in arabic and post a picture also.

I see you live in London near Battersea? I used to live at 44 Chester Row up half a block from Sloane Square down from Knights Bridge. You could almost walk to Battersea Park from there. I liked to walk and London was such a nice place, a very civilized city. And transportation was so easy and relatively inexpensive. I went to school up off Regents park...use to walk down through Campden Town. Played Soccer in Regents Park and used a Welsh Guards gymnasium, a regimenal favor. Went to the Lancaster Club.
Had a German girlfriend who was a Nanny, her name was Ursula Scholten. She came from Munich. She was killed in a car accident. Had another girlfriend who was from Argentina in London, part of the Embassy crowd. They were just beginning to build ( big hole in the ground) the large American Embassy at Grosvenor Square in those days.

Battersea...lots of memories...I seem to remember a barracks near Battersea. Isnt there a barracks there? English military, very fine troops, they dont pay them enough.

Just read the rules for this Forum, very astute. I could not have composed a better set of rules. I sincerely wish other Forums would read that set and adopt a majority of them. It is going to take me a month to get fifty posts. I dont even know if these count, I suppose they must.

I dont know how to reply to anyone. I suppose you will have to help me and be patient with me. Well, at least you got me to read the Koran. I carry a lot of books but have the Koran so I can carry that one book on me and even fall in the river and have it make across if I make it across. That leather wallet has saved the book numerous times. I have written a couple of books and been published. No great literature. Just stories, about war and travel mostly. Paperback cheap stuff. E-bay is selling some copies though. Saw one for $36 the other day. Had to laugh...my royalties ran out decades ago.

Dont worry, you'll reach 50posts in no time insha Allaah (God willing.) Just view some of the posts within the forums, and respond to them with your opinion.

Its kinda fun to get a variety of views from different people, so why not join in?


Peace.

Keep a copy of my writing? Why not. The entire book"The Cauldron of Light" was about a trip I took across an ERG, a desert so severe that the ecological cycle does not complete itself in there. There are only a few ERGS in the world.
This particular place was called the Pinacate Inferno. I like deserts, I am half devil.

The entire ecology was based on hate and heat and the only thing that stayed in there year long was a Stink Bug. I stayed in there from February until April..long enough. Last day of February until second week of April...Forty days roughly.

My beard was hard with sweaty dirt like icicles and I was burned and even my clothing was starting to rot from the heat. I never took my clothes off and I smelled awful. I had two guns and a couple of big knives and I had boots that were in shreds.

I started in from a place called the Williams Atomic Artillery Test Range, and then crossed through the Luke AF Gunnery and Bombing Range ( had to be careful crossing that) then the Cabeza Prieta ( Rotting Skull) Game refuge...mountainous and the only place in the border with Mexico where even a US Senator cant get permission ( not that any sane man would want to go, mind you) to enter. The only place in the Continental US that has TIGER. Big Black Jaguar ( dont tell anybody) and 700 Desert Bighorn mountain sheep. Feral Donkeys that have bred back to having stripes after centuries, and Wild Hogs , a species of really mean big Peccary. Poison waterholes with waters just as BLUE and beautiful and FULL of Copper Sulphates. Vampire bats, Walking Cactus...well they do crawl actually.
Rattle Snakes with heads the size of my fists. the largest Tarantulas in the world in the Tule Wilderness just northof the Agua Dulce Mines, water down in the mine alongside the Vampire Bat colony. Cant shoot the bats because you are in a three hundred year old mine and the shot would make the place collapse. Graves outside the mine date from 1888 and nobody but you been there since the Apaches killed everybody. No one ever came back...Lead mine, wonderful rich with big veins of almost pure Lead. The rotten mine timbers glow and flicker with light producing bacteria. The whole place lights up at night.

Water is very rare and you have to know where it is. Because you are on foot and if your watr runs out, so do you. Water weighs 8 pounds to the gallon. You need a gallon a day. How far can you walk? It is 312 miles from there to the Gulf of Baja. the average temp is over a hundred.F The heat will kill you in about 45 minutes in the open. You move at night and you navigate by the stars. You sleep during the day and you dont kill anything because there are more of them then there are of you.
You have to kill what you eat and you are very respectful of everything else so it wont eat you back.

There are three ICBM sites in the Williams Atomic range. As well as a thirty foot deep Atomic crater with a radioactive shallow pond in the bottom with a bottom made of crystallized trinitite green glass. surrounded by a beautiful field of Goldenrod. Beautiful place. radioactive as the door to Hell.

Cross into Mexico through a region used by Mexican tank regiments for practice and manuevers. Friendly with water catchment absolutely full of snakes there to catch rabbits who come to drink along with everything else. Ever drunk water with bits of bloody blown to hell snake in it? Point blank with a twelve guage blast from a shot gun for the snake that didnt want to share. Drink the stuff with him all in it.

The home of the Gila Monster...a beadpurse( almost spelled badpurse ) of sloth and acid. Said to have been the only animal God created without an anus. They bite you and then dont turn loose while they just chew and chew and work the poison in, they dont have fangs, just grooved poisonous teeth guaranteed to make you rot. The Tarantulas are so big they can kill rabbits.

Why was I there? I like bad places. I have a wicked hobby. I like to go to Hell and step in your face. Pinacate Inferno,a volcano ten miles across with five hundred smaller volcanoes down in the monstrous Caldera. And the stars at night close enough to touch and the clearest air between here and the Moon.

Made it out across the Santa Clara, dunes sixty stories high and fifty miles long. The last waterhole was Los Chivos, because onions grew all over the bottom of it and it stank something awful. But there wasnt anybody to kiss so I drank it anyway. The top of the Pinacate was the Devils Throne. The Aztec God Smoky Mirror is said to have first come to Earth there. The Aztecs sacrificed five thousand living human hearts to him every year. He was that sort of guy. Five men dressed in human skin held you down and a sixth one cut your heart out with an obsidian knife and held it up to Smoky Mirror Tezcatlipoca while it was still beating. It was that kind of town.

I like deserts.

As-Salaam Walikum Are You Also ManoMano? Because ManoMano , said the same first 2-3 sentences as you?
~~~As-Salaam Walikum~~~

What other Forums. You mean I can talk on other Forums even though I am under fifty posts and practically a Leper around here?

I thought I was in Quarantine. You mean I can get out and annoy people who post all the pretty pictures and go Inshallah a lot. Hey, Inshallah. Yay Team.

. What are you trying to say?!!!
~~~As-Salaam Walikum~~~

Yeah sure you can post within the other sections, you're a member here so go ahead.

By the way, we say 'insha Allaah' alot because anything that ever happens, happens through God's Will.

Greetings,

A belated welcome to the forum Faust. I have to say, I enjoy reading your posts. Very insightful.

Hello Faust

Welcome to the forum.

That first post was like de ja vu. I read it before somewhere. Then i remembered:
http://www.albawabaforums.com/read.p...95&t=98595&v=f

http://www.albawabaforums.com/read.p...47501&t=147501

http://www.albawabaforums.com/read.p...47415&t=147415

Swanlake, you got it. I am outed. A bad egg shall hatch a dragon.