Friday, August 11, 2017

Eastern Promise

I was sure dude was Texan at first. Turned out he wasn't.His mom was American. She was a parachute instructor. She insisted he learn to jump, and fly planes. They were flying single prop cessnas. This was the mid '60s. It was before Vietnam became a thing. They'd strap skis onto their chute packs and jump into the alps, ski down, and get into a kayak and float out, bike down, arriving at their final hold out. This was way before extreme sports.


To him, flying planes was just a chore. He got certified because his mom made him. He could fly anyone, as long as they weren't paying customers.


The Brits had introduced deer, they'd reproduced like rabbits, without any natural predators. Venison was going at $13 a pound, this is when the NZD was on par with the dollar. 


They started hunting deer with helicopters. He was responsible for unloading gutted deer from the choppers. They'd gut them in the field and tie them onto the legs of the helicopter. The felt from the antlers was going at $50 an ounce, the Koreans bought it up as an aphrodisiac. Then he got recruited as a paratrooper in Vietnam. 


As a Kiwi it was a bit much to go to war for the Queen. It just felt wrong.


The good times had ended. He went all through the war jumping with teams of 8 guys. 


He was on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, jumping down, a former farm boy new his trucks. The Viet Cong where driving Fords, much to his astonishment. They'd been manufactured in Russia.


When they came back they had to be debriefed. They were collecting intelligence. For every answer there was 30 questions. He indicated the enemy were driving Fords, made in Russia. The officers said this wasn't important information, they were interested in other details. 


Dude was confused about the war. He didn't understand what they were doing there. "We won that war 3 times and then handed it to them on a silver platter!".


Saigon fell in early 1975. His platoon of 8 had been tasked with demolishing an air base, that was also a submarine port. The submarines bunkered in underground chambers. Nobody knew the subs had been there. But, they didn't receive adequate tools to demo anything. It was weird.


It was by then May, they'd somehow been left behind well after the evacuation of allied troops. Their radio battery was extinguished. They had to hold up a gas station to charge the battery, so they could reach the US Enterprise positioned in the S. China Sea. The ship dispatched a chopper that finally picked them up. 


They wrote a book about it. There was a guy from NZ who had been one of the deer hunters he'd worked with. He could fly chopper with his knees and make head shots out the window mid flight. 


After the war he came back home. They wanted to give him a desk job in the government. He told them he wanted something more challenging, but his exact words were "Fuck you motherfuckers, I've just been jumping out of planes and killing people, I need something more exciting!".


Two days later they came back to him. They said he could pick a job in Kenya or the Philippines. By that time he'd figured out how the government worked, so he chose Kenya, hoping for Philippines. And he got his choice post. He worked in the oil fields. Had to wait until he was 25 to come to Indonesia. Jakarta was a whole lot better then, no traffic. That was 1979. He'd kept his residency ever since. 


It didn't make sense going to war for the queen. He was against all the elitism. The elitists had lost control. Trump would be out by the end of the year. 


Paul Ryan and Joseph Dunford were in control, had been since 2015. Most Americans didn't know the truth; that they'd been subject to a soft military coup, where Trump was merely a front man.  


He said "You know whenever you see a US flag with gold fringe, that's when you're at war. Your civil rights don't apply anymore, not even in court. That's where you are now." He went on to exclaim that American's don't know much about what's really going on, the media is just propaganda.


We are going to see tremendous changes in the next few years.


He took out his can of chew and took a pinch. 


I could have sworn he was a Texan, but he was an Indonesian Muslim. 

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