There have been many moments in woods and forests; sucked down as a child into the soil, nails clawing into earth then digging up worms for inspection, old toys, old soliders who had been buried alive in some previous battle. In the wood near my home it was possible to talk tactics with friends, shocked and awed by the scale of possibility. Now that it was summer we could eschew our bedrooms and open a new front in local woods with a new enemy, the unforseen.
In Cat Tien, a National Park 150km from Saigon, it must have been the unseen. One moment the forest we now walked through would have been cawing and shrieking with life, the scurrying sounds of beasts of fur and scale, rushing on through the thick vines that had been winding themselves around the Mahogany trees for centuries. And the next it was bludgeoned into eerie silence, just the lick of flames and the settling of chard embers to be heard. Millions of gallons of agent orange, a herbicide kept in containers with an orange markation strip on it, had been deployed to rid the forest of the Mekong and other areas of dense vegetation and hence cover for Minh's forces. The troops spraying the chemical were told it was harmless to humans but immediately children were running down roads, their skin disintegrating before photographers' eyes and then later, enlisted GI's found themselves the proud fathers of babies with half-limbs and sunken eyes.
Earlier we had been in an altogether different forest; one where trees and vines grown for centures were wild and furious, a literal jungle of entanglements, of varicose veins enveloping trees which stretched towards the canopy, their thick, wide roots giving shelter to alarmingly large beetles and twilight fauna. The defoliated forest had an evenness to it, all the trees were just 30 something years old, rising as they did out of contaminated ground. But it was good to be in the more primevil wood, you could sense a link stretching back millennia before man with poisoned ideas interrupted. Here we heard but did not see the monkeys, their howl making us jump with fright and then, and then a moment, straight out of the image bank, a moment catching us timely now, sweet posterity.
We heard them first, a flap of wings that was languorous but not weak, a slow rhythm that was no mere domestic flutter but a
sound that gave us a pre-historic flight, a rippling fright as though we were going to be swooped on by some jointed bird and carried to the laughing Howler monkeys. As it turned out, we looked up and saw pie-eye'd Hornbills (ok, I ain't no orniphologist) with a huge wing span and a call that dropped on us as they glided through the canopy. Around us, their sound was absorbed into the soft tread of hidden life. We stopped for longer than we had intended and met silence with silence.
Then later we trekked a few hours to a crocodile swamp which at first didn't live up to its name. We were to stay in rudimentary rooms, a bed with a mosquito net and nothing else. When we had hung our nets we took up our position at the top of the wooden, ranger's lookout. Below us our guide was chatting with the rangers as they all busied themselves with cooking their evening meal, fish caught just a few hours before from the lake that was supposed to contain our crocs. From our perch the five of us looked beyond the Beware The Crocodile sign that appeared to have been chomped quite heavily and strained our eyes to see something other than the flying fish, the exotic skimming birds that suddenly didn't seem worth our attention.
Eventually, a long eventually, having doused ourselves liberally with alcohol we had carried from our drop-off point, we took a walk beyond the sign on a moonlit-night, a good night to see them according to our guide. And as if cajoled by our wishful thinking, blubous eyes radiated and reflected in the night and with closer inspection at the water's edge, the gnarled and scaly body of a fairly docile male croc lurked for us to feel relieved. That nature had represented itself well.
I was lucky that my soldiers were not destroyed, buried or most commonly due to our flibbity concentration, missing in action as whole battalians could be mislaid as we fought over our strategy, our common goals. Such was our game at the age we were, our battles were of World War II, our imagination synchronisnng with what we had been taught. Our forest, our play was rich and dense, full of wonderfully fearful pretense. Of course we had know idea what the death of our soldiers meant as they valiantly balanced on top of mole hills. But we would have noticed a bomb that took away our cover and stripped the woods of their life. We would have noticed the death of nature and we would have noticed our skin falling like dead leaves to the soiled ground.
