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Barely twenty-four hours since death and destruction rained in Manhattan, I was soaked but happy, unaccountably so, given the circumstances. I felt his eyes penetrating into me from behind and turned to meet his gaze. I knew the look, despite myself. Like a cat that had got all the cream, Nao Kao was drinking me in. In the brief instant where our eyes met, he had undressed me so completely that the clothes I was wearing might have floated downstream with our paddle for all the coverage they provided. Instantly, the mood shifted. That he turned his attention so quickly and intensely from the immediacy of the moment – me or him or us in that narrow little boat – confirmed what I knew in my gut. I chose to ignore it all the same.
“He will have to declare war,” Nao Kao stated abruptly, followed by a litany of reasons that George W. Bush would not hesitate to go after the Taliban. Nor, Nao Kao predicted, anyone else he suspected of aiding them.
“I will tell you about war,” began a man whose life had been so marked by it. If I thought I had heard all of Nao Kao’s musings on war, I was wrong.
“It does not stay where they put it. The bombs are not confined to a neat little square, nor the destruction, nor the deaths. In my country, we are still feeling the war twenty-five years after it ended. The Vietnam War. It was not fought only in Vietnam. It was all of Indochina.”
As if I could have forgotten. As penance for soaking him, I held my peace.
“People in the United States, they hearVietnamand they think about helicopters over Saigon. American soldiers suffering the effects of Agent Orange. They do not consider napalm in the mountains of Laos, all the people there or in Cambodia or even in Vietnam who have suffered because men in America decided to pour poison on jungles half a world away. If old men make war and young men fight it, where do the babies fit in? The ones born even today with birth defects from chemicals their mothers encountered as children?
“People in the U.S., they do not think of the roads that decades later explode with a buried mine. ‘Stay on the path, beware of UXO,’ that is the order on every signpost in Laos. UXO. You know this? Unexploded ordnance. It is something serious where I am from. The farther from the cities, the greater the risk, of course. A farmer walking in a field, across a rice paddy – maybe he makes it across, maybe not. An animal hoof that strikes down just so? The cow might have made a nice dinner, except that the meat will be laced with shrapnel. And it will be scattered for kilometers.
“You are driving on a road, especially a small one? Hopefully, the road has been completely cleared, that the crews did their job properly, thoroughly. But off the road, just there to side, there where you might stop to fix a tire or relieve yourself – there are no McDonald’s on the roads of Laos, you know. Then? Bye-bye, good luck.”
He rubbed his temples, as though to sharpen – or erase – the scenes that danced through his memories, these aspects of his past to which I could listen, but could never fully understand.
“Do you know that they stack them in piles in the villages, these bombs, and that children play on these piles? That even today, Liss, decades after the war is over, we continue to count the victims: two, three, four each week. Some accidents, and some from scavenging, yes, scavenging among the bombs. But, why, you ask, what is there to scavenge among the bombs?”
Here Nao Kao laughed, not his usual, joyful laugh, but something harsh and jagged.
“Good American metal, Liss. Because the bombs that fell from the sky, payload after payload, were made of metal better and stronger than what most people in Laos had ever known. Today, you can see homes with bomb casings propping them up, as stilts, and the people in them turn bombs into spoons.”
This was the first time I had heard Nao Kao’s voice tinged with such bitterness, even more than when he had disdained the conspicuous consumption on display at the Art Fairs. He let his words hang between us as he picked up the paddle and returned us competently and quietly to the livery.
“Lose an oar?” the attendant asked.
Nao Kao sat mutely, looking pointedly in my direction, waiting for me to offer up the apology on our behalf. I did so meekly, but with a bright smile and a twinkle in my eyes. The attendant chuckled and waved us on.
“He would have made me pay,” Nao Kao observed, his mood still dark, as we made our way to the bus stop. Not for the first time, I am sure he was correct.
“Your feet okay for walking? Does it hurt?” I asked, looking at his bare feet. He’d chucked the one sandal that remained to him disgustedly in the trash as we left the livery.
Almost immediately, bewilderment replaced bitterness in his eyes. “You think this is the first time I am walking barefoot? I didn’t even own shoes until I started school. My feet will be fine.” He laughed.
“Well do you think they’ll let you on the bus without sandals?”
“What? No shirt, no shoes, no service?” he asked, laughing again, then added, “You should come up to Northwoods sometime you know.”
“Go on, Nao Kao, or you’ll miss the bus!” I admonished, more harshly than I intended, for fleetingly, certainly unbidden, had come the unwelcome thought: I wondered if we weren’t beginning to play with fire.
NAO KAO
“Is it safeto stay there?” my mom asked when I reached her on September 11.
“Ann Arbor is far from New York,” I replied, “and I don’t think the terrorists are interested in Angell Hall.”
“If it is not safe you should think about returning home.”
“Mom, it’s fine. I told you: Ann Arbor is not near New York. Or Washington. It’s better to stay and finish my studies.”
“Better for you. Hard for Noy. She has to take care of two babies by herself. The little one sick with malaria.”
Noy. My wife. The other woman who complained I did not call her often enough.
“She didn’t tell me, Mom.”
“Too busy. She doesn’t want to worry you.”
