WORDS WITHOUT MEANING

Click here for photos from this trip (opens in new window)

Quietly, whilst she still sleeps, pull back the covers and creep out of bed, slide on your shoes and zip up your bag. Carefully, so as not too wake her, walk towards the door and gently turn the handle. The cold pre-dawn air on your face, you turn, for the final time, to look at her. She sleeps on, so trusting that you are still there with her, but you are not. You have turned away from her and you have slipped out of the door. When morning comes and she finally awakes you will be far away and her day will have been destroyed. Today will be a good day.

Conditions could hardly be described as ideal. Squatting firmly above us was the subdued tail end of a typhoon that just days before had murdered so many in the Philippines. The wind was gusting above gale force and doing its utmost to blow us back inland and it wasn’t so much raining cats and dogs as raining bloody big elephants. No, this was certainly not the powder white beaches and coconut palms that I had pictured in my mind just two weeks earlier, but we had found waves, good waves, and that was something that hadn’t really been in the picture either. Today, in-fact almost had too many waves. From the safety of the village it seemed to be a good size to have fun, but not enough to scare, and on this side of the headland the wind was being funnelled cross shore and the waves were fairly clean. But then we paddled out, and with that, the war began.

The day you slip out the door, surfboard under your arm, will be a day when the times are good and you’ll be glad you ran away. But be prepared, for everything you know and understand is about to end and some of your past you will loose along the way, because when the times are bad the faces you see will mean nothing at all. On March 16th 1968 a group of teenage and twenty-something Americans awoke to a bad day.

It wasn’t my war. I wasn’t born when it took place. I wasn’t even that interested in its many different stories and I didn’t want it to become a part of mine. Rambo had re-written history too many times for me to care about the facts, but here it was, against my wishes, staring me in the face and demanding me to be a witness to its aftermath.

Vietnam is full of names, faces and words that mean nothing to me, but on our way to battle with a typhoon generated swell we passed through a name that means a lot to so very many. The road to the beach sweeps along the edge of the villages of Son My and, early on a spring dawn, back in ‘68, a platoon of teenage and twenty-something American GI’s slid out of the doors of their helicopters with guns under their arms. US Intelligence had informed the soldiers that at this time of the day all innocent civilians would be out of the villages at a nearby market and that anyone left would be an enemy combatant. By the end of the morning every house had been put to the torch and five hundred faces, the vast majority of which belonged to women, children and tiny babies, lay in cold, congealing pools of blood. Not a single bullet was fired back at the Americans.

Maybe the Son My massacre and the whole sorry episode of American involvement in Vietnam could have been avoided if the words spoken had been clearer. Maybe it was caused by nothing more than simple cross wires, a cultural misunderstanding and the confusion brought on by words without meaning. You can’t blame the Americans though, because, God knows, anything is possible in a land a long way from home where words mean nothing at all. Who is to say, that in the same situation, with all this cultural confusion, you or I wouldn’t shoot a child in the face?

Little has changed since Son My and the war, the Vietnamese faces are no more than decoration for our pictures and the words they speak are still without meaning. Cultural confusion remains the overriding factor behind every Westerners encounter of the country and, true to this pattern, I was getting my wires crossed more in Vietnam than at any other time since that spring dawn, many years ago, when I gave a final glance back before sliding out the door with a board under my arm.

Charades has never been my game and acting is not my forte, but eating is something I do enjoy. I even consider myself to be quite good at it and so if getting a meal involved putting on a theatrical performance to bring the house down then I’ll be up there with the best of the glitzy Hollywood stars, but by the end of our Vietnamese days it was Nick, my fellow Vietnam wave hunter, who would have swept the boards at the Oscars. A finer impersonation of a noodle, a chicken or even a goat’s penis has rarely been seen. Unfortunately though, Vietnam prefers its Chinese Kung-Foo movies to its Rambo’s, and so Oscar winning performances are greeted with just a polite smile, a look of complete incomprehension and, a few moments later, with the dishing up of another plate of goats penis (with Chinese medicine), field mice or pigs brain it becomes obvious that once again the menu request we had been trying to get across has been lost in translation.

When, in the cold of a bleak winter, we awoke before dawn, zipped up our board bags, quietly closed the front door behind us and set off for Vietnam in search of surf, the pictures in our minds were of blue skies, warm waters, maybe some mellow waves and certainly the good times that make you glad you ran away. Surf travel though can have a strange way of avoiding all the clichés and instead showing you something that can be nicer or nastier than you ever expected. In Vietnam things were starting off nastier. It just wasn’t going to plan, but then things rarely do when you take the plunge and leave behind the comfort of home. The onshore wind was a hundred times stronger than we had expected, yet the swell cleverly managed to remain almost non-existent, and as for those bright, sunny days….. We did of course know that there would be a little rain and possibly some wind, after all it was the middle of the monsoon, but in turn we thought that would mean waves. Between November and March a powerful northeast airflow covers the South China Sea generating consistent swells for the many bays of this huge body of water. Vietnam sits smack in the centre of the path these swells travel and its three thousand kilometre coastline of coral reefs, headlands and sandy beaches was just too tempting to keep Nick and I away.

Most people know Vietnamese surf through a pointless war that cost the lives of millions. ‘Charlie don’t surf’ and all that. Quite frankly, from what we had so far discovered, Charlie didn’t surf for a good reason. Days and days slid us by as we sat in our van, lurching down every muddy and sandy track we could find, and at the end of each and every one the result was always the same. More wind, more rain and more small and messy surf. The times were bad and we could think of nothing more than coming home. We had begun our journey by boarding a small propeller powered plane destined for an archipelago of forest drenched islands a couple of hundred kilometres to the south of the mainland. From the air things looked stunning, the sun was out and swells were rolling over the South China Sea and hitting a variety of reefs thrown about the islands. The view from up here matched the perfect pictures I’d generated in my mind before this trip began. Down on the ground though the pictures turned out to be nothing but rubbish postcards, because the truth was that the wind had turned every wave into a bouncy, choppy closeout and, even if the pictures from the sky had been real, access was all but impossible. It was too rough for the locals to consider taking out their boats and there were no roads, not even tracks through the forest, and why should there be? What reason had anyone ever had before today for going to such hidden beaches? So we returned, frustrated, to the mainland and continued our search from the back of a hired van.

Again though the wind was plaguing our hopes of a decent wave and when that wasn’t, it was the flat and featureless offshore reefs and sandbars that drained all the energy from the swells. It wasn’t just the frustration of finding no waves that was grinding into us, it was the whole process of explaining, through sign language, to Mr Truong, our driver, exactly what it was that we were looking for and exactly where we wanted to go. We would point to the beach and do an impersonation of a person surfing and Mr Truong would spin the van around and head inland in search of a place for us to eat. Maybe it was just our acting? Or maybe Mr Truong genuinely thought he was taking us the right way, because not just were we dealing with a language whose words had no meaning to us, but we were also dealing with Mr Truong’s feminine side. You see, navigation was not Mr Truong’s strong point, in-fact, if he was a woman he would have been the blondest of blonde girls. I quickly lost count of the amount of times Mr Truong would inexplicably get us hopelessly lost on a near enough straight road within sight of our goal.

So it continued, over the paddy fields and around the hills, through sloshing rain and wind blasted beaches. Forever searching for the pictures in our mind and every day, in our obsession to find perfection, we ignored the real reason for coming. The faces around us. Faces without meaning that spoke words that meant nothing to us. We had come, we had seen, but we had not understood. If only we had taken the time to understand, then who knows, but just maybe, they could have pointed us to the goal we were searching for right back at the beginning? We ignored them though; we knew best, we knew where we would find waves. Then came the afternoon when we started to understand. We pointed to a likely looking peninsula on our map and danced about Mr Truong pretending to be driving the van to that location. We even offered to drive it ourselves in the hope that we might actually get there within a reasonable time frame. Mr Truong said something that we took to mean as, “Don’t worry boys, I’ll drive around in circles for a few hours”, but in retrospect probably meant, “That place is crap. If only you’d only stop interfering and learn to understand, then you’d know that I have been trying to take you somewhere with far better waves for the past two days. Instead you just keep making me turn the van around to go and look at some crappy beach break”. Satisfied that we had, at least partially, got our message across to Mr Truong we clambered back into the van.

Things started well enough, we set off in the direction expected, but then, somewhere between the disco green rice fields and the sparkly lagoon, Mr Truong took an unexpected turn off and, ignoring our protests, continued down the road to its very end and an unremarkable cliff. We both sighed and Mr Truong smiled. With Nick launching into an animated sign language conversation with Mr Truong, that neither of them ever had the slightest hope of understanding, about our whereabouts, I took a stroll to the end of the cliff. “Hey Nick, never mind where we are. I think you should come and take a look at this”. In the cove below me head high lefts reeled across a reef and blew their insides out on the shallow end section.

We understood at last. Maybe these faces and words were not just pretty camera fodder. Maybe these faces and words had something to say? Maybe they did speak with meaning? They had led us to a quality wave and now we chose to listen and as soon as we did so, things became easier and more and more waves fell into place. If only, on the day I had quietly, so as not to wake her, slipped out of bed and shut the door behind me. Understood that all it really took was to follow the words without meaning and let them take you by the hand to wherever they are going, because the chances are wherever it is they are going it will be a good day there.

From this beach onward there were waves everywhere. Mr Truong still appeared to drive in circles and he still never gained the ability to navigate us back to our hotel. We still never really understood his words and he certainly never grasped the meaning of our pantomimes. Somehow though things were better, we had learnt to go with the flow, he asked the advice of locals and by the end of the day we always managed to get in the water.

Close to the end of our stay the weather took a turn for the worse. A typhoon that had murdered hundreds in the Philippines rushed across the South China Sea towards Vietnam. The conditions could hardly be described as ideal. That morning Mr Truong’s promise of good waves had led us down a road that swept along the site of the Son My massacre and finished up in a fishing village with potentially the finest waves we had so far found. The villagers warned us against it. Today, they said, was too dangerous, the waves too big, the wind too strong, but we had stopped listening. They were talking words without meaning and today, we knew, was going to be a good day. But then we paddled out, and with that, the war began. The currents caught us and swirled us about and the wind seemed stronger away from the safety of the land and the waves kept on coming. There were no lulls, no pauses, no sets, just great mountains of tumbling water and with every passing minute the waves seemed to build in size and ferocity. In seconds the hundreds of spectators on the beach were just dots. We were out of our league and paying the price for not listening to their words of advice. Still the waves kept on coming, whilst we, growing tired of trying to hold our position, became separated from one and other and were left to face the anger of a murderous typhoon alone.

We had come to Vietnam with the same ignorant view that most of us have. Vietnam was a country where Rambo won a war and the other faces in the film meant nothing at all. Vietnam though is not the country we want it to be. Vietnam is where the American War took place. Vietnam is where America lost a war it should never have been a part of. Vietnam is where America used chemical weapons for mass destruction simply because the words meant nothing at all. Charlie don’t surf, but maybe if he had then the cultural boundaries could have been crossed and the hundred other incidents as terrible as Son My avoided.

Back in the jaws of the typhoon we were both flagging and as the fear of the sheer energy in the water grew we gave into it and let it threw us back to shore. Vietnamese surf had beaten us, but its people forgave us. Just as they forgive all who arrive without understanding. As the crowds from the village surrounded us with questions and stares I felt the sudden friendly touch of a hand on mine and I understood enough now to know that I should let it lead me to wherever it was going. This is how I find myself standing in a tin shack house, sheltering from a storm, a surfer in a land a long way from home, surrounded by words without meaning. But it doesn’t matter for the gestures say it all and the faces around me have become real. They are faces like mine and they speak words like mine. I had awoken one cold dawn as a stranger who knew nothing and who had nothing on the mind but imagined pictures. Then I looked back for the final time, slipped out of the door, board under my arm, and set off to see the world for what it really was. It was the day when the faces on the TV news bulletins stopped meaning nothing at all and their words suddenly became clear. It was the day when the times became good and I was glad I had run away. From the tin shack I now stand in, in a land a long way from home, I urge you, as a surfer, to get up, quietly, so as not to wake her, and do the same. Open the door in the cold of a pre-dawn and see the waves and faces of the world for what they really are. It’s calling you from the books that you read. It’s calling you from the friends that you have. It’s calling you from the pictures that you see. It’s calling you from your surfers’ soul. Zip up your board bag and look beyond the narrow windows of your home. There’s a world full of words and faces and it’s time to see and understand them. Today is going to be a good day. Tomorrow is going to be good too. Slip out the door, carefully, so that she does not wake. It’s time you were a surfer. You’ll be glad you ran away.

Thanks to Oceansurf Publications, www.oceansurfpublications.co.uk and C-Skins Wetsuits, www.c-skins.com for understanding and Mr Truong for great driving – sometimes!