The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (13 page)

6

War Stories

In France they have two kinds, freedom and communist. In the U.S. they just have one kind: freedom.

—Open Ticket Lao buyer, explaining why he came to the United States, not France

T
HE FREEDOM ABOUT WHICH SO MANY PICKERS AND
buyers speak has far-flung referents as well as local ones. In Open Ticket, most explain their commitments to freedom as stemming from terrifying and tragic experiences in the U.S.-Indochina War and the civil wars that followed. When pickers talk about what shaped their lives, including their mushroom picking, most talk about surviving war. They are willing to brave the considerable dangers of the matsutake forest because it extends their living survival of war, a form of haunted freedom that goes everywhere with them.

Yet engagements with war are culturally, nationally, and racially specific. The landscapes pickers construct vary with their legacies of
engagement with war. Some pickers wrap themselves in war stories without ever having lived through war. One wry Lao elder explained why even young Lao pickers wear camouflage: “These people weren’t soldiers; they’re just pretending to be soldiers.” When I asked about the dangers of being invisible to white deer hunters, a Hmong picker evoked a different imaginary: “We wear camouflage so we can hide if we see the hunters first.” If they saw him, hunters might hunt him, he implied. Pickers navigate the freedom of the forest through a maze of differences. Freedom as they described it is both an axis of commonality and a point from which communally specific agendas divide. Despite further differences within such agendas, a few portraits can suggest the varied ways the matsutake hunt is energized by freedom. This chapter extends my exploration of what pickers and buyers meant by freedom by turning to the stories they told about war.

Frontier romanticism runs high in the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. It is common for whites to glorify Native Americans
and
identify with the settlers who tried to wipe them out. Self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, and the aesthetic force of white masculinity are points of pride. Many white mushroom pickers are advocates of U.S. conquest abroad, limited government, and white supremacy. Yet the rural northwest has also gathered hippies and iconoclasts. White veterans of the U.S.-Indochina War bring their war experiences into this rough and independent mix, adding a distinctive mixture of resentment and patriotism, trauma and threat. War memories are simultaneously disturbing and productive in forming this niche. War is damaging, they tell us, but it also makes men. Freedom can be found in war as well as against war.

Two white veterans suggest the range of how freedom is expressed. Alan felt lucky when an aggravated childhood injury caused him to be sent home from Indochina. For the next six months he served as a driver on an American base. One day he received orders to return to Vietnam. He drove his jeep back to the depot and walked out of the base, AWOL. He spent the next four years hiding in the Oregon mountains, where he gained a new goal: to live in the woods and never pay rent. Later, when
the matsutake rush came, it suited him perfectly. Alan imagines himself as a gentle hippie who works against the combat culture of other vets. Once he went to Las Vegas and had a terrible flashback when surrounded by Asians at the casino. Life in the forest is his way of keeping clear of psychological danger.

Not all war experience is so benign. When I first met Geoff I was overjoyed to find someone with so much knowledge about the forest. Telling me of the pleasures of his childhood in eastern Washington, he described the countryside with a passionate eye for detail. My enthusiasm to work with Geoff was transformed, however, when I talked with Tim, who explained that Geoff had served a long and difficult tour in Vietnam. Once, his group had jumped from a helicopter into an ambush. Many of the men were killed, and Geoff was shot through the neck but, miraculously, survived. When Geoff came home, he screamed so much at night that he could not stay home, and so he returned to the woods. But his war years were not over. Tim described a time when he and Geoff had surprised a group of Cambodian pickers on a mushroom patch Geoff thought of as one of his special places. Geoff had opened fire, and the Cambodians scrambled into the bushes to get away. Once Tim and Geoff shared a cabin, but Geoff spent the night brooding and sharpening his knife. “Do you know how many men I killed in Vietnam?” he asked Tim. “One more wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

White pickers imagine themselves not only as violent vets but also as self-sufficient mountain men: loners, tough, and resourceful. One point of connection with those who did not fight is hunting. One white buyer, too old for Vietnam but a strong supporter of U.S. wars, explained that hunting, like war, builds character. We spoke of then Vice President Cheney, who had shot a friend while bird hunting; it was through the ordinariness of accidents such as this that hunting makes men, he said. Through hunting, even noncombatants can experience the forest landscape as a site for making freedom.

Cambodian refugees cannot easily join established Pacific Northwest legacies; they have had to make up their own histories of freedom in the United States. Such histories are guided not only by U.S. bombardment
and the subsequent terrors of the Khmer Rouge regime and civil war, but also by their moment of entry into the United States: the shutting down of the U.S. welfare state in the 1980s. No one offered Cambodians stable jobs with benefits. Like other Southeast Asian refugees, they had to make something from what they had—including their war experiences. The matsutake boom made forest foraging, with its opportunities for making a living through sheer intrepidness, an appealing option.

What then is freedom? One white field agent, exalting the pleasures of war, suggested I speak with Ven, a Cambodian who, the field agent said, would show me that even Asians love U.S. imperial war. Given that Ven spoke to me with this introduction, I was not surprised by his endorsement of American freedom as a military quest. Yet our conversation took turns that I don’t imagine the field agent would have expected, and yet it echoed other Cambodians in the forest. First, in the confusions of the Cambodian civil war, it was never quite clear on which side one was fighting. Where white vets imagined freedom on a starkly divided racial landscape, Cambodians told stories in which war bounced one from one side to the other without one’s knowledge. Second, where white vets sometimes took to the hills to live out war’s traumatic freedom, Cambodians offered a more optimistic vision of recovery in the forests of American freedom.

At the age of thirteen, Ven left his village to join an armed struggle. His goal was to repel Vietnamese invaders. He says he did not know the national affiliations of his group; he later found it to be a Khmer Rouge affiliate. Because of his youth, the commander befriended him and he was kept safe, close to the leaders. Later, however, the commander fell out of favor, and Ven became a political detainee. His group of detainees was sent to the jungle to fend for themselves. By chance, this turned out to be an area Ven knew from his fighting days. Where others saw empty jungle, he knew the concealed paths and forest resources. At this point in the story, I expected him to say that he escaped, especially since he was beaming with pride about his jungle knowledge. But no: He showed the group a hidden spring, without which they would not have had fresh water. Perhaps there was something empowering about this forest detention, even in its coercions. Returning to the forest draws from this spark—but only, he explained, in the safety of American imperial freedom.

Other Cambodians spoke about mushroom foraging as healing from war. One woman described how weak she was when she first came to the United States; her legs were so frail that she could hardly walk. Mushroom foraging has brought back her health. Her freedom, she explained, is freedom of motion.

Heng told me about his experiences in a Cambodian militia. He was the leader of thirty men. But while patrolling one day he stepped on a land mine, which blew off his leg. He begged his comrades to shoot him, since the life of a one-legged man in Cambodia was beyond what he imagined as human. Through luck, however, he was picked up by a UN mission and transported to Thailand. In the United States he gets along well on his artificial leg. Still, when he told his relatives that he would pick mushrooms in the forest, they scoffed. They refused to take him with them, since, they said, he would never be able to keep up. Finally, an aunt dropped him off at the base of a mountain, telling him to find his own way. He found mushrooms! Ever since, the matsutake harvest has been an affirmation of his mobility. Another of his buddies is missing the other leg, and he jokes that together in the mountains, they are “complete.”

The Oregon mountains are both a cure for and a connection to old habits and dreams. I was startled into seeing this one day when I asked Heng about deer hunters. I had been picking by myself that afternoon when suddenly shots rang out nearby. I was terrified; I didn’t know which way to run. I asked Heng about it later. “Don’t run!” he said. “To run shows that you are afraid. I would never run. That’s why I am a leader of men.” The woods are still full of war, and hunting is its reminder. The fact that almost all the hunters are white, and that they tend to be contemptuous of Asians, makes the parallels to war yet more apparent. This theme was even more consequential for Hmong pickers, who, unlike most Cambodians, identify as hunters as well as hunted.

During the U.S.-Indochina War, the Hmong became the front line of the U.S. invasion of Laos. Recruited by General Vang Pao, whole villages gave up agriculture to subsist on CIA airdrops of food. The men called in U.S. bombers, putting their bodies on the line so that Americans
could destroy the country from the skies.
¹
It is not surprising that this policy exacerbated tensions between the Lao targets of the bombing and the Hmong. Hmong refugees have done relatively well in the United States, but war memories run strong. The landscapes of wartime Laos are very much alive for Hmong refugees, and this shapes both the politics of freedom and freedom’s everyday activities.

Consider the case of Hmong hunter and U.S. Army sharpshooter Chai Soua Vang. In November 2004, he climbed into a deer blind in a Wisconsin forest just as the white landowners were touring the property. The landowners confronted him, telling him to leave. It seems they shouted racial epithets, and someone shot at him. In response, he shot eight of them with his semiautomatic rifle, killing six.

The story was news, and the main tenor in which it was told was outrage. CBS News quoted local Deputy Tim Zeigle, who said Vang was “chasing after [the landowners] and killing them. He hunted them down.”
²
Hmong community spokesmen immediately took their distance from Vang and focused on saving the reputation of the Hmong people. Although younger Hmong spoke up against racism in the trial that followed Vang’s arrest, no one publicly suggested why Vang might have assumed a sharpshooter’s stance to eliminate his adversaries.

The Hmong I spoke with in Oregon all seemed to know, and to empathize. What Vang did appeared utterly familiar; he could have been a brother or a father. Although Vang was too young to have participated in the U.S.-Indochina War, his actions showed how well he was socialized in the landscapes of that war. There every man who was not a comrade was an enemy, and war meant to kill or be killed. The elder men of the Hmong community still live very much in the world of these battles; at Hmong gatherings, the logistics of particular battles—the topography, timing, and surprises—are the subject of men’s conversations. One Hmong elder whom I had asked about his life used the opportunity to tell me about how to throw back grenades and what to do if you are shot. The logistics of wartime survival
were
the substance of his life.