Acknowledgements

Return to "Rare Orchids"


Story With Many Muses

"Rare Orchids" is a story spanning a broad sweep of Vietnamese and U.S. history, from 1940 to today, featuring as central characters four generations of female family members, Vietnamese women who share the first name Lan, or Orchid. Their named after a rare orchid found by the father of our initial protagonist, a Vietnamese botanist who discovered a rare orchid in the wild up in Vietnam's northern mountains before then successfully propogating it in his orchidarium near Hanoi. As I am an American writer born in 1956, am I engaging in a cultural appropriation? Perhaps, but I offer the following exploration of my background for your consideration.

Vietnam was a big part of my formative years. It loomed as my inevitable destination from the time images of America at war there flickered across our black and white television screen. I was obsessed by war. The borders of my first grade papers were decorated with war murals, which resulted in a parent teacher conference. I assembled the largest G.I. Joe collection on the block. A few years later, as battles still raged across Indochina, I was at demonstrations against the Vietnam War with my parents before I was out of grade school, made a winning speech in junior high advocating protesting, published an underground newspaper in high school with info on protests, such as at the nearby Warren, Michigan GM tank plant, and attended a antiwar demonstration planning conference of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War, the Mob, also during high school. But I was spared being drafted by the end of the war. In the interim, I had absorbed The Pentagon Papers as published in the New York Times. However, the part of the formerly secret story that I my brain could not let go of was the very beginning, to notes about how U.S. Office of Strategic Services agents had worked during World War Two with the man who was the villan of the conflict by the time 60s rolled around, Ho Chi Minh, or Uncle Ho. I would continue to dive back into that storyline in my brain for years to come, resulting in this version of words arranged for you to read. I wanted to offer readers a ride to the roots of the U.S. involvement in the conflict when our best and brightest men who put boots on the ground recommended we go with Ho.

After the war ended with the Fall of Saigon, my mother convinced her Presbyterian Church congregation to adopt a family of South Vietnamese refugees. Later, they, and all the congregation's members, endured the tragic loss of the family's mother to gun violence paired with mental illness, committed by another Vietnamese refugee who the family had taken in. At some length after that, the family's daughter requested that my mother become her legal guardian. Mother did so. I protect her privacy by referring to her Lan. She was the one who suggested the main character's name over a feast of Vietnamese food at a crowded restaurant in Orange County. So, calling her Lan herein, from now on, Lan has been like a sister to me. She is now a county health department leader in the U.S. Midwest and has a daughter in college conducting cutting-edge bio-medical research. Muses herein include Lan, as she has told us stories of her family's time in Vietnam, of their escape by boat after South Vietnam fell under Communist control, of their harassment by pirates, and of much more. Lan has returned to Vietnam and met with her grandmother and others. Mother, Lan and Lan's daughter, have all reviewed and commented on earlier versions of these words, so know they are not absent, even though they are not the physical writers who are wordsmithing this story for you. Another muse is U.S. O.S.S. Major Lawrence Archimedes Patti. His thick book on the matters at hand, the reason for these words lining up as they do, is a combination roadmap and bible for this journey. When, after years, I finally found out about its existence, I rushed to it. L.A., as he was sometimes referred to, did not disappoint. You will meet him and travel with him for the first part of the story. I have combined him into the character of U.S. O.S.S. Major Peter Dewey, into whose character stories of other O.S.S. agent operatives have also been added.

All but one of the O.S.S. officers returned from their experiences during the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. To a man, they all reported that Ho Chi Minh was the Vietnamese leader the U.S. ought to continue engagement with, that he was most interested in independence for Vietnam, not Communist expansion. All who read this now can and will judge from safe perch far ahead in time whether such early O.S.S. sentiments were correct.