·wwu LIBRARY J\.RCHIVES
DECEMBER 1980
A PUBLICATION OF THE ASSOCIATED STUDENTS ENVIRONMENTAL CENTER WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
VOLUME 2 NUMBER
I
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By Chuck Blodgett A rice paddy. The early morning sun set into motion a thousand pirouetting sunbeams dancing among the young shoots glistening from the night's dew. Silhouetted against the pink sky, farmers led their water buffalo atop the dikes that divide the flooded fields into an intricate patchwork. Beyond the paddies, clusters of trees and bamboo hid individual villages detectable only by the smoke of early morning cook fires. Farther to the vest, the jungles and mountains of South Viet Nam brooded silently. Turning my head slowly to the left and back to the right afforded me the same view. Squinting my eyes compressed the scene into shimmering surrealism: sky and water became one and sunbeams melt-
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ed into a coalescence of liquid light. I closed my eyes attempting to drive the scene from my mind yet hoping to freeze it in my memory. All that I had seen and felt was to be destroyed if the military command were to have its way. The rice paddies were to become land fill sites buried under the refuse of a var long past its purpose. An affluent America had overestimated the needs of its warriors; the excess, along with the waste of daily human needs, was to be dumped and buried on a nation of subsistence farming a thousand years old. South Viet Nam had become the dumping ground of a disposable society. My job was to push the accumulation into the rice paddies and cover it with dirt; I was to march off across the paddies until I was killed or the var came
to an end. I t was for this purpose tha t I now s t ood looking beyond the paddies, beyond the farmers, beyond the villages, and beyond the mountains •••• trying to envision a world that once was. "Tom, "I said to the man on my right, "I can't do it." "Damn right." was his reply. We spent the rest of the day sitting in the shade provided by the truck and bulldozer discussing the possible repercussions of our actions. Neither of us fully understood why we were refusing to begin work; we only knew a terrible in j ust i ce was being committed. Our conversation was punctuated with s ~lent pauses as we pondered our fate and the future of the rice farmers and their f i elds. Tom and I returned to camp later that afternoon and informed Lieutenant H. of our misgivings about the assignment. Watching us from behind a veil of pipe smoke, he listened patiently as we argued our case, attempting to make him understand the farmer's plight. We also felt he should know that personal ethics necessitated we refuse to bury the rice paddies.
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