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by Jack Walraven © Copyright 2004 Jack Walraven, All Rights Reserved. Warning! Some segments in this document are inappropriate for children. VUNG TAU, JANUARY 1966 As we dropped anchor in the sheltered waters of Vung Tau, it seemed eerily quiet. The surrounding deep green hills, the beached fishing vessels with their nets hung out to dry under the warm blue sky, released some of the tension we had all felt since learning that we were going to Vietnam. Little did we know that our floating home, a 20,000-ton merchant ship flying the Norwegian flag, would find its final resting place some ninety miles up the Saigon river. POSTWAR HOLLAND, 1952 On a dark, gloomy Sunday in 1952, we took the train from Den Haag (The Hague) to Rotterdam. We were on our way to visit Opa Walraven, who was only months away from going blind altogether. Oma Walraven had died earlier in the year when they were still living in Den Haag. It was the only time I ever saw Papa cry. After the funeral, Opa moved back to Rotterdam where he was born. The city was quickly rebuilding but many of the structures were still in ruins and there were large city blocks that stood empty -- testimonial to the severe bombardment the city had suffered in 1940. We sat quietly in the small oppressive sitting room while Opa Walraven talked of the war and the suffering Oma had endured. I didn't understand the words he was saying, except that it had something to do with the destroyed buildings. That night, after being safely tucked into bed, I had my first nightmare, at least the first one I can remember. I was looking at the skyline of an unknown city. Even though it was night, the sky was alit with bright flashes everywhere. Strangely, there was no sound. When I woke up screaming in fear, Mama came and asked me what was wrong. I couldn't find the words to tell her. When the sobbing had subsided, she kissed me gently, turned off the light, and closed the door softly behind her. I've had that dream many times since.
She was born Rebecca van Leeuwen in Rotterdam on September 11, 1887. Her persoonsbewijs (internal passport) reveals part of her story. In 1941, Artur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands and highly regarded by Hitler, ordered that all citizens 15 years or older be issued persoonsbewijzen, and that all Jews had to be registered. Persoonsbewijzen had to be carried at all times and there were heavy penalties for not having one. Rebecca's persoonsbewijs was issued in 1943 in the village of Renkum near Arnhem. I never learned of her whereabouts prior to that date and one could only imagine. The first thing that stands out on the card is the big J stamped just to the left of her photo and on the front. That mark turned out to be a death sentence for most Dutch Jews. Those with mixed racial blood, partial Jews or bastard-Jews as the Nazis called them, had either a B-1 or B-2 stamp on their persoonsbewijs, depending on how many Jewish grandparents they had. Traditionally, a person is formally either Jewish or not, but the Nazis sought to divide the whole world of the partially Jewish artificially by counting the number of Jewish grandparents. The "Nuremberg Laws" of 1935 dictated that: 1) three or four Jewish grandparents made one a "Jew," regardless of one's own religion; 2) two Jewish grandparents resulted in a Mischling ('half-breed') First Grade; 3) a single Jewish grandparent defined the Mischling Second Grade; 4) an individual without any Jewish grandparent was to be considered "German" (Aryan).
To the Dutch, this period was one of the bitterest disappointments of the German occupation. Liberation had seemed so close. The area south of Arnhem had been freed. If the allies had succeeded to cross the Rhine, the whole country would have been liberated in a matter of days. Instead, it would take almost eight more months to accomplish this.
If it hadn't been for the farmers outside the cities, many more would have died from starvation. The farmers weren't necessarily altruistic, however, and often traded food for the last few valuables the starving families possessed. Mama had been active in the resistance and her main function was to smuggle food through the German checkpoints from the country into the city. In the late forties she frequently took me to revisit the farmers who had provided assistance in those needy days. For several years after the war, food and supplies continued to be rationed and I was undernourished. For several months, a farmer offered us room and board. We drank milk straight from the cow and ate chicken and pork from animals that had been slaughtered that day. I'll never forget my anguish when I saw the farmer chop the chicken's head off. He flung the headless chicken to the ground and it started running! At night we slept in a barn with the animals. Hospitality went only so far.
Mama was born Hetty Mulder in Tegal, Java on March 3, 1921, a third generation in a line of colonial families in the Dutch East Indies. She had two younger sisters, Marianne Elizabeth (Jannie) and Johanna Roberta (Robbie). Both her father, Derk Mulder, and maternal grandfather, Johannes Banens, served as officers with the Staatsspoor- en Tramwegen in Nederlandsch-Indië (Dutch Indies State Railways). Her mother, Emi Mulder, was also Java-born. The Dutch Indies were the only home they knew and loved. They lived in a picturesque villa with servants and a summer home in the mountains. Every 6 to 8 years the company men were given an 8-month furlough to visit the Netherlands, the official home country. In 1902, when she was five years old, Emi Mulder visited the Netherlands for the first time on a furlough. This is how she remembered the trip: "We left Java on a steamship (which also carried the overseas mail) on a 4-week long voyage filled with events, each more fantastic than the other -- the ports of strange lands, where you could go ashore and meet people from other races and different customs; beautiful scenery (but not as beautiful as our wonderful East Indies); strange creatures of the sea, brown fish and dolphins that could jump out of the water; sharks of which we could only see the dorsal fins and over which secret tales were told that would make your hair rise. And then came the Suez Canal, it was such a narrow passage between two seas that the ship moved very slowly. On both sides you saw the desert, a sea of sand, and now and then camels and small encampments, and at the end there was Port Said. There, the ship was boarded by magicians who could make little chicks appear from their necks, their ears, and even our clothing. For 10 cents young brown boys would dive off the ship, swim underneath it and reappear on the other side. And then we were in the Mediterranean, where I felt cold for the first time." When they arrived in Holland, she was amazed at how big the people were and to see flowers grow in the grass (they're daisies and buttercups, her mother told her). She had never seen cobblestone streets or heard the clop-clop and rattling sounds of the horse drawn carriages over the cobblestones. The horses were so big and robust compared to the small and skinny ones of the East Indies. She had her first ever checkup at a dentist and had to have a molar removed. She remembered that they gave her a chocolate heart and a small flask of cologne to dry her tears. It was all new and exciting, but she was so happy to return to the idyllic life of the East Indies.
Opa Mulder received a telegram from the railroad company urging him to return to Java. Hetty had decided to become a nurse and wanted to stay in the Netherlands. Jannie was torn but chose to remain as well. Little did they know what was awaiting them and there was a tearful farewell. Oma, Opa and Robbie Mulder boarded a train in Den Haag and, with shuttered blinds covering the windows, they traveled through France to the port of Marseilles where a ship awaited to take them leisurely back to Batavia. (Boarding the ship in Marseilles rather than a Dutch port saved about a week in travelling time to the East Indies.) On May 10, 1940, Holland was invaded and all means of staying in touch were lost immediately. It would be nearly six years before any contact was reestablished. Soon after their return to the East Indies, Opa Mulder took his retirement and they retreated to a mountain villa above Malang to await news from their daughters. Then on December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched their attack on Pearl Harbor and their war machine quickly rolled over Asia, including the Dutch East Indies. On March 8, 1942, the Dutch surrendered the East Indies to the Japanese. "Een zwarte dag! (A black day!)," wrote my grandmother in her diary. Almost overnight the supply of fuel dried up and the busses stopped running. Opa and Oma weren't well prepared because they quickly ran out of food and other daily necessities. All Dutch companies were confiscated and Opa's pension was cut off. They were forced to sell some of their possessions to the Chinese who always seemed to have money. (After the war, when I visited Oma and Opa in their home in Den Haag, I noticed that their attic was always stocked with enough food, water and sundries to supply an army.) In the summer of 1942, the Japanese decreed to move all Caucasians into prison camps -- for their own protection, they said. Men and women were segregated into separate camps. Oma Mulder and Robbie were interred in a camp in Malang, while Opa would spend the next three-and-a-half years away in an unknown men's camp. The Japanese announced the country had been liberated from the Dutch. This basically closed the book on 450 years of Dutch colonial rule over the East Indies. The situation was doubly humiliating to the Dutch prisoners. Oma Mulder wrote that they went from colonials to being colonized in one fell swoop. The idyllic life was over. Initially, in the camp where Oma and Robbie were "housed," there was food, although meager, and the internees were allowed to tend small gardens to grow vegetables. The food situation grew steadily worse and Opa nearly succumbed to starvation in 1945. Dutch cultural activities were strictly forbidden and they were indoctrinated into the rudiments of Japanese society (a society I later came to admire, voluntarily). Oma wrote about the odd trades that were made among the internees. An empty can with a lid was bartered for a package of embroidery thread. Robbie's childhood doll was traded for a whole kilo of sugar. Although the guards were strict, even brutal, they tended to be kind toward the children. Oma thought it remarkable that in times of need, humans could be so creative. The most beautiful things were made with the simplest materials. They got through the day by living out fantasies -- pretending to drink a cup of hot bouillon (lukewarm water) or inventing the most delicious recipes (while consuming the last crumb on their plates).
Indeed. The ultimate irony came on August 15, 1945 when, after the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered. The war was officially over but no liberators came to bring relief and joy to the prisoners. The allied forced were months away from reaching them. Instead, a new terror appeared in the form of Sukarno and his nationalist forces. Two days after the Japanese capitulation Sukarno issued his declaration of independence. This was a perfect opportunity to get rid of the Dutch once and for all. A power vacuum ensued and whipped into a frenzy by Sukarno and his cohort Hatta, unruly nationalists, guerrillas of various factions, and roving youth gangs declared open season on the Dutch. This was the beginning of a chaotic period known as the Bersiap. The gates to the camps were opened and the internees were free to go, and some did, but it soon became obvious that is was too dangerous to leave. Where could they go? The Japanese were ordered by the allied forces to keep order and protect the internees and after some reluctance, they did. Yet, thousands of Dutch and other Europeans, Indos (Dutch-Indonesians), Amboinese, and Chinese, were killed after the war was officially over. "The only footwear we had in the camp were wooden sandals with a strap that was attached with nails. When the rains came and the grounds around the barracks became soggy, the straps came loose by plodding through the mud. We promised the children a reward if they would search the grounds for replacement nails (they had more freedom to move around)," Oma wrote. "Having no footwear was especially problematic at night when we had to go outside to relieve ourselves. It was painstaking work to clean your muddied feet in the dark before crawling back on top of your mat. We found a solution in an old pot we had brought to the camp (with the illusion that we could use it to do our own cooking). Instead of going outside at night, we used the useless pot as a nachtspiegel (chamber pot)." On the day the war finally ended, the hunger was so intense and the women were briefly able to go outside the camp to purchase some food and cook it themselves. "That night, small pots with simmering contents over charcoal fires could be seen all over the camp. Suddenly, a lady we didn't know walked over to Robbie and I to ask us for a favor. 'I hear that you have a pot that you're not using,' she said, 'Would you mind trading it, because I really want to cook something for myself.' We told her that it had been used for years as a chamber pot. 'I don't care,' she said, 'I'll give you a real chamber pot in return.' And so, from then on we had a real chamber pot, and the lady could happily prepare her soup." While the years in the camp were unpleasant enough for the women, they were spared the violence of the war itself. When the war ended, that reality changed. "We were now confronted with death and destruction by the nationalists," Oma wrote. "It was ordered that anyone caught selling daily necessities to the "whites" would be punished with death. We heard that the families who had left the camps to return to their homes were killed." They eventually left their camp. Oma wrote,"Robbie and I, and many other women, were sitting in a rundown hotel wondering what the future held for us. Some men had left their camps and were reunited with the women. Onze man en vader (Our husband and father) still lay seriously ill from starvation in the hospital of the men's camp in the town we were now in. In the morning, guerrillas came to the hotel, rounded up all the men and took them away in trucks to prison. After the men were gone, several women were frisked for weapons and whipped with bamboo sticks. They were taken away and murdered in the night." "I lay awake that night, knowing that our time was up. Outside, gunshots rang out, intermingled with cries of Merdeka! (freedom) by the guerrillas. Weren't the Japanese -- our former enemy, now that they had lost the war -- weren't they obligated to protect us? But where were they?" "Suddenly, at 4 in the morning, I heard trucks coming our way; heavy boots were marching down the street. Thank God, it's the Japs, I thought. They're jumping out of their trucks to kill the guerrillas. The danger is over. From the kampong across the street echoed more gunshots and cries of Merdeka. The Japanese responded by setting the entire kampong ablaze!" "The following morning the men returned to the hotel from the prison they had been taken. They told us the bloody tale of what had happened. The guerrillas, after killing several Dutch and Japanese, were captured by the "not-so-gentle" Japanese, bound hand and feet, and thrown in the river." Shortly thereafter, a regiment of Ghurkas marched into town. The buildings were quickly cleared from guerrillas and the areas where they were concentrated were bombed from the air. They were indeed out of danger. But, several women camps outside the town had come under mortar fire from the guerrillas. There had been no one to defend them and women and children were losing their lives. The liberated town was ordered evacuated to Batavia in order to make room for the women and children in the beleaguered camps. They would be brought here in camouflaged trucks. "And so, in the morning I received a message -- via a priest -- that I was to take my daughter and immediately join my husband at the men's camp where the former prisoners were in the process of being taken to a departing ship from Batavia. I quickly grabbed my small case (which had long been packed and ready), called Robbie and we were ready to go. But what about the tomato soup? I had just made it! Such delicious aroma and warmth! After all those hunger years, how could I leave it behind? Moments later, we climbed into a Japanese truck (actually, this was forbidden) going in the direction of the men's camp. There stood my husband, impatiently waiting. He said, 'We can just make it on the last truck. Let's hurry!' He paused a moment and said, 'Hey, what are you doing with a pot of tomato soup?' Yes, indeed, what was I doing with it? Away, tomato soup, away. We then jumped on the last truck and we were on our way to the harbor." So finally, in February of 1946 -- sick and miserable, all their possessions gone, but free at last -- Oma, Opa and Robbie boarded a troop ship for the Netherlands. Just before the ship sailed slowly away from the Java coast, Oma got word that Jannie had died. To add insult to injury: Oma -- weighing only 78 pounds and wearing the over-sized trench coat she was given during a brief stop in the Suez Canal -- was accused of being a Japanese spy when the ship arrived in IJmuiden. Opa was carried off on a stretcher. And so began their new life in cold, damp Holland.
Two Black Roses DEN HAAG, 1957 Since the first grade Tedde Toet and I had been bosom buddies, and for years I had been repeatedly told not to hang out with him. "Jaap has such a wonderful future ahead of him," my second grade teacher told my mother, "but he's so easily influenced. Tedde is leading him up the wrong path." On that first traumatic day of school four years earlier, barely ten minutes after letting go off our mothers' hands, Tedde won the endearment of his classmates and teacher by dipping his tongue in the inkwell. He proudly showed his blackened tongue to everyone, and encouraged by our giggles and cheers, he emptied the remaining ink into his mouth and swallowed it. Twenty minutes later, Tedde was en route to the hospital. We were impressed. Not so the teacher. After six months she asked for a transfer. The more people tried to break up our friendship, the closer we became. What probably scared both teachers and parents was that Tedde appeared so much more mature than his classmates. He was the tallest in the class. His dark skin and wild, black curly hair made him look more ominous than he really was. He was the first one to smoke a cigarette, the first one to drink beer, the first one to sneak into restricted movies, the first one to jump off a building, the first one to do anything. There's only one thing I remember that I did first. At age eleven, I was the first one to smoke a pipe. Tedde was the first one to show me the red-light district of Den Haag. Long after everyone had gone to sleep, we would sneak out of our bedroom windows and walk several miles to the Geleenstraat, where dozens of ladies displayed their wares in dimly lit showcase windows. We would sit on the sidewalk, clad in our pajamas, and time the men going in and out of the narrow doors. Some were only in there for a few minutes. Tedde claimed that he had once seen his own father visiting one of the ladies. I had a big secret that I didn't tell anybody. I was madly in love with Heidi. The movie had affected me deeply, and I somehow identified with her. At night, I would lie in bed and fantasize that Heidi and I had been captured by an evil king. The king's men had tied us up and we were hanging upside down, suspended from the high ceiling in one of the cold dungeons of the castle. Below us were rattlesnakes with slithering tongues. Heidi looked at me with pleading eyes. Although I never figured how to rescue her, or even myself, it was a nice fantasy. Only once did I accidentally blurt out my secret. We were playing "Good Guys versus Bad Guys." Everyone took turns saying who he was. "I'm Roy Rogers," said Lange (Tall) Jaap. I was known as Korte (Short) Jaap at the time. Evie was Lucky Luke. Herman picked the Lone Ranger. Harrie wanted to be Tonto. "And I'm Heidi," I said. All eyes were upon me, dumb-faced. I blushed deeply and quickly changed it to Kuifje.
Although I preferred Kuifje, the most popular comic series in the Netherlands and Belgium at the time was Suske en Wiske -- the wild adventures of a brother and sister and a regular cast of weird characters. First created by Willie Vandersteen in 1946 and published in book form by Standaard Uitgeverij in Antwerp, Belgium, they were originally written in Flemish. I found Kuifje's adventures to be the more intriguing, but Hergé decided to call it quits after two dozen issues. Vandersteen hired assistants to continue his series and today over 200 adventures of Suske en Wiske are in print. I will always consider Hergé and Vandersteen as the world's top creators of a comic series. Occasionally, especially after watching a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers movie in the little community theater on a Saturday afternoon, we would play "Cowboys and Indians." Mostly, however, we played military games. We spent a lot of time in the many small stores that sold military surplus, remnants from the war, where we bought helmets, radio-telephones, and all kinds of other junk. We would then go on maneuvers in the polders, the farm and canal area just outside the city, where we "hijacked" one of the barges used for transporting vegetables. With long poles we pushed the barge through the network of canals. The farms were our battlefields. Hiding the barge in some reeds, we raided the hot houses for grapes and tomatoes. We plucked the trees for apples and pears. We dug up carrots. This wouldn't be any fun if you weren't caught occasionally. The real excitement was when a farmer came out yelling, shotgun in hand, and pumped a blast in our direction. The rush of adrenaline was exhilarating. Now and then one of us got hit by a pellet or two, never too seriously, and that made it all the more realistic. Carrying back our wounded, we called it. Other injuries were getting your skin torn up while trying to escape through barbed wire. Once Evie got his jacket caught in the barbed wire. As the farmer was nearing him, he screamed at us for help. His eyes were filled with the fear of imminent death. Tedde and Herman rushed back and pulled at him with all their might. The jacket ripped apart and Evie was yanked away in the nick of time. I had another hero of sorts at the time, a military one. His name was pilot "Ace" James Bigglesworth of the Royal Air Force (RAF) or "Biggles" for short. The adventures of Biggles take place in the prewar years, WWII, and into the Cold War. In all, 100 books were written. At age 12, I had finally collected half of them. One day, after an unpleasant ending to a game of Stratego, I threw my brother Dick's collection of tin soldiers in the garbage. Dick then proceeded to tear up my Biggles books, one by one. Tedde was going to teach himself how to ride a horse. He wanted to become a cavalryman. Not far from our school was a pasture with several horses. "What you need to do first," said Tedde, "is to befriend the horse. Always approach him from the front. Let him see you." Tedde walked up to the nearest horse, which he called Trigger, and stuck out his hand with some grass in it. "Here Trigger, Trigger. Good boy, good boy..." The horse reared its head, opened its mouth wide and brought it down on Tedde's shoulder. With a fierce grip, Trigger pulled Tedde off the ground and hurled him into the air. Tedde had Trigger's teeth marks for months. End of horse story, except to note that I've been scared of horses ever since. According to Tedde only sissies get involved with girls. That didn't mean that I did not secretly admire some of the girls in my class. I was especially fond of Sylvia and her long ponytail. Only two years earlier, sitting directly behind her, I had dipped that ponytail in the inkwell of my desk, which didn't exactly endear me to her. But now she had become really attractive, a young mixture of Brigitte Bardot and Maria Schell. In drawing class, I drew a picture of her and me naked, in a compromising position, so to speak. All of a sudden I saw Tedde leaning over and he began to snicker. He reached for the drawing and I tried to pull it away. The teacher looked and demanded to know what was happening. Tedde let go off the drawing, but before I could hide it, the teacher demanded to see it. She turned pale and later that evening, she came to our home to talk with my mother. After she left, my mother cried. She had a perverted son, poor Mama. The next day in class, Sylvia kept giving me warm glances. My God, I thought, somebody's told her! All I could do was turn away in embarrassment. But at night, Sylvia replaced Heidi in my dreams. Same fantasy, different girl. Then there was Maria, with hair so red you could spot her a mile away. Often a victim of teasing by other boys, she had a super-crush on me. After school, the Light Tower, as she was called, would ride by my home on her bicycle calling out my name for hours while I cringed in hiding. It finally became so bad that she followed me around everywhere, even when I was with the boys who teased me endlessly about it. "Sailboat loves Light Tower!" they told everyone that would hear. Because of my ears, that was my nickname. I once tried gluing them to the side of my head, but that looked even more ridiculous. "Go away!" I screamed at Maria, "Leave me alone!" But she would just grin at me. "It's not that bad," said Tedde, "Her father is a goldsmith. Pretend that you love her, get as much gold as you can, and then dump her." Tedde always found a silver lining in every cloud. I ended up solving the problem by throwing rocks at her every time she came close to me. Such is love. Probably one of the most hated classes was religion. Not that we hated religion. The teacher, we called him Moses, was right out of the Gestapo. Nearly seven feet tall and with a booming voice, he felt that the only way to teach religion was through fear and intimidation. Child abuse was a virtue with him, and he used the Bible as a lethal weapon, striking people over the head with it. He was a proponent of the "turn the other cheek" ethic. He would bang you across the ear with a giant hand and wait for you to turn the other cheek. Tedde thought that was marvelous. He dared us to use elastic bands or blow pipes, and shoot small projectiles at the bald spot on the back of his head whenever he was writing something on the blackboard. Of course, Tedde was the first one to do that. When Moses let out a yelp, he swirled around and demanded to know who had done it. Tedde, several other boys, and I looked at Willie Wortel, the kid everybody hated because he was the brightest. Moses walked up to Willie and belted him across the head, destroying Willie's glasses. "Turn the other cheek!" bellowed Moses, but Willie just cringed in fear, covering his head with his arms. Moses grabbed one of Willie's ears and began twisting it violently. "Turn the other cheek!" Moses repeated. But Willie couldn't do it, tears streaming down his cheeks. Moses hit Willie's head in full force with the Bible and his shattered glasses went flying across the floor. "Stop it!" yelled Tedde, "Stop it now!" The furious Moses whirled on Tedde, who smiled up at him and pointed at his cheek. Moses slapped him. Tedde, still smiling, turned the other cheek and pointed. Moses slapped him again. "Ah, this feels good," said Tedde, "Hit me again." This continued ten times and although there were tears in his eyes, Tedde never stopped smiling. Finally, Moses stormed out of the classroom in frustration. Tedde and I decided to form our own boys' club, complete with weekly dues and a rule book. As his first lieutenant, I was in charge of collecting the dues and handling all expenditures, which included cheap wine and candles for our clubhouse, a bicycle storage closet in Tedde's basement. Tedde was in charge of drawing up the rules, which were changed every week. He also kept inventing new, sometimes dangerous, initiation rites to test the courage of new members. This included eating live spiders, running through a hailstorm of falling rocks that the other boys had tossed up in the air, and jumping off high places. I remember at least one boy breaking his arm when he jumped down from a second-floor balcony. Probably the most bizarre was to go down to the farms and pee against a fence which had been electrified to keep in the livestock. I was quite relieved to learn later that I was still capable of producing children. Named the Black Spider, the club was patterned after the boy scouts, except that all of the rules were reversed. Instead of a good deed every day, we pledged to do a bad deed every day. One of the rules in Tedde's book: Offer to help an old lady across a busy street. When you get to the middle of the street, run away and leave her stranded. It was all bravado, of course. We never actually intended to do anything cruel, although some of our actions could have caused serious injury or damage. Ever since the second grade, Tedde and I had been designing a rocket that would take us into space. From the contents of firecrackers, we created small prototypes that were fired from a small floating launchpad in the pond of a nearby park. Most misfired, but a few hit heights of up to fifty feet. The reasoning behind the floating launchpad was to provide a "soft" landing zone for future passengers of our rockets. Various insects became our first astronauts. Once, when we had built a fairly large rocket, we tried launching a small field mouse. Unfortunately the thing blew up on the launchpad, frying the poor little mouse. Just like real life. In the summer of 1957, we discovered the bunkers the Germans had built during the war. Tedde had found a fenced-off area called the Waalsdorpervlakte just north of Den Haag. It was an area covering several square miles and consisted of hilly sand dunes, sparsely covered with clumps of reedy grass. Nestled between the sea on one side and a thick forest on the other, it was a remote military installation used for live firing practice.
"The bullets themselves are useless," Tedde told me, "It's what's inside the shells that we want." With a small pair of pliers, he gingerly began rotating the bullet inside the shell. "This is an art," Tedde said, "If you force it too much, the thing will explode and blow your hands off." One by one he removed the bullets and emptied the contents of the shells on a sheet of tin foil. We then stored the gunpowder in glass jars. Tedde and I visited the firing ranges and WWII bunkers in the dunes of Den Haag and Wassenaar frequently that summer and the area became our favorite playground. On a couple of occasions, the red flags were up, and crawling through the sand, we heard gun shots echoing through the dunes. Tedde grinned. He loved it. I was afraid that I was going to die. We discovered that the bunkers were part of an extensive network that reached from Hoek van Holland (at the mouth of the Rhine River) in the south to IJmuiden in the north (at the mouth of the IJssel River), a 40-mile stretch of coast facing the North Sea. Den Haag had served as the command center of the German occupation forces. The Germans began building the bunkers in 1942 and were part of the Atlantic Wall, which was erected to prevent allied landings along the coasts of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. We didn't know it at the time but the Germans had placed over a half million mines in the vicinity of the bunkers. Although many had been cleared after the war, the barbed wire fences and warning signs were obviously an indication that we shouldn't be there. Regardless, we spent the next two years exploring every bunker we could find along the coast. There were said to be hundreds, even thousands, of them in the sand of the dunes. Tunnels often connected the bunkers with various rooms in between.
The ammunition, weapons and other treasures that we found in the sand and bunkers were remnants of the war and we justified our appropriation of these items as archeological exploration. We came upon cases of ammunition, food rations, German magazines and documents, and boxes of the most awful cigarettes known to men. When we smoked a couple, we got so sick that we threw them out. Getting the stuff home and keeping it safe from prying eyes was a problem. We mostly used our bicycles and occasionally took the tram, and stored our caches in secret locations only we had the maps to. Later we included my brother Dick in our search for treasure. He managed to dig up a Nazi helmet, complete with swastika and the skull still inside. When he brought them home (both skull and helmet), Mama had a fit, but she let him keep his prized possessions. Later, an uncle took it all away. The following summer, only nine years old, he went there again on his own. This time he found a "super" bullet -- an intact 18-inch projectile -- weighing over 50 pounds. He tied it to the little rack on the back of his bike and, wobbling with the weight of it, transported it home through the center of city. Mama was not amused when she found Dick in the bedroom we shared, screwdriver in hand, trying to unlock the mysteries of his Super Bullet. I don't remember whatever happened to Dick's Super Bullet, but I think it ended up in Tedde's closet. Tedde had his mind set on finding a V2 rocket. "It's the best rocket in the world," he said. "If I can find one of those, I'll be the toast of the town." Despite my admiration of him, he sometimes appeared off his rocker. Actually, there had been quite a stash of V2s in Den Haag. As of September 1944, the Germans had begun launching these rockets at Britain from the Haagse Bos (Hague Forest) and nearby Wassenaar, causing great damage and terror to the city of London. Over a thousand of them were fired from in and around Den Haag and on March 3, 1945, the Brits finally retaliated and sent a squadron of Spitfires to take out the V2 launching installation in the Haagse Bos. In what came to be known in the Netherlands as the greatest human error of the war, the bombs missed their target and instead flattened Bezuidenhout, a large section inside the city center, killing over 500 residents. It took 50 years before I learned that British bombs and not German ones caused the damaged buildings and flattened areas I had seen in my hometown as a child. Tedde and I used the contents of the shells to make bombs -- a much easier task than building rockets. We put the gunpowder in a can and placed a small flashlight bulb in the powder. The bulb was connected to two long electrical wires. The can was sealed, placed into a hole we had dug in an open field, and then covered with a large rock. Unwinding the spool of wire, we walked back a safe distance to detonate our bomb. It didn't work the first few times when we tried to use simple batteries to set off the gunpowder. But then Tedde brought a small hand-cranked generator he had picked up in a military surplus shop. "Try it," he offered, "Hold this wire in your left hand and the other in your right hand." As he frantically cranked the dynamo, I got a blast that went through my whole body. "Yup, it's working," he said calmly. Tedde had discovered a new initiation rite. It also worked beautifully to detonate our bombs. We blasted rocks into the air to our hearts' content. Finally tiring of looking for ammunition in the dunes, we decided to create our own explosives from scratch. We spent hours going through chemistry books in the library, furiously making notes. Both of our bedrooms were turned into chemistry labs. We burned holes in the floor. We experimented with sulfur and saltpeter. Several times we were chased out of our bedrooms by choking fumes. One night, Tedde blew up half of his bedroom. But our perseverance paid off. We had invented the ultimate explosive. We then did something really stupid, something I still regret today. Across the street from our apartment building the city had just begun operating a tram into the center of the town. "What would happen," I asked Tedde, "if we were to wrap this stuff in tin foil and place it on the track." He shrugged. "Just a big bang, I guess. Let's try and find out." As soon as we placed the foil package on one of the rails, I had a feeling that we had put in too much powder. But there was no time to reconsider, the tram was coming towards us in the distance and we ran for cover. Ding, ding, went the little tram, ding, ding. Then WHAM! One of the steel wheels lifted from the track, and after some loud screeching and sparks, the tram came to a halt. We had derailed it! It was the first time for me to see Tedde scared out of his wits. Two ten-year old little terrorists! I thank God that no one was hurt in that incident. We weren't caught, and we didn't tell anybody about it until years later. Nevertheless, Papa was suspicious and fed up with the mess I was making of my bedroom. In the evening, he packed up all my chemicals and threw them in the canal that ran in front of our building. In the morning there was a crowd of people looking down from the bridge -- looking at hundreds of floating belly-up fish. Way to go, Papa. In the fall, I broke away from Tedde and the Black Spider club and formed my own club, the Red Adder. Our clubhouse was the crawl space below our apartment building. It stretched some 300 feet from one end of the building to the other. The ground consisted of fine sand. In some places, the dry sand was only one foot from the concrete ceiling. In lower areas, the ceiling was up to eight feet high. Here the sand was wet and small lakes had formed. The only way in or out of our clubhouse was through a small opening in the basement of the building. Originally, the opening was covered with a locked wooden cover. It would take six months for anybody to discover that we had removed the lock. Our clubhouse was steeped in total darkness -- the only form of lighting were the candles we brought. The only sounds were from the drain and sewage pipes from the apartments above and the seepage dripping from the ceiling into the puddles and lakes. Whenever we climbed into our clubhouse, we carefully closed the entrance by pulling the cover in behind us. No adult was aware of its existence. Not even Tedde knew where we were. We established our communal space at one end of the crawl space, where it was dry with enough headroom to sit up comfortably. We also had our own initiation rite: crawl to the far wall at the other end of the building, touch the wall, and then crawl back -- all without the aid of a flashlight or candle. The lakes, creepy-crawlies, and the minimal headroom weren't the only obstacles. We also hid some of our "senior" members in strategic places along the way. They were called the "mines." The mines weren't allowed to move, but if you accidentally touched one, you were "dead." Towards the end of December it was neighborhood tradition to collect all the Christmas trees on our street and burn them in a big pile on New Year's Eve. For a one-week period Tedde and I became archenemies. He lived four streets over where the Black Spider boys were collecting trees and hiding them. We stashed ours in our new clubhouse -- the crawl space beneath our building. Black Spider members would launch a sneak attack on a Red Adder member who was dragging a tree down the street, trying to take it away, and vice versa. We battled each other with homemade wooden swords and the lids of garbage cans. It was all in good fun, competing with each other for the biggest bonfire, but sometimes it got rough. Once a boy I didn't know shot me with a pellet gun. It hit me right between the eyes, leaving a red imprint for months. The boy, seeing what he had done, was more shocked than I was. The first day of the year, a truce was declared and we all became friends again. One day we were discovered coming out of our clubhouse by a neighbor. We had been smoking and he was sniffing the air. "What the hell are you kids doing?" he demanded. "Oh, nothing," some of us mumbled. "What do you mean nothing," he said, pointing at his large red nose, "You think I have poop up my nostrils?" Henceforth he was known as Poop-Up-My-Nostrils. When we were in our clubhouse a few days later, we heard a loud banging at the entrance. We quickly doused our candles and listened. Suddenly we saw a light in the distance. Someone had removed the wooden cover. Poop-Up-My-Nostrils poked his head inside. "Are you kids in there? If you are, come right out this minute," he hollered into the darkness. No one stirred. After a moment, he closed the cover. We all sighed with relief, but not for long. We heard banging again, but this time it was much sharper. Poop-Up-My-Nostrils was nailing the cover to the frame! "We are trapped!" cried Herman. Evie started to whine. "Be quiet!" I hushed them. When the hammering stopped a few moments later, I lit one of the candles. All around me were frightened faces. "Nobody knows we're here," Herman said. "We're going to die," said Evie. "Follow me," I said. The reason I wasn't scared is that several weeks earlier Dick and I had been digging outside in the back garden, near the foundation of our building. We had found a spot that led into the crawl space. It was too small to squeeze through, but it would be easy enough to make the hole larger. We covered the hole with a piece of plywood and some earth. Now all I had to do was find it. For two hours, five desperate boys were feeling their way along the back wall of the crawl space. Some were crying again. Our last candle had been used up and the blackness was closing in. I felt a tightness in my throat. I must not panic, I thought. I'm their leader and I'm the only who knows what to look for. If I panic, we will all die. "We must go to the deep area," I said, "Where the lakes are." When we found it there was some relief. At least now we could stand up fully. It was still pitch-dark, however. I needed to think clearly. Our hidden escape route had to be between the bottom of the foundation and the soil below it. I felt my way to the spot where the sand dropped below the foundation and then worked back from there. I could feel the compressed soil below the foundation. There had to be a gap somewhere along the way. Twenty agonizing feet, and then I found it. I stuck my arm through the gap and felt the piece of plywood. There was only a thin layer on top, and the plywood budged easily. The light that entered was blinding, but oh so welcome. We cried tears of joy as we removed enough of the soil to crawl out. We never went back. Which was just as well -- boys in the building behind us had discovered their own crawl space and only weeks after we had abandoned our clubhouse, a fire broke out in the other building. "Stupid boys," we chucked as we stood watching the firemen fight the smoke and flames coming from the crawl space. DEN HAAG, 1960Mama and Papa had divorced. Dick and I had seen it coming, but when it actually happened it was still a shock. I had wanted to go to the same lyceum (secondary school) as Tedde, but Papa had insisted that I attend the venerable Gymnasium Haganum, a highly rated learning institution dating back to the 14th century. In my opinion, it was the stuffiest "snob" school in Den Haag. Papa wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer and all I wanted was to get out of the cradle-to-grave neighborhood we were living in. The moment I walked through the wrought iron gates it felt like entering an asylum housed in a medieval castle, and I knew I didn't belong there. Dressed in blue blazers and grey slacks, my fellow students trudged about like zombies and I was convinced that I was the only one who hadn't undergone a frontal lobotomy. Until I entered Gymnasium Haganum, my school grades had been above average, but with the sudden shift in academic focus they began to suffer -- I immediately stumbled in German and Latin and needed tutoring. Who in the world speaks Latin, I wondered. The following year, with my confidence in learning new languages shattered, I was transferred to a lyceum. Mama had found a condom in my wallet. I was embarrassed, but why did she have to be so hysterical? What was the big deal? Did she think that I was doing you-know-what? The thing had been in my wallet for two years. All the other kids had one, too. Tedde had bought them for us, or more likely, had stolen them from his parents' bedroom. It was a status symbol. I guess Mama felt bad that Papa had never found it necessary to tell me about the birds and the bees. Now he was no longer available. Actually, we occasionally did use condoms. For example, we tied them to the exhaust pipe of our neighbor's car. We also used them as water bombs by throwing them from the fourth floor of our apartment buildings. They made marvelous toys. My only real experience up that point had been with Herman's sisters, both of them. Yvonne, at fifteen, was the oldest, and totally out of my league as a twelve-year old. She hung around the notorious nozems, the Dutch version of the teddyboys of Britain. She was a blonde very much in the image of today's Madonna. Whenever I saw her over at Herman's place, she would tell us little boys all about her sex life. One day she showed us that she was wearing eight panties. "The guys just go crazy when they see that," she said. She was a man-eater. I asked Herman if it would be possible for me to ask his big sister for a date. "I heard that!" Yvonne said. "Would you like to go to a movie?" I asked, nervous to the extreme. "Sure," she said. It must have looked ridiculous. Here's fifteen-year old Yvonne riding her bicycle into the center of the city. And there's me, her twelve-year old "lover," sitting astride on the back of her bike, my arms around her middle, feeling the heat of her belly. We went to see the Guns of Navarone, which, by the way, made me a lifelong fan of Anthony Quinn. On the way back, we stopped by her school, now very dark and abandoned. In the back of the main building she took me into her arms and we kissed, tongues sliding over each other, my first ever kiss. Later we dropped by the local roller skating rink at the Zuiderpark where she promptly abandoned me for her nozem friends. I must be a lousy kisser, I thought, as I walked home alone. Anyway, I did mention that I got "involved" with both of Herman's sisters. The younger one was named Carla and at thirteen she was only a year older than we were. In those days we played a card game called Canasta. We would sit for hours and play the game. Carla, knowing that I had been "broken in" by her sister, would place a nylon-stockinged foot on my lap under the table and probe around. Nobody noticed but they may have wondered why I was slouching so much. When I turned fourteen I began hanging out with a slightly older crowd, kids that rode mopeds instead of bikes. Most of them weren't nozems by any stretch of the imagination and rarely got in trouble with the law, yet they were rebellious in the way they dressed and styled their hair. And the way they rode their mopeds. The coolest moped in the Netherlands at the time, especially in Den Haag, the Puch -- the uncoolest was the Solex and nobody wanted to be caught dead on one. The Puch with its high handlebars was a symbol of the sixties in Holland, as was the Brylcreem-slicked hair. I wasn't old enough to ride one, so I usually climbed on the back of Lange Jaap's Puch when we rode the streets of Scheveningen or Centrum Den Haag with Boelo, Sim and Muus. At every red light we noisily revved the engine and when it turned green, we blasted off with the front wheel raised high in the air while disdainfully looking back at the cyclists. Doing a "wheelie" was not too comfortable when you were riding on the back, and to the amusement of the cyclists, I frequently fell off. The most dangerous thing we did was to race through the Boekhorststraat in the city's centrum. This was the turf of the nozems and they had weapons -- chains, brass knuckles, and switch blades -- and they weren't afraid to use them. The nozem gangs rode Puchs too, with handlebars raised even higher in the style of Easy Rider. It was a stroke of luck that we never fell into their clutches. By this time I had fashioned myself after my new friends -- hair grown long, slicked down with Brylcreem, a big curl that hung down to my eyes, and a large comb in my pocket. I desperately wanted to ride a Puch on my own but nobody was willing to lend me one. Finally, I borrowed the Solex of a neighbor -- a good learning tool, I thought. The Solex was hardly a bucking bronco. In fact, it was really a bicycle with a small motor that you lowered on top of the front tire once you got up to speed peddling it like a madman. When I thought I got the hang of it, I took off down the bike path along the main road. On the way back, while passing a cyclist, we clipped handle bars and I went flying down the bike path. The cyclist was fine but the left side of my face was scraped clean of skin. It must have looked ridiculous -- a kid looking like James Dean falling off his Solex. After a visit to the clinic, I told my unbelieving friends that I had been captured by Indonesian nozems from Rotterdam who had dragged me down the street tied to their Puchs. I never did get to ride my own Puch. Mama was growing increasingly worried about me and decided to call in Uncle Robert to the rescue. Uncle Robert was married to Aunt Robbie, my mother's younger sister. He was a military man, ram-rod straight, a man who jumped out of airplanes and a master of the martial arts. Uncle Robert decided to start off by telling me about the birds and the bees. "Ladies," he said, "can't control their urges. Therefore, it's up to the man to show restraint. And if you must, if you really must do it, then always use the thing Mama found in your wallet. Is that clear?" "Yes sir!" I almost saluted. Tedde's version of sex had been a lot more enjoyable. It was obvious to everyone that I was suffering from a lack of discipline. Even after transferring from the gymnasium to a lyceum, my school work was still suffering and my truancy record was through the roof. I didn't fit the fold, my mother was told, and she and Uncle Robert decided that I was to move in with his family, where I would learn how to become a gentleman and a scholar. My bedroom consisted of a converted closet in the hallway. "Windows are a waste of time," Uncle Robert said, "They make you daydream." He taught me how to fold my blankets and polish my shoes. "Men are judged by the look of their shoes," he said. We were up at dawn for a three-mile run down the beach, followed by an ice-cold shower. "If you dry yourself quickly and vigorously, you'll never get cold," he said. He took me to his barber to get a crew cut. "Gee, I never knew you had a face," he said, after my long locks were gone. He enrolled me into his judo class, where he could legally beat me up. He took me along to the local bars, where we played billiards and drank beer together. (The legal beer drinking age in Holland at that time was fourteen.) "Some day," he said, "I'll take you to a place that'll really make you a man." Wink-wink. The Cold War was intensifying and according to Uncle Robert, a nuclear holocaust was all but certain. He spent the whole summer digging up his back garden, destroying it in the process. "I don't care about the rest of them, but I'm building the best nuclear bomb shelter in the world," he announced. When it was finished he stocked it with canned food and other essentials. It was actually quite impressive, but I doubted that several layers of plywood would withstand much of a shock, never mind keeping out any radiation. For awhile, we had frequent nightly drills, where without warning Uncle Robert would bang pots and pans and blow whistles. "You have four minutes to get into the shelter," he would yell, "Move your butts! Now!" My aunt didn't think too highly of it, and after several weeks of "Total Readiness At All Times," even Uncle Robert tired of it, resigning himself to the futility of it all. In the early winter, after the first snowfall, the shelter collapsed. Uncle Robert taught me manners and etiquette -- with chivalry ranking high on his list of virtues. "There are exceptions to the ladies-first rule," he told me. "For example, a man always enters a bar before his female escort. Do you know why?" he asked. I shook my head. "If there's a brawl inside, the man will get hit first." There was another exception to the ladies-first rule. "A man always descends the stairs first. Just in case the lady trips, you will soften her landing." Uncle Robert could go on for hours like this. I was enrolled in dance school. "A gentleman should know how to dance," said Uncle Robert. "And by that I mean the Foxtrot, the Waltz, and the Tango. Not that Rock'n'Roll stuff or this new thing, the Twist." Actually, a week earlier I had won a Chubby Checker twist contest. It was fun and easy to do. The Arthur Murray dance studio turned out to be a drag. The girls were plasticky goody-goody-two-shoes. The teacher insisted that except for the hands no body parts could touch. They had shoe prints painted on the floor, showing you exactly where to step. Asinine stuff. One day, after our class was finished and a new one was about to begin, one of the kids in our class dropped several stink bombs on the way out. That summed it up quite well, really. Uncle Robert was a musical man. He played the guitar, the piano, the clarinet and the accordion, and could sing all the popular cowboy songs with a real American accent. His favorite was Red River Valley. He tried to teach me how to play guitar, but I was tone deaf and I was unable to get my hands to do two different things at the same time. (When I brushed my teeth with my right hand, my left hand made the same motion.) I did go to accordion school for a few weeks, but it turned out to be a waste of money. All in all, in the year I spent with Uncle Robert, I came to regard him as a mentor and close friend. He had earned my respect and, hopefully, I had earned his. HILVERSUM, 1962 With rare exception, all Dutch males had to serve two years in the armed forces. Most boys were drafted at age eighteen, but if you wanted to, you could volunteer to enter as young as sixteen. After talking it over with Uncle Robert and getting the government's permission to be accepted before my sixteenth birthday, I joined the Royal Dutch Navy. In the initial interview, I was asked to list three preferences for which I would like to be trained for. I listed naval pilot as my first choice, electrical engineer as my second, and radio operator as my final preference.
Next, I was tested for electrical engineering. Again I did quite well, until I was given a straight piece of copper wire and a pair of pliers. First I was to bend it into triangle, then a square, and finally a circle. I didn't get past the triangle. So I became a radio operator. Only a hearing test was required for that, a test which I passed with flying colors. Basic training took place at Marine Opleidingskamp Hilversum (MOKH), the naval training camp in Hilversum near the city of Utrecht. Uncle Robert had tried to prepare me for what to expect and left me with the advice to "just do what you're told, blend into the woodwork, and nobody will bug you." He was still convinced that the world was facing nuclear calamity, and thought that the navy would be a good place for me to be when it happened. For many of the boys boot camp was a living hell, but I remained determined to stick with it for the three months it took to determine who had the wherewithal to serve aboard Her Royal Majesty's flotilla. Over half were expected to drop out at the end of training, either of their own volition or because they weren't able to live up to the camp's motto of Constantia Et Fide -- With Constancy and Faith. The drill instructors, Marines who had recently returned from combat in the former Dutch New Guinea, were given the responsibility to convert us from mama boys into men -- a task they took on with relish. After the Second World War, in 1949, Indonesia finally gained full independence from the Netherlands, but the Dutch refused to honor Sukarno's claim to West Papua, the western part of New Guinea. The Dutch government contended that the Papuans were ethnically different and that they should be given their own independence and unified with the Australian-controlled part of New Guinea. Thus, they retained their military presence there until late 1962, when the territory came under control of the United Nations. In the intervening years the tension between Indonesia and the Netherlands remained high with scattered clashes. In 1961, Sukarno sent in an invasion force of guerilla fighters and war between the two countries seemed inevitable. It was under these circumstances that I joined the navy and I heaved a sigh of relief when the UN took over later in the year. The first three months we weren't allowed out of camp, although at night we could drink beer with the "real" soldiers in the canteen and listen to the jukebox endlessly playing Cliff Richard, Johnny and the Hurricanes and Fats Domino. After a few weeks, I got on friendly terms with my drill sergeant. Normally a beast during the day, he was relaxed and full of good humor after hours. I think one of the reasons he liked me was because of the picture I was carrying in my wallet. "She is my sister," I told him one evening, "I've written her about you and she's interested in meeting you." Fondling the picture, he grinned from ear to ear. He never got to meet my "sister," because I didn't have a sister. The picture was of an obscure Brigitte Bardot look-alike who never quite made it. Except to provide me with dozens of free beers. The sergeant bragged about how they had removed the rings and gold teeth from the enemy soldiers they had killed in the jungles of New Guinea. "How did you remove the teeth?" I asked. "With my boot," he said. Although I highly doubted these gruesome tales, I played along to humor him. If it were true, it certainly wasn't something to be proud of. "Would you believe that the natives there are still cannibals?" he asked me. That I did believe because I had read about the tribesmen who had eaten a missionary. I wondered if the alleged enemy soldiers that they had killed were hapless cannibals with spears. "You know," he said, "human meat isn't all that bad. When you're hungry and it's a question of survival, well, you know what I mean," "Just don't eat my sister," I told him. That broke him up. "I promise, I promise!" he said, slapping me on the back. Gallows humor. The weapon we trained with was the M-1 Garand rifle of World War II vintage. We were taught to take it apart, clean, oil and polish it, and put it back together -- all with split-second precision. It looked simple but it had an awful lot of parts. Shooting it on the firing range took some getting used to. It was heavy, noisy, had a healthy kickback, and it tended to misfire with part of the clip poking out from the top. But it was very accurate and I managed some pretty high scores in target practice. Often with bayonet mounted, we carried our M-1s everywhere we went -- on the run, over obstacles and through barbed wire, in water, and endless hours on the parade grounds. The bayonet was somewhat of a silly weapon, I thought, and when mounted, it made the rifle unwieldy and even heavier. I hoped that I would never get close enough to an enemy where it would come down to a battle of bayonets. Boot camp was finally over and I had "graduated" near the top of my class. I was military material. Tedde Toet and Uncle Robert had served me well. I brimmed with confidence. Or was it arrogance? It didn't matter. I knew how to row my boat. Decked out in my dress uniform, I took the train to Den Haag. Mama was with friends in Germany and Papa came to meet me at Central Station. He had been dead against me leaving school and joining the navy. Nevertheless, he looked proud when I stepped off the train. After the divorce I had seen little of him and he was anxious to make up for lost time. We walked to the cinema and during intermission he surprised me by buying me a glass of beer. He then added to the surprise when he presented me with a half-pack of cigarettes -- his way of saying that I had come of age. That night he came to my bed, lay down beside me, and for the first time ever, he embraced me and held me tight. I was embarrassed, but it felt good. In the morning he made a Spanish omelette, another first, and asked me if Mama would be interested in getting back together with him. I didn't know. I knew that Papa blamed Uncle Robert for encouraging me to enlist and destroying the dreams he had for me. But once he knew that there was little he could do, he enthusiastically supported me in my decision. Later, at a "show" parade on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Karel Doorman in Den Helder, he took picture after picture, as I brandished my M-1 Garand with bayonet in pose after pose. I felt sorry for him. He wanted me to be a doctor, preserving life, not killing it. Nevertheless, in the excitement of the moment, he beamed with pride. "That's my son," he told everyone. Poor Papa. I was to be trained as a radio-telegrafist, a radio operator. That was cool, but I was disappointed to learn that for the rest of the year I would be attending classes full-time. I already knew Morse Code and how to wave flags, and didn't see the need for learning how to encrypt and decrypt secret codes. To make matters worse, we had to take regular school subjects as well. What I wanted most was to be assigned to sea-duty and get out of Holland. All the stories I had heard made me hungry to see the world. The golden age of Dutch sailing ships roaming the seven seas was long over, but we still had a sizable fleet -- naval and mercantile -- and going to sea was still a realistic dream for boys my age. Many of my friends had fathers, older brothers, or cousins who were at sea, coming home once a year with trinkets from foreign ports and stories that could keep you spellbound for hours. The Netherlands is such a small country that it was every young boy's dream to leave it for a while and see what the rest of the world was doing. In the early days of colonizing, the Dutch were quite sensitive about the size of their home country. When negotiating with local sovereigns in the massive archipelago of the East Indies, the Dutch were often asked how big the Netherlands were. They would pull out a world globe and casually point to an area from the North Sea to the Urals. In 1602, Prince Maurits invited a delegation of royals from the East Indies to the Netherlands where they were wined and dined. They were then taken for an outing to Fort Grave which had been occupied by Spanish troops led by the Duke of Parma since 1584. They were taken there because just at that time, in a raging battle, Dutch troops were retaking the fort and sending the Spaniards fleeing for their lives. It was a nice show of force and the royals were duly impressed with such a "great country and powerful army." Maps of the Netherlands were not officially allowed in the East Indies until the 19th century. In the summer of 1962, most days were spent in the classroom and at night we were on guard duty at one of the camp's gates or on the occasional military exercise. Guard duty was extremely boring and tiring. We worked in watches of four hours on and four hours off. During the off-hours, we would sleep on a hard cot in the guard house. Return to the barracks was not permitted. Except for very brief periods, you weren't allowed to sit down. The only excitement came when some of the sailors and marines returned to camp roaring drunk, a common occurrence. If they were too drunk or rowdy, we were supposed to lock them up in the brig which usually ended up in a scuffle of some sort. Sometimes we would have ten or more "prisoners," some of them your friends, in the cramped cells. At the end of each watch, we awakened all the inmates and tied their hands behind their backs. We then "aired" them by walking them like dogs on a leash. In the meantime, all the cells were hosed down. The closest we got to water was in the fall, when we spent two months in a sailing camp at a lake near Utrecht. It was mostly rowing and very little sailing. I promptly suffered my one and only "military" injury by slicing off the tip of my finger while cutting bread. One evening we attended a live outdoor concert by Roy Orbison and a Moluccan group named the Diamonds. Cliff Richard did a concert in Rotterdam, but I missed that. At night we roamed the clubs and bars of Utrecht, but since the streets were overcrowded with military personnel, and given the fact that we were still regarded as pipsqueeks, we didn't stand a chance in competing for the ladies. The only romance I felt was in the winter, when I was on leave in Den Haag. A beautiful female singer in a downtown club never took her eyes off me while singing a wonderful love song. Even though the place was filled with several hundred people, she was singing just for me. Wow! Famous singer falls in love with teenage sailor, read tomorrow's headlines. Extra! Extra! Read all about it! The dream was shattered when she picked somebody else for her next song. My naval career came to an abrupt end in March of 1963, when Mama told Dick and I that she was going to marry Bill, a U.S. naval officer she had met in Rotterdam. Bill served on the aircraft carrier Wasp based in Norfolk, Virginia. On an earlier leave, Mama had taken us aboard the Wasp to meet with the jolly rotund Bill, who really wasn't an officer but a chef (okay, he was just a cook). I had worn my uniform and self-consciously compared it to the one worn by the U.S. sailors -- I preferred mine, especially the headgear. Mama told us that we were first going to emigrate to Canada and after their marriage, we would move to the United States. I was gonna be a Yankee-Doodle-Dandy! Whoopee! I was also disappointed, of course, that I would never be a Dutch admiral. I had one final fling with the guys. In honor of my departure, Boelo's older brother Sim had rented a Cadillac convertible for a week. Five of us, all smoking big fat cigars, and decked out in fancy suits and dark glasses, were going to terrorize the streets of Holland. After circling our neighborhood for an hour, loudly honking our horn to make sure everybody saw us, we hit the beaches at Scheveningen and Katwijk, the draw bridges of Delft and Gouda (scraping the undercarriage of the Cadillac), the Walletjes of Amsterdam, the bars in the port of Rotterdam, the cheese market in Haarlem. We attended an amateur rock concert in which some friends of ours were participating. They had called themselves Muus and the Mystics and were making their debut appearance. When they appeared on stage, all dressed in black leather jackets, the crowd cheered. Their first number was Peggy Sue by Buddy Holly. God, they were awful! The cheers turned to boos. Halfway through their second number, they were bombarded by empty Heineken and Amstel bottles, and they never got to finish it. "Ah critics," mused Muus later, "They know nothing about music." A car that size, and a convertible at that, was a rarity in 1963 Holland. Everywhere we went, people stared at us. We spent most of our time standing up in the convertible, twisting and shouting, and waving and cheering at all the lonely people. There were so many new rock bands starting up at that time, that most people simply assumed that we were rock-and-rollers. I mean who else could do something that outrageous. Bill Haley and the Comets? Nah! They're passe. You don't mean the Beatles, do you? Hmmm, could be. That one guy does have a pretty big nose. "Love, love me doooo...," we all sang. See I told you, it's them! Hey guys, it's the Beatles! "Love, love me doooo..." AMERICA, MAY 1963 It was sayonara time. Except for Papa, they were all there -- Uncle Robert and Tante Robbie, Oma and Opa Mulder, uncles and aunts, cousins and nieces and nephews, friends and friends of friends. Some were even crying, waving their handkerchiefs as Holland America's Rijndam moved away from the pier.
We picked up French emigrants in Le Havre and English emigrants in Southampton. Most of my fellow DPs (deported persons) were in their twenties. The first night out of Southampton, Mama dragged me out of the cocktail lounge in her nightgown at 4 o'clock in the morning. How embarrassing! Right in front of my thirty new British and French friends. Man-of-the-World, master of sophistication and elegance, gets dragged out of bar by his mommy. The following day I had convinced Mama that the only reason I was in the lounge so late was to hone up on my English and French. "After all," I reasoned, "aren't those the languages they speak in Canada?" "Yes, of course that's true. But please don't drink so much," my mother said. "Loosens the lips," I replied. We had a couple of good storms, and indeed the captain began appearing at the dinner table. He had found his sea legs. The storms brought with them a new game to play -- wait for the aft deck to reach its highest point out of the water. Then, just before it comes crashing down again, you jump as high as you can. Great fun! When we neared the North American coast, we spotted icebergs in the distance. What a sight! A lot of that evening's dinner talk concerned the Titanic, and what-if questions. As the Rijndam sailed under a bridge going up the St. Lawrence River, I finally began thinking about living in America. To my younger brother Dick and I, America meant both Canada and the United States, lands of untold riches, the streets paved with gold. The ten-dollar bill in my pocket was burning a hole. I was going to multiply it many-fold. It became official in Quebec City where we were processed by the authorities. We were now newly-landed immigrants! In the port of Montreal, wearing my gold-threaded suit especially bought for the occasion, I gave the porter my one and only ten-dollar bill as we disembarked. "S'il vous plait," I said. "Merci, Monsieur," the porter replied, "Merci beaucoup." The Man-of-the-World, not a penny in his name, had arrived. "Mais oui, c'est la vie magnifique." "Au contraire, mon ami, c'est la vie sans le sou." That evening Dick and I explored the center of Montreal. Everything was so much larger than in Holland. We had never seen such tall buildings. Except for annual summer vacations in the Tyrolian Alps of Austria, we had never been to a foreign country before. We went into a coffee shop where Dick bought me a coke. I was broke, remember? Neat! You could make a jukebox selection right from your table. Three selections for a quarter. Dick picked a number by the Beach Boys, I chose I Can't Stop Loving You by Ray Charles, and for the final selection, Dick punched the buttons for On Blueberry Hill by Fats Domino. We visited an Indian reservation across the river where a fully feathered, war-painted chief in a wig-wam sold us scalped heads and tomahawks. "These Indians are fake," said a disgusted Dick upon discovering that the scalps and tomahawks were made in Hong Kong. A few days later, Bill met us in Montreal -- not looking quite as impressive in his civilian clothes -- and drove us down to his hometown of Chatham, New York. Driving through the rolling hills, we stopped at an amusement park with a ghost town and cowboys shooting at each other. They were fake, too. Bill had rented a cabin by Chatham Lake where Dick and I met an American girl determined to teach us American slang and every variation of the word "fuck." We met Bill's elderly mother and watched him play softball -- a game we had never seen -- with his buddies. One of them asked where we were from and when we told him, he asked, "How did you get out from behind the Iron Curtain?" I don't think he was joking. Three weeks later, the marriage was off and we took the Greyhound back to Montreal, flat broke. Mama was too proud to admit defeat and she refused to contact family back in Holland. There was no way that she was going to ask for financial aid so that we could return. Doing odd jobs such as filling magazine subscriptions she scraped up enough money to buy train tickets to Vancouver -- there was a friend of a friend of a friend living in Port Moody, a Vancouver suburb, who was willing to help us get started with our new life in Canada. They kindly offered us lodging but it soon became obvious that we were imposing on their hospitality and after a week we moved to an abandoned tenement building on Broadway without water and electricity. Mom worked the early shift squeezing cookie dough at a bakery for a while until I found a classified ad in the help-wanted section of the Vancouver Sun: WANTED. Live-in housekeeper on ranch in Lone Bute. Caribou country. Children welcome. One phone call and Mom -- and, as it turned out, Dick and I -- were on the payroll of Nels Sandberg, a 70-year-old widowed rancher, also known as the Tyrant of Lone Bute. Hee-haw! Howdy Partner! Of course, there was no payroll -- room and board was all we were going to get. The ranch was huge (almost as big as Holland, Dick said) and very understaffed. As school hadn't started yet, he had us work the fields, bailing hay and stacking the bales in the barn, feeding the animals and herding cattle. Remembering Tedde's unfortunate incident with Trigger, I was loath to get on a horse, but I finally picked an old beast called Bunk. Bunk's maximum speed, if you got him to move at all, was five miles per hour. Dick and I were cowboys! Tedde, eat your heart out! Mom soon began referring to our "friendly" rancher as the Hangman. She had to get up before daybreak, fire up the wood oven, and cook up a stack of pancakes and bacon. The breakfast menu never varied, just pancakes and bacon. Although he had an old generator, he was too cheap to use it and we mostly lived without electricity. Sunset was bedtime, which was just as well because we were forced to get up so early. It wasn't all bad for Dick and I -- riding the range on our lame horses and running through muddy fields on tractors were loads of fun. The Hangman, in a rare moment of compassion, allowed us to have our pick from a closet full of cowboy paraphernalia -- hats, boots, bandannas, leather leggings, and spurs. All we needed now was a holster and a six-shooter. And a lasso, of course. I received a letter from Herman wherein he told me how depressed he had become. Carla had become pregnant and after only two weeks of marriage, her husband had left her. His alcoholic father was jailed for buying all his friends and relatives expensive appliances with stolen money. On top of that, his father had punctured his heart with a needle while putting on a new shirt he had bought as part of his final splurge in life. Herman had tried to enroll in the army, but was declared mentally unfit. All that kept him going, he told me, was jazz music. Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong were the only joys left for him. "You're so lucky to leave this miserable land," he wrote, "I don't see any hope for me." Two years later, he was shot dead by the Amsterdam police in a bungled bank robbery. His final battle. His last hurrah. I also received a package from my grandmother. It contained the wallet I had lost at the Efteling amusement park near Waalwijk just before leaving Holland. It even contained some 200 guilders that had been in it! I made a mental note that I should do the same were I to find somebody else's wallet. Honesty begets honesty. In September, after much arguing between Mom and the Hangman about the need for school, my brother Dick and I attended our first school in North America, a small shack in Bridge Lake, some fifty miles away. It was so small that there were only two classrooms, one for all the elementary grades, the other for the junior high grades. Dick and I were in the same class. The only problem was transportation. There was no bus and there was no way that the Hangman would chauffeur us. We had noticed a for sale sign on a 1947 Austin parked next to a coffee shop in Bridge Lake. Mom and I went inside to enquire. The counter clerk nodded at a gruff-looking cowboy in the corner. "How much do you want for the car?" my mother asked politely. The cowpoke looked up and pulled out a huge Bowie knife. Holy cow! My heart went up my throat and Mom took a step back. The man looked at his free hand and calmly began cleaning his fingernails with the knife. "Fifty bucks and she's yours," he said. My mother didn't haggle. We now had a set of wheels to go to school with. The engine was so gutless, that we had to try several times to negotiate some of the hills. Even though I wasn't yet licensed, I did all the driving, and Dick did all the pushing. On the dirt road between the school and the ranch we had to negotiate one long -- not steep, just long -- hill. I would double-clutch the little Austin into first gear but it just couldn't make it to the top. The only way to do it was to put it into reverse and back it up the hill. One time, while turning around to begin the back-up maneuver, I almost put it over the edge of a small cliff into the creek below. The front wheel on Dick's side was hanging in the air and he moved gingerly out of the car to lessen the weight on that side first. We then slowly hand-pushed it back to safety. It wasn't very heavy -- the battery was probably bigger than the engine. Dick had ordered an Italian rifle from a mail order firm in the States. It was a high-calibre weapon that could break your shoulder if you weren't careful. We had a lot of fun shooting at cans, bottles, and other targets, such as pumping holes in the Hangman's abandoned boat by the lake. One day we went hunting, and after several hours of trampling through the bush, I saw a pheasant. At least, that's what I thought it was, although I later learned that it must have been a grouse. He was perched on a branch some twenty feet up a tree, peering down at me. I aimed the rifle at the bird and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The "pheasant" continued looking at me curiously. "Take the safety off," whispered Dick. I did and aimed the rifle again. The stupid bird was staring down the barrel and made no attempt to fly away. This is not very sporting, I thought. "Pssst," I told the bird, "Fly, fly." "What are doing?" asked Dick, "Shoot it." "I can't just shoot it like that," I replied, "I want to shoot it out of the air." We never did kill the bird, and I never went hunting again. We stayed in Lone Bute, a very appropriate name, for five months. Mom's life was hell. Whenever she was done with all the housekeeping and cooking, the rancher would find something else for her to do. Finally, one of the many help-wanted ads she had responded to paid off. Mom had been hired as a housekeeper by a divorced man with three children on Vancouver Island. For fear that the Slave Driver of Lone Bute wouldn't let us go, we escaped while he was away to do his banking in Williams Lake. Since we was going there anyway, Mr. Kulek, a neighboring rancher, had agreed to drive us the long way back to Vancouver in the back of his cattle truck. I still vividly remember the shivering cold as we bounced through the winding canyons along the Fraser River in the pouring rain. From Vancouver, we took the ferry to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, where we were cheerfully welcomed by Douglas Fredrickson, our new employer -- and a year later, husband and father. Dick and I attended high school in Qualicum Beach, a pleasant resort town on the east coast of Vancouver Island. After the isolation of living on a ranch in the Caribou, we finally got a chance to mingle with people our own age. At first, our heavy Dutch accents and stilted English speech were the source of some good-natured teasing, but we were quickly accepted into the community. It was only natural that one of the subjects I took that year was European History. I was dismayed to find, however, that Admiral Piet Heyn, one of Holland's greatest naval heroes in history and conqueror of the Spanish Silver fleet in 1628, was described in my textbook as a pirate. "The man was a national hero, not a pirate," I angrily told my teacher, remembering the ditty about Piet Heyn we used to sing as kids. Others events of that era seemed strangely slanted as well, favoring the English -- great sea battles won by the Dutch got bare mention in the textbook as minor skirmishes. I was ready to fight these battles all over again, but the teacher calmly explained that perceptions of the same event can vary and each country likes to see itself in the best light. She was right, of course, but if Piet Heyn was a pirate, then so was Sir Francis Drake -- albeit both sponsored by the State. Douglas had given me his old Willes sedan, which I immediately took out for some time trials down some deserted logging roads. I still didn't have a driver's license and it didn't take long for the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) to pull me over. After being ticketed, one of the RCMP officers escorted me home. One hour later, I was on the road again, but I hadn't even gone one mile and I was pulled over again. It was the same officer, and I got another ticket. "Why don't you go and get a license," he suggested. "Good idea," I said. Several days later I got my license in Port Alberni. I even went to visit the RCMP station to show the officer. "Good boy," he said, "Just drive carefully." When you are a sixteen-year old boy with his first hot rod, that's a very difficult thing to do, especially when your friends are fond of drag racing. Peeling rubber was the in-thing to do. Of course, my Willes was no competition against Gary's '56 Chevy or Gordy's souped-up '57 Buick. Their V-8s against my flat-6. The only way I could peel rubber was to do it in reverse (the same trick I used with the old Austin). They were going forward, while I was going backward. In less than 3 months, I had blown every piston in the engine. By that time I had earned the nickname of Oil -- the Willes at one point consumed twice as much oil as it did gasoline. In November of that year, the principal of our school announced over the public address system that President Kennedy had been assassinated. There was stunned silence as school was let out early. For weeks everyone talked in hushed whispers. We all felt vulnerable and thought something terrible was going to happen. My next car was a Hudson Jet, while Gordy had bought a beautiful white Edsel. Our favorite pastime was to cruise the main drag of Nanaimo -- back and forth, back and forth -- and then hang out at the A&W sipping a root beer, flirting with the car hops, with twenty or so car radios trying to drown each other out. If you've seen the movie American Graffitti, you'll know what it was like. Sometimes, we were all tuned into the same station at the same time and the harmonious crescendo was impressive. That was one thing I really liked about North America -- you had a variety stations to listen to. In Holland, there were only two state-controlled stations, and they never played pop music. Your only other option was Radio Veronica, a so-called pirate ship station in the North Sea, or Radio Luxembourg. The Beatles were now really big. And so, of course, were the Beach Boys and let's not forget Gerry and the Pacemakers. Elvis I never liked. Cliff Richard was now a faint memory. We all knew the lyrics to I Want To Hold Your Hand and I Saw Her Standing There. The music was great in those days and so were the movies, such as James Bond in From Russia With Love and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. The only problem I had with Canada at the time was the legal drinking age. In British Columbia you had to be twenty-one to have a beer, while in Holland you could enter a bar at fourteen to consume beer. The whole attitude about alcohol was different. Sure, we drank too much on occasion back in Holland, but mostly it was a part of socializing, creating a warm and cozy atmosphere. British Columbia didn't even have bars in the real sense, just sleazy hotel beer parlors where the atmosphere was anything but warm. Fights between sloppy drunks was common. No wonder the men were segregated from the women in those establishments. People drank to get drunk, and I was astonished to see that so many of them were native Indians. I had never seen people so defeated and downtrodden, so sad and fatalistic. Unfortunately, the initial shock wears off and then, like everyone else, you don't notice it anymore. How tragic. Boys will be boys. If you can't have it, that means you must have it. Near most government-operated liquor stores there would an old geezer who would buy you a six-pack of beer or a mickey of rye, if you paid him for the trouble. Unable to go anywhere else in public, we would hop down to the beach in Parksville and drink our beer, and do a little bit of necking with Gail or Suzy. Nothing too excessive. Sometimes the beaches were raided by the RCMP, and we would move to some logging road up in the mountains. We always parked facing downhill, just in case the battery went dead because you had your radio on too long. Our lives revolved around our cars, the A&W and most importantly, the music. There were new groups appearing all the time - the Animals, the Dave Clarke Five, the Supremes, the Kinks, and of course, the Rolling Stones. Many of them became overnight stars on the Ed Sullivan Show. We finally got caught for "being a minor in the possession of alcohol" on the Parksville beach. My mother and I had to appear before a local judge in Qualicum. "Please kiss the Bible," the judge instructed my mother. She kissed it and left a bright-red lipstick mark on the opened page. As a result, I was sentenced to one year's probation and was to report to a probation officer once a month. Thanks Mom. A week later, while driving my Hudson Jet at its top speed of 130 MPH, the crankshaft popped loose. It hit one of the rear tires and I came to a screeching halt in the ditch. I was fine. My Hudson Jet was toast. From that point on, I rode with Gordy in his white Edsel. I met my probation officer only once. He was a Haida native and very kind and understanding. We talked about my native Holland and how we had moved to Canada. At the end of our meeting, he told me that I wouldn't have to report anymore. "Just take it easy and stay out of trouble," he said. In August of 1964, I heard for the first time that the United States and North Vietnam were entering into a conflict of sorts. Some U.S. naval ships had come under attack and the government had passed the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution." I recalled that back in the fifties the French colonials had fought fierce battles in Vietnam. When I finished school in the spring of 1965, I was eighteen years old and restless. Although the pop culture was still raging, there was now also a "counter-culture" or an "alternative culture" emerging, and in conjunction with that, the music changed, becoming shrill and inverted, almost nihilistic. Bob Dylan, whom I didn't like, was leading us into the psychedelic era. The Rolling Stones acted, looked, and sounded stupid. There was talk of new cult religions and LSD and marijuana. The world was freaking out. Some friends and I moved to Vancouver, where we rented a couple of rooms in a house in the suburb of Burnaby. I got a job as a stage hand at Ken Stouffer's Cave Supper Club downtown, where I met little Brenda Lee, Dennis Day, and the still-blond boy wonder, Wayne Newton, with a retinue of prostitutes in tow (they could have been bodyguards). At the Cave, I fell in love with the gorgeous Kim Sisters, Sue, Aija and Mia -- they offered me a job as an equipment handler (they played a truckload full of instruments) and for the life of me I still don't know why I didn't take it. Their West Side Story repertoire was superb. All very exciting, yet my life had become aimless again. Maybe this would be a good time to visit my family and friends back in Holland, I thought. Although I had saved a little money, I didn't have nearly enough for an airplane ticket. I started visiting the merchant ships in the port of Vancouver looking for a job, any job. No luck. Nobody was hiring a landlubber. By the early summer I convinced a friend to hitchhike to San Francisco with me. We would find a ship there and work our way to Europe, linger on the beaches of the French Riviera and stroll the streets of Paris. While in San Francisco, waiting for a ship that would take us to Europe, we would visit all of the famous topless Go-Go bars on North Beach. CALIFORNIA, JUNE 1965 When we arrived in San Francisco, we decided to first spend a few days relaxing. In a rented Plymouth Barracuda we drove south to San Jose and Santa Cruz, where we set up camp near the beach in an old tent I had brought from Holland. We whiled away the days "cruising" the beach and singing along with the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and the Hondels, from Help Me, Rhonda to Little Honda. Two weeks later, after returning the car in San Francisco, we were broke. The friend, blaming me for this misfortune, said goodbye. He was going back to Canada. I placed a collect call to my mother. Unfortunately, they were also in a financial bind, but she said that she would wire me ten dollars -- the fee for doing so was more than the amount she sent. I got a job as a dishwasher at a home for derelicts near Golden Gate Park. It paid very little, but at least I had a place to sleep. Remembering my purpose for coming to California, I began walking the piers of the harbor. I was told that my best bet for finding work was to register at the Norwegian shipping office, which I did. I lied about my experience and told them I was a cook. Did I have any documents to prove that, they asked. Sorry, I replied, I had lost them. Every day I checked in to see if anything had opened up. Every day it was the same reply: check again tomorrow. I went to a pawn shop on Market Street and said goodbye to most of my belongings, including my watch and tent. When I walked out, I bumped into a kissing gay couple. When they saw me staring at them, one quipped, "I'm not gay, my husband is." I didn't get the joke until much later. Two more weeks went by. I had lost my "job" at the derelict home and had begun sleeping in sleazy all-night movie theaters. Then the Norwegian shipping office informed me that they had found me a job. They gave me twenty dollars in cash and a Greyhound bus ticket to San Diego, where my ship was docked. I was rescued, I had money, and a means to get back to Europe. Another week in San Francisco and I would have become a Flower Child in Golden Gate Park -- spaced out and grooving. When I got on the bus, I realized that I didn't have any baggage, not even a toothbrush. I literally didn't have a pot to piss in. The following morning I boarded the ship and reported to the steward, as I had been instructed to do. An hour later we left port and six hours later the crew found out that I couldn't cook. By that time it was too late to turn around and dispose of me, and I was reassigned to deck work. Going to sea is a moment of magic. As we slid out of San Diego harbor past the armada of navy ships, I looked out at the open sea, beckoning. The shoreline disappeared in the distance. I didn't care if I ever came back. Such is the magnetism of the sea. The umbilical cord had been broken. I learned that we were going to Kobe, Japan. Oh well, at least I was being fed and had a place to sleep. From the steward I bought some toilet articles, a carton of duty-free Camels and a couple of T-shirts. I had the least desirable cabin on the ship: smack in the middle on the aft-deck, directly above the propellor. It was terribly noisy and there was so much vibration that it rattled my teeth. On stormy nights it was worse. The violent waves would lift the stern out of the water, and the propellor, freed from any water resistance, would spin crazily out of control. I literally had to hang on to the sides of my bunk when the stern came crashing down again. It probably contributed to my dislike of roller coasters. Although the officers were all Norwegian, my fellow shipmates were a motley crew, a virtual United Nations: Filipino prison escapees, refugees from African and Middle Eastern nations I had never heard of, cartoonish-like sailors from Finland and Denmark, a Clark Gable look-alike from Buenos Aires, a deaf-mute, and to balance things out, an American former teacher from Long Beach, California. In keeping things simple, everyone was assigned a nickname (being the only Dutchman, I was called Holland). We spoke a kind of pidgin English with a smattering of Scandinavian thrown in, vastly more practical than Esperanto. To this day I do not know what their real names were, with the exception of Popeye. His name was Oskar Hansen, which I learned a dozen years later, when I by chance ran into him at Yokohama Station. He invited me to dinner at his home in the suburbs, where I met for the first time his wife Yoshi and their two small children. They appeared to be a cozy and secure family, and we did very little rehashing of the past. The days at sea were spent picking and scraping never-ending rust, or when nobody was looking, simply painting over the rust. From Popeye, an able-bodied seaman (AB) from Norway, I learned how to splice the heavy manila ropes with a spike and mallet. Finland - a bald, bearded and bronzed veteran AB - taught me how to rig up a scaffolding and heave it over the side. We worked in two 4-hour shifts a day. During the night shift I had look-out duty on the foredeck. If I spotted the lights of another ship, I was to report it to the bridge by ringing the bell from one to three times, depending on the ship's location. In the middle of the Pacific that was very rare indeed. We once passed by a couple of Japanese trawlers that were bouncing up and down the waves. One moment you saw them, the next moment they were gone. Pretty gutsy to be out there in such little boats. Most of our free time was sheer boredom, probably the reason why so many sailors are heavy drinkers. We had a few stormy days, but since we took the southerly route it wasn't all that bad. The storms brought out schools of flying fish, and it was amazing how high and far they could fly. Some of the guys brought out nets and tried to catch them, but they were quite clever in evading obstacles. About once a day at midnight we set the ship's clocks back one hour (sometimes two), and when we crossed the International Date Line, we simply moved the calendar ahead one day. If it had been my birthday, there would have been no way to celebrate it, because it never happened. Living 25-hour days makes time drag. We also had GMT clocks, but they were never changed. The weather grew warmer as we neared land and I had begun sleeping outside on top of the aft deck, where I had placed my mattress. On moonless nights, it was magical to stare up at the billions and trillions of stars, numbers that Carl Sagan would later confirm for me. You could see forever. Just you and the universe. Far more inspiring for contemplating the meaning of life than any hallucinogenic substance back in San Francisco. Now let's see now, all those stars are particles of dust in the armpit of an ant. That's it, I'm living in the armpit of an ant! JAPAN, AUGUST 1965 By the time we reached Kobe, Clark Gable, a self-proclaimed expert on romance, and Popeye, married to a Japanese girl in Yokohama, had adequately briefed me on what to expect: girls, girls, girls. In later years, I would feel shamed to admit that this was one of the reasons I fell in love with Japan, but in these early days of sowing my oats it surely contributed to the interest I've had in that part of the world. When we docked at this busy port, there was a hum of activity. Customs and immigration officials, shipping agents, stevedores, chandlers, longshoremen and women, many of them elderly and clad in baggy "pajamas," their feet stuffed into tight tabi (Japanese socks), swarmed all over the ship. I noticed that many of the men relieved themselves in public without any concern for being seen. They peed against buildings, trees, and into the water. Must be a shortage of toilets, I concluded. It didn't help either that the crew had locked all of the ship's toilets. I also wondered why some of the Japanese were wearing surgical masks. Perhaps because of the pollution, I thought, or maybe they suffered from some terrible disease. Later in the city I saw many others wearing masks. When I asked Popeye about it, he told me that the masked people were suffering from a cold and that it was a courtesy not to spread it to others. Another weird thing I noticed was that Japanese cats didn't have tails. "The Japanese cut them off when they're still kittens," Popeye informed me. "Why would they do that?" I asked. "I don't know," Popeye replied, "Maybe it's some kind of superstition." Popeye turned out to be wrong. Even though the Japanese are quite superstitious, the tailless cats that I saw were bred that way. When I found an elderly longshoreman worker napping on my mattress on the aft deck, I told the bosun (boatswain) about it. He walked over to the poor unsuspecting soul and kicked him off the mattress. When I got upset over this treatment, the bosun shrugged and said, "That's the only language they understand." Nice guy, the bosun. The bargirls, or B-girls, were what sailors lived for in those days of early post-war Japan. The dollar was pegged at 360 yen, and even on a lowly deck boy's budget was it possible to enjoy the finer things in life. That first night in Kobe I finally lost my virginity. Twenty of us piled into a caravan of taxis that took us to the port's "amusement center." Most of us went to a bar recommended by Clark Gable, while the officers entered a somewhat classier cabaret across the street. Officers and crew rarely frequented the same establishments, I learned. The bar we entered was a madhouse. There were some thirty bargirls, or hostesses as they were called in the fancier places, and they crawled all over us. Clark Gable had one sitting on either side of him and one on his lap. Finland wasn't doing so badly either. He was "dancing" with two of them while the jukebox played You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' over and over. "Hey Mama-san," Clark Gable yelled, "This here is Holland. He's still a cherry-boy." Mama-san grinned at me. "Aa sou desu-ka? Cherry-boy very nice. You numba one. You buy drink for Hiroko. Maybe tomorrow you no more cherry-boy." Hiroko sat on my lap, put her arms around my neck, and nibbled on my ear. Hiroko was obviously the cherry-boy specialist. I quickly got the hang of how the system worked. The girls made their money by getting you to buy them highly overpriced watered-down drinks, in some cases just pop or iced tea. The more drinks you bought them, the more accommodating they would be. Some of them would sleep with you, but only if they liked you. No guarantees. There was usually at least one older woman, the mama-san or mother hen, who would protect the younger ones, the chicks. In the mid-sixties, Japan was not the economic power she is today. There was still rampant poverty, especially for the young women in the rural areas. Some had lost their fathers in the war and needed to support the remaining family. For others, it was the only way to bring some glamor into their lives. Japanese hostesses are an enigma. They still exist, but nowadays they are the domain of the Japanese businessman. In the mid-seventies, my good friend, Bob Wallace, would write this about them: "[The Japanese] hostess is many things. She is a pamperer, a teaser, a counselor, but most important she is a woman who makes herself available to men so that they may relax and enjoy themselves. She may offer just the right mood for business negotiation that would be difficult in the more formal realms of the office. Or she may simply provide the means for a man to escape from the daily routine of his structured life and to regain his sense of being a man among other men. In another sense, she offers an amorous rapport which invites the customer to play the role of seducer. This sometimes leads to a date outside the cabaret, but for the most part simply puts a little swagger back into a man's steps. She is there to make men laugh, to make them forget themselves, to give them a woman's loving attention which is so important. This is her job and it is how she earns a living." "Hey Holland," yelled Clark Gable, "Are you coming?" I looked at Hiroko, who nodded. "Good ruck, cherry-boy!" said Mama-san. We walked out of the bar. Finland and his girl followed. Clark Gable led the way with three girls. "You know, Holland," he said, "I've had "double-deckers" before, but this is my first time to go for a "triple-decker." I'm a bit like you tonight. It's like being a cherry-boy all over again." That made all the girls giggle. "Ooh, you sooo sukebe!" one of them said. I later learned that meant "naughty." I'll say! We walked several blocks and entered a "love hotel," one of Japan's finest institutions. Today, they are littered all over Japan, with many of them having quite unique and grandiose decors. Our love hotel was a simple inn. When we slid open the front door, we were greeted by another mama-san who welcomed us profusely on her knees. "Take your shoes off, Holland," said Finland. After putting on slippers, we followed mama-san down the darkened hallways where she showed us to our rooms. There were no locks or door handles in this place. Mama-san simply slid open the shoji door, and leaving our slippers in the hallway, we entered the tatami-matted room. Mama-san softly slid the door closed behind us. There was a window covered with shoji. (When I later tried to peek out through the window, there was just a solid wall one foot from my nose.) When I looked to my right, I saw a fluffy and frilly futon, and just beyond it was an alcove, tokonoma, with a scroll of a waterfall and birds. Inside the alcove stood a large Chinese vase. I must have spent five minutes taking all of this in. I had forgotten about Hiroko. The reverie was broken when all of a sudden mama-san appeared with a trayful of cups, dishes and a pot of hot water. She busily prepared setting out the dishes and cups and poured us green tea. She then handed us oshibori, so nice and hot, the absolute antidote to a sweltering day. Mama-san was wearing a kimono and she moved around the room by sliding on her knees. What was she doing? She moved to the head of the futon and corrected a slight imperfection, an unseen crease in the bed cover. She checked the kleenex, hidden away in a beautifully carved wooden box. She made sure that the shoji covering the window were perfectly closed. She removed a speck of imaginary dust from the tatami. Finally, when she was all satisfied, she smiled. "O-biiru-wa dou desu-ka? Nomimasen-ka?" she asked, "Mochiron o-furo-wa itsu-mo douzo." I was living in a fable. When Hiroko pointed out that I should pay mama-san for the room, I simply handed her my wallet. Hiroko took care of things after that. She took me by the hand, clutching our yukata, and walked me down to the basement into a small dressing room. Beyond it was a glass door, all steamed up. Hiroko began undressing and for the first time in my life did I see a woman in her full nakedness. I just stood there looking at her beauty, somewhat embarrassed and at the same time very excited. "You really are cherry-boy, aren't you? Here, I help you," Hiroko said while handing me a small towel. As she undressed me, she giggled when I tried to hide my "boyhood" from her with the towel. "Come," she said, "Let's go o-furo." Except for the ceiling, the bathroom was all tiled. A small waterfall gushed steaming hot water into the filled tub, much larger and deeper than I had ever seen. Hiroko pulled over two small wooden stools and nodded for me to sit on one of them. She dipped a small wooden bucket into the tub, and gently poured the scalding water over my feet. "Your hands," she said. I held out my hands, and she poured another bucket-full of water over my forearms and hands. "Atsui desu-ka? Too hot?" she asked. It really was, but I shook my head. As if she had read my mind, she partly turned on the cold-water faucet over the bath. Each time she brought up the bucket, she would add just a little bit of the cold water, test it with her hand for perfection, and then pour it right over me. "Water must be hot," she said, "Today hot day. Hot day and hot o-furo makes you cool." Not quite understanding that logic, I nodded. It did feel wonderful. Hiroko turned off the cold-water tap, stepped into the bath with the little towel placed nicely folded on her head, and immersed herself up to her chin. "Come," she said. I stepped into the water and sat at the edge of the bath. "I feel like a lobster," I said. "Is okay, is okay. You come inside. Feel good." I slowly, oh so slowly, lowered my body into the boiling inferno. My boyhood temporarily forgotten, I followed Hiroko's example of putting the towel on top of my head. My buns finally hit bottom. "Mr. Lobster, what does it feel like to be boiled alive?" "Well Fred, you bring up an interesting point. The boiling part is not all that bad. It's when they start eating me that really bugs me." How true. At first, I looked upon it at as another military exercise, just to see how much torture one can take. But when I looked at Hiroko, smiling Hiroko, so content and so relaxed, I had to smile too. The Japanese sense of the o-furo is a return to the womb. It's totally equivalent to looking up at billions of stars and wondering who you are. "Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are." Hiroko giggled. After a few minutes we were sitting on the stools again, and Hiroko shampooed my hair, twice. She then placed her towel on her thigh and vigorously soaped it. For the next half hour she scrubbed me from top to bottom. It was as if I had never washed my body before. Every toe and every finger was carefully attended to. She carefully used her towel to clean out my ears, and even tried to remove the blackheads on my nose. When she gently soaped my boyhood, I had to close my eyes from the pleasure of it all. "He very happy," Hiroko said. With all the soaping and scrubbing done, we rinsed ourselves with the wash bucket and went for another soak in the tub. This time I had no trouble at all with the temperature. My skin was tingling pink after Hiroko dried me with the rinsed and squeeze-dried wash towel. How practical, I thought, that little towel. I was now the cleanest man on earth and I no longer felt embarrassed with my nakedness. "From now on, I'm going to travel the world without my clothes on," I informed Hiroko. "Neva happen," said Hiroko. Clad in yukata, we returned to our room where two ice-cold Kirin beer were waiting for us. She poured me a glass, and I poured one for her. There was a small radio in the room and she tried to tune it to FEN, the U.S. armed forces radio network and the only one broadcasting in English, but I shook my head. I wanted nothing to do with the "real" world. "I want to be in Japan," I told her. She switched frequencies, and finally found one that she liked, a station playing what sounded like French chansons with Japanese lyrics. "I think you Greek god," said Hiroko in the morning. "Why?" I asked. "You never stop," she said, "You sleep five minutes and then you more." She was right of course. Never, ever, had I experienced anything like this before. Never, ever, was I able to repeat what I did that night. Which is probably just as well, because it probably would have killed me before the year was out. My boyhood had become my manhood. No longer was I a cherry-boy. Back on the ship, I slept most of the day and in the evening I considered visiting Hiroko again. She had been a good teacher, but in the morning she had looked much older than I had initially thought her to be. She had been a little rough around the edges. Instead, I went bar-hopping near the shopping area of Motomachi. Every place I entered I was besieged by girls asking me to buy them drinks. When I refused again and again, their demeanor changed. "Kichi. You stingy, you numba ten," they said. Finally, in the fourth or fifth bar, I met the girl of my dreams. It was immediately obvious that she was different from all the other bargirls I had seen. She sat alone and did not join her friends in pestering me for drinks. I caught her looking at me, but every time I looked at her, she shifted her gaze downward. Finally, I mustered up enough courage to walk toward her table. "Can I buy you a drink?" I asked. She looked up and smiled. "If you like," she said shyly. Her name was Machiko, she informed me, and she was seventeen-years-old. She lived in Osaka and had only been working for two weeks. "You speak English very well," I said. The compliment was sincere, because her English was indeed quite good, and it didn't contain any of the vulgar slang so common with the other girls. "Is not so good," she said, "I study very hard every day. Some day I want to go to America, or maybe Canada. Canada is very beautiful. What is your name?" I told her, and also that my friends on the ship called me Holland. "That's funny," she said, "If your name is Oranda, than my name is Japan." She giggled at that. "I like Jack much better. It's a nice name." So is Machiko, I told her. We talked for hours, like we had been friends all our lives. I told her about Holland and my crazy friend Tedde, and all about life in Canada. "Maybe I'll come and visit you in Canada," she said. I told her that would be wonderful. Just before closing time, I asked to go out with her. "No, I can't," she said, "I must go home to my family. I cannot miss my last train." Seeing my dejected face, she put her hands over mine. "It's ok, Jack-san. I can meet you tomorrow in the daytime. I'll show you Kyoto. It's very beautiful." We left the bar together and she pointed out a coffee shop where we would meet the following morning. During the cab ride back to the ship, I knew that I was in love. (Note to reader: please stop laughing and shaking your head.) Hand in hand, we strolled the Motomachi shopping arcade. Upon noticing that my jeans kept slipping down, she asked, "Don't you have a belt?" I shook my head, embarrassed. A few minutes later she darted into one of the stores and bought me a belt. "Why do you work in a bar?" I asked her. "I work there only two nights a week. It pays for my English class. I want to visit you in Canada, remember?" We stopped at a vendor who sold us two bowls of shaved ice. Mine was covered with red strawberry-flavored syrup. Hers was green, the flavor of melon. She gave me a taste of hers and I gave her a taste of mine. So simple, yet so deliciously refreshing on such a hot and humid day. "Do you have a boyfriend?" I asked her. "No boyfriend, just friend-boys," she replied, "Jack-san? Do you have a girlfriend?" I smiled. "I don't even have a friend-girl," I replied. She squeezed my hand. "That's not true," she said, "I am your friend-girl." When I asked her if she would be my girlfriend, she just giggled. We took the electric train to the ancient capital of Kyoto. At first I was disappointed to see that it was just another large city with heavy traffic and street cars moving about under the sweltering late-August sun. But later, as we walked up the climbing narrow street with the many little shops toward the Kiyomizu Temple, that feeling disappeared. She bought some omamori, talismans, and we tied them to a tree. We spent several hours at Kiyomizu, contently sitting on tatami overlooking the city and sipping hot sake. We played a little "pretend" game. I was Lord Yamamoto, ruler of Kyoto, and she was Lady Fujiwara, my evil mistress. In the evening we huddled together in the comfort of a futon in a small inn near Kiyomizu, where we continued our little game. We made love only once, very gentle and very caring, so unlike the bronco ride of the night before. Later, with Machiko sleeping like a baby, I heard a peculiar sound coming from the street. I slid aside the shoji to peer outside. It was a vendor pushing his cart of steaming noodles. I am at home, I thought, and dozed |
Kuifje was the Dutch name for Tintin, international reporter and adventurer extraordinaire, and my childhood hero. Tintin is the main character in a series of hardcover comic books by the Belgian author Hergé. The first book titled Tintin, Reporter, in the Land of the Soviets, was published in 1930. Tintin's sidekick was a clever little white dog named Snowy. The two travel the world together in a quest to aid the downtrodden. They were often accompanied by Captain Haddock, an old salt with alcohol problems and a vocabulary of the most colorful curses. The story lines portray in great detail the reality of international politics of the twenties and thirties from a somewhat cynical point of view. With Tintin, I traveled from the heights of the Himalayas to the Wild West of America, from the opium dens of China to the pharaohs in Egypt, and from the Mayan temples of South America to the jungles in the Congo.
Hergé was a master of intrigue. His storytelling instilled in me the strong desire to travel, to seek the truth through my own experiences, and not to take the words of others for granted. Tintin usually traveled by sea, and that's how I wished to travel. 
