No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Sweat poured off of my face in tiny rivers of salty regret. Tears stung my eyes as I made my way up the rolling hills covered in shoulder-high grass with patches of towering trees running aimlessly across the hillside. The mountain was crisscrossed with narrow trails left by eons of travelers and their domesticated animals. Most of their destinations no longer existed. I had no map, only the memory of the terrain study Hector and I had gone over countless times. The ground always looks different once you stand on it and figure out which trail to take, which to avoid, and just where the hell am I anyway?
A blistering sun and heavy humidity forced me into a slow meandering pace. I felt like I was back home in Florida during August, except this was steep climbing, and we didn’t have a lot of mountains in Florida. The forest edge provided a space between where the grass started and the forest thickened. It was shady and welcoming. The direction I intended to go was up to the ridge line, where I would stay overnight and observe the far mountain, my destination, and the valley below.
Human traffic patterns were the critical information I needed. Avoiding people until I reached the tribal village was a way of avoiding unpleasantries alone, a stranger in an area of wild country on the border with Cambodia, a lawless land too dense and mountainous to appeal to the lowlanders.
The Montagnards were an eclectic group of tribes with widely different origins, languages, and cultures. They were all lumped together by the French. Montagnard is french for Mountaineer. The people of the mountains. America had recruited some of the tribes to help them interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail that acted like a supply line for the North and Viet Cong. The tribes were very good at their job but suffered a lot during the war and especially after America abandoned them to their fate.
The hill tribes had wisely assimilated under northern control. They asked for autonomy to live as their ancestors had without demanding lands or separate states. Now the villages thrive culturally and are integrated with the modern Vietnamese culture of the large cities and local government offices. Montagnard supported tourism in the larger settlements and wore traditional clothes or the latest fashion depending on the day and purpose. They were modernizing, and the future would see them dwindle as the tribes slowly surrendered to progress. Great swaths of their ancestral lands were clear-cut for timber, mined for minerals, and turned into collective farms that grew as far as the eye could see.
My job was to ask them to help me observe these changes to the cultural and natural conservancy. Still, my work would fuel American trade agreements and the voracious appetites of land eater nations. I was a pawn in the military branch that served the goals of the Bilderberg Group. I knew none of this. I was trained to accept missions and ask what the objective was. Questioning motives were far more dangerous than the missions.
At the top of the ridge, the whole world of this magic land of Tigers and Dragons opened up into a giant rolling ocean of emerald green with seafoam of golden straw and blue skies turning to a dark purple in the distance at the curve of the earth. I watched as birds worked the treetops like elegant fairies. The songs of earth and wind, birds, hidden in the canopy, and creatures of all makes and models collided in my ears and held me spellbound.
My strange desire to live alone in the great grandfather forest overtook me again. I felt genuinely free owing nothing but my life to myself. Equally strange was my desire to share this life with someone who would love it as much as I. I knew that was not possible, but the ache never left me.
I set up my camp under a gnarled tree with low umbrella-like branches. I moved the stones to a makeshift fire ring and filled the space with grass and small bunches of leaves. This made a comfortable bed and gave me good observation and cover to conceal my presence. I decided not to light a fire for cooking this night until I was more sure of my location.
After a cold meal of prepared fish, rice, and millet, I finished nearly all of my water, then settled in to watch and learn. I awoke in the night, freezing my love to be alone ass off. It was cold in the highlands at night; now I knew just how frosty it got. I pulled my beloved girlfriend and poncho liner out of my pack, wrapped up in her soft, insulated embrace, and shivered back to sleep. God had the infantry in his heart when he made poncho liners. It was a prized possession, always friendly and accommodating regardless of my mood.
Hyperion Sky 
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