No worries,
Just some poetry.
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“I heard a commentator on talk radio the other day,” Hood said. “He said: ‘I want my country back!’ American Indians have been saying the same thing for a long time. Really, whose country is this? Why is there so much hatred in this world?”
He talks about the immigration war only grudgingly; he has no desire, he says, to get in the middle of it.
Soon he will retire. He hopes to return to the place he still calls home, to the reservation in New Mexico.
“There is nothing else that I need in life, so I think I’ll go back,” he said. “Water the plants. Water the heart.”
John Hood, a Navajo
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-outthere4apr04,0,218520.story
“I used to watch the animals too,” he said. “A horse will be staring away from you, but he can see you with his ears; you can see his ears going back and forth. It sounds weird, but you can learn from that. You can learn to be aware. You can learn to see.”
Before he finished high school, he enlisted in the Marines. It was 1968. Within a year, he was in Da Nang. His tour in Vietnam was terrifying and defining. He often volunteered to walk “point” on patrol, and carried C-4 plastic explosives to blow up booby traps. His platoon called him “Chief.”
Being an infantryman came naturally to him, or as naturally as it can come. Some of the tricks he used to survive had roots back home – the way, for instance, that he could often locate the enemy by studying the sunlight filtering through the jungle canopy. He was in, he estimates, at least 20 firefights. Many of his comrades didn’t make it.
“I lost a lot of things there,” he said. “Friends. Youth.”