HAWES ESCAPES

“Lau Lum,” Mrs. Gia greeted me. Long time. 

She smiled and set a dish of banh cuon on the counter, my favorite lunch in the old days.

I laughed.  “How did you know?”

“People don’t change much,” she said in her excellent English.

It felt like it was only yesterday when I’d come to say goodbye, but it had been six years since I left Hanoi for the Philippines. Mrs. Gia looked just as she had then, merry eyes twinkling beneath a shock of black hair.

I’d heard her story in bits and pieces from her daughter Mei. “Mom is Laotian,” she’d said, “but she came here after the war. She was one of the women who worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Every day the Americans would bomb hell out of it, and every night she and three thousand friends would rebuild it by hand.”

 

What Pegman Saw: Hanoi

 

American expat Pam Scott wrote a wonderful book on life in Hanoi, one of the world’s great cities. A different Mrs. Gia appears in that book, but the banh cuon (a dish of finely chopped pork, mushroom, and onion wrapped in a gossamer rice sheet and served with dipping sauce) is the same.

“Lieutenant Hanks? Sorry to disturb.”

Flédong was indeed sorry, for he knew  Hanks, like the rest of his garrison, was down with griping guts. The culprit was a cask of Royal Navy salt beef purchased from a salvage brig that had fished it up from the wreck of HMS Speedy. The men had been living on biscuit and fish since the Indians all vanished many months before, so they fell upon the meat with a fanatic zeal that soon betrayed them with cramp and fever.

But this was an emergency. A British captain with a company of soldiers and twoscore Indians had arrived under a flag of truce to discuss terms shortly after a cannonball was fired into into the fort’s wall.

Hanks looked ghastly as he stepped onto the ramparts. “But we are not at war, sir,” he said to the captain.

“Your information is outdated,” replied the officer. “And I cannot answer for what these Indians will do now that they are within your walls.”

 

What Pegman Saw: Mackinac Island

The Siege of Fort of Mackinac was one of the first engagements of the War of 1812. The British commander in Upper Canada, Major General Isaac Brock, learned of the outbreak of the war and sent a canoe to the commander of the British Army post at St. Joseph Island, Captain Charles Roberts, with orders to immediately capture Mackinac to secure the trade route of the upper peninsula.

Having learned that the Americans at Mackinac were unaware of the outbreak of war, Robert’s force dragged a 6-pounder cannon through the woods to a ridge above the fort and fired a single round before sending a message under a flag of truce to demand the surrender of the fort.

Fearing a massacre by the Natives, Mackinac commander Lieutenant Hanks capitulated without a fight.

I met Gregor in 1989, when the Sun assigned me to Ukraine to cover the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

I’d arrived at Donetsk at two in the morning. A gaping hole in the airport roof resulted in six inches of brown slush on the floor as we sorted through the pile of luggage the ground crew had dumped without comment.

I’d gone to the bank of phone booths to call a taxi, but the few ancient bakelite telephones that still functioned only took Soviet rubles, and the coins had been discontinued months before.

I was almost in tears when Gregor arrived in his taxi. He became my lifeline, and one of my best friends.

When I’d come back in 2012 to cover the football championship, Gregor was again my guide. He was bursting with pride at the many improvements to his beloved Ukraine, especially the Donetsk Airport.

Now as I wait for his plane to arrive at LaGuardia, I decide I will not ask him about it.

 

What Pegman Saw: Ukraine

 

BY CHRISTOPHER MILLER (AP)

JAN 27, 2015

DONETSK, Ukraine — Built for almost $1 billion dollars ahead of the Euro 2012 football championship, Donetsk airport — once a shining gem of the regional capital — has been the focus of intense fighting during the conflict in eastern Ukraine since May, as Russian-backed separatist rebels battle Kiev’s government forces for control over its grounds.

After nearly nine months of close-quarters combat that included fierce tank battles, the rebels this week managed to dislodge Ukrainian fighters from their positions inside one of the terminals, and from the underground tunnel network they used to move in and out without taking fire.

The airport is strategic because it could potentially be used to airlift supplies from Russia to the rebels and important because it gives them control over the entire regional capital.

It had also become an important symbol of the broader conflict. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that at Donetsk airport “I am sure that we are defending there the whole of Ukraine.”

The Ukrainian fighters defending it had been called “cyborgs” for their endurance in holding onto the complex for as long as they did. Countless numbers of them, as well as rebel fighters, died fighting for control over the airport. Now there is little left other than the wrecked carcasses of jetliners and twisted bird’s nest of steel and rebar.

“Introduce yourself, please.” The man stood up. He was younger than many attending the meeting. “My name is Serafin Martinez. I am a mechanic.” “And how many do you represent?” “Myself and nine others at our shop.” “And your affiliation?” “We are anarchosyndicatists.” “And your foundational ideology?” “We believe that any hierarchy that cannot be ethically justified must either be dismantled or replaced by decentralized egalitarian control.” And so it went, one man after another standing up and declaring his trade and ideology. No two groups were exactly alike, though the overarching goals were much the same. They all sought to empower the workers and create a balanced society. Ruiz watched them and sipped his coffee. He knew from bitter experience that these minor differences would be exploited by the powerful. The divisions would be widened. Leaders would be bribed or coerced, beaten or even killed. Thus is was. Thus it always shall be. What Pegman Saw: Montevideo, Uruguay Note: The Latin American Labor Congress met in Montevideo in May of 1929 to discuss ways of improving life across all of the Latin American countries. The meeting was considered a rousing success, with charismatic leaders outlining the plans to help bring sweeping change to the region though extensive unionization and collective bargaining with corporations and oligarchical institutions. In October of that year, the American stock market crashed and took with it much of the global economy. A decade later came World War Two followed by the invention of the CIA, an organization with the principal task of enforcing the virulently anti-Communist policies of the United States (much of which orginated with American corporations who despise organized labor). Though the CIA was deeply involved in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, their principal focus was and is Latin America. At the time of this writing, 42 individuals hold as much wealth as 50% of the global population. This economic imbalance, already the greatest in the history of humanity, grows larger by the minute.  The title is a Spanish idiom meaning “the hardest part of the task remains to be accomplished.”