About 10 months ago, I was in Nepal heading from Kathmandu up into the mountains. After a few hours of a cramped up rusted bus doing its best to shrink me, I was wondering how much more I could take. There was a deadening dull pain in my right knee and a stinky old lady’s head sleeping on my left one.
More people got on. One sat in my lap after he did not ask.
Chaos, chaos, chaos and the bus driver playing Hindi music mixed with Dido and Jimi Hendrix.
With a few hours left in the trip, Alan, Natasha and I gave up our seats to go up on top of the bus when the next load came aboard.
The top of the bus had metal bars rusting vertically down from front to back to tie down luggage and bags of rice and big weird looking leaves. Every four feet or so, there were some perpendicular-running footholds to dig in for the curvy road.
The sun was warm, but the air was crisp and cold and moist. Gray clouds rolled in over the lush green foothills. Terraced land stepped up towards heaven and on the way up, a house with no address way over there was sending up smoke signals of simplicity. Scrubby pines surrounded the wheat plots.
Everything seemed to be in focus a little more, the wind swaying the limbs to the sound of words soft-spoken. It was amazing that in such a place of peace and tranquility, one only had to go back downstairs to be in hell.
We headed through the curvy roads, closer and closer to the end of the road and the start of the walk. Children ran and waved at the white people sitting on top of the bus, they ran by all the goats and cows tied to posts by leashes just longer than short fuses, they ran as fast as they could but to no avail.
The air was growing cooler when the Royal Nepalese Army soldiers, dressed in blue and black urban camo, climbed up top with us at the next stop.
They held their rifles as they threw their knees over the last strand of ladder.
Smiles and introductions all around. Their interest was keen, asking questions, giving answers and giving me a peek at the bag full of grenades. Another local man was trying to buy Alan’s stash of snuff after a sample left his lip more than numb.
We talked about everything. What kind of guns the cops in America carry and what is the difference between them and the military, what kind of music we listen to.
The captain of the group asked me to sing a song of American music. I laughed, he insisted and told the men eagerly that I would be singing some American music.
I asked what he wanted me to sing. A younger fellow in the back, whose head was too small for his cap and who constantly was pulling the brim out of his eyes in the open wind yelled out, “Sing some Elvis.”
Of all the dozens of conversations that were going on before, there was just a one on the top of this bus now. The only sound was a downshift to make the turn, silence in waiting for me. Camouflaged soldiers sitting Indian-style leaned forward and placed their guns to their sides, and I thought ‘I’m not going to sing Elvis.’
They adjusted their ammo belts and pulled uncomfortable clips of bullets out of their back pockets, finding comfort as they waited for a hymn. Alan and Natasha laughed and heckled me to go on. So, I looked at the group, and since they had the guns and the grenades, I did the only thing I could do and screamed over the loud bus as many choruses of “Jailhouse Rock” as loud as I could out into the Himalayan air. When I finished, the captain laughed and slapped my arm, “Sing again.”
This time I did a little bit of “Hound Dog.”
It grew colder and the conversation between me and the captain grew a little more serious when I finally popped the question about the Maoists. Maoism is a communist movement in Nepal following the teachings of Mao Tse-tung, the brutal apple-headed idiot who sent his Red Army through Tibet, killing thousands of innocent monks and Tibetans.
Mao teachings mount up to not much more than a regurgitation of Lenin to fit Oriental society along with some remedial economics – perhaps that is why he is most famous for his saying, “Power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
Since Maoists are students of this atrocious man, they have followed true to that form in Nepal, killing over 2,400 since 1996 in bombings and attacks on police stations and airports. Their means are brutal and their desires ambiguous.
The Maoists say they want a communist society, free of western influence, but isn’t that what Marxist and communist teachings are – western ideals?
As the sun started to set, we came to a roadblock at an outpost.
The bus came to a slow stop and the captain pointed to the bullet holes in the walls, he said he lost six good friends from that attack.
He and his men were replacing some the fallen men up the road a few more miles. We climbed back down into the deserted seats of the bus; the only occupants remaining were two or three locals, the soldiers and three Tennesseans.
The captain had gotten a call on the radio talking of some activity in the area. We would be targets sitting up there in the dark. I sat beside the guy who liked Elvis, and he fell asleep and kept leaning towards me, once the barrel of his gun busted my lip.
Finally, I gave up with Natasha and Alan laughing about the fact that a Nepali soldier was asleep on my shoulder.
In the past few weeks, the Maoists have been terrorizing Nepal. The Lukla airport, where I took a Russian helicopter in and a Yeti chopper out, was bombed and several banks were looted. They have announced the start of “Kranti” or new revolution.
Last Sunday, the Maoists staged an unprecedented attack killing more than 130 police, soldiers and civilians in a string of attacks in which they burned two small towns to the ground in the middle of the night.
Peace talks had been fairing well between the government and the Maoist rebels, which lead some to speculate that a dissension and division within the rebel ranks has caused two different agendas to compete with each other.
Snow and muddy roads delayed the reinforcements in coming. When a chopper landed in the rice fields outside a smoldering once-was-a-town called Mangalsen, the soldiers found both civilians and comrades heads about the ground, their bodies lying apart from them.
In all reality, it is a good chance that the soldiers I met will soon be replaced by someone else, if they have not been already.
A few months back another large attack left 83 dead in the mountains.
It is no doubt that the replacements have made it there by now. More blue and black uniforms. More captains yearning for a song. More riflemen who like Elvis.

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