Don Mee Choi
Operation Punctum
Operation Punctum
The television in The Deer Hunter is in Clairton, Pennsylvania. Everything is still at Welsh’s Lounge: the clouds, the sky, the unlit neon sign outside the window. All is calm, all is bright. I sing in English while my father is in Vietnam. American wives are in immeasurable pain and so is my mother. American soldiers are pushing a helicopter to the right side of the TV screen. Behind the soldiers is number 19. It stands for USS Hancock: its nickname, Fighting Hannah. Helicopter whirring. It sounds like Godzilla crying. My father is nowhere to be seen because he’s behind the camera, behind the lens. His eye’s filled with the green ocean. It zooms in on the soldiers, some in uniform, some shirtless, on the decks with number 19 behind them. They’re calm and bright, looking down at the flight platform below. Nobody is crying. Number 19 goes beyond Yi Sang’s number 13. History is hysterical. The-13th-child-also-says-it’s-terrifying. 13+3+3. 19=13. A modest, shared hallucination. I’m still the 13th child. And Godzilla is still crying. Hannah ditches the helicopter in the sea. Now everything is happening on the left side of the screen. Nobody’s in the cockpit of the helicopter. The chopper blades tilt, making a diagonal line across the entire screen. That strange cry. It wants to go home—O like me, like my father. Now the helicopter and its blades are perfectly vertical to the South China Sea. The chopper is now engulfed by the sea, white with foam. Sayonara, Saigon! THIS SEEMS TO BE THE LAST CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM. Now everything appears in the center of the screen. Helicopter is everything. Hannah is everything. My father’s framing never sways even when flowers call to him. He edits as he films, he often told me. He’s still nowhere to be seen. Missing in action somewhere in Cambodia, filming carpet bombing, my mother said. O the chopper’s belly convulses. O it’s in immeasurable pain. The chopper’s door open and the pilot and men in white shirts and dark pants spill out. IT’S ALSO BEEN THE LARGEST SINGLE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA ITSELF. The chopper’s blades are swirling in every frenzied direction. O suicidal lines. Sayonara, Saigon! HILARY BROWN, ABC NEWS ABOARD THE ATTACK AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS HANCOCK IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA. White with foam. Now I see buttons on History's blouse.
