The Day Lincoln Was Shot (1955)

James Tiptree, Jr. (Julie Phillips, 2006)

NAM (168)

Morning is the ugliest because you can see through all your own bullshit. I guess your ego is still on standby so everything around you just seeps in without much resistance. Like a drunk says shit he wouldn't say sober. I mean you see things in a way that you don't want to see them in the full light of day. You've got your guard down, you can't help it. Only the batshit crazy motherfuckers wake up with their war face on.

In the first light it feels like everyone hates you. Your buddy hates you. The bush hates you. God hates you. And you know that's the truth. Everything else is lies you tell yourself to get through the day.

By the time the sun is done rising, you're back to believing you're all buddies, and it's just the VC and the god damned country that are fucked. But down deep you know you're all fucked from birth, down to a man.

NAM (149)

I was following a blood trail. He was losing more and more blood. It was twenty minutes after the fire fight, so some of the blood was dry right by the first bushes I came to. The color really changes as you follow along. It gets more bubbly, frothy-looking and wetter. Which means that you're gaining on the guy.

The Five Fingers (Gayle Rivers and James Hudson, 1978)

NAM (196)

The war took my measure. Not just me, but me and my culture. The culture had given me a framework, a frame of reference for understanding myself, my religion, and my parents, my background and all. And I was not that person.

A Planet Named Shayol (1961)

NAM (52)

We're on a hike along a friendly route, well-traveled, relatively safe. Still, everybody keeps one eye open in the back of their heads.

There is the feeling that anything could happen at any time. You're joking around with the guy next to you, everybody's full of piss and vinegar. But at the first glint of metal in the underbrush you're ready to jump into Hell. Could be a tin can, for all you know. Fuck it, you'll find out after you've emptied a clip at the bushes.

We spot a girl coming up behind us on a bike. She's maybe seven, eight years old. She rides by and we all get quiet. Its tense, you can feel it, a dozen guys ready to blow this little kid away at the slightest provocation. She must have felt it too because she doesn't even look at us, just keeps her head down, pedaling slow and steady. We let her pass.

Maybe it was the bike, the sound of the wheels. You can close your eyes and almost see a girl from back home. Dress blowing around her legs. Probably half the guys pitched a tent, listening to the wheels on that bike spin around.

NAM (98)

You're always on your feet, always hiking. Tripwires everywhere, guys getting torn up, legs blown off, castrated. You just gotta keep moving. You develop night vision. If you live long enough, you're able to spot the moonlight in the dew drops forming on the wire.

Once you learn to live like that, there's really no going back. It's hard to learn to walk again in normal situations. Even when you're back in the world, you go into a restaurant scanning the floor for traps. Taking these slow, careful steps. People think you're brain damaged.

NAM (48)

You see women all the time but they aren't real. The girls you've left back in the world are what's real to you. How you remember them is real. A photo of a girl from home is worth more to you than the whole god damn country. And you in it.

Nam... the women are just illusions to mess with your mind. Maybe bushwhack you. It can be hard to tell them apart from the VC mother fucker who will grease you. They do it on purpose with their clothes and hair to try to get you comfortable and let your guard down. Even the little kids can't be trusted. Little five-year-old girls will fucking grease you. Sure as you're born.

NAM (21)

You know if you ever come out of there alive, you won't recognize yourself. And then one day you catch yourself in a mirror and see it's already happened. By that time you don't give a shit.

NAM (19)

Day one, they shave you. It's weird, you look like an alien. They do it quick. I get off the bus, sign my name, twenty minutes later I go into this room with a couple dozen other guys, all of us shaved, identical, red as babies. All of us wondering what the hell happened.

It's supposed to acclimate you. They line you all up and just fuck with you. Chew you out, make you do squats. It goes on for days. Your skin is so raw you don't want to touch anything. It hurts to move. You can't stand still. Your legs are shaking. No one's eaten in a day or two. Nothing stays down. Finally you just sleep. All around you guys start dropping. They're out cold before they hit the floor.

By the time you get out in the field, it's amazing the kind of conditions you can sleep in. You could sleep right through a fire fight, if you wanted to. That's one thing they teach you real good.

NAM (Mark Baker, 1981)

In June 2008, Wrnlrd was interviewed by the Washington DC City Paper. The questions focused on the document Oneiromantical War (6), which was nearing its release date of June 24.

The interviewer asked about "influences". We found ourselves talking about the Hemi-Sync method for brainwave synchronization, Be My Baby by the Ronettes, and Mark Baker's NAM.

*

I first read NAM some time around 1984. The book enjoyed a wide readership at that time. When the first Fugazi EP came out in 1987, I recognized the band's name from Mark Baker's glossary. Everyone seemed to be reading it.

By late 2007, when recording for Oneiromantical War began, the book was long out of print. Initially all that remained in my memory of NAM was a hazy scene of a few soldiers... a dirt road... a fallen bicycle... someone removing a woman's breasts with a knife.

*

During our work on Oneiromantical War, we would dig out the old copy of NAM and read passages at random to help guide our improvisations. It seemed to be an entirely different book from the one we read in '84. In the 20+ years since then, it had grown in our mind to something like a religious vision or prophecy. Soon we abandoned the book and relied on our own recollections.

Over the course of several weeks "in the studio", our memory of the text served as an emotional framework or guidepost. During this time we made a habit of going to sleep listening to Hemi-Sync tapes on headphones. Synchronizing the hemispheres of the brain. The next day, memories of NAM would stir, entwined with memories of the night's dreams.