Ten Things Happened

(One Thing Leads to Another}

These ten things happened to John Steinbeck IV.

One

Steinbeck, in Los Angeles on his eighteenth birthday, is conscripted by the United States Army to fight in a country several thousand miles away about which he knows almost nothing.

Two

May 16, 1966: Private Fourth Class John Steinbeck, 19, is introduced to the president of the United States in the Oval Office by his father, the Nobel Prize-winning author. President Johnson wishes him well on his tour in Vietnam. His father gives him a derringer (a miniature pistol).

Three

December 1966: Private Steinbeck’s father arranges to visit his son in Vietnam. One night, in the course of his visit, Steinbeck, armed with a grenade launcher, and his father, bearing a machine gun, join the perimeter defence of a mountaintop base near Pleiku. Illumination flares explode overhead and battles are fought below. They do not themselves come under fire.

Four

On another night sometime in 1967, Steinbeck, having been warned by a prostitute of an impending ambush, lies in wait for his putative attackers. He cudgels one of them to death and then returns safely to his digs in Saigon.

Five

March 1968: Now returned to civilian life, Steinbeck testifies before a subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee that 60 percent of GIs serving in Vietnam regularly use marijuana when they consider it reasonable to do so, “taking into consideration their responsibilities at the moment.” The Commander, United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, (COMACV), General William C. Westmoreland, responds in a radio broadcast that Private John Steinbeck is mistaken.

Six

Steinbeck returns to Vietnam in 1968 and falls in with a famously wild group of war photographers, including Tim Page, the model for the character played by Dennis Hopper in the film, Apocalypse Now, and Sean Flynn, son of the famous actor who, with another photographer, Dana Stone, regularly heads into battle zones on a motorbike. Together the group occupies an apartment in Saigon where they indulge in drugs, including opium, and play rock music at a volume that carries into the street. Page, Flynn and Stone all are outstanding photographers. Page is seriously wounded on a number of occasions but, remarkably, survives the war. Flynn and Stone are later captured by communist guerrillas in Cambodia and presumed to have died at their hands. Steinbeck becomes a Buddhist.

Seven

Steinbeck and some others based in Saigon form an anti-war news agency, Dispatch, to counteract what they regard as the lies and misinformation emanating from official sources. When major outlets, including Life and Look magazine, decline to publish Seymour Hersh’s story about the My Lai massacre – a horrifying atrocity committed by U.S. troops in which hundreds of civilians are raped, beaten and murdered – Dispatch releases it to subscribers. The agency suspends operations in 1973.

Eight

In the course of researching religious sects in Vietnam, Steinbeck finds his way to an island in the Mekong River, located between the towns of My Tho and Ben Tre, where a charismatic Taoist yogi, Nguyen Thanh Nam, presides over a religious community. The pagoda presents to the visitor an extraordinary spectacle. Steinbeck describes seeing it for the first time:

There, like a hallucination floating in the middle of the river, was what resembled a Pure Land Buddhist Amusement Park built on pilings. At the prow of the island, a towering pagoda rose from the top of a seventy-foot plaster mountain. The summit was crowned by a Buddhist swastika, a triangle and a cross, which looked down on a huge terrazzo prayer circle, separated by color scheme and the elegant sigmoid line of yin and yang, duality in motion….

The yogi, known as the Coconut Monk, is a tiny, bent figure, less than five feet tall. He broke his back years before when he fell from the tree in which he had been meditating and the bones fused together leaving him forever in a sitting posture. He has taken a vow of silence but Steinbeck finds him easy to talk to. Steinbeck tells him of his discovery a few days earlier, while gazing at a map and under the influence of marijuana, that a circle, centered on the demilitarized zone separating North and South Vietnam that encompassed parts of Cambodia and the South China Sea revealed a perfect yin-yang symbol. The yogi is startled: apparently he, too, has made this discovery. “It was a tremendously awkward moment,” Steinbeck reports. “The surrounding monks and nuns started clucking their approval and whispering to each other about my prophetic perceptions.”

Steinbeck begins to make regular visits to the island. The benign influence of the yogi has made it a zone of peace in the midst of war. On many evenings, Steinbeck says, he sits there eating pineapple and watching “both banks of the river rage at each other with howitzer shells and tracer bullets whistling back and forth over my head.” Over time, he brings his friends to meet the Coconut Monk and they, too, become admirers. Eventually, at the yogi’s invitation, Steinbeck begins to wear the community’s maroon robes (“pajamas really”) and moves permanently into a thatched hut built on top of an old wooden barge, a fully fledged member.

Nine

The Coconut Monk is dedicated to bringing peace to Vietnam. He had hoped to convene a peace conference on the island and built a pavilion to house it, but his invitation to the warring parties was ignored. The frequent visits by Steinbeck’s journalist friends gives him an idea. He realizes that he has acquired his own public relations department, including representatives from AP, UPI, Time, Newsweek, CBS and the BBC. He decides to put them to work.

Steinbeck is dispatched with instructions to invite his journalist friends to lunch at a restaurant in Cholon, the mainly Chinese suburb of Saigon. Steinbeck complies although he worries that the yogi, who is not welcome in the capital, will be arrested. The lunch is a feast prepared and served by the yogi’s devotees. The yogi does not participate but turns up halfway through in a 1954 Buick Century with a saffron-colored roof. From his seat in the back he hands Steinbeck a document outlining his plan. He proposes to go the United States Embassy the next day and give the ambassador a letter for the president of the United States. He intends to bring together the warring parties in the demilitarized zone where, after days of meditation, they will begin to talk.

Steinbeck knows the Saigon police can be brutal. With the idea of heading off trouble, he goes to the embassy ahead of time to tell them what the yogi plans to do and plead for a respectful response. He is, as he later admits, naïve.

The next day, when the yogi’s car approaches the embassy, police jeeps emerge roaring and squealing from side streets and cut him off while helicopters hover overhead. Threatening ranks of police are ranged on all sides. The embassy gates are closed and locked. Undeterred, the Coconut Monk steps out of the Buick and begins walking. He has with him his letter and a coconut for the president. When no one appears at the gate, he sits down on the pavement and eats his lunch. The crowd that has gathered to watch the spectacle, previously apprehensive, begins to laugh.

Eventually, the staff inside the embassy understand that they are being made to look foolish. A diplomat comes to the gate and accepts the yogi’s letter. He declines the coconut, however, on the grounds that president can’t accept gifts from foreign dignitaries. The photographers take pictures and the journalists take notes.

A short article describing the event in Time magazine pictures Steinbeck in his Buddhist robes. The caption reads: John Steinbeck IV: A Yen for Zen?

Ten

The sanctity of the yogi’s island refuge is broken when South Vietnam’s president, in an effort to suppress Buddhist opposition, sends troops to arrest draft dodgers who have taken refuge there. Still, the yogi and his community remain unyielding in their quest for peace. He is arrested by the communists when they take over in 1975. A year or two later, Steinbeck is in a Paris restaurant when he overhears some Vietnamese expatriates say that the Coconut Monk was imprisoned by the communists. He is reported to have died in custody.

These ten things all happened to John Steinbeck IV. Some seem crazy but it’s not clear which ones.

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Photo of the Coconut Monk: National Film Board of Canada

Sources: John Steinbeck IV, In Touch: (NY: Knopf, 1969); John Steinbeck IV and Nancy Steinbeck, The Other Side of Eden (NY: Prometheus, 2001); Tim Page, Page After Page (NY: Atheneum, 1989).