by Ken Hruby

Dr. Ahn made a flute. He made it out of bamboo and he made it right there in the middle of the jungle.

This was not an ordinary shepard’s pipe either; this one played the full chromatic scale with all the sharps and flats. And the scale was the first thing he played. Then an aire by Bach – “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, or “Aire on a G String”. I do not recall which. But the notes were true and, God, how they soared. They rose above the drone of unseen bugs and birds and the muffled din of our Vietnamese rifle battalion breaking camp, oddly at ease with the place, but not the time.

During the first three weeks of the operation I observed his progress as he first picked the right piece of bamboo with just the right diameter and section length. With the field surgical kit, of all things, he then proceeded to drill, carve, whittle and scrape the bamboo until the flute took form. He actually had a formula written on a piece of scrap paper: frequencies corresponding to notes, corresponding to pipe diameter. He had calculated where the finger holes had to be, how large the aperture should be drilled and all the rest of it – right there in the middle of the Central Highland jungle.

It was an impressive undertaking, and, I’ll confess, a bit humbling. Not only did Dr. Ahn know both Eastern and Western medical arts and sciences, but he also spoke at least four languages that I could distinguish AND could design, fabricate and play a flute. He also must have known from some private intelligence sources that it was OK to play it than and there.

I never told anyone about the Vietnamese regimental surgeon, the flute and J.S. Bach. It seemed too insignificant. There were some real war stories to tell, after all. As with too many experiences, the memory gets tucked away in some dark wrinkle of the hippocampus, where, unnourished by retelling, it either vanished into the ether or it is launched into our consciousness by some hair trigger. I cannot pin down the trigger. But somewhere between the NEA censorship debates and the run up to the Gulf War, as I drilled, whittled and scraped to prepare for my sculpture show, the memory of gentle Dr. Ahn and his flute unfolded before me.

Perhaps it was a flood of the same old ironies that haunt us still. Or, as Yogi Bara put it, it was “deja vu, all over again”.