How Pan (and Neville Jules) Saved My Life

“You’re an All Star. We didn’t expect anything less.” - Neville Jules

by Dalton Narine

Global - I met Pete many, many nightmares ago at a Veterans Administration (VA) hospital in New York City. He’d left his legs in a booby trap in Vietnam. So they doped him up to alleviate chronic pain. When doctors stopped the meds, a friend on the ward helped out with heroin. Pete got hooked. And life returned as a figment of hell.

Dalton Narine in Viet Nam
Dalton Narine in the Ho Bo woods of Viet Nam

To maintain orbit, Pete went into business, buying the stuff wholesale with VA disability payments and peddling it to amputees at the hospital. No one on the staff knew, or cared – until Pete got hepatitis from an infected needle. The soldier from the 25th Infantry Div. joined 71 other addicts in a Methadone program. How strange that the new, legal dope had brought order to a rambunctious ward.

It was the best the VA could do. And, in a sense, Pete was at ease.

I left Pete, still tumbling in space, for my initial appointment with a VA psychiatrist four floors down. My boss at CBS had dispatched me there after phoning in. I was having flashbacks on the job, and she saw that they came on strong and real, even though she wasn’t aware of the demons within. What machine gun fire? That’s the typing pool.

Well, the pilot was in the building taking hits from dug-in Viet Cong, spinning the chopper around and making an arc to the curve of the earth, the ship pulling back into the LZ (landing zone) like a boomerang.

As I lay on the couch in Dr. Rodriguez’s Spartan office, I remembered the machine guns there making a racket, too, as the pilot did his best to jam the bird into the trees to insert the squad. Also, I remember the doctor trying to squeeze out the last three days of my dossier in Nam. But all he got was a strained story of 53 of my buddies being blown to bits on a LZ by our own bombs in a communications foul-up. I had backed out of the mission not because of a premonition that I had the night before, but that the operation would last 18 days in the bush at the Cambodian border.

Besides, I never got to go on R&R. Not in Hawaii, or Australia, or Japan or the Philippines, like other troops. Could’ve been punishment for squawking about the Confederate flag painted on the door of a chopper to which I was assigned. The flag is a most controversial, inflammatory symbol of American life. It was an injustice to troops of color, as I experienced its wrath during six months of combat controller training in Biloxi, Mississippi.

The brass wasted no time. They handed me temporary duty orders to a firebase deeper into the bush, at a location that sat, unknowingly to the army at the time, atop a feeder route in War Zone C. That “river of tears” sprang from the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail, or the North Vietnamese logistical system that shoveled manpower and matériel to guerrillas in South Vietnam.

Three days to go.

I was such a short-timer I couldn’t see above the tip of my boots. But the dead were friends, thick and thin. And, thin as a ghost, I’d slipped away from them.

As with Pete, the junkie, for me, too, it was hell to pay. Life on dope. Five hundred milligrams of Thorazine. (Years later, Billy Crystal to Robert De Niro begging for more in the movie Analyze That: “Three hundred milligrams of Thorazine would keep the Middle East pretty calm.”)

Dalton Narine
Dalton Narine on pan

The VA didn’t care. Get high to forget the war. By the way, don’t watch the news. Better yet, we’ll fly you to your native Trinidad so you could recuperate from “combat fatigue.”

“The American base will provide refills.

The strength of the pills pulled me into a zombie, away from family and friends. I’d never been stoned or drunk in my life, even though it was compelling to get wasted - not nearly as worst as the 500s - in the Nam.

“After a few weeks, I was beginning to drift into vagrancy. One day, while shuffling around Port of Spain, I ambled into Trinidad All Stars panyard, where I’d played before immigrating to Manhattan.

Other than my father, whose house I’d threatened to blow up the very next morning after I’d arrived home (the warning as real as the enemy grenade that obliterated my best friend’s head), Neville Jules, founder and captain of the band, was the only adult who tried to accommodate this city migrant.

Mr. Nevile Jules
Neville Jules at When Steel Talks Studios

First, Jules considered my condition, then reintroduced me to the music and All Stars’ extreme regimen, which became an alternate way of life. The detoxification was slow but measured. The music sweet. The Panorama was coming up. The Bomb song and other road music loomed on the playlist. The work ethic and camaraderie back in the jungle pushed through to the yard. And, by the time Carnival was over I’d all but weaned myself off the drug.

Back in Brooklyn, I was ready to take America up on the GI Bill and the full university education it afforded veterans like myself.

Fast-forward to the other night when I found an opportune moment and the man who helped to amend my lifestyle day by day.

I was shocked to see Jules, in his late 80s, locked into an interview session at the old Hell Yard haunt down by the East Dry River. I didn’t realize he still had it in him to speak about the musty nights up in the attic above the Maple Leaf Club. I’d just spoken with arranger Leon “Smooth” Edwards about his strategy for the Panorama finals, and was on the move to the Renegades and Desperadoes yards before they wrapped rehearsals. But I waited my turn. To thank him to his face. And if you knew Jules, you’d have understood his response.

“You’re an All Star. We didn’t expect anything less.”

Neither did I.

Jules’ articulation was revived from the memory of a jangly experience, the essence of which is everything that an old motor could muster. It was about brotherhood.

Brotherhood. It stands up for one another when need be.

And, post-war, that’s the reason I’m alive today.

We at When Steel Talks have been extremely fortunate to have been buttressed by the giants, titans and geniuses of Pan - arrangers, tuners, managers, players and educators the likes of a Neville Jules, Clive Bradley, Len “Boogsie” Sharpe, Ray Holman, Wallace Austin, Robert Greenidge, Dr. Jit Samaroo, Pelham Goddard, Glenda Gamory, Hue Loy among many, many  others. They cleared the road, had our back, encouraged, accompanied, inspired and never doubted and/or questioned - none more so than panman, Dalton Narine - simply one of the finest journalists of our time.

When Steel Talks extends best wishes and congratulations to Dalton as he - in his own words - transitions away from the world of Pan to “tell a different story, in a different format (screenplay and novel writing) about the human condition as it pertains to the constant fluctuations of the battlefield and post traumatic survival (the war after the war).”



 



About the author, Dalton Narine

Dalton Narine is a Miami writer and filmmaker, whose worldwide award-winning film Mas Man - The Complete Work, about Peter Minshall, the Trinidad Carnival artist and Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies legend, is available on home video as a three-disc set at masmanthemovie.com

Click for WST’s Trinidad and Tobago Panorama 2013 coverage

 

contact Dalton Narine at: narain67@gmail.com

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