I’m sitting at a corner joint in Da Nang, nursing a beer and watching the river of exhaust and metal flow past. It’s a hypnotic, chaotic swarm. A mechanical artery pumping iron, cheap gasoline, and human flesh.
Twenty-one years ago, back in the suffocating illusion of the States, my son was born. I marched into a store and dropped $200 on a fortress of a car seat. Then I bolted that plastic bunker into an $80,000 GMC Denali XL that I bought with cold, hard cash. I built a three-ton vault to protect a single life. We bubble-wrapped our existence. If that kid had so much as bumped his head, my ex-wife would have turned on me like a Cuban exile trying to score political points. We were paralyzed by the sheer terror of living.
Now, I look at this corner.
There is a family of four balanced on a single scooter. A toddler is standing up in the front, gripping the mirrors. An infant is wedged between the parents, fast asleep against the hum of the engine. There are no helmets worth a damn. No airbags. The mother is wearing flip-flops dangling two inches from the asphalt, doing 45 miles an hour. That’s the speed where bone stops bending and starts turning into powder. And right next to them, taking up half the lane, is a guy carrying a twelve-foot aluminum ladder sideways while texting with his free hand. Behind him, an old lady pedaling a bicycle that looks like it was welded by the French in 1922.
By all American metrics of safety, the streets of Da Nang should be paved with corpses. There are no traffic lights here that anyone respects. No rhyme. No reason. Kids no older than six step out into the current and just walk, forcing the metal river to part around them.
And as I watch this beautiful, terrifying insanity, the great historical truth finally drops on my head like an anvil: This is exactly why we lost the damn war.
How in the hell did the Pentagon ever think they could defeat a people who ride into the teeth of death in flip-flops and don’t even blink? You can’t bomb an ant colony into submission when the ants operate on a pure, blind, collective instinct. They don’t panic. They just adjust the load, put the dog on the floorboard, and keep driving. We brought statistics and safety protocols to a jungle where survival is just a game of inches and sheer willpower.
Let’s get one thing straight about the aesthetic of it all, though. There is nothing sexy about a scooter. It is the great equalizer, the ultimate de-masculator. You can take the most beautiful woman on earth, put her on a moped, and the sex appeal instantly evaporates into the exhaust fumes. It’s pure utility.
And speaking of the physical reality, you look at these local women—some of them tiny, frail, built like skeletons navigating a hurricane. I sit here at 6’4″, a giant in a land of miniatures, and my mind does the brutal math. You wonder how they don’t break. You wonder how a big man doesn’t just snap them in half, in the street or in the bed. But they don’t break. They’re woven from the same indestructible wire as the chaos around them. They bend, they adapt, and they survive.
There is a colonial infrastructure here, laid out by the French a lifetime ago. It hasn’t been upgraded to handle the million engines that now choke it, but they race through it anyway. You watch them cross the street holding onto each other, and you know they are risking their lives with every step.
Because out here, there is no safety net.
If you get hit, you bleed on the asphalt. There is no Geico adjuster waiting in the wings. There is no personal injury lawyer with a billboard telling you to sue. You see the locals walking around with their legs beat to shit, scarred and scraped from a hundred close calls. They don’t have comprehensive coverage; they have the immediate reality of pain. If you go down in this swarm, you are either fucked or double fucked.
That’s the raw, jagged truth of the commodity of life out here. They don’t have the luxury of fear. They don’t have the luxury of an $80,000 Denali. They just have the throttle, the road, and the undeniable fact that the only way to survive the swarm is to dive right into the middle of it and never look left or right.
So finish your beer. Watch the ants protect the Queen. We spend our whole lives building fortresses to keep the danger out, and all it does is make us soft. These people? They ride the danger every single day, dangling their toes just inches from the meat grinder, and they don’t lose a wink of sleep over it.
