Gimme Shelter

By Justino
There is a moment when you are travelling in a foreign environment that you completely break away from your daily routines, let go of your life and worries at home, and live in the moment. That moment for me was 3:00 am yesterday on a sleeper train somewhere between Saigon and Da Nang. I woke up surrounded by the sounds of families sleeping and the clatter of the train on the tracks. I grabbed a bottle of water, some toothpaste, and my toothbrush and stumbled to the toilet that you were only allowed to use in between stations because the metal hole in the ground just dumped out on the train tracks. I tried not to look in the mirror, brushed my teeth, rinsed out my mouth, and spat into the metal hole. When I got back to my bunk I couldn’t sleep so I put on Zack’s Ipod and looked through his collection of guitar hero bands—Rage Against the Machine, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC, Black Sabbath etc. I chose The Rolling Stones and the first song on his playlist was Gimme Shelter. I leaned my head against the window and watched the rice paddies go by lit up by lights on the tracks and sparsely lit huts and houses. I thought about what had happened here forty years ago—The American War—as they call it here in Vietnam. How strange and awful it must have been for 18 year old kids from middle America, who had never travelled more than 10 miles from where they were born, to be wandering through these rice paddies wondering if they would ever make it home. And, how strange and awful it must have been for the Vietnamese people who were living a simple and quiet life, raising their children and tending to their crops, to suddenly have their lives torn apart by a dispute that had little or no relevance to their daily existence. Although I've heard it a thousand times, I felt like I was hearing "Gimme Shelter" for the first time.
"A storm is threatening my very life today.
If I don't get some shelter. Im gonna fade away.
War, children, it's just a shot away, it's just a shot away.
War, children, its just a shot away.
Its just a shot away"

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