Terror is the foreign concept

When I hear people speak generically of their having visited “foreign” countries I am almost immediately tempted to ask: “How foreign were they?”

It should be obvious that some places away from one’s normal haunts exhibit more of an extrinsic feel than others. If you walk into a Starbucks in Vancouver, British Columbia, it would hardly be an alien experience especially if you had visited a Starbucks the day before in Seattle.

I was hardly a world traveler when I made a WestPac (Western Pacific) and Southern Pacific cruise in the Navy. Still it took quite a few port visits until I found a place that really struck me as foreign.

I had only made a couple of trips to Mexican border towns before deploying from San Diego on a destroyer for a year. And even though seeing a Col. Sanders with the brown hue of his Mexican hermanos at a KFC in Juarez, or marveling at a jackass painted with black stripes like a zebra outside a Tijuana bar, the border towns never struck me as being more alien than say a stroll down the French Quarter.

Even the off-base Philippines of Olangapo and Subic Bay, with its street vendors selling monkey meat on a stick or its cocky kids diving into the dark depths of Shit River to retrieve coins thrown in by passing sailors, seemed more an X-rated, hedonistic Disneyland for American sailors than a real foreign country.

Perhaps the one factor which separated alien from familiar was the frequency of spoken English.

My ship spent about two months of its cruise also playing war games with the Kiwis and Aussies and visiting its wonderful ports and people all over New Zealand and Australia.

Those two countries were foreign in one respect. That is the kind and civilized behavior could be so extreme at times as to be taken aback. And being from the South and from Texas, I always thought we were pretty friendly folks.

It wasn’t until I arrived in Jakarta — site of what appears to be the latest Jihadist attack on a pair of luxury hotels — that I found what really struck me as foreign.

The first day there found me on a bus with an Indonesian driver who apparently had no idea where he was supposed to take us. Then, he crossed into what seemed to be a lane for bicycles, sending one poor soul flying through the air. Luckily, I was seated and my vision was blocked by my fellow sailors who were standing who saw the whole sad spectacle. We never found out what happened to the biker. Apparently, the bus driver wasn’t concerned.

This was in 1978 and I am not sure of what was going on politically back then, or if this was just normal, but it seemed one didn’t have to look very far to see trucks carrying soldiers armed with automatic weapons combing the streets.

As memorable as that first day was in Jakarta, the second day would count as scary. I took off by myself for what I believed to be the city of Jakarta’s central business district. It took several hours to find, even in a bustling, cosmopolitan city such as Jakarta, someone who spoke English and who could tell me where I needed to go to get to my destination.

During the time that I visited, at least by State Department figures, Jakarta had somewhere in the vicinity of 5-6 million residents. Today, the population of the city itself is estimated at 8.5 million. It is Southeast Asia’s largest city, the 12th largest in the world and is part of the sixth largest metropolitan area.

Indonesia also has the largest Islamic population in the world and that was the case when I visited. Although I have not read anything as of yet which has sorted out the casualties from the bomb blasts in Jakarta along lines of Mulslim versus non-Muslim. It would seem the chances likely for those of the Islamic faith to suffer wounds from the blasts in what our culture calls in its euphemistic manner “collateral damage.”

What does all of this have to do with my musings on experiencing foreign and the not-so-foreign culture? Nothing at all really. Only, no matter how we walk down the street we are not really so different as to escape what is basically, pure evil. Call the perversion of religious beliefs religion if you want. But it doesn’t seem as if it would fit into much of the larger world’s understanding when it comes to those with individual religious leanings.

I am no religious man and by no means a holy man. But I can’t help but see such evil as foreign to the many who live decent lives in a good world.