Floating the Boonies

The recent rain in Oklahoma and resultant gloom reminds me of a similar night many years ago in Vietnam.

I was in the Army with the First Cavalry, humping the boonies near the Cambodian border. We came upon a Montagnard village beside a stream in the jungle. It was late when we found it and we decided to stay there for the night.

The village was tiny, only a few destroyed huts. The North Vietnamese hated Montagnards and always killed them - men, women, children and animals - and razed their villages whenever they encountered them. We were in a free fire zone and sort of hoped they would try the same on us.

It was monsoon season. Every night, as the sun went down, it would rain. It was the height of the season and heavy rain sometimes continued throughout the night. My best friend was Gary Clark from Seattle Washington.

He was a polysci graduate from either the University of Washington or Washington State. I can’t remember which. I do remember that he was a political junkie and that his favorite beer was Olympia, unfortunate because the only kind we got in the boonies was Black Label in steel cans, usually rusted by the time we drank the contents.

Many of us had air mattresses. We would blow them up at night and make a makeshift shelter by attaching two poncho liners. Clark and I had gone into the jungle the same day, from the same helicopter, and had started sharing such a shelter.

It was perpetually wet and humid in the jungle so we kept our letters and personal belongings in M-60 ammo containers. The containers were waterproof and there were always extras whenever rear support re-supplied us with food and bullets.

That night, it rained harder than usual – much harder than usual. Water in my face awoke me from a Technicolor dream. I was still lying on the air mattress but I was out in the rain, quickly floating away from the makeshift tent. If I hadn’t awakened, I would have ended up in the nearby stream, swollen up to its banks.

The scene was so surreal that I didn’t know whether to curse or to laugh. I think I did both. The next morning I learned that the ammo containers weren’t perfectly waterproof as all my personal belongings inside were now damp, or worse.

Shortly after that rainy episode, I bought a hammock from a group of Vietnamese and spent the rest of my nights in the jungle hanging safely – well, at least out of the water – off the ground.

I lost touch with Gary Clark, much like everyone else I knew while I was in the Army. I hope he’s safe and dry somewhere, keeping an eye on politics and drinking an Olympia, or two.

Fiction South