Spirits of the Dead

We had a torrential rainstorm in central Oklahoma today. When I left my office to meet friends Terry and Debbie at nearby Louie’s Restaurant, red muddy water was gushing from the vacant lot near the office. The rain and incessant dampness caused me to remember something from my past.

It happened almost forty years ago in the hills of Vietnam, near the Cambodian border. I was a machine-gunner for the 1/8 Cavalry (1st Cav). Deep in the jungle, we came on a deserted Montagnard village situated by a stream.

The North Vietnamese hated the Montagnards because they supported the South Vietnamese regime. They killed every Montagnard that they could and I felt certain that some atrocity had occurred at the deserted village we found on the outskirts of the jungle.

It was monsoon season and it rained every day. It didn’t matter much to us grunts because we wore the same clothes until they became as stiff as cardboard. We didn’t worry about dirty underwear. We didn’t have any underwear, dirty or otherwise – well, except for socks.

Like everyone else, I wore jungle boots. I usually kept them on for fifteen days at a time because I didn’t want to have to run through the jungle barefooted in case we came under fire at night. Snakes and scorpions also had a tendency to crawl in your warm smelly boots when you took them off.

My memory is faulty after forty years, but I remember a few desecrated structures made of brush, and a few campfires in the Montagnard encampment. The ground was bare of grass, which told me that someone had lived there for quite a while before vacating the premises, probably in haste. Something that happened later that night told me that they didn’t all make it.

We luxuriated in the stream, washing away days of mud and grime. That night, it rained so hard that the weight of the downpour almost took down the poncho liners Gary Clark and I shared as shelter from the storm. Water gushed through the tiny village, lifting my air mattress and washing me into the rain.

Falling water awoke me immediately, although I wasn’t fully asleep because you never really achieve deep sleep in a free fire zone. Grabbing my air mattress and other possessions that had floated out into the rain, I quickly poked them back under the poncho liners. It was then that I turned and saw something that I will never forget.

It was the villagers, men women and children. They weren’t real, just spirits of the dead, their lives destroyed by several decades of war. They weren’t alone. Behind them were the ghosts of North Vietnamese regulars, Vietnamese villagers and several dozen American soldiers. I stood there in the pouring rain, watching until the vision flickered and disappeared into the darkness.

Forty years have passed since that night so long ago. Tonight, as torrential rain dropped more than three inches of water on central Oklahoma, I remember the looks on the faces of the dead and realize you don’t have to be a genius to know what they wanted to convey.

Fiction South