I remember sleeping in the rain on the ground near my perimeter bunker in Vietnam, probably about this time of year in 1970. I say sleeping. Really just trying to sleep, with water running down the neck of my poncho, my face sticking to the handguard of my M-16 inside the poncho with me, the rain thrumming on the helmet semi-covering my head. Raindrops in Vietnam were the size of ping-pong balls and they made a lot of noise as they hit the plasticized poncho and the gravelly mud in which I lay. Inside the poncho, the stench (a smell Ill never forget but which Ive never smelled elsewhere) of my moldy jungle utilities wafted over my face like the slow breeze off a bag of rotting fruit. In the fall, daytime temperatures during the monsoons near Da Nang were in the 80s, nighttime in the low-mid 70s. So it wasnt cold. It was just wet. And fetid. And miserable. My comrades on watch were either manning the starlight scope watching for VC sappers coming through the wire or they were trying to stab the rats that lived in the crannies of the sandbag bunker. If Id known what single parenting was like, I might have stayed there.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 09:15:26 +0000
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