Monsoons

My weather experiences in Vietnam boiled down to: hot and dry, or cold and wet. It was hard to believe that cold in a tropical climate like Vietnam. 

Our first mountain probes reminded me of the many freezing nights in the fields of Ft. Campbell KY. However, we were equipped for the cold stateside.

The thick moisture laden clouds rolled in every night to soak our clothes and poncho liners. Then the temperature would drop about 40 degrees. Young disciplined bodies can adapt. But there was no adapting to soaking wet cold! Sleep was minimal with rotating watch. We lived tired and wet in those mountains.

In the lowlands our sky was devoid of anything but American military aircraft. The days were hot and the ground impervious. Entrenching tools bounced off the dirt, as if hitting cement.

Troops jettisoned their nonessentials quickly. Everything you owned was on your back. It was no surprise that most tossed their ponchos. We slept in the open, wrapped in our nylon liners. Our backs adapted to sleeping on that hard soil.

One day I heard a troop exclaim he had spotted a cloud. I looked up to eventually see a wisp of cloud. It was like trying to locate a small feather,  flying in the wind. Someone else spotted it shouting, “There it is!” We could sometimes make so much about nothing, as a welcomed distraction.

Each day the wisp grew bigger, eventually forming into a real cloud. The war kept our attention on the ground. But I would look up occasionally. The cloud became clouds. As time passed I saw layers…then more layers upon layers of cloud. The whole blue sky filled with massive formations of clouds.

Those clouds began to darken. There was talk of the monsoon season. The tropics seem to go from one extreme to the other. However, our eyes were fastened to the ground for far more urgent threats.

Finally the clouds, weighted down with moisture, let loose its burden. It started as a trickle. Then the bottom literally fell out. All God’s children have heard the story of Noah’s Ark. I have some inkling of what life looked like outside the ark.

I had never seen such heavy rain, nor seen it since. The parched ground soaked it up for a while…then gave it up in massive puddles. I sat my butt on my helmet to take a break. Soon there was water everywhere!

Somebody cried out, “Whose got a bar of soap?” The laughter was pretty general amongst all those dirty grunts… including me. My unit went 45 days without a shower or a change of clothes, in one stretch. The rain felt good. The temperature didn’t fall as much at night in the lowlands.

Most of us didn’t have our ponchos. If you didn’t carry it…you lived without it. We were issued ponchos on our next supply chopper (a couple of days later.)

The rain didn’t stop at first. Finally it set a pattern of raining and threatening to rain. On a good day, we would make a hooch with those new ponchos…tying the hood to any convenient branch. They could sleep two, with the other poncho laid for a ground cloth.We built them low, but with visibility 360°. This was no Boy Scout trip. A firefight always happened when you least expected it.

We often pushed too far and the rains would set in. That meant we would sleep wet. I remember one day we pushed well into the early evening rains. I couldn’t see much of the terrain, but managed to back my ruck up against a tree. My head found rest on that ruck. The rain felt refreshing on my eyes and face. The sun woke me in the morning in the exact same position…no one woke me for radio watch. I had a great sleep still attached to my ruck sack!

I remember how easy it was to dig a foxhole. Problem was…it soon became a swimming pool. I prayed that the rain would stop at 3/4s full so I could breathe if I really needed it! The torrential rains also gave us some pretty close calls with the enemy…close enough to surprise each other!

On my last memorable monsoon night, I managed to build a hooch before the rain. It looked like a pretty good spot on some slightly elevated ground. It felt so good to sleep dry…until I felt the first trickle run across my back. With darkness, my position was committed for the night. My spot turned into a regular stream bed. I had to lay my head inside my helmet. Sleeping in running water was a true test of military adaptation. Let’s just say that I remember it to this day!

Currahees…it’s fun to remember those common experiences now. Back then…it was all part of that survival package. We learned to deal with it.