No doubt about it, he’d screwed up, and was driving himself crazy thinking more than a few times that he had made a mistake in not slipping away into Canada, like some had, but somehow, it just didn’t seem to fit in his mind. There was his dad, a veteran US Army Ranger, a hero of sorts, and his family… how could he ever face them again? Or, would they understand and forgive him, he wondered.
Anyhow, it didn’t matter anymore, he was in-country now, with the heat and the rain and the humidity and the alienation of this nightmarish place, so odd and foreign and unforgiving in every sense… what he thought didn’t matter to anyone, he was alone for the first time in his life, no family, no loved ones, nothing to save or nurture him during this year long sentence of isolation from everything that he had ever known, to this place where death was more reality than anything else. And it was his own fault, and he began to slowly own this truth. He’d blown it.
When he opened his eyes, he remembered everything. He lay on the top bunk listening in the darkness to the rain beating down upon the sheet metal roof of his hooch. It was the start of the monsoon season, May, and the sound of the rain was deafening.
He lay on the top bunk dressed only in shorts, and yet he was sweating despite the faint, stirring dampness in the air which brought scents of the warm, steamy earth, and occasionally the smell of the diesel generator from Camp Alpha next-door, the base temporary housing compound for new, incoming troops awaiting assignments and deployment.
He began to realize what bothered him, what had disturbed his sleep. He couldn’t hear the sounds of the night, the noises he had become used to, the insignificant symphony of little sounds that assured him the world around him was at peace. The sound of a card game two bunks down, the never-ending whir of ceiling fans, the night crickets’ song, the muffled street traffic passing back and forth in front of the hooch, and the occasional incoming medivac chopper passing a few feet over-head, rattling the sheet metal and barely missing the rooftop as it landed at the adjacent Army Heliport, just across a barbed wire fence, some thirty yards away. These choppers brought in the wounded and dead from everywhere within a 20 mile radius of Tan Son Nhut Air Base, and were always met by ambulances brightly marked with a huge, blood red cross on all sides, top and rear. It was a grizzly thing to behold, body bags and stretchers, and it seemed non-stop, days, nights, it never ended. Yet ironically, he found the sound of the incoming choppers running their flight paths directly over his hooch, a comforting sound, knowing that someone… others were out there, others between himself and the waiting unknown.
The sound of the monsoon rain had isolated him. He lay on the top bunk, top floor of a wood and sheet metal hooch. If the rockets began coming in, began impacting on the base, began desolating concrete, metal and human flesh… began slamming into the earth like a monstrous sledge hammer, he would not know in time.
He sat up in the bed, put his legs over the side and dropped to the floor. He walked a few yards down the dark corridor to the screened door at the west end of he barracks, and looked out. There, in the rain stood the generator. The smell of the rain coming through the screen was pungent with dust and diesel fumes. He drew closer, opening the door slightly to look out and down the wooden steps to the ground. There were deep pools standing everywhere, constantly battered from the darkness above.
There were a few lights burning in Camp Alpha, signs of life that brought him comfort. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out through the screen and watched it disappear in the rain. He remembered exactly what the sirens had sounded like the first time the 122 mm rockets were incoming, as he crouched there in the hole, fetus-like, hearing the thunderous explosions of the missiles, feeling the earth around him shudder, and sensing for the first time, that tragic brotherhood men feel when they are at last, truly helpless.
A flap opened in a mess tent at Camp Alpha, briefly sending a flash of brightness out into the darkness, and a soldier in a white t-shirt and olive drab ball cap came out and emptied a pot of grease into a barrel. He stood there for a moment, looking out at the rain, and then up and down the barbed wire fence line separating Camp Alpha from the 7th Air Force barracks, then wiped his arm across his forehead and stepped back inside the tent.
From behind the screened door he had watched the soldier, and wondered if they hadn’t, just for a moment, looked into each other’s eyes in mute recognition of their strange and solemn kinship.
He looked up into the dark, depthless blur of heaven. It was going to rain for the rest of the night, and for the rest of that week…and perhaps forever after in the lives of some. It was the feeling of isolation that it brought. It was the deafening, dreadful sound of the rain that fell to earth.