Slow Walk in a Sad Rain (Badrus Salam: 210......095)

Name  : Badrus s (2100730095)

Class   : 4B

Title                : Slow Walk in a Sad Rain

Author            : JOHN P. McAFEE

Published       : In Hardcover by Warner Books

Year                : May, 1994.

A.    Chapter 1: Don’t Look Behind The Curtain.

In front of you and at the end of a dusty yellow dirt road is a large barbed-wire gate; from the gate to a large telephone pole runs a wire that keeps the heavy gate balanced. Directly beneath the place where the wire attaches it to the pole is a sign. It reads, normal is a cycle on a washing machine.

There is a cowbell attached to the gate. Ring it and someone in the machine-gun bunker directly in front of you on the other side of the gate will cautiously peer over the burlap bags filled with sand and ask, “What do you want here?” that someone is quite voice. He is always asking question like that.

Don’t shake the beer cans on either side of the gate-the ones hanging on the razor wire. They will make a noise, too. They are filled with rocks, and if you shake them, quite voice will shoot you, and then you won’t be able to answer his questions.

Color those times brown.

Like the sampan that brought all of us- quite voice, and me to special forces a camp 134, located twenty miles above Moc Hoa and less than a mile from Cambodia.

Waiting for us was shotgun. No one knew how long he had been in Vietnam or how long he had been waiting for us at the camp. He would show us how to survive.

  

B.     Chapter 2: The Opening Curtain.

According to scientists, the triangle is the only shape in nature that does not occur naturally. So we didn’t live inside a triangle. We live inside three of them.

The first triangle was a quarter mile of razor wire. The second triangle was located inside the outer wire and consisted of three huge earthen mounds ten feet high and four hundred feet long. These were called bermes by the French. From the air it looked like a crazed, giant mole hadn’t been able to make up its mind where to go.  At each corner of the berms were machine gun bunkers facing outward, scanning the wire, looking for giant moles and things much worse.

In 1969 everything in the village was the same as it had been in 1939; mortar shells were still coming out of Cambodia; villagers went to market in the province capital, Moc Hoa, during high tide and waited till the next high tide to go home; the rice was planted and harvested the same as it always had been. The three triangles north of the village were all that was different.

The triangles were a camp 134.

The villagers knew that if they ignored the triangles long enough, the triangles would go way. They were right.

C.    Chapter 3: Shotgun.

Shotgun was filing the fuses on the grenades again. He was helpful like that, even when we didn’t want him to be helpful. Of course, nobody had enough balls to tell shotgun to leave things alone.

The problem was that you didn’t know how far he had filed the fuses. There you would be, in the middle of a world of shit, and the only way out would be a couple of strategically placed-okay, hastily lobbed-grenades, and you didn’t have time once the pin was pulled to pick out where the grenades were supposed to go, lobbing speaking.

One trick we used was to throw the grenades without pulling the pins. At first the other team would laugh at our rookie mistake. Then they’d pick up the grenades and pull the pins to throw the explosive little baseballs back at us. Then, colonel black just like the elephants –had to come a long and fuck everything up. He was the colonel of the B team in Moc Hoa. He was always passing along orders to his A team. Judging by his orders, we’d concluded he was crazy.

Anyway, we thought it was neat how colonel black, explaining his idea, kept a serious face as we began filing past him to our jeeps outside. Then we noticed that shotgun hadn’t moved at all. This wasn’t unusual. After two cases of Vietnamese beer, sometime he didn’t move for days, but we were embarrassed for shotgun in front of the colonel. As we put our hands tentatively under his arms to lift him shotgun spoke. “Let’s do the mission. I’m bored.”

We sat back down.

The colonel outlined his plan.

D.    Chapter 4: The 4.2 Mobile Unit, Part I.

They are dog turds!” said spec. 7 Thompson. Now, I know that you are thinking-there are no spec. 7’s in the army-and you are right. But Thompson had given himself the promotions every four mounts in country as a way of marking time and not forgetting it. He’d paint the little upside-down chevrons under his specialist insignia on his sleeve, and then if he forgot how long he had been in Vietnam, he’d look at his sleeve and count the chevrons and relax again.

We all celebrated the quarterly promotions by having a barbecue-elephant steak was a favorite-and toasting Thompson as he painted another stripe on his uniform. Life was good.

A fact is a fact. Quite voice had definitely voiced a fact. Still, the sensors had to be placed over our area of operation (AO), which was a little smaller than Missouri, since it extended into Cambodia. Judging from the number of little rubber turds there were in the sacks, we had enough to cover the area. Things were not that bad.

Then we heard shotgun’s voice over in the mortar pit; he was arguing with his mortar. “What do you mean this mission is not a good idea that we are all going to die?” His voice raised another notch. “You are a goddamn coward!”  Things were that bad.

E.     Chapter 5: The 42 Mobile Unit, Part II.

As I walked out of the camp carrying the sack of turds I glanced back at our sign on the telephone pole: NORMAL IS A CYCLE ON A WASHING MACHINE. Shotgun had put the sign on the pole after the jeep full of inspectors had been blown up, not by a stray enemy round (it had been broad daylight), but by one of the inspectors.

We all had bet what would happen when the enemy triggered a sensor. I said the machine would give us the exact coordinates, but not too many agreed with my theory. Most of them went with Thompson’s idea that the green would change into a deeper shade of green.

Colonel black’s idea had been refined thusly: we were to monitor the machine- which was what we were doing and when it when off, we were to call the night-duty helicopter to our camp and put the 4.2 mortar, base plates and all, along with our selves-shotgun, quite voice and me into the helicopter.

Once airborne, we were to proceed to the activated sensor, sit down on the same sensor once it quite activating, set up the mortar, and fire on those who’d set off the sensors.

F.     Chapter 6: The Night Of The Mobiles.

It was not the different shades of green after all. On the fourth night, little white dots suddenly began dancing next to line 37 on the horizontal scale and line 8 on the vertical scale. These numbered vertical and horizontal lines matched the same vertical and horizontal lines on a map of our area.

Our maps called that-place the point at which line 37 horizontal and line 8 vertical intersected-the plain of reeds. But Hughes aircraft worked only with verticals and horizontals, not maps and people.

The first two sounds are what a large mortar makes when its shells are leaving the earth. The second two sounds are what a mortar shell sounds like when it’s hitting the earth again. The final sounds are a battalion of pissed-off AK-47s, the weapon of choice for crack North Vietnamese troops. But that’s not the bad news.

G.    Chapter 7: The Bad News.

There is a new species of a centipede-something slowly crawling up my rifle barrel. I don’t dare move. I watch the insect crawl across my sights, onto my hand, up my sleeve. I can feel it on my skin. It crawls up my shoulder, hesitates, and starts down my back. It stops. It starts. It stops again. Each leg rotates on my nerves. It gets to my lower back. My head is dripping with sweet and I want to lay it on my rifle but dare not move. The insect is forgotten as footsteps squish by me. There are worse things than a crawling insect. I know that now.

H.    Chapter 8: Beached.

Although it’s 1992 and there’s been another war, I feel like I just got home. The kid is doing fine. I think the nut is growing. Doc says it is, but I don’t trust him.

I suppose I will go trough life with this ache deep within that’s not really treatable. I first became aware of the ache when my son was born. I got worse each year he approached the approximate age of the little boy. The ache almost ripped my body apart when we visited a petting zoo and my little one the rump. My wife laughed and gave him a hug. I got sick.

But he strange thing is, for every year my son has passed the age of the little child dead in Laos, the ache has diminished accordingly. Every time I give him a hug or tell him I love him, I can feel the ache receding. Maybe the mind that looks back and judges is more mature mind than the one that made the decision in the first place. We could not be here if we had not been there. Maybe by loving my son I can make up for taking love away from another family.

I showed my son the wall and all those names, and after a long silence, he looked at me and said, “Let’s go home, daddy. There’s nothing more to do here.” So we did.