Fire on the hill
I stopped by my Dad’s to say hi. He was watching TV. He’d been doing that a lot the last few months. It was a shift from his lifelong obsession with ‘doing something’. Anything, really, but mostly making stuff. Metal things, wood things, rebuilding car engines, rebuilding whole cars, building fences, or building buildings—the list goes on and on.
At 75 he had neck surgery to mitigate spinal stenosis; that is when the spinal column ossifies and begins to encroach on the spinal nerve. Too much and it causes pain. To much of THAT and you can end up paralyzed.
Right after the surgeries, remember him telling me he was having vivid dreams of panthers attacking him from behind and biting his neck! The worst pain he’d ever felt, he said.
It makes me think of that old joke that God invented the pain of childbirth so that a woman would know what it’s like for a man to catch a cold.
Haha.
I’m sure it was miserable. He said if he could do it over, he wouldn’t do it. Preferring to role the paralysis dice.
When I walked in, he was watching Forrest Gump. As we chatted, the scene came on where Forrest is humping through the jungle with his platoon in chest deep water saying:
“One day it started raining, and it didn’t quit for four months. We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin’ rain... and big ol’ fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath. Shoot, it even rained at night.”
It is a great scene and we were just in silence watching it play out. While Tom Hanks is talking about the rain from below, my dad tells me the story of burning down the mess hall by accident:
“It never rained much when I was in Viet Nam. Not like they show in Forrest Gump. I mean, it was green, but not as as green as they make it. And it did rain… I bogged down a 5-ton in the mud once… so it could be come a muddy mess at times.
We had taken this hill, it was a flat-top, hill-972, so we could launch artillery from our 6-guns. We had ‘em set up at the top. We were using the anti-rock platforms that I had designed and they worked great. They kept the cannons from rocking back and forth and digging big holes. I shoulda’ patented those when I got back, I’d be a millionaire. Though, I doubt there’s much call for that sort of thing state-side. I was just glad we didn’t have to dig ‘em out when we finally pulled out of a camp.
A little further down the hill we sat up base. We just carved it out of the jungle hillside. And lived in the middle of nowhere. A little pop-up town.
We were watching a movie one night, and someone shouted that the mess hall was on fire. Fire’s are all-hands affairs, you grab whatever’s got water in it and you become a firefighter.
Setting up base was always a hectic affair. The sooner we were dug in, the sooner we could keep our heads down, our eyes up and get on with the task of living in Viet Nam.
Which is why, some genuine filled up the water cans with gasoline.
The fire was going pretty good when the call went out. We were scrambling looking everywhere for water. Like I said, green, but not wet like they show in Gump. Finally! Someone found a stash of what we all thought was water. We grabbed every single one of those jerry-can and started dumping.
WHOOSH!!!
Gasoline doesn’t burn the vapors do. Explosively.
The flames shot up into the night sky. And somewhere in the illumination was the dummy who’d put fuel in jerry cans meant for water.
Needless to say, the mess was a goner. Those tents weren’t much, but they were the difference between civilization and not.
Even now, 50 years later I can still see those flames like it was yesterday.