Boys in the Rain

Apologia pro poemate meo

Back in the World, back home, they would’ve called that kind of rain a frog choker. It was a Sunday.

He sat on a ridgeline near the Korean DMZ during that Sunday deluge. It was the fall of 1967 and he was a soldier in the 7th ID; 2nd Battalion, 32nd Infantry Brigade. Command put him there along with fifty other guys spread out along the ridge. He and the others would guard the perimeter for a visiting dignitary; a man named Hubert Humphrey, the Vice President of the United States. The sergeants rolled them out of bed early that morning before daylight, made them saddle up, and trudged them out into the inky downpour with no explanation on why — the Army’s usual modus operandi. The boys just did it because the person in charge was yelling at them to get their butts in gear and fall out.

They moved outside the compound, forded a swollen stream and — in grunt parlance — humped a yama (climbed a big hill). The lieutenant told the sergeants to park the boys two by two every twenty yards along the ridge.

He partnered up with a small black guy from Jersey… or maybe it was Kentucky. He finds it hard to recall; a lot of years have passed. But it didn’t really matter what skin they wore or where their mothers waited. That morning in the gray rain, they found their location smack dab in the middle of shared misery. They huddled together under snapped together ponchos, meager protection against the cold and driving monsoon. Besides, the soak had already reached their bones, blue-tinged their lips and fingertips as they shivered there. One offered a soggy cigarette from a wadded pack, the other held a shaking flame to light their bent sacraments. Their brotherhood wasn’t a matter of race, but of disposition.

The Veep didn’t show that day. One troop offered his guess that the man threw back the crisp sheets he’d slept between, looked at the rain outside his hotel suite in Seoul, and said, “I ain’t getting out in that shit. Where’s my breakfast?” They all laughed, picturing the silk-robed man sitting down to waffles and bacon on fine china, a nice fruit cup in a crystal goblet, a hot cup of coffee. The soldiers broke out sodden C-rations for their breakfast, drank metallic water from their canteens.

Truth is, none of them on that ridge knew what the man did or didn’t say that morning, but he said whatever he said while the troops slogged up that hill to protect him. Word didn’t reach them until late in the afternoon that he wouldn’t need their protection, after all. The rain hadn’t slackened one bucket by the time they trudged back down to thaw out, dry out, and de-mud in their hootches.

None of them got hurt that day, unlike so many others in so many other places at so many other times. Those boys in the rain suffered little more than physical discomfort. No shots fired; no mortars loosed. Doubtful those on the other side could see to aim through the dark curtain of rain, even if they’d wanted to, which they probably did. The privation which visits soldiers knows no ideology.

Most of us in that country lived to join that vast and exclusive club called Veterans. One who didn’t, a boy named Wilfred Owen killed in another generation’s war, the one that spawned the idea to create a day to remember all military veterans, wrote this:

… Nevertheless, except you share With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell, Whose world is but a trembling of a flare And heaven but a highway for a shell, You shall not hear their mirth. You shall not come to think them well content By any jest of mine. These men are worth Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

To my brothers and sisters who once wore the uniform, who answered the call, who paid the price, who were and are out there protecting us all great and small, I, by God, salute you.

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© 2020 by Phil Truman. All rights reserved.