My Puddle

There is a puddle of water in front of my house.  It is always in the same place, where the driveway meets the lawn. It’s about three feet long and two or three inches deep. The puddle is always there after it rains and quite often after the lawn has been watered.

I can see it from my bedroom window.  I can see it through the living room window. I can see it through the front door peephole.

When I know the puddle is there, I will keep an eye on it most of the day. I will sometimes go out and confront the puddle.  I will quickly walk up to it and say, “No, Not Today, I can’t do it”, and quickly walk back to the house and lock the door.

But there are times, very special times, when no one is around to watch me, a special time when I surge with strength. When I have a reckless kind of bravery. I can convince myself that I can do it.

That is when I will confidently walk up to my puddle. I hover over my puddle, staring down at it. I’ll take a deep breath and kneel at the edge of my puddle. I will lean forward and slowly lower my opened hand into the water. I slowly move my hand back and forth, creating small waves in the water. I will close my eyes. My heart will start beating faster because I know what is coming next.  I’m going back, back in time.

Back in time, but always to the same place and always to the same day.   Vietnam, July 20th, 1969.

That day started out like many other days in the Ashau Valley jungle. Our platoon was doing bunker security duty on the mountain top firebase Bastogne. After a quick morning breakfast and after our security replacements arrived, we were given our mission for the next five days. It was always the same mission: hunt the enemy, find them, and eliminate them, hunt and kill.

Today's mission was to head north, down the steep firebase mountain slope, and follow a path that led to the Ho Chi Minh Trail that the enemy used to send troops and resupplies from Laos.

My squad was the lead element. We left the firebase in single file, ten feet apart. Tommy White was our pointman, followed by Larry Banks. I was behind Roy Moore, who was humping the M60 machine gun with his ammo carrier, Billy White. I was carrying an M79 grenade launcher. Our CO, commanding officer Captain Kelly, was a few guys back with his RTO radio man and our medic. The rest of the squad was behind him. Arty Salsman was at the tailman, the last man in the column. He always walked backwards because the enemy tended to shoot the last man and run away.

As we approached the valley floor, the trail got narrower. The vegetation denser. The ten-foot elephant grass with razor-sharp edges, and the wait-a-minute vines with thorns hanging off low tree branches seemed to squeeze in on us. We have to roll down our sleeves and cover our faces to avoid being cut. The jungle is forcing us to slow down. But we moved on slowly and as quietly as we could.

The valley floor was fairly flat but covered with rocks and many small streams. The bamboo trees and the tall Banyan trees create a dense three-tiered canopy, fifty to seventy feet high, blocking the sun. It is darker, like dusk, cooler, and kind of spooky.

We had traveled about two and a half miles. It was a little after noon. The trail made a sharp turn to our right and opened up to a completely wide-open area. It was pockmarked with a dozen bomb craters, most of them twenty to thirty feet wide. The crater in front of us was the biggest, fifty feet wide and at least ten feet deep in the center. The trail went around the right side of the bomb crater toward a dense jungle hill on the other side. As we were more than halfway there when, All Hell Broke Loose!!

A hail of bullets, both from rifle and machine gun, came from the hill we were approaching. The sound was deafening. Bullets were flying everywhere. Larry Banks was hit. We hit the ground and returned fire. We all rolled into the bomb crater and quickly formed fighting positions along the edge of the crater. We returned continuous fire in the direction of a well-concealed enemy bunker on the hill. Roy Moore unleashed the M60 machine gun and sprayed hundreds of bullets at the target. Everyone else put their M16s on auto, firing and emptying magazine after magazine at the enemy position.

I ran across the bunker to the left front edge and started to fire high-explosive rounds from my M79 grenade launcher at the enemy position as quickly as I could load, aim, and fire.

As I quickly moved over to my left to reload my weapon, two bullets landed on the ground right where I had just been. Wait a minute. How can this be? I’m inside a bunker with bullets flying over my head. How did these bullets get inside next to me? How do you shoot down? There had to be a sniper in a tall tree, firing down. I yelled as loud as I could, “Gooks in the trees”. Roy stood up bravely and sprayed machine gun rounds into the trees. The rest of us emptied a least one or more magazines into the trees. Leafs and tree branches were flying everywhere. We all saw the gook sniper fall through the tree branches and hit the ground hard, dead.

We continued to fire a steady stream of bullets at the enemy position. As I rose up to fire my weapon, I saw a gook with a lit explosive satchel charge sprinting toward me. We fired at him. He fell dead. But the satchel charge left his hand at the last instant and flew forward. It didn’t land in the bomb crater. It landed five feet in front of me outside the crater. I crouched into a fetal position against the crater wall, my face to the ground covered with my hands and arms. The explosion was thunderous and deafening; it violently shook my body. It sent dirt, rocks, and shrapnel everywhere. A couple of pieces of the shrapnel made small dents in my helmet; the rest blew over me. I was ok, and my hearing gradually returned. I continued firing my weapon.

The firefight seemed like an eternity, but only lasted a few minutes.  We were all quickly running out of ammo. After I shot my last explosive round, I loaded my close-range shotgun round and pulled out and cocked my 45.

Captain Kelly called Firebase Bastogne and requested an artillery barrage on the enemy position. He ordered us to fall back to the safety of the dense jungle trail we had just come from.

Martinez and I were the first to leave. We were running as fast as we could across and up the opposite side of the crater to the trail. He was ten feet ahead of me. I was running with my M79 in one hand and my 45 in the other. Martinez fell to the ground face-first. He was shot. I stopped to get him, but my first sergeant said, “Keep going, we got him”. I made it to the top of the crater and ran a couple of hundred feet down the trail to a safe location.

 I collapsed on the side of the trail, heart pounding and gasping for air.

A minute or so later, they laid Martinez right next to me. He was dead. His mouth was open, his eyes were open, lifelessly staring a the sky above he could no longer see. It was a sight I will never forget. I had to look away.

My heart was still pounding. It was a hundred degrees in the open jungle, but I was not sweating. Not a drop. The battle had caused my adrenaline level to spike. My entire body was dry as a bone. My throat is on fire. I could not even wet my lips.

Water, I need water, but there wasn’t a canteen in sight. And then I saw it, across the trail ten feet away, a puddle. I crawled on my hands and knees to the puddle. I leaned forward and slowly lowered my opened hand into the water. I slowly moved my hand back and forth, creating small waves in the water, clearing the fallen leaves and sediment. I cupped my hands in the water, raised my hands, and drank the puddle water. I drank several times. The water soothed my parched mouth. I splashed the water on my face. My heartbeat was coming back to normal. I am safe. I took a deep breath. I close my eyes.

I open my eyes, and I’m back home, kneeling in front of my puddle. I slowly stand up and look down at my puddle and say, “Today I was strong, and I did it.”

Sometimes I have the urge to jump into the puddle and stomp it dry with both feet, sending the water everywhere outside of the puddle, and keep stomping until all that is left is damp ground. Erase it.

But, instead, I always turn around and go back home.

Because I know my puddle will return, and so will the memory.