It is the rainy season here in Da Nang where we can expect an average rainfall of 15 to 25 inches of rain for the month of October.  I was here on active duty in 1971 when Typhoon Hester, the most powerful typhoon to hit Vietnam since 1945 ripped through Da Nang.  Here is an excerpt from my impression of that time:

I came to, a man ascending out of a yawning bottomless well.  I was curled up on the customarily flooded floor of a sandbag bunker wrapped in a poncho so asleep I may as well have been dead.  But dead men don’t feel, and I could certainly feel someone shaking my drenched jungle boot.

Over the muffled scream of the wind I faintly heard a voice whispering my name, “R.C,, R.C., wake up, come quick!”  The bunker was dark, cold and wet.  I could hear that it was still raining sideways.  It had been raining for days, weeks, months, I had given up keeping track.  I had spent the night at the airfield “guarding” aircraft that were as securely tethered as possible in this storm, armed with an M-16 rifle and a red flare in the event something went terribly wrong.  I spent my time huddled in the relentless rain wondering what I was going to do if one of the birds actually came loose.  Run like hell seemed a prudent course of action.  There was no radio at my post, certainly no way to alert the detail sergeant in charge of any mishap.  At 0600 the duty driver of a deuce and 1/2 truck picked me up, left the next hapless guard duty victim in my place, and slowly made his way through mud and the relentless downpour back to base camp and the evil smelling bunker.

As I came to slowly, rising from the deep well of dream-rich sleep to the soggy reality of the bunker, I heard my name again, “R.C., come quick, ông nôi! Very sick! Bà ngoai say come now!”  

“Bao, is that you?”, I croaked in what I thought was a whisper.  I had been dreaming of my grandfather John, he and I adrift in the cold morning in the middle of a deserted North Missouri lake fishing in the pouring rain.  I was five years old and had peed my pants, too embarrassed to stand and urinate over the gunnel of the boat in front of my grandfather.  With the rain I hoped he would not notice the circular stain at my crotch.  I straightened my legs, hoping that my jeans would become soaked, guarding my secret, hiding my shame.

Now I had to choose which dream was real.  None of the information that had come my way since awakening fit together – Bao, improbable green eyes flashing in fear, here in the base camp, here in the bunker no less, with news that Huong’s father Dat was sick, sent by one of his wives to fetch me in a storm so intense all military operations everywhere in Vietnam had come to a complete halt.  This was the stuff of dream or nightmare.