That Saturday night, hot as real hell. It was the bunch of us, some guys I remember like
brothers, though we never kept in touch, though we promised and swore we would
and really meant it at the time. And some other guys that were just extras in the scene. We all
climbed the steel ladder up the water tower, the big green steel bubble you could see from everywhere. The hundred feet straight up was bad enough, but the part of the ladder that followed the curve of the dome straight up toward the top to where it got level enough you could stand up and walk, that was the scary part. For me, at least. But the tower was the best place to watch the fireworks.
Joints were lit and passed around and we walked and stood, sat, and laid back and we talked,
waiting for it to begin.
Three of us, me Mark and Terry, we were talking philosophy between tokes. Well, Terry was talking philosophy, I was talking mostly nonsense that I thought was philosophy at the time, and Mark was just looking back and forth between us as we talked, like a disciple in the company of two spiritual masters, absolutely certain he was learning some deep stuff.
The difference between day and night is about one minute in the tropics and it was now dark
enough even though a minute ago it wasn't. The ones of us that weren't already too stoned to even care knew that it wouldn't be long now and they were scanning the 360 degree horizon to be the first to call everyone's attention to it when the fireworks started.
Being on top of the giant water tower was scary. There was no fence or railing to keep you from
just walking out too far and sliding off to make your final impact on the environment, a slight and bloody depression in the ground. There wasn't even a line painted to demark the point of no return, where one more small step would put you on the wrong side of the line that separates your life from your death just for being stupid.
It was worse in the dark. For some. For others it was better. Some needed the comfort of
feeling safe. They liked the shroud of darkness that let you believe it was
safe when it very much was not. Terry was committed to finding and drawing the
line of no return. But he did it in the daytime when he was alone and wasn't stoned. He thought if he did nothing else in his life, of any good, that drawing the line of no return on the top of that water tower would be his important and lasting contribution to the world. I always wondered what happened to Terry after we all got back to the world.
"Fireworks! South by southeast!"
Someone had called it. Guys quickly started looking around in confusion, because most of us had no idea which direction was south by southeast. But we quickly followed the stares of those that did and took in the show. Puff the Magic Dragon was in the air, and the AC-130 Spectres were doing their pylon turns, flying their tight circles and creating their beautiful cones of fire. The cones of fire were the grand inverted cones of flickering yellow-red formed by the tracer rounds from the gunship miniguns and human persistence of vision as the planes went about their business of turning some battalion of Viet Cong into hamburger with a ton or two of bullets from banks of shrieking, fire-spitting miniguns. Or maybe they were just shredding a few acres of empty jungle because the VC were already gone or weren't even there to begin with. I don't think anyone really cared about the reality of it, except maybe our ground troops who were supposed to be getting close air support because the VC were shooting them up. Anyway, it was happening close to us tonight, so the show was awesome.
Then, just as we were feeling let down that it all was about to be over, the tower began to shake hard in all directions. Strong enough to make most of us drop down and hug the painted
metal, which was still hot from 12 hours of tropical sun. We clung to it like fuck-you
lizards until the shaking stopped. No one had to say it. We all knew it was the Rolling Thunder. Somewhere, not that close but not that far,
the B-52s were laying down carpets of five-hundred and thousand-pound bombs on
some very unfortunate jungle, making huge craters that soon filled with water
and became perfectly round lakes. Maybe some of them are still there now. I
don't know. It wasn't that unusual to hear doors and windows suddenly rattle at
whatever time of day, but we'd never felt Rolling Thunder up there on the water
tower before, amplified like that. It was like being ants on the head of a snare
drum. Not the kindest thing to happen to you stoned wasted.
But Rolling Thunder was not to be the finale that night. We were all getting up and
laughing and convincing each other that we weren't really scared or anything
and thinking maybe it was time to get down off that water tower. Only a couple
of us heard the first distant 'kump' and stopped to listen because we knew that
sound. Our muscles and guts knew it. More heard the second 'kump' and most saw
the two thin yellow arcs stretch out from the jungle beyond the perimeter
toward the flight line and then heard the shrieking 'wheeee-ssssss' ending in the
final 'WHUMP!'. No one missed the sight of the 122-mm rockets hitting the
runway and the resulting white-yellow-red eruptions. Several more soon followed, walking a drunkard's line down the runway.
Within a few heartbeats, two field ambulances arrived and parked at a supposedly safe distance
from now well-pocked runway. They would wait there against the unlikely case that a rocket hit an occupied building or something. I stared at one of the ambulances and had a moment where I imagined being the driver. It was easy because I was a medic and had sat there waiting just like that quite a few times myself. Had I been on call that night, it would have actually been me there. But in my moment I was seeing through the driver's eyes and looking out through the flat windshield at the flight line and waiting for the it's-over-folks sirens. It was so vivid and I got like confused if it was really me on the tower thinking of me being in the ambulance or if it was really me in the ambulance thinking of me being stoned up on the tower.
"Hey, you're gonna miss it." Terry broke my Schrödinger moment and I turned to look at
the jungle where the rockets came from, like everyone else was. The first response was 105-mm artillery counter-fire on the suspected launch areas. Booms, big billowing explosions of yellow and red blooming from the black jungle like an insane time-lapse garden in hell. And then parachute flares hanging and swinging in the air all over the damned place, and rockets and traced mini-gun fire from helicopter gunships. An insane storm of hellfire and destruction.
Then the fireworks were over. The skies were quiet, the ambulances had returned to the base hospital, and the only real reminders that anything had happened at all were the strong smell of cordite in the air and the crews busy fixing the giant potholes in the runway.