The Wind and The Darkness

                                          

                                          The Wind and The Darkness





     I have always enjoyed being on or around the water.  Coming from Tennessee the only water I was familiar with was Old Hickory Lake.  My first two years in the Navy were spent at Patrick AFB in Florida.  There I tasted salt water for the first time if only to swim in it.
     The last twenty months  of my enlistment were spent on the ocean either on board a ship or on a Mike boat.  I became familiar with the many faces of the sea - from calm gently rolling swells that would rock you to sleep, to monsoon storms so rough you would be tossed out of your bunk. There were times when I would look up and see nothing but water all around, even overhead, and times when I would be mesmerized by the sun glaring off the calm surface. The sea has it's own smells too - fishy odors close to shore, clear and cleansing out of sight of land.  It's colors are the clear blue green of deep water and the angry gray of storm-tossed waves.
     All of us had respect for the sea, we operated in all kinds of conditions.  Some of us looked into the depths reflecting on our problems to put them in their proper place.  I used to go on the flight deck at night and lay in the safety netting surrounding the deck, hanging over the side of the ship with nothing beneath but the darkness of the sea.  Even with the stars shinning the nights were black, we had black out conditions aboard ship at night.  The wind always blew because the ship was underway.  On a black night it was as if you were in a void - all thought replaced by the wind and the rocking of the ship as she rode the swells taking you into another world.  For a short time the war and all your worries were far away, for me the sea was refreshing and invigorating like a good nights sleep.
     We were never more that a few miles from shore.  In the daytime the jungles were clear, green and inviting, at night they were dark, lifeless and at best a shadow in the ambient light of the stars.
     Laying in the safety netting looking towards shore I watched red tracer rounds arc thru the darkened sky, crossing from mountain top to mountain top.  It was like a light show only all of the lights were red.  There was no sound or smell of cordite only the wind. Tracer rounds were spit out about every fifth round and at night it appeared as though a seamstress were stitching the darkness with red thread.
     At first the sight of the tracers was interesting in that I had never seen anything like it but then I wondered about the guys pulling the trigger. Were they alone, did they have hot chow that night and when would they see clean sheets again, how many more days til they rotated stateside, were they scared and what was going thru their mind. Up until then my war experiences were limited to the old movies on TV where the good guys always won and the enemy perished by the hundreds, but this was Vietnam, John Wayne was in Hollywood and the good guys were dying.
     One night several of us watched as an ammo dump exploded miles away down the coast.  It was like the final act of a fireworks display where they shoot off bunches of rockets at one time. Red tracers and flashes of large explosions illuminated the darkness for hours - we were in awe of the sight. The reality that this was war couldn't sink in as the sounds and smells were not there. Then just as in the movies the screen faded to black as the ship came about and the stern now faced out to sea. The wind and the darkness engulfed us as we wandered back to our compartment and told the guys " wow you should have seen the ammo dump go up ".
     Just a few miles away men were fighting and dying in the black of night. Fighting the enemy and the darkness of their own mind. This was something I knew nothing about and could only imagine. All I could do was watch red tracers as they crossed the night sky.