Kids In The Water

Geoffrey S. Poor   |   geoffpoor@gmail.com

Setup: I've arrived in the Central Highlands city of Kontum, and remember an incident from 1969.

My best friend back then was Felix Mario Rivera, a trumpet player from Brooklyn, and one day the two of us were assigned to pull security around a bridge we were building over a river near Buon Ma Thuot. This meant patrolling in an arc in the dense woods – something between a forest and a jungle - about a half mile away from the bridge, on the lookout for enemy troops. 

Neither one of us had the slightest idea how to do this and had never been trained for it. Our experience qualified us to operate trucks and picks and shovels and sledgehammers. I myself had become something of an expert at tipping back the bed of a dump truck gradually, while smoothly driving the truck forward, in order to deposit my five ton load of dirt in a uniform layer two feet deep. When my truck got a flat tire, I could fix it in an impressive 45 minutes -- at least in the dry season -- a procedure that involved jacking up the truck and removing the four foot diameter 80 pound tire, often requiring me to jump up and down on the lug wrench to unfreeze the lug nuts, taking off the rim’s breaker bar with just the right series of deftly placed strikes from a pick-ax, prying one side of the tire’s edge outside the rim with a crowbar, working the tube out of the tire’s cavity through the resulting crack between the tire and the rim, finding the leak in the tube by inflating it and sticking it in water to look for bubbles of escaping air, patching the leak with rubber and glue, inflating the tube and putting the patch under water to see if the seal held, releasing the air so I could work it back into the tire, reverse-prying the tire’s edge back under the rim, inflating the tube half way and releasing the air to make sure no wrinkles had formed in the tube’s rubber which could cause another leak under full pressure, re-inflating the tube, wrestling the tire back onto the axle, and tightening the lugs. Sometimes I did this in the burning sun, and sometimes sloshing around in a foot of mud under pouring rain.

But no one ever told us how to navigate through the countryside without being detected by the enemy. They just told us to do it.

Rivera and I came upon a brook running cool clear water. Trees overhead filtered the sunlight and gave the scene a soft mottled look. The brook opened up nearby and formed a large pool, and six Montagnard boys, around eight to ten years old, were swimming and playing in the water, naked except for simple brass bracelets made from shell casings. Their faces were bright and carefree and it seemed as if we’d stepped out of the war. They came running over to us, guilelessly and fearlessly chattering in Vietnamese, and gestured that we should join them swimming. This was a shock -- we were more accustomed to worrying about children begging with one hand and trying to steal from us with the other. We said no, of course -- we were carrying backpacks and our weapons, Rivera an M14 rifle and I a 40 mm grenade launcher and .45 pistol -- but sat down to take a rest and watch. But the day was hot and muggy, and the kids were having such fun and our canteen water had that warm and stale canteen flavor, and, well, we certainly couldn’t see any enemy soldiers around. So we laid our packs and weapons down, telling the kids with voice and gestures not to go anywhere near them, took off our clothes and played and frolicked for a while. With not a single word of any language in common, we had an underwater breath-holding contest, we tossed kids through the air into the water, we practiced being birds and elephants and crocodiles.

When we all got dressed to leave, the boys tried to tell us something we couldn’t understand until one of them took a stick and drew a house in the dirt, mimed walking away and gestured for us to come along. They were inviting us to come visit their village. As if entranced in a tropical Brigadoon, Rivera and I looked at each other and shrugged, and soon we all were headed down a path away from the brook and away from the river. But soon the spell broke; we realized we were going too far, and, with a touch of fear, how stupid and crazy the whole idea had been from the start. With sad faces, we motioned to the kids that we were going back. We all stood there silently for a few moments. Two of the boys then removed their brass bracelets and placed them on our wrists, first Rivera’s and then mine, and we watched the boys walk single file into the bush and disappear.