To the Rescue!

This is embarrassing.

Scooter, making his submission display while I was lifting him off the night-night, pissed on my hand.  I took the desecrated appendage to the kitchen sink, holding it away from the rest of me; while feverishly scrubbing it like a surgeon preparing for the operating room.

Gawd!  Shot at and missed and pissed on and hit.  That should be everyone’s start to the new day. Quite humbling, really.  Each morning should bring a similar moment of clarity as to how little control we exercise over our own existence.

The tumultuous thunderstorm that brought the entire Mutt Brigade to bed for the reassuring comfort of comforter and Daddy has passed us by.  The pre-dawn sound of pouring rain is the end of Thor’s Sky Bash.  Daddy and Dorks are settled once more in the office cave, dogs to resumed slumber; Ish to the keyboard.

And who the hell forgot to tell me about the fallback of daylight savings time?

Shit.

I’ve half a mind (!) to leave the fricking house clocks, stove clock, watches and microwave just as they are.  I don’t need an extra hour of daylight to harvest the sorghum and slop the hogs; in fact, daylight savings time has as little impact on my tiny universe as whatever hapless schmuck won the lottery last night.

Or who wins the election.

Do I note the Republicans sounding a bit shriller in these closing days of the campaign?  Do they have a nervous wavering doubt that perhaps they have backed the wrong horse’s ass? Are they caving to the impending doom of an Armageddon-in-the-offing? 

Really now, regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, politicians do not affect the economy or world events any more than that idiot despot king who had his throne placed on the beach and commanded the tide to recede.

The last time we experienced such a din of temper-tantrum wailing and kicking of little heels upon the kitchen linoleum was when Franklin Roosevelt brought in Social Security and back-to-work programs like the WPA and CCC.  There were Republicans back then who darkly predicted the end of America—and the world--as they saw it; when FDR did the things that he did.

Did those huge government initiatives put an end to the Great Depression?

They did not.

In actuality, the Depression finally ended with World War II.  You see, war is the excrement that will fertilize economic growth like no other.  One could quite easily propose the argument that war has sustained our country and our enemies for the last century and into this one.

In my sophomoric youth, I didn’t see this logical flow of History’s River.  From the limited vantage point of my hippie hovel, marooned on the River banks, I only heard the anti-war rhetoric and assumed it was the failure of politics to make things OK in Southeast Asia. 

One of the most cryptic slogans of the day was, ‘War is good business.  Invest your son.’  I’m sure the military and defense contractors agreed whole-hardheartedly with that concept.  Making death available for 58,000 Americans made a few folks a lot of money, sitting in their corporate buildings; or at the 19^th hole--back safe at home.

How’s about one more rousing cheer for trickle-down economics, you profiteering-policy-making-pentagon-geek sons of bitches?  All together now…

If you get the idea that I am cynical about the American War in Viet Nam, then for the sake of my 58,000 fallen comrades, I will be a cynic.

That I did not become a name etched in black marble on a Memorial deep in the heart of political Washington was only a matter of the Divine Plan having other plans for the blonde yeoman of yore.

What lingers to this day for me were the close calls with death.  These, according to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, were not combat-related; therefore not the sort of trauma that induces PTSD.

On that score, I beg to fucking differ. 

Here is the story of how BM-2 Dickhead came close to killing me a second time:

Although many stories have been interwoven with the monsoons, I have said naught of the weather systems themselves.

The East Asian monsoon affects large parts of Indo-China, Philippines, China, Korea and Japan.

(Skip the italicized paragraph below.  It is boring and won’t explain the monsoons any better.  This is Wikipedia’s copy-and-paste on nasty-

weather Asian monsoons)

“The onset of the summer monsoon is marked by a period of premonsoonal rain over South China and Taiwan in early May. From May through August, the summer monsoon shifts through a series of dry and rainy phases as the rain belt moves northward, beginning over Indochina and the South China Sea (May), to the Yangtze River Basin and Japan (June) and finally to North China and Korea (July). When the monsoon ends in August, the rain belt moves back to South China.”

OK, for the (at least) one reader out there who is a) as dilatory as I am about looking up facts and b) is still obsessed with wanting to know them anyway:

When the ocean ambient temperature is higher/lower than the land temperature, the imbalance causes turbulent weather in direct proportion to the extremity of the dichotomy.

There! Satisfied?  Gosh, I hope so.

One afternoon late in November, we could look out from the Boathouse and watch the storm beginning to build.  If the monsoons had not been so devastating, perhaps it might have made for an entertaining interlude.

But monsoon storms bore no resemblance to the colorful buildup of thunderheads on a mid-April afternoon, far away in the Texas Hill Country.

As the dark clouds boiled and broiled, the air would become somewhat electrified; with the near 100% humidity ever present.  It was a tactile sensation, but not at all pleasant.  The fast approaching weather was not going to be to anyone’s idea of amusement.

God!  Can I remember that now, here in the quiet office cave, in the glow of my monitor—the feeling of impending threat as those clouds grew darker and the winds began to howl; the sea starting to keep rhythm with the tempo of really nasty weather descending on our miniscule patch of causeway.

As the swells increased out in the harbor, the anchored fuel barges began to bob and yaw.  After a while, it became increasingly clear that the six or eight barges out there were not only loose from their mooring, they were not properly lashed together as they should have been.

Scott peered out the window, turned and glared at Dickhead, returned to look at what he could see was coming disaster.  Adrift in the storm, the barges were free to bash into anything; a speculation much like seeing a loaded Semi lose its brakes and start rolling down a steep incline.

Unlike any Semi, these floating gas tanks contained thousands of gallons of fuel.  They were as threatening as mines out there.  Yep.  A goddamned disaster in the offing.  Dickhead’s failure to do his job once again was about to become mayhem.

I remember that he began to cry, to add a touch of sincerity to his wailing perplexity as to how this situation could have come about.  Scott was largely unimpressed with this outpouring of apologies; as unmoved as the rest of us staring out the windows.

My feelings wavered between disgust and inexplicable pity for the wretched prick.  This fuck-up could be the showstopper for him; the last straw on a straining camel’s back.  The end of skatin’ duty followed in short order by a plunge into oblivion.

For the moment, Dickhead’s discomforting emotional outburst was ignored as Scott seized the situation and barked at me to go out and fucking fire up a skimmer; he nodded at Jerry who understood what the nod implied and was in motion to the locker to grab nylon line for the job ahead.

The three of us converged; they joined me in the boat and I brought the skimmer about headed out on the choppy water, straight for the barges, about 200 yards out from the causeway.  None of us were wearing rain gear—no time to dress for the occasion.

As we drew near, the bobbing mass of metal tanks made me think of toys in the bathtub.  I thought of this innocuous distraction to calm my terror at the impending job at hand.  Tying on to the nearest barge, we alit onto what can only be described as a pitching bucking undulating fairground ride…from Hell.

I don’t have much recollection of what happened next.  I do remember the wild ride and seeing Scott and Jerry working the lines, through the sheets of rain on the farthest side of the barge.

I stepped backwards, and suddenly my left leg had disappeared up to my crotch.  I had broken through a rusted patch of metal—one more testament to Dickhead’s benign neglect.

I can remember feeling a sort of displaced embarrassment at my predicament.  I was wedged so firmly into the hole that I could not extract myself; and with the unchartered feelings of human emotion, I felt chagrin instead of fear.

Shouting for help over the wind, Jerry saw and came as quickly as he could move on the tipsy surface below his boots.  He grabbed under my arms and hauled me up and out.  He told me through the rain and shriek of wind to sit down and stay the fuck where I was; then went back to help Scott finish lashing the barges back together.

I watched them hopscotching from one heaving surface to another until they were lost in sight to the driving rain.  It didn’t take two seasoned boatswain’s mates very long to complete their task.

We made for the skimmer and the return trip to the causeway.  Without the distraction of frantic activity, I became aware of how much my leg hurt; as I limped into the boat.  They lowered me down on the front seat and Jerry steered us back home.

Outside the Boathouse, the monsoon reaching its crescendo, it was as dark as night in the middle of the afternoon.

Dropping my torn pants, Jerry began using the contents of the first aid kit to clean and dress my leg.  My left leg was raked with scrapes and cuts from my upper thigh to ankle.  Jerry swabbed the bloody mess with Mercurochrome.  That was fun.

I limped up to the hooch to put on dry clothes and came back to the Boathouse to finish out the workday.  Just another quiet day in service to my country.

When I was a teenager, Mom would take one look at similar wounds (Little boys injured themselves with the antics of youthful males well into adulthood and beyond).  She would tell me I should go get a tetanus booster; an admonition that I invariably ignored.

The trip next morning to the clinic would have made Mom proud that I was finally heeding her words of caution.  At the time, the cuts and the scabs were nothing to compare with my imagining what might have happened had I fallen overboard.  In the turbulent water I could have drowned.  Or a barge could have crushed my skull like a ripened cantaloupe.  That these fears were not real didn’t make them any the less intense.

I thought it a pity that the previous day’s event had not included a red alert for a rocket attack or some other enemy-initiated shit.  My wound could thus be considered a war wound, entitling the bearer to a Purple Heart.

Hey!  Guys had received theirs for less.  Urban in-country lore had it that one individual was bitten deeply on his cock whilst getting a blow job from a whore, who turned out to be a Viet Cong operative.

He may have gotten a Purple Heart for his action while engaged with the enemy, but you can damn sure bet that the ‘action’ wouldn’t be the same one he disclosed to his people back in  the world!

As to Dickhead, nothing came of the incident of the unmoored barges.  He blamed it on his work crews, failing to take notice of his own supervisory role.

Lifers.  What would the world be without them?  A better place--of that I had not a single doubt.