First Impressions

There are no shadows in Vietnam. The sun is almost directly overhead and the shadows hide under your feet. At home in Minnesota, even at noon the shadows are long and comforting. The sun is much brighter in Vietnam, more intense, and when I stepped off the airplane in Cam Rhanh Bay, I felt exposed.

I had been traveling in my dress blues which were by then badly wrinkled from a flight that had taken nearly 24 hours, and I pulled at my trousers to shake the wrinkles free. I was only a one-striper, but I had to look good.

Squint-eyed and straight-backed, I swaggered across the tarmac and entered a Quonset hut lit by a bare, incandescent bulb swinging slowly on a long chain.

An acidic smell of body odor and jungle rot cut into the back of my nose and burned my eyes. A dozen wet men with mud-blotched faces and tangled hair clenched their rifles holding one finger lightly over the trigger guard, silently watching my movements.

Alert, alive. Alert, alive. No safe place. No safe people.

One man sat on the dirt floor against a pole, M-16 across his abdomen, his face a dead, black-eyed stare. On a boom-box next to him played a song by John Lennon, "Happiness is a Warm Gun."

When a year later I returned to the land of shadows, I brought the stink back with me.