Thomas P. Dunne

Sunrise / Monsoons - I Corps 1967-70

Sunrise I Corps 67-70

I witnessed two or three hundred sunrises and sunsets, many of them breathless in beauty, when there was the breath to spare. At dawn and dusk, the ancient’s time between this world and the unknown, you saw ghosts walking, and often went with them. Ambushes and patrols going out or coming back, if you didn’t do one, you did the other.

Morning would spread softly across the sky and you would marvel at its arrival, and your own, back from the netherworld.

There was nothing soft about the evenings; they just fell, unless you were far up in the mountains above the triple canopy facing the West. Then you got a nice breeze before dark, and if you took the time to look, you would see a panorama that, in any other circumstances, would have been worth the trip. Up there it was cold at night, even in summer, a thirty or forty degree difference between sunset and sunrise.

Once the day left, fog would form in the valleys and crawl up the mountains. In the morning you would be shrouded in mist, among the clouds. Nobody moved until the sun burned it off.

We went a whole month in the rain and had no battle casualties, though four were drowned in the Cam Lo River, and there were two suicides.

Young shirtless man inside his barracks, eating from a can.

Monsoons 67-70

The rest of the time it rained and there was no night or day, just graduations from black to grey and back again.

A daguerreotype world made even more untimely by the timelessness of our surroundings, sandbags that would have been at home at Waterloo, Cold Harbour or the Western Front. Trench lines and bunkers that any soldier since the introduction of the rifling, would have found familiar.

It was, at times, so freaking fantastic and strange, you’d wonder if you were awake or asleep.

During the rainy season monsoon mud made weapons and those who used them ineffective. We went a whole month in the rain and had no battle casualties, though four were drowned in the Cam Lo River, and there were two suicides. Trench foot, jungle rot and malaria made up the difference and our averages never changed. Ten percent a month, dead or gone, whether you woke up or not.

You didn’t have to be good with numbers to figure out you could be killed twice before you went home. Colour film was wasted.

T.P. Dunne S/Sgt
USMC 1966-1972
VVA Chapter320