POVERTY

POVERTY

Now poverty means different things to different people but in my discussion about poverty, I’m talking about having enough quality food to eat, clean water to drink, enough clothes to keep you clean and comfortable and a nice safe place to rest your head at night.  This to me, is the positive side of the borderline of poverty.  However poverty means different things in different countries.  In America, there is no logical reason for practically anyone to stay poor.  If you seek education, work hard, spend your money wisely and spend less than you make, you are bound to prosper.  If you are poor, lazy and inclined to have someone take care of you, you will most likely always remain poor, lazy and inclined to have someone take care of you.  Making excuses about why you are poor is just that excuses.  The secret is to have an aversion to ward poverty so strong that you are motivated to seek out knowledge and work like the devil.  I can’t say that I was born with that aversion but somehow I grew into it.

To stay alive or to help improve the chances of you staying alive, I learned at a later date, that volunteering for anything, while you were in Vietnam was NOT A GOOD IDEA.  I guess you could say that I was lucky.  No, I’ll say it for me.  I am lucky.

But this isn't really about being lucky, brave or scared or any of the things that you might associate with war.  It is about curiosity and compassion. 

The villagers near LZ Ross located in the Quang Nam Province (South Vietnam as it was called back then) were very poor as most of the rural people of Vietnam were at least by American standards.  Before I go any further, I have some credibility upon which to judge the level of poverty one might experience, having grown up in a family of 8, which included my two parents.  As a child, I grew up on a farm, where we had an outhouse instead of a toilet with running water.  We often used Sears Catalog for cleaning up, if you know what I mean.  My mom’s stove was a wood stove and that’s where she cooked for all eight of us.  That meant that the family had to cut their own firewood to heat the stove, just so you know.  And for heat, yeah, we had central heat but the only reason you could call it central heat is because it was centrally located in the very small house that we lived in and the only heat in the house came out of the fire place.  My mom’s washing machine was one of those manual washing machines whose only automation was the wringer which squeezed the water from the clothes as you turned the handle with strong arms.  A flat washboard was placed vertically inside of the “washing machine” which had a  corrugated  or ridged rectangular surface which you used for manually scrubbing the clothes.  For hot water, well, you had to heat cold water that was pumped from an old fashion outdoor hand pump well.  After filling the kettle, pot or what have you with fresh cold water from the well, you had to transport the amount needed for the job to the wood stove, heat it until boiling then transport it back out into the back yard where the “washing machine” stood.  With two of the children still in diapers (yes the old soft cotton type that you used safety pins to bind them to child’s body), the washing machine was used on a very regular basis.  There were no stores to purchase high technology Pampers or such things.  This was back in the age of the dinosaurs; well actually it was back around 1950-1960 when we lived in Husser, Louisiana on a dairy farm.  Our family received not one red cent from welfare or any other government program.  The church didn't provide us with anything either.  We just managed to do without, to endure and to put one foot in front of the other, all without stealing or robbing our neighbors.

When we first moved there, dad had no experience at dairy farming but gave it his best, at first milking a herd of  about 30 “dairy” cows by hand (yes, that means no milking machines, but they did come later).

Breakfast amounted to fresh home-made fried bread and coffee.  No milk for the children or anyone else unless Mom would sneak out to the dairy barn to get her children some needed nutrition which she did on occasion to the ire of dad.  Most of the time, he would just scowl because he knew Mom could only take so much of deprivation, especially when it came to her children.  Anyway, food was scarce.  We didn't have any past experience at farming of any kind.  Neighbors would occasionally lend a hand, plowing a field and helping us plant some peanuts, where we could derive some needed nutrition.  The school I went to was Loranger Elementary School and they actually allowed us to go to school barefoot and I did that on more than an occasion or two, not because I liked it but because I just didn't have any shoes to wear at the time.  My parents weren't made of money and they didn't believe in wasting anything.  Hand me downs were the order of the day.  Hand me downs are clothes that are passed from one sibling to the next as they grew out of them and we shared most everything until they were too tattered to sew or patch a hole.

Now I’m going to stop right now about how I came to be a respectable judge of poverty because I don’t want to stray too far from the story I planned to tell and I don’t want you to think I am sitting on the pity-potty and I don’t want you to do that either for me or my family.  It wasn't all that bad.  Being poor isn't bad, it’s just being poor.  My childhood was filled with enjoyable and memorable things in addition to being dirt poor but rather than go on and on about just how poor we were, I’ll save that for another story and get back to Vietnam.

When we would return from the bush (patrolling the outskirts of the base) after several days we would return to the LZ Ross to rest, write letters and eat in the mess hall where lots of nourishing food and milk waited for us.  We had limited time to eat and drink, so there was no lollygagging allowed.  One thing they taught you in the Marine Corps was not to dawdle.  In Vietnam, people that stayed in one place too long unless immensely fortified, were subject to the enemies’ venom which could come in any form at any moment.  Each day, we would empty the milk that we did not completely drink into a 55 gallon metal drum.  Our paper and plastic would be placed in another drum and our food was scraped into the milk drum making a mixture of milk and food.  When the meal was finished, they would ask for volunteers to guard the Deuce And A Half, which was a M35 truck which carried cargo , men and sometimes was equipped with weapons.  Generally, two trucks would be loaded with the barrels of milk and food and be brought to the village.  The village elders would determine who got which portions.  New guys like me with more curiosity and compassion about how these people lived would volunteer to guard the milk and food.  Now anywhere in Vietnam was hazardous but I didn't volunteer because I was daring, brave or stupid.  I just had an insatiable desire to know how other people lived. 

So, essentially the barrels of mixed food and milk were placed inside the truck, and I would take my M 16 rifle and stand guard next to the drums.  Now you might wonder, why in the world would you need someone to guard this mix of milk and food?  Well, the primary job wasn't to guard the milk and food but to provide protection to the truck in case it was fired upon.  No heavy weapons were mounted on the particular trucks that I rode on. The M 35, 2 ½ ton (deuce and half) trucks that I road on and the drivers had to drive EXCEPTIONALLY SLOW so as to avoid spilling the contents all over the back of the large truck which measured almost 7 meters long and 2 ½ meters wide.  This meant that the truck was an easy slow moving target but thankfully, all of the runs I went on, we were never attacked.  I learned later how volunteering can get you killed but then I was just young, innocent, curious and ignorant about how dangerous of an occupation I had chosen.

As we pulled into the village to offload the treasure, young boys ranging in age from probably 7-11 years of age, would be waving and smiling.  Each was holding a one gallon paint bucket in one hand and waving with the other.  I had been coached about these reprehensible miscreants in advance and knew their tactics.  I also was told it was my job to make sure that NO ONE attempted to climb on board the truck for our safety of course.  Well, my attention was primarily scanning the area for any possible threat with my weapon locked and loaded.  I always carried my rifle on safety, having been taught that from the very beginning of weapons training and having witnessed one of our own guys leaving his weapon off safety, handing his weapon to a friend to help him climb an embankment only to have the weapon go off and shoot him in the chest, killing him on the spot.  Still, I was vigilant for any sign of possible attack.  We were told to move quickly and the truck had barely come to a halt when much to my surprise, these very skinny boys, would hop like monkeys, first onto the hubs of the very high and large wheels, then onto the top of the tires, flinging their one gallon empty paint buckets at the drums of slosh, hoping to get a half gallon of slosh, for what purpose I still to this day don’t know.  I always assumed that the slosh was given to livestock, most likely pigs to eat, but there was such a frantic rush to get the food from the mess hall to the village, I don’t know if the villagers actually ate/drank any of the concoction or not.  As one fleet of foot, skinny-ass kid would move like lightning toward the barrel on one side of the truck, I would make menacing motions, loud grunts and piercing eyes, sometime sweeping the butt of my rifle toward them as if to strike them.  They would dart out of the way as fast as a hummingbird reverses direction without a thought or care of what I did.  As fast as I scared off one kid, another would appear on the opposite side of the truck, quickly dipping his one gallon paint bucket into the barrel of slosh.  It was a game of sorts, repeated over and over until the elders of the village arrived, which only seemed like minutes but was more likely just seconds.  The elders would motion the youngsters away and calm would be the order of the day.  We unloaded the barrels quickly and left without every knowing what they did with those barrels of milk and food.  Coming from a dairy farm, I often wondered if the children who often lived in houses that looked like they were made of sticks, mud, straw and occasionally siding made of coke boxes of all things were actually depending on  this slosh for nourishment.  The ugly truth is as a child, I was far richer than any of these children would ever live to be.  I learned that poverty is only a relative term and poverty doesn't make you a bad person.  It can actually be a fuel to propel you to your life’s dreams as it did me.  When I visit my doctors and nurses, new ones will always ask me if I am allergic to anything and I always reply, “Only poverty.”.

Thanks to one of life’s lessons learned in the tropics of Southeast Asia in a place called Vietnam.

JoeyA