Sea Stories

Recycling the Mighty Waters of the Mekong River

By Al Bell

Proud to be able to do so in Tibetan Sanskrit syllabary, Chinese characters, and Roman letters, Tönpa Shenrab, the lama, pulled open his robes and began writing his name. The warm yellow stream melted the snow and combined with the water to form a small rivulet coursing down the mountainside.  It was April of 1969 and the snow on this part of the Tibetan Plateau was near the melting point anyway.

            Farther down the mountain, past a pile of yak dung in the rivulet, sat a seven and a half foot tall yeti musing about whether, with better representation, he could have had a career in the NBA.  Ultimately deciding that his thick fur coat would make extended basketball play too difficult, he stood up and wandered off up through the snow to his cave in the mountains.  Sadly, his large footprint, complete with dermal ridges that would have delighted cryptozoologists, filled with water from the growing stream and disappeared.

            Now a brook, the water flowed by a small village where Sherpa women washed their clothes on a large, flat rock.  It was their first opportunity to wash family clothes since the cold autumn several months ago.  The reeking vestments yielded up a soup of bodily excretions and bacterial plaques.  Oil and dirt were carried away by the now brown waters.  The brook passed by village after village now, each making its noisome contribution to the water.

            Entering China, the river passed villages interspersed with towns.  The towns were larger, but too poor to afford sewage treatment facilities.  This pollution did not trouble the simple people, for the waste quickly disappeared in ditches down into the stream.  In Yung-Nan Province of China tributaries added to the stream, and it was then called Lancang Jiang (Turbulent River).  Small factories discharged heavy metallic industrial byproducts into the water to give it color and flavor.  Poisoned by the chemicals, fish floated to the surface and decayed.  Abundant rainfall ensured that the waste storage ponds of the large pig and poultry farms overflowed into the river.

            In Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam the Lancang became the familiar Mekong.  The area there known as the Golden Triangle was the source of much of the illegal opium and heroin production in the world.  Chemical byproducts of that production enriched the growing river.  The Mekong flow slowed in the broad Vientiane Plain, where young Laotian boys washed their carabaos.  Carabaos, indigenous to Southeast Asia, were water buffalo domesticated in the Philippines as far back as pre-Hispanic times and were used by farmers in Southeast Asia to plow the fields.  Rains also overflowed the vast, night soil fertilized rice paddies along the river.  Several gorges and falls prevented navigation and mixed the potent ingredients of the water.

            The Sambor rapids above Kratie in Cambodia were the last to impede navigation.  Merchant freighters below there pumped their bilges into the river before entering Phnom Penh.  In villages along the river from there to South Vietnam, the words for “toilet” are “crap bridge” in their respective tongues because the typical toilet is a small, rickety pier built out over the water.

            Near Tan Chau, a town on the Cambodian-Vietnamese boarder, a U.S. Navy lieutenant lay perspiring in darkness behind the berm of a rice paddy.  He had come to Tan Chau as an advisor on a South Vietnamese LSIL (Landing Ship Infantry, Large).  The LSIL had escorted several merchant ships up the Mekong to the Cambodian border and was then waiting several days for the ships to unload and load cargo before escorting them back down the Mekong and out to sea at Vung Tau on the coast. 

            I was that lieutenant.  Bored with sitting around in a U.S. Army advisors' shack waiting for the ships to return, I had volunteered to go out on ambush with the Army advisor and his Vietnamese Ruff Puffs (Regional Forces and Popular Forces – local South Vietnamese militias).  There had been intelligence that a group of Viet Cong was going to sneak across the border from Cambodia near Tan Chau.  Our mission was to intercept and destroy the VC.

            I had an M-16 rifle and a 45 CAL pistol, but not much else.  The key item that I was missing that all of the soldiers had was a canteen.  The weather was hot and humid, and, by 0300 hours, I was thirsty as hell.  No VC had shown up. It had been a false alarm. 

Sensing my growing distress, a Vietnamese soldier asked me in a whisper whether I would like some water. I replied, “Yes, please!”  Instead of simply handing me his canteen as I had expected, he crawled away into the darkness.  After what seemed forever, he returned with a full glass of water; I mean an honest-to-goodness glass such as one would find in a fine restaurant in Saigon.  I drank the water quickly, ignoring the odd taste.   I couldn’t see the water in the darkness.

 I asked, “Where did you get the water?”  “From the river,” he responded proudly.  Thinking about the interesting 3,000 mile length of the Mekong River, I marveled that I was still alive. 

A couple of hours later, before returning to the advisor shack, I unbuttoned my fly and returned the water to the river.

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