Rain on Me

It’s raining in Daejeon today. The kind of rain you know will last all day. During the rainy season in Korea—장마, changma—the rains settle in for weeks at a time, hanging over the peninsula. The air turns heavy, the sky lowers, and the days take on a slower rhythm, as if everything is waiting for the rain to pass.

One thing I’ve learned about the rain in Korea is that it has a personality.

 

Sometimes it comes in steady, quiet sheets, soft enough that you don’t notice it at first until the streets begin to shine and the sidewalks darken. Other times it arrives sideways, pushed by gusts of wind rushing down from the hills, umbrellas tilting and bending as people lean into it and keep moving. It lingers. It fades. It returns. You begin to feel as though it’s not just weather, but something moving through the day with its own mood.

 

And whenever it rains like this, I sometimes think about a very different kind of rain.

Back when I was stationed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama, I worked in the After Hours Support Unit in the 24th Supply Squadron. It was a sweet assignment—one day on, three days off. During the week, it meant a sixteen-hour shift, from four in the afternoon when supply shut down until eight the next morning. On weekends or holidays, it stretched into a full twenty-four hours. You stayed close to the phone—or carried a Motorola radio if you went to the chow hall—waiting for something to come in.

The job was simple enough on paper. Whatever supply handled during the day, I handled at night: take the request, grab a truck, head to the warehouse, pull the item, and deliver it. If it was a priority tied to mission readiness—and sometimes it was—you had thirty minutes. Most of the time, though, it was routine.

One lazy Saturday afternoon, I was stretched out in the supply office when maintenance called in a request for a radome for a C-130—the large, black, cone-shaped covering for the radar on the nose of the aircraft. At the time, Air Force Reserve units rotated their C-130s through Howard for missions in Central and South America, so there was always a steady flow of aircraft coming and going.

I took down the information, checked the inventory printout for the radome’s location, filled out an AF Form 2002, and headed out. The warehouse sat at the far end of the flightline.

The radome arrived packed in a wooden crate about the size of a Volkswagen, and moving it meant climbing onto a massive forklift and hauling it out across the flightline.

The day had been beautiful. The sky was a deep, open blue, broken up by slow-moving white clouds. The air was thick with heat and humidity, the kind that settles on your skin and stays there.

 

I started down the flightline, the forklift chugging along, the crate balanced out in front of me. No hurry. No sense that anything was about to change.

 

At first, I didn’t notice the clouds shifting.

 

But somewhere along the way, the light changed. The blue faded. The white clouds turned gray. I remember glancing up, more curious than concerned, wondering where the sun had gone.

 

Then the sky opened.

 

Not rain the way we usually think of it. Not a steady fall or even a hard shower. This was something else entirely. A wall of water. It came down so fast and so hard that the flightline disappeared. I couldn’t see beyond the forklift. The world shrank to the space around me—the metal frame, the crate, the sound of rain hammering everything at once.

 

There wasn’t anything to do but stop.

 

I shut off the engine and sat there, soaked within seconds, waiting. It lasted maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Long enough to feel like it might not stop.

 

And then it did.

 

Just like that.

 

The rain let up. The clouds broke apart. The sun came back as if nothing had happened. 

 

The sky turned blue again, and steam began to rise from the flightline, lifting off the concrete in thin waves.

 

I was completely soaked.

 

But under that tropical sun, my fatigues started drying almost immediately. By the time I started the forklift again and continued down the flightline, I could already feel the heat pulling the moisture out of the fabric. Ten minutes later, when I reached the C-130 and delivered the radome, I was almost dry.

 

That’s the thing about rain in places like that.

 

It comes all at once. It overwhelms everything. And then it’s gone.

And you realize later—it wasn’t the rain that stayed with you. It was the moment you stood in it.