This is the short story of being near massive gunfire for the first, and hopefully only time in my life.

Not that I had not seen and heard guns before. Other than hunting with a 22 or my trusty shotgun as a kid on the farm, for food, I had not seen anybody shoot at another human.

Once, while in Rio Bravo, before the projects down there ended, but after the drug cartels became as well armed as the Marinos (govt troops), I was sitting at a stop light, on the way back to a project, with a truckload of lumber from the lumberyard. Approaching the stoplight opposite me, was a Federales Humvee. There was a guy manning the machine gun mounted in the back. He was looking all around, and swinging his gun with his eyes. It was a hard war for the Federales. They had black uniforms, and govt humvees, and were easy to spot. The cartels, on the other hand, could just be some Pedro in a serape, sitting in the shade, with an AK-47 underneath. And it kept the federales nervous. The machine gun stopped moving back and forth as the humvee came to a stop, and centered on me sitting there in my Ford. It was a govt humvee, so I had no reason to fear it, right? Even so, looking at the end of the machine gun barrel pointed at me, made me sit real still, except for the big gulp that I took. I put on a big, tho fake, smile. We sat there waiting for the light to change. I wondered if this was it, the end of my fun life. The gunner, who had a black balaclava on, even in the hot sun, just stared at me.

The troops wore balaclavas because if the cartel guys could see who they were, they would go and kill their family. It was war. Americans never see that.

Just as I was wondering what I should do when the light changed, the humvee jumped forward, and turned down the street to the right and sped away.

Another time, I was in a little park on the main road through Rio Bravo, playing with some kids. There were lots of moms, and a few dads in the park, enjoying the cool evening. Off in the distance, it sounded like someone was shooting off firecrackers. It was the day before new years, and I figured someone had got a jump on the holiday. Nobody was paying any attention. As I played, the sounds kept getting louder, and I knew it was a gunfight. I had just called the kids to come with me, and down the street came a humvee, driving backwards at a great rate of speed. It was firing its machine gun behind it. Everybody freaked out in the park, and ran to dive into the canal behind the park.

I knew what was in the canal, having had the “water” tested about a year ago, and it was nothing that I would ever dive into. It was a hideous concoction of fecal matter, blood from the slaughterhouse up river, and lots of chemicals. I had, in fact, gotten in trouble for testing the canal water, because I asked a chemist friend stateside to test it, and her boss caught her, and raised hell about bringing in a toxic substance without permission.

I corralled the kids, and pushed them down behind a cement bench, just as another humvee came speeding forward, firing its machine gun at the one in front of it. People were screaming and running everywhere. And then it was over, the humvees racing down the road and right through the center of the town still firing.

It was after that, that I wound the projects down. I did not want to have to explain to a volunteer’s mom, that her child had died while doing good works in Mexico.

Maybe a year and a half later, I was driving back to the colonia from the big grocery store in town, with food for supper, and two girls in my pickup truck. We turned down the street at the aforementioned park on the way home. It was just after sunset. As I passed the park, three state police cars came speeding in, corralling a dusty Ford pickup. The police jumped out of their cars, and started firing their pistols at the pickup. If I had been 3 seconds later in passing, I would have been right in the middle of the bullets. I floored the truck, and sped to the railroad tracks which ran through the middle of the colonia where the girls lived, and keeping my foot on the gas, drifted a left turn, and sped down the gravel road between the tracks and the houses, and raced down to the girls house, and we jumped out, and ran into their house. We were all shaking.

The next day as I left the colonia to come back to Austin, I encountered a guy I knew well, and stopped to talk with him. He told me the story. The state police had forced the pickup truck into the park because they thought it was a cartel guy driving. They shot 150 bullets into the truck, killing the driver and his truck. But, oops, it turned out that it was not a cartel guy like they thought. It was a young man coming home from engineering classes at the local university. Now deceased.

That was why when I got home that afternoon, I messaged the girls and told them that I would not be coming back to Rio Bravo for the foreseeable future. Life is just too cheap down there.

In awe of girls who can live and study in a war zone.  

Very angry with assholes who can shoot up school children here stateside.