RIPE TAMARINDS CARRY MEMORY BACK TO EARLIER DAYS

By Juan Montoya
It has long been said that the sense of smell is the most persistent in one's memory. When it comes to the smell of ripe tamarinds, it is certainly true.

Way back in another lifetime when I was a member of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children (USMC), I was in a unit called Shore Party.

The Corps, being an amphibious assault force, formed this unit with soldiers from the different Military Occupational Specialties (MOSs). There were infantry (well, in the crotch everyone is  a basic infantryman), motor pool, heavy equipment, communications, medical corpsmen, etc., in our platoon. We wore rectangular red strips on the side of our trousers and covers (caps) so that other troops would recognize we were with that unit during the hectic landing stage.

The idea was that this Shore Party would come ashore ahead of the amphibious force and form the roads and basic infrastructure that the assault force would use to move inland their jeeps and equipment to conduct warfare. In our case, since at the time we were just exercising on Vieques Island in Puerto Rico, it was exercising.

While the assault force was grunting inland, the members of the Shore Party would wait for them to finish their war games and – after two or three weeks later of lying on the island's pristine beaches – we would again load them and their equipment on the LCUs (Landing Craft Utility)  and onto the LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks) and LSDs (Landing Ship Docks).

But for the better part of  a month we spent sunning it up on the beach.

Not far from the shore was a large grove of trees somewhere between a mesquite and an ebony tree without any thorns. When one went under their canopy, you caught a whiff of a tangy ripe tamarind that I used to smell when I walked in the produce area of the mercados in Matamoros. (That and ripe guayabas permeated the air.)

On Vieques Island, what perked my olfactory sense was a large tamarind grove. We quickly learned that if we strung a hammock inside the grove, the breeze coming in from the shore and the sweet tangy smell of ripe tamarindos would lull you to an enjoyable sleep.

Brownsville, I discovered later, also has its fair share of tamarind trees in the barrios. The one above yields bountiful pods of tamarindos that neighbors there say they use to make aguas and that kids eat by breaking the pods. When the wind blows in just the right direction, you catch the fragrant odor of the ripe fruit.

We have long been told that Brownsville is a semi-tropical paradise, but really, it's has more of a semi-arid climate that lends itself to these types of trees and plants. Birds love the city because there is no shortage of food like papayas, citrus, guayabas, anacua berries, and, of course, tamarindos.