Foxhole

1

We are talking now of summer evenings...in that time when I was so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

James Agee, A Death in the Family

1949

When I was a boy, only seven or eight years old, I had a hard time keeping up with my grandfather's long strides across the rows of recently planted corn. My grandfather was a very tall man who wore a suit, tie, wingtip shoes and a fedora hat even as he walked his fields. He was so tall he could keep an even pace by walking at a diagonal, each step going from row to row at just the right length. At that age my legs weren’t long enough to walk that way. To follow Papaw I had to walk along a row for a step or two and then hop across to the next.

This was Arkansas River bottomland on the north side of the river not far from Van Buren. One side of the field was bounded by a grass-covered levee. The other boundary of the 300 acre plot was a sinuous ox-bow lake, a dark and forbidding slough where I could hear strange birds shouting, see squirrels dancing through the trees and other, more mysterious, shapes moving in the shadows.

In the fields the sun was high and there was no shade. From time to time Papaw reached down to pick up a clump of the land. He crumbled it as he talked to his hired man, his field boss. He sniffed the dirt and rolled it into dust between his fingers. They talked of rain and seasons, of plans for turning the earth and harvesting the crops. 

I copied my grandfather’s gesture. I took a clump of dirt from the top of the row. It pulled off like the crust of a pie and was flat in my hand, tan on the top and dark brown underneath. Picking up the clump exposed darker soil and I saw a tiny, pale green spike of corn just peeking out. I imagined the seedling squinting at the sudden light because I’d pulled his cover off. Still holding the clod in my hand I crouched down and looked along the row. I saw an irregular shifting of the surface — other spikes were pushing the ground upwards. Down that low I smelled the damp coolness.

As Papaw had done, I crushed the slab of dirt in my hands and let the grains flow out between my fingers. Then, just like Papaw, I brushed my hands together. Unlike him, I then wiped them on the seat of my jeans.

That was the same summer I learned the world was round and that China was on the other side. Like many a child before me, and since, I was puzzled at how all those Chinese could walk around upside down. I decided to go through the earth to see them. I used Mamaw’s gardening spade. I chose a spot in the back of her garden and went down into the earth. I was going to go all the way to China.

I learned in that afternoon something about sculpting holes in the ground. It was grainy, well-packed soil. A few kicks on the edge of the spade drove it easily into the earth. The dirt lifted out and fell from the spade without protest. The shovelfuls, tossed on the side of the hole, made a mound that grew tall as I went down. I learned that starting with a small hole meant I could not get very deep before I couldn’t get the shovel out. To go deep I had to also go wide. Eventually I even had to move some of the dirt I’d already taken out of the ground. To go deep, the hole had to be at least as wide as my body and as long as the handle of the spade. 

My hands began to hurt. I spit on them and they felt better.

This was summertime in Van Buren, Arkansas. When I was waist deep I realized that it was cool down there. It was damp and dark. I took the spade and cleaned up the edges of my little earth-bound box. I sliced away the earlier marks of the spade until the sides were smooth and dark brown. I decided I wouldn’t go all the way to China. It was a nice place just where I was. When I crouched down all I saw was the earth around me and the sky above. It smelled cool and safe.

My grandfather called it a “foxhole,” a word I’d never heard before. I later learned that foxhole was an Army word. But my grandfather had been too young for World War One and too old for World War Two, so even if he had been willing, he had no personal stories of war to tell me. 

But he did tell me stories of a wandering man, a returning soldier, who tricked one-eyed giants and tied himself to a mast so he could listen to women sing seductive songs. My grandfather rode a palomino in the rodeo parade. He hunted quail in the Fall. He taught me how to shoot a shotgun.

At the time I still assumed a foxhole was a place where foxes lived. I had never seen a fox in the wild, but if Papaw said foxes dug holes like mine, then they must. I wondered how they did it without hands and shovels.

Note for new readers:

This is a re-posting of the first entry in this blog from November of 2011. I've learned a bit more about blogging since then. I'm about to do some cleaning up of earlier posts and images and thought that new readers (you lucky few) might like to start at the beginning. A weakness of blogs is that they flow from back to front and you can lose the narrative thread. If you'd like to view Dirt, Blood, and Grace in a linear fashion, then click here to go to the second post of the series, "Becoming an Infantryman."

13 March 2014/2 Dec 2017:

Or to see the entire Dirt, Blood, and Grace as a single file, I have a .pdf of the entire file (a bit of a work in progress) here. Please note the copyright protection on the file.

Grace: Last Day

Roger Blum, 1966

44

Only take heed,

and keep your soul diligently,

lest you forget the things

which your eyes have seen,

and lest they depart from your heart

all the days of your life;

make them known to your children

and your children’s children.

Deuteronomy 4:9

1990

Glancing out of my window, I saw the color detail assembling. This was my last day. My inbox was empty, my outbox was full. There was a cardboard box of with memorabilia on a chair. I stood, picked up my hat, and walked out my office door.

“I’m going to step out for a minute,” I said to my team.

I went outside and stood on the steps of the building, yet another wooden structure built for World War II and scheduled for demolition soon. The uniform of the day was BDUs. I had the sleeves rolled up and was wearing polished black boots. Above the right pocket my name was embroidered. Above the left pocket U.S. Army was embroidered and above that were cloth black jump wings and a black Combat Infantryman’s Badge. My rank, a black oak leaf, was on my right collar and my branch, the crossed rifles on the Infantry, was on the left collar. I put my soft hat on.

I stood looking out over Monterey Bay. The flag pole was at the top of a parade ground that swept down towards the waterfront. A softball game was about to begin on one edge of the field. The setting sun was to my left and shards of light glinted on the water’s surface far below me. In the distance I could hear the barking of sea lions. I heard the electronic click of the public address system being switched on up in the Headquarters building behind me and the soft static as someone, probably the duty NCO, waited for it to be exactly 1700 hours. The color detail was positioned by the flag pole across the street from my office. At the first note of the bugle I heard a sergeant on the street bark, “Colors!” at other soldiers walking by. They, and the softball players, and I, faced the flagpole and stood at parade rest.

At the end of Retreat there was a pause of perhaps five seconds, then the bugle began to play To the Colors. I snapped to attention, my body erect and still, and brought my right hand up to the brim of my hat in a salute. The color detail began to lower the flag.

By staying in the Army so long, twenty-five years, I had become more of the infantry than in the infantry. Eventually all I did was write plans and orders, make analyses, and wait in places very far away listening to radios as other men and women were put at risk. I worked in offices most of the time and had to use my imagination to visualize the men that might be out there on point somewhere else in the world.

No one knew better than I that the operations in the Crow’s Foot, over the Wagon Wheel, and others like it, were, in the end, not very important. Nevertheless, over the years I invested significance into them if only because I was there and I was a witness to them. What we, all of us, did was simply what infantrymen do, what they have always done. We went for a walk, heavily armed, and tried to kill other men while keeping from being killed, and owned, for however brief a moment, a piece of dirt.

If I traced back all my life the only morally significant choice I could find on the path that led me to those places, and from there to other bloody places, was the choice to put myself at risk. But I had done it so many times before that it didn’t seem particularly important that I had done it again. More than that, I found it very hard to tease out along the braided chain of causality just why I had made that choice in the first place.

Of course, I had not been alone out on my walk. On this day, as I watched the flag whip in the wind as it was drawn down the pole, all of my fellow infantrymen were volunteers. But it had not always been so. For much of my service most infantrymen were conscripts with ideas of their own about life and the military. In fact, many of my generation had subscribed to the idea that war, all war, did not make sense, and because war did not make sense, wars should not be fought. We were the first, and possibly the last, generation to think so. Nevertheless, once I, and those few of my generation who fought, began to dig foxholes, sweat pouring off our bodies, fear dilating the pupils of our eyes, we would agree that, for the moment, that particular idea was irrelevant.

Of this much I could be sure. We went where we went because we had been told to go. We were ensnared in a web of mutual obligations. This was both our curse and our comfort. By virtue of what I had become, I made choices not only for myself, but choices that brought death to those who were my enemy and to my own men. Just as I was being put at risk by those above me, I risked the lives of the men below me and with me. All I could do to resolve this paradox was to — not resolve it. The best I could do was simply know the paradox was there — accomplish the mission, take care of the troops.

So what would I, or they, have at the end of the day? Well, if nothing else, if we lived, we would have our stories. And that would have to be enough.

A member of the color detail stepped forward and grasped the flag at the exact moment that the last note of the bugle sounded. I dropped my salute and watched him unsnap the flag from its halyard. The rest of the detail dropped their salutes and stepped forward to fold the flag. And then they marched away.

Grace: Holding On

43

Amparo

Amparo,
sitting alone at home,
dressed in white!
(Halfway between the jasmine and the
spikenard.) 

You hear the wonderful water
gushing in the garden,
and the feeble yellow trill
of the canary. 

You see the cypresses, in the afternoon,
trembling with the birds,
while slowly embroidering
letters upon the cloth. 

Amparo,
sitting alone at home,
dressed in white!
Amparo,
how difficult to say:
I love you!

Federico Garcia Lorca

1990

Late at night the fog drifted up from the bay shrouding the twisted cypress and stunted oaks. I let the dogs out for their evening piss and stood at the door as they disappeared into the mist. This night I didn’t really care if they dug up the flower beds, which, like all those I’d planted in so many places, weren’t very successful. I had never stayed any place long enough to get a sense of the soil and the seasons. I whistled and the dogs came back with their coats dampened from the fog. They followed me through the stacks of packing boxes and sprawled on the floor beside me as I sat at my desk and polished my boots. The fog muffled the night sounds and it was so quiet I could hear the faint ticking of my grandfather’s pocket watch. It was probably 80 or 90 years old and was hanging from a brass pin on the wall. It kept pretty good time as long as I remembered to wind it. Every ten years or so I found a watchmaker to clean it. From time to time I took it down off the wall and put it in the watch pocket of one of my few pairs of trousers that had a watch pocket, or sometimes just let it ride along with keys and change in a regular pocket. It seemed to add something to my day. Tomorrow morning I will take it down and carry it with me.

On my desk I had one hell of a letter opener. It was a Randall fighting knife and more than 20 years old. Owning the knife was the result of deep study of the Randall catalog with my fellow lieutenants in Germany. We all knew that we were liable to be sent to a war and we all wanted a good knife, perhaps one of the storied Randalls. I ordered one not long before my orders to Vietnam came through and I was told that it would be a six-month wait. I called Randall while I was in a school at the Special Warfare Center and they put my knife to the head of the list. I picked it up at the same time I was settling my wife in an apartment near Orlando, Florida. The knife had a seven inch blade of very hard, hand-forged steel. The steel was not stainless. Years later as I was swimming across a river in Panama I tasted the water and discovered it was salty. I spent much of the next couple of days using the oil I carried in the butt of my rifle to wipe the blade, but on this day almost 20 years later, the pits in the steel seem to give it character. The top of the blade was sharpened from the tip back about three inches. The knife had a brass double hilt that I polished once every four or five years and it shined back up very nicely. My name was engraved into the blade. The handle was made of a synthetic material called Micarta and had finger grooves for a right-handed person. The knife had never been used for anything more challenging than opening a beer can, whacking bush to make a comfortable place to sleep, or opening a letter. Since I don’t trust the movers, the knife would go in the car with me when I left California.

Above my desk I had a delicate ink drawing. It was maybe sixty years old and was created by a young Cambodian-Chinese boy studying calligraphy in the Cholon part of Saigon. It was essentially an illustrated poem. I had never been able to get a precise translation of the poem, but the calligrapher, by the time I met him an older man living in the Delta village of Lịch Hội Thượng, told me, in French, that the poem had to do with a rock, bamboo, and grass (or maybe orchid) and how a man had to have within himself the qualities of all three. When I first saw the painting in Lịch Hội Thượng I told the artist that the poem reminded me of the children’s game of paper-rock-scissors and I showed him and my interpreter the game. They already knew the game from their own childhoods and we played it a bit, the three of us. There were two of the paintings in the man’s home. Both with the same poem on the right-hand side of the sheet of rice paper, both with quickly drawn hints of rock, grass, and bamboo on the left. In the subtle way such things were done, later in the day I found one of the paintings wrapped in newspaper in the back of my jeep. I was never able to think of an appropriate gift to make in return. I could not think of one years later. There were open boxes for all of the paintings in the house that the packers would fill up the next day. The ink painting would come down and be packed in one of them.

Out in a storage shed next to the carport was a workbench made out of inch and a half thick ash planks. The wood came from a lumber yard in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I and my new wife needed a table for our little student apartment and I thought I could make one. I misjudged the hardness of ash and, instead of hours, it was days of sanding and finishing before I could fit the table together. I attached short legs to the planks and we bought pillows to sit on. I was very proud of that table. 

The Army moved us to Fort Benning, Georgia and we took the table with us. Then we were sent to Worms, Germany, and Aschaffenburg, Germany and on to Wurzburg, Germany. We came back to the U.S. and I moved my wife to Maitland, Florida while I went to Vietnam. Then it was Fort Carson, Colorado where our daughter was born. From there we went to Fort Knox, Kentucky and El Paso, Texas. I drove my family back to Maitland, Florida and went to Vietnam again. Then it was Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We put the table into storage while we went to Quetta, Pakistan and took it back out when we arrived in Detroit, Michigan. We went back to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and then to McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida before we ended up in Monterey, California. Along the way my daughter went to schools in all those places, except for the year in Pakistan where her mother home schooled her. She finished high school in Florida and went off to college in Kansas. Her parents ripped her idea of home away from her and moved to California (and lived in two different houses there). Along the way the table stopped being used as a dining table. First I put it up on taller, much sturdier legs and it was used in various kitchens as a work table. But eventually, after being refinished a couple of times it became a workshop bench. It was now out in the storage shed, from where it will be carried to the moving van.

I once heard a story of a hiker on the Appalachian Trail who proudly showed off a toothbrush he was carrying in his pack. The hiker had drilled holes in it to save weight. Some infantrymen treated their lives like that, doing anything to save weight, keeping their personal belongings to the bare minimum needed to survive the next mission. I wasn’t able, and did not want, to do that. I had, instead, drawn into my life someone who would roam the world with me and by so doing keep me connected with the world. I had the pleasure of raising a daughter who, by her circumstances, did not see the differences in the color of a person’s skin until it was pointed out to her in her late teens. By then it simply could not make a difference. I always had a place to which I could return, not escaping from the infantry, but a place that was almost a part of the infantry, a place that had the whole world between me and the outside.

Very few of our possessions survived all those travels. On that fog-bound night we had set our table with the stainless steel flatware we were given as a wedding present. There was a book or two from the beginning (translations of Spanish poets given for a Valentine’s Day, a ragged copy of The Joy of Cooking) among the hundreds we had accumulated since. In a cedar chest that I made along the way was a wedding dress and a black suit that was hopelessly out of style, but I still thought I could wear. All the rest of our possessions were going into those boxes scattered around the house. Much more had been left behind, put on the street to be picked up, given to our daughter after her marriage, or otherwise simply disappeared. 

We sat at a dining room table bought in Kansas, on German and Danish chairs, ate from German china and drank from Austrian wineglasses. There was a Chitrali rug on the floor and an old Pathan sword hanging on the wall. Also on a wall were pieces of Champa cloth woven in Vietnam and a batik piece from Indonesia. The furnishings of the house were very like those of the other houses in our neighborhood.

The dogs stirred as I finished my boots and got up to wash the polish from my hands. My wedding ring tapped the side of the sink. It had an unusual design and was matched by the one on the left hand of the woman asleep in the room just down the hall. I undressed and slipped into the bed beside her. The dogs took their places at the foot of the bed and settled down with loud, snuffling sighs.

She had shared the pain of my departures and the joy of my returns. I cannot entirely know, except through her letters, what it had been like for her all this time. I knew that throughout we had been together and she was a part of it. And because she was with me she also became separated from the rest of the world around her. In the time that we lived in the high desert of Pakistan, when I was a student at their staff college, we found that we had more to share with the German, British, Ghanaian, Egyptian, Australian, Canadian, and Pakistani military families than we did with those back in a more conventional life. She and my daughter were more at home at a Thanksgiving dinner in the mess hall than a family gathering in North Carolina. I could only guess at the ripples of fear and dread that spread through housing areas as men packed up rucksacks and disappeared into the early morning or the different perspective of one who is on the ground watching instead of being in an airborne drop.

Here in the night, in the warmth of our bed, what mattered was that we were together, had been together, will be together. I reached out to put my arms around her to hold her and she, in turn, reached out and held me.

Grace: Crepe Myrtle

42

Gravedigger

His name is Otis Cox

and the graves he digs with a spade are acts of love.

The red clay holds like concrete

still he makes it give up a place

for rich caskets and poor

working with sweat and sand

in the springing tightness of his hair

saying that machine digging

don’t seem right if you know

the dead person.

His pauses are slow as the digging

a foot always on the shovel.

Shaking a sad and wet face

drying his sorrow with a dust orange white handkerchief

he delivers a eulogy.

Miz Ruth always gimme a dipper of water

Then among the quail calls and blackeyed susans

Otis Cox shapes with grunt and sweat and shovel

a perfect work

a mystical place

a last connection with the living hand.

James A. Autry, Nights Under a Tin Roof

1974

My grandmother didn’t stay in the house on the hill after the passing of my grandfather, but moved to a smaller place not far from her son’s, my uncle’s, house. Her new house had a deep, narrow lot that ran back to a railroad embankment and she put her garden in. For most of the next twenty years she raised her corn, peas, okra, tomatoes, limas, and pole beans. She had a peach tree that, if there wasn’t a late frost, produced fruit as sweet as any I ever tasted.

I usually spent part of my summers with her. I didn’t stay as long or as often as when I was younger, but enough to get to know the neighborhood and accumulate a stash of comic books in a closet and toys in the garage. When I got older I discovered among my grandfather’s books an edition of Homer, B.A. Botkin’s collection of American folklore, and Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I  was to wonder ever after how much of these I knew from my own reading and how much had simply seeped in sitting on porch swings on summer nights.

I was in school at the University of Arkansas up in Fayetteville when Kennedy was killed. With my new wife I drove down through the Boston Mountains and watched the funeral on my grandmother’s television. 

Siting with her that day in 1963 and remembering her age, I asked her if the event was anything like her memory of the McKinley assassination. She said that she’d just been a girl and she didn’t think it made much news at the time. She didn’t really remember it. They certainly didn’t hear about it quickly since they didn’t get a newspaper. And it was before radio. Maybe the news came out by train. What she did remember was the reaction to Roosevelt’s death. But she didn’t want to talk about that either.

The stately horses that pulled the caisson and the prancing black horse with reversed empty boots in the stirrups has stayed in my memory. Much of those days has stuck in my memory. King’s eloquence of the previous summer, the open-mouthed gasp of Oswald as Jack Ruby’s bullet tore through his gut, the rumors and realities of new substances spreading to the east from the west — LSD and peyote, freakish chord changes in guitar solos, the brave white civil rights activists suddenly encountering their own draft status and finding a new and different cause.

But I never had the occasion to ask my grandmother about those disorienting changes.

When my cousin called me to tell me my grandmother had died, I was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. With my wife and daughter I traveled to Arkansas. My older brother, in the Air Force, came up from a base in Texas. My younger brother, just out of the Navy, came up from Florida. My parents came from Florida. My cousins, in Fort Smith and Van Buren, met us at the airport. 

The funeral was much smaller than the one I remembered for my grandfather. The circle did not complete itself until I stood at the grave. The rectangular hole in the ground must have been blasted and then shoveled out. My infantryman’s eye saw the shards of stone and the loose dirt hidden by a tarp. My older brother and I had decided to wear our uniforms and the sunlight flashed off badges and ribbons as we listened to a preacher, who obviously didn’t know our grandmother at all, read from the books of Job and John.

Crepe myrtle is an interesting plant. It will grow as either a bush or a tree, depending on how it is pruned when young. It is an exotic, originally found only in Asia. These days it is common throughout the South. It begins to bloom near Easter time in Florida, but waits almost until mid-July in Arkansas before its red or white blossoms break out. Later in the year, each year, it will shed a layer of bark and will look, for several weeks, a lot like the mottled camouflage of an infantryman’s field uniform. In my youth my grandmother’s street was lined with them.

Next to the grave was a crepe myrtle tree. Probably the same one the bee had been visiting when my grandfather was buried. Now it was considerably larger and spread irregular shadows over the grave and the mourners. It was past blossoming time and the bark was beginning to slough away in loose strips that hung from the trunk. 

It was not part of the ritual for us to watch the casket into the grave. Instead the words were said, a benediction was pronounced, and we all walked away back to our cars. The empty rectangular hole was behind us, up under the crepe myrtle, waiting for the casket to be lowered.

Grace: Thanksgiving

"Thanksgiving in camp sketched Thursday 28th 1861,” by Alfred R. Waud. Library of Congress.

41

For themselves they were a self-contained universe, a sub culture with its own routine, its own ceremonies, its own music and dress and habits; that whole tedious but obsessive way of life known as ‘soldiering’....

Michael Howard, War in European History

1974

It was Thanksgiving Day. I was commanding an infantry company and I was participating in one of the rituals of my trade. The company was gathered in the mess hall, a wooden building built during the surge of construction in the 40’s. That era’s buildings were all alike and I had lived and worked in them, and would live and work in them, for years. The building was heated by coal-fired boilers’ steam. The company’s First Sergeant meticulously maintained a duty roster of fire guards whose sole task was to spend their windblown winter nights walking from boiler to boiler looking for the fire which, if it came, could sweep through these buildings in a storm of heat and light. Outside a late fall wind rattled the loose window panes.

The mess hall was bedecked with crepe paper streamers and I was in my dress blues. In that time I had three dress uniforms — dress blues, mess blues, and mess whites. The uniforms were, all of them, anachronistic, of another time, of almost another century. I wore a white shirt with a black four-in-hand tie. If it had been evening time, I would wear a bow tie, also black. My trousers were royal blue with a broad yellow stripe down the side. They did not have front pockets, but they did have a watch pocket along the waistband where I carried my grandfather’s Illinois pocket watch. My coat, my “blouse,” was dark blue with shoulder boards encrusted with gold braid. Insignia made of tightly coiled silver wire designated my rank on a light blue background. The light blue background declared me to be an infantryman. On my lapels were pinned small brass and highly polished crossed rifles that also declared me to be an infantryman. I had gold buttons on my coat that could be removed for polishing (and to keep the dry cleaners from screwing them up). I had a plastic name tag on the flap of my right breast pocket and above that the ribbons my unit had been awarded for various campaigns in various wars over the years. On the flap of the left breast pocket were my silver jump wings, polished for this occasion, and above the pocket were the rows of ribbons that I had been awarded. Above the ribbons was my Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

This was my mess hall and I was obligated to be there on this day. The cooks had been there since well before daylight preparing the meal. An immense variety of food — turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, rolls, salads, vegetables — was about to be placed on the serving line. My four lieutenants, also in their dress blues, and also with the light blue inserts in their shoulder boards, were present. I held the hand of my young daughter. She shone with innocence and beauty in her red gingham dress. She burbled with laughter and shook the ribbons in her hair. My wife stood nearby and kept an eye on her as she chatted with the wives and girlfriends of my officers and men. 

The First Sergeant’s dress blues were a resplendent display of gold stripes that almost covered his arms from shoulder to elbow. He was being watched very carefully by the mess sergeant, since it was the First Sergeant’s opinion that really mattered that day. The rest of the sergeants and all of the soldiers were in Class A uniforms of green wool. Sergeants were not required to have dress uniforms and none except the first sergeant had them. Light glanced off polished brass buttons and spit-shined shoes. A few of the sergeants had collections of ribbons and badges (one or two with quite a few more than I) but most did not.

The chaplain stood beside me. The inserts in his shoulder boards were black, the color of the chaplain corps. He had small crosses on his lapels, which meant he was either Protestant or Catholic; a Jewish chaplain would have had Stars of David. Behind me, near the entrance, was a small table for our dark blue hats with their golden eagles attached.

The real color in the room came from the dresses of the wives and girlfriends and the holiday garb of the children swirling about and spilling the punch from the bowl on a side table set with an elaborate display of fruit and nuts. The music came from a hi-fi. Steam billowed out of the kitchen. This was all, for the length of my command, mine. The cooks delivered the filled pans of food to the serving line. I asked the Chaplain to say grace. The Chaplain stood to the front of the room and the First Sergeant said, in a voice that easily carried over the noise and clamor, “At Ease!” The room was instantly quiet, even the children. Someone took the needle off the record. The Chaplain offered a brief prayer. The meal began.

Army ritual and custom demanded that sergeants and officers eat after the men, so I and my family were the last through the line. The mess crew was sweating and proud of what they had done in the early-morning hours. They made sure the “old man” and “his lady” were served well.

We joined a table of privates and junior NCOs. One very young wife cooed over my daughter, but the rest were uncomfortable around the “old man.” That was appropriate, that was the way it was supposed to be. 

I was only able to have a few bites before the mess hall echoed with a shouted “At Ease!” that was quickly followed by a brisk “As you were!” from a different voice. I looked up to see that the Battalion Commander and his family had arrived, making their rounds of the battalion’s mess halls. I went to greet them. I introduced them to the First Sergeant and his Japanese wife and, at the commander's urging, returned to my meal. They made their way from one long table to another shaking hands and chatting before leaving with a shouted, “Happy Thanksgiving!”

I noticed how very diverse and “American” the room was. One of the cooks was from Mexico and went to special pains to introduce his wife and six children. His English was barely comprehensible and his wife had none at all. Other wives were German, Korean, and Japanese. In a few more years I expected that some of them would be Vietnamese. The men were of all shapes and skin colors. What they had in common was their fitness and, except for the First Sergeant and the Supply Sergeant, their youth. I could take this group of men and turn out an above-average softball team, a so-so flag football team, a not-very-good basketball team, or a brigade-championship volleyball team. They could march twenty-five miles a day for day after day after day — and had done so. They were above average in a bar fight — or so I’d been given to understand.

The really interesting thing was that I could take these men, even into the somewhat civilized former farmlands of the training area, and disappear. We could fade into the landscape. The process would be a stripping down. It would be a peeling off of the badges, the gold and the blue cloth, and anything else that caught the light. It would be a building up of layers of clothing that were baggy and mottled in shades of green and brown. It would be a fastening and taping of everything metal so that nothing clinked or rattled. It would be taking creams and putting them on their hands and faces and necks to mottle and change the reflectivity of the skin. It would be, finally, a stillness.

Or we could be sent to a piece of ground, a piece of dirt, and claim it. We could position our rifles, our machine guns, our mortars, our anti-tank weapons. We could register artillery. And we could dig our foxholes and clear our fields of fire. We would establish our lines of communications to the left and to the right. We would own that dirt. That is what infantrymen do.

This day was the other side of that. This day was the glitter and badges. These men who were like peacocks in their displays in front of their women and children were the same men who would glide silently in the night or dig like foxes into the ground. They must be the same men. It all somehow fit together and made sense.

Grace: Homecoming

40

Si monumentum requiris circumspice

(If you wish to see his monument, look about you) 

It signifies that those who desire to behold a proper memorial to Kurban Sahib must look out at the house. And, Sahib, the house is not there, nor the well, nor the big tank which they call damns, nor the little fruit-trees, nor the cattle. There is nothing at all, Sahib, except the two trees withered by the fire. The rest is like the desert here — or my hand — or my heart. Empty, Sahib — all empty!

Rudyard Kipling, A Sahib’s War

1973

At the end of my second tour I left Sóc Trăng and traveled to the out-processing center outside Saigon. On the morning of January 31, 1973 I was lying on a steel-framed cot under an olive green mosquito net. There were a couple hundred other men like me staying in one-story buildings inside the fenced compound. Giving up on trying to sleep, I grabbed my shaving kit, slipped on my flip-flops and walked to the latrine to shave and shower and get dressed for my trip back to The World.

Through sheer happenstance, or a very odd kharma, my DEROS — date of reassignment from overseas, 365 days from the moment I’d been ordered to be in country — was also the official date of the cease fire agreed to by the United States, the Republic of South Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. I felt oddly detached from this coincidence of history, except that it did have some small effect on me: As I’d left my team I had had no one to whom I could transfer my duties. I was just leaving, in fact, I was one of the last to leave.

Back from the latrine, I stuffed my shaving kit into the top of my duffle bag that was filled with bits and pieces of the preceding year. On the floor beside my bunk were the shoes that only a few days earlier had been covered with mildew. Now they had a high polish thanks to one of the Vietnamese hooch maids back in Sóc Trăng that would soon be out of a job. A cotton khaki uniform was hanging from the mosquito bar, freshly laundered and stiffly starched. Light glinted from the Combat Infantryman’s Badge and polished jump wings pinned to the shirt. All around me men like myself were finishing their packing or sitting on their cots, stunned to numbness by the reality that they were going home, back to The World. They did not reflect on why they were going home.

I felt uneasy about what I would not be putting on that morning, by what I was not wearing. I would feel that uneasiness for weeks, months. There was no .45 and knife to strap to my belt. The .45 had been turned in and the knife was deep inside the duffel bag. I’d thrown away most of my jungle fatigues and all except one pair of my jungle boots. Most of the green underwear was also gone. 

I put on a clean white t-shirt and white boxer shorts, put on my new sunglasses and strolled outdoors still wearing my shower shoes to smoke a cigarette. It felt odd to stand in the sun without either a helmet or my jungle hat on my head. The heat beat down on packed earth, but I didn’t notice it. My hands were free. I had no M-16 to carry or hang from my shoulder. My ears — trained to filter messages from the whispering hiss of radios, alert to the metallic click of a rifle bolt, the snap of a branch breaking, the slithering snick of a booby trap, the distant whop whop whop of helicopters — could make no sense of the normality of flight announcements, rock and roll radio, howling jet engines.

I went back inside and put on my uniform. It would be very rumpled before this day was done. In a pile on my cot was a pile of crumpled paper money, Military Payment Certificates, fake dollars in lurid colors, and Vietnamese đong. They had no meaning for me. They were currencies for an economy that no longer existed, except in my mind.

As an infantryman, in this place I could not stand. Whatever small victories I and the men I’d worked with had won; whatever small hamlet I had once walked through like a king, safe and secure; whatever we had earned was now spent and was as worthless as these torn and frayed scraps of paper. I had filled up my foxhole and moved on. And now I was without even my team. These men around me, even though they were in the same uniform, were not my brothers. They were just waiting for the ride home.

The loudspeaker announced my flight. I hoisted my duffel bag and left.

Victory in battle ultimately comes down to a small group of men, usually an infantry squad, possessing a place on the earth. What is extraordinary is how men responsible for the conduct of war, who once may have known this truth, seem to lose sight of it. At the end of December 1944, little squads of men owned the dirt in the Ardennes. When the truce was declared in Korea, each point in the irregular line across the peninsula was owned by infantry squads. After its great sweep across southern Iraq in 1991, the tanks of VII Corps idled their engines. The Bradley fighting vehicles drew up alongside, dropped their ramps, and infantry squads rushed out. Those men stood on the ground not far from the banks of the Euphrates and declared by their presence that they owned the land. In every case they knew, or would come to know, that they would eventually leave. But they could all, each of them, remember that moment and know that they had done their jobs, accomplished the mission. Almost twenty years later it would happen again.

Hours and hours and hours later I stepped out of the hatch of the chartered jet airliner and was stunned by the bright California sunlight. Near the bottom of the metal stairs was a cluster of television cameras recording this first flight of soldiers coming home after the cease fire. My ears cleared from the depressurization and the reporters’ shouted questions seemed to bounce off the concrete and slap me in the face. Behind the chain link fence at the terminal were men and women, boys and girls, waving signs scrawled with obscenities and symbols. I stumbled slightly on the last step down to the concrete and it disoriented me. My head went skyward and I momentarily felt as if I had just hit the ground and was looking for fellow paratroopers. I felt a shivering fear that I must have jumped out all alone. I was on the ground and I could not see my squad, my platoon, or my company. My men were not gathering about me. We were not coming together on the ground to protect each other. I turned and turned and looked for them, but they were not there. 

I pushed past the reporters and went into the terminal where I found my duffel bag and got a shuttle to San Francisco International. As I had been advised, the first thing I did at the airport was find a men’s room and change out of my uniform into civilian clothes. 

I have never quite forgiven them, my country, even elements of my Army, for that day. I wondered later when I finally visited the memorial if anyone understood that it was, at least for me, anger and resentment that motivated me to donate my money and effort to its creation. I wanted the memorial to tell those television crews and demonstrators, and those bastards who’d called my wife in the middle of the night while I was gone, and the sonofabitch who’d bragged to her about how much money he was making on the war as she flew to meet me in Hawaii in the middle of one of my tours, to go to Hell — we will remember our comrades.

At that moment, however, it was more important that I was going home. I flew to my family and took them with me back to the infantry.

Grace: Filled With Grace

Vendor, Dalat, Vietnam, Photo Courtesy of The Cape Club

39

Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end. Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Saviors of God

1972

They sent me up out of the Delta to Đà Lạt. Maybe they thought I needed a break. Maybe it had something to do with my time in country. Or maybe I was just on some roster kept somewhere and my name came up. I packed my AWOL bag with an extra uniform, clean socks and underwear, spare ammunition, and went where I was told to go. This was not an operation, so under the loose jungle fatigue shirt I wore only my .45 and a knife. Instead of a helmet I wore a floppy jungle hat with the three lotus-blossom symbol of my rank. 

I was driven to Cần Thơ where I caught a ride on an Air America C-47. I strapped in and they took off. The Delta began to flow below me, the flatness marked by irregular stream beds and the ruler-straight canals. The long flight took me over the rubber plantations of III Corps and up into the soft-looking mountains surrounding Đà Lạt.

The airstrip was set on a small plateau. As we turned on the final approach I saw the orderly rows of crops, very different from the rice paddies I was used to. Ambitious Vietnamese truck farmers were raising produce for the Americans scattered up and down the country. But on the drive in there were the same black-eyed water buffalo and their child herdsmen.

I was driven through the town where the streets were filled with a frantic clutter of bicycles and cyclos, past fragrant marketplaces and up to an old resort hotel. When I stepped out it was as if I had fallen into a Somerset Maugham story. A porter grabbed my bag and led me up a wide set of stairs and into a high-ceilinged lobby. Broad-bladed fans hanging far overhead slowly turned. I walked on wide planks of polished wood through a room defined by upholstered furnishings, oriental carpets, brass ash trays and potted palms. Small men in starched white coats scurried about. A distinguished-looking Vietnamese man dressed in black noted my reservation and room assignment. He gave the porter an old fashioned key attached to a wooden fob that reminded me of the tops I used to spin on my grandfather’s driveway.

A stately four-poster bed dominated my room, the diaphanous mosquito netting rippled from the air blown by a ceiling fan and swayed in the breeze that came through a tall open window. The view from that window was of a green lawn and the peculiar spindly trees left behind when the jungle was cleared. In the near distance were green rumpled hills. 

My dinner was sautéed trout, new potatoes, and fresh green beans, with ripe strawberries and cream for dessert. On the veranda after dinner I felt out of place in my loose green fatigues smoking unfiltered Luckies. I thought I should be in a white linen suit and smoking a thin black cheroot or perhaps an Algerian briar pipe filled with a blend of cured Virginia tobaccos flavored with latakia and perique. The conversation should have been of the fate of Empires, the British or the French or, for the older Southeast Asia hands, the Dutch. Or of rubber production and markets, of shopping trips to Paris, of tigers bagged or Eurasian women available to share one’s room. Instead, even though the coffee was strong and French, the conversation was about Provinces and Corps, VC infrastructure and HES reports, of time in-country and DEROS, of the status of peace talks and the Vietnamese response, of the prospects for promotion and the possible location of the next war, the next place for us.

As I watched, the sky shifted abruptly from a cloud-streaked blue to purple, then black. In the very far distance a flare blossomed and drifted down over the forest. It reminded me of where I was, the time I was in, as I sipped my coffee and smoked my cigarettes.

The conference was just for one day. So I only had two evenings on the cool veranda before I stuffed my underwear and spare ammunition back into my bag and was driven back to the airstrip. This time my ride to the south was in an old C-123, the two-engined predecessor to the C-130. I got on board by walking up the ramp that dropped down at the back and took a seat along the side. Pallets were strapped down the length of the cargo bay, a shipment to the Americans at Cần Thơ and elsewhere in the Delta.

The engines were running. Over them I heard the high-pitched whine of the electric motor for the ramp. The ramp rose up and shut out the sky until with the final thump I was enclosed in a noisy darkness broken only by the light from the scattered port holes. 

My nostrils flared and filled with the scents flowing from the lashed-down pallets. They were loaded with the produce from the fields nearby. In the coolness and darkness around me were lettuce, strawberries, cucumbers, cantaloupes, and watermelons. I breathed in deeply, again and again and again, not even noticing that we had left the ground.

Grace: Funeral

38

“Well, well, grandfather, I hear you’re a hundred years old. Tell me, how has life seemed to you these hundred years?”
 He looked up with inflamed, lashless eyes.
“It’s like a glass of cold water, my child.”
“And are you still thirsty, grandfather?”
 He raised his hand high, as though to call down a curse. “Damn whoever isn’t,” he said.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

1951

The First Baptist Church was a large, yellow-brick building not far from the center of town. It was filled with people. The men wore suits. The women were in somber dresses, dark hats, and gloves. The size of the crowd didn’t surprise me. I thought everyone knew my grandfather, and everyone did. The coffin was in front and just below the pulpit. We, the family, were slightly off to one side. Everyone in the family was there, including a lot of people I didn’t know. Aunts and an uncle, parents, brothers and first cousins I knew. However, my grandmother’s sister had six married children. The great uncle and aunt, second cousins and their spouses, and the whirlpool of their children were not even names to me, but they brought memories of a house in the country with high ceilings, a hammock on the porch, and guinea fowl running free in the yard.

I sat in the row with my brother and between my grandmother and my mother. Brother Anthony stood in the pulpit and preached salvation. He always preached salvation, at least every Sunday in the summer when I was visiting Arkansas. About the only thing Brother Anthony left out was the Invitation and that was probably only because the rededicated would have to walk around the flower-covered casket to get to the preacher. He did, at last, speak of my grandfather and I felt some of the tension, the angriness slip out of my grandmother. She never liked Brother Anthony. Still, she kept in place her purse-lipped expression I knew so well.

I passed the time looking at the flowers and watching the men in dark suits at the back who had seated all the people and handed out the printed folders that listed the hymns and the pallbearers and named the survivors. Survivors. I wondered what that meant. I was thrilled to see my name right there, in print.

The church was nice and cool. Even so all the older women in the congregation were slowly waving their funeral home fans. This was the only place in Van Buren I knew of that had air conditioning, except for the Bob Burns movie theater (for the twenty-five cents from my grandfather I could watch Lash LaRue, Superman, Zorro and Roy Rogers on Saturday afternoons from the front row of the balcony seats).

When it was over they all sang Amazing Grace without even having to open the hymnals. By this time I was looking forward to another ride in the long black Cadillac with the little seats, just my size, that folded down in back of the front seat where the man in the black suit sat and drove the car. But first we had to stand on the sidewalk and watch the men carry the coffin out to the hearse that looked just like the ambulance except that it was black and didn’t have a red light on top or sirens on the fenders.

When that was done we got into the Cadillac and rode in a great parade to the cemetery. Men walking on the street stopped and took their hats off as the parade passed. Cars coming the other way pulled off the road and waited for us to go by. My mother and grandmother sat across from me on the plush gray seats, holding each other’s gloved hands, their eyes barely visible behind the veils hanging down from their hats.

The sun was bright and hot at the cemetery and I wished I had a hat to wear. But the only hat I had was an old floppy straw cowboy hat that my mother wouldn’t let me wear with my suit, the suit that once was my brother’s and that had sleeves that were too long. All the adults sat down in folding chairs beside the coffin resting over the big, deep, dark and cool-looking hole in the ground. I read the names of Floyd and Ruth on granite stones nearby. Brother Anthony began to talk and pray again. I watched a bee hovering over the blossoms of a small crepe myrtle.

* * * * *

For days after the funeral it seemed the house was always full of people. I wasn’t really wanted in there, getting in the way of my grandmother and Juanita and the constant flow of well-dressed people carrying casseroles and sitting and talking — I’d have to be still or at least quiet. Instead, I spent my time down at the packing shed where my uncle was keeping the business going.

I didn’t mind, especially when the boxcars were being loaded and iced down. I loved all of that: the rumbling of the switch engine when it backed a car in; the metal on metal screech of the wheels braking on the rails; the slamming open of the doors; the clatter of the rollers as the boxes went down the conveyor from the shed to the car; the big men in thick leather gloves wielding ice tongs; the howling of the ice crushing machine when one of the child-sized blocks of ice was dropped in; the rushing sound at the end of the hose as the ice flew across the stacked boxes of produce. Best of all was the smell. It was strawberries or tomatoes or spinach or cantaloupes or watermelons or corn or beans and all, all smelled of green.

One time a packer caught me there, standing just inside the door of the boxcar being very still, sniffing the air like a pointer snuffling for quail. They were loading loose spinach leaves into containers in the car. The packer caught me up and carried me, laughing and shrieking, to the beginning of the packing line where the spinach from the fields was being washed and sorted. The packer tossed me into the bin with the dirty spinach and I rolled down through the chute, getting sprayed with water and tumbled about, and surrounded with the smell. The packer caught me at the end of the line.

“Can I go again?” I remember asking. “Please, please?”

Grace: Crow's Foot

Photo courtesy of  South East Asia - Hidden Riches of a Colonial Past

37

We master archers say: with the upper end of the bow the archer pierces the sky, on the lower end, as though attached by a thread, hangs the earth. If the shot is loosed with a jerk there is danger of the thread snapping. For purposeful and violent people the rift becomes final, and they are left in the awful center between heaven and earth.

Eugene Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

1969

The Crow’s Foot was southeast of Pleiku. It was called the Crow’s Foot because on a map three blue lines representing streams in three valleys merged into a single blue stream, all of them running to the south. That is, on a map it looked like the footprint of a bird. It was just the local American name for the area, and not the only place like it in the country. Even the name was used elsewhere, so that when I told my stories in later days I had to say, “This Crow’s Foot was southeast of Pleiku,” and my listeners would get a rough idea of where it was.

The operation was sort of an experiment. Regular U.S. Forces were given a sector. Regular Vietnamese forces had a sector. And on one flank the local militia units, Regional Forces/Popular Forces or “Ruff-Puffs”, were cobbled together into a battalion and given a sector. At the level of the colonels and the generals it had all the common elements of any decent-size operation: estimates of who and where the enemy might be; lists of units participating; assignments of sectors and objectives drawn on maps; timetables and routes of movement; bound booklets of radio frequency assignments and call signs; and all the rest. At every level and within each level this was expressed in the same five paragraph format, even when it was in different languages. The higher the level, the more pieces of the plan that were put in writing, typed on paper or mimeograph stencils, and drawn on semi-transparent sheets of paper. At the lowest level it was a group of soldiers standing around a sergeant who drew the plan in the dirt and told each man where he was to go and what was expected of him.

The plan was much, much more than just the infantrymen who were out on the points of the arrows spread across the maps. First, and most important, were the schemes for the entire array of indirect fire weapons. Those plans began with the infantry units’ own mortars that we carried with us and would set up and move and set up again as we made our way into the Crow’s Foot. Positioned behind all the infantry units at distances appropriate to their caliber and range were the artillery pieces. These were towed or driven into position. They would be “surveyed in” so that they knew exactly where they were on the ground and in relationship to each other. And, more importantly, where they were in relationship to us infantrymen. The artillerymen would unload some of their ammunition and sort it by type and then, sweating in the heat, drinking water from their canteens and Lister bags, wait. Near them were the mathematicians and geometers, the men who plotted on maps and computed from tables the angle and direction of fire and amounts of propellant needed to launch an explosive shell that would land at the right time and place.

Back near the main road was a small group of M-48 tanks. Almost never in all the years we were in Vietnam was there a time when the terrain, the roads, and the enemy location were right for the use of these monsters, these war chariots, but maybe this time. So the tankers tested their radios and their engines, their main guns and their machine guns, and waited.

Flying orbits overhead were FAC’s in their quiet little airplanes. They were looking down at the ground and talking to Air Force command posts and aircraft waiting on airstrips much further back. They were working together to make educated guesses about what kinds of weapons might be the most useful.

Whistling very high in the sky, and very far away, en route from an island in the Pacific Ocean was a flight of B-52 bombers scheduled to deliver an ARCLIGHT into the center of a rectangle drawn near the Crow’s Foot. That was to be the overture, so to speak, of the concerto. Cynics, that is to say the infantrymen in the process of getting off of helicopters or jumping down from the backs of trucks and some of the more jaded staff officers still back in Pleiku, would make the allegation that the Air Force must have been the low bidder on an Army contract to dig a bunch of swimming pools out in the middle of nowhere.

Also in the sky were command and control helicopters. These were filled with radios and the superior officers of the men on the ground. Their place in the sky gave them something of a God’s eye view of the operation. Best case, they had the ability to shift artillery fires and air strikes to exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Worst case, they had a deceptive illusion of control, of being in absolute charge of the men on the ground.

Even further back, near the base camps of the units involved and not very far from the Air Force units, were caches of ammunition, water, fuel, and food for the men in the field. Their orders gave them timetables of when they would move what supplies to which places. In the nearby tented hospitals ward space was cleared out, supplies of blood and bandages checked, procedures and routines checked.

On the ground, on the far right flank of all the thousands of men was one binh-si, one little man about 5’2” tall and weighing maybe 110 pounds. He was walking down a footpath that ran southeast along the edge of orderly rows of tea bushes. To his left and continuing along in a wide, kilometers-long arc were dozens of men just like him, the point men of their respective platoons and companies. He didn’t know about them, nor did he much care. He was focused on what was directly in front of him. His only concern was making it through the day, sorting out the light and the shadows, the natural from the unnatural, the friendly from the hostile.

Behind him was his squad. Behind his squad was his platoon. Behind his platoon was his company commander and with the commander were the only Americans on this flank of the operation — they were my sergeant and me. Each company had three platoons and they were advanced with two platoons forward and one back. That meant that leading the other forward platoon somewhere off to binh-si's left, probably out in the middle of the tea plantation, was another binh-si like him, just as scared, just as hopeful that there was nothing in front of him.

The battalion had three companies and it was advancing with two companies forward and one in reserve. Each company had a pair of Americans who walked near the Vietnamese company commander. At battalion level was another American team, this one with a larger group of four men.

The complexity was extraordinary. Every leader had at least one radio, most had two or three. The Americans could talk to each other. The Vietnamese could talk to each other. The Americans could talk to the Vietnamese. The commanders flying in their helicopters could talk to their units on the ground and the ones back at the base. The artillery and the mortar units could be reached and the Air Force could be called.

In the middle of the morning a grumbling sound came out of the east and the earth began to tremble. The ARCLIGHT had arrived. Thousands of pounds of steel and explosive were falling from aircraft so high they could not be seen. Somewhere to the east the bombs were crashing into the ground, flashing into life, and stirring the earth.

As I said, I was with the company on the far right flank with the binh-si out on point in front of me. The only other American with me was a staff sergeant with a couple of months in country. Our job was to help the captain, the đại-úy in command, bring in fire support and give him advice on how to use his company in battle. It struck me that it was as if we were on a hunt like those once staged for noblemen in Europe. The ARCLIGHT was like the beaters who swarmed through the woods and flushed game to run in panic towards the hunters. The only problem was that in this case the game was armed. Also, there was a good chance, a very good chance, that the ARCLIGHT had hit nothing at all. In any case, any NVA or VC unit in that general direction knew for sure that something was coming. They would be ready.

What was most memorable about the day was the heat, the steam room oppressiveness of the air. The straps of my rucksack began to chafe almost as soon as I put it on. Itching flared in my crotch within minutes. I wrapped an olive drab bandanna around my neck to soak up some of the sweat and before the day was done I would ring it out a dozen times.

Soon we were past the tea plantation and moving into the hills. We walked through a mixed kind of cover. In some places the grass reached up past our knees and the few trees that stood had black burn marks on their trunks. That meant that at some point the Montagnards had cleared the area with fire and had perhaps grown manioc and other food. Now the grass was back and soon the jungle would return.

We went under the canopy and the air was even more still. When we waded through a stream that hadn’t been on our maps I rinsed out the bandanna and tied it back around my neck. For a moment it felt so cool that a shiver ran down my spine. We broke out of the jungle at the base of a hill that was oddly clear of trees and brush. The point man, the binh-si, was well ahead of us, about halfway up the hill, his squad spread out behind him. The point man stopped, seeing something not quite right in front of him. Then he fell. He was so far away that it seemed to take minutes for the sound of the rifle shot to reach the command group. And then that was mixed with the small clatter of noise coming down the hill and up the hill.

The ruff-puffs went to ground. That was the wrong thing to do, but ill-trained soldiers will not do what seems so insanely counter-intuitive as run up a hill into fire. Nothing I could do, nothing my sergeant could do, would get them up and moving forward. After a few moments cajoling the đại-úy, I got on my radio and began bringing in artillery on the hillside.

I ended up behind a tree trunk checking coordinates on my map and watching the gray puffs of the incoming artillery march up the hill. As always I was struck by how benign it looked from a distance. Even the sound was a soft crump, crump, crump. But I knew it was only because I wasn’t near.

“You must go now,” I told the đại-úy after the last rounds had landed. Suddenly, for no reason I could see or understand, the ruff-puffs shook themselves into a decent unit. Small groups rushed forward, covered by their mates and machine guns. Bit by bit they worked their way up the hill.

I scrambled up the hill with my sergeant trying to listen to my radio, keep my rifle ready, and watch everything all the way up. We rushed from one small fold in the ground to another, keeping watch over each other, but there was nothing coming our way. I saw a still Vietnamese in an odd green uniform sprawled in the bottom of a shallow hole, but that was all I saw of the enemy.

We reached the top of the hill and flopped on the ground. Below us was an abandoned Montagnard village. Of the buildings only the structural posts of the long houses remained. Grass was already growing into the edges of the fire pits. On the far side of the village I could see the first of the streams of the Crow’s Foot running between steep banks. Except for the dead soldier I’d passed on the way up, there was no sign of an enemy. The soldiers were scattered about and seemed confused and disorganized.

“We’ve got to get this sorted out,” I told my sergeant. “You take the platoon over there. I’ll try to get the đại-úy on track.”

I spoke with the đại-úy and listened to him shout his orders to his lieutenants. In ten minutes or so the men were set into a perimeter and linked up with the company on our left. A medevac came in for the point man’s body and took the sniper’s body with it. I put together a report and called it in. From my team leader I got a summary of the rest of the action so far. Across the front it was much like their encounter — a few snipers, but no real concentration of force.

We stayed in a hasty defense long enough to open a couple of cans of C-rations, but what I wanted more than anything else was water. I drained one canteen and started on a second. From the radio chatter I could tell that some of the artillery was displacing so that they would stay in range. I heard, then saw, one of the FAC birds fly over. The troops began to move out, cautiously wading through the stream and up the mottled hillside beyond. They generally followed the edges of the fields that had once been cleared, not quite in the open, but not in the jungle either. Drops of sweat ran off my forehead and into my eyes, blurring my vision and stinging. When I crossed the stream I stopped for a minute, filled my canteen, dropped in a couple of iodine tablets, and shook it a few times before putting it back in its carrier.

By mid-afternoon we were on the top of the second of the ridges that defined the Crow’s Foot and looking down into a part of the box that had been struck by the ARCLIGHT. In the last hundred meters the smell of the wood smoke told us we were near. From the ridge it was a landscape of potholes and shattered trees marked by wisps of black and gray smoke. I was pleased that, according to the plan, it would not be my company sweeping through. Instead, we would turn to the south and establish a position at the place where the map showed the three streams meeting.

As I moved I could sense the units in the operation condensing together. They were gathering as they approached their objectives. My company followed the middle stream bed. The reserve company was swinging out to my right and the other company was coming up on my left. As the afternoon waned we found our objective, an odd little hillock overlooking the confluence of the streams. The company spread out on the forward slope and began to dig in. The chatter among the soldiers began to increase in volume. I went off to find the company on my right and found them close to where they were supposed to be. Talking with their American advisors we adjusted the two foxholes that were on their respective flanks and gave quick lessons on emplacing Claymore mines to the squad leaders.

As far as I could tell, if there had ever been anyone there, they were gone. If that sniper we’d encountered in the early morning had been part of a larger unit, that larger unit had long since abandoned him.

I took my helmet off and wiped the soaked sweatband with my bandanna. “What do you think?” I asked my sergeant when he came up.

“Not bad.” He pointed to a location down the slope to his right. “That’s about the only place they can get close. If we get an outpost out there we’ll have some warning.”

It wasn’t going to get any better. This was going to be our place for the night. There was plenty of daylight for the company to work on their holes, clear their fields of fire, plot mortar and artillery fires, plant more Claymores, and plan their night patrols. Nearly smokeless cooking fires were lit and the smell of rice boiling drifted over the positions. I and my sergeant ate cold C-rations and settled in for the night. We then endured the black hours of mosquitoes humming. We scratched the salt residue on our skin. Our hearts raced at sudden clanks and clicks out beyond the perimeter. We heard soft pops and saw brilliant white lights in the distance. At odd moments we heard the sound of water moving through the stream below us.

More cooking fires were lit as soon as the morning light filtered down through the mist. Two cigarettes, a malaria pill, and a cup of coffee made from water boiled over a chunk of C-4 explosive opened the day. Then I got a call telling me the units were staying in place, at least for a while. I was told to report to the battalion command post for a meeting. The message ended with a cryptic line: “Bring soap.”

I gave đại-úy a little pep talk about staying alert and went with my sergeant back down the path we’d walked the day before.

We found the CP on the back side of the ridge. The Battalion Advisor, a Major from our province team, looked as scruffy as all the rest of us. He waited for the rest of the teams to show up.

“We’ve got too many advisors out here,” he said, “but I was overruled on that at the beginning. We need to give them a chance to run their own units for a while. They’ve changed the plan anyhow. The ruffs-puffs are going to stay in place for the rest of the morning and then we’re all pulling out.”

He drew some arrows on his map and showed us. “The rest of the task force is going to continue to swing around to the south and will simply sweep past where we are at about the same time that we pull out.”

He looked at his sergeant with a grin. “In the meantime, the we’ve got something to show you guys.”

He led us up into the valley and then along the side of the stream. A squad of Vietnamese was off to our flank as security. The path took a sharp turn and then the jungle opened out and revealed a glade, a glen, a copse, or whatever word rightly describes something out of a Tarzan movie. A gentle, graceful waterfall spilled from a ledge about 15 feet high into a still pool beneath the jungle’s trees and vines. The banks of the pool were lined with feathery ferns, pale green moss, and small blossoming plants. The Vietnamese soldiers kept on going up the path until they were above the waterfall. I saw them settle on rocks and light cigarettes, American cigarettes, and turn to watch the jungle upstream.

I crouched beside the pool and drew water into my hands. It felt cool and it was very clear, if tea-colored.

“Take turns,” the Major said. He indicated his sergeant. “We’ll take the first watch.”

With a few mumbled, appreciative obscenities the rest of us dropped our gear, stripped to our skins, grabbed our soap, and waded out into the pool.

My first step was tentative and I realized that for a very long time, since the morning of the day before, my senses had been cranked up to an extra level of alertness. They had been tuned for specific kinds of sights and smells and sounds, tuned to wrongness. I’d walked through an Edenesque countryside, but all that I saw, all that I looked for, was something out of place, something not quite right. I had not listened for the gurgle of water or the call of a songbird. I had listened for the sound of metal on metal or the crack of a branch. The smells that mattered were raw tobacco, sweat, and human shit, not the perfume of flowers or the dampness of watered earth.

Now I watched the sunlight dance on the splashing water, felt the coolness sluice over my bare skin, smelled the pungent soap I lathered on. I got my turn to stand in the waterfall to rinse off and I just stood there, eyes closed, feeling the water drum on the top of my head, hearing the childish laughter of my fellow soldiers. When I stepped out from under the waterfall and opened my eyes the first thing I saw was a huge iridescent dragonfly hovering and flitting and then dashing away.

Later in the morning, back with my ruff-puffs, feeling clean and refreshed, I walked the perimeter with my sergeant. It was a sound defense. They owned this small piece of ground. I used my rudimentary Vietnamese to congratulate the đại-úy and his soldiers because they had done a good thing. They had done what infantrymen do. They had staked this claim and would defend it, or, as it turned out, simply move on to another place. Did it make any difference in the long run? Probably not. Nevertheless, at that moment, at that time and place, things were exactly as they should be.

Grace: Regret

36

Comfort, content, delight,
The ages’ slow-bought gain
They shrivelled in a night.
Only ourselves remain
To face the naked days
In silent fortitude,
Through perils and dismays
Renewed and re-renewed.

Rudyard Kipling, For All We Have and Are

1972

The worst thing that ever happened to me, the worst thing that I ever did, what I could not and did not want to forgive, did not happen in war or in training for war. It happened on a bright clear January day in Orlando, Florida. The moment was as resonant as, and much more painful, than the imagined ping that drew me into the infantry.

The pain struck as I looked out the circular window of the airplane. It struck just above my diaphragm, near my heart. It was not a blow, exactly. It was a clenching, a tightening, a collapsing inward that took the air out of my lungs. There they were. I could see them at the airport window. I raised my hand and gently touched the scratched plastic. It was the movement of a palsied old man, my fingers crooked with pain. She, she with the dark hair, saw the gesture through the layers of glass and pointed to me, then caught our blonde daughter up into her arms and turned her towards the plane. “See,” she seemed to be saying, “See! See! There he is!”

The whine of the engines overwhelmed my hearing and through a blur I could see my wife and daughter begin to recede from me as if I were sitting still and they were gliding away from me on a moving sidewalk that took them further and further into the distance.

The worst of it was I could not say exactly why I was doing it. Almost all the rest of my generation had decided that this war was a mistake and I was pretty sure they were right. It was very personal to abandon my family without even a righteous cause to fight for. When asked why by civilian friends all I could say was, “Because they told me to.” And that was true, but only the World War Two veterans of my father’s generation had nodded their heads. 

Or was the worst of it that I was going back? That this was not a trip into the unknown? I knew the musty smells of Asian markets. I knew the green underwater feel of the jungle and the clacking of bamboo groves.

The engines spun up louder and louder as we waited at the end of the runway. The terminal was out of sight and all I could see from the window was concrete and brown grass and pine trees in the distance. I was going away and going to. I had left those that meant everything to me to a year of loneliness.

I could not tell when the pain went away. I am not sure that it did. It seems still inside me like some black insect captured in amber, a shadow that sometimes blocks the light.

Grace

A Cretan once said to me, “When you appear before the heavenly gates and they fail to open, do not take hold of the knocker to knock. Unhitch the musket from your shoulder and fire.”

“Do you actually believe God will be frightened into opening the gates?”

“No, lad, He won’t be frightened. But He’ll open them because He’ll realize you are returning from battle.”

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

Blood: From the Sky

The Night Café, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

35

...the officers were playing billiards in the mud-walled club-house when orders came to them that they were to go on parade at once for a night-drill.

Rudyard Kipling, The Lost Legion 

Who are these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?

Woody Guthrie, Deportees

1972

The road from Mỹ Xuyên to Lịch Hội Thượng on the South China Sea paralleled a wide canal that eventually emptied into a slackwater inlet that barely deserved to be called a bay. The hamlet there was a shallow-water seaport with a few fishing sampans tied up at ramshackle docks. Not many Americans ever visited this hamlet even though there was a lovely Catholic church set in a bamboo grove nearby with a Vietnamese priest who spoke very good French and kept a large garden enclosed by the bamboo and banana trees.

At the intersection of the canal road and the road that led to the church was a little shop. It could perhaps be called a tea shop, or a cigarette shop, or maybe just the corner store. The building was a shabby mixture of tin, woven bamboo, and thatch. The roof projected enough forward to provide a small rectangle of shade and shelter from the rain over the beaten earth in the front. Under the shelter an old woman sautéed plantains for passersby and for folks such as myself and my little team. I was making my rounds in that peculiar window of time in Vietnam where the war, for Americans, was at an end and the Delta was relatively peaceful. We stood in the shade and watched the bananas sizzle in the black pan. My interpreter and I chatted with the Deputy District Chief, a civilian, in a bizarre mixture of French, English, Cambodian, and Vietnamese. We spoke of Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism, and other Existentialists.

This sort of thing happened in the Delta because it was not really a good place for war. This man, the Deputy District Chief, was of mixed blood, Cambodian and Chinese. He was a French-trained bureaucrat who could remember the Japanese occupation of the area during World War Two. He fondly recalled his one visit to Paris and his teacher of calligraphy in Chợ Lớn. We sat at a rickety table and drank tea and ate fried plantains.

My interpreter, Kiêm, was also a man out of time and place. He was Vietnamese by ethnicity but he and all his kin had lived for generations in Phnom Penh until they were driven out in the early 70’s. They fled downriver to end up in Ba Xuyen Province. (He would, much later, after re-education, flee again and traverse Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand before finally coming to live in Arlington, Virginia.)

We spoke of Albert Camus and the final irony of his death, as a passenger, on a highway in France. 

The Deputy District Chief led us into the gloom of the store/cafe/tea shop and from there into a back room where he swept his arm out like a headwaiter showing us to the finest table in the house. He grinned and the gold in his teeth flashed in the dim light. There stood a billiard table.

For a moment two images competed in my mind. The first was of a faintly-remembered painting of a green billiard table in a pool of Van Gogh’s inimitable yellow light. The second was in black and white, a recollection of a movie and of a man sweeping the cover off a billiard table to Paul Newman’s astonishment.

But here in Vietnam? In the Delta? In Lịch Hội Thượng? A billiard table? A Catholic church down the road? A Khmer Buddhist temple visible in the distance? 

The cues were warped and only thin shreds of leather remained on the tips. The heavy, ivory-appearing balls had chips gouged out of their surfaces. I rolled a creamy yellow ball across the table. It lurched over the seams where pieces of the slate bed had become misaligned. The ball eventually fell against the dead rubber and torn felt of the rails. I looked at the Deputy District Chief and we both slowly shook our heads in respect to an irretrievable past.

I went back to my jeep. We all shook hands and bowed to each other. The hiss of the radio hung from the back of the seat intruded as my driver fiddled with the squelch. We drove away leaving the French-trained, Cambodian-Chinese, official of a Vietnamese equivalent of an American county standing in front of the billiard parlor. I checked my weapons, chambering rounds into my M-16 and into my .45. I used the radio to tell the Province Headquarters where I was and when I expected to return. We drove along the canal, the flat, felt-like Delta on both sides of us.

We crossed the ferry at Mỹ Xuyên and went on towards Sóc Trăng. I dropped my interpreter off at the entrance to the refugee village where he lived with his father, wife, and daughter in a hut made of woven bamboo. The road led past the airport on its way into the city and as we came near we saw a black cloud beginning to boil up out of the rice paddies between us and the airport.

Death came to the Delta that afternoon when a C-130 transport plane fell out of the sky in sunlight so bright that, after the plane exploded, the flames could barely be seen. The plane gouged a wide furrow in the paddy and spilled out its fuel. The black pillar of smoke arose softly and quietly. My driver and I saw the cloud and at almost the same time the radio began to chatter. Jeeps and trucks were coming out of the city. My jeep was coming into the city. We gathered on the side of the road.

Soon we were struggling thigh deep in the rice paddy mud. Americans from the Province Team and Vietnamese soldiers from the airport converged and got as close to the heat as we could. But then we had to wait, holding our hands in front of our faces, circling around the pyre, dodging the pools of flame that spread across the top of the water with the leaking fuel.

Eventually the flames slackened and we could approach. We heard the clicking cooling of the aluminum. The stench reached into us. On that day death was in my hands and death became simply work. It became the gathering of charred remnants of human beings into heavy rubber bags and zipping the bags up.

One pair I will remember forever, because they were a pair. The inferno fused their bodies together. I and my team mates could not bring ourselves to tear them apart. We placed both of them into one bag and made an annotation on the tag attached. 

Every one of us working in that mess of mud and blackened aluminum and broken rice stalks found his own way through the afternoon. Some were angry. They tore pieces off the plane with their hands and wrestled bodies out to have them flop and almost disappear under the water into the mud before someone else would grip a hand or toe or shoulder. Others wore gloves, the thick leather kind used for stringing barbed wire, as if that layer of leather would keep death and pollution away. Some were excruciatingly gentle, so gentle that they would stay inside the fuselage for ten or twenty minutes just to loosen a melted seat belt and gently, so gently, try to separate a form from the charred frame of a seat. One of us thought to relieve his own anxiety through a blackly humorous comment and was angrily rebuked, although several days later, over a bottle of sour mash whiskey, the same comment brought unrelenting, tear-evoking laughter. We worked in pairs or threes, sharing the burden, solving the small puzzles of where one body stopped and another started, lifting the corpses together, taking turns on the really difficult tasks.

Hours and hours it seemed that we bagged blackened bodies and dragged them to the edge of the paddy. Chopper after chopper lifted off. Truck after truck drove away. Someone arrived with a manifest and the body count didn’t match the list. Cables from armored personnel carriers were attached to odd pieces of the aircraft that stuck out from the wreckage and the plane was ripped apart. We spent the twilight looking for the last body, but we never found it.

We returned to our compound and drank a lot that night. We all showered again and again until the hot water was gone and then we took more showers. We put our uniforms into plastic bags and threw the bags away. But we couldn’t escape the smell.

Those were not infantrymen’s deaths. Falling out of the sky? How could that be a way for a soldier to die? Helpless, belted into a machine. It could not be right. We, we infantrymen, like to think we have a choice. Is this just the arrogance of youth, that we will choose the time and manner of our dying? Or is it any soldier’s necessary illusion?