Dirt: Arctic

SAS - Taking Shelter
By permission of the artist Ian Coate

9

How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?

Alexander Solzhenitzyn, 

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

1975

In January, just below the Arctic Circle, the sun shows itself only briefly and the shadows are stark and spare. I awoke in the darkness inside a double-walled tent. Above me four pairs of my socks were hung on an improvised clothesline. Sitting up, but not leaving my double-layered sleeping bag, I filled a canteen cup with water and set it on the portable diesel-burning stove that burbled in the middle of the tent. I opened up the valve that let more fuel into the stove. I eased out of my sleeping bag and pulled a layer of clothing on over my long johns. I took three pairs of socks down from the lines, rolled them and put them in an easily-reached pocket of my rucksack. The last pair I put on over the socks I’d slept in and then pulled on my insulated, vapor-barrier boots. By that time the water had come to a rattling boil on the top of the stove. I ripped open a packet of instant coffee and poured it into the cup. I added a hooded parka and mittens to my layers of clothing and took the cup with me as I went out into the dark to piss and have a cigarette.

The hair inside my nose crackled in the cold. Looking around I could see a small ice fog hovering over our encampment. The snow crust creaked under my boots until I reached a spot near a tree and I created my own small cloud of steam. Above, beyond the fog, stars were crisp and faintly shimmering, giving enough light to throw a purple shadow. I shook a cigarette out of a pack. My lighter clinked and flared as I lit the cigarette. I quickly re-gloved my hand. The coffee cooled rapidly in the metal cup. I drank it in gulps. I swirled the cooling dregs in the bottom of the cup and then tossed them into the air. Nothing came down. The drops sublimated directly into tiny, almost invisible brown crystals that dispersed into the darkness. It was, I guessed, about 40° below zero, but no wind was blowing. It was a nice day.

An hour later we were packed. The gear for six men — tent, stove, fuel, ammunition, food, water, sleeping bags — was lashed to a plastic sled. We slowly made our way through the darkness on our snowshoes, pairs of us taking turns pulling the sled. My compass was almost useless this far north and I navigated by constantly checking landmarks that I could see, oriented to the stars, and trying to locate our place on the map. In good terrain we would traverse about a kilometer an hour. The key was setting a pace, shuffling one snowshoe in front of the other, getting the sled to smoothly glide across the icy crust of snow, never slowing, never changing the pull on the ropes until we reached a stopping point. 

In that harsh coldness we were attuned to simply surviving the environment. Each man paired off with another to watch exposed skin for frostbite. We stayed ravenously hungry as the calories burned off in our bodies’ efforts to stay warm. At that latitude in late January the sun was low on the horizon even in the middle of the day. We shuffled across the low hills and through the sparse forests in dimness. 

“Loose and in layers,” was the mantra for this place. Beginning with my two pairs of socks I wore a layer of long underwear, thick wool shirt and wool trousers, a pair of baggy overtrousers with a quilted liner buttoned inside them, and a parka that also had a quilted liner. Outside all those layers were a thin white over-parka and trousers that served as camouflage. My boots were rubber and insulated by a captured layer of air. This insulation was so effective that my major concern was the sweat that accumulated inside the boots, soaking my socks and threatening blisters. Part of the survival ritual was to change socks two or three times a day, tying the sweat-soaked ones to my gear and letting them first freeze, then dry in the extreme arid cold. On my head I wore a thin balaclava, a wool-lined cap, my helmet, and a fur-lined parka hood. There was a wire inside the hood that I could shape into a small circle, making a tunnel for my eyes and nose so that I could see to the front, but had to turn my body to see anything else. On my hands I wore wool gloves and huge thick mittens tied to me with strings.

I felt the bulk as I led my patrol across the snow. I was puffed out by all the clothes and insulated from the world. When I tripped and fell I didn’t feel anything. It was like falling on a pillow. It was hard to stay alert and sustain the necessary paranoia of an infantryman moving across the world. The radio hissed at me and forced me to stay in touch. I could sense the frustration of the command center. Time and again the questions came to me and I could visualize them in their warm tent, with their stoves blazing and their lights shining. It was impossible for me to tell them what our world was like. I didn’t try.

After an hour or so my vision narrowed from the exertion and from my parka hood restricting my view. All I saw was that small white circle of the world. I became so tired that I did not want to make the effort to swing my head and look around. I did not check the horizon. I was not being careful. If we had encountered an enemy, we would have been killed. But we were lucky.

We could not go into the earth in January north of Fairbanks. Instead we had to find something to hide behind, a rock or a clump of trees. To dig was simply to move the old snow around and provide something to hide behind or perhaps use as insulation. Snow will not stop a bullet. The secret was to see them first, to find them first, and take them out first.

We set things up, including our tent and stove; established the guard; and then the rest of us tried to huddle away from the cold for the night.

North Africa, 1942

C. M. Paterson, Tents, Equipment, Soldiers in Desert, New Zealand Archives

Dirt: Desert

8

A shabby, gritty landscape. The sweat oozes and trickles all day. This is war, one kind of war, sweat and tiredness and no water till evening and cigarettes made of dirt. The pain of muscles, not wounded, but twisted from the weight of rifles, automatic guns, heavy equipment. The abrasion of the skin by a sand-paste of desert and sweat. The thud of feet on the sand 94 times every minute, 50 minutes an hour...And every night dig...Dig in case the bombs drop. Dig for discipline. Dig to save your skins. Dig through sand. Dig, if necessary, through rock. Dig for bloody victory.

Neil McCallum, Journey With a Pistol

1978

In the high desert a jagged ridge line in the far distance matched exactly the brown contour lines on my map. This was a khaki-colored landscape of sharp-edged shadows, little water, and striated sunsets. In that high, arid country infantrymen move in quick, darting steps from shadow to shadow, like lizards. In that country, I saw so far that a rifle seemed not enough; no bullet would ever reach its target but all would fall prey to gravity’s pull and drop to the grainy soil. On foot the distance from one place to another seemed infinite and in the yellow-white sunlight I felt infinitely exposed. To move in the open seemed foolish, like a mouse scampering beneath the shadow of a stooping falcon.

My small infantry unit spread itself out so that each man was almost alone, the point man a dark spot in the distance. I could see so far — and be seen from so far.

Yet the day was full of energy. In the coolness of the early morning I moved with my men swiftly over the rocks that turned slightly beneath my boots. The pebbled ground seemed to help me along. Swiftly, swiftly, five, six, seven kilometers in an hour until the shadows began to shorten towards mid-day and my load lightened as the water I carried was consumed. As the shadows shortened the rippling brightness began to hide the distance. Paranoia and fear returned and I sought what few shadows were left. I paused in a cleft of the ground to wait through the heat. I began to feel the warmth and long for darkness.

The flatness was an illusion. Although the eye was drawn into the far distance, nearby there were sharp folds in the ground where rivers once ran and where they might run again. Here they were called wadi or nullahs. Elsewhere they were called arroyos and gulches. There were hints and warnings that there had been water in this place, that there would be again. When I moved my men into a nullah we were below the line of sight and we felt hidden.

Half a world away, on a high bluff above the Missouri River, a small chapel at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas memorializes soldiers lost on the high plains of the American West. The walls of the chapel are covered with plaques and inscriptions giving the names, dates, and often the location and cause of death. The remarkable thing is how many were drowned. Not lost in an encounter with Apache, or Arapaho, or Sioux, but drowned in the midst of that emptiness, that desert.

So too here I knew that a nullah was not a place of safety. I knew that a small storm in a mountain range fifty miles in the distance could fill this crevice without warning and wash us all away. But down in the nullah we were below the sight lines of the landscape, we were difficult to see. It was very tempting to stay there, to move along the watercourse as it meandered rather than to strike out in the direction I was ordered to follow. It was the old puzzle. If you cannot be seen, neither can you see.

Once the terrible heat of the mid-afternoon passed I led them out of the nullah onto the open ground and headed towards the next small rise in front of us. Small noises traveled far in this dry landscape, the crunch of a boot on the rock, the clink of metal against metal. The sounds rang through the constant wind that dried the skin on my face and hands. I listened most carefully for the sounds of engines. We were in the open. If we were seen there was nothing to protect us unless we were able to get down into the earth very quickly or our own tanks and artillery could arrive in time to save us. Our advantage was that we were very hard to see, these small specks moving across the land. We wore clothing colored and mottled very like the ground we were traversing. Our equipment was taped to our packs to prevent rattles and clinks. We tried to move from shadow to shadow. It was only the movement itself that was likely to give us away.

Once into the low hills we stopped. This was not dirt friendly to our shovels. It was either sand that slid and pooled like water or rocks that deflected the entrenching tools with a ringing, position-revealing clatter. Instead we gathered stones and constructed little walls next to the larger rocks and then we hid behind the parapets. We could not go down into the earth so we built the earth up around us.

Looking Down the Trail/Jungle

James Pollock, 1967

Kerr Eby, 1944(?)

Dirt: Jungle

7

Flying over jungle was almost pure pleasure, doing it on foot was nearly all pain.... 

Once in some thick jungle corner with some grunts standing around a correspondent said, “Gee, you must really see some beautiful sunsets in here,” and they almost pissed themselves laughing. But you could fly up and into hot tropic sunsets that would change the way you thought about light forever. You could also fly out of places that were so grim they turned to black and white in your head five minutes after you’d gone.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

1972

In Panama I awoke in a nylon hammock suspended just two or three feet above the ground, my back muscles aching from trying to sleep in a curve. In the thin green light that seeped down I saw small tendrils of smoke drifting up from tiny cooking fires. My boots and socks were with me in the hammock. I balanced myself and shook the boots before putting them on. I was looking for ants, scorpions, spiders or any other living creatures that might have taken shelter during the night.

Booted, I squatted on the dank jungle floor and carved a small chunk off of a block of C-4 explosive. I put that between two green sticks then rested a canteen cup full of water on the sticks. Using the paper matches that came with C rations, I lit the piece of C-4. It burned with an intense blue flame and heated the water while I untied my hammock and rolled it up. I took my rucksack down from the branch I’d hung it from and brushed the bugs off. I checked my rifle, looking for flecks of rust. I unrolled a fresh condom to put over the muzzle. By then the water was boiling and I emptied the coffee packet into it. I lit a cigarette and watched a column of leaf-cutting ants make their way across the jungle floor. I was just about ready to move out.

A few days earlier I had chuckled when I first heard the phrase, “wait-a-minute vines.” It wasn’t funny anymore. The NCOs said: “In the jungle you got to be smooth. You got to slide through the jungle. You got to be like a cat. You got them wait-a-minute vines that’ll grab you; you got them black palms with spines that’ll go right through you.”

I could not longer find any humor in the jungle. More than once I’d gotten entangled and had to mumble, “Wait a minute,” while I got myself free. And the black palm spines were just nasty. Within the first week I had several festering sores where the spines had broken off.

So I rolled my sleeves down and buttoned the collar of my shirt in the damp heat. I put on leather gloves. I had strings attached to all my gear, even my rifle, and the strings were tied to my webbing. I put on my web gear and tucked the strings in. Now I was ready for the inevitable moment when I would slip and fall on a steep, slippery trail. I could just tuck in my arms and roll, because anything I might grab could be sharp and probably poisonous.

Finding a route was tricky. We didn’t have a horizon down inside the jungle. Here there were just the steep, so very steep, sides to the ridges and sharp-edged crests that could not be walked along. I and the men with me tried to walk as infantrymen, spread out so that we could support each other and not be a vulnerable clump. But the trees and vines and shadows and steep slopes drew us together.

We moved slowly up the side of a ridge and down the far side, trying to determine our location by how the ground was shaped and the direction of the flow of the black water in the streams. It was slow. I became more and more careful, placing one boot slowly to the ground to be sure of my footing before placing another. We all were wearing green and the rest of the men began to fade into the foliage around me until all I could see was the pack of the man in front. I thought, I hoped, that someone else was looking to the right and left and covering my rear.

It was very quiet. That is, human sounds could barely be heard. Only the occasional whispered “wait a minute” as someone got entangled in a vine. The thick dead debris on the ground muffled my steps. Occasionally something far overhead dashed through the trees, its shadow pushing a branch around. Sometimes a monkey would scream, startling me and causing me to jerk my head up. I was just moving through the jungle. Dark patches of sweat formed in my armpits and under the straps of my webbing. Every place on my body that something touched began to chafe. Sweat ran down my forehead and pooled in my eyebrows and sometimes fell into my eyes, stinging and blurring my vision.

A sergeant I met some years later, who had done his time on Vietnamese jungle trails, had been dyslexic as a child. He was a very poor reader until late in his teenage years. He developed, perhaps in compensation, a prodigious memory and, once his problem with reading had been overcome, a compulsive desire to read and memorize. He could recite, in exact detail, every element of every label on a U.S. Army rucksack, right down to the Federal Stock Number. He knew every marking and every possible combination and permutation of text that could be found on the cases of C rations, and everything printed on every box, can, plastic packet, envelope, and slip of paper inside the case. He could recite every word of every label and instruction that came with claymore mines, ammunition boxes, and first aid packs. He remembered it all. “What else you gonna do while you’re humpin’ through the jungle just starin’ at the guy in front of you. It’s boring, man. Hell, I could probably tell it to you backwards.”

At one point our patrol came to the edge of a river. Through the thick brush on the bank I looked out across the water and for a moment my eyes rested on the openness, the distance. I studied the green, pebbled texture of the far bank. I realized that it was just like the place I was in, that if I crossed the river I would still be in the same place. And so I went back into the jungle and struggled toward the spot on the map that was to be my place at the end of the day.

The jungle was no place for claustrophobics or for people in a hurry. It set its own pace and I slowly moved through it, scratching at my insect bites, wiping the sweat off with a kerchief already wet, and was blinded by the dark greenness.

Going down into the earth in the jungle was difficult. The surprisingly barren soil beneath the humus was root bound and brightly colored. I had to struggle for each shovelful. Down near the ground I could see even less and I had to take a machete to cut a tunnel out to where an enemy might approach. The foxhole filled with water and crawling things of all descriptions. The flying insects were with me always, crawling into my ear canals and buzzing me into near-madness. I would not sleep in my hole. I would, because I had to, stand guard here. But when not on guard I slipped back behind the line of defense and found two trees the right distance apart. There I strung my hammock, braced it open, and hid within its netting until I came out again to watch in the night.

Dirt: To and Fro

6

It is God who girds me about with strength
and makes my way secure.
He makes me sure-footed like a deer
and lets me stand firm on the heights.
He trains my hands for battle
and my arms for bending even a bow of bronze.

Psalm 18:32-34

1950

My grandparents’ house was on a bluff above the Arkansas River. This was before the river had dams and it was a wide, treacherous, sluggish stream flowing out of nearby Oklahoma. Levees tried to keep it from the fertile floodplains and it was hemmed in by the flinty outcroppings from the Boston Mountains to the north and the Ouachita Mountains to the south.

The front porch looked out over the river. Flagstones led from the porch out to the edge of the bluff. A winding series of steps went down the face of the bluff to the road below. On summer days I was sometimes allowed to walk to work with my grandfather; he in a suit and straw fedora hat, I in jeans and tennis shoes.

The steps were made of stone and concrete. Aged wrought iron railings on the downslope side were entangled with honeysuckle, Boston ivy, and grape vines. I often picked up a stick and rattled it along the rails to clatter my way down the hill, warning the rabbits that we were coming, listening for their dash into the thickets. Sometimes I counted the steps to the road below, the same road that ran from the back of my grandfather’s house and around the hill, the road he drove in his Hudson Hornet most days. When we reached the road we crossed the railroad tracks and walked the three blocks to his office at the Myers Commission Company.

At the end of the day, we walked back. By then the summer afternoon heat was full upon the streets of Van Buren. By the time we reached the railroad tracks my grandfather had taken off his coat and had once or twice wiped the leather sweatband of his hat with his handkerchief. Then we started up the steps. I hopped and skipped up them two at a time, pausing at each landing to wait for my grandfather who walked at a steadier pace. My grandfather’s approach was to lightly touch the iron railing at the bottom step and begin a slow, steady climb, placing his heavy wingtip shoes one after the other, one step at a time, carefully, patiently, inexorably making his way up the hill.

From time to time I was able to sneak up on a garter snake sunning itself or a toad lurking in a damp shadow. Or I might stop and pluck a honeysuckle blossom. I’d bite the end off and suck the green-sweet nectar.

Halfway up the bluff I was ready to sit for a moment, perhaps to pick at a broken piece of concrete or a loose stone. My grandfather came on slowly, steadily, breathing lightly, enjoying the walk up the hill. He watched me with a benign air, but never slowed his pace, shooing me forward when he caught up with me, watching me scamper and puff my breath out and wipe my face on the sleeve of my shirt. On a turning when we could see the river, Papaw looked out across the floodplain on the other side then glanced at the sky to check the weather. He might point something out to me — a new sandbar in the river or one of the rowboats used by the rough men who set trot lines for catfish and primeval alligator gar.

At the last turn, when there were only another 20 or so steps to go, I would be exhausted. Grandfather, never slacking his pace, always took my hand. 

“Just a bit further,” he’d say, “I’m an old man and you are just a boy.” 

I always found something new and fresh in myself as if energy flowed out of that huge hand that wrapped around mine. I would pick up my pace, skipping up the steps but never letting go, like a puppy on a leash dashing ahead, pulling back, but never letting go.

We always reached the crest together and as we crossed the flagstones leading to the front porch my grandfather let go of my hand to put his coat back on and wipe the sweatband of his hat for the last time. I’d dash across the yard and up the steps, crash through the screen door and shout out my announcement of our return, “Mamaw, we’re home!”

Dirt: Indirect Fire

Big and Little Firepower, Burdell Moody, 1967

5 

They, the Locrians, had no love
for stand-and-fight encounters —
had no crested bronze helmets to guard their heads,
no balanced shields in their grasp, no ashen spears,
only their bows and slings of springy, twisted wool.
Trusting these, they followed their chief to Troy,
shooting with these, salvo on pelting salvo,
they tore the Trojan battle lines to pieces.
So the men in heavy armor fought at the front,
they grappled Trojans and Hector helmed in bronze
while Locrians slung from the rear, safe, out of range,
till the Trojan troops forgot their lust for blood
as showering arrows raked their ranks with panic.

Homer, The Iliad

1965

Once in my hole I wasn’t finished. Eventually the peculiar psychology, the paranoia, of all infantrymen began to have its way. For a moment, an hour, a day, I felt safe from bullets, but there was more than bullets out there. Even though I had put the whole world between me and my enemy I was not, in fact, safe. I must deal with those of my opponents who specialize in overcoming gravity, those who hurl objects into the sky and control their murderous descent into my place on the earth.

The process was described by one of the bloodthirsty noncommissioned officers who trained me on yet another sun-seared day at Fort Benning.

“Your rifle and your machine gun, they are what’s called direct fire weapons. They have a flat trajectory.” He made a motion with his hands describing the flat sweep of rifle fire across the ground. 

“It ain’t really flat, but you know what I mean. So you use your machine guns and your rifles, your direct fire weapons, to get the bad guys to duck their heads down into their holes. Then you just drop some indirect fire down into them holes.” He made another motion with his hands describing the vertical arc of a mortar round up into the air and down into the foxhole. 

“That digs ’em up an’ out. Then you shoot at ’em some more with your direct fire.”

Then he added, with a particularly malevolent grin, “Now my personal favorite in this regard is called Willie Pete, that’s white phosphorus. Phosphorus burns when it comes in contact with the air and there ain’t nothin’ that can put it out. I can tell you, drop a little Willie Pete down into them holes and they’ll come out.”

There followed hours and days of discussion and practice of the complex geometries of launching projectiles from one location on the earth to another. And it was very complex. To strike a place on the ground involved understanding a host of variables: the explosive power of the propellant, the weight of the shell, the effect of the wind on deflecting the path of the shell, the accuracy of knowledge regarding one’s location and the location of a target. 

From time to time I was on the other end of these equations, in my hole in the ground and safe from the direct fire of my opponents. I had the world between myself and them — but what about the sky? What I was taught to do was build a roof, a very thick roof of, in military parlance, overhead cover. In the end this was simply the hard work of felling trees (if there were any around) and building a roof of wood and dirt.

Building overhead cover was part of the general principle that a soldier continuously improves his defenses until ordered to leave. In practice this meant that leaders found something for soldiers to do all the time. What began with a small hole in the ground could, and should, evolve into a complex of bunkers with layers of protective overhead cover, minefields and barbed wire to the front, trenches connecting each position and leading back to command centers, carefully-sited lanes down which machine gun fire could be poured, and precise locations for artillery fire. By the time all that work had been done, it would probably be time to go back and start repairing the hole originally dug.

Nevertheless, in the American army there is a general uneasiness with this whole process of digging in. The institution starts to worry when the troops aren’t moving. A soldier feels safe in his hole. His leader, even when he is concerned about the soldier’s safety, is more concerned about the particular value of that place on the earth. If the location is of no value, then there’s no point to being there and the troops should be moving to some place that is of value.

Dirt: Three By Two By You

Used by permission of artist, Kelly Swann. See also  WWII GIs

4 

     Dig a hole in your back yard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and, so there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire.     Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you....But you still won’t understand how he feels when things get tough.

Bill Mauldin, Up Front

1965

In the same summer that I became an infantryman my platoon was led through pine trees and scrub oaks to the top of a small hill. We spread out just below the crest, facing north, huddling behind trees or laying behind low bushes. Our sergeant moved along the line to place us more carefully and to position the machine guns to cover the approaches. The men on the flanks of our platoon were put within view of the units next to them. At the time I was more concerned with poison ivy than the enemy. Then the sergeant came by and said, “Dig in. Right here.”

The basic dimensions of a fighting position, a foxhole, are three by two by you. In other words, a hole in the ground that is three feet wide (facing the enemy), two feet long, and deep enough so that you can stand and shoot while being reasonably protected. I am 6’2” tall, which meant a hole about 4 feet deep. Even then I knew, from my perspective, that the purpose of this little hole was freedom from fear. But the hole was also my place. I could hide there, but I also owned it. To keep it, I had to defend it.

In its way, my foxhole was the ultimate in fortification. A properly dug foxhole, as one of my instructor sergeants once said, “Puts the whole world between you and the enemy.” The sergeant’s point was that all the equations regarding how thick a barrier needed to be against a particular weapon were meaningless if you were down in the ground. If I dug a hole that was three by two by me, and I had my head down below the surface of the earth, no rifle bullet that an enemy soldier could fire could possibly hit me. I would be safe.

I knew we would probably move on, that day, the next day, the next hour. But whenever we stopped the collective compulsion of our leaders was to go down into the earth.

In peacetime it was difficult to establish a sense of either fear or purpose. This day with the sun blazing down on us, a crow cawing off in the distance, the sounds of truck engines on a public highway a few miles away, was just a day in Georgia. We were just boys playing games. And yet, it must be done. It must be learned.

I was, I and my buddy were, low to the ground, hiding from the enemy. But the better we hid, then the less we could see. That’s an old paradox and one never to be resolved, this wanting to see but not be seen. I didn’t think about why I was where I was. For the single infantryman, that was really quite simple. I was there because someone told me to be there. I was there because everyone else in my fire team, squad, platoon, or company was there. I was there because if I moved someone else would see me and try to kill me.

I was given my place to stand and I began my hole.

I wasn’t alone. Not that day in Georgia and rarely in the years that followed. One man in one hole was not enough. What would happen when I slept? There were almost always two of us at a place on the earth. Three by two by you was the basic formula, but six by two by “y’all” was the reality. Inevitably, one of the infantrymen was tall and the other short. The y’all, the depth, became a compromise. My buddy became the guard. His job was to protect the digger, me. I dropped my gear on the ground, laid my weapon close to hand, and got out my entrenching tool.

For other men, not soldiers, digging holes is a straightforward task that requires very simple tools — a shovel, a pick, and an axe. The pick breaks up the surface of the ground and helps lever out the rocks. The axe cuts the roots. The shovel moves the dirt out. I had none of those tools. I had my entrenching tool, which was a compromise of all three. It was a folding shovel. It was sharpened along one edge of its blade so that it could be a primitive axe. It could also be folded so that the blade was perpendicular to the handle and could be used as a pick. But it was too short, light and small to be very effective at anything. I had nothing fond, profound, or even mildly kind to say about this tool. In the evolution of the entrenching tool over perhaps fifty years about all that could be said in its favor was that the newest of them was marginally easier to carry around and marginally less useful as a shovel — and significantly less useful as a weapon. The comparison to the helmet soldiers wear now is compelling. Today’s helmet is slightly lighter and more protective than its predecessor, but not as good as a hat and worthless as a cooking pot or wash basin.

But I had no choice. I took my entrenching tool and folded it into a pick-like shape, marked the dimensions of my place and began to dig, first scratching out a shallow trench that was just enough to get me below the edge of the earth. Thus began my encounter with the soil, the dirt of that particular place.
I eventually became a fine amateur geologist, or at least a decent describer of the results of time and weather. Over the years as I wandered about my place on the earth might be where glaciers once crept down and then retreated, grinding rock into grains of sand. It might be a place where generation upon generation of trees and grass lived and died and left behind layers of organic debris. Through that sort of soil my shovel sliced with ease and the dirt scooped out pleasantly, allowing me to reach safety in only a moment or two — until I reached that damn tree root right through the middle of things.

Or I could be upon a place arisen from the floor of an ancient sea, pressed and compacted into natural pottery. My entrenching tool then only chipped away at the clay; chipped and gouged until the handle twisted in my fingers from the sweat and I could not get safe for a very long time.

And rocks. Some smooth and rounded from tumbling among themselves down the beds of rivers; some the jagged and shattered remnants of rifts within the crust of the planet; some that once flowed in incandescent rivers of lava from out of the earth. On the surface of the earth, they might be lovely shapes pleasant to the eye and, more important, something to hide behind. But in the earth they were evil, lurking monsters always larger, more tenacious than expected. They deflected the blade of my entrenching tool and sent painful shivers up my arms. They had to be muscled from the ground much like a dentist grappling and levering and then ripping a tooth out of a jaw.

Thus digging-in began and proceeded at a pace that depended almost entirely on the nature of the dirt itself. However, it must also be said that, except under the motivation of fear, soldiers do not like to dig. The reasons were clear enough. Most of the time it was hard work that served no obvious purpose. Most of the time the holes were dug for the future, not because someone was shooting right then. So the pace was slow under any circumstance and even slower when the dirt was not cooperative.

The soil itself was never perfect. My fantasy became a firmly-packed loam that my entrenching tool could sink into with a two-handed thrust or a solid kick of a boot. It would have no roots and no rocks. It would be fine grained, but not so fine as to crumble along the sides of the hole. After that day in Georgia I acquired some passing acquaintance with the soils of Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Colorado, California, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Alaska, Vietnam, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Panama, Portugal, and Germany. I remembered most fondly the sandy soils of Fort McCoy, Wisconsin. It was a bit like an oenophile’s search for the perfect vintage. Fort McCoy was not perfect, but it was very, very close. A bit more body, a few less roots would have been nice.

I became familiar with the vagaries of compaction and adhesion. There were soils that clung to my shovel and would not shake loose. Those heavy lumps had to be lifted up out of the hole and banged off of the shovel. Some soils had grains so fine and dry they flowed like water and the hole collapsed into itself like the tiny lairs of ant lions. In one place it was as if I were along the seashore and as I went into the earth the hole filled with water.

The dirt was colored through chemical processes I did not pretend to understand, except perhaps the distant relationship between iron ore and the color red, or of copper to green. They, the soils, were none the same. They had shades of gray that descended from black to the color of doves’ feathers, or pale yellows, or sometimes a faded rose red. I had to worry about the contrast between the soil I was digging out, the spoil, and the color of the surface of the earth. In a day or two the spoil would merge back into the color of the landscape, but when it was freshly dug it was easily seen and someone else might know where I was, would find me, would seek me out.

But to get back to my time in Georgia, as I went down into my hole I began to shape it to my needs, carving the edges smooth as I went deeper. Here I encountered the damp coolness. I dug one end of my rectangle a little bit deeper so that in those moments when I didn’t need to be on lookout I could go even further in the earth and be even more protected. Also this deep spot would collect the water when it began to rain. Then I dug a small hole into the side of the big hole. This was called a grenade sump. The theory was that if someone tossed a hand grenade into my hole, I could kick it into this smaller hole where it would explode harmlessly. I never met anyone who tested this theory and lived to tell the tale. But it made sense and made me feel better, so I dug out the grenade sump.

Eventually I completed my fighting position. It was a rectangular hole in the ground where I and my fellow soldier could hide. We had something like forty-eight cubic feet of spoil mounded up around the hole that presented a problem all its own. But we could get down into the earth.

If an infantryman is young, if he is poorly led, if he does not yet understand battle or the infantry, then he will not know that he is a fool, that what he feels is an illusion, that the comforting earth around him may well be a grave.

My buddy and I were allowed to leave our hole for mail call. My name was shouted out and a letter was passed back to me. On my way back I filled my canteen with fresh water. Down in the dark coolness of my foxhole I spread out my poncho. I leaned against the dirt wall and could see the tops of pine trees and blue sky overhead. I lit a Lucky Strike and opened my mail. I sipped the cool water as I read my mail and smoked. There I was cool and the outside sounds, the growling sergeants, the clink of other soldiers’ entrenching tools, were attenuated. The sweat dried and began to itch. I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life.

Later that evening it began to rain. I was ordered out on patrol. I slipped and fell getting out of my foxhole and dirt fell down inside the collar of my fatigue shirt. When I pulled my poncho on, I got the side that had been on the ground on the inside so that it trapped the dampness in. As I walked in the darkness the rain tapped against the top of my helmet. I stumbled through the dank woods for hours, scratching at the dirt in my shirt, my boots squishing full of water at a stream. I was miserable. The memory of the moment back in my foxhole reading my mail faded swiftly away.

The patrol returned in the early morning hours and we received new orders. I filled the hole back up with the dirt I’d dug out, put my helmet on my head, hung my gear over my shoulders and moved on.
Every time we stopped we were ordered to dig. At first we dug to hide and to be safe. We made holes where we were told to dig. My place became a part of a relationship between the shape of the ground, the importance of the ground, the location of the enemy, the location of the rest of my unit, and the weapons I carried. My hole in the ground and its shape and purposes evolved to fit the circumstances.

Then and for years afterward I kept remembering that first moment when I was able to feel safe in the earth, sipping water and reading my mail. For that matter I kept remembering that first place in Arkansas earth so many years before. Maybe that was really the moment when I became an infantryman.

Ambush

Elephant Grass, Roger A. Blum, 1966

3

The experts in defense conceal themselves as under the ninefold earth; those skilled in attack move as from above the ninefold heavens. Thus they are capable both of protecting themselves and of gaining a complete victory.

Sun Tsu, The Art of War

1968

I was just a passenger as we rode along the road that ran from Pleiku to Ban Me Thuot. The landscape was open, a grassy savannah edged with spindly trees that marked the beginning of the jungle. Some hillsides had been cleared and planted in tea bushes and the rows were a dusty green very pleasing to my eye. Off to the southeast was a place known as the Crow’s Foot that was reported to have a lot of VC and NVA in it. 

The purpose of the trip was as peculiar as the war. Later in the day there would be a ceremony involving the gift of an elephant to a Montagnard village and the unit I was helping to advise, a Vietnamese battalion, was to set up a perimeter defense around the village. For this trip, however, I didn’t have a real job. I was just along for the ride. To be honest, I really just wanted to see the elephant.

The road ahead of us curved and the jungle crept down close, perhaps only 100 meters away. I was nodding, barely awake when the jeep swerved toward the ditch. As I fell out of my seat I saw that the convoy was halted and soldiers were pouring out of the backs of the trucks. A small black cloud was drifting up into the air at the head of the column. A “thump” sound carried down to me. The radio behind me was chattering in Vietnamese, too fast for me to understand. I hit the ground and watched my helmet roll away while I was struggling to get a round into the chamber of my rifle (I know, I should have had a round chambered in the first place). As I crawled after my helmet I heard the angry buzzing and the steady popping sound coming from the tree line. I sprawled in the grass of the ditch and put my helmet on, then slowly, carefully peeked up over the top of the ditch. I could see the flashes of the ambush, hear the spang as bullets ricocheted off the roadway. I ducked back down and hugged the earth and wished, very desperately, for a hole to crawl into. 

Face down in the ditch I smelled the crushed green grass. I didn’t really want to put my head up to begin returning fire. But I had to and I did. More than anything else I wanted a shovel. I wanted to get down into the earth.

It ended much like most such events in those days. Within minutes shells were falling from friendly artillery. The rounds dropped into the tree line with a dark crumping sound and the flashes of the ambush faded away. The buzzing sound of the bullets stopped. Friendly troops swept the tree line finding only brass shell casings and a few spots of blood. I cleared my rifle and put a fresh magazine in. As the convoy resumed I reloaded the magazines I’d emptied. 

I never had the time to begin digging my hole, but I sure did want one. I needed to go down into the earth.

Becoming an Infantryman

2

For, as I am a soldier,

A name that in my thoughts becomes me best...

Shakespeare, Henry V

Whereas in 1800 roughly 20,000 men were required to hold a mile of battle front, this figure progressively dropped to 12,000 by 1870, to 2,500 by 1917, and to less than 1,000 today. Rather than a glorious panorama of color, the battlefield became instead a foreboding, desolate place in which combatants maintained a high degree of invisibility.

John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry

1965

I became an infantryman. I came to know that dirt defines the infantry and, for the infantryman, warfare itself. He walks on it. He digs into it. He kills and dies to own it. He moves from place to place upon it. He is buried in it.

I know the exact moment when I became an infantryman. From that moment, and for the remainder of my time as a soldier, I was concerned with dirt, with blood, and with grace.

I told my story from time to time over Friday night drinks at the officers’ club, especially when armor officers were there. 

“I guess I have too much imagination to be a tanker,” I’d say. “Think about it. Just think about sitting there and hearing the ping of a fifty caliber spotting round. You’ve got what? Maybe a second, or less, to kiss your ass goodbye. I’d rather be on the ground. Even better, I’d rather be in the ground.”

But the time came when the younger soldiers didn’t know what a spotting round was and the story took longer to tell because I had to explain about the 106 millimeter recoilless rifle. Still, if I told the story well some of them would listen and perhaps the infantrymen among them would understand. They would understand if they had experienced fear and if they had learned that in their world things could go very, very wrong.

I became an infantryman on a firing range. I and the rest of the trainees were getting acquainted with all the weapons of our craft. On this day the weapon was the 106 millimeter recoilless rifle. That weapon isn’t around any more. It is an enormous steel cannon mounted on a tripod (sometimes a jeep) that actually looks a bit like one of those black cannons on display at old forts and Civil War battle sites.

We sat in bleachers under a hot Fort Benning, Georgia sun and looked out over the barren landscape of the range. All that could be seen in the distance were numbered panels and burned-out hulks of tanks. Lined up at firing points were the 106 recoilless rifles. Well behind the rifles, since the rifles kick up a dusty back-blast, were stacks of their ammunition, huge bullets almost four inches across. 

In front of us the instructor used large graphics to explain the weapon and, with some bloodthirsty glee, the principle behind the “shaped charge” in the weapon’s projectile. The interesting thing about a shaped charge is that when the projectile hits a tank, the explosive inside the shell is shaped so that it burns a tiny little hole through the tank’s steel skin, sort of like the hole made by a welder’s torch. Extremely hot gases then pour through the hole and those gases melt and fragment the steel on the inside of the hull. Those little blobs of molten steel then ricochet around at very high velocities inside the compartment of the tank. 

The sergeant vividly created the image for us of being inside a very small windowless steel room filled with ammunition and fuel. Then, with the strike of the 106’s projectile, thousands of tiny, searingly hot droplets of molten metal began to bounce off the walls and floor and ceiling. The inside of the tank becomes a buzzing, burning maelstrom detonating the tank’s ammunition, vaporizing and exploding the tank’s fuel, incinerating the tank’s crew.

But what struck me as really clever about the 106 wasn’t the main gun. What I liked was the spotting rifle. The spotting rifle was bolted to the barrel of the 106 and fired the same bullet as a .50 caliber machine gun. With a spotting rifle attached, the 106 gunner didn’t have to fire the big, expensive, and slow-to-load 106 round until he was sure he was going to hit his target. What he did was fire the spotting rifle (loaded with tracer ammunition so he could see where it went) and see if the spotting round hit the target. When the spotting round hit the target he would know he had the range to the tank. Then he fired the main gun.

After sitting through the lectures we watched a demonstration. An NCO got into the metal seat beside the weapon and put his eye to the sight. He manipulated the wheels that traversed and elevated the main weapon. He began firing the spotting rifle. Bang...bang...bang. We could see the tracers fly through the air and come closer and closer to an old tank hull. Then a tracer hit the hull with a ping! Immediately after the ping was a huge BOOM as the main gun fired and a cloud of dust blossomed up from behind it. Downrange the hulk of the tank rocked backwards on its treads as the 106 round slammed into it. That’s when I had my epiphany. 


I’d wrap up my story by saying, “I’ve got too much imagination to be a tanker. Just think about it. There you are clanking along in a steel box, smelling the diesel fumes, sittin’ on top of God knows how many rounds of tank ammunition, hatches closed so you can’t see a damn thing, engine howling up a storm, the loader and gunner bitching at each other abut something. And then you hear this little ping.” 

If I was feeling dramatic I’d  pause for a moment. 

“Can you hear it? I could hear it that day. I knew what was coming next. I could almost feel the round slamming into the tank, see those little fireballs of molten steel whizzing around inside, bouncing around, cooking off the ammo and the fuel.” 

“Tell you this — I want to have the smell of dirt around me the day I die.”