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.”