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.