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.