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.