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.