Dirt: Maps

Main Street, Bastogne, Belgium, Olin Daws, 1945

15 

If we reflect upon the commencement of War philosophically the conception of War does not originate properly with the offensive, as the form has for its absolute object, not so much fighting as the taking possession of something....

Karl von Clausewitz, On War

My map was on the ground beside me and was wrapped in plastic to protect it from rain and sweat. The plastic covering also allowed me to draw on it with a grease pencil. The scale of the map was 1:50,000, which meant that one map sheet covered a very small piece of the earth. The map was a masterpiece of the cartographer’s art and yet so common in my experience that I had long since quit admiring it. I wanted it to tell me even more than it did.

Brown contour lines provided a sense of the three-dimensional shape of the land — how high the hills were, how steep their sides. Small blue lines showed me the streams and rivers. Black symbols and lines told me the man-made objects that were on the land such as roads, houses, bridges, churches, and graveyards. Other tints and symbols told me about farmland and orchards and swamps and rice paddies.

Overprinted on the map was a grid that sectioned off the land into little squares one kilometer on a side. If the map was accurate, if my hand steady, if my eye clear, and if I could relate this piece of paper to the ground in which I dug, I could tell within 10 meters exactly where I was. I could create a number that would tell any listener to my radio or reader of my messages exactly the same thing.

On the plastic covering were drawn other symbols. They told me where to go and what to do when I got there. They told me who was supposed to be on my left and my right. Essentially, the symbols gave me ownership of a specific piece of the earth. I possessed this land with my men and my skill and my weapons. Also, when I converted my numbers into code and sent them up through the chain of command I told them, “Here I am! Don’t shoot me!”

But why was I here? This day? This time? That was not easy to answer.

An appraiser determines the value of civilian real estate. In general, that value is determined by the most recent sales of “comparable” pieces of property. It is self-evidently a fool’s game and a tautology, but it is in most places a shared delusion so that a market is made and deeds are exchanged. However, ownership established by anything other than force of arms is a rather modern idea.

The infantryman is from an older tradition. The infantryman establishes a much more primal claim to the land. His claim is very simple. “This is mine because I am here and I will kill you if you try to take it away from me. I have dug my hole and it’s either your blood or mine.”

That’s one soldier’s view. But the perception shifts the moment two foxholes are considered. Perception shifts again and again and again as the circumstances become more complex. Simple possession is not enough. Just being there only matters if being there has some advantage that favors the owner in relation to his enemy.

All other things being equal, the value of land to an infantryman derives primarily from its prominence, its shape and its location.

Consider a road junction in the Ardennes forest in late 1944. If an infantryman and his colleagues are at that junction, standing in the middle of the road, then a group of Germans who want to go through that junction will have to get them out of the way. If the infantrymen just stand there in the open, the Germans will shoot them, drop some artillery on them, or maybe just drive over them in their tanks, crushing their bodies into the mud and the snow. The location has some value, but defending is a bit difficult.

So what happens if they dig their holes beside the junction? That is a little bit better, at least now they are more difficult to kill. Their ability to control who can go through the junction is pretty much determined by who has the most people and the amount and types of weapons they have or can call on.

Suppose that the road junction is next to a small hill. If the infantrymen are up on the side of the hill where they can cover the intersection, then they can shoot anything that tries to get through and they are even more protected. To use the intersection, the Germans have to send some people up the hill to force the infantrymen away.

Of course, it doesn’t mean a damn thing if the infantrymen are in a place no one else wants. Of course, it doesn’t mean a damn thing if they occupy a hill that confers no advantage over their enemy. That was one of the many frustrations of being an infantryman in Vietnam. All too often the only point of attacking a location was to kill the people at that location. The dirt had no value relative to the enemy and once they were there it often meant nothing to the enemy or friendly forces. But the history of war is full of examples of mis-appreciation of the value of a particular piece of dirt. The infantryman just knows that it is his job to claim ownership today. Tomorrow will have to take care of itself.

Dirt: Where in the Hell Are We?

Landing Zone, John O. Wehrle, 1966

14

Then there was silence, broken only by the clicking of the compass-needles and snapping of watch-cases, as the heads of columns compared bearings and made appointments for the rendezvous.

Rudyard Kipling, The Lost Legion

1973

The helicopter lifted and fell as it followed the shape of the land and the height of the trees, alternately pressing me down on the metal deck and giving me the feeling of floating just above it. The land below me was a mottled amber and gray, with an occasional flare of white where a dogwood was coming into bloom. Inside the aircraft the environment was mechanical and hard-edged. The pilots’ helmets hid their humanity and made it seem as if giant insects were transporting us. From my place in the back I saw only the pilots’ bulbous heads, the lights and dials of the instrument panels, and the pilots’ gloved hands on the controls. I did not want to talk to them. I did not need to talk to them over the clatter of our flight. The time for talking was past. Now the job was just to get there, to a spot on a map, and get off.

The land was difficult to understand at our speed and height. The contours were hidden by vegetation and shadows. It flowed past us in a rush. I was tapped on my shoulder by one of my soldiers and I looked up to see a pilot pointing through the front windscreen to a small open area. I signaled my men and we unbuckled. 

Unsafe. Not supposed to unbuckle before landing. Screw it. Too many seconds lost trying to unbuckle after landing.

The ground suddenly came into focus. Tall grass was blown down by the rotor wash. The nose tilted up, then settled and the struts were on the ground. We jumped to the earth. We crouched and shuffle-ran burdened by gear to get out and away from the wind. Then we fell to the ground, looking outward. Behind me the rattling roar of the helicopters increased. I heard the shouts of squad leaders. The flight of six machines lifted up and away and we were alone.

Twenty meters away was a tree line and we rushed towards it, running close to the ground listening, watching for a popping sound and flashes. We ran awkwardly carrying our world with us — helmets, radios, ammunition, food, canteens of water, first aid packets, knives, bayonets, pistols, rifles, grenades of several types, rocket launchers, machine guns, spools of wire, dry socks in plastic bags, cigarettes, paperback books, codebooks, maps, toothpaste, razors, shaving cream, compasses, maps, matches, green t-shirts and boxer shorts, blocks of explosive, blasting caps, claymore mines, det cord, entrenching tools, ponchos, soft caps, gloves, poncho liners, spare shirts, spare sets of trousers, extra shoe laces, rifle cleaning kits, camouflage sticks, dog tags, extra eyeglasses, mosquito repellent, aspirin, water purification tablets, ear plugs, hand soap, flashlights, grease pencils, ballpoint pens, note pads, map overlays, wallets, protective masks, atropine injectors, packets of condoms, chewing gum, candy bars, strobe lights, batteries, P-38 can openers, green duct tape —  all packed into waterproof bags and stuffed into rucksacks, or attached to web gear, or in the side pockets of trousers. It was all put someplace where it could be found in the dark.

At the tree line I got out my map to figure out where we were. I knew where I was supposed to be, but this did not feel right, it did not look right. Reports came in accounting for my people. The second flight of six appeared over the tree line and touched down. Men floundered out and dispersed. The flight took off. More humpbacked men scrambled into the trees. Another accounting was received.

A flow, it was all a flow. First I had decided how I, my company, wanted to look on the ground when we arrived. Then I worked it out backwards, each step dictated by the carrying capacity and quantity of helicopters and where they were coming from. Less than an hour ago and far away small clumps of men divided up on the edge of the pickup zone. Timed flights of helicopters arrived low over the horizon, fluttered down, and the small clumps of men shuffled into them. Then the choppers tilted forward and flowed away, to this place, again and again. Until they were all gone from there and that field was empty and marked only by crushed grass and a blowing candy wrapper, as if nothing had ever been there.

Now we were here. Each pod scattered its seeds and then the pod itself was blown away in the wind. The seeds settled in, waiting to be told where to go next. It was an illusion of scattering. Infantrymen’s desperate need to stay together meant that we clumped into at least pairs, but often the clumps were larger. The first shouts of the squad leaders over the thumping of the helicopters were, as always, “Spread out! Spread out! Spread out, goddamnit!”

We were all here, wherever here was.

“Get me 3-5,” I told my radio operator, “and tell him to come see me.”

The radio whispered and 3-5, the Third Platoon sergeant, showed up. We did not salute. I pointed to my map and told the sergeant, “This doesn’t look right. I think they put us in the wrong place.” The Third Platoon did not have a lieutenant and anyhow, Sergeant Donald was the best navigator in the company.

Sergeant Donald nodded and said, “I agree.”

“Where do you think we are?”

Donald took out his own plastic-wrapped map, one marked with the same symbols of where they’d been and where they were supposed to go. He pointed to two elevations on the map and two hills barely visible above the trees. “Could be the same places,” he said.

A quick resection put them two kilometers east of where they were supposed to land and maybe three kilometers offset from where they were supposed to go.

“Are you sure?”

“No, sir,” the platoon sergeant answered.

“Neither am I.” I pointed to my map, “If we go this way, and if we are here, then we should cross that stream and that road about there.”

“Looks right.”

“OK. Your platoon leads out. I’ll follow with the second and first platoons. We’ll take another look when we get across the stream.”

Other lieutenants and NCOs were in a small circle around me now. All of them had their maps out and were casting their heads up into the air looking for landmarks. The ritual of movement was about to begin.

“Third, Second, First Platoon,” I said. “First Platoon sweep the LZ. We don’t want to leave any shit behind. I’ll follow Third Platoon. We don’t know where the hell we are, but we’ll be able to figure it out.” I pointed to the Second Platoon leader, “Lyle, you figure it out on your own and double check what we’re doing.”

Seafaring men never know quite where they are and, unless there are rocks or shoals or sandbars, as long as they’re within a mile or two it does not matter. For them the computations of the sun and stars, the precise recording of time, the tables and sextants and compass cards are good enough to determine their longitude and latitude. The infantryman’s going to and fro upon the earth demands a greater precision.

Well, that’s not entirely the case. For the individual infantryman it is enough to know that he is here and the rest of his squad is there. But outside his little cocoon of concern he and his small collective are going somewhere to do something. He cannot get there unless he knows where he is now and where there is from here.

“I’m not gonna waste any marking rounds and I’ll be damned if I’ll ask the CO to find us.”

Pride. That was all it really was. One way to find my location was to ask someone else. I could ask the artillery to fire a smoke round on a registered location. If I could see the round land then I could take a bearing and then I would know where we were. Or I could ask someone who was flying around to come find us and tell us where we were. I didn’t want to do either of those things. I and my lieutenants and sergeants would be able to figure it out, assuming the maps were right.

Eventually I must have the answer. My company was part of a larger group. Someone up at battalion HQ had us plotted on a larger map and huddled around that map were people who also wanted to know where the hell we were and what we were doing. More important, if someone started shooting at us, I had to know. For now, just screw it. Find out on my own. So I reported my best guess and moved out following Sergeant Donald’s platoon. Donald checked his compass and sent out his point man on the azimuth, compass direction, that made the most sense. His squads took up flanking positions watching the sides for shadows and threats.

When we crossed the stream the leaders gathered again. We crouched in a group under a tree. Off to the side was a cluster of radio operators, their antennas and faint whispering of their radios marking them off. Lyle, as he was supposed to do, had found another place on the map that looked very much like the ground they were seeing around them. We could be there, not here. It was a puzzle, a fundamental puzzle.

I could not get to where I was supposed to go if I didn’t know where we were. Eventually there was going to be an enemy in the way. It was not a friendly world here. 

“If we’re here, then that road junction ought to be there.” I pointed to a place on the map. “And, if we’re here, then that hilltop ought to be at a heading of about 135 degrees.”

He made a decision. “OK. Lyle, send a quick patrol out to see if the junction’s there. Just a klick out and back. Sergeant Donald, you go on until you get a clear view of that hilltop. I’ll revise the movement plan based on what you find. Everyone else take up a hasty defense right here.”

“Dig in?” someone asked.

I had to smile. I had a reputation to keep.

The platoons spread out and picked their spots.

“Sonofabitch is a goddamned mole,” I heard a private say. “You stop walkin’, start diggin,” he said in a high, sing-song voice. 

His squad leader, who was young and had not seen much combat, agreed with the private, but he did not say so. Instead, he said, “You dig in the wrong place and you’ll dig it again. Look at where you are goddammit. You’ve got no fields of fire. You can’t see anyone on your left or right. Move back to that tree there and start again.” 

They moved, but before they started on another hole, Lyle was back. “No junction,” he says. “Looks like Sergeant Donald is right.”

Donald came back. “We’re off some. Got an azimuth that puts us right about here,” he said pointing to a spot on the map.

“OK. I’ll call it in and see if we can find out where Alpha and Bravo Companies are. Lyle, your platoon is on point. Let me know when you’re ready to move. March order is Second, Third, and First Platoon. I’ll follow the Second Platoon.”

I encoded the coordinates of our position and radioed them back to the command post. I learned that the other two companies were also put down in the wrong locations. Alpha company was so far off that the helicopters were going back for them. I was told that aerial recon of the objective showed no sign of the enemy.

“Then why the Hell are we attacking it?” I said to myself.

Overall I was happy. I knew where I was, a simple pleasure in a complicated, dangerous world. I was at this little dot on a map, this little dot that was moving from here to there, there being a small circle on the map. I was connected to the rest of my battalion and brigade and division, my Army. I was even connected to the Air Force. Now that I knew where I was, I could tell them and they could come to me. Even if the air began to whistle and buzz, even if the green and blue day began to change into gray and wet, I knew where we were and I was not alone. It was a good feeling.

The private muttered and folded his entrenching tool. He shook the dirt off his M-16 and checked to make sure nothing had gotten in the barrel. He put on his rucksack and humped over to a position off the side of the trail just to the left of his squad leader.

When we got to the hill and there was no enemy. Our cautious creep through the last five hundred meters brought only sweat into our eyes, leeches on our legs, and a few more insect bites on the back of our necks. We found our places all around the upper slope of the small hill and we dug in. 

The private looked back up the hill and saw his Captain, shirt off, entrenching tool in hand, digging his own hole just like the rest of them.

Dirt: Key Terrain

Bloody Ford, Charles Johnson Post, 1898, San Juan Hill, Cuba

13

Conformation of the ground is of the greatest assistance in battle.

Sun Tsu, The Art of War

Infantrymen travel to a particular place on the earth — fight to control a location, defend a place against attacks by others — because that piece of dirt has value, because that dirt has some meaning. Otherwise they would not go there; otherwise they would not be there.

The value of a location has much to do with the geometries and trigonometries of the weapons they carry. High ground is better than low ground, most of the time. High ground where the shape of the ground provides natural defenses against attack is even better. Best of all is ground from which a soldier can control the ability of his enemy to move elsewhere. Finding that place, that key terrain, is part of a soldier’s craft.

In some parts of the world it is easy. If it is a place where people have been a long time, a place with a history of conflict (say the Rhine River valley) then it is more than easy — most of the time there is already a structure on the key terrain built to defend or control the ground.

For a single infantryman, key terrain is simply where he can see and shoot and not be shot. If where he is on the earth meets those criteria, he is on key terrain, his key terrain. If he is moving, then his personal key terrain is somewhere around him, where he was, where he is going, or maybe a meter or two to his left or right. He is usually looking for his place as he walks along. His movement becomes a chain of equations: if the enemy is there, then my place is over there. If I move to that place, then I will be safe, I will be able to kill him.

However, soldiering is a collective activity. Being an infantryman is being part of a group of men. If soldiers watch only for their individual places on the earth they are no different from the individual birds in a covey of quail that has been flushed to flutter up into the air to be hunted down one by one after they scatter across the field.

The movements of a soldier are not part of a random walk. They move from one place to another place that is selected by them or for them from maps, from sending someone out in front of them to look at the ground in the direction they are going, from guesses about the value of a place on the ground made by someone else. 

But first of all, they have to know where they are.

Dirt: Place

Bridges: Van Buren to Fort Smith, Arkansas, ca 1912

12

     Take the even, take the odd,
     I would not sleep here if I could
     Except for the little green leaves in the wood
     And the wind on the water.

 Archibald MacLeish, J.B.

1949

On summer evenings after supper — fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and corn bread cooked by a large dark woman named Juanita — my grandfather and I sat on the front porch of the house atop the bluff as the day cooled. My grandfather had his own rocker with a seat woven from split white oak. He smoked Pall Mall cigarettes and stubbed them out in an amber glass ashtray on a metal stand by his rocker. I sat in the porch swing that hung from chains attached to the roof. It creaked softly as I pushed off the floor and swung my legs. My grandmother rarely joined us. I think she preferred the brighter light of the parlor where she sewed, or the kitchen, where she continued with the day’s chores.

Under the bluff next to the river was a double track of the Union Pacific Railway. When the evening freight came through, my grandfather would take out his Illinois pocket watch. It was his habit to check the trains. If we were to walk out on the bluff we could see down to the east where the railroad crossed the river. But usually we stayed up on the porch.

The best view from the porch was to the south and west in the direction of Fort Smith and Oklahoma. From there we could watch a sunset. Sometimes we watched summer storms come up out of Oklahoma and sweep across the river bottoms below us. The storms were black boiling clouds that darkened the day and pulsed with lighting. Then we would go inside and watch the flashes through the windows and hear the wind shake the oak trees in the yard. The next day I would find the husks of cicadas scattered on the ground where they’d been blown from their attachment to the rippled bark.

Sometimes all we saw was a light graying of the sky and a light summer rain would come to wash across the air, caressing the roof of the porch, as gentle as a Bob Wills song coming from the huge Philco console radio inside the house.

Dirt: City

442 Combat Team, Leghorn Italy, Dong Kingman, 1944 (?)

11

The worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative.

Sun Tsu, The Art of War

1989

In the natural world almost nothing is smooth, almost nothing has regular edges, almost nothing throws a shadow at a perfect right angle or describes a perfect ellipse. The natural world is irregular. The creations of man are regular — the curve of a helmeted head or a tank turret, the straight lines of roads, railroad tracks, buildings, and telephone poles. The infantryman, as he moves upon the earth, is constantly searching for the unnatural. He is looking for the edges in his visual world, because those unnatural things represent threats to his life. In a city or town everything changes and the infantryman is confused and more fearful than ever.

Our base camp was in a warehouse. We created a small illusion of a site in the woods by boiling water and heating our rations with pieces of C-4 explosive. But it was a world full of all the things we had learned to fear. All about us were edges — the corners of doorways and the sides of buildings. Rooflines cast sharp, angular shadows into the streets as we moved through the city. The sounds were sounds that meant danger — engines, doors slamming, metal striking metal, dogs barking. The smells were wrong — diesel fumes, fresh bread and seared meat. Instead of the regularity of color in the natural world, the colors we saw were wrong and out of place. Worst of all were the people — shouting, laughing, crying, moving, stopping, gesturing, talking, arguing. These people might or might not be the enemy. They might or might not have a weapon under their clothing. They might or might not be friendly. They cluttered the landscape and confused us with their humanity. Our eyes sought men who looked like us, other soldiers, with perhaps a slightly different shading in their uniforms, a slightly different curve to their helmets, slightly different shapes to their weapons. Those shapes we could kill.

Our job was to control a particular place upon the earth, but here there was no control. Here was only chaos. The cold vocabulary of our trade did not seem to apply. Here we could not “select targets” and “engage with maximum firepower” unconcerned with “collateral damage.” Here there was no clean delineation of humans into friendly and enemy. Here there were others and the situation required discipline and a new level of awareness.

We adapted. We learned the patterns of echoes reflected from building walls. We learned the small hiding places along a street and we moved in small surges from place to place, one group covering another. We learned how to cross a street by looking right and left and up. We learned how to cope with sight lines interrupted by awnings and doorways and the tall vertical corners of buildings. Movement here was quickness followed by caution. We traversed the city in a jagged path, turning right-angled corners, trying to find a place to stand, a piece of this confused earth to own.

The sergeant joked as they dropped their packs in yet another warehouse, “Awright, get out your jackhammers an’ start diggin’ in.” I groaned because I was too tired to laugh. What I did was estimate the thickness of the walls and find solid objects to reinforce them. Men went up on the roof to watch the nearby streets for movement. We barricaded ourselves and tried to find ways to watch. The longer we stayed, the thicker we would make the walls until we had built a little fort in the city.

Dirt: The Delta

Rice Paddy, James S. Hardy, 1969

10

The Delta perhaps demands every reserve of mysticism from the Americans who live there.

Frances FitzGerald, The Long Fear

1972

The Delta was a place of regular geometries. It was a place of straight lines and pale shades of green. It was a man-made terrain of dikes and canals with deceptive distances in which a line of darker green trees could hide almost anything. It was a place of almost billiard-table green flatness. This hydraulic, engineered landscape was designed so that the flat sheets of water sustained the rice and also could move ever so delicately from place to place. This was the Wagon Wheel, a place that was the junction of six canals into a hub on the edge of Ba Xuyen Province.

That day we walked down the path on the top of the paddy dike and I was among them, very tall and unlike any of my fellow soldiers. In the luminous morning light the men I walked with were in single file with blackened rice-cooking pots strapped to their gear. They were carrying obsolete rifles and they chattered softly in their musical language.

If I had to find a hiding place here it would be down in the water up against the side of the dike. As I walked I towered above my companions and I was even more marked out by the cluster of radio men who followed me everywhere. As I walked I was simply a target, hard to miss.

Our course was a step-wise approach to the hub of the wagon wheel. We made right angle turns at the intersections of the dikes and sometimes had two files of small men walking parallel to each other on different dikes. Water buffalo with their little boy handlers stood in the water and watched us pass. The deep, black, patient eyes of the buffalo kept secrets from us They seemed to be waiting.

We moved slowly as we approached the green cluster of planted trees that marked the hub. One of the dikes intersected a canal and now there was still brown water on one side and green rice fields on the other.

The rotting woven bamboo huts of an abandoned hamlet marked the end of our march. The cooking sites there were long cold. We huddled and and I listened to them chatter about what to do next on this empty day. The soldiers began to go slowly down into the earth on the edges of the hamlet. Water began to fill their holes before they’d gone more than a foot or two deep.