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.
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