Dirt: Poker in Pleiku

James Pollock, GI Card Game, 1967

19

Most people do not start out as heedless adventurers hell-bent on the road to destruction. It’s just that danger is like most things in life: you can get used to it. After a while you stop paying quite so much attention to it, then you ignore it, and finally you are contemptuous of it. You might even be so audacious as to taunt it on occasion, just to see if it can be pricked to a response. But the worst thing of all is to think that it is no longer worthy of your attention. That’s when you start doing stupid things and making stupid decisions.

David Donovan, Once a Warrior King

1968

We were playing poker when the rockets came. The dealer was an artillery captain and at the table were an intelligence NCO, a CIA contract guy advising the Vietnamese reconnaissance teams, another civilian working for USAID, an armor officer working in the Province headquarters, and me. We were in a team house on the edge of Pleiku City, Pleiku Province, Vietnam where most of us lived in various buildings scattered around the compound.

The dealer called for the ante, a 25 cent chip, and named the game, seven-card stud. A tape slowly spooled from one reel to another on the TEAC tape player. Blood, Sweat, and Tears came through on the stereo. As the cards ran out, two down, one up, the conversation was of weapons we’d known and used, a common topic. The chips clicked into the center, a bet, a raise, a call, a fold.

The dealer tapped the table. “Pot’s good,” he said. He dealt the next card.

A rifle was my primary tool. I was serving in a time and place where I saw and used weapons that covered almost a fifty-year span of technology. Like others of my craft the weapons were endlessly debated in barracks and bars and hooches and foxholes, preferably, as in Pleiku, accompanied by music and shots of Jack Daniels.

With each weapon came its legend and reputation, its quirks in assembly and disassembly, its appropriateness to the mission at hand. Although I had handled the ancient Springfield ’03, the bolt-action rifle in use in the early days of World War Two, by my time the ’03 was purely for ceremonial purposes. It was ideal for the ‘manual of arms’, the ritualized forms of carrying and moving a weapon inherited from the days of muzzle-loading muskets and from the times when the movement and massing of men were the essence of infantry at battle. The ’03 was reputed to be a very accurate rifle, but I never fired it on a rifle range. The ’03 was replaced by the M-1.

The M-1 was going out of the inventory as I was going through training. Nevertheless, it was the first rifle that I mastered as a soldier and the one most respected by the older sergeants who were my teachers. The M-1 and the smaller M-1 Carbine were given to the Vietnamese in large quantities and I encountered them often in my years there. The M-1 was, to me, a near-perfect weapon, probably because it was the first rifle I truly felt comfortable with. It was quirky in how it had to be handled, particularly during drill and ceremonies, but it was very accurate.

I was never entirely comfortable with its replacement, the M-14, although after enough beer (or bourbon) I would reluctantly admit that, yes, the M-14 held more rounds of ammo, that later models were at least as accurate as the M-1, that it was slightly lighter, and that its round (its bullet) was possibly more effective than the M-1 (and interchangeable with the round used by other armies in NATO). Besides, old hands, Korean War vets, had one very telling criticism of the M-1. The M-1’s ammunition was held in a small metal clip that was shoved down into the rifle. After the last round was fired, the clip was ejected with a distinctive metallic pinging sound. In a way that was good, that is, you knew that you had to reload. On the other hand, anyone else who heard that ping also knew you had to reload. Not a good thing if the person who heard was one of the bad guys. Still, in all, the Korea vets didn’t much like the M-14. The M-14 lasted until the M-16 came along. The old hands really hated that one.

An interest in weapons is expected of an infantryman, but it can be taken too far.

In our compound on the edge Pleiku we had not dug foxholes. Instead we had bunkers made out of old shipping containers placed along the perimeter. The containers were built up with layers of sand bags around their sides and on top. When the compound was attacked by rockets or mortars, we would run to these forts and hide, waiting for a possible ground assault.

My room was about twenty steps from the poker table. In it I had the collection of weapons I’d accumulated in the months I’d been in-country.

I was issued an M-16 when I arrived and managed to get my hands on a .45 pistol along my way to Pleiku. Or maybe it was the other way around. At any rate, when I joined the team I had a pistol and a rifle. A lot of different kinds of weapons were floating around in the advisory world, since the need for uniformity so pervasive in conventional units was not as important. Poker table and dinner conversation often tended to discussions about the merits of what was available.

The Swedish K, for example, a 9 mm submachine gun, was a favorite of the semi-military CIA advisors. It had a certain aura simply because the agency guys were carrying them. A Thompson sub-machine gun had a John Wayne macho style to it, and it was quiet. But four or five magazines of the .45 cal ammunition was one hell of a load to carry. Then there was the Army’s own “grease gun”, a .45 cal weapon that was notoriously inaccurate, but possibly handy as a “car gun”, something to carry in a jeep. The M-1 carbine was very light and a weapon that fit the hand very well. But the small .30 cal round had a terrible reputation. No stopping power. Just wouldn’t kill anyone, at least with conventional jacketed military bullets. Shotguns, 12 gauge pump-actions, were around. These were usually loaded with double-ought buck shot and had their advocates amongst those who walked jungle paths. Very nice close range weapons. But they only held a few rounds, the ammo was heavy to lug, and reloading was slow. Some preferred the AK-47, the weapon of choice of our enemies. The major problem with the AK was that with its distinctive sound and the different color of its tracer ammunition there was a good chance you could be mistaken for a bad guy and draw friendly fire. The M-79 grenade launcher was considered to be very handy, but it needed a good bit of practice and wasn’t quite a personal weapon all by itself.

I had one of each of these, except for the AK-47, in a locker in my room: M-16, .45 pistol, grease gun, 12-ga. shotgun, Swedish K, M-1 carbine, Thompson sub-machine gun, and M-79. I had a bag of ammo for each of them handy.

The Intel NCO bet fifty cents on the king and the four of spades he had showing. I checked my hole cards to see if it was worth staying for the next card.

“Lucretia McEvil” was playing from the tape deck when the first rockets came in. The rockets made a terrible, terrifying sound, a great screeching tearing of the night that made me want to dive under the poker table. Instead I did what every one else was doing. I ran to my room to get my flak vest and put a helmet on my head. I grabbed a weapon and a bag of ammo.

I ran, crouching low, to my assigned bunker through the streaking light of the rockets and the painful, ear-breaking sound of the alert siren. A rocket went overhead just as I reached the entrance. I rolled inside and crouched into a corner. I huddled up against the metal wall and listened as two more rockets screamed overhead. I was paralyzed. I knew in my brain that if there was a ground assault in progress I would be helpless, but I just could not move.

Another man, the artillery captain, the dealer, came crashing in through the entrance and immediately went to one of the firing slits. “C’mon, c’mon,” he said as he looked out. “Get that illumination going.”

I heard a soft popping sound overhead and then bright, bright, white-bright light of illuminating flares flooded through the firing slits. I came out of my crouch and peered through one of the slits and saw miniature suns floating down over the dry rice paddy outside our side of the compound. The paddy field was empty. I saw only the eerie dancing shadows thrown by the flares as they floated down beneath their parachutes.

In my hand was my loaded M-16 rifle. Over my shoulder was a bag of shotgun ammunition. If we were attacked, I had one magazine of useful ammo and then I would be helpless. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I was too embarrassed to say anything to the artillery captain who was watching his field of fire. “Had a pair of jacks,” he said. “Was gonna raise him back to see if he’d paired his kings. You have anything?”

“No. Had a pair of fours and the third one was already showing. I’d a probably folded.”

The captain patted the side pocket of his jungle fatigue shirt. It clinked. “Got your chips?”

“No.”

“Better hope they’re still there when you get back. Gotta be quick around here.”

A few minutes later the all-clear sounded. My chips were still stacked in front of my chair when I got back. I cashed out of the game and went to my room. I packed away all of my arsenal except for the M-16 and the .45 pistol.

Dirt: Rifle

M-1 Garand

18

Men complained as bitterly about them [the introduction of cannon and hand gun in 15th Century] as today we do about napalm; not simply because they were inhumane in their effects but because they degraded war, putting as they did the noble man-at-arms at the mercy of the vile and base born. 

Michael Howard, War in European History

Killing a man with a rifle is nothing like killing a quail with a shotgun. For one thing, the seeing is different. After some practice, the butt of the shotgun goes to the shoulder with a smooth motion and the cheek rests against the wood of the stock. The eye looks down the barrel and sees the small metal bead on the end of the barrel. The eye also looks for the target and the shotgun swings with the head and eye. The eye is looking for a fluttering shadow against the sky, a shadow that is moving away. The bead and the barrel of the shotgun trace the path of the bird and the pull of the trigger comes without thought. The moment is full of light and has a relaxed feel to it. It happens standing in the open with feet apart, it happens standing astride the land.

A rifle is nothing like a shotgun. The eye and the body take to it differently. Instead of a small metal bead on the end of the barrel, a rifle has a thin metal blade at the end, and, back near the stock, a flat metal circle with a hole in it, a peep sight. The rifle comes to the shoulder the same, and the cheek rests against the stock, but the eye looks through the peep hole, which is fuzzy and indistinct. The eye focuses on the blade of the sight and the infantryman then tries to put the top of that blade on the target. The target is never very clear. The eye simply cannot focus on the peep hole, the sight, and the target at the same time. The image is always in motion. The target may be moving. The rifle may be moving. The infantryman rests his elbows on anything to help him keep the rifle steady, but even his heartbeat can move the sight off the target. He is almost never standing up. He is instead hiding from the target — crouched behind a rock or tree, laying down on the ground, or looking from inside a foxhole. Truth be told, he almost never really sees his target. He sees shadows moving against shadows. He sees the flashes of his target’s rifle shooting back at him. He sees shapes in the wind.

It doesn’t look the same and it doesn’t sound the same. When walking through a field on an Arkansas morning the only sounds are the instructions to the dog, the thrumming flurry of a covey of quail rising into the air, the quick booms of the shotguns. A rifle makes a sharper cracking sound, a flat tenor among the basses. A man is killed amid the clattering sounds of many rifles firing many times, the urgent electronic sounds of voices over radios, the crumping explosion of artillery shells, people shouting and giving orders, smoke and flashing lights. More often than not there is no careful steadying of the rifle. More often than not the rifle is just pointed in a direction and the trigger is pulled again and again until the rifle stops firing and there is a spasmed rush to reload. Sometimes there are machine guns, grenades from grenade launchers or thrown by hand, artillery being fired from far away, bombs and rockets falling from the air. And men do not move quickly across the ground. In fact I never really saw well the men I shot at, they were all dark shapes in dark places. The sounds eventually die away and an odd silence emerges. Then the infantryman discovers if men have been killed.

Nevertheless, there is a kinship between that little .410 and the weapons infantrymen carry. The .410 was simplicity. It was essentially two pieces: a tube of steel bored out to a diameter of .41 inches and a wooden stock for my shoulder. A hammer, firing pin, and trigger mechanism were attached to the breech. With a cartridge loaded, the two pieces locked together to make a weapon. Every single-barreled and double-barreled shotgun (and a few rifles) in the world are the same.

Most rifles are more complex mechanisms. The kinship is this: the whole purpose of a rifle or shotgun is to contain an explosion that in turn forces a projectile out of a barrel. Also, they look alike, sort of, and the ammunition for them can be carried.

The difference, ultimately, is in intent, in purpose. The inside of a shotgun’s barrel is smooth and the weapon fires clusters of pellets. The purpose of the weapon is served by the hunt for food. The inside of a rifle’s barrel has small, twisting grooves that spin the single projectile. This increases the range and accuracy of the weapon. The purpose of the weapon is served by killing other men. Of course, some rifles may be used for the hunt and some shotguns may be used for war. They are, after all, just tools. A knife can be used to butter bread or slice a throat. The knife doesn’t care.

M-1 Disassembled

Dirt: Shotgun

17

Achilles set out iron, dark grey trophies,
ten double-headed axes, ten with single heads.
He stepped the mast of a dark-prowed man-of-war
far down the beach and tethered a fluttering dove
atop the pole, its foot looped with a light cord,
then challenged men to shoot and hit that mark...

Homer, The Iliad

1950

The Hudson stopped at the gate to the pasture. Two adults were in the front seat, my grandfather driving, my uncle on the passenger side. Queenie and I shared the back seat. It was my job to get out of the car, without letting Queenie out, and open the gate. I held the gate open while the Hudson drove through, carefully closed it, and got back in the car. The guns were in the trunk, all in sheepskin-lined cases except for my little single-shot .410 — Papaw’s 16 gauge Remington automatic and Uncle Russell’s autoloading 12 gauge.

We followed the faint path up to a fence line where we stopped and we all got out for some preliminary practice. Russell opened the trunk so we could get to our shotguns and ammunition. Uncle Russell gave me some tin cans that I put on fence posts before I could take my shotgun out.

The .410 was a little big for me, but I’d been assured that I would grow into it. My grandfather reminded me of all that he’d shown me in the backyard of the house on the hill: carry the gun with the breech open; never point a gun at a person; keep a gun unloaded until just before you plan to shoot; always keep the safety on; keep an eye on the people you are hunting with.

Finally, after we were facing the fenceline, I with the open shotgun in my left hand, Papaw let me put a shell into the chamber and close the it. He made sure I put the hammer on half-cock and kept the barrel pointed toward the ground. When he said OK, I put the shotgun to my shoulder, resting my cheek on the polished walnut stock. At last, I was looking down the barrel knowing something was going to happen, not like all those backyard practice sessions. This time the hammer wouldn’t just make a snapping sound when it hit the firing pin. I reached up with my thumb and pulled the hammer all the way back. I sighted down the barrel and put the bead right on top of the can. Take a breath. Let a little out and hold the rest in. Steady on the target. Squeeze the trigger.

BANG!

Even though I’d been expecting it, the bang and the kick surprised me. The can didn’t move.

“Try it again, boy.”

I pushed the lever that opened the breech, broke the gun open, and pulled out the empty shell, smelling the sweet gunsmoke and noticing the little wisps that came out of the barrel. I put the warm shell into my left pocket, got a live shell from my right, and reloaded the gun.

“Squeeze the trigger, boy, don’t jerk it.”

I was ready for the bang and the kick this time, but I missed again.

“You just flinched a bit. Keep the stock firm against your shoulder. It won’t hurt you.”

I nodded and got another fresh shell and re-loaded the gun. This time I watched the bead on the can very carefully and saw it wavering around. I waited until it seemed to be swinging towards the can and then I pulled the trigger. This time the can popped up into the air and bounced on the ground on the other side of the fence.

I swung around with a big grin on my face. “I got it!” I said.

“Watch that gun!” both my grandfather and my uncle shouted at me.

“Pay attention to where you point that thing!” my grandfather said.

“Don’t ever point a gun at someone,” my uncle said.

I flushed with embarrassment as I pointed the barrel of the gun to the ground and turned back towards the fence. I never forgot that lesson. But I also never forgot the thrill of hitting that can.

I shot a few more cans off fence posts before my grandfather and uncle got their shotguns out. Then I put my .410 back in the car and started throwing cans for them. When one of them would shout, “Pull!” my job was to throw the can into the air. Not straight up, but away from them, kind of like a quail might fly from them after being flushed. Neither of them missed very often, even when I tried to trick them by throwing off at an angle, or throwing harder or softer.

After a while it was my turn and they talked to me about leading, about sensing how fast the bird was flying and getting a steady swing to the gun just in front of the bird and following through as I pulled the trigger. I didn’t hit very many cans. It was so hard to remember all the things I was supposed to do.

“That little .410’s got the tightest choke I’ve ever seen,” my uncle said. “Shoots like a rifle.”

“Pretty good for squirrels and rabbits,” my grandfather said. “We’ll see about quail.”

They let Queenie, who’d been whining and yipping all this time, out of the back seat. Queenie was my grandfather’s favorite pointer bitch. She was a little fat and a little old, but she had a wonderful nose and could quarter across the field at a steady lope, her nose swinging across the ground, her tail curved up into the air.

We crossed over into another field and began strolling behind her, spread loosely apart. My grandfather and uncle had their shotguns loaded with the safeties on. I had my .410 with the breech open and a shell in the chamber. It rested in the crook of my left elbow the way my grandfather had showed me.

Queenie worked her way up to a pile of brush near the center of the pasture and suddenly froze, quivering, nose pointed at the brush, tail straight behind her, left forepaw off the ground. My grandfather motioned with his hand. I quietly closed the shotgun and held it halfway up towards my shoulder, my thumb on the hammer, my finger outside the trigger guard.

Queenie was beginning to tremble. The .410 felt heavy in my hands.

“Hut! Hut! Hut!”

Queenie jumped forward in a bound. The covey of quail broke skyward in a rattling whoosh. The birds scattered forward, right, left. I brought the .410 the rest of the way up to my shoulder and cocked the hammer in the same motion. I looked down the barrel and tried to find one of the gray, fluttering shapes.

Bang! Boom! Boom! Boom!

I heard my own gun fire once and couldn’t count the times my grandfather’s and uncle’s fired. I saw bursts of feathers in the air and awkward shapes fluttering to the ground and more whirring shapes diving off into the distance and dropping into the tall grass. Queenie ran towards the fallen shapes.

I pulled the spent, warm shell out of the breech and loaded a new one while Queenie brought the birds back to us, carrying them gently in her mouth. The dead ones my grandfather put into the pouch on the back of his hunting jacket. One of the birds was still squirming, struggling to escape.

“This one must be yours,” my grandfather said as he took the bird from Queenie. “Good shooting.”

My grandfather put his shotgun in the crook of his left arm, freeing his left hand to hold the bird’s body. He pinched the bird’s head in the fingers of his right hand and, with a quick shake, snapped the head off. The quail quivered once, then died. He put the bird into the game pouch.

We walked down some of the single birds from that covey and found two more coveys that morning. I shot five or six more times, but was sure that I missed each time. My uncle and grandfather each got several more birds.

Back home we cleaned the birds and confirmed that, yes, it was my little .410 that had winged that crippled bird.

“See here,” Papaw said, showing me the dark pellet under the skin near the breast. “That’s a number 6 shot, all I could find for that .410 down at the hardware store. I was shooting 8’s and they’re a lot smaller. Make sure your grandma knows that was your bird so she cooks it just for you.” Which I did and she did and I ate it crunching the bones and feeling like a hero at the kitchen table, my hands still smelling of the solvent and gun oil I’d used cleaning my shotgun.

All my life I have been unable to recall all of the exact details of that moment, just how it all fit together, the thrumming rush of the birds into the air, the little .410 kicking into my shoulder, the fluttering of the bird to the ground. Later, after many more days in the field with many different shotguns, I reached the point where I could see it all — the beat of the wings against the blue sky, the quick rise into the air and the tailing off at the top of the curve, the bead of the shotgun just ahead of a bird, the trigger pull and shot, the crumpling of the wings and puff of feathers, and erratic fall to the ground. But that was the result of experience and practice.

Dirt: Battle of the Bulge

16

...the overall operational effectiveness of the infantry arm is determined most fundamentally by the performance of its smallest units and their leaders.

John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry

1974

When the three old men gathered in the mess hall at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in 1974 it was the first time that they had ever discussed with each other their fight in the Ardennes. Back then, thirty years earlier, they had been too busy to talk about it. They had more battles to fight. Although each had been interviewed by Army historians during the war and had told their stories at various other times, they had never had the opportunity to remember together.

Now they were in a company mess hall of their old regiment, the 327^th Infantry. They were the wartime regimental commander, one of his battalion commanders, and a company commander of the battalion. The current brigade commander was there and the audience was his serving officers. Maps of the Ardennes were mounted on easels and each man was going to tell a new generation of officers, the Vietnam and post-Vietnam generation, what their unit had done in the Battle of the Bulge.

I noticed how close in age the three men seemed to be. It could not have seemed so thirty years earlier. Then, as now, rank and age seemed to go together. A colonel is supposed to be much older than a captain. But even if the colonel had been forty and the captain twenty-five that winter morning in 1944 (and the battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, somewhere in-between), there was an even greater distance in authority. Now at seventy and fifty-five they looked much closer in age. Nevertheless, between them, the men who had been a colonel, a lieutenant colonel and a captain, there was still a distance.

The first to step to the maps was the Colonel. He was very clear and concise as he described his assessment of the situation. He told what he knew about the German attack, when he knew it, what locations he thought were critical, how he disposed his battalions, and how he plotted his artillery fires. As he described it, the information was carefully drawn in military symbols on sheets of clear acetate covering the maps.

Then the man who had been a lieutenant colonel and one of the battalion commanders stepped up to the map. He studied it for a while and turned to his old boss. 

“I got your orders, sir, but I didn’t think you really understood what was happening here.” He pointed to a spot on the map.

He went on to explain the orders he had given to his company commanders. These were drawn on more sheets of acetate and placed over the maps. They were not quite the same as what the colonel had told him to do.

Then the man who had been one of the lieutenant colonel’s company commanders came up to the map. He smiled.

“I got your orders, sir, but I didn’t think you really understood what needed to be done at the road junction right here.” He pointed to a spot on the map as the rest of the men in the room chuckled.

The Lieutenant Colonel turned to the Colonel. “Told you that sonofabitch never followed orders. He’s the hard-headedest infantryman I ever saw.”

The Colonel shot back, “He had a good example. I didn’t notice you following my orders all that well.”

The Captain turned back the map and went on to describe how a small hill controlled the intersection and where he’d put his machine guns and anti-tank weapons, and where he’d plotted artillery fires.

They all then went on to tell the stories of the confusion of the days that followed, the back and forth in the cold and mud, and how they stayed and fought and won until they were at last relieved.

This is a delicate, delicate balance, this web of relationships that spreads across the infantryman’s earth. One foxhole relates to another foxhole. One platoon’s set of foxholes and machine guns relates to another platoon’s. Company to company, battalion to battalion, brigade to brigade, the web spreads beyond any one person’s capacity to control. But if that one foxhole is right, and in the right place, and the web is built on the competence of each person in it, then everything can hold together.