Blood: The Eternal

Killed in Action, Burrell Moody, 1967

22

And ye shall hear of wars
and rumors of wars.

Matthew 24:6

1967

Soldiers don’t think about eternity. The eternal is mentioned from time to time, such as in the memorial services they attend or at funerals when they provide the escort and firing squad. But they don’t feel that the preacher is talking to them.

Soldiers live within the moment. The future is a list of things they have to do, steps they need to take, tasks that need to be accomplished. But the actual goal is always a bit hazy and they know that when they’ve finished the list there will be more tasks. Even the strategists never look beyond victory; instead they develop lists of what has to be done to achieve victory. They determine what actions have to be taken against which aspect of the enemy force they are opposing: bomb here, march there. They make lists of what forces they need, supplies to accumulate, intelligence required, ammunition to be delivered. The future is simply the time at which all those things will have been done.

In this sense soldiers create their own future, but it makes bringing the eternal into the light, and what little comfort can be drawn from contemplating the eternal, somewhat awkward. They are inept in the face of death. They, we, never expect, really expect, the consequences of being in a killing profession.

I was in Germany, far away from Vietnam. I was the Staff Duty Officer, the SDO, for the 1st Battalion, 39th Infantry — Paddy’s Gang, Anything, Anytime, Anywhere, Bar None — which was headquartered in Worms, a city most famous for Liebfraumilch wine and as the place where Martin Luther first confronted his Catholic Church. Every battalion in Germany, Alaska, Italy, Japan, Korea, the United States — that is, the entire Army — had a man like me sitting in a room with a couple of radios and a telephone. With me were two other men, a duty NCO and a runner. As with most things military the task had both ritual and purpose. In the room were large 3-ring binders with instructions for almost any contingency. In a locked safe in the room was a set of code books with decoding instructions for the “big one,” since in those days even an infantry battalion had its own nuclear weapons and planned diligently for the day when the Russian hordes would come pouring through the Fulda Gap.

The duty officer’s usual tasks were mundane in the extreme. I walked through the kaserne (the barracks area) and spoke with the Charge of Quarters of each company. At 0030 hours I stopped by the NCO club to supervise closing out of the cash registers. Twice during the night I checked guard posts outside the kaserne. My runner drove the jeep and my job was to make sure the guards were awake and doing their jobs.

It was simply an accident of German geography and U.S. troop stationing policy that the call came to the 1st of the 39th’s duty room telephone at just after 0600. A Staff Sergeant named Atkins had a wife who was German and who was from Worms. She had come home to stay with her parents while her husband did his tour in Vietnam. The 1st of the 39th was the only combat unit garrisoned in Worms.

Six in the morning in Germany was midnight in DC and noon in Vietnam. When the phone rang the Duty NCO had just finished playing reveille over the battalion’s public address system. He logged the time of the call as he picked up the phone and chanted the greeting used by anyone in the battalion who answered an office telephone, “Headquarters, First Battalion, Thirty-ninth Infantry, Triple A-Bar None! Staff Duty NCO speaking, sir. This line is not secure.”

I was drinking a cup of coffee as I listened to the duty NCO answer the call. My eyes were clear if my mind a bit fuzzy. I had just visited the latrine down the hall where I had shaved, brushed my teeth, broken starch on a fresh set of fatigues, and laced up my spit-shined Corcoran boots. I was ready to be relieved of my duty and go home to my quarters and hug my wife and sleep out the rest of the morning.

The SDNCO was listening and making notes on the log sheet. Then he flipped open one of the 3-ring binders. I came fully awake.

An alert?

Every month or so we had a practice “go to war” drill. Officers from the 8th Division headquarters would show up and stand around with clipboards and stopwatches. They watched the battalion assemble, pack up our tracks and start our engines, issue weapons and ammunition — and waited for us to screw up.

I stood behind the sergeant and saw the page he turned to, Casualty Notification, and felt my heart sink. There were hundreds of “additional duties” specified for officers in a line unit. Some were handed out on a semi-rational basis based on an individual officer’s rank, or skill, or special competence. Others were assigned almost randomly, most often simply exchanged between officers leaving and officers arriving. Others were assigned on a “tag, you’re it!” or “hey, you!” principle. That is, if you happened to pick up the phone or be standing in the sight of the CO — if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time —then it was your job. I was standing there. I would be the Casualty Notification Officer.

I scanned down the page my sergeant was looking at and saw the list of tasks, questions, procedures. He was writing out the details on a message pad.

Step One: Verify.

Almost too easy. “She’s a friend of my wife, sir,” the duty NCO told me. “This address sounds right to me.”

Step Two: Call chaplain to accompany.

Which one? Probably Catholic. Didn’t really matter. Call the battalion chaplain, interrupt his breakfast, and let him decide.

Step Three: Wait for official message before delivering notification.

And so on through a list of procedures that ultimately referred to a regulation and another book of procedures that would guide the Survivor’s Assistance Officer.

None of which let me off the hook.

Light was filling the parade ground of the kaserne. A thin fog from the Rhine obscured the units that were falling in for morning formation. My relief would be here in a few minutes and I would no longer be the SDO. That burden would be lifted. I could go home, but only to change into my Class A uniform.

This I did and I then walked back through the German morning in the green woolen coat (blouse) and trousers wearing my polished low-quarter shoes. The sunlight glinted from the jump wings on my chest and the eagle on my hat.

Back at the battalion headquarters the battalion chaplain was waiting alongside our colonel’s sedan. I was given an envelope that had been couriered from Division headquarters that had the official message from the Secretary of the Army in it and the unofficial story I would be allowed to tell. We drove along cobblestone streets through the city.

“Have you done this before?” I asked the chaplain.

The chaplain nodded. “First time in Germany, though. I hope her English is OK.”

“Should we have brought an interpreter?”

“Too late now. But they were married for quite a while. I’m hoping we don’t have a problem. And I’ve called the local parish and let them know.”

The sedan stopped outside a neat, sturdy house near the edge of the city. We got out. I knocked and the dark wooden door swung inward. A young woman stood there. She had her blonde hair in a bun and was wiping her hands on a dishtowel. I saw her eyes go wide at the uniforms. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. She knew.

I am forever grateful to the chaplain. Quick as an infantryman he stepped toward the woman and took her into his arms before she collapsed. His rush took them into the small, perfectly kept living room. I followed, but I left the door open behind me. The chaplain helped the woman to a couch and sat beside her with an arm around her shoulders, murmuring to her. I stood there with the envelope in one hand and my hat with its shining eagle in the other. I listened to her take her breath in and in and in and in, as if she were sucking all the air in the world into her body.

I could not tell you how long I stood there before the small whimpering cry began. Her long mewling sigh like a bereft kitten brought her mother into the room. That woman, her square face lined like someone who worked outdoors, glanced at the green uniforms and looked out the door where she saw the official sedan at the curb. She looked then at her daughter and I would remember that look as being very hard, as if she wanted to say, “I told you so.” But her face then softened. She sat beside her daughter and pulled one of her hands into her lap and began to pat it and stroke it. The daughter turned from the Chaplain’s embrace and curled within her mother’s arms. They sat there, together, for what seemed like a very long time. The Chaplain was very still.

I knew I should read her the letter from the Secretary of the Army, but the moment would not come. I heard a sharp rap on the door behind me and turned to see a priest standing there, accusatory in his black suit and white collar. He acknowledged the crosses on the chaplain’s uniform with a sharp jerk upwards of his eyebrows. The chaplain got up and joined the priest at the door. They spoke in low voices, in English, for a few minutes. Then the chaplain gestured to me. I joined them outside the door, in the open air, in the sunlight.

“You will tell me, please, of the circumstances,” the priest said.

I told the story — a patrol, an ambush, an evacuation, a death — and gave the priest the envelope. I also told him the next few steps in the process: where the body was, where it would be, decisions that needed to be made by the new widow. The priest looked at the chaplain for confirmation. The chaplain nodded.

“Good. I will now take care of things. We will be having more information soon?”

“Yes.” My sentences took on the quick cadences of the German priest. “By this afternoon. An officer will be appointed to help Mrs. Atkins. My task was only to notify her.”

The priest nodded and abruptly turned and went into the house.

“We’re done,” the chaplain said.

On our way back the chaplain told me that the mother was a war widow, too. “It seems that we have brought another war here. I think that upset the priest more than the dying.”

Blood: Korea Comes to Baumholder

21

Fire seldom but accurately. Thrust the bayonet with force. The bullet misses, the bayonet doesn’t. The bullet’s an idiot, the bayonet’s a fine chap. Stab once and throw the Turk off the bayonet. Bayonet another, bayonet a third; a real warrior will bayonet half a dozen and more. Keep a bullet in the barrel. If three should run at you, bayonet the first, shoot the second, and lay out the third with your bayonet. This isn’t common but you haven’t time to reload....

Alexander Suvorov, The Science of Conquering

1966

As in Arkansas, forsythia also announces the coming of spring in Korea. Korean newspapers track the progress of the blossoming from the southern tip of the peninsula up to the north and those blooms, as well as those of the azaleas, tell the Korean people that spring has arrived. 

Korea is one of those places in the world the United States knows, but does not attend to. It is a place like Cuba, the Philippines, France, Tunisia, Algiers, Morocco, Italy, Germany, New Guinea, Burma, China, Japan, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan and a few others where U.S. infantrymen have studied the nature of its dirt, and marched and killed and died.

The invasion of South Korea by the North in 1950 was a surprise. The strategists of the day had looked into the future and tried to come to an understanding of their new atomic weapon that had blossomed twice over Japan. Those men did not expect Korea. They had not thought through the political inhibitions that ensnared the new weapons, nor had they yet come to a clear understanding of the unique circumstances that allowed the first, and only, use of those bombs. That first use was an old front line soldier’s decision. It was the reflexive response of a man who had seen war as a young artillery captain and who had seen the casualty reports of Okinawa and the estimates of the human costs of invading Japan. Truman probably didn’t lose much sleep over his decision. He was, after all, one of the few real soldiers to ever serve in the White House.

In 1966 Sergeant First Class Sapp was the Platoon Sergeant of the First Platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 39th Infantry, “Paddy’s Gang, Anything, Anytime, Anywhere, Bar None,” of the 8th Infantry Division garrisoned in Worms, Germany. He had been a PFC in the Korean War. He had experienced bugles wailing in the dark, the sudden appearance of a hundred Chinese soldiers in front of his foxhole, masses of men who seemed just to rise up out of the night. He never quite got over it.

That explains the incident in the US Army training area in Baumholder, Germany. The 1st of the 39th was a mechanized infantry unit. That meant that instead of walking across the training areas of Baumholder, we soldiers rode in diesel-powered, tracked, aluminum boxes, one squad to a machine. We let our machines carry us to the vicinity of the objective, but to win we had to stop, drop the loading ramp in the rear, and run out with half a squad (a fire team) going to one side and the second fire team going to the other. Then we went on the attack, one fire team providing covering fire as the other fire team advanced up the hill.

This was a training exercise. All the weapons were fitted with adapters so that the rifles and machine guns could fire blanks. Instead of real artillery and mortars, umpires had big firecracker-like devices called simulators to make noise. They threw smoke grenades to confuse the fake battlefield. For all the smoke and noise, it was still grown-ups playing cowboys and indians. The buzz of bullets and the whine of shrapnel were not in the air. Bodies were not being shattered and shredded. At least that was the way it went until one of the fake enemy, a young soldier with a red armband designating him as the enemy, jumped out of his foxhole right in front of Sergeant Sapp. 

He jumped up in front of Sapp and yelled something at him. Sapp buttstroked him. 

A buttstroke is usually executed when you are carrying your rifle, in this case an M-14, at the ready position. For a right-hander, that’s with your left hand under the forestock and the right hand holding the small of the stock just back of the trigger guard. The buttstroke is like a right uppercut, just bringing the rifle stock up and into the face of your opponent.

After he buttstroked the fake enemy, Sapp drew his rifle back and made as clean a bayonet thrust as you could ask for. Absolutely no question that if his bayonet had been on the end of his rifle it would have gone right up through that young soldier’s chest and into his heart. As it was, the tip of the barrel cracked the boy’s sternum. The buttstroke had already shattered his jaw. He lost three teeth. His clothing had powder burns from where Sapp had pulled the trigger of his M-14 twice and fired two blanks.

The boy lurched back. His mouth gaped open and blood sprayed out over his chin. When he fell backward his helmet came off and rolled down the hill with a clatter. The umpires began blowing their whistles. 

After only a few moments sanity crept back into Sapp’s face.

A couple of things were then clear to me, the Lieutenant from Arkansas who was now Sergeant Sapp’s Platoon Leader. One was: Don’t fuck with Sergeant Sapp. He’d earned that Combat Infantryman’s Badge he wore.

Another was that I realized that I was in some confusion as I tried to distinguish between the war-like nature of games and the game-like nature of wars. I never quite overcame my confusion. I am not alone. But, for me, it helped to keep thinking about blood and dirt, about killing and avoiding being killed.

Blood: Slings

David and Goliath, Edgar Degas

20

And David put his hand in his bag,
and took thence a stone,
and slang it,
and smote the Philistine in his forehead,
the stone sunk into his forehead;
and he fell upon his face to the earth.

I Samuel 17:49

1950

My mornings in Arkansas were sometimes disturbed by a distant thumping sound. The sound carried with it a very faint shaking that caused the crystal goblets in the china cabinet to tinkle ever so softly, the way they sometimes did when a train came by under the bluff. If this happened when I was in the kitchen I could count on my grandmother’s maid Juanita to shake her head and say, “They’re gettin’ a place ready,” and then go on to say somebody’s name, “Must be for Miz Parks. Heard she passed yesterday.”

Looking back it seems odd that such a rocky place was chosen for a cemetery, but at the time I simply took it to be the way things were. It was normal to me to that a new grave was opened with sticks of dynamite.

The cemetery was up the hill from my grandparents’ house and the favorite playground of my cousin and me. My grandmother strongly disapproved. She was sure that a gravestone would fall over on us. Besides that, she thought playing in a cemetary just was not right. In fact, it seemed so wrong that she simply did not have the words for it and, of course, did not bother to explain her own fears. Her generation never thought that children were owed explanations. In her mind it was enough just to say so.

More than once when I arrived at the steps to the back door after playing in the graveyard I was met by a disapproving shake of Juanita’s head and a mumbled comment, “You in trouble, boy.”

Then, when I went into the kitchen where my grandmother was shelling peas or cutting up a chicken she would say, “You just go right back out there young man and cut yourself a switch from that forsythia bush. Your aunt called me and told me you and Rusty were playing in the cemetery again. I’ve told you not to do that.”

Forsythia is a sign of spring throughout the South. As March winds swirl and the days lengthen the bright yellow blossoms string themselves out along thin branches. The blossoms do not last very long and they are soon replaced by small green leaves. Neighbors of my grandmother considered the forsythia bush just beside the steps up to her back door a particularly fine specimen. I, however, have long held an acquired aversion to the species. It goes back to Arkansas.

My task at that moment was to find the pruning shears, usually in a peck-sized peach basket on the back porch, and select the instrument of my punishment. I then waited at the foot of the steps for my grandmother to finish her work and wash her hands and come out to deliver my switchin’.

I’d stand there squirming as that little woman, wiping her hands on her apron, came through the screen door and took the forsythia branch from me. She’d tell me to turn around and pull my pants down. As I obeyed, she stripped the leaves off the switch. I had to lean over the steps and was switched until I bawled very loudly and promised not to go to the cemetery. To myself I vowed to be sure that next time I wouldn’t be seen by one of the townspeople.

Forsythia is not my favorite plant. Although I do remember that fairly often the switching was followed by a bowl of peach cobbler and cream slipped to me by Juanita.

In spite of the threat of a switching, however, the cemetary was endlessly fascinating. The old stones had familiar names on them. They were the names of the people my grandmother knew at church.

More than that, one of the enduring legends of the area was that DeSoto’s expedition through southern America had marched through this part of Arkansas. The legend included the report of discovering a Spanish breastplate in a shallow grave site in that very cemetary, although no one knew just what happened to the breastplate. We guessed it was probably up at the University in Fayetteville. It seemed only natural to us that if there was another Spanish artifact or even a skeleton, it would be found in the cemetery. Where else would DeSoto have buried one of his men? So we were constantly on the lookout for old shards of metal or bone as we played our games of cowboys and indians or war, GIs and Japs, around the gravestones. All we ever found were irregular rocks and pieces of flint — although some of those could have been arrowheads — scattered by the dynamite. Aand dead flowers drifting in the breeze.

In one corner of the cemetery the gravestones were all the same. They were small, maybe just a foot or two tall. They were all gray stone, probably granite. They all marked the resting place of men. I understood enough arithmetic to figure out that, unlike the differences in birth and death dates on the stones in the rest of the cemetery, which were everything from two or three to fifty, sixty, even seventy and more, here the differences were very much alike, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, most of them. They all had died at about the same time in the early 1860’s. Still, that wasn’t the best part of the cemetery to play in. Much better was under the huge old trees and around the stone angels and cherubim and urns.

My grandmother made me go to Sunday school when I was visiting. I went with my cousin. One morning was spent on the story of David and Goliath. We even had a small comic book illustrating David’s heroic deed. I spent all of the painfully boring church service that followed Sunday school studying the cartoons and trying to understand David’s sling. It didn’t look like the slingshot my grandfather made from a forked stick, rubber bands cut from inner tubes, and a patch of leather. The cartoons showed a boy with a small rock in one hand and a loop of string and leather in the other.

Rusty, my cousin, figured it out later. He found a drawing in a book about Indians. It showed two leather thongs with a leather pouch in the middle. We took rawhide shoelaces out of an old pair of hunting boots and then cut up a too-small baseball glove with scissors to make leather pouches. We tied two pieces of the shoestring to each pouch. Between the Bible, the comic book from Sunday school, and the drawing my cousin found, we figured out just how David slew Goliath.

We tied the end of one thong around the wrist of our throwing arms and held the other end in the same hand so that the leather pouch hung down right in the center. We put stones in the pouches, then whirled the slings around our heads. When we let go of the free end, the stone went whizzing away at a very high speed. The trick was learning when to let go. It was not like throwing a ball. It was all a matter of timing and sensing the direction the stone would fly, and it would fly very, very fast.

We worked on our new skill in the graveyard because that was where we could easily find ammunition for our biblical weapons, and the gravestones made wonderful targets and places to hide behind. At first the stones flew in all directions. They clattered off the markers or thunked into trees. Eventually we began to get the hang of it. So we moved on to our natural targets — each other.

My cousin struck first, hitting my forehead just above my left eye, splitting the eyebrow. Blood streamed down my face in a bright red flood. We ran, whimpering and afraid, to our grandmother’s house. Juanita took me in hand, stanched the bleeding with cold water and a damp dishtowel, and then cleaned the blood off my face. After a phone call, one of my grandfather’s truck drivers, a man named Kansas, came up from the packing shed and drove me and my grandmother to the doctor’s office. Six stitches were sewn into my eyebrow and a gloriously large bandage was wrapped around my head. My cousin was envious of the bandage.

Returning, my grandmother listened to the story about David and Goliath and sent us both to cut forsythia switches and made us promise yet again to stay out of the cemetery. Juanita’s solace was a batch of fried pies with apricot filling.

That evening on the front porch I told the story of the slings while my grandfather rocked and smoked a Pall Mall. He smiled and sent me to bed with a scratchy, tobacco-smelling kiss on my cheek.