Blood: Alone in the Air

Jump in Tonight, Torrijos Airport, by Al Sprague, 1990

26

Stand up! Hook up! Shuffle to the door,
Jump right out and count to four.
If that chute don’t open wide
Meet your maker on the other side.

Marching song, U.S. Airborne Infantry

Almighty God, we kneel to Thee and ask to be the instrument of thy fury in smiting the evil forces that have visited death, misery, and debasement on the people of the earth....Be with us, God, when we leap from our planes into the dark abyss and descend in parachutes into the midst of enemy fire. Give us iron will and stark courage as we spring from the harnesses of our parachutes to seize arms for battle. The legions of evil are many, Father; grace our arms to meet and defeat them in Thy name and in the name of the freedom and dignity of man....Let our enemies who have lived by the sword turn from their violence lest they perish by the sword. Help us to serve Thee gallantly and to be humble in victory.

WW II Regimental Prayer

506th Parachute Infantry Regiment

1967

Nothing is more terrifying to an infantryman than being alone. An infantryman is part of a collective that sustains him, shapes him, and protects him from at least some of the chaos around him. The collective will, briefly, grieve for him.

I rode through the sky over North Carolina in a C-130. I was part of an infantry company organized into ten-man “sticks” and belted into seats that ran along the outside of the cabin and in two long rows down the center. Overhead, metal cables were stretched the length of the aircraft. I was at the end of the first stick, the one nearest the right-side door. Outside, down below me, pine trees stretched up into the sky, open pastures of fescue and small plots of tobacco were growing. It was early in the year and dogwoods were in bloom. But I couldn’t see any of it because the C-130 had only a few windows and I wasn’t near one of them.

Like all the rest, I was thoroughly trussed up in a parachute harness that bound me through my crotch. I had to carefully arrange my testicles before I moved anywhere. The big main parachute on my back cushioned me, but also pushed me forward in my seat so that I was sitting on the hard edge. A line came over my shoulder from the main parachute and ended in a metal snap link temporarily attached to my harness. This was the static line. Clipped and tied to the front of the harness was another parachute. Also strapped to the harness was an equipment bag filled with gear — ammo, clothing, food, water, entrenching tool, the odd necessities of war. Laced to a leg was a scabbard holding an M-16 rifle. I was wearing a heavy helmet with its chin strap tightened. 

We were so immobilized that many of the soldiers simply relaxed, hung in their harnesses, and slept. One yawned, a typical stress reaction. One after another copied him. Down the row men stretched their mouths, exposed their teeth, and filled their lungs with air. Those who smoked wanted to have a cigarette, but that was out of the question. Almost all of them really wanted to take a piss.

On a signal I couldn’t hear over the roar of the engines, the Air Force crewmen opened the doors on both sides of the plane. The noise of the engines jumped higher and howling wind blasted into the cabin. Sergeants wearing goggles and tethered to the frame of the aircraft, the jumpmasters, began peering out of the doors.

Finally the ritual began. The ritual had been so rigorously rehearsed that every man in the aircraft would do exactly as he should, exactly when he should, and whatever he might feel simply would not be felt. Each command — “Get Ready!” “Stand Up!” “Hook Up!” “Check Equipment!” — was done exactly so, because it must be done exactly so. 

I was watching the jumpmaster standing in the buffeting wind of the open door. I (as everyone else) was waiting for the command to “Get Ready!” When it came I freed my seat belt. Then with my right hand I gripped the snap link attached to the static line hanging across my shoulder. 

I didn’t hear the jumpmaster scream, “Stand Up!” But I could see him sweep his arms upward in the signal and I knew what was coming anyway. The two outside rows of trussed-up men struggled out of their seats and formed bulky, hump-backed lines down the aisles of the aircraft’s cabin. 

At the signal of “Hook Up!” I grabbed the cable running overhead and attached the snap link with the static line to it, giving it a hard pull. The static line was, curiously, a lifeline. If the line did not rip open the pack on my back then I would simply fall to the earth, down into the trees, the tobacco plants, the cloud-like blooms of the dogwoods.

At “Check Equipment!” I looked carefully at the gear of the man in front of me, testing the connections, making sure it was perfect. Facing the door, I whacked the butt of the man in front of me to signal OK.

At “Stand in the Door!” the first man in the stick did just that. He shuffled up to the open door. One hand held the static line that been hooked to the steel cable overhead, the other hand slapped the near side of the door frame. He handed his static line to the jumpmaster and turned to look out into the sky beyond the door. He slapped the far side of the door frame with his left hand and stood there, face to the horizon, hands on the frame, feet on the edge of the door, rigid, knees bent, like Samson in the Temple, listening to the howling wind and engines, waiting for the jumpmaster’s signal. 

The rest of our stick shuffled forward, reserve parachutes pressed against the main parachutes. Since I was the last man in the stick, I pushed forward as hard as I could until the stick was collapsed like an accordion that has wheezed out its last reedy note. When the jumpmaster screamed “Go!” we would all pour out of the door. It was inevitable. It was pure ritualized collective action. It was part of my job to make sure that they all must go. There would be no jump refusals in this stick.

The jumpmaster screamed “Go!” and hit the man in the door on his butt, hard, and the first man’s legs pushed him forward. He disappeared into the wind and noise. The shuffling men surged forward into the hole he left. The steel cable rang with the sound of sliding snap links. Each man briefly paused then vanished into the roar.

As I neared the door I remembered our training insisted that each man was to stop at the door and strike the same rigid pose as the first man: head up, hands on both sides of the door frame, knees slightly bent. But the wind was rushing past and it was not like when I rode through the summer nights with my grandfather. When I opened my window and held my hand in the wind, feeling my hand dance in the air. This was a storm of air that would rip my arm from my body if I gave it a chance. None in the stick waited for the slap on the ass and the shouted “Go!” The line behind him was pushing too hard. Each must go!

So, as soon as I reached the door, I left. 

As the wind plucked me from the side of the aircraft, I tucked myself tightly into a stiff folded shape, my arms across my reserve parachute in front of me, my elbows in, my feet and knees together, my chin down. At that moment I became totally, absolutely, utterly alone. My group of men became a scattering across the sky. 

The ritual demanded a screaming count — “One Thousand! Two Thousand! Three Thousand! Four Thousand!” Just between “Three!” and “Four!” a giant hand reached out and snatched me back up into the sky. I was suddenly hanging, swinging in the air. 

From the ground it would have looked as if olive green blossoms were opening up against the blue.

The ritual continued. My hands reached up to find the risers. I checked my canopy looking for holes where a line might have snapped over and melted the nylon. I looked for lines that might have looped over the top to create the bulges called a Mae West. I looked for an entanglement where the canopy had not opened at all. When my check of my canopy was complete, I looked around for other canopies beside me, above me, below me. 

Finally I looked to the ground below my feet. If I looked closely I could see it moving past. The movement gave me a reference point for the wind. I got ready to drop the bundle of equipment tied to me so that it would hang from a line below me, drift with me, and hit the ground before me.

On a good day there was a moment when I was free and alone as I rode in the air. A good day was when the harness was not crushing one of my balls back up into my groin, when the snap of the opening didn’t wrench the muscles of my neck and create a fierce, lingering ache, when some asshole wasn’t walking across the top of my canopy or drifting into me across the wind, or when it wasn’t so damn cold that I couldn’t feel my fingers, or when the wind wasn’t pushing me so quickly across the ground that I just knew I was going to crash and burn. A good day was when I was up there with the birds, drifting through the air with them, when I could see almost forever across a green horizon.

And then I remembered that I was alone. I must not be alone. If I am alone then I am lost.

The stick was strung out in the sky in a line, the wind line, the first man lowest, the last man highest. Even in the air they were trying to get back together. The first man turned his ’chute and tried to run against the wind and shorten the line. As the last man I tried to run forward to the front. Ultimately, however, where we would land was predetermined by the pilot, the direction he was flying, the altitude of the plane, and by the force of the wind. I had little more control over my destiny than that of a cigarette flipped out of the window of a speeding truck.

Eventually the ground below me took form. What was a pebbled texture became individual trees. The open field of the drop zone appeared free of rocks or other hazards. I tried to relax. I released my equipment bundle to hang below my feet. I turned my canopy to face into the wind. At the last moment I put my feet together and looked toward the trees on the horizon. I did not want to be looking at the ground because I knew the rush of it would make me flinch. I wanted it to be a surprise and it was. The landing was a rushing, bumping sensation, like being tackled. To my body it was just another ritual. I’d done it thousands of times off platforms, tens of times like this, for real. My body did what it had to do. I was compelled into a rolling landing by the wind that still filled my canopy. I came to my feet and jogged with the wind, around the canopy, and the canopy collapsed. 

It was over. I was on the earth. All that mattered to me now was finding everyone else, for they were my life. My head turned and turned as I disconnected my harness, as I rolled up the ’chute and stuffed it into the bag I carried with me, as I knelt and checked my rifle. I must join up with my stick, my squad, my platoon. I saw a few figures on the edge of the drop zone. I moved in a shuffling run toward them. We gathered there in ones and twos, threes and fours. Again and again the names were checked until we knew we were all accounted for. We formed a loose circle, facing outward, like a herd of wild animals protecting their young. But we were protecting ourselves.

I was nothing there. We were everything. By myself on the ground I was vulnerable, in control of nothing. We were a team. We must establish our control over a piece of dirt right now. If not where we stood, then someplace we could get to as quickly as possible. If we must move, we must do it now and we must do it together. We desperately searched for the landmarks, the assembly areas, the real places that were marked on maps or photographs. 

In my rational mind I believed that it didn’t work very well, this jumping out of airplanes. That is, it didn’t work very well as a tactic for winning battles. Yet no one doubted that the units that jumped out of airplanes were the elite of the infantry. It had everything to do with being alone that moment in the sky, with being scattered like dandelion fluff in the wind, and with that fear-filled aloneness being followed by a coming together, a finding of each other or being found. When two got together, then three, then five, the collective could face a threat together. That lonely moment in the sky created a need, then built a bond among those who did it and then came together.

It was an exclusive grouping in peace or battle. Fitness was everything. Injured men were recovered and remained a part of the group until they overcame their injuries, or were evacuated, or died. 

Ritual provided for the dead and wounded. It enclosed them. Ceremony excised them from the body of the unit like a surgeon’s scalpel. The lost were remembered coldly, ritualistically, symbolically, but outside the living body of the unit.

Peacetime: “Yeah, he augured right in. Main malfunctioned. Reserve wrapped around the main. What a mess.”

Wartime: “Couldn’t get a medevac in. We humped that sonofabitch five clicks before we could get to a LZ. Good man. Gonna miss ’im.”

Part of the trick of getting men to die is putting them into units, into teams, because the unit is immortal. So maybe they will be, too. Even if they die keeping the rest of the unit alive.

Blood: Point

Sketch of a Soldier, Theodore E. Drendel, 1967

25

   But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard, it took me a year to understand it:
   “Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.”
   I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story; when I asked him what had happened he just looked like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he’d waste time telling stories to anyone dumb as I was.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

1968

Point was a fearsome place to be. Even with all the estimates, the planning, the aerial reconnaissance, the careful crafting of orders and map overlays, it all eventually came down to a young man, by himself, out in front of everybody else.

Kilometers to the rear, in a well-lit command post with the smells of coffee and cigarettes, the hiss of radios and the chugging of a generator, the point was only the tip of an arrowhead drawn in grease pencil on clear plastic on top of a map. To see the point man required the imagination to look down through the markings, the plastic, the contour lines, down to the real point, the young man who walked so softly, carefully through the shifting light.

On some terrain he touches gently with his heel and rolls his foot forward, increasing the weight slowly, listening to himself. On other ground he uses a slight shuffle, weight balanced. Always he is trying to become as weightless and without substance as a shadow. He wants to blend and be part of his place, but he must move within and in spite of the danger and fear.

Infantry careers are not made of being point men. Point was simply the shared experience of the survivors and the competent. A soldier might take some pride in being good enough to be chosen to be point. And they all — once there — if they were not yet insane — wondered ruefully if they were not too good for their own health.

Competence, or at least confidence, got a man put on point. If he were good and his luck held out — he needed both — he would someday become the man who put someone else on point. He might become the man who gave out the order of march and said, “Jones on point.” Jones then would groan with mock fear, pride, and bravado, and feel real fear. Jones would check his compass and take the lead. He was on point.

From there, as always, it depended on the mission, the enemy, and the terrain. Consider a Russian Spetznatz point man traversing a rugged, treeless, arid valley on the edge of the Hindu Kush, or, fifteen years later, a U.S. Special Forces soldier in the same place. The landscape was far and khaki. It was not for agoraphobics. Their eyes were on the long view, the glint of sunlight off binoculars, the sudden shifting of a falcon’s flight over a ridge line, the unnatural shape on the edge of a distant rock.

In Vietnam in the highlands it was close and green and full of sounds. It was not for the claustrophobic. A tendril of vine was like a trip-wire and, after constant touching and tripping, natural reflexes were damped by the never-ending apprehension. The one sure constant was the fear of the sound of metal on metal. Nowhere in the world of an infantryman is that a safe sound. The point man’s own metal objects were wrapped and muffled to keep him safe. As were those of his squad mates.

The point man is extruded from the collective like one of those creatures under a microscope in biology lab. He is encapsulated within his own self and is linked back to his brothers by the barest filament, the thinnest of strands. He is isolated. His job is to lead them all from here to there. His job is to be on point, to be the first man, the lone man, the tip of the bayonet.

He probably won’t trip an ambush, or step on a mine, or trip and stumble and give them all away. He might have known, in his rational mind, that probabilities don’t change, that the odds of throwing a seven on the next roll of the dice are exactly the same odds they were on the last roll of the dice. But he doesn’t believe it. He believes that every time he rolls the dice the odds a seven will come up increases. He believes that if his point was five, on a good day he can roll a three and a two the very next roll, every time. He knows that you can fill an inside straight with the last card in the deck. He believes this. He also knows that snake eyes can come up again and again and again. He believes that if he is lucky, he will live and that if he is unlucky, he will die.

Point men are rotated fairly often.

Blood: Solitude

Jazz Green, Oak Tree, 2009

24

...and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. 

Job 1:15

1949

A magnificent oak tree stood in the back yard of my grandparent’s house. My grandmother did not think that I should be allowed to climb the tree, but my grandfather told her that boys would be boys.

The trick was to get up on the first branch, because it was seven or eight feet off the ground, maybe more. That wasn’t too hard since for a very long time chains had been wrapped around the limb to hold a swing. The chains had been there so long that the tree had grown around them like the scar tissue that now threaded its way through my eyebrow. I could stand on the seat of the swing and, with a little hop, get my arms around the limb. Then it was a simple matter to get a leg over and scramble around until I was sitting up in the air.

Seated there I could look directly into the kitchen and watch my grandmother and Juanita at work. I could go further. The next limb was about a third of the way around the trunk and only a little bit higher. My tennis shoes gripped the rough bark easily and the tree was rock-sturdy down this low. A few branches higher and I could look into the screen porch on the back side of the second floor. That was where we all slept on hot summer nights with the door open to the house and the attic fan pulling a breeze across us as we lay on top of clean sheets and lumpy old mattresses on enameled iron bedsteads. At that height I could sometimes hear the Electrolux vacuum cleaner whirring across the carpeted bedroom floors behind the porch, or the flushing of a toilet. I could see over the fence into the neighbor’s yard and the house vaguely like my grandparents’. Sometimes I stopped there and rested in the joint between the limb and the tree, but more often I went on higher, finding limbs within stepping distance or sometimes putting my arms and legs around the trunk and shinnying up using the insides of my arms and thighs to grip the bark.

The next good resting place was on the side away from the house. There, sitting on the limb I could feel a faint tremble when the wind blew and I could look out through the leaves and toward the bluffs along the river. There were caves in those bluffs, another place I and my cousin could go to play, and another place my grandmother disapproved of. Sometimes this was as far as I would go. Other times I kept on until I reached a point where I could look down on the roof of the house and out over it to the river far, far below.

Up that high the trunk swayed in a decent breeze and there was a fork and a hollow where I once discovered the broken eggs of a nesting bird. There I was up in the tree, part of it, swaying with it. It was as if the tree were holding me, cradling me, rocking me. When I was very still I could hear a bird chittering near me and once a squirrel came right up to the toe of my sneaker, his tail flipping up in the air, his black eyes snapping with curiosity, his incredible hands — they seemed to be more hands than paws — casually gripping the bark. The squirrel heard me breathe and was off in a chattering scamper from limb to limb and away. Up there I was alone, perfectly alone with the tree and the sky.

Blood: Into the Rocket Belt

Spooky aka Puff (AC47) working out of Pleiku, Vietnam in 1969

23

Interestingly, from the start of the war, incessant talking and shouting characterized most German small-unit offensive actions. Erroneously interpreted by Allied soldiers as a sign of poor discipline, it was later ascertained that such chatter was, in fact, a most effective means of dispelling individual loneliness and heightening group cohesion. 

John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry

1968

On my first tour in Vietnam I lived in reasonable comfort as part of an advisory team in the city of Pleiku. Along with our other jobs, a duty roster assigned two-man teams as advisors to the local militia units, known as Regional Force/Popular Forces, shortened to the acronym RF/PF, and then, inevitably, turned into slang — “Ruff-Puffs.” The Ruff-Puffs were not regular army in either training or equipment and were used only locally, such as operations into the “rocket belt.” The rocket belt was a rough perimeter around the city from which, if they could get inside it, the VC or NVA could launch 122 mm rockets. An operation into the rocket belt was intended to prevent them from firing them from firing rockets into the city or the nearby bases.

For my first real combat operation I found myself packing gear into a rucksack and shaking hands with a staff sergeant about my own age but with a very different look on his face, SSG Jarvis. Not much later we got out of a jeep on the edge of Pleiku and joined up with a small crowd of ill-uniformed Vietnamese. This was a Ruff-Puff company and we were going on an overnight operation into the rocket belt. Almost before I’d made sure of our location on my map we were moving, strung out in a line and walking through an odd landscape of tall, thin trees and open spaces interrupted by clumps of bamboo. It was late in the day and the idea was to move to a location, set up a hasty defense, and run a few patrols.

I was not there as a leader. My job was to coordinate American fire support. So the really important tasks were to make sure that the radio was working, that I knew all the frequencies for units in the area, that I understood how to use the codes, and, most important of all, that I knew where the hell we were on the ground. It helped enormously that I knew exactly where I was when we started on our stroll. All I had to do was keep track of our path, be sure I knew where we were when we set up our final position, and where the patrols were planned for that night. Deciding where the patrols were going was not my job. That was the job of a Vietnamese captain, the dai-uy who commanded the Ruff-Puff company.

The operation was not what I expected, what I trained for, what my life as an infantryman at Ft. Benning, in Germany, and at Ft. Bragg had been. Instead of a practiced formation, the Ruff-Puffs moved in a straggling line, all chattering and joking. They looked like children with their oversize, antique American weapons — M-1s, Browning Automatic Rifles, and Thompson sub-machine guns. They were little spindly moving mushrooms in outsized American helmets. They smoked cigarettes as they walked along and the cooking pots tied to their packs clanked to the rhythm of their steps. I glanced at my sergeant who had not done anything more than introduce himself. He just shrugged, lit his own Marlboro and swung his CAR-15 into a more comfortable position. I followed and ran a radio check every fifteen minutes or so.

As we approached our final position the noise of the Ruff-Puff’s movement was increasing. By this time several live chickens had been acquired while passing through a hamlet along the way and were tied by their feet to the packs of the soldiers. I was surrounded by little people I did not understand. Their voices sang up and down and seemed incongruously cheerful. From time to time the dai-uy would talk into his radio, then shout something to his troops. The strung out line of soldiers would then shift its direction.

Eventually, about an hour before sunset, we stopped and the soldiers drifted into a loose circle around us. I noticed SSG Jarvis talking to our interpreter and handing him one of his C-ration cans. The sergeant came back and said, “Let’s dig in, sir. The Vietnamese’d do it for us, but maybe it will do some good to set an example for that dai-uy with the long fingernails over there.”

We opened our entrenching tools and dug a shallow fighting position, only about two feet deep. The soil beneath the leaves was full of fine roots that were easily sliced by the shovel. Not easy digging, but not too bad. The spoil was a deep brick red that we covered with leaves.

Just before dark the interpreter came back carrying a pot of rice with a few small fish on the top.

“Get your canteen cup out, Captain,” Jarvis said.

I did and he filled it with rice and added a couple of the fish.

“ARVN C-rats,” he said. “Sardines. Think they get it from the Koreans. They’re pretty good. Want some nuoc mam?” He offered a bottle of pungent fish sauce. ARVN would be the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the regular soldiers of the South Vietnamese army.

“Sure,” I said.

I poured some over the fish and rice and crinkled my nose at the smell. Jarvis pulled chopsticks out of a pocket of his shirt and began to eat. I used a plastic spoon from my C-ration box. We ate sitting on our helmets. All around us small fires were going and groups of Vietnamese were squatting around them waiting for rice to be ready. The next morning I would accidentally kick a small mound of feathers and watch them drift across the trail as we headed back to our pick-up point.

The interpreter sat near us, eating his share of the rice and sardines. Jarvis and he talked in an odd mixture of pidgin English and Vietnamese. Jarvis took a second canteen cup of rice from the pot and offered more to me, but I didn’t want any. I got a can of fruit from my pack and ate that. Then a can of crackers and a can of peanut butter. The sergeant wiped his chopsticks off on his pants leg and put them back into his pocket. Then he cleaned his cup with a mix of water and dirt. He picked up his entrenching tool and his rifle.

“C’mon, sir. Let’s go take a shit before these guys get settled in.”

I followed him to a place close to the perimeter where we dug a small hole.

“You first, sir. I’ll stand watch.”

I did my business and then picked up my rifle and looked out into the brush for God knows what while the sergeant did his. I crushed my C-ration cans by stomping on them and tossed them into the hole before I covered it back up.

“Gotta be regular in the field,” Jarvis told me. “Take a piss whenever you can. An’ don’t never put nothin’ off if you don’t have to.”

Back at our foxhole we went over the fire plan. I wanted to be sure Jarvis approved, although all I got was a few grunts and nods. We agreed on a watch plan, two hour shifts, but both of us awake between 2300 and 0100, the usual time for rocket attacks. In the swift darkness fires still flared and the bobbing ends of cigarettes could be seen. Wood smoke and the smell of boiled chicken drifted past us. Then there was the clatter of a group getting ready for a short patrol. Eventually only the hiss of the radio was in the night.

SSG Jarvis rolled himself into his poncho and poncho liner and went to sleep sitting up, his hands on his rifle. He came instantly awake when I touched his arm to wake him for his shift.

For me it was as if an alarm clock had gone off when my eyes snapped open at exactly 2300. I glanced at my watch glowing in the moonlight to confirm. I smelled tobacco smoke in the faint breeze. I shifted in the hole and sensed the sergeant beside me.

“Wish I could smoke,” I said.

“Aw, go ahead, sir. Just light up under your poncho and keep it cupped down below the edge of the hole. And duck down when you take a drag. There’s little guys all around us. They’ll get shot first anyhow.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, but I really did want a cigarette. So I got under my poncho, feeling like a child hiding under his blanket reading a comic book by flashlight. I held the Zippo with both hands as I opened it so that it would not be able to click, and I closed one eye before I spun the wheel so that I would not lose night vision in that eye. I came out from under the poncho with my lungs full of smoke and night blind in the other eye.

“Just about rocket time,” the sergeant said.

He was right. A moment later a light streaked across the sky, like a shooting star on a warm summer night, like a fire arrow in an old western. Then another and another and another. I damn near shouted as a cold flare of fear went through me.

I felt an intense isolation, as if I were the only man in the world. The calm voice of Jarvis talking into the radio steadied me.

“I can’t even give you a decent guess about the distance, but I put the launch point on an azimuth of 330° from my position...roger...out.” He snapped his compass closed. He looked at me. “They’ve got another bearing from another bunch of Ruff-Puffs. So they can triangulate. We’ll hear some outgoing 175 in a few minutes. Hope to hell we’re not on their GT line.”

The GT line was the gun-target line, the thin path on the earth between an artillery piece and its target. 175 mm’s were famous for their short (and long) rounds. Something to do with the length of the barrel, the flexing of the steel as it warmed up from being fired, and, sometimes, sheer negligence because the crews were Americans and the troops under the GT line were not — except for me and SSG Jarvis.

Soon we heard the whiffling sound of outgoing artillery. We could not observe the impact of the rounds. Jarvis was back on the radio. “No...not observed...roger...out.”

He turned to the me. “They’re putting a Spooky up.”

Spooky was an old airplane, a C-47, with a modern weapon,  7.62 mm “mini-guns” mounted in the door.

The Vietnamese dai-uy slid into our hole and was almost gutted by the nasty-looking, serrated Randall that appeared in Jarvis’ hand. The dai-uy had his map with him and a flashlight with a red lens on it. We two captains studied the positions to confirm where they could and could not fire. Vietnamese and American artillery was firing. Spooky was coming in. We needed to be sure. I called in the information to the American side of the Province command post. The dai-uy did the same to the Vietnamese side. Everyone was talking to everyone else. I knew the voices on the radio. I felt less alone. And yet in the darkness all around me, in the moving, helmeted shadows, who was my friend?

The radio crackled. Jarvis gestured toward the sky. “Spooky’s coming on station,” he said. We looked up and saw the lights of the airplane begin to circle, roughly over the area where the rockets had been launched from.

A mini-gun was a six-barreled contraption that seemed to defy the ordinary laws of mechanics and physics. It looked, at first, very much like the old, hand cranked Gatling gun. It had an electric motor that drove the six barrels in a whirring circle. In the space of a minute, a complexly-curved mechanism fed thousands of 7.62 mm cartridges into the barrels and a cascading shower of bullets spewed out. Even with a standard mixture of one tracer to five plain rounds, what was seen from the ground was a great shining stream of fire falling from the night, like God was taking a piss. The weapon fired so fast that the sounds of the rounds firing canceled each other out and what was heard was a deep buzzing sound, like a muffled chain saw or the ripping of a giant zipper. “Rrrrrrrrruuup! Rrrrrrrrruuup!”

And then the dai-uy was screaming for it to stop, to cease fire, to turn off the mini-gun in Spooky. He was screaming that the rustling swarm of bullets falling from the sky was landing on his outposts.

I called it in, but it was five long minutes before the aircraft turned slowly away, far too late for the poor souls in the outpost.

What was strange to me the next morning, as we walked out with two limp bodies strung beneath bamboo poles, as if they were game bagged on a Central Highlands safari, what was strange was how little anyone seemed to care.

Jarvis, who’d waited till dawn to light his cigarette, shrugged it off. He seemed mildly surprised that I would even bring it up. It was as if he expected the Air Force would fuck it up — especially if there weren’t any real Americans on the ground. “We ain’t Americans no more. Not when we’re out with the little guys.”

Jarvis’ breakfast had been more rice and nuoc mam. I was beginning to understand that he, with his worn rucksack and array of carefully fastened accessories — knife, grenades, strobe light, and all the rest — was within himself, had gone somewhere beyond the ordinary comradeship of the infantry. Two or three back-to-back tours will do that.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow him.