Blood: From the Sky

The Night Café, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

35

...the officers were playing billiards in the mud-walled club-house when orders came to them that they were to go on parade at once for a night-drill.

Rudyard Kipling, The Lost Legion 

Who are these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?

Woody Guthrie, Deportees

1972

The road from Mỹ Xuyên to Lịch Hội Thượng on the South China Sea paralleled a wide canal that eventually emptied into a slackwater inlet that barely deserved to be called a bay. The hamlet there was a shallow-water seaport with a few fishing sampans tied up at ramshackle docks. Not many Americans ever visited this hamlet even though there was a lovely Catholic church set in a bamboo grove nearby with a Vietnamese priest who spoke very good French and kept a large garden enclosed by the bamboo and banana trees.

At the intersection of the canal road and the road that led to the church was a little shop. It could perhaps be called a tea shop, or a cigarette shop, or maybe just the corner store. The building was a shabby mixture of tin, woven bamboo, and thatch. The roof projected enough forward to provide a small rectangle of shade and shelter from the rain over the beaten earth in the front. Under the shelter an old woman sautéed plantains for passersby and for folks such as myself and my little team. I was making my rounds in that peculiar window of time in Vietnam where the war, for Americans, was at an end and the Delta was relatively peaceful. We stood in the shade and watched the bananas sizzle in the black pan. My interpreter and I chatted with the Deputy District Chief, a civilian, in a bizarre mixture of French, English, Cambodian, and Vietnamese. We spoke of Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism, and other Existentialists.

This sort of thing happened in the Delta because it was not really a good place for war. This man, the Deputy District Chief, was of mixed blood, Cambodian and Chinese. He was a French-trained bureaucrat who could remember the Japanese occupation of the area during World War Two. He fondly recalled his one visit to Paris and his teacher of calligraphy in Chợ Lớn. We sat at a rickety table and drank tea and ate fried plantains.

My interpreter, Kiêm, was also a man out of time and place. He was Vietnamese by ethnicity but he and all his kin had lived for generations in Phnom Penh until they were driven out in the early 70’s. They fled downriver to end up in Ba Xuyen Province. (He would, much later, after re-education, flee again and traverse Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand before finally coming to live in Arlington, Virginia.)

We spoke of Albert Camus and the final irony of his death, as a passenger, on a highway in France. 

The Deputy District Chief led us into the gloom of the store/cafe/tea shop and from there into a back room where he swept his arm out like a headwaiter showing us to the finest table in the house. He grinned and the gold in his teeth flashed in the dim light. There stood a billiard table.

For a moment two images competed in my mind. The first was of a faintly-remembered painting of a green billiard table in a pool of Van Gogh’s inimitable yellow light. The second was in black and white, a recollection of a movie and of a man sweeping the cover off a billiard table to Paul Newman’s astonishment.

But here in Vietnam? In the Delta? In Lịch Hội Thượng? A billiard table? A Catholic church down the road? A Khmer Buddhist temple visible in the distance? 

The cues were warped and only thin shreds of leather remained on the tips. The heavy, ivory-appearing balls had chips gouged out of their surfaces. I rolled a creamy yellow ball across the table. It lurched over the seams where pieces of the slate bed had become misaligned. The ball eventually fell against the dead rubber and torn felt of the rails. I looked at the Deputy District Chief and we both slowly shook our heads in respect to an irretrievable past.

I went back to my jeep. We all shook hands and bowed to each other. The hiss of the radio hung from the back of the seat intruded as my driver fiddled with the squelch. We drove away leaving the French-trained, Cambodian-Chinese, official of a Vietnamese equivalent of an American county standing in front of the billiard parlor. I checked my weapons, chambering rounds into my M-16 and into my .45. I used the radio to tell the Province Headquarters where I was and when I expected to return. We drove along the canal, the flat, felt-like Delta on both sides of us.

We crossed the ferry at Mỹ Xuyên and went on towards Sóc Trăng. I dropped my interpreter off at the entrance to the refugee village where he lived with his father, wife, and daughter in a hut made of woven bamboo. The road led past the airport on its way into the city and as we came near we saw a black cloud beginning to boil up out of the rice paddies between us and the airport.

Death came to the Delta that afternoon when a C-130 transport plane fell out of the sky in sunlight so bright that, after the plane exploded, the flames could barely be seen. The plane gouged a wide furrow in the paddy and spilled out its fuel. The black pillar of smoke arose softly and quietly. My driver and I saw the cloud and at almost the same time the radio began to chatter. Jeeps and trucks were coming out of the city. My jeep was coming into the city. We gathered on the side of the road.

Soon we were struggling thigh deep in the rice paddy mud. Americans from the Province Team and Vietnamese soldiers from the airport converged and got as close to the heat as we could. But then we had to wait, holding our hands in front of our faces, circling around the pyre, dodging the pools of flame that spread across the top of the water with the leaking fuel.

Eventually the flames slackened and we could approach. We heard the clicking cooling of the aluminum. The stench reached into us. On that day death was in my hands and death became simply work. It became the gathering of charred remnants of human beings into heavy rubber bags and zipping the bags up.

One pair I will remember forever, because they were a pair. The inferno fused their bodies together. I and my team mates could not bring ourselves to tear them apart. We placed both of them into one bag and made an annotation on the tag attached. 

Every one of us working in that mess of mud and blackened aluminum and broken rice stalks found his own way through the afternoon. Some were angry. They tore pieces off the plane with their hands and wrestled bodies out to have them flop and almost disappear under the water into the mud before someone else would grip a hand or toe or shoulder. Others wore gloves, the thick leather kind used for stringing barbed wire, as if that layer of leather would keep death and pollution away. Some were excruciatingly gentle, so gentle that they would stay inside the fuselage for ten or twenty minutes just to loosen a melted seat belt and gently, so gently, try to separate a form from the charred frame of a seat. One of us thought to relieve his own anxiety through a blackly humorous comment and was angrily rebuked, although several days later, over a bottle of sour mash whiskey, the same comment brought unrelenting, tear-evoking laughter. We worked in pairs or threes, sharing the burden, solving the small puzzles of where one body stopped and another started, lifting the corpses together, taking turns on the really difficult tasks.

Hours and hours it seemed that we bagged blackened bodies and dragged them to the edge of the paddy. Chopper after chopper lifted off. Truck after truck drove away. Someone arrived with a manifest and the body count didn’t match the list. Cables from armored personnel carriers were attached to odd pieces of the aircraft that stuck out from the wreckage and the plane was ripped apart. We spent the twilight looking for the last body, but we never found it.

We returned to our compound and drank a lot that night. We all showered again and again until the hot water was gone and then we took more showers. We put our uniforms into plastic bags and threw the bags away. But we couldn’t escape the smell.

Those were not infantrymen’s deaths. Falling out of the sky? How could that be a way for a soldier to die? Helpless, belted into a machine. It could not be right. We, we infantrymen, like to think we have a choice. Is this just the arrogance of youth, that we will choose the time and manner of our dying? Or is it any soldier’s necessary illusion?

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.

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: 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.

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.