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.

Dirt: Key Terrain

Bloody Ford, Charles Johnson Post, 1898, San Juan Hill, Cuba

13

Conformation of the ground is of the greatest assistance in battle.

Sun Tsu, The Art of War

Infantrymen travel to a particular place on the earth — fight to control a location, defend a place against attacks by others — because that piece of dirt has value, because that dirt has some meaning. Otherwise they would not go there; otherwise they would not be there.

The value of a location has much to do with the geometries and trigonometries of the weapons they carry. High ground is better than low ground, most of the time. High ground where the shape of the ground provides natural defenses against attack is even better. Best of all is ground from which a soldier can control the ability of his enemy to move elsewhere. Finding that place, that key terrain, is part of a soldier’s craft.

In some parts of the world it is easy. If it is a place where people have been a long time, a place with a history of conflict (say the Rhine River valley) then it is more than easy — most of the time there is already a structure on the key terrain built to defend or control the ground.

For a single infantryman, key terrain is simply where he can see and shoot and not be shot. If where he is on the earth meets those criteria, he is on key terrain, his key terrain. If he is moving, then his personal key terrain is somewhere around him, where he was, where he is going, or maybe a meter or two to his left or right. He is usually looking for his place as he walks along. His movement becomes a chain of equations: if the enemy is there, then my place is over there. If I move to that place, then I will be safe, I will be able to kill him.

However, soldiering is a collective activity. Being an infantryman is being part of a group of men. If soldiers watch only for their individual places on the earth they are no different from the individual birds in a covey of quail that has been flushed to flutter up into the air to be hunted down one by one after they scatter across the field.

The movements of a soldier are not part of a random walk. They move from one place to another place that is selected by them or for them from maps, from sending someone out in front of them to look at the ground in the direction they are going, from guesses about the value of a place on the ground made by someone else. 

But first of all, they have to know where they are.

Dirt: City

442 Combat Team, Leghorn Italy, Dong Kingman, 1944 (?)

11

The worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative.

Sun Tsu, The Art of War

1989

In the natural world almost nothing is smooth, almost nothing has regular edges, almost nothing throws a shadow at a perfect right angle or describes a perfect ellipse. The natural world is irregular. The creations of man are regular — the curve of a helmeted head or a tank turret, the straight lines of roads, railroad tracks, buildings, and telephone poles. The infantryman, as he moves upon the earth, is constantly searching for the unnatural. He is looking for the edges in his visual world, because those unnatural things represent threats to his life. In a city or town everything changes and the infantryman is confused and more fearful than ever.

Our base camp was in a warehouse. We created a small illusion of a site in the woods by boiling water and heating our rations with pieces of C-4 explosive. But it was a world full of all the things we had learned to fear. All about us were edges — the corners of doorways and the sides of buildings. Rooflines cast sharp, angular shadows into the streets as we moved through the city. The sounds were sounds that meant danger — engines, doors slamming, metal striking metal, dogs barking. The smells were wrong — diesel fumes, fresh bread and seared meat. Instead of the regularity of color in the natural world, the colors we saw were wrong and out of place. Worst of all were the people — shouting, laughing, crying, moving, stopping, gesturing, talking, arguing. These people might or might not be the enemy. They might or might not have a weapon under their clothing. They might or might not be friendly. They cluttered the landscape and confused us with their humanity. Our eyes sought men who looked like us, other soldiers, with perhaps a slightly different shading in their uniforms, a slightly different curve to their helmets, slightly different shapes to their weapons. Those shapes we could kill.

Our job was to control a particular place upon the earth, but here there was no control. Here was only chaos. The cold vocabulary of our trade did not seem to apply. Here we could not “select targets” and “engage with maximum firepower” unconcerned with “collateral damage.” Here there was no clean delineation of humans into friendly and enemy. Here there were others and the situation required discipline and a new level of awareness.

We adapted. We learned the patterns of echoes reflected from building walls. We learned the small hiding places along a street and we moved in small surges from place to place, one group covering another. We learned how to cross a street by looking right and left and up. We learned how to cope with sight lines interrupted by awnings and doorways and the tall vertical corners of buildings. Movement here was quickness followed by caution. We traversed the city in a jagged path, turning right-angled corners, trying to find a place to stand, a piece of this confused earth to own.

The sergeant joked as they dropped their packs in yet another warehouse, “Awright, get out your jackhammers an’ start diggin’ in.” I groaned because I was too tired to laugh. What I did was estimate the thickness of the walls and find solid objects to reinforce them. Men went up on the roof to watch the nearby streets for movement. We barricaded ourselves and tried to find ways to watch. The longer we stayed, the thicker we would make the walls until we had built a little fort in the city.

Dirt: Arctic

SAS - Taking Shelter
By permission of the artist Ian Coate

9

How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?

Alexander Solzhenitzyn, 

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

1975

In January, just below the Arctic Circle, the sun shows itself only briefly and the shadows are stark and spare. I awoke in the darkness inside a double-walled tent. Above me four pairs of my socks were hung on an improvised clothesline. Sitting up, but not leaving my double-layered sleeping bag, I filled a canteen cup with water and set it on the portable diesel-burning stove that burbled in the middle of the tent. I opened up the valve that let more fuel into the stove. I eased out of my sleeping bag and pulled a layer of clothing on over my long johns. I took three pairs of socks down from the lines, rolled them and put them in an easily-reached pocket of my rucksack. The last pair I put on over the socks I’d slept in and then pulled on my insulated, vapor-barrier boots. By that time the water had come to a rattling boil on the top of the stove. I ripped open a packet of instant coffee and poured it into the cup. I added a hooded parka and mittens to my layers of clothing and took the cup with me as I went out into the dark to piss and have a cigarette.

The hair inside my nose crackled in the cold. Looking around I could see a small ice fog hovering over our encampment. The snow crust creaked under my boots until I reached a spot near a tree and I created my own small cloud of steam. Above, beyond the fog, stars were crisp and faintly shimmering, giving enough light to throw a purple shadow. I shook a cigarette out of a pack. My lighter clinked and flared as I lit the cigarette. I quickly re-gloved my hand. The coffee cooled rapidly in the metal cup. I drank it in gulps. I swirled the cooling dregs in the bottom of the cup and then tossed them into the air. Nothing came down. The drops sublimated directly into tiny, almost invisible brown crystals that dispersed into the darkness. It was, I guessed, about 40° below zero, but no wind was blowing. It was a nice day.

An hour later we were packed. The gear for six men — tent, stove, fuel, ammunition, food, water, sleeping bags — was lashed to a plastic sled. We slowly made our way through the darkness on our snowshoes, pairs of us taking turns pulling the sled. My compass was almost useless this far north and I navigated by constantly checking landmarks that I could see, oriented to the stars, and trying to locate our place on the map. In good terrain we would traverse about a kilometer an hour. The key was setting a pace, shuffling one snowshoe in front of the other, getting the sled to smoothly glide across the icy crust of snow, never slowing, never changing the pull on the ropes until we reached a stopping point. 

In that harsh coldness we were attuned to simply surviving the environment. Each man paired off with another to watch exposed skin for frostbite. We stayed ravenously hungry as the calories burned off in our bodies’ efforts to stay warm. At that latitude in late January the sun was low on the horizon even in the middle of the day. We shuffled across the low hills and through the sparse forests in dimness. 

“Loose and in layers,” was the mantra for this place. Beginning with my two pairs of socks I wore a layer of long underwear, thick wool shirt and wool trousers, a pair of baggy overtrousers with a quilted liner buttoned inside them, and a parka that also had a quilted liner. Outside all those layers were a thin white over-parka and trousers that served as camouflage. My boots were rubber and insulated by a captured layer of air. This insulation was so effective that my major concern was the sweat that accumulated inside the boots, soaking my socks and threatening blisters. Part of the survival ritual was to change socks two or three times a day, tying the sweat-soaked ones to my gear and letting them first freeze, then dry in the extreme arid cold. On my head I wore a thin balaclava, a wool-lined cap, my helmet, and a fur-lined parka hood. There was a wire inside the hood that I could shape into a small circle, making a tunnel for my eyes and nose so that I could see to the front, but had to turn my body to see anything else. On my hands I wore wool gloves and huge thick mittens tied to me with strings.

I felt the bulk as I led my patrol across the snow. I was puffed out by all the clothes and insulated from the world. When I tripped and fell I didn’t feel anything. It was like falling on a pillow. It was hard to stay alert and sustain the necessary paranoia of an infantryman moving across the world. The radio hissed at me and forced me to stay in touch. I could sense the frustration of the command center. Time and again the questions came to me and I could visualize them in their warm tent, with their stoves blazing and their lights shining. It was impossible for me to tell them what our world was like. I didn’t try.

After an hour or so my vision narrowed from the exertion and from my parka hood restricting my view. All I saw was that small white circle of the world. I became so tired that I did not want to make the effort to swing my head and look around. I did not check the horizon. I was not being careful. If we had encountered an enemy, we would have been killed. But we were lucky.

We could not go into the earth in January north of Fairbanks. Instead we had to find something to hide behind, a rock or a clump of trees. To dig was simply to move the old snow around and provide something to hide behind or perhaps use as insulation. Snow will not stop a bullet. The secret was to see them first, to find them first, and take them out first.

We set things up, including our tent and stove; established the guard; and then the rest of us tried to huddle away from the cold for the night.

Dirt: Desert

8

A shabby, gritty landscape. The sweat oozes and trickles all day. This is war, one kind of war, sweat and tiredness and no water till evening and cigarettes made of dirt. The pain of muscles, not wounded, but twisted from the weight of rifles, automatic guns, heavy equipment. The abrasion of the skin by a sand-paste of desert and sweat. The thud of feet on the sand 94 times every minute, 50 minutes an hour...And every night dig...Dig in case the bombs drop. Dig for discipline. Dig to save your skins. Dig through sand. Dig, if necessary, through rock. Dig for bloody victory.

Neil McCallum, Journey With a Pistol

1978

In the high desert a jagged ridge line in the far distance matched exactly the brown contour lines on my map. This was a khaki-colored landscape of sharp-edged shadows, little water, and striated sunsets. In that high, arid country infantrymen move in quick, darting steps from shadow to shadow, like lizards. In that country, I saw so far that a rifle seemed not enough; no bullet would ever reach its target but all would fall prey to gravity’s pull and drop to the grainy soil. On foot the distance from one place to another seemed infinite and in the yellow-white sunlight I felt infinitely exposed. To move in the open seemed foolish, like a mouse scampering beneath the shadow of a stooping falcon.

My small infantry unit spread itself out so that each man was almost alone, the point man a dark spot in the distance. I could see so far — and be seen from so far.

Yet the day was full of energy. In the coolness of the early morning I moved with my men swiftly over the rocks that turned slightly beneath my boots. The pebbled ground seemed to help me along. Swiftly, swiftly, five, six, seven kilometers in an hour until the shadows began to shorten towards mid-day and my load lightened as the water I carried was consumed. As the shadows shortened the rippling brightness began to hide the distance. Paranoia and fear returned and I sought what few shadows were left. I paused in a cleft of the ground to wait through the heat. I began to feel the warmth and long for darkness.

The flatness was an illusion. Although the eye was drawn into the far distance, nearby there were sharp folds in the ground where rivers once ran and where they might run again. Here they were called wadi or nullahs. Elsewhere they were called arroyos and gulches. There were hints and warnings that there had been water in this place, that there would be again. When I moved my men into a nullah we were below the line of sight and we felt hidden.

Half a world away, on a high bluff above the Missouri River, a small chapel at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas memorializes soldiers lost on the high plains of the American West. The walls of the chapel are covered with plaques and inscriptions giving the names, dates, and often the location and cause of death. The remarkable thing is how many were drowned. Not lost in an encounter with Apache, or Arapaho, or Sioux, but drowned in the midst of that emptiness, that desert.

So too here I knew that a nullah was not a place of safety. I knew that a small storm in a mountain range fifty miles in the distance could fill this crevice without warning and wash us all away. But down in the nullah we were below the sight lines of the landscape, we were difficult to see. It was very tempting to stay there, to move along the watercourse as it meandered rather than to strike out in the direction I was ordered to follow. It was the old puzzle. If you cannot be seen, neither can you see.

Once the terrible heat of the mid-afternoon passed I led them out of the nullah onto the open ground and headed towards the next small rise in front of us. Small noises traveled far in this dry landscape, the crunch of a boot on the rock, the clink of metal against metal. The sounds rang through the constant wind that dried the skin on my face and hands. I listened most carefully for the sounds of engines. We were in the open. If we were seen there was nothing to protect us unless we were able to get down into the earth very quickly or our own tanks and artillery could arrive in time to save us. Our advantage was that we were very hard to see, these small specks moving across the land. We wore clothing colored and mottled very like the ground we were traversing. Our equipment was taped to our packs to prevent rattles and clinks. We tried to move from shadow to shadow. It was only the movement itself that was likely to give us away.

Once into the low hills we stopped. This was not dirt friendly to our shovels. It was either sand that slid and pooled like water or rocks that deflected the entrenching tools with a ringing, position-revealing clatter. Instead we gathered stones and constructed little walls next to the larger rocks and then we hid behind the parapets. We could not go down into the earth so we built the earth up around us.

Dirt: Jungle

7

Flying over jungle was almost pure pleasure, doing it on foot was nearly all pain.... 

Once in some thick jungle corner with some grunts standing around a correspondent said, “Gee, you must really see some beautiful sunsets in here,” and they almost pissed themselves laughing. But you could fly up and into hot tropic sunsets that would change the way you thought about light forever. You could also fly out of places that were so grim they turned to black and white in your head five minutes after you’d gone.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

1972

In Panama I awoke in a nylon hammock suspended just two or three feet above the ground, my back muscles aching from trying to sleep in a curve. In the thin green light that seeped down I saw small tendrils of smoke drifting up from tiny cooking fires. My boots and socks were with me in the hammock. I balanced myself and shook the boots before putting them on. I was looking for ants, scorpions, spiders or any other living creatures that might have taken shelter during the night.

Booted, I squatted on the dank jungle floor and carved a small chunk off of a block of C-4 explosive. I put that between two green sticks then rested a canteen cup full of water on the sticks. Using the paper matches that came with C rations, I lit the piece of C-4. It burned with an intense blue flame and heated the water while I untied my hammock and rolled it up. I took my rucksack down from the branch I’d hung it from and brushed the bugs off. I checked my rifle, looking for flecks of rust. I unrolled a fresh condom to put over the muzzle. By then the water was boiling and I emptied the coffee packet into it. I lit a cigarette and watched a column of leaf-cutting ants make their way across the jungle floor. I was just about ready to move out.

A few days earlier I had chuckled when I first heard the phrase, “wait-a-minute vines.” It wasn’t funny anymore. The NCOs said: “In the jungle you got to be smooth. You got to slide through the jungle. You got to be like a cat. You got them wait-a-minute vines that’ll grab you; you got them black palms with spines that’ll go right through you.”

I could not longer find any humor in the jungle. More than once I’d gotten entangled and had to mumble, “Wait a minute,” while I got myself free. And the black palm spines were just nasty. Within the first week I had several festering sores where the spines had broken off.

So I rolled my sleeves down and buttoned the collar of my shirt in the damp heat. I put on leather gloves. I had strings attached to all my gear, even my rifle, and the strings were tied to my webbing. I put on my web gear and tucked the strings in. Now I was ready for the inevitable moment when I would slip and fall on a steep, slippery trail. I could just tuck in my arms and roll, because anything I might grab could be sharp and probably poisonous.

Finding a route was tricky. We didn’t have a horizon down inside the jungle. Here there were just the steep, so very steep, sides to the ridges and sharp-edged crests that could not be walked along. I and the men with me tried to walk as infantrymen, spread out so that we could support each other and not be a vulnerable clump. But the trees and vines and shadows and steep slopes drew us together.

We moved slowly up the side of a ridge and down the far side, trying to determine our location by how the ground was shaped and the direction of the flow of the black water in the streams. It was slow. I became more and more careful, placing one boot slowly to the ground to be sure of my footing before placing another. We all were wearing green and the rest of the men began to fade into the foliage around me until all I could see was the pack of the man in front. I thought, I hoped, that someone else was looking to the right and left and covering my rear.

It was very quiet. That is, human sounds could barely be heard. Only the occasional whispered “wait a minute” as someone got entangled in a vine. The thick dead debris on the ground muffled my steps. Occasionally something far overhead dashed through the trees, its shadow pushing a branch around. Sometimes a monkey would scream, startling me and causing me to jerk my head up. I was just moving through the jungle. Dark patches of sweat formed in my armpits and under the straps of my webbing. Every place on my body that something touched began to chafe. Sweat ran down my forehead and pooled in my eyebrows and sometimes fell into my eyes, stinging and blurring my vision.

A sergeant I met some years later, who had done his time on Vietnamese jungle trails, had been dyslexic as a child. He was a very poor reader until late in his teenage years. He developed, perhaps in compensation, a prodigious memory and, once his problem with reading had been overcome, a compulsive desire to read and memorize. He could recite, in exact detail, every element of every label on a U.S. Army rucksack, right down to the Federal Stock Number. He knew every marking and every possible combination and permutation of text that could be found on the cases of C rations, and everything printed on every box, can, plastic packet, envelope, and slip of paper inside the case. He could recite every word of every label and instruction that came with claymore mines, ammunition boxes, and first aid packs. He remembered it all. “What else you gonna do while you’re humpin’ through the jungle just starin’ at the guy in front of you. It’s boring, man. Hell, I could probably tell it to you backwards.”

At one point our patrol came to the edge of a river. Through the thick brush on the bank I looked out across the water and for a moment my eyes rested on the openness, the distance. I studied the green, pebbled texture of the far bank. I realized that it was just like the place I was in, that if I crossed the river I would still be in the same place. And so I went back into the jungle and struggled toward the spot on the map that was to be my place at the end of the day.

The jungle was no place for claustrophobics or for people in a hurry. It set its own pace and I slowly moved through it, scratching at my insect bites, wiping the sweat off with a kerchief already wet, and was blinded by the dark greenness.

Going down into the earth in the jungle was difficult. The surprisingly barren soil beneath the humus was root bound and brightly colored. I had to struggle for each shovelful. Down near the ground I could see even less and I had to take a machete to cut a tunnel out to where an enemy might approach. The foxhole filled with water and crawling things of all descriptions. The flying insects were with me always, crawling into my ear canals and buzzing me into near-madness. I would not sleep in my hole. I would, because I had to, stand guard here. But when not on guard I slipped back behind the line of defense and found two trees the right distance apart. There I strung my hammock, braced it open, and hid within its netting until I came out again to watch in the night.