Blood: Alone in the Air

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

26

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

Marching song, U.S. Airborne Infantry

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

WW II Regimental Prayer

506th Parachute Infantry Regiment

1967

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blood: Point

Sketch of a Soldier, Theodore E. Drendel, 1967

25

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

Michael Herr, Dispatches

1968

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Point men are rotated fairly often.

Blood: Solitude

Jazz Green, Oak Tree, 2009

24

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

Job 1:15

1949

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

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

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

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

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

Blood: Into the Rocket Belt

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

23

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

John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry

1968

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“You first, sir. I’ll stand watch.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Wish I could smoke,” I said.

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

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

“Just about rocket time,” the sergeant said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow him.

Blood: The Eternal

Killed in Action, Burrell Moody, 1967

22

And ye shall hear of wars
and rumors of wars.

Matthew 24:6

1967

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An alert?

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

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

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

Step One: Verify.

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

Step Two: Call chaplain to accompany.

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

Step Three: Wait for official message before delivering notification.

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

None of which let me off the hook.

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

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

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

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

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

“Should we have brought an interpreter?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re done,” the chaplain said.

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

Blood: Korea Comes to Baumholder

21

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

Alexander Suvorov, The Science of Conquering

1966

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blood: Slings

David and Goliath, Edgar Degas

20

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

I Samuel 17:49

1950

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dirt: Poker in Pleiku

James Pollock, GI Card Game, 1967

19

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

David Donovan, Once a Warrior King

1968

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

Dirt: Rifle

M-1 Garand

18

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

Michael Howard, War in European History

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

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

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

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

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

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

M-1 Disassembled

Dirt: Shotgun

17

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

Homer, The Iliad

1950

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

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

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

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

BANG!

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

“Try it again, boy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hut! Hut! Hut!”

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

Bang! Boom! Boom! Boom!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dirt: Battle of the Bulge

16

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

John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry

1974

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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