Blood: Arkansas Evening

34

But a man’s life breath cannot come back again — no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.

Homer, The Iliad

1951

The red light pulsed up into the branches of the tree overhanging the driveway behind the house. A long, white, high-topped Cadillac with torpedo-shaped silver sirens on its fenders and the red light on its roof was there, its engine idling, the gate-like rear door open, light pouring out. It waited.

Voices out on the sleeping porch, but I could not go out there. I had to stay in my room with my brother. My grandmother had told us to go there and stay there in a firm voice. So I opened my window and looked down through the screen and watched the ambulance and wondered about the sound of my grandfather falling off the bed on the sleeping porch.

I had fallen out of bed myself before, but not this night, so I knew what the fall was like. I remembered how confusing it was to wake up on the floor. I knew how different the room looked from down there — the narrow oak planks, the throw rugs, the little clusters of dust under the bed, the smell of floor wax and time.

But this sound was not quite like anything I’d ever heard before. It was a grunting sound and a thud like a feed sack falling from the bed of a truck. I hadn’t been quite awake. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d heard. I thought I remembered something my grandmother had said. It sounded like, “Oh! Jim!” I had heard the sound of the phone dialing, that clickity, clickity, clickity of the dial twirling back. I remembered being walked half asleep from the sleeping porch to my room where I now sat on the window ledge and stared down at the revolving red light.

I listened to thumping and grunting and a clattering sound on the stairs. Then I saw the white-jacketed men walking through the pool of light above the kitchen door carrying the gurney. I saw my uncle’s Packard drive up just as they were pushing the gurney into the back of the ambulance. The red light bounced off the Packard’s windshield.

I watched my uncle talk to the men. One of them shook his head. My uncle came into the house as the ambulance drove away. I watched the flashing of its red light diminish as it went down the hill. I wished they would turn the great silver sirens on. I’d like to hear that. It would tell all the town that my grandfather was coming down the hill.

Blood: Kentucky Morning

Bodies on the battlefield at Antietam

33

The combat man isn’t the same clean-cut lad because you don’t fight a kraut by Marquis of Queensberry rules. You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself.

 Bill Mauldin, Up Front

You know how the boys used to sit all along Brighton front in their blues, an’ jump every time the coal was bein’ delivered to the hotels behind them?

Rudyard Kipling, A Friend of the Family

1974

Death and blood are always there. They are, after all, the purpose of the infantry. That is why we move to and fro upon the earth and up and down in it. To kill. To be killed. To bleed. To die.

Not that I meditated at any length on these ideas. But they struck me at odd times and I sometimes reacted inappropriately.

I went to my war twice. When I returned after the last time I was still a captain. I did not object, because captain was the best rank of all for an infantry officer and it let me stay in the best job of all for an infantry officer, the commander of a rifle company. In this time we were in training. We slipped through the woods and were alert, but not as alert as we would be if our lives were at stake. The alertness was driven as much by the games-like atmosphere as anything else. Some of the sounds were the same — the hissing of the radios, the distant thumping of helicopters, the curses when someone tripped and fell. On the other hand, there was a distance, and not-realness to this game, as if it didn’t matter.

I studied the map. I knew that if I could get my men to a specific location before the Blue Force (my men were the Red Force, the “opposing force,” the enemy), if I positioned my men correctly, if they dug in and performed all the tasks of defense correctly, that the Blue Force would lose. At least that’s the way it was supposed to be. Unless the Blue Force had more people, or they managed to get around a flank, or if they were actually somewhere else. A lot of “ifs.”

This time we did all the right things. We were at the right place. We set up on a very pretty horseshoe-shaped hill with an open field at the bottom of it. My men were there early and we quietly planned our defense and dug in. Listening posts were set up out to our front. We linked up with other infantry companies to our left and right. Through the night we watched and waited and were very silent, very professional.

Not long after dawn the Blue Force battalion came into the field below us. They were in an appropriate formation and they moved reasonably well. They just didn’t know they were moving into a trap. With a few clicks on my radio and a few whispered code words I unleashed my artificial Armageddon. The sounds, although impressive, were not quite right. Belts of blank ammo ran through the machine guns. Blank rifle cartridges banged and flashed in the morning light. A few crashes of artillery simulators and fake hand grenades were heard. Colored clouds from smoke grenades rose up into the air and flowed down the hillside. My heart beat increased. I thrilled to the sounds and sight of destruction.

Then there were whistles and men with white arm bands and soft caps strolled through the smoke waving their arms. These men were not camouflaged and did not carry weapons. They were the umpires, the referees of the game. They called for the commanders of the opposing units.

I came up out of my command post, signaling with my hands for my men to stay hidden. My two radio operators, my RTOs, followed me as always, like remoras constantly circling close to their shark. An umpire who’d been with me in my command post came along, looking clean and unconcerned. We walked down the hill. 

My company was quickly judged to have “won.” The Blue battalion was told to withdraw and casualties were assessed. The operation would restart in a couple of hours. I turned and went back up the hill, calling in a situation report as I went. My platoon leaders and their sergeants were waiting for me.

“We won,” I told them. “Decisively. They’re assessed thirty percent casualties and have been told to move back 3 klicks to refit.” The lieutenants grinned and left to inform their men. Their sergeants just nodded and followed them.

The news rippled along the line from foxhole to foxhole. 

“Teach them assholes to take on the Cold Steel Cobras.” 

Calls flowed down the slope toward the Blue Force soldiers. 

“Come back another day, pussies!” 

“Call yourselves soldiers? We saw your butts coming a mile away.” 

And more friendly curses and belligerent shouts.

Behind me I heard the sound of a jeep bringing up supplies. In the distance I could hear the thumping of a helicopter, probably one of the bosses circling around. Below me, down in the bowl into which they’d come, the Blue battalion was gathering itself. Some of the men stood up and drank from their canteens. A medic was working on the leg of one of them, probably a twisted ankle. Their battalion commander was arguing with the umpires about something. A slight breeze blew the smell of smoke up the hill.

And then it was as if a cloud had passed in front of the sun. The golden grass below me seemed to fade and flicker. The image shifted to one that looked like a civil war photograph. The color leached out of the ground and every shadow was a pool of blood, every manshape was dead or dying. The bodies were everywhere, bodies and pieces of bodies and metallic debris. A grimacing head lay at the foot of the slope. Churned dirt and shattered tree stumps marked the impact of artillery shells. The faint sounds I heard were the calls of the wounded. Thin wisps of smoke rose everywhere across the valley floor and what movement I saw was like the movement of crippled insects lurching away from the light into the far darkness. The thrilling, atavistic surge, my soaring sense of triumph abruptly spiraled downward. Victory spilled out of me like vomit splashed to the ground.

I heard my troops begin one of their marching songs, a song filled with jokes and obscene affirmations of their prowess as soldiers and men. It was a song I’d heard and smiled at a dozen times, but now it infuriated me, filled me with an unresolved, unreasoning rage. From deep in my belly came the voice I used on parade grounds, the voice that could echo across a hundred yards and still a thousand marching soldiers.

“At ease!” I barked. 

The command blew across the hill and the hill was still. 

More quietly, almost to myself, I muttered, “Every one of those sonsabitches is dead. It is not their fault, God damn them!” 

I could say no more.

My cluster of RTOs and the artillery forward observer, my personal little command group, drifted away from me. In the valley below an umpire wearing a soft cap and white arm band looked up at me. All of the Blue Force had heard my order and they, too, were silent. An empty circle was around me, a bubble that no one would breach, no one could understand. I turned to look down the hill again and took my helmet off. 

Behind me I heard one of my RTOs mutter, “What the fuck got into him?” 

“Beats the shit outa me. But I’m not gonna ask.”

My First Sergeant strode through the cluster of men and into the silence. He walked swiftly up to me and stopped directly in front of me in a rigid posture of attention. His dark, almost black eyes stared out from under his helmet. He looked directly into my eyes. I’m sure he saw the rapid breathing, the color of my face, maybe a muscle jumping on the side of my jaw. When he spoke he was very formal and it reminded me that he, the First Sergeant, was also an infantryman, that he had been an infantryman for a very long time. He was in full field gear that hung from his shoulders and around his waist as if he’d been wearing it all his life.

“Sir,” the First Sergeant said in a still, quiet voice pitched so low that only I could hear him, “Battalion has ordered us to ‘go admin’ and redeploy. They’ve designated a PZ about a klick from here.” 

He held up a plastic-covered map and showed me where he’d drawn a circle on it. “With the Captain’s permission, I think it would be good training for the junior NCOs to take charge and run the extraction and insertion.”

My heart was still racing. I was barely seeing the First Sergeant. What I was seeing was the dead, the hundreds of dead. I blinked and gave a short nod. 

The First Sergeant spun around and pointed at one of the RTOs. His voice lashed out at him. “Soldier, the Captain wants all the platoon sergeants and the lieutenants here. On me. Right now!”

“Yes, First Sergeant,” the RTO answered and he began talking into the handset of his radio.

In a moment helmeted heads were bobbing along the crest of the hill. The First Sergeant walked about ten meters away from me. The sergeants and lieutenants formed a small circle around him. He showed them the map.

“Put your next senior NCO in charge of your platoons and tell me who it’s going to be. We’re moving out. March order third platoon, second platoon, first platoon. Third platoon, you secure the PZ. We’ve got three flights of six coming in forty-five minutes. Set it up. The Captain has put me and the junior NCOs in charge of the operation. Platoon sergeants, the Captain wants you to get down there and tell those dumb assholes how they got all their men killed. Lieutenants, sirs, I suggest you do the same.” 

He turned to the forward observer. “You. The Captain would like you to go with the lieutenants and help them explain to the Blue Force just how fucked up they were.”

He turned back to the sergeants. “Just make sure that they know it was the Cold Steel Cobras that whipped that entire battalion’s ass. And that we could do it again. Any time. Any place. But that they made it easy for us today. Any questions?”

There were none. The platoon sergeants murmured into their radios as they went down the slope and other helmeted heads came bobbing over the hill towards the First Sergeant. The First Sergeant pointed at one of the RTOs. 

“There’s a thermos with coffee in it in my jeep. Get the Captain a cup.” 

The soldier scurried off.

Down the slope I saw the Blue battalion commander still arguing with the umpires. Their words didn’t carry up the hill, but the lieutenant colonel was waving his arms at them. The Blue battalion’s command sergeant major was back near that commander’s little cluster of radio men. One of my platoon sergeants went up to the sergeant major. I saw them standing side by side while my platoon sergeant spoke rapidly and pointed me out on the hillside. The sergeant major nodded once and then walked over to his battalion commander and took him off to one side.

I was handed a canteen cup filled with coffee. The hot metal burned my lips as I took a sip, but it didn’t matter. I was still staring at the field below me, at the dead men now walking and talking. I should not be proud of this, but I was.

“Nice day,” my First Sergeant said as he came up and stood alongside me and offered me a cigarette.

I looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. “Good to see you, Top. You came up with supplies?”

“Yes, sir,” he said as he lit a cigarette of his own. “Looks like we figured this one out right. Men did a good job.”

“Yeah, we did.” I gestured down the hill to where the defeated unit was moving out and the landscape was turning back to normal. “They didn’t. We woulda slaughtered them. Just goddamned wiped them out. No goddamned excuse for that.”

“No, sir. I take it the Captain’s pissed off because the Blue force is no good, sir?”

My mood shifted as suddenly as it had come on me, as if the cloud blocking the sun had drifted on through the sky. I came back to the game. I smiled. “That’s right, Top, I’m pissed at them, not us. We did fine.”

The First Sergeant field-stripped his cigarette and put the filter in his pocket. “Company’s ready to move. Let’s walk with ’em, sir. The platoon sergeants will make sure the lieutenants find us.” The First Sergeant had nothing but contempt for lieutenants. In fact, he talked to them only when he absolutely had to.

“Right, Top. Let’s go. Thanks for setting it up.” 

I field-stripped my cigarette and we walked off together towards the Third Platoon. The First Sergeant shouted, “Move out!” and the platoons shook themselves into formation. The RTOs were circling within calling distance of me. I threw the dregs of the coffee out of my cup and tossed the cup back to the RTO. 

It was not yet noon on this fine Kentucky morning and I noticed an immense dogwood tree in full bloom. Spring was close at hand.

“We really did kick their ass, didn’t we, Top?”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is one hell of a company, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. Proud to be in it.”

“So am I, Top, so am I.”

It was a good day. The men began to sing again and I saw out the corner of my eye the gesture from the First Sergeant that signaled that it was OK. 

And so the soldiers moved through the Kentucky morning, blood on their hands, a song on their lips, proud, happy, moving to and fro upon the earth and satisfied with doing just that and only that.

Blood: Medal

32

Thou shalt not kill.

Exodus 20:13

This commandment forbids murder, not the forms of killing authorized for Israel, e.g., war or capital punishment.

Note to Exodus 20:13

The New Oxford Annotated Bible

Thou shalt do no murder. Lord have mercy upon us. and incline our hearts to keep this law.

The Book of Common Prayer

There had to be something somewhere in all of them, in all of us, that loved it. Some dark, aggressive, masochistic side of us, racial perhaps, that makes us want to spray our blood in the air, throw our blood away, for some damned misbegotten ideal or other. Whether the ideal is morally right or wrong makes no difference so long as the desire to fight for it remains in us. Fanatics willing to die for ideals. It was territory, back when we were animals. Now that we have evolved into higher beings and learned to talk, territoriality has moved up a step higher with us, and become ideals. We like it. Cynical as it sounds, one is about led to believe that only the defeated and the dead really hate war. And of course, as we all know, they do not count.

James Jones, WWII

I still have a box that used to rest on the bureau in my grandparents’ bedroom. It has a leather-like covering that is now a deep mahogany color and has the logo of a tobacco company on it. In my grandparents’ time it had treasures in it — cufflinks, an Illinois pocket watch, a church collection envelope with petunia seeds in it, and a medal for service on the local draft board during World War II. The box sat on the top of the bureau alongside photographs of my grandparents’ four children, two young men and two young women. One of the women was the my mother and one of the men was the father of my cousins. The other two I never knew. The woman wore a high-necked dress and had dark eyes and hair done into a tight bun — Ruth, dead from TB sometime in the 30’s. The other was a man in uniform whose death will be forever a mystery since all who might know the truth are now also dead and at the time no one spoke of him — Floyd. He was only a photo and a name on a tombstone.

In the cedar-smelling closet there was no uniform for my grandfather to wear his medal on. I wondered, then, why the medal was in the box and what it meant.

Part of what it meant was connected to the courthouse square. No respectable county seat is without monuments on its courthouse square. They memorialize at least the Civil War, World War One (called the Great War on many of the monuments), World War Two, and other conflicts great and small. Crawford County, Arkansas is no different.

Most of those squares also have a bench or two where people can sit and feed pigeons and squirrels, which was what I often did with my grandfather and at least once, I seem to remember, with my Aunt Edyce, widow of the man in the uniform on the bureau. In my memory she was a woman who was oddly sexless, a woman who sat on the fringes of family gatherings.

Sometimes I ran my fingers across the raised letters on the bronze plaques or the letters carved into marble and granite, the names, the names. It did not occur to me to ask why these names? Why this specific name? Nor was I the only one who did not, does not ask.

I now know that in my grandfather’s time, in the 40’s, a roll was made of every male child in the county, not unlike the call for enumeration by Caesar Augustus commemorated each Christmas. All the sons of Crawford County were listed and classified. Their names were put forward to a selection committee that had been chosen from among the elders of the community. Eventually and at last all those selected went out of the county. For some of those men all that now remained was a name on a monument. They passed forever even from the memory of the community, as have the names of their elders who sat on the board and were given their medals at the end of their service.

Blood: Above the Wagon Wheel

Huey and Farmer, Jerry Barnes, 1969
Used with permission of the artist

30

The Delta is silent below Saigon. Where the land falls away to sea level, the waters of the Mekong fan out, pulse like plasma through the dark silt and infuse it with the slow, rich life of rice, sugar cane, and bananas. The Delta nourishes the country and is silent, complete within itself. On its rivers and along the grey strips of road, cargoes of rice move east to Saigon, west to Cambodia and to the North, as they did in the days of Indochina.

Frances FitzGerald, The Long Fear

1972

From the air the Delta was a pale shade of green that time of year. The particular spot I was over was called, by Americans, the Wagon Wheel and wasn’t very far from My Xuyen. At the Wagon Wheel several canals met and from a helicopter it looked like a hub with thick spokes radiating outward. Looking down I wondered just how and why the configuration came to be. I had seen canals being dug and had an understanding of the human effort involved. I thought this must go back to French times before World War II. Where else in this country’s past had people been able to organize themselves for something like this kind of effort? And why this hub and spoke arrangement?

I couldn’t ask the question of the men I rode with. True, I spoke more Vietnamese than most on the advisory team, which was why I was the only American on this helicopter. But I didn’t know enough to ask them why the wagon wheel was there.

The Vietnamese infantrymen were down there on the ground. Small figures walked along the paddy dikes that ran like lacework between the spokes. It was another day of endless searching. I sat near the open door of the VNAF Huey with two PRC-25 radios near my feet and a map in my lap. In the helicopter with me were other Vietnamese, mostly officers, and more radios and maps. Somewhere up in the air and far away were U.S. Navy jets. Nearby in the sky with us was a U.S. Air Force FAC, Forward Air Controller, in a high-winged, propeller-driven aircraft with rockets hung under his wings.

It would be nice to think that the FAC’s presence — and the fighter-bombers soon to come on station — was all part of a carefully thought-out plan, an acute analysis of Mission, Enemy, Terrain, and Troops available. I’d like to think that my job was to sit here on high and conduct a small, carefully composed concerto of death, or at least be the percussionist, the guy who stood in the back of the orchestra, eyes glancing at the score from time to time, waiting, waiting, then almost casually unleashing a burst of thunder.

But I knew better.

I had personally delivered the bag of VC and NVA flags (sewn up by the mother of one of the hooch maids) and sworn their provenance as having been captured at the end of a desperate fire fight. This was over shots of Jack Daniels while sitting at the FAC squadron’s table in the Ton Son Nhut Officers Club. I had also delivered the books with our radio frequencies and codes so that we’d be able to talk to each other. I had bartered for a promise.

“Sure,” one of the FACs said, “we ever have anything extra, anything we can’t use, we’ll give you a call and come down and put it anywhere you want.”

So on this day I had a FAC up in the air with me. He’d refueled in Can Tho and had given us an hour’s warning that something might be available. Navy aircraft were coming on station with ordinance they had not used on their primary mission to the west. They would stay nearby for as long as they could before flying back to their home on the sea. The FAC passed on to me the ordinance — the types of bombs — available and the station time — the time that they would become available and when they would be leaving. I passed the information on to my counterpart, a Vietnamese Major, Thieu-ta, now sitting beside me. We’d spun up the chopper and flew to circle over an operation that was already in progress. Now we were above the wagon wheel waiting for the jets.

I checked with the province headquarters on the other radio to make sure the Americans there were listening. Our helicopter and the FAC kept on circling. The troops on the ground kept on making their way across the paddies and dikes below them.

The Thieu-ta listened to his radio and drew a circle on his map. He tugged on my sleeve and held the map in front of me, pointing at a blue-green hatched area on the map. Then he pointed out the door at a smudge of green alongside one of the canals that radiated from the hub. I had been down there. I knew what it was. It was a swamp full of dark green plants and snakes and spiders.

I picked a spot in the middle of the green and made a quick computation of the grid coordinates. Just before calling the FAC I shouted my last question to the Thieu-ta — had the Province Chief approved? “Ya-phai! Yes!” the Thieu-ta shouted back. I nodded, encoded the numbers, and called the coordinates to the FAC. Then we circled away to be out of the path of bombs falling from aircraft. We would never see either the bombs or the bombers. The FAC buzzed down low and marked the point with a white phosphorous rocket. A thin trail of white smoke fell up out of the green. I confirmed that the smoke marked the right spot. Moments later great black gouts of mud and water began to erupt into the air. They formed odd bulbous patterns in the green, like bubbles boiling up in a sauce, as if the Delta’s surface was a thick green stew left too long on the stove.

It was someone’s unlucky day. From the edge of the deep green a sampan came sputtering out. One man was standing up in the narrow boat holding the tiller of the outboard engine with its long propeller shaft thrashing the muddy water behind him. The FAC was excited. He was screaming for permission to follow up. The Thieu-ta, excited himself, was calling for more bombs. In the flat voice I adopted in crisis, I laconically passed the request to the FAC. Everyone was very happy.

More bombs came. One splashed into the canal in front of the sampan, another behind. The prow pitched up over the wave and the man could be seen struggling for control. The Thieu-ta shouted in Vietnamese for me to stop the bombing. He was pointing to the troops on the ground who were running down the bank of the canal and firing their rifles. I passed the cease fire order to the FAC and both our helicopter and the FAC’s plane dropped down low, so low that we could see the moment the man pitched forward into the bottom of his boat. One of the soldiers on the canal bank dropped his gear, jumped into the canal, and swam out to retrieve their prize.

I switched to another frequency, one for only myself and the FAC. “Why don’t you and the Navy take a KIA for that? Looks good to me.” I heard a click-click of acknowledgement before I switched back to the open frequency and called a report back to the province. The FAC came up on that frequency and reported that the “fast movers,” the fighter-bombers, were outbound. He thanked me for the action. Said it was the most fun he’d had in a long time. We agreed that the FAC would buy a round of drinks the next time I was in Saigon.

Up in the cockpit of the helicopter the alarms that had been sounding for several minutes finally got my attention. I saw red lights flashing on the instrument panel, but didn’t know what they meant. I replayed in my mind the gallows humor of the team house about the risks of flying with the Vietnamese. It wasn’t the pilots. They were generally thought to be almost as good as the teenage American warrant officers. It was the maintenance and the maintenance crews who sometimes left off vital parts or tightened the wrong bolt, or left out the odd cotter key.

“Chung-ta phai di. We must go back now,” the Thieu-ta shouted. The pilots took us up to gain enough altitude for a possible fluttering autorotation, that peculiar death spiral unique to helicopters that could sometimes be walked away from. I spent the flight back in indecision regarding my seat belt. Should I keep it buckled? Or would I be better off if I were thrown from the crash?

The district town of My Xuyen came into sight and the big white H of the helipad was a beautiful sight. The pilot banged the Huey down on its struts and immediately began shutting down the engines. Everyone else just climbed off like it was an ordinary ride. I gathered up my radios and my rifle and strolled to the edge of the pad where Chen, my bodyguard/driver, and Kiem, my interpreter, were waiting. I gave the radios to Chen who held them while I made one last check with the FAC and then turned that radio off. I used the other radio to report my location to the province CP and gave the mike to Chen, who knew my call sign and would bring the radio to me if I were called.

All of us, the Thieu-ta, a Dai-uy, Kiem and Chen had a mildly celebratory meal in the shade of the marketplace. We commandeered two tables. Kiem and Chen began walking through the stalls and coming back with sellers of fish, shrimp, and crabs, each of them with a basket full of their wares. The Thieu-ta made the decisions and I dealt out stacks of Vietnamese currency, dong. In a few minutes bottles of Ba Muoi Ba beer, filthy glasses with chunks of probably contaminated ice in them, bowls of rice, and platters of cooked shrimp and crab were on the table. I picked a pair of chopsticks of equal length from the container and competed with them all for the shrimp and morsels of crab, pausing from time to time to shovel some rice into my mouth or to take a swig of ice-cooled beer.

When the meal was finished the sun was past noon. The Thieu-ta and the Dai-uy went back to the district headquarters, probably for their mid-day naps. I decided to wait for the ground unit that had been sweeping the wagon wheel to return. I planned to have a chat with their commander and then head back to Soc Trang to make a full report on the day’s operation.

This was in the days when American presence was slowly being pulled out of the Delta. The problem, as I saw it then, was not in the Vietnamese soldiers or even the young officers. Even this Thieu-ta was reasonably competent and did not lack courage. The problem was very simple — there was no way to “win” unless you killed them all, every VC and NVA soldier — to the last man. And neither the South Vietnamese nor the Americans had the heart for that. It wasn’t a war, not even a battle. There was no place to stand, no place from which victory could be proclaimed.

My Xuyen was at the junction of a couple of large canals that connected to the Bassac, a lower branch of the Mekong. Narrow sampans made their way along the canals carrying rice and other goods. Roads paralleled the canals. At key points the canals were crossed by bridges or ferries. The market was near the largest of the canals and I walked along the banks with my little team. I was an infantryman without my fellow soldiers. I was alone, but I was not fearful. A child came up to me and brushed his small hand along my bare forearm. The boy wanted to feel the hair. A woman scolded the child and the boy ran to the shelter of her shadow. At a corner an old woman tossed peanuts into a metal pan atop a charcoal brazier. I watched as she shook them back and forth. I bought all of them and shared them with my team as we walked along.

Behind us I heard the sound of trucks pulling into the square in front of the marketplace. I turned around and walked back to them. I reached the square just as they were pulling the corpse off the back of one of the trucks. They laid the body out on the steps to the market. I saw the District Chief, a Lieutenant Colonel, Trung-ta, walking across the square followed by his small entourage, the Thieu-ta and the Dai-uy. I met them at the steps and we discussed the operation over the dead body. The dead young man wore only loose black cotton trousers. His hair was still damp with streaks of mud in it. His bare chest was hairless and marked only with a small, round, blue blemish, the bullet’s hole. He was still and composed, like an old cat in a pool of sunlight.

The District Chief was smiling and pleased with himself, as if this one dead body was his own kill, as if he were a hunter returned from the mountains above Dalat with a tiger instead of a sad dead boy who may not have even been a soldier but a poor unfortunate who picked the wrong day and time to check out his father’s fish traps.

The Trung-ta began a long oration directed at my interpreter. The gist of it was that he was sure that this person was from the local area. He would leave the body here in the market square until someone claimed him. Then they would know who he was. The District Chief was pleased with this playing off cultural values — the desire for a proper burial — against his own need for military intelligence.

The District Chief gave a small speech to the townspeople who were nearby and waited for a few minutes, rapping his swagger stick against his thigh. No one came forward. He strode off with his retinue, back to his headquarters. A soldier squatting near the body brushed away a fly that had landed on the dead boy’s cheek.

I waited, sitting in my jeep, for the length of a couple of cigarettes. I talked for a while to the Dai-uy who had led the ground operation. Then I drove across the bridge and onto the highway that would take me back to Soc Trang and my team house.

Blood: Packing Corn

29

...the exceeding brightness of military glory — that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood...

Abraham Lincoln

1950

My grandfather was a produce broker. He bought and sold the crops of the nearby counties and shipped them by truck and rail car to the cities — Chicago, Memphis, Kansas City, Tulsa, St. Louis. He shipped beans and tomatoes, spinach and strawberries, peaches and watermelons, cantaloupe and carrots, sweet corn and cucumbers. Whatever was planted and grown nearby. Whatever could be sold.

The drivers pulled their trucks on the scales in front of my grandfather’s office, got their tickets, and then drove across the street and backed up to the loading dock of the packing shed. Then they waited to be loaded. The drivers were friendly to me. They dressed as cowboys in boots, jeans, straw hats, large belts with larger buckles, shirts that had snaps instead of buttons, and had red bandannas hanging out of their hip pockets or tied around their necks on a hot day. One was known as “Kansas” and wore his straw hat tilted to one side of his head. He told me that that was the way cowboys wore their hats in Kansas, where he was from, and I believed him.

Kansas could do rope tricks in the manner of Will Rogers. Waiting for his truck to be loaded he would take the hemp lariat out of the cab, spin it in lazy circles, and step in and out of the loop. He’d toss the loop over my head and it would drop down around my shoulders. He’d tug it tight and draw me to him and ruffle my hair as he took the loop from around me. “Gotta be quicker than that to get away from Kansas, boy,” he’d say. “If I ever got me the right horse I’d go on the rodeo circuit, ’cause I’m the best man with a rope I know. Just ain’t got the right horse.”

Kansas, and almost all the truck drivers, did not sit like ordinary men. They squatted down on the platform of the packing shed. They hunkered on the balls of their feet, the cuffs of their Levi’s drawn up toward the tops of their boots. It was a posture like a catcher behind home plate, and not too unlike that of Vietnamese villagers and Montagnard tribesmen, although those peoples squatted flat-footed. Later in my life I was to do both, squat behind home plate for wild throwing high school pitchers and facing Montagnards in the highlands and Vietnamese village elders in the Delta.

Lounging this way, sometimes leaning back against the side of the packing shed, they whittled on scraps of wood. They all carried a pocket knife of some sort. Some rolled cigarettes made from sacks of Bull Durham carried in a shirt pocket with the red tag hanging out or from a can of Prince Albert. A rare few smoked tailor-mades, possibly Home Runs, or, if he had made a recent run to New Orleans, Picayunes, the famously strong cigarette from that part of the country. Or Lucky Strikes.

Kansas was particularly proud of his ability to tightly roll a cigarette from the flakes of Bull Durham and gummed paper. He made a trough of the paper with the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand and shook the tobacco from the pouch held in his right hand. When he had measured out enough tobacco, he caught the tag of the sack in his teeth, tightened the string, and put the sack back in his pocket. He then tamped the tobacco down with a finger and brought the paper to his lips, licked it, and then smoothed out the cylinder.

“See that, boy, as good as any tailor-made you’ll ever see.”

It wasn’t, I knew, certainly not as perfectly formed as my grandfather’s Pall Malls, but I didn’t say so.

Some of the drivers would let me puff on one of their cigarettes.

“Don’t do him no harm. Long as he don’t inhale.”

“Stunt your growth, boy,” another would say.

My grandmother once smelled the smoke on me and it was the occasion for yet another visit to the forsythia bush behind the house.

Inside the packing shed a crew prepared loads for the trucks. Depending on what was being packed, a configuration of conveyor belts, bins, cutting devices, wrapping machines, piles of crates and baskets, and work lines was established. The machines were all driven by arrangements of belts and pulleys that whirred overhead and led, if carefully traced, back to an electric motor with a great on-off handle in a back corner of the shed.

One day they were packing corn. Trucks filled with loose ears picked that morning in the river bottomland waited to take their turns backing up to the loading dock. At the dock a conveyer belt ran into a truck and the loose corn was shoveled onto the belt. The corn flowed into the shed and along the packing line. At the packing line people stood on both sides of the belt and grabbed the corn as it streamed past them. Alongside the conveyor belt in front of the people working the line was a cutting machine. This was something like a row of enlarged mechanical cigar cutters. In front of each worker was a row of holes that every second or so opened up for a moment before a cutting blade flashed across. What a worker did was grab two ears of corn and thrust the ends of the corn into two open holes. In a moment the blades flashed and chopped off the ends of the ears. Then the worker rotated the two ears, flipping them like small batons, and put the other ends into the holes. The blades flashed again. After that, the worker tossed the ears onto another conveyor belt that delivered the trimmed ears to packers. The packers took the flow of trimmed ears of corn, now all nearly the same length, and put them into boxes. The filled boxes then went down a set of rollers to a waiting truck.

Back at the cutting area the ends of corn filled great bins that were emptied out during breaks between the unloading of trucks. These bins had a sweet summer smell to them. The silage in them often moved with the struggling of corn worms and the sides of the bins were speckled with the brown juices of worms that had been caught by the cutting machines.

The men and women who worked the line were local people. It wasn’t steady work. It ebbed and flowed with the season and the harvest. But some, because of their skills, or because they could reconfigure the lines based on what needed to be done, or because they were some sort of kin somewhere back in time, were always there in the summers. They were all acquainted. One of them was named Joe.

As I watched (they would not let me get anywhere near them while the machines were running) they chatted and joked and told stories on each other as the ears of corn flowed down the line in front of them. Perhaps it was a particularly funny story, or perhaps he’d tasted a bit more than he should of the whiskey that came down out of the nearby mountains the night before, or perhaps his steel-toed boot stepped on a stray piece of corn —  but instead of an ear of corn it was the tips of two of Joe’s fingers that went into the cutters.

The blood spurted across the line and one of the women screamed. Joe’s truncated hand still clutched the ear of corn as he stood back from the line. He shouted to shut the line down. Someone ran back and pulled the big handle and there was a sudden quiet in the room.

Kansas came striding in from the loading dock, whipping his red bandanna from out of his pocket. He wrapped it around Joe’s hand, ear of corn and all, and said, “Let’s get you to the hospital.”

He turned to me. “Go get your grandpa and tell him the line’s been shut down and that we need to take Joe to get his hand fixed.”

He said to one of the other line workers, “See if you can find them fingers and we’ll take ’em along. Don’t think it’ll do no good though.”

I ran across the street and interrupted my grandfather who was talking on the telephone. Papaw took his hat off its hook and went out the door. Kansas was walking Joe across the street, carrying someone else’s bloody bandanna with the fingertips in it. My grandfather started his Hudson and he and Joe and Kansas drove off, leaving me behind to wait.

I told the story to my grandmother at the dinner table that night. Her only comment was not to me, but to my grandfather. “You keep him away from the machinery, Jim. You know that’s a dangerous place.”

Blood: Killer

It Was Dark and Wet, Tom Dunn, Bougainville, 1942

28

Varieties of religious experience; good news and bad news; a lot of men found their compassion in the war, some found it and couldn’t live with it, war-washed shutdown of feeling, like who gives a fuck. People retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair, some saw the action and declared for it, only heavy killing could make them feel so alive. And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years. Every time there was combat you had a license to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

1969

The most dangerous man I ever encountered was an Australian. We never would have met, probably, except that we were fellow passengers on a flight through several province capitals, beginning at Nha Trang, dropping south to Phan Rang, then to Dalat, Ban Me Thuot and finally to Pleiku. It was an overly circuitous route for me since it was an easy direct hop from Nha Trang to Pleiku. I would not have taken it if it had been my choice, but I had been tagged with a courier task while at IFFORCEV headquarters. I carried thick sealed envelopes in a canvas bag at my feet on the deck of the Air America C-47 and got a receipt in exchange for an envelope at each stop we made.

Dangerous was the first adjective that came to mind when the Australian took the seat next to me in the nylon webbing that lined the side of the fuselage. The man dropped a well-worn kit bag on the deck and leaned a Belgian FN rifle against the bag. His floppy hat was down over his forehead shading watery blue eyes. He was a thin man. His tiger-striped jungle fatigues draped down from the points of his shoulders. He was also a still man. He glanced at me as he dropped his kit, mumbled a “g-day”, and settled into his seat seeming to notice everything and nothing.

He was quiet on the first leg, until we flew over the tracings of irrigation canals and squared dikes that marked the remnants of the Champa kingdom. “Know anything about those chaps?” he asked as we were both looking down at the ground.

“Only what I’ve read. Remnants of the old Champa kingdom who were defeated by the Vietnamese when they pushed down from the north a couple of centuries ago.”

“Smart buggers,” he allowed, “but no match for the Vietnamese. Something like you chaps, I reckon.” He said the last with what he probably thought was a friendly smile, a thin quivering of the corners of this mouth.

“Those chaps (he meant the North Vietnamese), aren’t any more comfortable in the jungle than you are. Ya got to make them fear the jungle, fear the night.”

He meant doing what he had been taught to do and had done as a young soldier in Malaya. The same skills he was now teaching to the Special Forces and their Montagnard allies in the highlands. 

On the leg from Phan Rang to Dalat, I, who’d read my Mao, Che, Ho, Giap, Sir Robert Thompson, and Magsaysay, pointed out that the Emergency had been different. They had had the advantage of exploiting ethnic differences. In Malaya it was much easier to separate the “fish” from the “sea.” The insurgency could be confined to a mainly Chinese sub-group. The Malay Peninsula was easier to isolate from sources of arms shipments. Vietnam, on the other hand, was inevitably part of the larger Cold War where Chinese and Soviet factors were much more important.

The Australian would have none of that, or so it seemed — in those still blue eyes it was hard to read anything like anger. He had no sense of politics, only war, his kind of war. He rapped the wooden stock of his rifle and then gave a contemptuous look at the plastic of my M-16.

“That’s not a real rifle,” he said. “Ya can’t trust it. Wouldn’t have one. My chaps,” meaning his Montagnards, “have some of your old M-14s and it’s a better rifle.”

He was quiet for a long time as the plane droned over the textured mountains. “Ghurkas, that’s what you need here.” 

Ghurkas had been his mentors in Malaya, and they seemed to be the only soldiers he really respected. They hadn’t understood the jungle either, not when they first came down out of their mountains. But they understood soldiering and stealth and terrorizing their enemies. Put Ghurkas on patrol in a region and pretty damn quick you didn’t have any living opponents.

It was the cold stillness that marked the man, not the words. There was no real emotion in his voice. Nor was there any connection between him and the people he talked about. He was telling  stories he’d told before. He didn’t expect anyone to care or even understand. He was isolated and self-contained. A pure assassin. It was easy to imagine him on the edge of some jungle trail west of Ban Me Thuot, his hat down over his eyes, his rifle in his arms, just waiting for a target. He was a hunter, a killer. He was no longer part of an army.

That man had long since separated himself from any purpose larger than his own narrow satisfaction in killing, if it can even be said that he was moved by anything like an emotion. Even on the airplane in his washed-out tiger-striped fatigues he seemed to fade into the background. On the ground he would drift like morning fog through the elephant grass and bamboo groves, like smoke from a Montagnard cooking fire, like one of those spirits they propitiate with bowls of rice wine set into bamboo tripods erected on the edge of their villages.

That kind of man was not created by a training program. He was born to it. What shaping had occurred was done by forces outside the drills and rituals of ordinary soldiering. He did not seem to be a man who could be comfortable in a city. He did not even seem to be a man who could be comfortable in a foxhole with other soldiers. He was a ghost, a ghost that one could only hope was on our side, because people like him did not seem to be bound by ordinary rules.

I shivered as the aircraft flew high over the plateau. The distance between me and the man beside me was uncrossable, and neither had an interest in crossing it. I would like to have his respect, his acknowledgement that we were fellow soldiers, but I knew that was impossible. And when I thought about it later I knew that I would never want to walk the path that had made that man whatever he was.

The Australian left the plane at Ban Me Thuot. A battered jeep driven by a Montagnard in loose fitting jungle fatigues and a bush hat was waiting.

Blood: Serpent

27

The Copperhead According to Mother Ruth

Get him with a hoe
but don’t step on the head
He’ll bite you
even dead.
Look in brushpiles
circle them wide
he’s their color
and he’ll hide.
He’s God’s creature
but it’s also true
you must do unto him
before he does unto you.

James A. Autry, Nights Under a Tin Roof

1951

My grandmother was a small, tough lady. She was a Brinkley, a name that didn’t seem to mean anything in the town and wasn’t in the graveyard. I came to understand her people migrated from somewhere in the Carolinas after the war and settled farmland along the Arkansas River bottom. Her family claimed some kin to Stonewall Jackson, the soldier beloved of Lee who was killed by his own men.

She kept a garden behind the house on the hill and by the time I arrived for my summers it was well established. She grew a little bit of everything there. Bush beans and pole beans, sweet corn, okra, radishes, field peas, spinach, squash, cucumbers, a couple of watermelon vines, onions, lima beans, black pendulous eggplants, and others. She worked in the garden almost every day, wearing an old-fashioned bonnet to keep the sun from her skin and wielding a hoe she sharpened with a file.

That’s how I knew she was leaving the house to work in the garden. I’d hear the screen door screek and slam and then the rasp of the file across the edge of the hoe.

I helped some of the time, but the too long handle of the hoe was difficult for me and I could easily end up doing as much harm as good. She didn’t seem to want me to help. Perhaps it was her own personal time that she didn’t like to share as she bent over along the rows, chopping out the weeds, testing for ripeness.

The garden was a great place to find a beetle to torment; or to watch an ant lion in the bottom of its small pit waiting for an unwary ant to trip and slide down the slippery side of the trap; or to watch a spider craft a web from one leaf of a corn stalk to another. It was in the garden that I found the most beautiful creature of all basking in the sun at the end of a row of corn. It was just resting there with its slit eyes watching from within its wedge-shaped skull, its patterned skin a dusky orange and black, its tongue flickering out to taste the world.

“Git back!” Mamaw said, loudly, forcefully.

With her sharpened hoe she diced the copperhead as if it were a carrot on her chopping board. In just moments with a chop, chop, chop, the same motion she used for a recalcitrant patch of weeds, the snake was dismembered before me.

“You stay away from them. They’re pizen, you hear?”

What could I say, but “Yes, ma’am?”

But the twitching remnants of the serpent fascinated me. They kept on moving long afterwards. Juanita told me some folks believed that, if the moon was right, the pieces could join back together. That was why, when she heard about the killing, Juanita came out with a shovel and buried the pieces in different places around the garden.

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.