Foxhole

1

We are talking now of summer evenings...in that time when I was so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

James Agee, A Death in the Family

1949

When I was a boy, only seven or eight years old, I had a hard time keeping up with my grandfather's long strides across the rows of recently planted corn. My grandfather was a very tall man who wore a suit, tie, wingtip shoes and a fedora hat even as he walked his fields. He was so tall he could keep an even pace by walking at a diagonal, each step going from row to row at just the right length. At that age my legs weren’t long enough to walk that way. To follow Papaw I had to walk along a row for a step or two and then hop across to the next.

This was Arkansas River bottomland on the north side of the river not far from Van Buren. One side of the field was bounded by a grass-covered levee. The other boundary of the 300 acre plot was a sinuous ox-bow lake, a dark and forbidding slough where I could hear strange birds shouting, see squirrels dancing through the trees and other, more mysterious, shapes moving in the shadows.

In the fields the sun was high and there was no shade. From time to time Papaw reached down to pick up a clump of the land. He crumbled it as he talked to his hired man, his field boss. He sniffed the dirt and rolled it into dust between his fingers. They talked of rain and seasons, of plans for turning the earth and harvesting the crops. 

I copied my grandfather’s gesture. I took a clump of dirt from the top of the row. It pulled off like the crust of a pie and was flat in my hand, tan on the top and dark brown underneath. Picking up the clump exposed darker soil and I saw a tiny, pale green spike of corn just peeking out. I imagined the seedling squinting at the sudden light because I’d pulled his cover off. Still holding the clod in my hand I crouched down and looked along the row. I saw an irregular shifting of the surface — other spikes were pushing the ground upwards. Down that low I smelled the damp coolness.

As Papaw had done, I crushed the slab of dirt in my hands and let the grains flow out between my fingers. Then, just like Papaw, I brushed my hands together. Unlike him, I then wiped them on the seat of my jeans.

That was the same summer I learned the world was round and that China was on the other side. Like many a child before me, and since, I was puzzled at how all those Chinese could walk around upside down. I decided to go through the earth to see them. I used Mamaw’s gardening spade. I chose a spot in the back of her garden and went down into the earth. I was going to go all the way to China.

I learned in that afternoon something about sculpting holes in the ground. It was grainy, well-packed soil. A few kicks on the edge of the spade drove it easily into the earth. The dirt lifted out and fell from the spade without protest. The shovelfuls, tossed on the side of the hole, made a mound that grew tall as I went down. I learned that starting with a small hole meant I could not get very deep before I couldn’t get the shovel out. To go deep I had to also go wide. Eventually I even had to move some of the dirt I’d already taken out of the ground. To go deep, the hole had to be at least as wide as my body and as long as the handle of the spade. 

My hands began to hurt. I spit on them and they felt better.

This was summertime in Van Buren, Arkansas. When I was waist deep I realized that it was cool down there. It was damp and dark. I took the spade and cleaned up the edges of my little earth-bound box. I sliced away the earlier marks of the spade until the sides were smooth and dark brown. I decided I wouldn’t go all the way to China. It was a nice place just where I was. When I crouched down all I saw was the earth around me and the sky above. It smelled cool and safe.

My grandfather called it a “foxhole,” a word I’d never heard before. I later learned that foxhole was an Army word. But my grandfather had been too young for World War One and too old for World War Two, so even if he had been willing, he had no personal stories of war to tell me. 

But he did tell me stories of a wandering man, a returning soldier, who tricked one-eyed giants and tied himself to a mast so he could listen to women sing seductive songs. My grandfather rode a palomino in the rodeo parade. He hunted quail in the Fall. He taught me how to shoot a shotgun.

At the time I still assumed a foxhole was a place where foxes lived. I had never seen a fox in the wild, but if Papaw said foxes dug holes like mine, then they must. I wondered how they did it without hands and shovels.

Note for new readers:

This is a re-posting of the first entry in this blog from November of 2011. I've learned a bit more about blogging since then. I'm about to do some cleaning up of earlier posts and images and thought that new readers (you lucky few) might like to start at the beginning. A weakness of blogs is that they flow from back to front and you can lose the narrative thread. If you'd like to view Dirt, Blood, and Grace in a linear fashion, then click here to go to the second post of the series, "Becoming an Infantryman."

13 March 2014/2 Dec 2017:

Or to see the entire Dirt, Blood, and Grace as a single file, I have a .pdf of the entire file (a bit of a work in progress) here. Please note the copyright protection on the file.

Grace: Last Day

Roger Blum, 1966

44

Only take heed,

and keep your soul diligently,

lest you forget the things

which your eyes have seen,

and lest they depart from your heart

all the days of your life;

make them known to your children

and your children’s children.

Deuteronomy 4:9

1990

Glancing out of my window, I saw the color detail assembling. This was my last day. My inbox was empty, my outbox was full. There was a cardboard box of with memorabilia on a chair. I stood, picked up my hat, and walked out my office door.

“I’m going to step out for a minute,” I said to my team.

I went outside and stood on the steps of the building, yet another wooden structure built for World War II and scheduled for demolition soon. The uniform of the day was BDUs. I had the sleeves rolled up and was wearing polished black boots. Above the right pocket my name was embroidered. Above the left pocket U.S. Army was embroidered and above that were cloth black jump wings and a black Combat Infantryman’s Badge. My rank, a black oak leaf, was on my right collar and my branch, the crossed rifles on the Infantry, was on the left collar. I put my soft hat on.

I stood looking out over Monterey Bay. The flag pole was at the top of a parade ground that swept down towards the waterfront. A softball game was about to begin on one edge of the field. The setting sun was to my left and shards of light glinted on the water’s surface far below me. In the distance I could hear the barking of sea lions. I heard the electronic click of the public address system being switched on up in the Headquarters building behind me and the soft static as someone, probably the duty NCO, waited for it to be exactly 1700 hours. The color detail was positioned by the flag pole across the street from my office. At the first note of the bugle I heard a sergeant on the street bark, “Colors!” at other soldiers walking by. They, and the softball players, and I, faced the flagpole and stood at parade rest.

At the end of Retreat there was a pause of perhaps five seconds, then the bugle began to play To the Colors. I snapped to attention, my body erect and still, and brought my right hand up to the brim of my hat in a salute. The color detail began to lower the flag.

By staying in the Army so long, twenty-five years, I had become more of the infantry than in the infantry. Eventually all I did was write plans and orders, make analyses, and wait in places very far away listening to radios as other men and women were put at risk. I worked in offices most of the time and had to use my imagination to visualize the men that might be out there on point somewhere else in the world.

No one knew better than I that the operations in the Crow’s Foot, over the Wagon Wheel, and others like it, were, in the end, not very important. Nevertheless, over the years I invested significance into them if only because I was there and I was a witness to them. What we, all of us, did was simply what infantrymen do, what they have always done. We went for a walk, heavily armed, and tried to kill other men while keeping from being killed, and owned, for however brief a moment, a piece of dirt.

If I traced back all my life the only morally significant choice I could find on the path that led me to those places, and from there to other bloody places, was the choice to put myself at risk. But I had done it so many times before that it didn’t seem particularly important that I had done it again. More than that, I found it very hard to tease out along the braided chain of causality just why I had made that choice in the first place.

Of course, I had not been alone out on my walk. On this day, as I watched the flag whip in the wind as it was drawn down the pole, all of my fellow infantrymen were volunteers. But it had not always been so. For much of my service most infantrymen were conscripts with ideas of their own about life and the military. In fact, many of my generation had subscribed to the idea that war, all war, did not make sense, and because war did not make sense, wars should not be fought. We were the first, and possibly the last, generation to think so. Nevertheless, once I, and those few of my generation who fought, began to dig foxholes, sweat pouring off our bodies, fear dilating the pupils of our eyes, we would agree that, for the moment, that particular idea was irrelevant.

Of this much I could be sure. We went where we went because we had been told to go. We were ensnared in a web of mutual obligations. This was both our curse and our comfort. By virtue of what I had become, I made choices not only for myself, but choices that brought death to those who were my enemy and to my own men. Just as I was being put at risk by those above me, I risked the lives of the men below me and with me. All I could do to resolve this paradox was to — not resolve it. The best I could do was simply know the paradox was there — accomplish the mission, take care of the troops.

So what would I, or they, have at the end of the day? Well, if nothing else, if we lived, we would have our stories. And that would have to be enough.

A member of the color detail stepped forward and grasped the flag at the exact moment that the last note of the bugle sounded. I dropped my salute and watched him unsnap the flag from its halyard. The rest of the detail dropped their salutes and stepped forward to fold the flag. And then they marched away.

Grace: Crepe Myrtle

42

Gravedigger

His name is Otis Cox

and the graves he digs with a spade are acts of love.

The red clay holds like concrete

still he makes it give up a place

for rich caskets and poor

working with sweat and sand

in the springing tightness of his hair

saying that machine digging

don’t seem right if you know

the dead person.

His pauses are slow as the digging

a foot always on the shovel.

Shaking a sad and wet face

drying his sorrow with a dust orange white handkerchief

he delivers a eulogy.

Miz Ruth always gimme a dipper of water

Then among the quail calls and blackeyed susans

Otis Cox shapes with grunt and sweat and shovel

a perfect work

a mystical place

a last connection with the living hand.

James A. Autry, Nights Under a Tin Roof

1974

My grandmother didn’t stay in the house on the hill after the passing of my grandfather, but moved to a smaller place not far from her son’s, my uncle’s, house. Her new house had a deep, narrow lot that ran back to a railroad embankment and she put her garden in. For most of the next twenty years she raised her corn, peas, okra, tomatoes, limas, and pole beans. She had a peach tree that, if there wasn’t a late frost, produced fruit as sweet as any I ever tasted.

I usually spent part of my summers with her. I didn’t stay as long or as often as when I was younger, but enough to get to know the neighborhood and accumulate a stash of comic books in a closet and toys in the garage. When I got older I discovered among my grandfather’s books an edition of Homer, B.A. Botkin’s collection of American folklore, and Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I  was to wonder ever after how much of these I knew from my own reading and how much had simply seeped in sitting on porch swings on summer nights.

I was in school at the University of Arkansas up in Fayetteville when Kennedy was killed. With my new wife I drove down through the Boston Mountains and watched the funeral on my grandmother’s television. 

Siting with her that day in 1963 and remembering her age, I asked her if the event was anything like her memory of the McKinley assassination. She said that she’d just been a girl and she didn’t think it made much news at the time. She didn’t really remember it. They certainly didn’t hear about it quickly since they didn’t get a newspaper. And it was before radio. Maybe the news came out by train. What she did remember was the reaction to Roosevelt’s death. But she didn’t want to talk about that either.

The stately horses that pulled the caisson and the prancing black horse with reversed empty boots in the stirrups has stayed in my memory. Much of those days has stuck in my memory. King’s eloquence of the previous summer, the open-mouthed gasp of Oswald as Jack Ruby’s bullet tore through his gut, the rumors and realities of new substances spreading to the east from the west — LSD and peyote, freakish chord changes in guitar solos, the brave white civil rights activists suddenly encountering their own draft status and finding a new and different cause.

But I never had the occasion to ask my grandmother about those disorienting changes.

When my cousin called me to tell me my grandmother had died, I was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. With my wife and daughter I traveled to Arkansas. My older brother, in the Air Force, came up from a base in Texas. My younger brother, just out of the Navy, came up from Florida. My parents came from Florida. My cousins, in Fort Smith and Van Buren, met us at the airport. 

The funeral was much smaller than the one I remembered for my grandfather. The circle did not complete itself until I stood at the grave. The rectangular hole in the ground must have been blasted and then shoveled out. My infantryman’s eye saw the shards of stone and the loose dirt hidden by a tarp. My older brother and I had decided to wear our uniforms and the sunlight flashed off badges and ribbons as we listened to a preacher, who obviously didn’t know our grandmother at all, read from the books of Job and John.

Crepe myrtle is an interesting plant. It will grow as either a bush or a tree, depending on how it is pruned when young. It is an exotic, originally found only in Asia. These days it is common throughout the South. It begins to bloom near Easter time in Florida, but waits almost until mid-July in Arkansas before its red or white blossoms break out. Later in the year, each year, it will shed a layer of bark and will look, for several weeks, a lot like the mottled camouflage of an infantryman’s field uniform. In my youth my grandmother’s street was lined with them.

Next to the grave was a crepe myrtle tree. Probably the same one the bee had been visiting when my grandfather was buried. Now it was considerably larger and spread irregular shadows over the grave and the mourners. It was past blossoming time and the bark was beginning to slough away in loose strips that hung from the trunk. 

It was not part of the ritual for us to watch the casket into the grave. Instead the words were said, a benediction was pronounced, and we all walked away back to our cars. The empty rectangular hole was behind us, up under the crepe myrtle, waiting for the casket to be lowered.

Dirt: Three By Two By You

Used by permission of artist, Kelly Swann. See also  WWII GIs

4 

     Dig a hole in your back yard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and, so there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire.     Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you....But you still won’t understand how he feels when things get tough.

Bill Mauldin, Up Front

1965

In the same summer that I became an infantryman my platoon was led through pine trees and scrub oaks to the top of a small hill. We spread out just below the crest, facing north, huddling behind trees or laying behind low bushes. Our sergeant moved along the line to place us more carefully and to position the machine guns to cover the approaches. The men on the flanks of our platoon were put within view of the units next to them. At the time I was more concerned with poison ivy than the enemy. Then the sergeant came by and said, “Dig in. Right here.”

The basic dimensions of a fighting position, a foxhole, are three by two by you. In other words, a hole in the ground that is three feet wide (facing the enemy), two feet long, and deep enough so that you can stand and shoot while being reasonably protected. I am 6’2” tall, which meant a hole about 4 feet deep. Even then I knew, from my perspective, that the purpose of this little hole was freedom from fear. But the hole was also my place. I could hide there, but I also owned it. To keep it, I had to defend it.

In its way, my foxhole was the ultimate in fortification. A properly dug foxhole, as one of my instructor sergeants once said, “Puts the whole world between you and the enemy.” The sergeant’s point was that all the equations regarding how thick a barrier needed to be against a particular weapon were meaningless if you were down in the ground. If I dug a hole that was three by two by me, and I had my head down below the surface of the earth, no rifle bullet that an enemy soldier could fire could possibly hit me. I would be safe.

I knew we would probably move on, that day, the next day, the next hour. But whenever we stopped the collective compulsion of our leaders was to go down into the earth.

In peacetime it was difficult to establish a sense of either fear or purpose. This day with the sun blazing down on us, a crow cawing off in the distance, the sounds of truck engines on a public highway a few miles away, was just a day in Georgia. We were just boys playing games. And yet, it must be done. It must be learned.

I was, I and my buddy were, low to the ground, hiding from the enemy. But the better we hid, then the less we could see. That’s an old paradox and one never to be resolved, this wanting to see but not be seen. I didn’t think about why I was where I was. For the single infantryman, that was really quite simple. I was there because someone told me to be there. I was there because everyone else in my fire team, squad, platoon, or company was there. I was there because if I moved someone else would see me and try to kill me.

I was given my place to stand and I began my hole.

I wasn’t alone. Not that day in Georgia and rarely in the years that followed. One man in one hole was not enough. What would happen when I slept? There were almost always two of us at a place on the earth. Three by two by you was the basic formula, but six by two by “y’all” was the reality. Inevitably, one of the infantrymen was tall and the other short. The y’all, the depth, became a compromise. My buddy became the guard. His job was to protect the digger, me. I dropped my gear on the ground, laid my weapon close to hand, and got out my entrenching tool.

For other men, not soldiers, digging holes is a straightforward task that requires very simple tools — a shovel, a pick, and an axe. The pick breaks up the surface of the ground and helps lever out the rocks. The axe cuts the roots. The shovel moves the dirt out. I had none of those tools. I had my entrenching tool, which was a compromise of all three. It was a folding shovel. It was sharpened along one edge of its blade so that it could be a primitive axe. It could also be folded so that the blade was perpendicular to the handle and could be used as a pick. But it was too short, light and small to be very effective at anything. I had nothing fond, profound, or even mildly kind to say about this tool. In the evolution of the entrenching tool over perhaps fifty years about all that could be said in its favor was that the newest of them was marginally easier to carry around and marginally less useful as a shovel — and significantly less useful as a weapon. The comparison to the helmet soldiers wear now is compelling. Today’s helmet is slightly lighter and more protective than its predecessor, but not as good as a hat and worthless as a cooking pot or wash basin.

But I had no choice. I took my entrenching tool and folded it into a pick-like shape, marked the dimensions of my place and began to dig, first scratching out a shallow trench that was just enough to get me below the edge of the earth. Thus began my encounter with the soil, the dirt of that particular place.
I eventually became a fine amateur geologist, or at least a decent describer of the results of time and weather. Over the years as I wandered about my place on the earth might be where glaciers once crept down and then retreated, grinding rock into grains of sand. It might be a place where generation upon generation of trees and grass lived and died and left behind layers of organic debris. Through that sort of soil my shovel sliced with ease and the dirt scooped out pleasantly, allowing me to reach safety in only a moment or two — until I reached that damn tree root right through the middle of things.

Or I could be upon a place arisen from the floor of an ancient sea, pressed and compacted into natural pottery. My entrenching tool then only chipped away at the clay; chipped and gouged until the handle twisted in my fingers from the sweat and I could not get safe for a very long time.

And rocks. Some smooth and rounded from tumbling among themselves down the beds of rivers; some the jagged and shattered remnants of rifts within the crust of the planet; some that once flowed in incandescent rivers of lava from out of the earth. On the surface of the earth, they might be lovely shapes pleasant to the eye and, more important, something to hide behind. But in the earth they were evil, lurking monsters always larger, more tenacious than expected. They deflected the blade of my entrenching tool and sent painful shivers up my arms. They had to be muscled from the ground much like a dentist grappling and levering and then ripping a tooth out of a jaw.

Thus digging-in began and proceeded at a pace that depended almost entirely on the nature of the dirt itself. However, it must also be said that, except under the motivation of fear, soldiers do not like to dig. The reasons were clear enough. Most of the time it was hard work that served no obvious purpose. Most of the time the holes were dug for the future, not because someone was shooting right then. So the pace was slow under any circumstance and even slower when the dirt was not cooperative.

The soil itself was never perfect. My fantasy became a firmly-packed loam that my entrenching tool could sink into with a two-handed thrust or a solid kick of a boot. It would have no roots and no rocks. It would be fine grained, but not so fine as to crumble along the sides of the hole. After that day in Georgia I acquired some passing acquaintance with the soils of Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Colorado, California, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Alaska, Vietnam, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Panama, Portugal, and Germany. I remembered most fondly the sandy soils of Fort McCoy, Wisconsin. It was a bit like an oenophile’s search for the perfect vintage. Fort McCoy was not perfect, but it was very, very close. A bit more body, a few less roots would have been nice.

I became familiar with the vagaries of compaction and adhesion. There were soils that clung to my shovel and would not shake loose. Those heavy lumps had to be lifted up out of the hole and banged off of the shovel. Some soils had grains so fine and dry they flowed like water and the hole collapsed into itself like the tiny lairs of ant lions. In one place it was as if I were along the seashore and as I went into the earth the hole filled with water.

The dirt was colored through chemical processes I did not pretend to understand, except perhaps the distant relationship between iron ore and the color red, or of copper to green. They, the soils, were none the same. They had shades of gray that descended from black to the color of doves’ feathers, or pale yellows, or sometimes a faded rose red. I had to worry about the contrast between the soil I was digging out, the spoil, and the color of the surface of the earth. In a day or two the spoil would merge back into the color of the landscape, but when it was freshly dug it was easily seen and someone else might know where I was, would find me, would seek me out.

But to get back to my time in Georgia, as I went down into my hole I began to shape it to my needs, carving the edges smooth as I went deeper. Here I encountered the damp coolness. I dug one end of my rectangle a little bit deeper so that in those moments when I didn’t need to be on lookout I could go even further in the earth and be even more protected. Also this deep spot would collect the water when it began to rain. Then I dug a small hole into the side of the big hole. This was called a grenade sump. The theory was that if someone tossed a hand grenade into my hole, I could kick it into this smaller hole where it would explode harmlessly. I never met anyone who tested this theory and lived to tell the tale. But it made sense and made me feel better, so I dug out the grenade sump.

Eventually I completed my fighting position. It was a rectangular hole in the ground where I and my fellow soldier could hide. We had something like forty-eight cubic feet of spoil mounded up around the hole that presented a problem all its own. But we could get down into the earth.

If an infantryman is young, if he is poorly led, if he does not yet understand battle or the infantry, then he will not know that he is a fool, that what he feels is an illusion, that the comforting earth around him may well be a grave.

My buddy and I were allowed to leave our hole for mail call. My name was shouted out and a letter was passed back to me. On my way back I filled my canteen with fresh water. Down in the dark coolness of my foxhole I spread out my poncho. I leaned against the dirt wall and could see the tops of pine trees and blue sky overhead. I lit a Lucky Strike and opened my mail. I sipped the cool water as I read my mail and smoked. There I was cool and the outside sounds, the growling sergeants, the clink of other soldiers’ entrenching tools, were attenuated. The sweat dried and began to itch. I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life.

Later that evening it began to rain. I was ordered out on patrol. I slipped and fell getting out of my foxhole and dirt fell down inside the collar of my fatigue shirt. When I pulled my poncho on, I got the side that had been on the ground on the inside so that it trapped the dampness in. As I walked in the darkness the rain tapped against the top of my helmet. I stumbled through the dank woods for hours, scratching at the dirt in my shirt, my boots squishing full of water at a stream. I was miserable. The memory of the moment back in my foxhole reading my mail faded swiftly away.

The patrol returned in the early morning hours and we received new orders. I filled the hole back up with the dirt I’d dug out, put my helmet on my head, hung my gear over my shoulders and moved on.
Every time we stopped we were ordered to dig. At first we dug to hide and to be safe. We made holes where we were told to dig. My place became a part of a relationship between the shape of the ground, the importance of the ground, the location of the enemy, the location of the rest of my unit, and the weapons I carried. My hole in the ground and its shape and purposes evolved to fit the circumstances.

Then and for years afterward I kept remembering that first moment when I was able to feel safe in the earth, sipping water and reading my mail. For that matter I kept remembering that first place in Arkansas earth so many years before. Maybe that was really the moment when I became an infantryman.

Ambush

Elephant Grass, Roger A. Blum, 1966

3

The experts in defense conceal themselves as under the ninefold earth; those skilled in attack move as from above the ninefold heavens. Thus they are capable both of protecting themselves and of gaining a complete victory.

Sun Tsu, The Art of War

1968

I was just a passenger as we rode along the road that ran from Pleiku to Ban Me Thuot. The landscape was open, a grassy savannah edged with spindly trees that marked the beginning of the jungle. Some hillsides had been cleared and planted in tea bushes and the rows were a dusty green very pleasing to my eye. Off to the southeast was a place known as the Crow’s Foot that was reported to have a lot of VC and NVA in it. 

The purpose of the trip was as peculiar as the war. Later in the day there would be a ceremony involving the gift of an elephant to a Montagnard village and the unit I was helping to advise, a Vietnamese battalion, was to set up a perimeter defense around the village. For this trip, however, I didn’t have a real job. I was just along for the ride. To be honest, I really just wanted to see the elephant.

The road ahead of us curved and the jungle crept down close, perhaps only 100 meters away. I was nodding, barely awake when the jeep swerved toward the ditch. As I fell out of my seat I saw that the convoy was halted and soldiers were pouring out of the backs of the trucks. A small black cloud was drifting up into the air at the head of the column. A “thump” sound carried down to me. The radio behind me was chattering in Vietnamese, too fast for me to understand. I hit the ground and watched my helmet roll away while I was struggling to get a round into the chamber of my rifle (I know, I should have had a round chambered in the first place). As I crawled after my helmet I heard the angry buzzing and the steady popping sound coming from the tree line. I sprawled in the grass of the ditch and put my helmet on, then slowly, carefully peeked up over the top of the ditch. I could see the flashes of the ambush, hear the spang as bullets ricocheted off the roadway. I ducked back down and hugged the earth and wished, very desperately, for a hole to crawl into. 

Face down in the ditch I smelled the crushed green grass. I didn’t really want to put my head up to begin returning fire. But I had to and I did. More than anything else I wanted a shovel. I wanted to get down into the earth.

It ended much like most such events in those days. Within minutes shells were falling from friendly artillery. The rounds dropped into the tree line with a dark crumping sound and the flashes of the ambush faded away. The buzzing sound of the bullets stopped. Friendly troops swept the tree line finding only brass shell casings and a few spots of blood. I cleared my rifle and put a fresh magazine in. As the convoy resumed I reloaded the magazines I’d emptied. 

I never had the time to begin digging my hole, but I sure did want one. I needed to go down into the earth.

Becoming an Infantryman

2

For, as I am a soldier,

A name that in my thoughts becomes me best...

Shakespeare, Henry V

Whereas in 1800 roughly 20,000 men were required to hold a mile of battle front, this figure progressively dropped to 12,000 by 1870, to 2,500 by 1917, and to less than 1,000 today. Rather than a glorious panorama of color, the battlefield became instead a foreboding, desolate place in which combatants maintained a high degree of invisibility.

John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry

1965

I became an infantryman. I came to know that dirt defines the infantry and, for the infantryman, warfare itself. He walks on it. He digs into it. He kills and dies to own it. He moves from place to place upon it. He is buried in it.

I know the exact moment when I became an infantryman. From that moment, and for the remainder of my time as a soldier, I was concerned with dirt, with blood, and with grace.

I told my story from time to time over Friday night drinks at the officers’ club, especially when armor officers were there. 

“I guess I have too much imagination to be a tanker,” I’d say. “Think about it. Just think about sitting there and hearing the ping of a fifty caliber spotting round. You’ve got what? Maybe a second, or less, to kiss your ass goodbye. I’d rather be on the ground. Even better, I’d rather be in the ground.”

But the time came when the younger soldiers didn’t know what a spotting round was and the story took longer to tell because I had to explain about the 106 millimeter recoilless rifle. Still, if I told the story well some of them would listen and perhaps the infantrymen among them would understand. They would understand if they had experienced fear and if they had learned that in their world things could go very, very wrong.

I became an infantryman on a firing range. I and the rest of the trainees were getting acquainted with all the weapons of our craft. On this day the weapon was the 106 millimeter recoilless rifle. That weapon isn’t around any more. It is an enormous steel cannon mounted on a tripod (sometimes a jeep) that actually looks a bit like one of those black cannons on display at old forts and Civil War battle sites.

We sat in bleachers under a hot Fort Benning, Georgia sun and looked out over the barren landscape of the range. All that could be seen in the distance were numbered panels and burned-out hulks of tanks. Lined up at firing points were the 106 recoilless rifles. Well behind the rifles, since the rifles kick up a dusty back-blast, were stacks of their ammunition, huge bullets almost four inches across. 

In front of us the instructor used large graphics to explain the weapon and, with some bloodthirsty glee, the principle behind the “shaped charge” in the weapon’s projectile. The interesting thing about a shaped charge is that when the projectile hits a tank, the explosive inside the shell is shaped so that it burns a tiny little hole through the tank’s steel skin, sort of like the hole made by a welder’s torch. Extremely hot gases then pour through the hole and those gases melt and fragment the steel on the inside of the hull. Those little blobs of molten steel then ricochet around at very high velocities inside the compartment of the tank. 

The sergeant vividly created the image for us of being inside a very small windowless steel room filled with ammunition and fuel. Then, with the strike of the 106’s projectile, thousands of tiny, searingly hot droplets of molten metal began to bounce off the walls and floor and ceiling. The inside of the tank becomes a buzzing, burning maelstrom detonating the tank’s ammunition, vaporizing and exploding the tank’s fuel, incinerating the tank’s crew.

But what struck me as really clever about the 106 wasn’t the main gun. What I liked was the spotting rifle. The spotting rifle was bolted to the barrel of the 106 and fired the same bullet as a .50 caliber machine gun. With a spotting rifle attached, the 106 gunner didn’t have to fire the big, expensive, and slow-to-load 106 round until he was sure he was going to hit his target. What he did was fire the spotting rifle (loaded with tracer ammunition so he could see where it went) and see if the spotting round hit the target. When the spotting round hit the target he would know he had the range to the tank. Then he fired the main gun.

After sitting through the lectures we watched a demonstration. An NCO got into the metal seat beside the weapon and put his eye to the sight. He manipulated the wheels that traversed and elevated the main weapon. He began firing the spotting rifle. Bang...bang...bang. We could see the tracers fly through the air and come closer and closer to an old tank hull. Then a tracer hit the hull with a ping! Immediately after the ping was a huge BOOM as the main gun fired and a cloud of dust blossomed up from behind it. Downrange the hulk of the tank rocked backwards on its treads as the 106 round slammed into it. That’s when I had my epiphany. 


I’d wrap up my story by saying, “I’ve got too much imagination to be a tanker. Just think about it. There you are clanking along in a steel box, smelling the diesel fumes, sittin’ on top of God knows how many rounds of tank ammunition, hatches closed so you can’t see a damn thing, engine howling up a storm, the loader and gunner bitching at each other abut something. And then you hear this little ping.” 

If I was feeling dramatic I’d  pause for a moment. 

“Can you hear it? I could hear it that day. I knew what was coming next. I could almost feel the round slamming into the tank, see those little fireballs of molten steel whizzing around inside, bouncing around, cooking off the ammo and the fuel.” 

“Tell you this — I want to have the smell of dirt around me the day I die.”