WARTIME IS WONDERFUL

                                                 Wartime Is Wonderful

When we first occupied the section of the First Marine Division perimeter overlooking the Song Tra Bong River, we used to shit in a slit trench, which you'd straddle and squat over and do your business as fast as you could to minimize the number of big black flies that buzzed up your asshole. And we pissed in piss tubes: they were empty, olive drab, cylindrical steel powder canisters ‑ the ones from 155mm howitzers or 8" Long Tom self‑propelled guns were best ‑ with one end buried in the ground. We'd place them at a slight angle to the ground, with the top of the canister just below dick level. You just walked up, unbuttoned your fly, and pissed in it. As time went on, and the occasional Navy nurse or Red Cross "donut dolly" would pass by in an open jeep on the way to the Division CP, we were ordered to drive three tall stakes in the ground, forming an angle between the piss tube and the road, and stretch an old poncho around them at waist height. The road was too far away for the women to actually see our dicks (though some guys would argue that theirs were big enough to be seen from twice that distance). And since the piss tube and our boots were clearly visible between the poncho and the ground, the poncho wasn't concealing the activity. Modesty was a creation of the command structure. Some guys think that that kind of thinking was probably what lost us the war. Funny, but then war is funny. Funny as the rest of what we do.

     A couple of weeks before my tour was up, the troops' complaints to me, as senior corporal in the outfit, rose in frequency and volume: Couldn't we have a decent place to shit? Couldn't we have something with walls, something to keep out at least some of the flies, a little privacy for that private act? (Unspoken: a little privacy too for that more private act, the midnight sojourn with Playboy centerfold or girlfriend's snapshot).

     I took the complaints to our skipper, a fat ineffectual lifer captain who'd been passed over for promotion to major so many times that only the war had saved him from being mustered out before he was eligible for a pension. He bounced it back to me in the Marine Corps way: ‑ Take charge, Corporal: form a detail, build a shitter. How? ‑ Figure it out. Take charge. From what? ‑ Find something. Figure it out. You're in charge. Take charge. Charge!

     Everybody knew that the Marine Corps had nothing but a lot of men (or, as the brass would have outsiders see it, A Few Good Men), some weapons, some ammo, a few vehicles, a lot of canvas gear our ancestors in the brotherhood carried ashore at places with now‑totemic names like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima. Gear the U.S. Army had replaced with newer, lighter, quieter stuff: plastic canteens, nylon ponchos, canvas‑topped boots, fiber helmet liners.

     The Marine Corps had nothing. The Navy, on the other hand, had everything. They gorged the bowels of their great grey ships and brought everything a bush-weary warrior could dream of (except home): hot chow, movies, nurses, building materials.

     So we stole from the Navy.

     It's not that paperwork, and the legions of peculiar humans required to type and sort carbon copies and file and log, didn't come to Vietnam. There were more of them than there were of us. But that was one system, whose function was, as we saw it, to keep the lifers occupied and out of our hair. The other system was the rest of us, operating under the umbrella of, and with the blessing of, combat exigency.

     Wartime is wonderful that way. It cuts through the bullshit, the pettiness, the insufferable claptrap of everyday life (this is one of the most important reasons why we go to war), reducing one's choices to lean, clear alternatives. Success rules. You pull it off, you don't have to explain. You fuck up, and you fall back into the bureaucratic morass.

     Our detachment was down the red dirt road from the 1st MarDiv command post. The Navy's Construction Battalion (Seabee) unit that supported the division was in that command post. They'd have what we needed. It would have to be a "midnight requisition," of course. But we wouldn't start that way. Too inefficient. I made a list of what we needed ‑ 2x4's; plywood if we could get it, planking if we couldn't; nails; some kind of roof covering ‑ including preferred sizes. I took a vehicle and one other man, and we drove over there one afternoon, parked a little ways from the Seabee compound, and walked up to the wire fence separating their materials dump from the rest of the CP.

     Most of their lumber was stacked pretty close to the fence, and the rest of it was close enough for us to evaluate. I pulled out my list and started checking things off. The sentry saw us, interrupted his circuit of the compound, and made his way halfheartedly in our direction. He wasn't stupid. It was his job to run us off, but since we weren't yet doing anything illegal, and weren’t on his side of the wire, all he could do was glower. Besides, he knew how things really worked, knew that one of the Seabees' real jobs was to haul in vastly more of everything than their own jobs required, so Marines could steal what we needed and go on making war with a minimum of paperwork. The office pogues had forms they could fill out and turn in so some staff officer somewhere up the line could make his numbers match.

     Time came for our midnight requisition. We had my sketch of the locations of what we needed, and a plan. Lights off, we backed the truck up to the wire, and three or four of us crawled under, leaving one man behind to load, and a second just inside the wire to slip the stuff under. The rest of us fanned out, each with a specific assignment: so many 2x4's from such and such a stack, and so forth. We were out of there in minutes with everything we needed, or a reasonable substitute.

     Hegel wrote ‑ I believe it was in the "Master and Slave" section of his Phenomenology of Spirit ‑ that the man who is forced by those who hold power over him to work on the world with his own hands has a more immediate relationship with the world than does the master, and therefore, paradoxically, has a more empowered position in life than does the master himself. As soon, that is, as he, the slave, understands the true nature of his activity. The slave doesn't need the master to work the land, because he knows how. But the opposite isn't true: the master needs the slave to accumulate wealth from the land, because he can’t do the work himself.

     I knew that then, though I didn't know Hegel had said it. I think that, in a way, every private soldier knows it, and every factory worker and farm hand and deck hand and seamstress and cook and waitress. Women especially know it, and people whose skin is not white, even though Hegel didn't spend any more words on any of those groups than did the founding fathers of our country.

     We made that knowledge work for us. It had to do with where we'd put the shitter. Militarily speaking, the officers would have been duty bound to locate it off in the brush behind the tents we lived in, and far below the ridgeline which went through our position and which was the tactical reason for our having been stuck there.

     But the captain didn't tell me where to put the shitter; he just said, "You're in charge, Corporal, get it done and don't bother me with details."

     "Well, guys," I says, "where do we want this fine new shitter we're gonna build?" We discussed military exigency, and we discussed our own social priorities, and we discussed beauty and convenience. Over the next few days, between radio watches and sentry duty, we built the shitter. We scraped the red dirt at four corners until the tops of four pyramidal concrete piers were level, and built a plank floor on them. The two end walls were trapezoidal, so the roof would slant enough to carry off the rain. The bottom half of the back wall was hinged, so the halves of 55‑gallon diesel drums ‑ four of them, one under each hole ‑ could be pulled out and their contents doused with diesel fuel every few days and lit up to produce the bilious clouds of black smoke and the stench that, to this day, clings to the nostril hairs of every Vietnam veteran. (Scholars, please see Bruce Weigl's excellent poem, "Burning Shit at An Khe".) We ruined all manner of saw blades trying to cut the steel drums in half, before we went at them with an ax, driving it blow by blow through the steel with a sledge hammer, taking turns with the relentless sweaty pounding until the two drums were cut into four jagged‑topped halves.

     The front had ‑ get this ‑ an actual door, steel hinges and all, that could be closed, and a coil spring to keep it closed.

     When I left the outfit a few days later, there it stood, our fine new four‑holer, right smack on the ridgeline, with a golf‑course quality view ‑ screened, of course ‑ of the Song Tra Bong River valley, where you could sit and shit in peace, read, beat your meat, or just enjoy the view. It was especially nice at sunrise. The breeze that came up the valley ventilated it as well as an outhouse can be ventilated. It was convenient to the enlisted men's tent, but quite a longer hike from the officers' tent. Xin loi, sorry 'bout that.

     A couple of months after I left, I got a letter from Martin Luther Ealy, who was still there at Chu Lai. He said that after I'd left, they'd had an official opening ceremony. The captain had cut the ribbon himself, thereby making his first contribution to the project.

     I still have Martin's letter. He was from New Orleans. He always told me to look him up there, after the war. I wonder if I could still find him. I wonder if he's alive. Martin, are you out there?