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.
The German philosopher 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: his hands, his back, his body know how, from hard experience. 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 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 fourholer, right smack on the ridgeline, with a golfcourse 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 left, they 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?
