MAN AND PISTOL

Man and Pistol

     One evening at Chu Lai I got off radio watch and went behind the tents to the little illegal club we'd built for ourselves. Every man there was drunk. Minutes after I'd leaned my elbow on the plank we used for a bar, grabbed the church key that was always handy and popped open a can of beer, Sergeant Williams, who was standing about five feet from me, pulled out his .45 semiautomatic pistol and worked the slide. It slammed home, steel on brass on steel.

     There was a sharp scuffling sound of bootsoles leaving rough lumber, then a collective oof! of the breath being knocked out of everyone but Williams and me as they hit belly-down on the shipping pallets we'd laid as a floor. Williams was so drunk he could barely stand. He waved the pistol, now loaded, cocked, and off safety, from side to side. Since I was standing directly in front of him, it was pointed mostly at me. 

     Several things became jarringly clear to me. The first was that I was looking my own immediate violent death in the face. The second was that it was entirely up to me to resolve the situation, because I was the only sober person there. The third thing was that if I made a mistake about how to relate to Williams...see realization number one. 

     I studied him as though my life depended on understanding him, since it did. He did not seem particularly angry; he did not seem about to shoot. At least, not on purpose or at anyone in particular. He was just a normally harmless guy with a loaded pistol and something to prove. He did seem to have so little physical control of himself that, since his finger was on the trigger and the safety was off, an accidental discharge was highly likely, especially if he were bumped. Or challenged.

     He seemed...well, lonely. He seemed to want attention. Military outfits are like all societies; they have their cliques, their insiders and outsiders. Williams was a Sergeant, but no one respected him very much. He wasn't particularly good at his job, or brave, or funny. He didn't stand out in any way or have any special claim to anyone's loyalty. He didn't have any close friends. I remember one time when he tried to be friendly. He was sitting on the ground outside our tent, drinking with Martin Luther Ealy. Ealy was a laughing, generous man, a 250pound cook from New Orleans who was particularly proud of his black heritage. Sgt. Williams draped his arm around Ealy's powerful shoulders and said, in all sincerity, "Y'know, Ealy, for a nigger, you're a pretty good guy." Ealy convulsed with sobs, having chosen that reaction instead of killing Williams.

     Suddenly Williams seemed at once dangerous and pathetic to me. This guy wants respect, I thought. He pulled his weapon because he couldn't get respect or attention any other way.

     I began to talk to him, with one elbow leaning on the bar in as casual a pose as I could manage, but with my nerves firing as if I had two fingers plugged into a wall socket. The pistol's muzzle was three or four feet from my gut. This was the M1911A1 .45 caliber semiautomatic, with which I’d qualified on the firing range, becoming familiar with its heavy recoil. I’d been told it leaves an exit wound the size of a man’s fist, by at least one man who had inflicted such a wound.

     I asked him how things had been going, how things were back home. He began to talk a little, still waving the pistol, not all over the place, but just back and forth in front of him as he reeled, which meant mostly at me, since I was so close. His concentration, such as he had, was on the cigar stub he was puffing. When he mentioned something, I would ask his opinion about it. I was very respectful. 

     I began to admire his pistol. My first tentative compliments seemed to please him, so I committed in that direction: "A very fine weapon, yessir, a very fine piece. You must take mighty good care of it. Can I see it?" 

     He proudly handed me the pistol, muzzle still towards me. I slowly turned it to point at a spot on the floor where no one was lying, let the hammer down tenderly, slipped the magazine out, and cleared the chamber. There was a sucking sound of air re-entering lungs as Marines began scraping themselves off the pallets. 

"YOU'RE TOO LATE."

            "You're too late."

(Note: In this chapter, I’ve used “BULLRUSH” as the call sign of the battalion I was working with. BULLRUSH was indeed one of the infantry battalions based in the same 1st Marine Division Command Post as my outfit, Direct Air Support Center, at Chu Lai. What I don’t know is whether it was the same battalion we were working with during the events described in this chapter. I’ve used it here because it was one of the battalion call signs we used in that place at that time.)

     We were on watch in the Direct Air Support Center at Chu Lai. There were two or three enlisted men under me, radio operators and air traffic controllers. There was a watch officer, in this case a Lieutenant who kept his nose in a book "so I can stay out of Corporal Metcalf's hair while he runs the DASC." We were the air traffic control shop for the First Marine Division: we coordinated and dispatched helicopters on courier flights, trooplifts, medevacs, gunship missions, and whatever else they did; and also sent out our own jets - A4 Skyhawks, F4 Phantoms, and F8 Crusaders - on air strikes either by themselves or in support of Marine infantry units in the area. 

     A situation had been developing before I came on watch. A few kilometers from us, a Marine rifle platoon was surrounded by a superior number of Viet Cong. In the early part of our 4 hour watch, neither side had yet gotten the upper hand. But the VC ring around the platoon tightened, and things sounded grim. I was talking directly with the platoon commander’s radio operator, and I could feel the heightening tension in his voice. I could also hear rifle and automatic weapons fire and grenades going off when he keyed his mike to talk to me. 

     The VC tightened the ring again, and it became clear that the infantryman's greatest fear was staring them in the face: they were in imminent danger of being overrun.

     The only thing that had prevented this all along had been artillery. Now, whoever was adjusting artillery fire for that platoon - he must have been a real ace - walked the impacting rounds in closer and closer to his own men until everybody in the fight, Marines and VC, was pinned down by the artillery. The platoon commander had hoped this would break up the attack and send the VC fleeing, but instead it produced an awful stalemate, one of a kind that was to recur often during the coming years of war: the VC tightened their ring even further, to the point where the artillery couldn't be brought any closer without hitting our own men. The fact that they were dug in was the only thing preventing that now.

     So a few miles from where we sat in an air conditioned bubble, two concentric rings of desperate young men were hugging the planet as hot metal ripped the ground and air around them. Grenades were being rolled into foxholes, sometimes with enough time left on the fuses to throw them back, sometimes not. I began to hear screams on the radio. 

     "Landshark Alpha, this is Bravo two six...I need an emergency medevac, NOW, HURRY! over." The radio operator was screaming at me: "He's my best friend, for God's sake! He's bleedin' bad! He's gonna die! GET..ME..A..MEDEVAC! ..MEDEVAC!..NOW!..OVER!" The sheer will in that man's voice comes back to me, even now, across the years.

     Fluttery things happened in my stomach, along my spine. Everyone in the DASC had heard that, and we knew that by now, that grunt battalion's entire chain of command, including the battalion commander himself, was monitoring our net.

     "Two six, Landshark...." I was shaving call signs now; seconds could mean lives. Anyone else using this net, having heard what we'd just heard, would shift their traffic to another frequency and give us the air. "Roger your request emergency medevac. Hang on. Out." I wanted to try to comfort the guy somehow, but comfort takes time, and comfort wasn't what he wanted. He wanted a helicopter to come out of the sky and carry his bleeding friend to a hospital. He wanted that and nothing else in the whole world, and I was the only one he could ask for it. 

     While all this was developing, I'd felt the presence of the infantry battalion commander. I hadn't talked to him yet, but orders coming out from him had been few, succinct, and had obviously come from a cool head who cared deeply about his men but wasn't about to panic and lose one or two helicopters and half a dozen men trying to save one. 

     I got on another radio and called the battalion's call sign. The Man himself came on: "Landshark Alpha, this is Six Actual. I heard. You may not, I repeat, you may not send in a medevac at this time. The artillery fire is continuous, and must remain so or those men will be overrun. The bird would just be shot down by our own artillery. Repeat that back to me. Over."

     I repeated it. 

     Then: "Sir?"

     "Go."

     "I have a medevac bird with a gunship escort ready on the airstrip, engines running. Can I get them in the air and have them circle near the platoon, so they can drop in if there's an opening? Over."

     "Some of those arty rounds have proximity fuses. They could knock the birds out of the air on their way to the target. Over."

     He hadn't told me to shut up. He knew I was trying to find a way. He didn't think there was one. But he wanted for there to be one, I guess even worse than I did. He would write the letter to the next of kin of guys who got killed, not me.      

     "Sir, I’ve been a Forward Observer for both artillery and naval gunfire. I have a radio on the arty net. I can plot the position of the guns on our board, and we already have the platoon's coordinates plotted. I can plot the trajectory of the artillery rounds, including their maximum altitude. I know what the guns will do, and what the fuses will do. I can keep the birds near the platoon, and still clear of the artillery. I know how to do that, sir. I will take responsibility for it. And the air crews want to do it, sir. They know the drill, and they've all volunteered...." 

     I left the mike keyed without speaking for half a breath, then changed my tone from that of a Corporal speaking to a Lieutenant Colonel to one of two Marines speaking to one another in combat, just trying to find a way: "...they're Marines, too."

     It was a stupid, insubordinate thing to say to an officer who had been working with Marine pilots for the better part of twenty years. But it touched him, I could tell. That was the beautiful thing about the Marine Corps: a Lieutenant Colonel, even a General - the good ones, anyway - was a Marine first and an officer second, so that what bound us together was stronger than what separated us. In combat, anyway.

     I heard a hint of relief in his voice, even a touch of brotherly gratitude for my help in carrying his load: "Landshark Alpha, Six Actual. You may proceed. You may put the birds in the air, on standby. Their location is your responsibility. You will keep me informed about everything you do. And you will not, repeat, will not, lift the artillery fire or send the birds into that landing zone without personal clearance from me. Over." 

     "Wilco, sir." Will comply. Left unsaid was what we both knew, that a Corporal can't relieve a Lieutenant Colonel of responsibility for anything.

     All this took a lot less time to do than to tell. A few seconds on another radio got the medevac chopper and its gunship escort into the air and vectored to a position aloft where they could see the besieged platoon but were clear of the artillery's trajectory.

     I got back on the horn to the platoon's radio operator. "Two six, Landshark Alpha. Medevac bird and gunship escort are in the air. But I have direct orders from your own battalion commander not to lift the artillery around you. He will lift it if the situation allows. Until that happens, the birds are on standby, circling near you...I'm sorry, man. That's the best I can do."

     "...you...God...FUCK! MEDEVAC...you gotta...I'm holdin' 'im, he's bleedin' all over me, you gotta...." He was sobbing and screaming and pleading all at once, blaming me, the only person he could blame, for what the world was doing to him.

     "Stand by, Two Six." Pathetic words. At that moment I wanted only two things in the world. The first was to be able to say to him, “Here comes your help: your friend will be safe now.” Since I couldn't say that, I wanted to be there with him. I sincerely felt that I would rather have shared the danger than be blamed for not relieving it.

     "Bullrush Six Actual, Landshark Alpha, over."

     "Six Actual, go."

     "Sir, can I replace the arty with air strikes? If I can, I think we can get those birds down to that platoon."

     "The VC are thirty meters outside that perimeter. Our people will be overrun within a minute if that artillery lifts."

     "Not if there's no gap between arty and air, sir."

     "How will you keep from shooting your own birds out of the sky?"

     "Timing, Sir. It would have to be an instantaneous handoff. I can get my birds in position so they can be strafing within a few seconds of the last arty rounds."

     "Set it up, then talk to me again. You may not do this without my clearance. Out."

     "Uh, sir?"

     "Yes."

     "Sir, this can only work if I can work directly with arty. They would have to cease fire directly at my command. If we have to wait for two or three radio transmissions, there'll be too long a gap."

     "That's right. Good. I will give that order. Set it up. Check with me. Out."

     The platoon had already taken several casualties when I inherited the situation, but they had all been wounds that weren't immediately life threatening. The radio operator's buddy was the first to be critically wounded. By now, casualties were mounting in number and gravity. The stalemate was shifting in favor of the VC; if things kept on this way until nightfall, what the VC couldn't accomplish by frontal assault would happen by attrition. In the face of that, a risk now was less risky than a couple of hours ago. Or even one hour ago.

     The table in front of me was piled with radio remote consoles, microphones with their cords snaking in all directions, and the handsets of EE8 field telephones. The Lieutenant had long since put down his book, and had taken direct control of all the missions in progress besides the one I was working on. He had been listening as I spoke with the battalion commander. Knowing he was responsible for everything I did, I looked a question at him. He nodded. 

     I would begin by organizing the aircraft, giving the Colonel time to notify the arty battery that I would be giving the command to check fire. I swept the desk clear of anything but what was necessary for this mission, unplugged the microphones, unsnarled their cables, plugged them back in with their cables in neat parallel lines across the desk from the consoles to me, mikes resting on the forward edge of the desk. There was one mike for choppers, one for jets, one for artillery, one for the pinned-down platoon's radio operator, one for the battalion commander. If I got my wires crossed - if I said the wrong word to the wrong party, I could get a lot of the wrong people killed. It went without saying that by saying the right thing to the right party, I would get a lot of the right people killed. That was what we were there for.

     The original medevac chopper and its gunship escort had long since run low on fuel and been replaced. I replaced those again, with freshly fueled aircraft, and sent up another pair of gunships, orbiting them above the medevac birds. We used the word "angels" to denote altitude; "angels ten" meant ten thousand feet. I scrambled a pair of A4 jets with a full load of strafe and rockets aboard, then put a series of similar pairs on standby, to take off at regular intervals so they could replace the attacking pair on station as soon as they were out of ordnance. The pilots, talking with one another, would set their own timing so there'd be no gap over the target. I got on the horn with the artillery battery. The Colonel had talked to them. I told all these people, the cannoncockers, the air crews, exactly what the plan was. Everyone understood that timing was everything: if there was a gap, the grunts would be overrun. If there was an overlap, our artillery would be shooting down our own aircraft, and they would be crashing into one another above the platoon's position, killing more of our own people.  

     "Bullrush Six Actual, Landshark Alpha, over."

     "Six Actual, go."

     "Sir, everybody's ready. All the pilots know the plan. It looks good up there. Over."

     When two radios were near the limit of their operation range, all you got was the basic content of the communication, if that. But the battalion commander was just down the road; communication was 5 by 5: loud and clear. So the Colonel's deep breath was audible before he spoke: "Okay, Landshark. Do it."

     The arty people told me their Time of Flight, the number of seconds between the firing of the guns to the  projectiles’ impact on target. I told that number to the A4 pilots; I think it was seven or eight seconds. Artillery and I agreed that their next fire mission would be the last. 

     I remembered one time in 1964 when my section of naval gunfire spotters were doing crosstraining as Forward Air Controllers in Japan, working with Marine jet pilots. They had wanted to show us just what they could do, if things ever got really tight. It was risky, but wildly effective. My section had been set up on a low hillock in the foothills near the base of Mount Fuji. We'd asked one pilot what was the most coverage he could put on a target in an emergency. "That'd be what we call 'gear down, flaps down, low and slow'," he said. "Like this." He rolled in, landing gear down and flaps at their steepest angle to slow the aircraft and increase its time on target. He just missed clipping our radio antenna; I remember pressing the side of my face into the dirt, and still clearly seeing the pilot’s face and helmet as he passed. The thundering presence of the aircraft alone was enough to keep an enemy's head pinned down. 

     "Can you give me gear down, flaps down, low and slow?" I asked the A4 flight leader. "That will probably get you into some ground fire," I added. Dumb, I said to myself. The pilot knows there's a war on.

     "Yoooobetcha, Landshark. Say when."

     "Shot," arty said to me, meaning the last mission had just left the guns. "Shot," I said to the A4 pilots. We'd set them up so they could begin their run-in just before the artillery rounds landed. The first bird was strafing along one side of the platoon's perimeter within seconds of the final artillery impact. As soon as he passed beyond the target, he pulled up sharply to clear the way for his wingman, coming behind him, to strafe a line along the opposite side of the perimeter. Several flights of A4s tore up the ground around the infantry with 20mm cannon fire and rockets; we added 250-pound bomb runs at a little greater distance, once the pilots got close looks at our guys and their guys on the ground.     

     Time for the second shift. I said "stop" into one microphone; "go" into another. The A4s pulled away as a series of Huey helicopter gunships, which had been circling directly above the area, dropped down to strafe. Their machine guns were less powerful, but they had the advantage of being able to bank in a tight circle, and completely ring the platoon with fire. We had the gunships stacked up to follow one another in as they ran low on ammo, so there was never more than a few seconds without intense fire being put on the ground. 

     The other reason for switching to gunships was that, by tightly circling the platoon (which jets couldn't do), they left the sky open above it. I now had the medevac chopper move into position directly above the center of the platoon's position. There was no way for it to approach from the side. The pilot said he could drop her straight down. 

     "Bravo Two Six, this is Landshark Alpha. Get your emergency ready. Here comes your bird, straight down from above you." Nothing in my life had ever felt so good as saying that.

     Two Six keyed his mike, but waited a long moment to speak. The panic was gone, replaced by a calm, bitter voice: "You're too late." 

     Nothing in my life had ever felt so bad as hearing that. I still hear it.

PROLOGUE

Prologue

Tho An

Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began; others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the F-4 Phantoms - sharks of the air with high triangular tails and turned-down black snouts - finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.
Attached to “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, I was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements, or attempts to flee.
They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot Company's combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C4 from the blast. A sergeant cursed the engineer for using too much explosive. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.
I'd imagined battle, but I'd never imagined this. The children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers' arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, yet feared my rifle and bayonet more. They wailed in awful concert with their children. The older women joined.
But the old man: he didn't wail, cower, try to flee the explosions or shrink back from my bayonet. He just stared at me, afraid but with that resigned, calculated, limited fearfulness of one who is going to die before too long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I had ever seen on a human face.
Something happened, as I looked down my rifle and bayonet at the old man and the women and children I was holding captive, which would determine the course of the rest of my life. I looked at those people, then looked around me. I saw, in the bright noon light, a veil dropping. There was a feeling of the veil's movement having a direction: top to bottom, sky to earth. The veil seemed transparent, leaving the artillery-blasted fronds of the palm trees, their napalm-charred trunks, the flaming thatch and skeletal bamboo frameworks of the huts, the urgent movements of the Marines of "F" Company, the terrified people at my feet, all looking exactly as they had a moment before. Yet they also looked completely different. I can't explain that, except to say that suddenly, and ever after, I saw the world through different eyes.
But it wasn’t just my present and future which I saw differently. That day in Tho An, a process began of re-seeing my entire life, from as far back as I could remember, and of realizing that a gradual accretion of boyhood experiences, beginning long before I entered Marine Corps boot camp, were what had made me a warrior.

II. Learning War
I first saw the world on January 23, 1943. Pearl Harbor was 13½ months in the past; the United States was at war with Japan and Germany. The 1st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal( ) 5½ months earlier; Americans had invaded North Africa 2½ months earlier. The Soviet Army had counterattacked Axis forces outside Stalingrad, trapping 91,000 German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian troops inside a pocket. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would surrender all those troops a week after I was born, and the Japanese would begin evacuating Guadalcanal a day later. Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term as President of the United States. The blockade of Leningrad was in its 502nd day, of 872. Tatyana Savicheva( ) was 5 months dead. Treblinka( ) had been in operation 6 months, with 10 gas chambers working full time. In October of that year, Jewish slaves at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland, would stage a sufficiently successful revolt that the Nazis destroyed the camp for fear that the escapees would tell the world what had happened there, which they did.( ) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.


NEXT: Table of Contents, and a story or two from childhood.

MASTER AND SLAVE IN WARTIME

August, 1966. I was ordered to form a detail, and to design and build an outhouse for our section of the 1st Marine Division perimeter near Chu Lai...

     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?

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?

MAN AND PISTOL

                                    Man and Pistol

     One evening at Chu Lai I got off radio watch and went behind the tents to the little illegal club we'd built for ourselves. Every man there was drunk. Minutes after I'd leaned my elbow on the plank we used for a bar and popped open a can of beer, Sergeant Williams, who was standing about five feet from me, pulled out his .45 automatic pistol and worked the slide. It slammed home, steel on brass on steel.

     There was a sharp scuffling sound of bootsoles leaving rough lumber, then a collective oof of the breath being knocked out of everyone but Williams and me as they hit belly‑down on the shipping pallets we'd laid as a floor. Williams was so drunk he could barely stand. He waved the pistol, now loaded, cocked, and off safety, from side to side. Since I was standing directly in front of him, it was pointed mostly at me.

     Several things became jarringly clear to me. The first was that I was looking my own immediate violent death in the face. The second was that it was entirely up to me to resolve the situation, because I was the only sober person there. The third thing was that if I made a mistake about how to relate to Williams...see realization number one.

     I studied him as though my life depended on understanding him, since it did. He did not seem particularly angry; he did not seem about to shoot. At least, not on purpose or at anyone in particular. He was just a normally harmless guy with a loaded pistol and something to prove. He did seem to have so little physical control of himself that, since his finger was on the trigger and the safety was off, an accidental discharge was highly likely, especially if he were bumped. Or challenged.

     He seemed...well, lonely. He seemed to want attention. Military outfits are like all societies; they have their cliques, their insiders and outsiders. Williams was a sergeant, but no one respected him very much. He wasn't particularly good at his job, or brave, or funny. He didn't stand out in any way or have any special claim to anyone's loyalty. He didn't have any close friends. I remember one time when he tried to be friendly. He was sitting on the ground outside our tent, drinking with Martin Luther Ealy. Ealy was a laughing, generous man, a 250‑pound cook from New Orleans who was particularly proud of his black heritage. Sgt Williams draped his arm around Ealy's powerful shoulders and said, in all sincerity, "Y'know, Ealy, for a nigger, you're a pretty good guy." Ealy convulsed with sobs, having chosen that reaction instead of killing Williams.

     Suddenly Williams seemed at once dangerous and pathetic to me. This guy wants respect, I thought. He pulled his weapon because he couldn't get respect or attention any other way.

     I began to talk to him, with one elbow leaning on the bar in as casual a pose as I could manage, but with my nerves firing as if I had two fingers plugged into a wall socket. The pistol's muzzle was three or four feet from my gut. This was the M1911A1 .45 caliber semiautomatic, with which I’d qualified on the firing range, becoming familiar with its heavy recoil. I’d been told it leaves an exit wound the size of a man’s fist, by at least one man who had seen, or inflicted, such a wound.

     I asked him how things had been going, how things were back home. He began to talk a little, still waving the pistol, not all over the place, but just back and forth in front of him as he reeled, which meant mostly at me, since I was so close. His concentration, such as he had, was on the cigar stub he was puffing. When he mentioned something, I would ask his opinion about it. I was very respectful.

     I began to admire his pistol. My first tentative compliments seemed to please him, so I committed in that direction: "A very fine weapon, yessir, a very fine piece. You must take mighty good care of it. Can I see it?"

     He proudly handed me the pistol, muzzle still towards me. I slowly turned it to point at a spot on the floor where no one was lying, let the hammer down tenderly, slipped the magazine out, and cleared the chamber. There was a sucking sound of air re-entering lungs as Marines began scraping themselves off the pallets. 

A BOY OF THE VILLAGE

An Tan

     An Tan was the nearest village to our base at Chu Lai. Now and then a junior officer would organize an afternoon liberty detail, and we'd round up whoever wasn't on duty, jump in a six‑by, and head for the ville. It wasn't that great, just a little Vietnamese town with hot dusty streets ‑ or muddy, during the monsoon season. But, except for five days of R&R which each of us got once during his 13‑month tour, this was about all we had to cut the drudgery of life in the compound, and the nights of sentry duty in our machine gun bunkers on the perimeter which alternated between sheer drudgery and moments of surreal terror.

     Word had come down: don't even think about trying anything with the women. The village mayor was unusually strict about prostitution, and for some reason, he'd been able to make it stick. But at least we could buy Cokes and "33" beer, though we were pretty leery of them because we'd heard rumors of VC putting broken glass in drinks sold to GI's. We'd stand around filtering Coke and beer through our teeth, hoping to catch any broken glass in our lips instead of our throats. Sometimes they even had ice.

     There was a spectrum of what we wanted when we visited a village that was, in a way, continuous. First, of course, we wanted to get laid. Since that couldn't happen in An Tan, we'd move down the list: something to drink besides warm, heavily chlorinated water; something to eat besides B‑ration chow; someone to talk to: human contact outside of You got midwatch in the bunker; You got DASC 0800 to noon.

     I met this kid on one of our trips into An Tan. His mother, who looked ancient but was probably in her thirties, had a little kiosk on the side of a dirt street where she had a piece of plastic stretched over bamboo poles for shade, and sold sodas and beer and mysteriously-wrapped things to eat that most of us never touched. I was standing in the shade swigging a beer when this little guy wandered over and looked up at me.

     The kid was a mess. One eye was radically crossed. He had open sores on his face and body that the flies wouldn't leave alone, and his hair, though cut short, was patchy like that of a dog with mange. His arms and legs were skinny, and his belly was beginning to show that swelling which comes with malnutrition.

     His mother introduced him to me proudly: "Ong," she said, pointing at him. Actually, the sound was a cross between "ong" and "om". "Hello, Ong," I said, and pointed to my chest. "Dean. My name...Dean." That was the extent of our verbal communication, except that I had learned Vietnamese numbers well enough to bargain with his mother and the other merchants. I found out later that Ong wasn't his name; it was Vietnamese for "man" or "male". His mother had been telling me - with pride - that her child, the one who had taken a liking to me, was a boy. So I spent those liberty afternoons walking around with this kid saying, "C'mon, Manchild," thinking I was calling him by name.

     That first time we met, he took some packet of food from his mother's little store of stuff and approached me with it and a questioning look. We were all accustomed to being inundated by pushy kids and had built up defenses against them. But this little guy was actually very shy, and I could tell he was hungry. I bought it for him. His mother seemed grateful.

     I had my guard up, twice: once against the hidden grenade or satchel charge which VC had been known to strap to children who would then walk into a group of GI's and detonate; once against forming an attachment that could only end in separation.

     The next time we went to An Tan I went over to Ong's mother's place and gave him and her some cans of C‑ration food I'd stuffed in my pockets. Like a lot of Americans, I would gather up cans of Ham and Lima Beans, or "Ham 'n' Slimeys," bartering or making points with the Vietnamese. In my four years of service I think I met only one American who would actually eat Ham 'n' Slimeys if he didn't absolutely have to. It was the thick layer of congealed grease that greeted you when you opened the can that revolted us. But they seemed popular with the Vietnamese, most of whom were so poor that meat in any form was a luxury.  

     After that, Ong would always know when our truck had come to the village and would run up to it and greet me and grab my hand and drag me back to his mother's stall. Then he began to take me through other streets in the village. At first I thought he was proud of the village, and was showing it off to me. And sometimes I thought that he was proud of me, and was showing me off to the people of the town.

     One afternoon he took me by the hand and led me away from the center of the village and down some narrow back streets where there were no GI's or even any businesses that catered to us. We got odd looks from people there; I wasn't sure if it was hostility or just surprise. I disengaged my left hand from Ong's and put his hand on the flap of the big cargo pocket on my left trouser leg so he could still feel like he was holding onto me. I swung my rifle around in front of me from where it had been hanging under my right arm by its sling, and cupped its forearm with my left hand. I felt safer now.

     So did Ong. I'd come to realize that the other kids in the village picked on him because of his odd eye and who knows what else, and that there were parts of An Tan where he never went, except when I was with him. I could sense a change in him, a hint of gloating, as we passed a group of tough‑looking boys who glowered at him as he passed with his personal Marine bodyguard.

     Word came down that An Tan would soon be put off limits for liberty. VC activity, or some such. Anyway, we would have one more visit. We were told that if we'd made any acquaintances there, this would be our last chance to say goodbye. I took in some extra food this time, and spent more money than usual at Ong's mother's stall. When the lieutenant herded us to the six‑by to head back to the base, Ong followed me. I knelt down and looked into his one good eye. How do you say goodbye to someone whose language you don't speak at all?

     I just said it the best I could, in English and with my hands: Goodbye, take care of yourself, I won't be seeing you anymore. I climbed over the tailgate as the truck took off.

     I looked back. The truck raised the usual thick cloud of red dust above the street. There was Ong in the dust, running after us. The truck got a slow start out of town because of its low gearing and because there were people in the way. Ong was able to keep up, staying close behind for a long time. We could see his face through the dust. He was crying, screaming, holding his arms up in the air as he ran, reaching for me, pleading for me to pick him up and take him with me. He'd understood goodbye.

SERGEANT VANCE IN BOOT CAMP, SERGEANT VANCE IN VIETNAM

Late 1962. Marine Corps boot camp, San Diego, California.

Sergeant Vance

     Sergeant Vance was a recruiting‑poster Marine, a redhead who wore his hair so short that what little was left blended with his skin, leaving the impression when he wore his Smokey the Bear drill instructor's hat that he had no hair at all. Can't get any neater than that.

     He had stood some serious sentry duty. One day he was instructing us on how Marines went about doing this. He told us of having a prestige assignment in Washington, DC, where he'd been posted at gates and doorways used by high‑ranking government officials to attend important meetings. There was this high muckety-muck conference, he said. It was more important than usual, and it was even more important that no one but people with this certain pass be allowed to enter. Some would try, he was told. They might even be legitimate government officials. They might try to pull rank on you. But if they don't have this pass, you stop them, period.

     Vance was put on the gate because his appearance was always impeccable and because he could be counted on to follow orders and not to be intimidated by powerful people trying to go where they didn't belong. Sure enough, here came this long black limousine, with the driver in a black suit and tie, and a very authoritative-looking older gentleman in the back seat, dressed in a tuxedo. Sgt Vance thought he recognized him from news photos, but wasn't sure. He didn't spend a lot of time with newspapers.

     The driver stopped at Vance's guard shack and rolled down his window. Vance asked for the pass. The driver said he didn't have one, but it was okay because his passenger was Senator So‑and‑so, whom everybody knew. Vance told him he was sorry, sir, but his orders were not to allow anyone to enter without a pass. The senator rolled down his back window and spoke to Vance, saying he was in a hurry and indeed had a pass but had forgotten it and didn't have time to return for it, or he'd miss this very important meeting.

     Vance said, "Sorry, sir. No pass, no entry."

     The senator had had enough of having his authority usurped by a lowly Marine sergeant. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to drive on through the gate. The driver barely had the limousine in gear when Vance's .45 service pistol was out of its holster, he'd jacked back the slide and chambered a round, and touched the pistol's muzzle lightly against the driver's temple.

     "You move this car one inch, and I'll kill you," he said softly.

     The driver and the Senator both turned pale. The limousine turned around and left. The senator squawked like hell, and tried to get Vance busted. His commanding officer said he'd done the right thing, and quietly transferred him to another unit.

     When Vance had finished his story, one of the recruits raised his hand. Vance nodded: "Yes, Private?"

     "Sir, would you have shot him, Sir?"

     Vance looked the kid in the eye, letting the tension in the Quonset hut build as if he were conscious of only that one recruit and not the other seventy of us who fretted around the edges of the seconds he waited to speak.

     "Yes," he said quietly, with a slight shrug. "And so will you, if those are your orders. The point, Privates, is this: nobody gets by a Marine sentry who's not supposed to."

A little over three years later, I’m on sentry duty on the tiny Vietnamese island of Ky Hoa, just off the coast near 1^st Marine Division Headquarters at Chu Lai. It’s daytime, and I am alone on a cliff overlooking the beach and the South China Sea.

                                                      Ky Hoa

     Ky Hoa was an island just off the coast of South Vietnam near Chu Lai. We were posted on its seaward side, along the top of a cliff that dropped steeply to a narrow rocky beach.

     One afternoon I had sentry duty on the cliff. With the rest of the outfit at my back, my orders were to watch the cliff and beach below me, making sure no Vietnamese climbed the cliff toward our position, or moved along the beach past a point even with my post. If anyone was moving along the beach (it could only be approached from the mainland side of the island), I was to halt them. If anyone continued after I'd given the command to halt, I was to repeat it, and wave them back. If they still didn't stop, I was to fire a warning shot just in front of them, in the forbidden direction. If they still refused to stop, I was to shoot to kill.   

     A Vietnamese man came around the corner, clambering along the slippery rocks just up from the water's edge. He seemed to be looking for something in the tidepools. He was barefoot; his only clothing was something wrapped around his hips. He carried nothing in his hands.

     He saw me standing on the cliff, rifle at the ready, watching him. He kept moving across my front, with a cautious eye in my direction. I held up my hand. He saw it, but kept moving. “Dung lai!” I yelled. "Halt!"

     He kept moving, looking among the rocks, looking up at me. I yelled again. He moved again. Sergeant Vance leaned across three years and nine thousand miles to speak in my ear: "Nobody gets by a marine sentry who's not supposed to." I lowered the muzzle of my rifle, pointed it at the beach in front of him. He gestured earnestly toward the rocks ahead of him as he moved past the point to my front which I wasn't supposed to let him cross. I challenged him again; he kept moving forward.

     I jacked a round into the chamber of my M14, put the rifle to my shoulder, braced my feet along my line of aim, and sighted at a point one foot in front of him. I picked out a rock situated so that, if I fired at it, my shot would - if he were lucky - throw rock fragments into the man's lower leg, then ricochet out to sea. If he were unlucky, it would ricochet into his vitals and kill him. I tightened my right hand's hold on the rifle's grip so as to be able to support its whole weight with that one hand, and slowly, threateningly, waved the man back with my left hand. He paused.

     He said something in Vietnamese, and pointed again at the rocks in front of him. There was something there he really wanted. I brought my left hand back to the forearm of my rifle, quickly checked the elevation setting on my rear sight, lowered my cheek to the stock, sighted on the rock at the man's feet, began to squeeze the trigger - that crisp light slip of steel on steel - and braced myself for the kick of the rifle butt.

     The man turned and walked dejectedly back the way he'd come. My trigger finger eased forward as slowly as it had been squeezing back. I lowered the rifle without firing, clicked the safety on, and began years of thinking how close I'd come to shooting, he'd come to being wounded or killed, how some part of me had desperately hoped the man would reach under a rock and pull out a weapon so I could finally do what I was there to do.

The man was unarmed. But I was already squeezing the trigger, and would have fired my rifle, had he not turned back. He’d have been injured or killed, depending on the direction of my bullet’s ricochet. The nuances of moments like this are what we don’t have time for in combat, yet they shape, or end, many lives.

SERGEANT OF THE GUARD

Sentry duty can be boring as hell, and for those of us on the First Marine Division’s perimeter at Chu Lai, it often was.

     Except at night: you didn’t know if it was going to be a boring night, or not, until your shift was over. Meanwhile, you watched rocks and bushes that had been stationary in daylight, get up, move, creep, and dance, in the phantasmagoric light of parachute flares. Again and again, you’d flick off the safety on your rifle…        

                  Sergeant of the Guard    

     Those days, besides my job in the DASC, I regularly pulled Sergeant of the Guard duty, which meant that I didn't stand watch down in our machine‑gun bunker. But instead of the four‑hour shifts those men stood, I was on duty from dusk till dawn, and had to stay awake all that time and be responsible for security along our section of the perimeter, which included supervising the changing every four hours of the two‑man bunker details, making sure one man was always awake in the bunker, making sure their EE8 field phone to the guard shack was working, making sure they had the proper weapons and ammo and that everything was working right.

     This was about the time of the centipede. One night, in the wee hours before dawn, I rang up the bunker: "I'm bringin' down some coffee." I always called before I approached the bunker from behind in the dark, so that if the sentries were especially jumpy, they wouldn't shoot me, and so they wouldn’t hear an unexpected noise behind them and have to deal with any more fear than they already had to: fear of what was beyond the razor-wire in the dark.

     I walked down the trail to the bunker, picking my way by starlight and memory, taking my time but not trying to walk quietly. When I got close, I saw the two sentries and their M60 machine gun silhouetted atop the bunker against the bright light cast beyond the barbed wire by the floodlights mounted off to either side of the bunker. "What the fuck are you guys doin' up here?" I growled in my best NCO's voice. "You're sittin' ducks, against that light...."

     One of the sentries answered in a voice more resolute than mine: "I ain't goin' back in there."

     "Why not?"

     "'Member that centipede?" Just after they'd come on watch, they'd found, on the steps leading down into the bunker, a centipede about seven inches long and as thick as a man's thumb. It had a leathery shell, segmented like the curved plates of a medieval knight's armor. They'd killed it with a rifle butt, then called me down to show me.

     "Yeah?"

     "Have a look." He jerked his head toward the bunker's entrance.

     I stepped over to where the steps were carved into the earth, and turned on my flashlight, absorbing most of its beam with cupped fingers. The centipede was almost gone, replaced by a violently active swarm of ants that were ripping the last bit of the centipede's armor plate into pieces small enough to carry away.

     We’d been having trouble with a "boot" lieutenant, one who had just recently come to Nam from officer's training, didn't know shit from Shinola about Vietnam, and was trying to make up for it with that great old killer of warriors, the combination of career ambition, ignorance, and arrogance.

     Officer of the Day (OD) duty rotated among several small outfits like ours that each manned a bunker or two along that section of the 1st MarDiv perimeter. The boot lieutenant who was OD on this particular night had a favorite trick: he'd walk around in the dark and sneak up behind the bunkers, as quietly as he could instead of letting his presence be known, trying to catch sentries asleep.

     Sleeping on guard duty in wartime is an offense which carries severe punishment, and necessarily so. But our line had been probed several times lately, and we were jittery. This one night when I was Sergeant of the Guard, two of our younger guys were in one of the bunkers. They'd heard that the "boot" had OD that night, and had been jawing about him during their watch. That was the last straw: they had rats, they had VC, they had bamboo vipers whose bite could kill you before you took a dozen steps. They had centipedes right out of horror movies, and they had ants that could eat such a centipede down to nothing in four hours. Now they had to worry about noises behind them.

     They howled all this at me. In the Marine Corps, especially in combat, rank works both ways: you do what the man above you tells you to do, but you also are responsible for the performance and wellbeing of those below you, who can and will demand that you buck The Man if they're doing their jobs and are still being jacked around.

     I was as pissed as they were. It was three in the goddamned morning. We were sleepy and scared and cold and frustrated.

     Well, fuck it, I thought. I'm Sergeant of the Fucking Guard. These are my people. This is my ground. My job is to manage these people and their weapons in such a way that my ground is not penetrated by any unfuckingauthorized personnel until I'm relieved in the morning.

     "Okay, listen up," I said. "Here are your orders. I ain't gonna stutter, so get it right. Your job is to protect your front. I will be responsible for keeping anybody from approaching you from behind. From now on, the only person who may approach you from behind, for any reason, is me. I will not come down unless I call first. That means that any noise you hear behind you is an enemy noise. As your immediate superior, I authorize you, in fact, I hereby fucking order you, to throw a frag grenade at any sound you hear behind you. Do not challenge, do not say, Oh excuse me Sir, is that you?, do not say a fucking thing. Just throw the grenade. Be sure to pull the pin first. If you kill some chump who wasn't supposed to be there, and there's an investigation, just tell 'em what your orders were. It'll be my ass. Don't even worry about it. Now. Grenades only. You may not shoot behind you, because you could hit someone in our tents, or you might hit me.

     "Any questions?"

     Both guys grinned their thanks: awright: man wears his stripes.

     I got on the phone and called the OD shack. "We've been having some activity around here," I said. I described in detail the orders I'd given.

     I called our own Staff NCO tent and woke up the duty SNCO and told him the same thing. I didn't ask for permission; I just told him what I'd done. He chuckled and went back to sleep.

     That was the last we heard from the boot lieutenant.