ANTS

Taoists, and many indigenous people, some martial artists, and some other folks, look to Nature to learn how the world works. Sometimes even I get smart enough to do that.

     Here’s a short lesson I received from some ants.

                                    Ants

     One day in late 1992, the water went off in our house above Soquel, near Santa Cruz. I went up to the 2,000‑gallon storage tank to see what was wrong. The pressure gauge rested at zero. The pressure switch, which hadn't turned on when it should have, was in a little grey steel housing next to the gauge. I unscrewed the cap nut and lifted the cover. There it was: the ants again.

     The switch had two pairs of ignition points. There were so many dead ants between the ignition points that their accumulated carcasses prevented the points from making contact.

     The small spark emitted when electrical points close a circuit ionizes the air immediately around it, emitting ozone. Ozone has a sweet smell, which attracts ants. They crowded their bodies into the small space between the points until the points made only partial contact. This caused a bigger spark, which ionized more air, emitting more ozone. Although a number of ants, finding nothing sweet at the source of the smell, had already paid for their mistake with their lives, their living kin crowded in among the carcasses, their movements ever more urgent, dying in ever greater numbers, until their accumulated crushed bodies prevented any current at all from sparking across the gap. The ants were being killed, serving no purpose of their own, by something they couldn't see ‑ not because it was too far away to see, but because it was too near: it was in their own natures.

     Just like us when we go to war, I thought.

DREAM: DANCE OF THE ARROWS + ANTS

Dream: Dance of the Arrows

I'm standing alone in the center of a wide, barren plain that stretches to the horizon in every direction. The sky is clear, and sits like a hemispheric blue cap over the plain. I look at the horizon, follow it around. It is featureless... but wait: there is a solitary figure, a speck on the horizon. That figure and I are the only visual interruptions of the universe bounded by earth and sky. I'm invigorated by the feeling of spaciousness, but recognize that I must be watchful. Sure enough: the figure on the horizon is an archer. He draws a powerful bow. Alarm, my warrior's antennae say. The archer shoots an arrow into the sky. The arrow's trajectory says that it is perfectly aimed at me. The arrow disappears from sight, but I must track its flight. I do so by moving my head as though my initial observations had actually programmed the arrow's trajectory into my nervous system. I track the arrow forward, from the point where it disappears from sight in the sky until it reappears, a deadly dot in the blue, now on its way down to kill me. I jump around. I try to dodge it. But it never wavers: no matter how I move, I feel the tingle of its anticipated penetration just below my navel. The arrow swoops toward me, visually accelerating in the way I've seen machine-gun tracers appear to speed up as they come nearer, after having seemed to be moving quite slowly toward me as I observed them from a distance; or the way the ground swoops up toward a parachutist during the last seconds of fall. Just before the arrow hits me, I make one final, quick sidestep. The arrow's feathers brush my belly; it thunks into the earth. Alarm. I look up. Comes another. Again I am able to dodge it only at the last instant. Again the feathers brush my abdomen. Again the arrow stabs the ground at my feet. There is an infinite succession of them. I have figured out that the arrows, while seeming to remain perfectly aimed at my center, never waver in flight, no matter how I jump and dodge. This, I learn, is because the arrow simply knows where I will be when it arrives three and a half feet off the ground, and is aimed there. So my jumping about as the arrow descends is irrelevant. I learn that, with each shot, I am given one, and only one, chance to save my life. This is what Japanese martial artists call suki, or "opening": that tiny window in time ‑ often far less than a second ‑ when an opponent's attention is interrupted or distracted, when only an instinctive, forceful, and unhesitatingly intentional motion will be quick enough and sure enough to enter the opening. So I must watch each arrow as it leaps out of the sky to kill me, and I must wait. I must let it come. As the arrows continue to come and I tire from exertion and fear, I must force myself to relax so that in dodging one arrow I don't overexert and fail to recover in time for the next. Each time, I must wait, closing out the fear that tries like a pack of howling dogs to crowd my mind, to panic me. I must wait until the steel of the broadhead is about to puncture my belly. Then I must perfectly ‑ without protest, without excuses, without appeal to fairness or justice, without asking for help ‑ execute the one quick movement I'm allowed for dodging that arrow. Then I must forget that arrow, allowing no thought of relief or victory or pride in accomplishment, and be ready for the next. The arrows come in a perfect rhythm. So my side‑steps adopt the same rhythm, thereby becoming, of necessity, a dance. I'm never released from the mortal urgency of the situation, but it begins to strike me as funny. At the end of the dream, I'm still dodging the arrows, which never relent in accuracy or intention. But I'm laughing, as at something in a Chaplin movie, funny but urgent, as I dance my dance of survival.

                                                   Ants

     One day in late 1992, the water went off in our house. I went up to the 2,000‑gallon storage tank to see what was wrong. The pressure gauge rested at zero. The pressure switch, which hadn't turned on when it should have, was in a little grey steel housing next to the gauge. I unscrewed the cap nut and lifted the cover. There it was: the ants again.

     The switch had two pairs of ignition points. There were so many dead ants between the ignition points that their accumulated carcasses prevented the points from making contact.

     The small spark emitted when electrical points close a circuit ionizes the air immediately around it, emitting ozone. Ozone has a sweet smell, which attracts ants. They crowded their bodies into the small space between the points until the points made only partial contact. This caused a bigger spark, which ionized more air, emitting more ozone. Although a number of ants, finding nothing sweet at the source of the smell, had already paid for their mistake with their lives, their living kin crowded in among the carcasses, their movements ever more urgent, dying in ever greater numbers, until their accumulated crushed bodies prevented any current at all from sparking across the gap. The ants were being killed, serving no purpose of their own, by something they couldn't see ‑ not because it was too far away to see, but because it was too near: it was in their own natures.

     Just like us when we go to war, I thought.

CHO LON

                                             Cho Lon

     When I studied, when I read a book, when I talked with friends and teachers and classmates about politics, I did it with the same urgency I'd felt when I left my outfit at Chu Lai. One day in the Spring of 1968, as the aftermath of the Tet offensive in Vietnam dominated the news, the availability of a small grant for a student to travel to "an underdeveloped country" was announced in classes. In separate classes, at the same hour, Jim Martin and I heard the announcement and had the same idea: Vietnam was an underdeveloped country.

     We became joint recipients of the grant. I didn’t know anything about cameras, but Mike Taylor did, and became my photography teacher. He told me I either had to have a camera with a light meter, or to get a separate, hand-held meter. Our classes consisted of a couple of hours on the porch and lawn of the “Shell House” at 524 East Cache La Poudre in Colorado Springs, with Mike, ever generous with his friends, patiently explaining F-stop, shutter speeds, film speeds, focal lengths. I took some pictures of the lawn, trees, and the rusting green panel truck that Tom and I had bought cheap because it was old and almost done for.

     So for the summer between our junior and senior years, Jim and I were accredited, by the Denver Post and the Colorado College Tiger, to the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) in Saigon, the official agency for the dissemination of information about American operations in Viet Nam to the news media. We got to Saigon in late May.

     We hooked up with Lee Dembart, a student reporter like ourselves who had come to the country some months earlier with a credential from New York radio station WBAI and then found other work as a journalist. Lee knew the lay of the land as far as reporting in Vietnam was concerned. He knew how to deal with government information bureaucracies, who was who in the journalism community, how to get places.

     A couple of days after our arrival Lee took us to Cho Lon, the Chinese district of Saigon where there was still fighting left over from Tet. We hopped into a small taxi and headed out into Saigon's wartime maelstrom of motor scooters, rickshas, jeeps, and Army trucks.

     The traffic gradually thinned, and the noise with it. First there were only a few vehicles and the odd hurrying pedestrian or bicyclist. That number dwindled to none as war's damage began to appear: corners of buildings blown out, masonry tumbled into the streets, blackened re‑bar twisted against the sky, Renaults overturned, burned, dimpled with bullet holes.

     The driver stopped; this was as far as he'd go. Jim and I got out. Lee stayed to return with the taxi; he'd already reported the Cho Lon story, and had another commitment that afternoon. He pointed us in a direction, with the war correspondent's parting shot: "Keep your heads down." The taxi turned around and left.

     Nothing is as noisy as a crowded city, or as eerily quiet as a deserted one. We walked a world of rubble, shattered glass, silence.

     But soon, up ahead, we heard the guns: the snap snapsnap of rifle fire, then the throbbing staccato of a heavy machine gun, then the crash of a much larger weapon.

     The scene we arrived at was one of two ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) tanks, parked a few yards apart in the middle of a wide street in the business district of Cho Lon, their turret guns angled down and across the street at what had been a sizeable brick building. A unit of ARVN Rangers hung out on the sidelines, in no particular hurry to move up the street.

     Jim and I took cover in a doorway and watched. I'd been shot at before, but street fighting was new to me, except for a little training at ITR six years earlier. Jim, a Navy vet who had served on an icebreaker in the Antactic and then volunteered for duty in Vietnam but was never sent there, was under fire for the first time. He did well, though. In fact, he moved ahead a little more quickly than I thought was wise.

     There were other journalists around. Peter Arnett, the AP reporter, and his frequent partner Horst Faas, the photographer whose Vietnam pictures for Life magazine were already famous, were standing on a street corner where Arnett conversed in Vietnamese with some local people. They were both wearing flak jackets and helmets. In the years since 1968, whenever I saw Arnett’s byline, or saw him on television, I would jump to his defense if sarcastic remarks such as “opportunistic reporters” or the like surfaced from the gallery. This happened frequently when Arnett stayed behind to report for CNN on the bombing campaign against Iraq during the first days of the Gulf War in 1991. I’ve always considered him the real deal, in a profession where lots of people weren’t.

     Everyone, including the ARVN infantrymen, was watching the tanks. We learned that there was, or had been, a sniper in the brick building the tanks were firing at. During the time we were there, there may (or may not) have been a round or two of return fire come up the street in our direction. There was so much muzzle blast, so many ricochets, so many pieces of flying masonry that it was impossible to tell. Return fire or no, the tanks were systematically destroying the building. Each tank had a .50 caliber machine gun up front, and a 90mm cannon mounted on its turret. One .50 caliber gunner would open up and traverse the top row of bricks on what was left of the building. When his can of ammo ran out, the machine gunner on the other tank would take over while he reloaded. Periodically, one or the other of the tanks would cut loose with its 90mm cannon on a stubborn section of the building. Then the .50's would go back to work.

     Storefronts all along the street were demolished, their contents spewed onto the sidewalk. Plastic shoes and small electric appliances covered the sidewalk where we knelt, hugging the wall with our right shoulders.

     I began to feel that less was happening here than met the ear, that the sniper had long since left the brick building, that what we were witnessing was the expenditure of ammunition, the destruction of a building, and Vietnamese soldiers taking advantage of the opportunity to vent their racial enmity towards the Chinese merchants of Cho Lon.

     I let my attention drift away from the tanks. A few feet away from me, some of the ARVN Rangers had wandered into a store with its glass front shot out, helping themselves to the merchandise. A soldier who emerged next to me seemed pretty pleased with the small electric fan he'd procured.

     I turned around, peered into the gloom to my rear. I was crouched in a corner formed by the elevated sidewalk, the storefront at my shoulder, and a low wall behind me, at right angles to the storefront. The low wall sealed the end of a long space enclosed by the raised sidewalk which extended down the street behind me, about three feet above street level.

     As my pupils dilated, I saw a roughly circular hole in the masonry of the low wall behind me, blown open by some large ‑ caliber ordnance. I duck-waddled over and peered inside. At first it was too dark to see into the space beneath the sidewalk. Gradually I made out the form of a corpse, a Chinese woman in her middle years. She seemed to have recently died. I assumed she had been killed in the fighting, though I could see no wounds. She had been carefully laid out on the rubble that defined the floor of the space, until the fighting ended and her relatives could retrieve her. She looked very dignified. Looking at her, I thought of the phrase, "lying in state."

     As I looked ‑ she was just inside the hole in the wall, with her feet near enough for me to touch, and her body extended away ‑ the body let out a long, loud, slow, putrid fart right into my face.

     We walked out of Cho Lon the way we'd come in, away from the tanks, past blocks of blown‑out buildings, back to where there was again traffic in the streets, back to the land of the living, and caught a taxi downtown just in time to catch the "Five O'clock Follies," the daily press briefings at JUSPAO. Some journalists did all their reporting from there, scooping up the official handouts, re‑writing them a little or a lot, shooting them off to their stateside editors, and collecting a regular paycheck for it. Some of the better ones, like Arnett, preferred to get their news where it happened, and seldom went to the briefings except to compare them with reality.

     The gallery of reporters sat through the U.S. Army major's recital of recent encounters between their side and our side, giving comparative body counts. During the question‑and‑answer period, things got more animated when people began asking about whether some helicopter gunships working over Cho Lon in recent days had caused any civilian casualties. I don't remember the outcome of that exchange, except that it was both confrontational and inconclusive.

     What I do remember was the evening's final question. A reporter asked the briefer to comment on reports that the ARVN Rangers had been looting during the fighting in Cho Lon. The major was emphatic. Nonono, he said. The Rangers were the South Vietnamese Army's elite. They had all been trained by U.S. officers and NCO's. They would never do that.

DANANG TO COLORADO COLLEGE

                             Danang

     I loaded my rifle, seabag and 782 gear (a Marine's pack, web gear, canteens, etc.; so called for the number of the receipt form we signed when it was issued to us) aboard the truck that would take me to the airstrip at Chu Lai, where I'd catch a C123 or C130 to Danang, then another plane to Okinawa, then another plane back to The World. The guys who weren't on duty over at the Direct Air Support Center came out to see me off. They were envious, but they were also glad for me. They asked me to study for them, and of course to get laid for them. I promised to do my best.

     The strongest thing they said to me came when somebody mentioned student anti‑war demonstrations back in the states. They said to tell those fucking jerkoff wimps just what the war was about, on behalf of the guys who were fighting it. Everyone present, including me, loudly agreed that I should do that.

     But there was another moment. It was more private, in fact intensely private. Along with the awareness that had come as I lowered my rifle just before firing on the Vietnamese man on the beach at Ky Hoa, and the shift in awareness that had come over me when the transparent veil dropped in front of my eyes as I was guarding the women and children and old man at the well in Tho An, this slap of suddenly shifting awareness that entered my skull as I climbed aboard that truck were among the experiences that I brought home from Vietnam that have most determined the course of my life during the forty-odd years since then.

     I was angry. I was angry about losing the young Marine when his buddy told me “You’re too late” getting the medevac to them. I was angry about our loss of those Recon boys who’d fought all night, hand to hand, on Howard’s Hill, as I sat in a relatively safe place and tried to send them help. I was angry about being too hot and too cold and too wet and too hungry for too long, angry about being terrified too many nights, and about having my body invaded by ants and mosquitoes and rats and snakes and centipedes like horror-movie monsters. I was angry about the loss and the guilt. I was angry about having kept the faith with people who did not keep it with me. With us.

     So what is still with me now, at this moment in late June, 2008, in a 12’x16’ log cabin three miles outside Joseph, Oregon, is the promise I made to myself as I climbed over that tailgate to begin my trip home. That promise was to study and study whatever it was I had to study until I understood the causes of the misery I had been a part of. And then I would fix it.

     Yup, that’s the promise I made to myself. This book is the result, whatever that’s worth. Of course, the problem isn’t fixed. If anything, it’s worse. No wonder I’m so angry. That’s a lot to carry, and a long time to carry it.        

     At the staging area in Danang, where Marines who had finished our tours were being processed out of the country, I got a cot in a 12‑man tent, and turned in my rifle and 782 gear. I suddenly felt naked, but tried to reassure myself that I was going where I wouldn't need a weapon.

     All this, and waiting for the scheduled bird to Okinawa, took a few days. We sat around the tent and talked about what we'd do back in The World. Women, cars, jobs, school. Student demonstrations came up again. Others in the tent had heard more about them than I had. One guy said he'd heard about a vet who got to the states, thinking he was safe at last, and was followed into an airport bathroom by several civilians who beat him up just because he'd been in Vietnam.

     The tent pounded with anger. One Marine, who'd seen more combat than some of us, was furious. "I'm takin' a piece back with me," he said, meaning a pistol. He deserved to be done with danger, he said. But if those pukes wanted a fight, he'd show 'em one, by God. He'd kill 'em. Period.

     I was the only one of the group who would be going straight to a college campus. The guys expressed concern for me; they said to watch my back. I'd be unarmed, and there'd be no Marines to back me up. And those cowards always ran in packs.

     That was what I took to school with me, mixed with the elation of being able to live my own life after one thousand, four hundred and fifty days of following other people's orders, and a focus, tinged with rage, on studying just what had caused this whole mess and others like it, and trying to find a way out. I fully intended to study so hard that I could answer, at least for myself, the question Why war?

IV. Relearning War

A. Back to School, Back to War

Kicking the Leaves

     It had been mid‑August when I left Vietnam; by the end of the month I was on campus at Colorado College. It was the biggest culture shock of my life, except ‑ maybe ‑ for the one I'd felt on arrival at boot camp. I was free! and it was terrifying. I didn't know how to act. I was used to deferring to certain people, having others defer to me. Here, everybody just sauntered around, wore whatever they pleased, talked to one another like ‑ well, like civilians. I remember standing in bright sunlight on the curb outside the student union at Rastall Center. A pretty young woman pulled up in an expensive car ‑ a Jaguar or BMW ‑ jumped out, and greeted a friend she hadn't seen since Spring. I stood there with mouth agape, staring at and listening to two foxy co‑eds compare their summers in Europe and South America. Goddamn, I thought. Anybody wanna hear about my summer in Southeast Asia?

     I was the first Vietnam vet on campus. I remembered the conversation in the staging tent at Danang, and walked around stiffly, looking over my shoulder, waiting to be accosted, surrounded, yelled at. The opposite happened. As word got around, people began approaching me, tentatively, with sincere questions. Mostly, just "How is it over there?" No one showed me the slightest disrespect; several people expressed admiration for what I'd done. Some questions had a political content, but nothing that felt accusatory. The questions centered around the war's human cost: simply, were those numbered hills and rockpiles worth the blood they cost? And they would ask for stories.

     Sometimes I would tell the story of Howard's Hill, or my story of the fight at the well in Tho An, or of trying to get a medevac chopper in to a radio operator's wounded buddy and being told "you're too late." Reliving those stories, against the background of (now, fellow) students' questions about whether those fights were worth what they cost, continued the process of recalibrating the way I looked at the world, and my place in it, that had begun at the well in Tho An. The context of our interactions was one I hadn’t expected: instead of being attacked by these people, and looking around for fellow Marines to cover my back, as I’d expected upon leaving Vietnam, I’d been welcomed – if tentatively, at first – by the people I’d expected to be my enemies, and I spent my days with them in classes. Some were now my friends. Though I would never lose my intense loyalty to fellow Marines, these were now my people. I wanted them to like me.

     One evening that fall I was studying in my dorm room, alone as usual. I put aside the philosophy or history or politics assignment I was working on, and just sat and thought for a while. I drifted back to the moment in August when I’d thrown my seabag and weapons and web gear aboard the truck, taken one last look around at the olive drab tents and red dirt and the new outhouse on the ridge, said goodbye to a couple of off-duty buddies who’d come out to see me off, and promised myself to study this mess until I could see a way out of it.

     I was studying, all right: I was already known on campus as the Nam vet who always had three to six books under his arm, and was actually reading all of them. But I wanted to learn more. Always more. If I was to answer, or even speak intelligently to, the question Why war?, what great lever could I get my hands on to move my mind, or the world, or whatever it was that needed to be moved?

     I opened an atlas to a map of the world. Shit, it was big. Look at all those countries. Look at all those people.

     Communication. I can’t understand all these people unless I can talk to them, understand what they’re saying. I decided that evening that I had to study languages, beginning with those that would allow me to communicate with the most people, over as much of the globe as possible. I was already in a Spanish class. With English and Spanish, I could talk with most of the people in the Western Hemisphere, except for Brazilians.

     Good start, but what else? Looking at the map, I thought: China. It had a great land area, and an even greater population, proportionally. China already loomed very large in world history; its presence was only bound to become greater. The next day I approached Professor Frank Tucker after a history class and asked him if Chinese language study was offered on campus. He said no; we had Spanish, French, German, and Russian, besides classical Greek and Latin.

     I went back to my map and looked again at land area and political significance. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, and the hot war in Vietnam, which was very much entangled with the Cold War, had the whole world scared, and with reason. The following academic year I would continue in Spanish and begin studying Russian. And I would study French my senior year.

     I had a tiny single room in "Superdorm," our monicker for a big brick building that hadn’t yet been formally named. On my R and R to Hong Kong earlier in the year I'd bought a massive stereo system with two big speakers, a reel‑to‑reel tape deck, tuner, turntable, the works. I'd even bought my favorite tapes and records, at the PX on Okinawa, and shipped them home: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Percy Faith, Montovani. The Ray Conniff Singers. Henry Mancini was a special favorite: "Moon River, wider than a mile/I'm crossing you in style...." That stuff soothed me, and I needed soothing.

     The guys in the dorm didn't know what to do with me. Who was this strange bird, holed up in his little amplified cave with this strange music? They were listening to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel.

     Marines, whisper whisper. Vietnam, whisper whisper. Still, I didn't seem dangerous. One guy named Cy, who was there from Minnesota on a football scholarship, actually thought it was kind of cool that I'd been to Nam. You know, ballsy. After a few weeks, when I'd leave my door ajar hoping somebody'd say hello, maybe even invite me to take part in the horseplay in the hall, Cy would cautiously poke his head into my room and ask how the hell I was doin'. Cy and I went to town one night and got drunk together, and became running mates for a while. Once when we were walking back from town, pretty well oiled, he threw his arm around my shoulders and said, "Dean, how'dja like to become a Kappa Sig?"

     Being asked was a hell of a compliment, and I told him so. But though I was only a couple of years older than Cy, I felt a generation apart. My right hand still curved reflexively, wanting to hold a rifle stock. I said No, but thanks a lot for asking.

    

     Tom Gould came up to me one day after Spanish class. He said something like, "You look like somebody who's been around a little." Then: "Maybe spent a little time on your uncle's farm?" He said it with a knowing grin, and I knew he meant Uncle Sam. Tom had been a Force Recon Marine, and had gotten out just before most of his unit shipped out for Vietnam. He invited me over to meet his roommate, Mike Taylor, with whom he shared a basement apartment. Mike had served a hitch in the Army, but was sent to Germany instead of Vietnam. They re‑introduced me to civilian life: macaroni dinners and medium‑priced wine in a messy kitchen shared with dogs and cats and even with actual human females. Later, the three of us rented a house off-campus with a Navy vet named Jim Martin and a Special Forces vet named Mark Streuli. The five of us became friends for life.

      One pre‑dawn morning that fall of 1966, I was walking across the campus lawn between the library and Rastall Center, to my job washing pots in the cafeteria. That would earn my breakfast, and a little more. Heading out that early, in that cold, to that job and that food is not normally a set of circumstances to make the heart leap. But mine did. The lawn was covered with three‑fat‑fingered maple leaves in a layer so thick that my feet began to plow up piles of them as I walked. I laughed, and kicked the crackling leaves across the lawn. Everything was so wonderfully dry and cold, welcome opposites to hot and wet. I stopped in one of my kicked‑up leaf piles and looked at the sky. I noticed the stars for the first time in a year, startled to realize that they had no relation to the war, that I was looking at them not to determine whether it was clear enough to dispatch aircraft on a mission of killing or mercy, but just to look at them.

     I romped on across, kicking leaves and howling at the stars, delirious that I could walk this far, alone, unarmed and upright, making all this noise, and no one would try to kill me.

                                                                Townies

    Jim Price and I had met at the college track. He was on the team, and I went there to run laps after classes. We were on north Nevada Avenue, walking back to campus after a late movie in Colorado Springs. There was no one else on the sidewalks and, at the moment, no cars on the street.

     A car turned onto Nevada Avenue and approached us. It slowed, passed us with heads hanging out the windows on our side, then its tires yelped as the driver veered to the curb. Five or six "townies" jumped out, young men out of high school who hadn't gone to college, who liked to rough up college guys for fun.

     "Let's go!" wasn’t out of Jim's mouth before he was gone, sprinting up the street towards campus.

     No.

     I was just back from Nam. I was home, among the people I had fought for, or so I wanted to believe. The thought that those same people would try to re‑immerse me in the fear I was trying to leave behind sparked in me an immediate, dedicated fury. Not hot fury. Nah. Cold fury.

     Fine. I will kill at least one.

     The townies rounded both ends of their car and approached the sidewalk. I made no sound, no gesture. I unsnapped my corduroy jacket lined with synthetic fleece and stepped to a nearby fire hydrant. I draped the jacket over it and stepped back. Oh so methodical. In my mind was the hand‑to‑hand combat stuff from boot camp: Be an animal. Attack, attack. Speared fingers on one side of the trachea, thumb on the other, plunge, pinch the grip closed, rip his throat out. Or break the bridge of the nose, then ram the broken bone up into the brain. A fist to the temple, with enough force, also kills. Or a speared finger through the eye into the brain....

     They were on the curb. Still I had made no sound or gesture. I remember folding my hands in front of me, at arm's length, looking at the townies and waiting. I leaned forward a little.

     They stopped, each individually yet all nearly together. They seemed to recoil, like cartoon germs bouncing off that "invisible Colgate shield" we used to see in television toothpaste commercials. The apparent ringleader, now standing at arm’s length from me, looked me over carefully, then spoke:

     “Let’s go,” he said.

     They got back in their car and drove off. I put my jacket back on and walked along the sidewalk toward campus. I did not hurry. 

SERGEANT OF THE GUARD/WARTIME IS WONDERFUL

                             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.

    

                                                 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?

HOWARD'S HILL

Marines in Skivvies

     "Metcalf, get the five‑ton and organize a shower detail."

     I spread the word in the enlisted and NCO tents, stripped to my trousers, grabbed my rifle and cartridge belt, and pulled the truck up near the tents and waited while eight or ten Marines in glaring white boxer skivvies straggled out with towels over their shoulders and climbed in the back.

     "If it isn't too fucking much trouble, would a couple of you gentlemen mind bringing along a rifle and at least one loaded magazine?"

     Fucking tight‑ass corporal, grumblegrumble.

     Fucking dumbshit candyass wingwipers don't know there's a war on, I grumblegrumbled back.

     Aloud: "Alright, folks, I realize this is kind of sudden, seein' as how we've only done this once a week for a coupla months now. Harris. Get your rifle, and a magazine. Magazine in rifle, safety on, chamber empty. In case you didn't recognize it, that's a fucking order. Yes. Sorry to disturb you. Garza. Same order. Do it now, not sometime this week. I don't want us comin' back along this road in the dark, and you don't either. One rifle on either side, facing outboard. You might even watch for VC, if it's not too much trouble."

     I pulled out onto the main road. The six‑by towed a giant snake of red dust behind us. We got to the shallow channel between the mainland and Ky Hoa Island just at low tide; the ford was easy. I drove around the end of the island and parked at the base of the cliff, where the wide, light waterfall splashed onto the rocks. This had been our favorite shower since we'd been outposted on Ky Hoa; we organized shower details whenever weather and tide and VC activity allowed.

     It was the end of a sunny tropical day; the sun's dropping behind the top of the cliff drove its shadow across the rocks, the beach, out onto the bright water of the South China Sea. Shower‑time banter was mostly about what a pity it was to have to share such a perfect place with a lot of ugly assholes like you guys instead of a bunch of babes in bikinis, hey, how 'bout babes without bikinis, I ain't proud ‑ that kind of thing.

     I drove back slower, trying to kick up less dust on us now that we were clean and still half‑wet. We piled out of the truck and straggled up the hill to where our tents were pitched just below the ridgeline. A certain languor had settled over us: the waterfall shower, the bright daylight, the waning afternoon that was balmy rather than hot, had seemed to put the war at some distance. Cold and dark and fear and shivers are of a piece; warmth and relaxation and being able to see a long way are their opposites.

     So we weren't ready for the surprised yelp that caused us to raise our heads and notice the neon‑red, thumb‑sized orb that floated by just over our heads. More came, seeming to come at a lazy speed as they barely cleared the ridge, then accelerating wondrously as they passed overhead.

     For me, it was slow‑motion time again. The next instant stretched itself, took up all the space and time it wanted, wandered out to the horizon in all directions, then wandered back and settled into my synapses forever. I had known immediately, but the softness of the evening light had disarmed us all. Besides, I assumed that all the other men would know as I knew, and move as I was now moving.

     But: Hunh. Men? I looked around, and saw a gaggle of high‑school boys, fresh from the locker room, standing in their clean white skivvy drawers and shower shoes, their chins dropped, mouths open, their most innocent imaginable faces upturned, watching the .50 caliber tracers pass a few feet above their heads like kids staring at the lights of the first Ferris wheel ever to come to their town.

     The shout came from deep inside me. I meant it to be an explosion that would shatter their reverie.

     "Get rifles, boots, helmets, flak jackets, nothing else. Get in the holes. There's no time. They're at the perimeter."

     I was moving as I shouted, snagging my helmet from my cot. Since the time when, as a kid, I'd badly cut my foot on broken glass playing barefoot in the sand, I'd had a fear of walking around with my feet unprotected, so I never left my cot without boots on.

     They couldn't believe it, or else the instant stretched even longer than I'd thought. They were still standing, mouths agape, when I tore through them on my way up the hill. I bumped two people hard with my body, shouted into their ears “MOVE!...

MOVE!”  knowing that the stunned mood was somehow a single organism that had settled over them all, and that once I had chipped one or two of them loose from their communal reverie, the rest would follow.

     There was no time for more than that. The VC must be at the wire. Fuck! they never do this in daylight. But... I'd have to hold alone for a very long time, maybe two, three minutes, way longer than it takes to die. Oh, they'd come. They were kids, but they were Marines. But they were nearly naked, and this was their first time. The tents would be a sea of flailing bootlaces and flak jackets and "Where the fuck's my helmet?"

     I desperately wanted a machine gun, but they were unloaded and put away. There just wasn't time. I slammed myself into the Conex‑box guard shack, grabbed an ammo can we used to store fragmentation grenades, and sprinted over the ridge and down its other side thirty yards or so to the line of fighting holes we'd dug as a last‑ditch line to fight from if the enemy ever got through the wire. This is it. I dumped out the grenades on the berm in front of me, jacked a round into my rifle's chamber, and looked down toward the wire for muzzle flashes. I would just have to hold. That was all.

     It was a false alarm. A South Vietnamese gunboat operating below our position on the Song Tra Bong River had strafed a suspected VC position on the near riverbank, and the .50 caliber bullets had glanced up the hill and arced directly over us.

                                                    Howard's Hill

     June, 1966. Staff Sergeant Jimmie Earl Howard was in command of an 18-man patrol of Marines from the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. These were the guys we’d see trooping past our tent on their way to the nearby chopper pad on their way to make an insertion like the one today, where a chopper would drop them on an isolated hilltop and they’d call in artillery and air strikes on enemy activity they could see below them.

     I had come on duty for the midnight to 0400 watch at the Direct Air Support Center. Howard and his seventeen men had been surrounded since dusk on top of Hill 488, named Nui Vu on Vietnamese maps, near Chu Lai. The surrounding force was a highly trained, well‑equipped North Vietnamese Army (NVA) battalion.

     Apparently the NVA wanted to eliminate one of the recon units which had caused them so much grief by entering their territory and calling in strikes on their training and staging areas. So they committed over two hundred men in the attempt to kill eighteen Marines whose perimeter was less than twenty meters across.

     The fight went on all night long. The Marines held the crest of the hill; the Vietnamese assaulted again and again with automatic rifles, mortars, machine guns, grenades, bayonets. Several of those charges ended in short, violent, hand‑to‑hand fights. By the time the second charge was beaten back, every Marine on the hill was wounded, and ammunition was so low that they had to fire semiautomatically. By the middle of the night, the Recon boys could see, by flarelight, NVA reinforcements swarming in the valley below. PFC Joseph Kosoglow said later it had looked "just like an anthill ripped apart."([1])

     We sent up flight after flight of helicopter gunships and jets to strafe and rocket the steep slopes around our men. An Air Force flare ship orbited above the hill to drop parachute flares; it was always supposed to be relieved on station when it was low on fuel. We coordinated that relief from the DASC. On the radio, I heard one Air Force pilot say he had to leave before his relief arrived because he was low on fuel, and heard a Marine piloting one of the helicopter gunships ‑ I later heard he was a major ‑ tell the Air Force pilot that he would personally shoot down the flare ship if it left before relieved. The major didn't live to be court‑martialed. He was killed before morning, flying rocket runs again and again down the throat of one of four NVA .50 caliber machine guns that were tearing up the men on the hill. The gun got the major. I don't know if the major got the gun, but he sure kept it busy for a while.

     When I left the DASC just before dawn, I could see the fireworks over Hill 488: flares, rockets, the long lovely parabolic arcs of red tracers.

     With dawn came better visibility, more air strikes, an airlifted company of Marine infantry. Later, we heard stories from the Recon guys, whose tents were near ours in the 1st MarDiv compound. One marine and one NVA soldier were found dead with their rifle muzzles touching each other's chests. Two of the marines' entrenching tools were found, bloody, in a circle of "mangled" NVA. One dead Marine was embracing the last man he'd killed, still gripping his KABAR knife where he'd buried it in the back of the enemy soldier in his embrace.([2])

     But they'd held Hill 488. Of the eighteen Recon Marines, twelve were still alive. All were wounded. They had eight rounds of ammunition among them. The hill was called Howard's Hill by Marines after the fight. It still is, among those who remember. But the

9 West, Ibid.

Marines left the hill the day they won it.

     Jimmie Earl Howard got the Medal of Honor. Years later, I talked with Jack Shulimson, a Marine Corps Museum historian who said that Howard’s hair had turned white within days after that fight, that he’d been a decorated veteran of Korea before he ever went to Vietnam, but had had a rough time of it after Nui Vu.

     Howard's call sign, by the way, was "Carnival Time."

---

[1] “Small Unit Action in Vietnam, Summer 1966”  by Captain Francis J. West Jr., USMCR.  History and Museumss Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington,  D.C. Printed1967, reprinted 1977.

[2]

RATS

                                                        Rats

     Rats are as much a part of war as young men and rifles and mud, black marketeers and prostitutes. The biggest rat I ever saw was one that charged in broad daylight. This was at Chu Lai, when we were stationed on the outer perimeter of the 1st Marine Division CP. Across the road from us was a unit called Force Logistics Support Unit, which we called FLUSh. We ate in their mess tent. One day at noon a couple dozen of us were headed for chow, fanned out over a large area that had been covered with heavy gravel ‑ stones an inch and a half across ‑ to help control the mud. There was a commotion up ahead. It was coming our way. Rifles came unslung, but there was no shooting. Must be guys fighting for a place in the chow line, I thought. Then enough men had jumped to the side so we could see. It was a rat, a huge gray mangy rat dragging its long dirty pink tail, running a straight line, audibly kicking up the rocks, swerving for no one, just running in full daylight. I watched at least a dozen armed Marines jump out of its way, mess gear clattering. It came straight at me. I jumped too. There were too many people around for us to shoot, though we all wanted to in the worst way. The rat ran through us and kept going. Since then it’s been my favorite example of the limits of power: one rat scatters a sizeable group of armed Marines and nobody can do a thing.

     The second biggest rat I ever saw, I had a better chance at. We were at that same perimeter position at Chu Lai. We lived in 12‑man tents with slatted shipping pallets for a floor to keep our cots up off the mud. The rats loved the pallets, of course. Rat condominiums. One night I was asleep in our tent when a rat the size of, say, a small gray squirrel landed out of the sky squarely on my chest. Then, as I yelped and jerked myself awake, it scurried off. What I remember most is the feeling of that tail, that groty piece of barely animate, hairless meat, dragging itself across my belly.

     It was getting late in my hitch. I had shuddered violently so many times at having rats crawl on or near me that I wanted revenge, I wanted it badly, and I wanted it to be as nasty and as deadly as possible for as many rats as possible. I had fantasies about killing rats, hundreds of rats ‑ no, make it thousands. I would shoot them with my rifle. Each 7.62mm bullet, big enough for hunting deer or elk or bear, would slam into a rat and dismember it and splatter pieces of it violently about. Better, a machine gun, a colony of rats, that's it, a whole swarming gray and black sea of them with pink tails writhing like mutant worms, my beloved M60 running warm and smooth, shooting long bursts into them, now and then a frag grenade, a shot of flame thrower, yeah, YEAH! white phosphorus, fricassee them fuckers, then back to the machine gun, just hosing them down, killing rats, killing, killing, killing rats.

     I had Sergeant of the Guard duty one night, which meant that I had to stay awake all night in the Conex box, the steel shipping container we used for a guard shack. We had a pyramidal tent pitched adjoining the Conex, with the usual shipping‑pallet floor. I had to check the sentries every hour or so, and call over to the Officer of the Day, but still had a lot of time on my hands. I read a lot, but late in the night that carried the danger of falling asleep.

     I would ambush the rat.

     One particular rat had made the guard shack its territory. It was about the size of a full‑grown domestic rabbit, and I had seen it up close enough to see the stringy black hair falling off its dirty gray hide in patches, like a dog with a bad case of mange. It dragged that ugly tail behind it like a pickup drags a forgotten tow chain.

     I truly hated this rat. It was so insolent. As usual, we couldn't shoot, because we might hit our own people or equipment, and because a shot, especially at night, was recognized as a sign that the perimeter had been probed. You got in deep trouble for sending a false signal. This rat seemed to know it could do pretty much what it wanted, right in the midst of all these armed men, with impunity. And it had a way of moving that was like a pickup load of teenage boys flipping you the bird. It would come in, scratch around, knock things over like a drunk, and when you charged at it, cursing and throwing things, it had this perfect timing: it would wait until the last possible instant, then, with an air of Gee-what-a-nuisance, it would amble out of reach just ahead of the descending shovel, or 2x4, or rock. Sometimes you even managed to hit it with something. Didn't seem to matter.

     I needed to drop the half‑measures. I needed to carefully plan and execute, yeah, that was it, I would execute this rat. Assassinate the fucker. Impale its filthy carcass on a stick in the sun to rot and stink and scare away the other rats. Fuck. They'd probably just eat it.

     The rat came every night, usually in the wee hours when things were quietest. Time was on my side. I had all night to set it up, to make it work. Besides, it would keep me awake. I waited till after midnight, when I got the two new sentries posted. The guys I'd relieved trooped off to their tent to sleep.

     Now. The bayonet. Now. Let's see. The rat usually comes in the far corner of the tent, and searches through that pile of stuff we've got stacked along the far tent flap, for C‑rations it can chew open and eat.

     I needed a place for me, a place for the rat, a set distance between: not too close, not too far. My place would be here, just inside the open door of the Conex. I would leave the light on in the tent, but switch off the one behind me in the Conex. The rat would be in the light; I would be in the dark.

     I picked out a target area. It had a couple of advantages. It was a place the rat usually went anyway, and its distance from my chair in the opening to the Conex was about the average distance to any point in the tent. Distance was the key. I carried in an extra pallet and leaned it against the stack of C‑ration cartons, and found a scrap of thick plywood a couple of feet square and leaned it against the pallet, and took out my pen and inked a solid black dot on the plywood.

     I went back to my chair and adjusted its position and angle so that four legs were solidly placed on the steel floor, and when I sat in it facing out into the tent I could see, and throw at, the whole area without shifting any part of my body.

     I practiced for over an hour, starting with easy throws.

     At first the bayonet would hit at odd angles and clatter off across the pallets. If it hit the plywood with the point too low and the handle then banging the plywood above the ink dot, I knew it had turned too fast. I'd make the next throw with my grip slid farther up the blade. If the point hit high, I'd slide my grip down. It came back, the endless afternoons of childhood mumblypeg, of throwing Eb Hogue's old hunting knife at the tree in our yard in Grants Pass. After more than an hour of throwing and retrieving the bayonet, I was getting good penetration of the plywood, sticking it more times than not, and hitting pretty close to the ink dot.

     Ambush time.

     I cleared away my target, opened a packet of C‑ration crackers, and put them down on the pallet in its place, being careful that the distance between a rat eating those crackers and my chair was exactly the same distance at which I had been practicing.

     I sat down to wait, with the bayonet's handle resting on my shoulder, blade cradled lightly and lovingly in my right hand. I sat like that for over an hour, with no movement but breathing and blinking. Then: there it was, the impudent clunk and scrape. A rat was coming to call, and not just any rat, but my favorite rat, my enemy, the big mangy arrogant one.

     I smiled and waited. The rat jostled around in our gear, digging and scraping and chewing. Once, within hearing but still out of sight, it climbed something and slipped and fell with a sodden thump and a pig-like grunt, then picked itself up and continued foraging. Its head came out of the pile, turned, looked at the crackers. Whiskers twitched as it sniffed. It came out of a space between C‑ration cartons, turned toward the crackers.

     Distance was good; the target was broadside to me. But it wasn't the angle at which I'd been practicing. Wait.

     The rat took its time, even raised up and looked around. Crackers in plain sight, hm, suspicious. But its myopic eyes couldn't see me, ten feet away in the dark. It started its slow, impudent waddle across the pallets, stopped at the crackers, began to chew.

     I raised my hand with the bayonet, held this past hour at just the right grip for this distance. I raised it very slowly, so the rat would see no motion. I threw, the bayonet flowing out of my body the way Eb Hogue's knife had flowed out of my boy's body ten or twelve years before. The bayonet parted the stringy hairs under the rat's belly and stuck, quivering, in a slat of the pallet the rat was standing on. The force and manner of the bayonet's arrival had lifted the whole rat into the air. It hung there, draped over the blade like a sack of rotten meat, four legs flailing. Then it managed to tip forward and grab the pallet with its front feet. It was the only time I had ever seen that rat make a quick, frightened movement. But now it moved in pure panic, its front feet trying to pull its weight over the bayonet, its rear haunches clawing the air, trying to find something to climb on.

     All this took only a couple of seconds, during which time the one flaw in my perfectly planned ambush showed itself: I didn't have a backup weapon. I looked around desperately... nothing!

     The rat finally pulled its weight far enough forward to get a rear foot up on the blade of the bayonet and heave itself over. Boots! Stomp him!... I lunged out of the Conex, crossed the pallets in two jumps just as the rat scurried out of sight.

     "Scramble, motherfucker!" I yelled. Fuck! Missed him!

     But, for once in the history of that rat's insults to our dignity and sanity, I had made it know fear, and that felt good.