DREAM: DANCE OF THE ARROWS

THIS IS ONE OF MY LATER DREAMS, ABOUT THE TIME OF "RATTLESNAKE AND PISTOL." LIKE THAT DREAM, THIS ONE BEGINS AS A NIGHTMARE, BUT BY THE END OF THE DREAM, MY EMOTIONAL/SPIRITUAL SURVIVAL IS TAKING HOLD. I AM WINNING THE BATTLE FOR MY OWN SOUL. FOR NOW,I'M POSTING THIS DREAM IN SPANISH. YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO SIMPLY MOVE THE CURSOR OVER THE TEXT, AND THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH SHOULD APPEAR IN A BOX TO THE SIDE. LET ME KNOW, OKAY? OR CHECK THE BOX "ORIGINAL" AT THE TOP.

 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 sidesteps 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.

EL MUNDO EN QUE NACÍ

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(1) 5½ months earlier. Americans had invaded North Africa 3 months after that. 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(2) was 5 months dead. Treblinka(3) had been in operation 6 months, with 10 gas chambers working full time. In October of that year, Jewish slaves 1 Twenty-three years later, I would stand in the open, off to the side of the village well in Tho An, side by side with a veteran of Guadalcanal, other island battles in the Pacific, and Korea. He was by then First Sergeant of “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. He leaned close to my ear to be heard above the firing and said calmly, “You be the last man out.” 2 See below, “Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague” p.271ff. 3 The reader who may have seen Treblinka listed as a “concentration camp” should clarify that notion: the only things concentrated at Treblinka were corpses, ashes, and huge piles of clothing and shoes taken from the people who were reduced to ashes. Treblinka was an extermination camp. 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.(4) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.

WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE / CON DIOS A NUESTRO LADO

Sueños de serpiente de cascabel: la historia de un guerrero americano SUEÑOS serpiente de cascabel es una memoria de medio siglo más o menos de tratar de entender por qué vamos a la guerra. Historias de mi tiempo como combatiente y periodista en Vietnam, y el periodista en Camboya, Laos, Leningrado, Moscú, Bakú, Kiev, Praga, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Este y Oeste de Jerusalén, Gaza, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Miami .... 11.313 DOMINGO, 04 DE MARZO 2012 Okinawa: CON DIOS DE NUESTRO LADO Con Dios de nuestro lado Steve McLaughlin y yo habíamos sido compañeros en 29 Palms, ambos habían pasado por la escuela de radio telegrafista en San Diego, y ambos terminaron en Okinawa en 1964. Mi nuevo equipo fue la Infantería de Marina Doce, un regimiento de artillería con sede en Sukiran campamento del Ejército de EE.UU.. Steve estaba en otro conjunto de Sukiran. Un día me encontré con Steve en la biblioteca del campo. "Ven aquí", dijo, y me llevó a la sala de escucha donde se podía jugar a los registros de la colección de la biblioteca. Él me mostró la portada del disco, lo miraba mientras él pone el registro y ajuste la aguja hacia abajo en la canción que quería escuchar. El álbum fue por esa cantante de folk joven y bella con largo, largo cabello negro. Su nombre era Joan Baez. Yo nunca había oído hablar de ella. La canción de Steve quería que yo oía era "Con Dios de nuestro lado." Fue por un tipo llamado Bob Dylan. Nunca había oído hablar de él tampoco. Steve no estaba seguro de lo que las palabras de la canción fueron llegando, y quería saber lo que yo pensaba. Lo jugamos, hablamos de ello, jugó un poco más. Estábamos tratando de averiguar lo que significaba. Se trataba claramente de una canción sobre la guerra, una guerra acerca de lo que lo importante es, sobre lo importante que es hacer las cosas bien si lo haces. Al parecer, por una parte, una canción muy reverente. "... Pero no hacer preguntas / cuando Dios está de tu lado." Eso tenía sentido para nosotros. Se ha ido perfectamente bien con la forma en que había sido educado, y con la forma en la Infantería de Marina nos había entrenado: El nuestro no es razonar por qué, pero el nuestro es de vida o muerte .... Pero había algo más? La pregunta que molestaba a nosotros como nos tocó la canción una y otra vez. La cantante y las palabras eran tan sinceras que tendían a tomar la canción a su valor nominal. Era evidente que estaba señalando que en las guerras, ambas partes afirman a menudo que tienen a Dios de su lado. Lo que nos pareció en el sentido de que era uno de los lados tenía que estar equivocado, ya que Dios no iba a estar en ambos lados a la vez. Por lo tanto, debe ser una canción sobre lo importante que era para estar en el lado derecho. Que seríamos nosotros, por supuesto. Pero es así? ¿Podría realmente estar diciendo que ambos lados pueden estar equivocados? Wow. No lo creo, pero quizás sí. Salimos de la biblioteca sin llegar a una conclusión que satisfaga cualquiera de nosotros acerca de lo que la canción deseada. Lo que estaba de acuerdo era en que estamos seguros gustaría conocer a la bella chica en la portada del álbum. Powered by Translate

PROLOGUE W/ TRANSLATOR - PRÓLOGO CON TRADUCTOR

I. Prologue: Tho An 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 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 even 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.

RATTLESNAKE DREAMS CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE/ TABLE OF CONTENTS/PROLOGUE (3/12/2012) RATTLESNAKE DREAMS An American Warrior’s Story Dean Metcalf This book is dedicated to KRIP who was killed at the US Special Forces camp at Mangbuk, June 18, 1968. He was 18 years old, or so they said… and to TATYANA SAVICHEVA who watched her extended family starve and freeze to death around her during the siege of Leningrad, September 1941 – January 1944. She was eleven years old when her last surviving family member died, leaving her alone. She was evacuated with other children through the blockade in August 1942, and died of disease resulting from the siege on July 1, 1944. and to the Marines who waded the lagoon at Tarawa, November 20-23, 1943. Copyright© 2010 Dean Metcalf All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-578-08809-9 CONTENTS I. Prologue 1 Tho An II. Learning War 5 Cowboys and Indians 8 Toys 8 Cartoon 9 Roy Rogers 10 Atomic Stove 12 Mumblypeg 13 K’reans 14 First Blood 15 Hunger 1 17 Rogue River 1 19 Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue’s Knife 20 A Rifle, A Pistol 24 Dress Blues 1 29 Almost a Cowboy 31 Canal 39 Dogs of Eberlein Street 42 Rogue River 2: Rattlesnake Air 44 Sunset Over Klamath Lake 55 Second Buck 56 Crater Lake 59 Semper Fidelis 67 Gunny Rogers 1: Mama’s Boy 67 Sergeant Vance 69 Man and Rifle Reaching 71 Gunny Rogers 2: The Most Powerful Weapon 74 Dress Blues 2 77 Marine Corps History 80 Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis 84 Banning 87 29 Palms: Ungentle 89 Old Enough to Bleed 91 Footprints 92 Okinawa 94 With God On Our Side 98 Tonkin 100 Olongapo 108 Put Me In, Coach 110 III.War 112 Oakland 113 Going Over 115 Ky Hoa 124 Gunny Rogers 3 126 Phantom Pisser 127 Hunger 2 131 To Kill a Gook 131 Tam Ky 132 “You’re Too Late” 135 An Tan 144 Request Mast 148 Tho An 150 Man and Pistol 167 Rats 169 Marines in Skivvies 175 Howard’s Hill 178 Sergeant of the Guard 181 Wartime Is Wonderful 184 Danang 189 IV. Relearning War 193 Kicking the Leaves 194 Townies 198 Missouri Squirrels 200 Hunger 3 204 Dark-Skinned Warriors 1 205 Packing 206 Seminar 208 Cho Lon 210 Interlude: A Veteran’s Dreams: 215 Dream: Nazi Pursuit 216 Dream: Money Man Pursuit 217 Mangbuk: The Camp 219 Soldier Tin 227 Dream: Bodies of Water 235 Dalat 237 Saigon 1. LA Cop 239 2. Kids 240 3. Dream: Vietnamese Children 242 Spook Hunting in Laos 243 Mark 269 J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac 271 Leningrad, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague 278 Samaritan in Los Angeles 308 Chinese Soldiers 309 Dream: A6 and Wolves 311 Tumalo 313 Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove 320 Triptych The Clubbing 333 Bait 335 Dream: Vietnamese Women 337 Spider and Fly 338 Fear 340 Guard Dog 342 Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle 343 Zen Warrior Bass Player 345 Sandinistas 346 Missing Man 356 Dark-Skinned Warriors 2 368 Dream: Guts 369 Indians and Cowboys 370 Mercenary 1 370 Rus Rus 1. Maco Stewart’s Letter 375 2. Flaco and Luque 378 3. Babes in James Bondland 380 4. Rus Rus 384 5.The Tape 391 6. Lasa Tinghni 395 7. Red Chief, White Chief 399 8. In Camp 399 9. Border Crossing 402 10. Skulls of Tulin Bila 406 11. Perico’s Garrote, and Other Stories 410 12. Meeting 416 13. Out of the Woods 425 14. Aftermath 428 Dream: Deadribs 437 Mercenary 2 437 Guns in Costa Rica 444 Interview with Bill Gandall 457 Guatemala: La Violencia 465 At the Battered Women’s Shelter 467 Palestinians and Israelis and Americans 469 Ants 488 Dream: Dance of the Arrows 489 The Rattlesnake Dream 491 Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol 492 The Last Nightmare 494 V.The Web (Essay) 496 APPENDIX: FAVORITE BOOKS AND WRITERS...533 Acknowledgments 535

FAITH AND FIGHTING

RATTLESNAKE DREAMS is a memoir of half a century or so of trying to understand why we go to war. Stories from my time as combatant and journalist in Vietnam, and journalist in Cambodia, Laos, Leningrad, Moscow, Baku, Kiev, Prague, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, East and West Jerusalem, Gaza, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Miami.... 11,279 THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2011 THE WEB part 3: LA FE AND EL COMBATE When I threw my weapons and 782 gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai in August of that year (1966), I was a troubled, angry, and nearly faithless young man. By the end of the year, some months into my intensive studies at Colorado College, I was a “born again atheist,” a state of mind and heart that had begun to exist while guarding the women and children and the old man at the well in the village of Tho An earlier in the year. I’m still an atheist. Of the many instances of phenomenal luck that have allowed me to survive being both a combatant and a journalist in the Vietnam War, hitchhiking up the Mekong through Cambodia and Laos at the height of that war (1968), through some close calls at sea aboard fishing boats, and later in construction work, as well as some dicey journalism situations in Central America, that day in Tho An was the luckiest of my sweet life. Not because I escaped death – that’s happened many times - but because of what I learned. More importantly, because of what I unlearned. Since those days, when I see a public appearance by anyone in garb intended to impress people with the sacred, therefore exalted, therefore authoritative, status of the wearer - I call them “long robes and funny hats” - the cynic in me says, “Okay, here comes the bullshit.” I am a cynic, but of a certain ilk. I get itchy and edgy whenever anyone talks about “pride.” I feel that way when I’m in the bank parking lot in my home town in northeast Oregon surrounded by the red, white, and blue bumper stickers handed out as freebies by the bank that say “Proud to be an American.” Don’t get me wrong. I’m okay with being American. I love the stubbornness of our independence, our rascality, the creativeness that has given the world jazz, Motown, and Elvis; some great and many pretty good movies, some great and a lot of good literature, Walt Disney cartoons([1]). I especially love that shining gift our people gave to the world, the United States Constitution. I love and am inordinately proud of the circumstances of the American Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence and other events in the desperate time which birthed that Constitution. Every year on November 10th, I celebrate the Marine Corps Birthday with a few buddies, in person or by email. Some of these guys I would die for, at the drop of a hat. We often combine that day with the next, Veterans’ Day. We thank entities from Jesus Christ to “shit-house luck” for the fact that we are still alive. I, of course, am in the latter group. The guys all allow me that; some agree with me and some disagree, with varying degrees of stridency, regarding questions of patriotism and religion. This is done with the same respect with which I allow some of them their continued belief in Jesus Christ: we all came by, or solidified, our deepest beliefs under the gun. In the presence of public patriotic celebrations, I get uncomfortable if there is more than one flag, or if it’s deliberately oversized; if the speakers’ voices seem overwrought with too much sincerity, or use too many over-generalized phrases that draw an ideological line in the sand between “us” and “them.” And I become downright angry when a speaker, especially a public official or clergyman, extols faith as something to sustain our soldiers in combat. Faith is what we use to take up the slack between what we know and what we hope for, or what we wish were the case. Or what we pray for. Of all the emotions along the spectrum from the most sincere to the patently phony, which constitute the fabric of human feelings and beliefs we use to send young men – and, now, young women – to war, faith is the killingest. Having viewed what we humans do for 40 years now from outside religion, what I see when organized religion is at play is people telling one another what to do: how to behave, whom to obey, whom to love and whom not to love, whom to hate, and whom to kill - all by claiming to speak for a higher power that is unimpeachable, yet at the same time non-specific. For me religion became like a greased pig at a carnival: impossible to get ahold of. Since no one, in my view, has ever seen the God who is the source of these commandments, it falls to God’s messengers to do the heavy lifting. To me, those people are nothing more than an ancient but ever-renewing parade of older males in long robes and funny hats who claim to have been sent by God, and to have been told by God how to instruct the lesser humans below them: do this, don’t do that. Pray. Obey. Do what I say, because God, or this or that Holy Book, told me to tell you to do so. I don’t believe any of that. But what continues to astonish me is that so many people do believe it, in the face of so much evidence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that the people we fight against are inspired by, commanded by, driven by, ideas which are nearly interchangeable with ours. Not mine any longer, but ours. Here I can’t help but note that Abraham, the religious patriarch featured in the Kierkegaard essay “Fear and Trembling”, is regarded as a prophet by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism: the very people who are now killing one another with such conviction in the Middle East. Kierkegaard’s essay is the one which got me in such hot water with J. Glenn Gray (see above, pp. 298-305), when I was so angered by Abraham’s being prepared to sacrifice his son because God told him to, and by Professor Gray’s use of the word “sublime” to describe Abraham’s faith. I even wrote my own version of Genesis, Chapter 22, where God commanded Abraham to kill his son: “And Abraham raised both fists to the heavens, middle fingers extended, whence had come the voice of God, and screamed at the sky: ‘FU-UUUCK YOU! What kind of god would command a man to kill his own son? C’mon, Isaac. Let’s go home.’” I downloaded from the Web a photo of the belt buckle worn by Wehrmacht soldiers in WWII. It has an eagle perched on a swastika, and the by now well-known motto GOTT MIT UNS: GOD IS WITH US. Hitler’s soldiers, the perpetrators of the Siege of Leningrad, of Treblinka, of Sobibor, of Babii Yar, of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald – were praying to the same god our soldiers prayed to. The same God I prayed to, the night before I entered Tho An with “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. The same god about whose loyalties Steve McLaughlin and I had been so confused as we listened again and again to Joan Baez sing Bob Dylan’s song “With God on Our Side.”

     We need to look at how we look at things.

     Combat is specific. It is excruciatingly specific. But faith is nonspecific. The moment a bullet or an explosive device rends tissue and separates life from death in a young person is the moment when, in this so-common human event, the specific and the general diverge, and somebody dies. The bullet is not aware. It has no faith, is not directed or deflected by faith. It goes where it goes. The bullets that snapped past me on April 19th, 1966, did not know or care where they were going. I simply happened to be standing in a lucky, rather than unlucky, place. That’s all there is to it. But faith is general: “The Lord will protect us.” “God’s will be done.” “Masha’allah (God has willed it)”. “There is a divine purpose....” Or that most general of all: “The Lord moves in mysterious ways.” Well. Bullshit. All that means to this very lucky veteran is that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, and we try to bridge the gap between reality and what we know of that reality with phrases that we cling to in desperate, willful ignorance, in the absence of knowing what we’re doing. It happens with 23-year-old individuals (and now, in some armies, with 8-year-olds), with squads, platoons, companies, nations, alliances... it is how humans have done business for these millenia. It is how history has been built.

 [1] Upon arrival in Managua, Nicaragua, in October 1983, I caught a ride into the city from the airport on the back of a flatbed pickup driven by some Sandinista teenagers. I noticed as I climbed aboard the truck that it had Bugs Bunny mudflaps. The boys’ antics as we drove through the city seemed to have more in common with the mudflaps than with either side in the 4-year-old war between the fledgling Sandinista government and the Reagan-backed contras.

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MAN AND RIFLE REACHING

Man and Rifle Reaching

     It was near the end of our three weeks at Camp Matthews, the rifle range. Our drill instructors had behaved like blacksmiths, sticking us and our M14 rifles into a fire until everything in every boy-man of us that did not have to do with rifle was burned away, then hammering what remained of each of us, together with his rifle, until a new, unified instrument was forged. This is pretty literal: in the sitting position, for example, the rifle's sling pulled the left elbow in toward the body's centerline in an attitude which muscles and tendons aren't really designed to adopt. After ankles were crossed in the dirt so that each knee was supported by the opposite booted foot, the spine had to curl forward until each elbow reached past the supporting knee.

     At the beginning, few of us could get even near this position. As Marine Corps drill instructors always had, ours simply kicked us into it: it was a boot to the back, a knee to the neck, a kick to the elbow, all amid a whirlwind of shouted curses and warnings that failure to get it right could result not only in the individual Marine's death, but in the deaths of his comrades as well. That was against regulations. In fact, it was the ultimate crime, not because the Marine Corps loved us, but because such a death would end that Marine's contribution to his unit's victory and because it would necessitate writing letters to our mothers, whose usefulness on the planet had ended once they had turned their sons over to the men who would temper all that softness out of us.     

     One of Gunny Rogers' favorite exercises was for the purpose of preparing the muscles of the right shoulder to hold the rifle steady in the offhand position. The M14 weighed over nine pounds unloaded, closer to eleven charged with a 20-round magazine, more yet with a bayonet fixed on the end. Accuracy could mean your life, or someone else's. Accuracy required holding the rifle steady. Holding the rifle steady required strong shoulder muscles. This was what Marines did.

     The exercise started by turning your body ninety degrees, so that your left shoulder, instead of your chest, pointed downrange. Then you put the rifle to your shoulder for the offhand position. They taught us a special way of doing this. First you brought the rifle up in front of your chest, with the muzzle pointed downrange. But instead of holding it in the normal firing position with the sights and top of the weapon pointed at the sky, you rotated the rifle ninety degrees away from your body so that the bolt handle pointed toward the ground, and the sights away from you. 

     Then you curled your head and chest out over the rifle, the way you would lean over to pick up a baby from a crib. This made a nice hollow at the base of the shoulder for the toe, or bottom, of the butt plate. With the rifle still flatways to the ground, you tucked the toe of the buttplate into that nice little pocket you'd made, snugged it in tight, then rolled your head and upper body and rifle upright all in one motion, at the same time rotating your right elbow clear up past the horizontal until it was nearly vertical. That put your upper arm in the most efficient biomechanical position for supporting the rifle's weight, with the right arm making a vertical triangle like a section of bridge truss, from the shoulder up to the elbow and back down to the hand at the rifle's grip. The left arm made a triangle supporting the rifle from below, with the left hand cradling the stock at its balance point. 

     The Gunny would have the whole platoon spread out with double spacing between the four squads and our rifles raised in this position, then order us to drop our left hands. He ranged in front of us, scowling and taunting those who wavered with the usual insults: pussies, girls, non-hackers, pukes. The contest was to see who was the last to lower his rifle. One time, I remember, that was me.

     So we lived Rifle. Not gun. Rifle. In boot camp, to call your rifle a gun was a sacrilege the penance for which was to stand in a place where the rest of your platoon could see you but the outside world could not, with your penis in one hand and your rifle in the other, reciting:

This is my rifle,

This is my gun.

This is for fighting,

This is for fun.

We cleaned our rifles and fired them and cleaned them again. We cleaned our rifles and did calisthenics with them and cleaned them again. We became rifles: the Marine Corps expression for grabbing a man by the shirt front and bracing him up against a wall was to "grab him by the stacking swivel," which is that little metal hook near the end of the forearm on many military rifles, used to engage three rifles with one another to form a freestanding tripod on a parade ground or bivouac area. 

     Each of us was forcefully laminated around his own rifle, like the blades of the Japanese katana swords that had been faced in their youth by some of those who were now training us. And, though all our rifles would have looked alike to an outsider's eye, each of us was so familiar with his own as to be able to recognize it from a few feet away as easily as one could pick out his own brother or sister on a playground full of kids. We caressed their walnut stocks with linseed oil, and scrubbed their machined steel parts with Hoppe's #9 solvent, then wiped that off and oiled them lightly. Then we snuggled our boys' cheeks and noses down alongside them again, to store forever in our synapses the remembered smells of linseed oil and Hoppe's #9 and burnt powder. 

     One day, as we were getting ready to go back to the firing line after noon chow, I stepped to the corner of our tent and reached for my rifle, which was leaning there. Something happened, a quick small thing which I will remember when I have forgotten most of the rest of my life. As I reached for the rifle, and my hand came near it, the rifle itself seemed to move, to tip itself out from the corner of the tent, taking a little hop into my hand as if it were impatient with the slowness of my reach. The rifle seemed to have had the same intentionality forged into it that had by then been forged into me, and was leaping from the corner of the tent, into my ready hand, in its eagerness to get back to work.