He waited a moment. “You just set the range on the fuse for whatever height you want. Set the fuse for the height of twenty meters, and it will flatten everything within fifty meters.”
“Gentlemen,” the Major said the next day, the Oklahoma landscape shimmering behind him as he stood by the small platform at the base of a howitzer, “there are four kinds of shells: high-explosive, white-phosphorous, smoke, and anti-personnel. This,” he said, pointing to a shell standing on the platform in front of him, “is an antipersonnel round. It was developed after Korea and it will stop your batteries from being overrun. Inside each shell are 10,000 feathered stainless steel darts. It is detonated by a specially timed fuse that sets itself when the shell is spinning at 1500 rpm’s. This is approximately the rpm’s the fired shell will be rotating at when it has traversed one half the barrel length of a 105-mm howitzer. In the time it takes to traverse the rest of the barrel length, the fuse detonates and the shell casing, of special construction, twirls off the round much as the casing off a can of sardines. By the time the round leaves the barrel, the casing is completely gone and the 10,000 darts come blowing out the barrel.” He stopped for a moment. “Just crank down the gun to zero elevation...”
Macabe stared at the cannon, anchored so firmly into the ground in front of him.
“Now, gentlemen,” the Major said, “we are scheduled this hour to talk about FADAK—the artillery computer. It can, as you know, read maps, terrain, weather condition, meteorological situations. It can register your gun, and if you want, it can shoot it.”
During the whole time not one instructor specifically mentioned Nam; they stayed away from any mention of killing and death, though there were allusions, such as, “Most of you will be using grid coordinates for your fire missions; locations from known points are used only in the European theater of operations” and “White phosphorous should be considered as much a psychological weapon as a pyrogenic one.”
The classroom work went on for two weeks, with officer training in between. Macabe was getting bored and a bit fed up with the academics of it all. It was getting to be just like college all over again. But things changed when they went out to the artillery range, a great hilly area at the eastern edge of the fort. They went in their combat gear. After a four-mile hike and a quick talk on safety procedures, they took up their positions. Macabe was given the first fire mission. With the class spread out behind him, he lay down on the rim of a high hill overlooking the huge, desolate, pock-marked Oklahoma valley baking in the sun. He opened his grids, and laying them down on the dirt next to him, took the horn from the RTO. He was given a convoy in the open.
“59/51 fire mission, over.” He waited, and pressing the button, went on. “Grid 524/313, direction 0300, shell WP, convoy in the open, over.”
“51 fire mission, out.”
“Fire mission—524/313; 0300—out.” And two miles behind him a battery of 105-mm howitzers began traversing toward the target.
“59/51 grid 524/313 clear.”
Less than a minute later, a single shell came whistling in over his head. Despite himself, he was startled by how quickly it was over him and how loud it sounded—like a freight train roaring down through a narrow canyon. A moment later it exploded. A white puff rose out in the valley. Almost right on, he thought; a bit too high, though. Excited, lying sweating on his hill, he pressed the button again, with the guns working unseen miles behind him, doing whatever he asked. He felt somehow as if he were conjuring up the Devil.
“59/51 L50 drop 200, shell H and E. Request battery fire for effect. At my command.” He waited a moment, looked out expertly at the valley, and then, putting down his binoculars, gave his grids one more look and ordered: “Fire!”
Almost instantly a salvo came roaring over. Unconsciously he ducked his head. He had his glasses fixed on the smoke from the first round. Suddenly the ground, a good 500 meters behind the white marking smoke of the first round, heaved open, and the dull thudding of the exploding shells rolled back over him. Confused, Macabe looked quickly from his grids to the smoking valley and back again.
“You killed at least a company of your own men,” the Sergeant said, kneeling down beside him. “They’re dead, Lieutenant.” There was no ridicule in his voice, not even any particular concern. “H and E shells weigh more than WP; that was explained the third day of the class. There is a correction made for it in the FDC. You should have considered this in making such radical corrections.”
Macabe picked up his grids, dusted himself off, and walked slowly off the rim. Three miles away the ground was still smoking. He wasn’t sure whether he felt badly because he’d killed his own men or made a stupid mistake.
The mistake on the hill had sobered him, and he began working harder. There were night fire missions, perimeter fire. It might have been interesting to use what he had learned and go to Nam as an artillery officer, but he had come into the service to acquire more than just a skill. Three days before graduation he requested airborne training, and the day artillery school was over, he went airborne.
Benning was tougher than Sill, and sharper. The men moved more quickly and looked starker. After the cerebral stuff of artillery training, the physicalness of airborne training came as an almost welcome relief. Nothing was sloppy at Benning; even the buildings seemed to have an edge on them. The first day, Macabe stood on the parade grounds and watched the groups of lean, tough troops wheeling past. The next morning he became one of them. During training there was no rank. Everyone on the field—enlisted men and officers—was treated alike. In most cases it was obvious who was who, though the instructors scrupulously ignored the obvious. The harassment never ended. They were pushed all the time.
“Those boots aren’t quite right. Give me twenty.”
“Sorry, but you weren’t down low enough. Let’s try another twenty...ten more.”
“Sorry, mister, but that brass just isn’t right. Go around again.”
“What do you want to be? What do you want to be? Come on...come on...come on...come on. Go, go, go, go.”
He lost ten pounds the first week. They slept four and five hours a night and then got up and ran everywhere. FT in the morning, afternoon, and evening; in groups or singly there was constant exercise. Everything—home, letters, concerns, friends—everything faded under the weight of exhaustion. “Come on, come on, come on....” With the few other officers he struggled along with the crazies, the tough, role-playing enlisted kids right off the streets of Chicago, Gary, and the back roads of Georgia who had gone airborne because of all the John Wayne movies they’d seen. Jump school was full of them, white and black, and among them some who were almost psychotics. There was talk at night about murders in the enlisted barracks; knifing out in the middle of nowhere; adolescent blood oaths and gang attacks. Another officer told him about a barracks race riot in the class before theirs; it had been so bloody that afterwards the MP’s had to hose down the inside of the building.
“Before I got here I used to think I knew what was what,” Macabe said one day as he sat using his bayonet to peel the mud off his boots. “I’ll tell you something. I’ve talked to ’em, and they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. It’s their way of life, I guess. I’ve never lived in a ghetto.”
“Well,” his fellow officer said, “something ought to be done. Ghettos or no, they’re in the United States Army now.”
“I don’t know,” Macabe said. “Maybe you have to pay a price if you want people to jump out of airplanes.”
The next day they began jump training: the 34-foot tower; the 250-foot tower; water landings; tree landings; high-tension wire evasion. And for each there was that one last moment when alone he had to take that one last step. For Macabe, each last step was a struggle with fear. Each survival brought with it an increased sense of well-being, a sense of power restrained only by what had yet to be done.
There was comfort, too, in helping others and sharing and being helped himself.
Enl
isted men and officers—they watched each other suit up, checked each other’s gear, made sure there was nothing too sharp, nothing packed wrong. A comradeship that a few months ago Macabe would have sneered at helped to sustain him right up to the doorway of his first jump. Everyone, even the loudest and most obnoxious of the crazies, felt it. For days the tension grew. Like a wind out of the future it blew into everything they did, everything they thought. There had been injuries off the towers. Now, though, it was not simply a matter of a pulled muscle or a sprained ankle; it was a matter of dying—of falling forever.
The morning of the first jump no one ate, no one even talked. Macabe tried to shake off his fear. Like a child mumbling a lesson he repeated to himself over and over: “I’m trained, I’m ready, I’m fit. They wouldn’t send me up if they didn’t think I was ready. I’m trained, I’m ready, I’m fit.” He didn’t care who heard him, nor did anyone care what he said. He was fighting to keep from backing out. It made everything else that had ever bothered him—exams, girls, people—seem stupid and unimportant.
Tight-lipped, their fear out in the open, they helped each other put on their gear, silently, with a solemnity that was almost suffocating. For the first time in weeks no one joked. Everyone just stood there in the barracks strapping in his doubt, grimly getting ready. Full gear: one hundred and twenty pounds of added weight. Two chutes, front and back. Equipment packs slung between their legs, weapons, webb gear, entrenching hooks, jump helmets—they strapped in their terror until hardly able to move they shuffled out of the barracks to the flight line. It was a hot, dazzling day, and soon every one of them was soaked with sweat. Waiting near the transports, they sat along the runway back to back, resting against each other, their hands folded nervously across the tops of their front packs. Macabe found himself trying to look at the planes through the shifting spectrum of his own sweat. He closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing.
“How you feel, man?”
“Scared.”
“Me too.”
“Phew!”
“Long way down—huh, man.”
They had to be lifted into the planes. Sitting down, pushed together, they waited for the jump master to pull himself into the plane.
Feet braced in the doorway, the jump master was suddenly there. “Scared!” he yelled at them. There was a moment of stunned silence and then, “Airborne!” they screamed back. Macabe screamed as loud as he could. The very effort was comforting.
The jump doors slammed shut, and locked in they began rolling jerkily down the runway. Macabe pressed his back up against the bulkhead, listening past his nervousness to the sound of the engines. The plane picked up speed, and the jerkiness increased, pitching them from side to side, like dolls on a rack. Then they were airborne. The plane lifted sharply. Even while they were climbing, the jump master unexpectedly opened the doors. Dazzled by the sudden light they stared terrified out the open back of the plane, numbly watching the bits of cloud swirling past the open doorway. The jump master kept the door open. Macabe, despite the terror in his guts, was drawn again and again to look at the sky. He had never seen it so close, so huge.
Thirty minutes later the jump master, hanging on to the pitching plane, yelled over the noise: “Stand up!”
No one moved.
“What are you?” he yelled, his face contorted with the effort. “WHAT ARE YOU?”
“AIRBORNE!” they yelled back.
“Stand up! Hook up!”
Hooking their clips into the overhead line, they pressed close together, shuffling their feet, stomping harder and harder until the whole plane was vibrating under them as they edged forward, until they were packed so tight it was difficult to breathe. Macabe rested his cheek against the pack of the trooper in front of him. As they pushed closer to the doorway he could hear the engines and the wind whistling past the opening. The jump master grabbed on to the door jambs and stuck his head out into the 120-knot wind. It tore at his face, but he remained there until he was satisfied, then turned back to the rows of stomping troopers and shouted something, but his words were lost in the wind. The plane slowed a bit as the pilot cut the inboards.
“Equipment check,” he yelled over the noise.
“30-OK; 29-OK; 28-OK...” They were packed in so tight that when the light switched from red to green there was no place to go but out.
“Go, go, go. Go—go, go, go, go...” Macabe felt he was not so much moving toward the hatchway as being propelled there. The plane was bouncing now, making it tough to keep his balance. Ahead of him, they were leaping, twirling out of the doorway. “Go, go, go, go, go...”
Terrified, Macabe suddenly found himself even with the screaming sergeant. A great shove, and he was gone—hurtling out into the sky—a tiny brown stick twisting through all that brilliance.
Afterwards he heard that the fifth time was a bit easier.
Somewhere before the end of jump school, between the third and the last jump, he decided to go on to Ranger training. There was a poster in the barracks: a tough, good-looking soldier, framed against a yellow-red background of exploding shells, grim, sleeves rolled up, an M-16 held high in one hand, a Ranger tab on his left shoulder. Across the whole thing in big block letters were the words: RANGER TRAINING MAKES A GOOD SOLDIER BETTER. Macabe saw it every day. Maybe, he thought, maybe, just to do it right, he’d go, and finally two weeks before the end of jump school his decision was made. A fifth of the class went with him.
They weren’t given much time between Jump School and Ranger training at Fort Benning, but there wasn’t much time to give. The Tet offensive had finally been stopped, and while the Army called the American defense a success of sorts, it was, even to the most myopic general, obviously a costly one. In the two months that it had taken to stop the VC, 20,000 Americans had been killed or wounded. Whole units had become inoperational. Others were running at one-half to three-fourths strength. There weren’t enough first and second lieutenants to go around; sergeants were running companies, and corporals platoons.
Three days didn’t even give him time to relax. Later, all he could remember about his trip home was that everything seemed so easy there, so fat, and so very dull.
“Tomorrow morning, gentlemen, we will be up at zero three-thirty. We will begin the day by running one full mile.” What’s all the fuss, Macabe thought; they’d run six miles at a time at Airborne school.
They woke up at 3:30 in fatigues and jump boots. With 40-pound field packs on their backs, they lined up near the half-mile track of Fort Benning’s Jump School.
“Gentlemen,” the instructor said, “we shall now run one mile—in twelve minutes.” It took a moment for Macabe to realize what he was hearing. The six miles at Bragg had been a rather leisurely affair. A twelve-minute mile in full gear would almost have to be a sprint. “Tomorrow, we shall run a mile and a quarter; the day after that, a mile and a half, until you are running four miles in twenty-four minutes. Fall out!”
Everything from then on was timed—the low crawl, the parallel ladders, the run, the dodge and jump—everything. Macabe had come to Benning confident that he was in shape, but they were pushing him right from the beginning. “What’s wrong, soldier, don’t you want to be a Ranger?” He pushed, and still it was, “Come on, sonny, do it again.” There was almost one instructor per man, and he was always there over you, pushing, shouting, yelling. Already lean, Macabe could feel himself getting leaner.
“You look a little tired, mister, want to rest?”
“Dragging there, huh? You don’t want to be a Ranger, do you? Not if you move like that.” Through mud and water, through the woods, carrying forty-pound ammunition cans—and each other.
“Now get your ass moving, or back to mother.”
“Go back and do that again—right!”
During those first weeks at Benning, exercise became more than just PT. It took on the aspects of combat, of survival. Exhausted, they were pushed through miles of mud and water under full gear, always under
full gear. They jumped blindfolded off three-meter boards, crawled for hundreds of yards, got up and did it again, and all the time they were getting less and less sleep and meeting grueling inspections. And all the time there were forced marches under full gear.
“The first few hours of sleep are the only ones you need. They’re the deepest ones. The rest are just for dreaming. Now fall out!” They went to bed at one and two and got up at three and four. There was no heat in the barracks, and after a while it didn’t matter. Everything was always done flat out, rapelling down freezing cliffs, log ladders, dragging forty-pound ammunition cans through the mud, going up rocky, forty-degree slopes. An incredible numbness began to take hold of them all; Macabe drank his morning coffee while he was still in line so that he could warm his hands. Then it would begin again.
He finished drills without even remembering what he had done, pulled himself through another mile without thinking of the mile ahead. In a world removed from anything he could remember, he began losing track of days, then hours. A strange, sullen kind of rebellion began to develop. Exhausted, his humor gone, he began glaring back at the screaming instructors. Others quit; they gave up or just said “Fuck it” and went away. Rebellion would have broken out, not only with him, but with the other survivors as well; a little more pushing, another unnecessary march, just one more abuse would have done it. But just when rebellion was taking over, the instructors, as if on cue, suddenly backed off, and it was over. The troops were called out and told to get their gear together and to get into the two-and-a-half-ton trucks.
365 Days Page 6
