Even then I couldn't raise an answer, a spark of feeling.
Oh, I had things to say: No, Morning, not my war, baby, but yours; he wasn't killed in a war, he was murdered.
But these were thoughts without feeling.
Of course it must rain our first two days at Hill 527, air mattresses and shelter halves must leak, and men sweat and stink in ponchos, or stand naked in hard, cold rain, or fall prey to malaria and cat fever and fungus. Boots must mildew, and meals be cold, and mud ball at our feet and creep up our legs and stick to our fingers and clog in our eyes. Sleep must come in nightmare snatches, and guard be stood, and waiting drift in long cross hours, and of course it must rain without pause for two days and two nights square in the middle of the dry season. And of course the sun must shine, eventually. And it all must be endured.
Hill 527 and its twin, 538, were not really big hills, but tall rises in the middle of a large clearing where a jungled forest encroached on a grassy plain. Five hundred and thirty-eight was a gentle rise, an easy slope up and down from all sides, and 527 was the same except for a flat triangular peak like a surrealistic nipple smack in the middle of it. The sides of the nearly equilateral triangle were approximately one hundred yards long. A forty degree slope separated the flat nipple-top from the more gentle slopes below it. On the first two muddy days we laid wire around the steeper slope, dividing us from the two companies of provincial militia already entrenched in a rough circle about fifty yards further out and down. Outside of their wire and their mud and sandbag parapets, the grass and the occasional patches of brush had been cut down for about one hundred yards. The jungle was on three sides of the clearing, east, west, and north, but on the open side the land sloped away in rolling, grassy hills. The jungled forest came to within four or five hundred yards of the compound on the north and east, but because of Hill 538, it was between nine hundred and one thousand yards away on the west. Our antenna field was to be built on 538, and then the whole hill mined.
All in all, it wasn't a bad position. The peak was high enough so that we, if we had to, could fire on the lower slopes without chewing up the protective coating of Vietnamese militia. The militia had good wire out, and we had wire ten yards wide, two fences and four rows of concertina on the slope off the peak. (The harried American major who advised the Vietnamese major commanding the militia said he wished that we hadn't strung the wire between our two forces. The Vietnamese major thought it an insult to both the patriotism and the fighting ability of his men. Capt. Saunders showed them his orders signed by the admiral in charge of American forces in the Pacific, the area military commander, and the major's commanding officer, so the wire stayed, and we stayed alive.) We dug a four-foot deep trench along the inner edge of the wire with twenty rifle positions on each side of the triangular peak, then put machine gun bunkers at each point of the triangle, a communication trench midway across the triangle, north to south, connecting to the ammo and gas bunkers, then dug mortar pits at the four corners of the trapezoid formed by the communication trench and one behind the eastern point. A spotting tower was erected over the mid-point of the communication trench, and a CP and guard mount bunker dug under it. All the trenches were dug in a regular wavering curve so that a man could step around half a curve and be away from a grenade explosion. After this was done, we began slit trenches all over the compound, laid Claymore mines to protect the western side and gate, and constructed a concrete landing pad for choppers, south and west of the gate, inside of the outside wire.
All this work, which was not nearly the total work we would do, took the first week, a hard week of digging and filling sandbags, of sleeping on the ground under shelter halves, of cold rations, and lots of heavy guard duty. Thirteen men had left on med-evac choppers, ten with fevers and/or malaria, two with infected shovel cuts, and one who couldn't stand the waiting; but we were beginning to feel secure, as if hard work could keep death away, as if dying could be endured like manual labor, but Capt. Saunders set us straight.
"We have no intention," he said, "of being impregnable, because the intention would be foolish. The VC could take this Det any time they wanted to pay the price. The trick is not to be impregnable but expensive."
Some trick, but we were dug in, dug out, and halfway ready.
On the third day of the second week, the troops were still busy, raising squad tents with wooden floors, a four-foot protective wall of mud between two rows of logs on the three open sides of the lower half of the triangle, and digging bunkers for ammo, gasoline, and a guardshack command post radio room. Four rhombic antennae were being erected on Hill 538, now known, of course, as the Other Tit. A log cutting detail had gone off to the edge of the forest on the north to cut trees for the wall and the bunker roofs. I had mounted guard details for the log cutters and the antenna builders, then finished drawing up the guard roster for perimeter duty, two men in each M-60 position, two men at the west gate, a walking guard on each of the three sides, and a man in the spotting tower, day and night.
The paperwork had bored me, so I left my tent to check guard posts, then climbed up the steel spotting tower in the center of the compound. I stayed there a bit, bumming a cigarette from the kid on duty. I was trying to quit for physical and professional reasons. Morning had tried to give me a bad time about it, and about wearing my watch with the face against my wrist, and carrying a.45 automatic, and the tiger-striped camouflage coveralls I used as a uniform of the day, and the razor-sharp bayonet slung in the scabbard sewn on my right boot, and the combat harness, etc. He couldn't piss me off, though. Quite frankly, I felt above such minor emotions, minor griefs, even above the constant irritant of dysentery which I, like the rest of the Det, seemed to have caught out of the air. Like a Trojan on the walls, or a Kamikaze pilot, I felt anointed, and afraid.
As I smoked, the day became perceptibly hotter, but a fragment of morning air drifted under the hot steel roof and I stayed a moment longer. Inside the outer perimeter, children played, wives gossiped, and their soldier husbands and fathers sat in shaded places and cleaned their old Springfields. Smoke from cooking fires ascended stiff columns straight into the ashen blue sky, but sounds wafted about the compound like the odor of burning charcoaclass="underline" a soft curse and a grunt of pick into dry, rigid earth as the bunker diggers toiled; a metal squeak streaking from the Other Tit as nut and bolt strained metal to fit tightly; the clunk of an axe late after the swing or the sweeping fall of a tree from the cutters on the northern edge of the clearing. In spite of the activity, the compound, the scene, seemed essentially peaceful; perhaps because work is a peaceful occupation, whatever you're building. I was reminded of the American West, of building a fort against the hostile land, of peaceful treaty Indians camped about the stockade walls; out-riders, wood-cutters, and scouts moving out and back across the parched grass hills. And over all this, controlling each contraction of muscle in this new land, the confident, foolish idea that because man piddles in the earth with pointed sticks, because he shits in holes and covers it like a serene tomcat, because he cuts trees and replants them where he wishes, that because of these things man shall inherit the earth. That we shall be masters, inheritors with the tried and true strength of our brown arms and calloused hands and with great boldness and strength, never fearing for a moment the violent winds which might cast us like chaff across the land; nor afraid that the land itself might buckle and rip beneath our very feet and suck us into its soft hot core; nor afraid, least of all, that the aborigines who came before us can stand against us, feathers and paint and leather shields no hope against a Sharpes or a Henry. It seems our only fear might be of those who come behind us, the wave pushing behind us just as the Huns and the Vandals pushed the Visigoths into the Romans and the Romans into the sea. But we know there are none behind us, know we are the last, the best and the last of the barbarians, the conquerors, the long knives, the jolly green giants of history who move at first across the land with fire and sword, then with transistor radios and toothpaste, seeking not even greener grass, nor even movement itself, but merely senseless turds in the large bowel of history…