The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  He carefully bloused his trousers against his boots with the steel springs to keep the leeches out and stuck a plastic bottle of insect repellent into the wide rubber band circling his new green camouflage helmet.…

  Jancowitz grinned at Mellas. “Sir, I’d, uh …” He hesitated and then tapped the side of his soft camouflage bush cover.

  Mellas looked at Hamilton. “The insect repellent,” Hamilton said. “The white stands out in the bush. Makes a great target.”

  “Then, what’s the rubber band for?” Mellas asked, shoving the bottle into his pocket.

  “Beats me, sir,” Hamilton answered. “Holds the fucking helmet together, I guess.”29

  Even at the other end of the learning curve, death could still squirm its way in through the cracks and chinks. David Hackworth, one of the most highly decorated field commanders of the Vietnam War, noted the numerous ways complacency got even experienced men killed: “Many combat vets come to think they know it all and start taking shortcuts. They blow off the basics and neglect the little things that keep them alive because they get cocky or think it’s better for their men’s morale. They build a fire at dusk, smoke at night, walk on trails, don’t carry their weapons, wear mosquito repellent on ambush or patrol, don’t send out flank security on ops. Shortcuts that get you killed.”30

  Fatigue and the craving for some kind of relief were both seductive and deadly. Larry Fontana found that

  the quest for creature comforts over safe discomfort was a dangerous game to play. The gooks would booby-trap heavily traveled areas. If an old abandoned hooch was next to a roadway that is patrolled daily, stay away! If it isn’t booby-trapped, it should be.… Shortly before I left to go home, I was ordered to build a bunker for a team of medics.… I have to admit, [we] built a hell of a bunker for these guys.… Near the bunker was a small, wood-framed building with a corrugated roof on it. It was used to house supplies. After dark, the gooks fired a recoilless rifle into the firebase. The shell hit the roof of the building and made a mess of the inside.… Part of the mess were 2 dead medics who were sleeping on cots in the building. I guess they didn’t care to sleep on the dirt floor of a fortified bunker. They died for their quest for comfort in a hostile environment. To this day, I still feel no remorse for these men.31

  And, if according to the adage that war comprises long stretches of tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror, those long stretches of boredom could prove fatal. Joel Turnipseed describes how men adjusted to being hit by Scud missiles in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Persian Gulf War:

  Being bombed is boring. It was thrilling, at first, to have the Scuds start falling: when the sky flashed and the desert rumbled: when I and the other frightened Marines scattered like roaches from our tents, wearing nothing but gas masks and dog-tags and underwear.… By the second or third night of the war, the thrill of being awakened two or three or four times turned to something more like annoyance.… You’re tired. You’ve heard sirens all night long. So do you get up and run? No, you light a cigarette.… After a couple of weeks of this I didn’t even bother to get out of my cot.… When the alarms for that fourth SCUD started whirling, half the Pound ignored it.

  The bomb exploded right overhead, and the concussive effect of the explosion knocked the wind out of us. Through some pure adrenaline-charged order from our animal brain, we sped out to the shelter.…

  Hatch turned on American Forces Radio to hear the news. There was no mention of our attack, just the tragic report from the Khobar barracks, where twenty-eight Army soldiers were killed by an Iraqi Scud and a hundred more wounded.… Why didn’t they run for their bunkers? Maybe because they didn’t have time. Or maybe because war is boring. Bombing is tedious. And during war’s long drag, we all exhaust our inner resources.32

  ALL WARS ARE different, but those against insurgents share some critical strategic/tactical characteristics that determine the ways in which soldiers will die. A primary factor is the need of occupying forces to seek refuge in strongholds as some respite from the dangers of Indian country. But insurgencies cannot be suppressed from the comparative safety of compounds. The “bad guys” have to be hunted and destroyed, and the occupiers have to stick their necks out and sometimes their heads get chopped off.

  Back during the American Revolution, Lord Cornwallis chafed at the constraints imposed by a reliance on what were, in more modern parlance, “firebases”: “One maxim appears to me to be absolutely necessary for the safe and honourable conduct of this war,” he wrote to his boss, General Sir Henry Clinton, on May 26, 1781, “which is, that we should have as few posts as possible.”33 It was Cornwallis’s determination to strike out from the British firebase posts and hunt down his bad guys that led directly, and ironically, to the last post of all—the Saigon of the Revolutionary War—Yorktown.

  It might be doubted that if Captain Doug Beattie in Afghanistan in 2006 had Lord Cornwallis in mind, but he echoes the sentiment: “We had a presence Helmand-wide but our tactical bases were in the centre of towns and villages like Gereshk, Sangin and Now Zad. Movement beyond them was not easy; in fact it was downright dangerous. We had toeholds in these semi-urban centres but little or no influence beyond them. In effect these troops were prisoners in their own fortresses.”34

  In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, forays were fraught, deadly, and frustrating. Tobias Wolff’s classic Vietnam memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army (1994), gives a vivid idea of the lethality of that exposure, which apart from some technological changes was eerily reminiscent of what whittled away at Cornwallis in the Carolinas or, for that matter, the US Army in the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century:

  The enemy were local guerrillas organized in tight, village-based cadres. Occasionally they combined for an attack on one of our compounds or to ambush a convoy of trucks or boats, or even a large unit isolated in the field and grown sloppy from long periods without contact, but most of the time they worked in small teams and stayed out of sight. They blew us up with homemade mines fashioned from dud howitzer shells, or real American mines bought from our South Vietnamese allies. They dropped mortars on us at night … to kill a man or two, or inflict some wounds.… Then they hightailed it home before our fire-direction people could vector in on them, slipped into bed, and, as I imagined, laughed themselves to sleep. They booby-trapped our trucks and jeeps. They booby-trapped the trails they knew we’d take, because we always took the same trails, the ones that looked easy and kept us dry. They sniped at us. And every so often, when they felt called on to prove they were sincere guerrillas and not just farmers acting tough, they crowded a road with animals or children and shot the sentimentalists who stopped.

  We did not die by the hundreds in pitched battles. We died a man at a time, at a pace almost casual. You could sometimes begin to feel safe, and then you caught yourself and looked around, and you saw that of the people you’d known at the beginning of your tour a number were dead … And you did some nervous arithmetic.35

  Once “in-country,” the occupying soldier was exposed to a whole range of deadly weaponry, but one of the most lethal, whether it be in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, was some version of a mine. In Vietnam about 18,500 soldiers were killed by gunshot, while some 16,000 were killed by multiple-fragment wounds caused by mines, booby traps, and “other explosive devices.”36 In 1966 alone, mines and booby traps killed more than 1,000 American soldiers, representing about 25 percent of all combat deaths that year.37 In Iraq and Afghanistan, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were the single-greatest cause of coalition deaths. In Afghanistan, for example, IED fatalities in 2009 accounted for over 61 percent of all coalition KIAs.38

  The same pattern of fatalities was experienced by the Soviet army during its invasion of Afghanistan (1979–89). In the course of the whole war, the Soviets had 14,450 men die from all causes, plus another 53,700 wounded. In the early years the majority of Soviet KIAs were caused by small arms, but as time went on, shrapnel and blast casualties (mainly from mines) accounted for 2.5 t
imes more than those caused by bullets, peaking in 1981–82 at 800 for that year; these figures dropped thereafter as anti-IED measures such as reinforcing vehicles, wearing flak jackets, and riding on the tops of armored vehicles took effect. By 1984 the Soviets were losing only 100 men a year to IEDs.39

  Captain Francis J. West Jr. spent the spring and early summer of 1966 with the Ninth Marines in South Vietnam. The patchwork quilt of paddies and hedgerows around Hill 55 (where two battalions of French infantry had been wiped out in the French Indochina war) was particularly deadly. Of the Marines, West records, “The enemy they hated, the enemy they feared the most, the enemy they found hardest to combat, was not the VC; it was mines. One company of the regiment—Delta—lost ten KIA and fifty-eight WIA in five weeks. Two men were hit by small arms fire, one by a grenade. Mines inflicted all the other casualties.”40 The mines were everywhere: “There seemed to be no pattern to their emplacement,” West remembers. “They had been scattered at trail junctions, at the intersection of rice dikes, along fences, under gates. Having watched the movements of Marine patrols in this area, the enemy buried their mines where they anticipated the Marines would walk. Often they scouted the direction and path a patrol was taking and planted the mines ahead. If their patrol passed that point safely, the VC would scurry out of his hiding place, dig up his mine, and keep it for another day.”41

  Some weapons are so brilliantly malevolent that they have bounded enthusiastically from one war to the next. The Bouncing Betty mine, a horror of World War II, was also terribly feared in Vietnam. It was sublimely evil. Dr. Ronald J. Glasser remembers a conversation between Robert Kurt and his doctor, Peterson, in a hospital in Japan:

  Kurt gritted his teeth but kept on talking about a trooper who’d frozen on a pull-release bouncing betty.

  “But why didn’t you help him?” Peterson interrupted as he put down his probe.

  Kurt looked up at him, obviously offended. “How?” he said flatly.

  “Get him off it,” Peterson said, as he put on a new dressing of the wound.

  Kurt shrugged. “If we could have, we would have. Look,” he said seriously, testing his leg, stretching it out a bit on the bed, “it was a bouncing betty booby trap. They’re all pull-release: you step off it, and then ‘boom,’ the lifting charge goes off and throws the explosive charge up into the air.”

  “Couldn’t you have put something on it and let him step off it?”

  “Who you gonna get to do it? The detonator’s no bigger than a tit, and you don’t know how much pressure you need to hold on to it to keep it from going off. Some of them are really unstable. You don’t have to step off it to set it off; just shifting your weight can do it. Your foot goes first. You just have to leave them. You have to.”42

  As far as mines and booby traps were concerned, there were things that should never be done; things that got you killed:

  Bobby had always told me from when I first met him, “Don’t go through an open gate, don’t do it.” I was hopping over the fence just getting ready to say, “Don’t go over the open gate Bob.” Man, he hit that fucking gate and a shaped charge blew his ass all over the place. He was just lying there screaming, “I’m going home! I’m going home! I’m going home!”

  … The corpsman says, “You’re God damn right you’re going home.”

  He stayed awake like that.… Then he died.… He was always telling me, “Don’t walk through no open gate.” … Yeah, look who’s talking now. Poor fucker.43

  The Vietcong used frugality to fashion the infernal. The vast majority of the IEDs were made from the hundreds of tons of unexploded American ordnance available to them every month. Ninety percent were antipersonnel devices, some quite crude but nevertheless fiendishly effective, as Jerry Johnson, walking point along a trail west of Saigon, discovered.

  They would take two flat pieces of wood and put a stick on either end of it to hold them apart from each other. Then they would wrap gum foil around it on each side and run two wires to that from a battery. When you tramped on that it would complete the circuit and the booby trap would explode. We had a tank commander killed … two days before he left for R&R. [He] was walking over a piece of corrugated steel that grounded out his tank, and his tank ran over the slapstick [mine] and he was standing on an eighty-pound charge.… You couldn’t find [anything] from the waist down. Half his face was gone. That explosion was so violent that when he came back down there was pieces of him all over everything.44

  Dan Vandenberg of the Twenty-Fifth Division in Vietnam describes what it was like to trip a grenade booby trap:

  Soon, we moved, and I walked over a dike. I had gone about 30 yards when I felt something around my ankle. I knew it wasn’t a vine, and I quickly figured out it was a wire. You’ve got approximately 2 or 2½ seconds once the pin is pulled on a hand grenade before it goes off. It took about 1½ seconds to figure out what I had tripped on, which left about a second. A lot of people ask me, why didn’t you run, why didn’t you dive? First of all, you don’t know which way to run: You might run right into it; it could be anything from 2 to 4 feet away. Also, you’re using part of that second of time to let sink into your head exactly what you’ve done. My first thought was, “Aw shit, I’ve blown it now.” And for anybody out there wondering what it feels like to have a hand grenade go off at your feet, it’s comparable to someone winding up with a baseball bat and rapping you in the face. Your whole body goes numb, it hurts like hell for the first 10 seconds, and after that, you can’t move.45

  About 77 percent of deaths sustained while traveling in armored personnel carriers in Vietnam were caused by IEDs, a percentage that has increased in Iraq and Afghanistan.46 The explosive power of IEDs intensifies within the confines of a vehicle, as Tobias Wolff witnessed.

  We passed through a string of hamlets.… I drove fast to get an edge on the snipers, but snipers weren’t the problem on this road. Mines were the problem. If I ran over a touch-fused 105[mm] shell it wouldn’t make any difference how fast I was going. I’d seen a two-and-a-half-ton truck blown right off the road by one of those, just a few vehicles ahead of me in a convoy coming back from Saigon. The truck jumped like a bucking horse and landed on its side in the ditch. The rest of us stopped and hit the dirt, waiting for an ambush that never came. When we finally got up and looked in the truck there was nobody there, nothing you could think of as a person. The two Vietnamese soldiers inside had been turned to chowder by the blast coming up through the floor of the cab.47

  A Marine sergeant and his radioman tripped an IED in Vietnam; journalist Charles Anderson saw the result:

  The mine accomplished just about what the Russians who made it and the North Vietnamese who planted it had in mind. The only things left inviolate on those two human bodies and their clothing was the propriety of boots on feet, although the feet were ripped from their legs. The mine mixed trousers with calf muscles and tendons with genitals with intestines with bladders with shit with livers and spleen and kidneys and stomachs, and jammed the oozy mass upward into lungs and throats. Then it burned hands and arms and chests and faces to the texture and appearance of dried prunes. Just like it was supposed to do. What happens to human beings in mechanized warfare has absolutely no poetic or theatrical possibilities.48

  Mines and booby traps inflict not only grievous physical but also profound psychological damage—inducing Tobias Wolff’s “nervous arithmetic.” David Hackworth could see the same computation in his men:

  Most 4/39th soldiers knew that each time they took a step they risked the ugliest of wounds. A bullet makes a hole, a chunk of shrapnel may take off an arm—but a mine turns a soldier into a splattered, shrapnel-punctured basket case.

  Many troopers in the battalion had concluded that waging war consisted of crossing a field, hitting a mine, calling for a medic, patching up the wounded, getting a medevac; then moving out again and hitting another mine. They also did the math and figured out that not many of them would be lucky enough to make it through the 365
days it took to rotate home.

  “The very words ‘booby trap’ bring back the smell of blood whenever I hear them,” recalls Jim Robertson. “The damned things were so numerous, so varied, and Charley was so good at making and concealing them, that the feeling was that if you stayed in the field long enough, you were going to fall victim to a booby trap. It was just a matter of time.”

  In a firefight, the grunts knew they had a chance to fight back. If you got ambushed and you didn’t get hit in the first burst, you could get your licks in. “But with a booby trap,” Robertson remembers, “it was BANG, game over.… That was the worst—the frustration and the helplessness.”49

  It was, remembers Dan Krehbiel of the Twenty-Fifth Division, “a different nature of war, a war of booby traps, mines, watching where you walk, and having nobody to shoot back at when somebody gets hurt or blown up.” It was warfare mostly robbed of satisfying confrontation.

  We walked right into a huge, booby-trapped area. There were no enemy soldiers, no shooting. The guy in front of me stepped into a punji pit [a camouflaged pit in which sharpened stakes have been embedded—a throwback to a hunting technique of our ancient ancestors].… At the same time, three ARVN soldiers walked into a white phosphorous artillery booby trap, a big 155mm shell, and it went off and threw white phosphorous all over them and they burned—they just cooked. All three of them died.… Then somebody set off a hand grenade behind us that wounded someone.… I was all set to put my gun on automatic and wait for something to move in the bushes. I figured we were going to get overrun or something, but that was it.50

  A soldier in the US Fifth Stryker Brigade in Afghanistan echoes the frustration: “A lot of guys felt gypped. All the other units have these great stories about firefights, then here we are, we’re not getting anything. We had to sit there and just wait to get blown up.”51