365 Days (7 page)

The morning before Macabe destroyed the village, a squad sweeping through the village area found the imprints of mortar tubes 500 meters from the village. The Old Man asked for clearance to hit the compound, but was told that unless they were receiving direct fire, they were to leave it alone. That evening he told Macabe that on the first round that came in from anywhere—anywhere—he was to blow the village off the face of the map.

Before it got dark, Macabe plotted the village’s coordinates and pasted them on the front of his radio. A little after midnight, they took a single sniper round. The bullet cracked across the lager and was gone. While troopers turned over in the mud and tried to get back to sleep, Macabe, shaking himself awake, climbed up on his track. In the silence, he picked up the horn and, staring out into the black, cloudless night, called in an illumination round. Fifteen seconds later it came whistling in over his head, splattering the paddies into a dazzling, metallic silver. The star shell drifted gently in the air, and swung slowly back and forth above the village. With the radio crackling in the heavy air, Macabe waited a while to make sure the star shell was working, then pressed the button.

“69/51 fire mission, over.”

“69 fire mission, out.”

He checked the coordinates and then looked back at the village.

“51 D.T. 106 direction 0600; shell H and E, enemy visible; prox 800 meters, over.”

“51/69 corrective, shell WP, over.”

“69/51,” he said calmly; “shoot, over.”

“51 shoot, out.”

The first rounds came roaring in over the lager. Suddenly, with a reddish roar, the whole left side of the compound lifted up.

“69/51, right 50, add 100; shell H and E; request zone fire, three quadrant, 3 mills, battery 2, over.”

The radio crackled again with the corrective read back, and a minute later a second salvo came roaring in. The center of the village was suddenly gone. Hundreds of square meters of ground were being thrown into the air, tumbling over, twisting, in a conflagration of noise and fire. Far away he could see tiny figures running out of what was left of the village.

“69/51 mixed shell H and E and WP. Air burst—20 meters.”

White hot steel and phosphorous slammed down into the ground, taking everything and everyone with it.

When it was over, Macabe’s RTO patted him on the back. He put away his grids. This was not his kind of war; he would rather have been on his own, close up without all this noise and confusion. With the illumination round fading in front of him into a soft yellow green, he picked up his M-16 from the top of the track, climbed down from his APC, and began walking around the lager, checking the perimeter defenses.

He walked slowly past the great hulking thirty- and forty-ton shapes. Walking up alongside a tank he stopped, put his hand on it, and looked out at the razor wire. The steel, grimy from the mud, was still warm from the day’s sun. Drawing his hand thoughtfully along the armor, he walked on past the tracks and stood quietly near the driver’s hatch, the cannon reaching out silently above his head. Slinging his weapon, he took his hand off the armor and wiped it clean. He was still surprised—even after two weeks—at having been assigned as a forward observer to a mechanized unit. Even with a primary MOS of an artillery officer, he hadn’t expected it. He had gone into artillery during ROTC because he wanted to be part of a combat arm, and artillery was the only one the school offered. He thought he’d left artillery behind him at Fort Sill. He had complained, but no one at the 90th Replacement would listen. “We don’t need Rangers,” they said. “We need forward observers.”

It was not an uncommon occurrence in Nam; Rangers are dispersed through the Army. There are no Ranger units as such. The Army doesn’t like elite troops; they’ve always felt them to be more trouble than they were worth. The training, though, is good, so the Pentagon offers it, but then disperses the men in different units, officially to act as leavening for the rest of the Army, though unofficially to keep these highly trained elite men from getting together and feeling special.

Macabe was disappointed. He would have liked to use what he had learned. It was not just a romantic notion; Florida had killed the last of his fantasies. What advanced infantry training, Fort Sill, jump school, and Fort Benning hadn’t done, the swamps had.

The day after graduation from college, Macabe was out of ROTC and on active duty, on his way to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where the Army was sending him to learn more about artillery. He felt he was going as an interested observer rather than as a second lieutenant. At first he kept a little notebook, but after a while he gave it up, consoling himself that what he couldn’t remember later wouldn’t be worth writing down now.

At Fort Sill his first impression—one that never quite left him—was how big it was: not only Fort Sill but the Army itself. Sill was a country within a country. But it was more than the sheer physical size that affected him; it was the way the Army sat there, reaching out across the whole country, grabbing everyone and pulling people into it without the slightest concern for what they were, what they wanted to be, or what they did. Those first few days, watching it function, unique and insular, saluting and being saluted, he marveled at how something that big and complex, something affecting so many people’s lives, could have been there all along, without his even knowing it. It was difficult to get used to, and if the cadre hadn’t been so serious about it all, the regimentation and the foolishly exacting concerns would have been laughable. But it was business, serious business, and they got right to it, quickly, with little humor.

“OK,” the instructor said, “you are officers. It is our job here at Fort Sill to make you artillery officers, so we shall start at the beginning.”

Survey, phone communication, laying the base piece, laying the battery, setting up the FDC, setting up the exec post, registering the guns, grids, firing from fixed points, scales, tables, logarithms, trigonometry—it went on every day: lectures, tests, discussions, reviews.

“Gentlemen,” the Major said, standing in front of the demonstration table until the class was completely quiet, “there are four kinds of fuses. Point detonating: it will,” he said, pointing to the first cone-shaped tube in front of him, “detonate on contact, though the pressure necessary for that detonation can be varied. Timed”—he pointed to the second—“the times can be changed—two seconds out of the barrel, five seconds. Delayed”—he picked up the third—“if the leg units are pushing the enemy, and they’re turning but don’t have a blocking force on the flanks, you can lay shells with these fuses into the flanking areas. These time fuses can be used as an instant mine field, any delay you want. This one,” he said, pointing toward the fourth, “this is the beauty—variable time. It is radar-controlled. On its way down, impulses are sent out from the detonator, and the time it takes these impulses to get back to the falling shell is measured and computed, and when the time span is equal to whatever height you’ve set, it will detonate.”

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.