The Last Full Measure (52 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
IF THE OCCUPYING
armies lack tactical preparedness, they invariably have the advantages of the hardware their wealth provides, and so the default response tends to be to play that ace card—weapons superiority, in particular artillery and air-delivered devastation. Given the sheer volume of firepower available to the occupying forces, insurgent soldiers will have a much greater chance of being killed by artillery and air-delivered bombs and rockets than by small arms. Ta Quang Thinh, a medic with the North Vietnamese army, remembers: “Most of the wounds I treated were caused by artillery shells. Bombing also caused many shrapnel wounds and concussions.”
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The United States dropped three times as many bombs during the Vietnam War as it had during the whole of World War II. In 1968–69 alone it delivered one and a half times as many as the total dropped on Germany.
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A reliance on overwhelming air and artillery superiority was also the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. Captain Doug Beattie was astounded at the power of air support he could call in during his fight with Taliban insurgents in Garmsir in Helmand Province: Apache helicopter gunships (“the real battle winners”); close
ground support A-10 Thunderbolts (“Warthogs”) armed with a massive seven-barrel Gatling gun capable of firing up to four thousand 30-millimeter shells per minute; F-18 fighter-bombers firing an M-61 Vulcan Gatling gun as well as delivering air-to-ground missiles and rockets; and the huge B-1 bombers with their massive GPS-guided payloads. Beattie used them all, the B-1’s in particular. “The sight was awesome. It reminded me of the old footage I had seen from Vietnam, where the US pilots tried to carpet bomb the Vietcong into submission. This was far short of what happened in the 1960s, but gave some insight into the sheer scale of the destructive firepower available to us in Afghanistan.”
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Within minutes though, Beattie records, the insurgents had returned to the fight with renewed vigor: “The small-arms fire and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] being directed towards us had now been joined by mortar rounds … the enemy was attacking us from at least three sides.”
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The beleaguered Beattie was reliving another lesson of Vietnam (and, indeed, of so many attacks in modern warfare, be it World War I or the amphibious assaults in the Pacific during World War II)—humongous amounts of high explosive do not always have the desired suppressive effect. The enemy survives, like some backstreet brat tough enough to take his licks and come back to whack the rich kid. Vietnamese insurgent Tran Thi Gung, the only woman in her unit, believed that “the Americans lost many people because they were applying conventional tactics against our ambushes and tunnels. Their shells and bombs were extremely powerful and sometimes they killed people in the tunnels, but it didn’t happen as often as you might think.… ‘A stork can’t shit into a bottle.’ ”
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Or as S. L. A. Marshall put it, referring to Vietnam (but applicable also to Iraq and Afghanistan): “Elephant guns are used to bang away at rabbits.”
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CONVENTIONAL TROOPS FIGHTING
an insurgency war often die because they cannot adapt quickly enough. “It will never cease to amaze me,” wrote GI Tom McCabe as he recovered from wounds in a hospital in Vietnam, “how unorthodox this war seems compared to how I imagined it. There are no set lines of battle & it is usually over as fast as it starts.”
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When the unprepared and unsuspecting soldier is transposed to an alien environment, so many things can trip him into the grave. This was especially true in Vietnam, where the US Army was largely composed of draftees (the Marine Corps, in contrast, would only accept volunteers). In Iraq and Afghanistan, where the challenges, both tactical and cultural, were equally great, the troops were professionals by choice, with, one presumes, their military compass needle pointing north.
The tour of duty for most US Army infantrymen in Vietnam was one year. As the war progressed, draftees accounted for a higher proportion of the soldiery, and not surprisingly, their risk of being killed early in their tours was significant. The Army lost 43 percent of all its killed in actions in the first three months of their service; the Marines lost 33.8 percent. American combat troops were twice as likely to be killed in the first half of their tour as in the second.
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For FNGs (fucking new guys), like FNGs in every war, the learning curve could be tragically steep.
A vet recalls after the war trying to warn a “kid named Donald who wasn’t in-country even three months” that he should keep his head down and eyes open because snipers were active.
Donald took his time and was laughing.… Donald sits up facing away from the outside of the perimeter. As I was telling him to keep his eyes open, all of a sudden there’s this pow!
The bullet went through Donald’s upper shoulder [and] came out his chest.… When it hit the kid he didn’t die
right away. His guts were hanging out his mouth and his nose. He like coughed them up when he was shot.… I didn’t really have a chance to be working with him, to teach him how to stay alive, because by the time he came, we was on the run constantly. He didn’t learn how to do what you told him instantly, when he was told to do it.
He looked at me and all I could see were the tears in his eyes. It was like he was saying, “I’m alive, but what do I do? I’m dying.”
I debated whether I should put a bullet in his head and take him out of his misery. For some reason I couldn’t do it. I looked at him, he was a young kid. He was seventeen.
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Some vets, however, felt anything but protective toward FNGs, as the filmmaker Oliver Stone remembers:
I was totally anonymous, just a guy who didn’t talk too much and tried to learn things as fast as I could. They [the vets] didn’t know your fucking first name.… I tried not to get too noticed. Just did my job and shut up. Don’t get picked on. I was pretty good at that because some of the other new guys were really irritating to them and believe me, when you were a new guy they would kill you. They don’t really care about you, because you’re an FNG. They’d put you up on point all the time. If you don’t know what you’re doing you’re dead. And if they really wanted to fuck with you, they’d put you on an LP [listening post]. which is as spooky as hell because you’re only two people outside the perimeter.
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There were so many things to learn. In themselves they seemed trivial, but the trivial could get a newbie killed. Karl Marlantes,
in his fine Vietnam War novel
Matterhorn
(2010), which is richly informed by his own combat experience, describes the preparations for combat of a newly minted junior officer:
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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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