Chemistry of Fire Page 24

  In the case of Germany, May writes, “Hitler in Mein Kampf puts the blame entirely on the shoulders of the Jews and the Communists.” Something like that can be said about the eight years of the Reagan administration, which put the blame for all the troubles of our nation on drug dealers and used the idea that our youth was being poisoned by drugs, combined with the already rampant fear of communism, as a way to rationalize spending ever-increasing amounts of money in Latin America, to incite racial stereotypes and a national hatred of Latin Americans, and to justify building up a military presence in the Caribbean in preparation for conducting warfare in Central America. The Eighty-Second Airborne Division, as well as tactical fighter units, have already been sent to Honduras “to conduct exercises” and to make a “show of strength.” Since the United States has the largest budget in the world for military matters, there is hardly any need to show strength.

  In other words, this story was simply a lie. The soldiers I trained with at Fort Bragg understood that they were going, eventually, to war in Latin America. They were already pretending to blow those little brown creeps to kingdom come. The stereotype—like that of the “gook” in Vietnam—was already formed. I was told that the Latin Americans they were going to fight were probably dealing drugs and that they were the source of all our troubles anyway.

  But no matter what one despot or another does in any given theater of war—and no matter whether he is our despot or their despot—a central question always remains: Is war an act of will or an act of nature? Do we decide to go to war, or does war simply happen in the course of things, without our being able to stop it? Is war an upheaval of the species, as natural and neutral as a hurricane, or is it the work of evil minds?

  The greatest military thinker of the modern world, Carl von Clausewitz, failed in a lifetime of revising the same work over and over again to find the answers to those questions. His critics are still arguing about what he was trying to say. His work is taught at West Point, and it is also studied by the enemies of West Point, including those who would prove that war is altogether wrong. Calling one side the evil empire and the other side good is fallacious because, as Emmerich de Vattel points out, war is not a fight of good against evil. The very concept of the state implies the right to wage war, and therefore all states are created equal. So, too, are all wars equally good and bad. And so, too, are both sides in every war. The only difference is who wins.

  War throughout the ages has been the subtle turning of the wheel of paradox. Clausewitz’s On War was unfinished at his death. Like Einstein’s attempts to wrest a unified theory from the equations of the universe, all attempts to distill out of war a general theory have failed. In a fashion, Clausewitz wrote his book based on the man he most despised and most admired: Napoleon, who was the undisputed genius of the world in war but who wrote nothing down. It is said that Napoleon understood the elusive unified theory of war but took it to the grave with him. We are left with Clausewitz trying to understand Napoleon and all of us trying to understand Clausewitz.

  Clausewitz’s central problem is that he devoted his life to trying to make a logical structure out of something that can be made to seem logical only if you take yourself out of it and strip yourself of all moral and ethical responsibility to your fellow man. We force our children—and those soldiers I was watching practice for their own deaths and the deaths of others just like them were children—to fight and die because it’s good business. War is a business, the best business on earth if you have no morals and if you don’t care whose children you kill. Every time a bullet is fired, someone who is largely invisible to the public is made richer. Those innocents sitting uncomfortably in the C-130 practicing for death knew nothing of the real cause of war. They were parroting the propaganda. Most of these children would not even have heard of the companies they were making rich, such as United Technologies, L-3 Communications, Finmeccanica, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, and BAE Systems. So war makes perfect sense if you are selling weapons. For the United States, which has the largest military-industrial complex in the world, that eventually led to perpetual war. And yet the suspicion lingers that there is even more to it that we have not quite comprehended.

  The anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum described living with a Stone Age tribe in South America for six months. The people were lovely, playful, affectionate. They took him in and gave him the status of a family member. And one night, with no warning, they all got up and started running through the forest. At their urging, Schneebaum went with them.

  They ran and ran all through the night. Rain fell as they slogged through deep mud and across rushing rivers. They saw a nutria that would have provided good food but ignored it. Just before dawn, they came on a village of sleeping people not unlike themselves. Swiftly they entered the village and slaughtered all the men. In his book Keep the River on Your Right, Schneebaum describes the childlike glee with which they punctured the intestines of the victims with their spears, how they laughed as the gas escaped. They carried some of the bodies home, marching all day through the forest. That night, they made a feast of those they had slain.

  Was it the march—the hunger and exhaustion and the rhythmic assault of muscles on earth and earth on bone—that induced the trancelike, hallucinatory state that turned peaceful, friendly individuals into killing machines? I believe that without the march, the killing would have been unthinkable. Besides, marching to kill your enemies means that they live far away from you. If you did the same thing too close to home, it would be murder.

  Even Clausewitz recognized that, in this sense, war is more like art than anything else—a controlled transport of the mind and spirit. The truly great commander’s state of mind, said Clausewitz, is the state of mind of a great artist at the moment of creation: his rules and skills are so fully absorbed that he is completely free, behaving by second nature, with ease of movement, relaxed at the most crucial moment, where all can emerge naturally, without effort, from that dark place of universal inspiration. Clausewitz writes, “War . . . is a wonderful trinity, composed of the original violence of its elements, of the play of probabilities and chance which make it a free activity of the soul, and of its subordinate nature as a political instrument, in which respect it belongs to the province of Reason.” What Clausewitz leaves out is that war, like art, also contains an element of frenzy or ecstasy—in other words, it requires being out of one’s senses, out of one’s mind, in a state of temporary insanity, much as the artist or scientist is at the moment of creation or great discovery.

  That makes war all the more inscrutable.

  The drop zone (DZ) is an eerie place. Fort Bragg is all sand and pines and waterways that appear when it rains, then disappear again. The field is in a constant state of mock warfare, and you can never go very far without hearing the distant chattering of automatic weapons or the tin-gong sound of a big tube weapon, howitzer or mortar.

  By eight on the evening of our assault, the moon had not yet risen, but the Big Dipper was up in the western sky, and a big orange planet burst halfway up beyond the southern tree line as I walked out onto what seemed like desert but had been the floor of an ocean ten million years before. The darkness was so complete that I could see nothing before me as I struggled through the sand. Then one of the stars in the southern sky resolved itself into an artificial light, and I walked toward it, knowing that it was a turn-in point and that I’d find people there.

  Out on the vast expanse of sand in the clear air, I smelled his cigarette long before I saw him. By the time I saw him, I was almost on top of him. He was a young soldier, all wrapped in that dark green, waiting, shifting from foot to foot under the pale beacon stuck on a stalk in the sand. The jumpers would turn in their chutes to him, and he would log and count them. Then a truck would come around and take them back to be repacked. I asked him to confirm where and when the drop was going to happen, and he shrugged and pointed vaguely in the direction of the middle of the DZ, and I walked on, sinking in
the sand with every step.

  Eastward I saw a planet suddenly rise halfway up the sky. I had to watch it for a moment before I realized that I was looking at a flare. In another moment, automatic weapons ripped away, and then the heavy whoosh-thud of a howitzer peeled back the pretense of solitude for a moment before night closed once more around me. There is nothing quite like the sound of a howitzer—an enormous galvanized steel door being slammed, jamming the air all up into the valleys of those hills. Like surf, the waves of air come back when they’ve spent their energy out there.

  Far in the distance I heard the faint mechanical hammering of aircraft engines that I knew so well from years of being around them. I looked north to find the red and green navigation lights moving toward us along a line parallel with the drop zone. I ran to get under it as it came on and on. I reached the middle of the DZ just as the C-130 drew overhead.

  For some reason everything seemed to grow silent. The sky was light compared to the land, and against that shimmering, cold, feather-gray scrim, I saw the dark leviathan shape of the ship cross to the south. Without warning, a blossoming profusion of jellyfish sprayed out across the sky. Silently and swiftly they grew from black points in the sky to the swelling, round, living atoms of darkness, filling in the spaces between the stars.

  The plane was gone, and truly there was no sound at all. As I stumbled on the ocean floor, watching scores of the creatures come down around me, I knew that one would surely drift down on top of me and engulf me in the trembling petals of its mushroom flesh. I could see, as they descended in the fluid of the air, that men were dangling from them. Within a hundred feet of the ground, each man pulled the release that dropped his rucksack to dangle on a fifteen-foot lanyard, and all around me I heard the snap-clatter-swishing of the packs as they dropped and the men prepared to land.

  The first man hit with a crunch. I heard his “Oof!” and saw the gray jellyfish above him balloon and invert, dumping its bubble of air, then drift and fold and lie down quietly on the sand, as dead as an uprooted rag of seaweed. “Oh, God! I’ve got to piss!” the man hollered, and I heard the clanking of his gear as he tried to free himself of hasps and clips and webbing.

  Then all around me men were landing—first the rucksack’s crunch, then the man, hitting and rolling as best he could, encumbered as he was—and then the great weight of the parachute itself, the sea creature that had carried him there, dying in the dead sea air on the ten-million-year-old shore. They were all carrying live rounds, rockets, high explosives, claymores, grenades, and flares. I kept waiting for the explosion. It was just then that a jumper on DZ Sicily not far away was leaping to his death. I heard about it only later. But it happened while we were going out to play war that a man jumped into the path of another airplane. The propellers cut his shroud lines. He pulled his reserve chute but not soon enough to save himself. The jumpers go out at an altitude of only eight hundred feet. It does not leave much room for error.

  After a jump into enemy territory, the paratroopers run for cover, regroup, and get on the march toward their objective as quickly as possible. On this night it was an enemy defensive position about seven clicks overland to the west. Sometimes, however, it takes time to get all those jumpers rounded up out of the sand and to separate out the injured ones. So before they go into the woods, there is a period of waiting. All the paratroopers stretched out on the sand in a low area of dunes and scrub cover. Some set up defensive positions with M16s and SAW tripod weapons. Others simply lay out, relieved of the burden of parachute and rigging, and went into a meditative trance. Some call it sleep.

  Our platoon leader thought he might have broken his leg. “The god-damned jump was so well on target that I damned near landed on top of the Humvee,” he whispered, limping along. They had been aiming for the area where several vehicles were parked on the DZ. With no wind, they had hit what they were aiming for. In trying to maneuver to avoid landing on top of the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, which we used to call a jeep, the platoon leader had twisted his ankle. But he was a Ranger, and he was going on.

  A transformation takes place when you move out into the night woods for combat. The men, animated before, seemed to blend into the earth. I had been talking to one, having an ordinary conversation, but when the absolute darkness of the forest fell on us, he wandered off and simply ceased to be. The night-fighter makeup, the camouflage battle dress, the way the men moved so quietly, made them all disappear.

  The march was strenuous but not terribly so. It was simple: Put one foot in front of the other. Keep the man in front of you in sight but not too close. Don’t bunch up. The enemy can take out a lot of men with one explosion.

  The woods were a surreal thrill. My eyes played tricks on me. The road went one way, the men went the other. We crossed, then recrossed a stream. Star bearings gave way to a black canopy of trees. Sweat poured down my face and neck and back, but the air was cold. If we stopped for more than a minute, I began to freeze, and the men around me began to snore. They were like infants, constantly falling asleep.

  Getting tactical, they call it, which means sneaking up on the enemy, camouflaging yourself, being quiet. It means that if anything strange happens, everyone stops and waits until it is all sorted out and they get a signal from up front. While waiting we were as quiet as possible, which for most of the men meant sleeping. After walking all night, I was able to manage it once or twice, though it was pretty unnatural for me just to sit down in wet clothes, freezing cold, wearing packs and packages, and fall asleep in pine needles. But I did it, and when I awoke, I saw the naked, deserted forest all around me and heard a silence such as I have never heard before and saw a blackness below and a full moon above through a hole in the trees, and I knew that they had walked off and left me out there alone in the middle of these seemingly endless miles of wilderness. (What a joke: Lost another reporter, har-har.)

  I startled, sat up against the tree at my back, and heard a clank. My head spun left, and I clambered to my knees. Colonel Robert Lossius was on the other side of the tree from me, eating a piece of licorice. I wasn’t alone at all. The men had simply turned into dark lumps on the forest floor. They looked like bushes or piles of dead leaves, but they were all still there, most of them asleep. I wondered what it would feel like to be their enemy and to stumble on them accidentally and then see all of this midnight earthen splendor rise up out of the forest floor to smite you.

  Softly, I heard the whispering of the radioman somewhere ahead. We were moving out again. As we hustled out into a clearing, I could see that the moon had grown so bright looking at it was like looking through the PVS-7, the night-vision scope, which is to say that its light was like daylight but all tinged with a blue ethereal beauty, the restless energy of dreams.

  We crossed a firebreak, went down an incline, and moved across an area of plants I could not even begin to identify, lost in sucking sands strewn with gritty meteorites, some of them as big as watermelons. It looked as if we were crossing the site of an ancient asteroid war, and we stopped for a few minutes, genuflecting, and I picked up a meteorite to see if I was hallucinating, but it was sharp and metallic and real. Out in the brush, I heard a noise, and I realized how much I hoped it was our own troops and not the enemy.

  By the time we reached the first signs of human life, I was so tired that I didn’t realize it was our troops. I nearly flipped meeting men with M16s pointed at us, men who were in a small clearing in the forest on white sand setting up mortar tubes on their big round ring bases. I came to understand only after we had passed them that they were our rear support team. And with that understanding, I came to realize that they’d be firing those silver-finned rockets with the selectable fuses and the golden-colored conical noses. They’d be firing them right over our heads to get at the enemy that we were attacking. I hoped they weren’t as tired as we were.

  I also understood that if we were stopping, we were about to attack. In the distance I began to hear automatic weapons f
iring. The tumbling M16 rounds made a snapping, zinging, buzz-bomb sound chewing through the pines. A big Apache helicopter thundered overhead, tracing a path back and forth. Unsure what this meant, I asked a soldier near me what he was doing. His weary, youthful face smiled at me through unearthly swirls of camo makeup, and he said softly, “He’s killing people.” And looking at his face, I recalled that before the attack on the village in Peru, Schneebaum and the natives had all painted themselves with jungle camouflage decorations.

  The last hill was the hardest. That must be a rule of some sort, like Clausewitz’s rule about never planning anything that depends on anything else. When we reached the bunker, drenched in sweat, so tired that we were seeing double, we found a couple of men in a trench eating MREs (meals ready to eat) and listening to radio static and watching the fortified enemy position dug into a low overgrown treeless area of weeds and bramble about half a click away. We were facing south. From the west another force, similar to ours, would attack. Then we’d close in, pinching the enemy between the two. Pretty standard stuff.

  For the initial stage of the assault, the men with the SAWs, machine guns on tripods, threw themselves facedown on the ridgeline and set up their weapons. Soon the mortars began from behind us, and the offensive line opened up. We carried ear protection—little foam plugs—but I had dropped mine in the forest, so the wall of sound hit me and creased my skull between my eyes where a headache had been brewing for the last few hours. A white flare went up and illuminated the scene in its dancing candlelight, while red tracer rounds burned in steady lines from our position straight out into the sky.