Chemistry of Fire Page 25

  Just ahead of our position, the land rose slightly. To avoid it, the men were shooting at the stars. Behind me the officers were screaming for them to get down, get their aim down, but no one was listening, and the ammunition was being harmlessly spent in the air. I watched one man direct his weapon straight down into the enemy position, but the machine-gun bullets would have had to chew their way through the soil embankment to get to their target. Instead they set the grass on fire around him, and he leaped away leaving his weapon idle in the flames.

  Every once in a while, someone would get a straight bead on the enemy position, and the red tracers would ricochet as they skipped across the undergrowth, making weird right-angle turns upward. Some even made that ka-ching sound we’ve all learned to love from cartoon warfare.

  As the flanking force moved in from the west, our firing team switched the stakes that supported the barrel and fired across at another angle. Out under the flare light and moonlight, I could see a couple of enemy vehicles—what might have been a truck and a tank—on the rise half a kilometer away.

  The firing on our flank stopped, and we moved in for a better position, shifting south and west. I could see the men on a small bluff a hundred yards away setting up the DRAGON missiles. I heard more mortar rounds popping off overhead. Now the rounds were landing closer to the enemy vehicles, and we had moved in closer ourselves, so we were beginning to feel the effects of the high-explosive detonations, the quickening of the earth beneath our feet. It felt as if it turned slightly liquid with each explosion, the way the sand does at the edge of the surf.

  I moved out into the brush with one of the claymore jumpers, helping him string out his electrical wire through the bushes. He would use the mine to defend against a possible enemy counterattack. The brown wire came off the plastic spool with the detonator already in place, and we stretched it out as far as it would go, and then he lay down on his stomach and stuck the metal legs into the sand and looked through the small gunsight on top to aim the mine the right way, making sure the side that said “Front Toward Enemy” was facing away from our position. He smelled the silver body of the mine and said, “Mmmm, I love the smell of a claymore.” I got down on my belly beside him. I leaned in and touched my nose to the plastic body and inhaled. It smelled like cherries.

  Then he slid the silver detonator into the threaded fitting on top, as if he were installing an electrical conduit for a porch light. He tightened the nut down. Then we got up off the ground and went back to our position, where he attached the clacker, as it’s called, the switch that would detonate the mine. It was called “command detonated” because he would decide when to do it. It was simple, beautiful, deadly.

  The second attack came fast and furious, with both sides firing everything they had. People were throwing hand grenades, officers were shooting flares, every man was firing his personal weapon, men on their stomachs were sending the golden coils of ammo belts ripping through machine guns, and tracers were crisscrossing the sky. The sound was not so much a sound as a storm, like the winds of Armageddon. In front of me, a man was laughing and firing 40 mike-mike grenades as fast as he could load them. He pointed the weapon back at me and said, “Hey, reporter, you wanna fire some mike-mike?” I waved at him and started to crawl out from behind the boulder where I had taken cover. But an officer grabbed me by the backpack and pulled me back. I think it was Colonel Lossius. I think he was my guardian angel. But I didn’t get to find out. Something else was about to happen, and it had my full attention before it even started.

  A sound like a gong turned me back to where the DRAGONs had been set up. A sheet of flame ten feet long went back from them, and then I saw the missile, as big as a lamppost, gliding with its ghostly tail of fire, low across the grass and scrub. I was amazed at how slowly it seemed to move. As it went, it corrected its course with small bursts of white rocket fire out of the sides of its body, like a spitting snake, pop-pop-pop, and when it found its target—one of the vehicles I had seen—it destroyed it with a clash of metal that fractured the low clouds, a dull and toneless sound as big as the sky itself, the final closing of the final door.

  I heard the claymore jumper beside me shouting, “Fire in the hole!” and I knew what was coming. I got down a little farther behind my boulder. My friend the boulder. Having helped the jumper lay the wire, I knew how close that land mine was, and although it was pointed the other way, the explosion could pick up rocks and trees and meteorites and fling them back at us. “Fire in the hole!” He repeated it three times. I saw the heads go down all along the line. The claymore commanded a lot of respect.

  When it went off, I understood why. The boulder against which I was leaning—it must have weighed as much as an old Cadillac Eldorado—leaped as the earth heaved. They had told me not to look, but that’s my job. I was momentarily blinded as the flash lit up the night. Trees were cut down by the swath of steel ball bearings. I don’t even want to think about what happened to real people in Vietnam as they approached these diabolical devices.

  Two more DRAGONs went off, spitting fire and angling slowly across the illuminated land, while mortar rounds kept crunching in ahead of us in clouds of sandy smoke. The enemy vehicles had vanished, and only the crackling of rifle and machine-gun fire remained. By and by a red flare went up—cease firing—and the men were left standing around, looking at the stores of cartridges they still had left. Some rich man had just gotten richer that night.

  “What’re we gonna do with this stuff?” the claymore jumper asked.

  “I guess we’ll just throw it in the bushes just like we always do,” another soldier said, and they both laughed, high and weak, as if they were just spent, completely shot. It was as if, having spent their ammunition—both real and spiritual—they had suddenly snapped out of the trance into which the ritual of war had put them and were returned to their earthly keeps. But the sounds of war had cracked open the moon, and a weak light, like egg white, leaked down on us from above. The spell was broken in this broken light. Dawn was coming on.

  Tolstoy asks:

  But what is war, and what is necessary for its success, and what are the laws of military society? The end and aim of war is murder; the weapons of war are espionage, and treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruin of the inhabitants, and pillage and robbery of their possession for the maintenance of the troops, deception and lies. . . . And yet this is the highest caste in society, respected by all. All rulers, except the emperor of China, wear military uniforms, and the one who has killed the greatest number of men gets the greatest reward.

  Like Immanuel Kant and many other thinkers, Tolstoy comes to the conclusion that war is evil in and of itself and that it is not possible to justify it under any circumstances. At the root of his objections are two main ones: The first is that those who fight and are killed in war, the common people, are the ones who benefit from it not at all. Again, recall that war is the world’s most profitable business and those who reap the profit are an elite and invisible few. Certainly not the boys I walked with.

  “The deluded ones are always the same eternally deluded,” Tolstoy writes in Patriotism and Christianity, “foolish working-folk, those who, with horny hands, make all these ships, forts, arsenals, barracks, cannon, steamers, harbors, piers, palaces, halls, and places with triumphal arches . . . for whom, before they can look around, there will be . . . only a damp and empty field of battle, cold, hunger, and pain; before them a murderous enemy; behind, relentless officers preventing their escape; blood, wounds, putrefying bodies, and senseless, unnecessary death.”

  Tolstoy’s second objection is to the notion of institutionalizing violence. In order for a state to wage war, the doing of violence to people must be an accepted method of achieving one’s ends. It must become codified as a learned and learnable discipline. It must be taught by professors, and it must be continuously magnified, enlarged, improved on. In Aztec culture before it was destroyed by invading Europeans, the preparation and cooking of
infant children for serving at feasts was such a discipline and was continuously magnified and improved on. And as with the meals served by Schneebaum’s friends in Peru, I have no doubt that the dishes were delicious. Cortés and company were served such a meal.

  For those interested in trying this dish, a suckling pig would probably suffice as a substitute for an actual human infant. Sear it over a hot wood fire until evenly browned, and then braise it in liquid with ancho peppers and spices. Serve with corn tortillas and vegetables such as squash.

  So the very process of thinking through and refining violence against people causes a decay of what we value in civilization. To the extent that we become an institution of violence, we become more barbaric. That’s why Tolstoy said, “Patriotism is slavery,” for patriotism is the religious frenzy into which the masses are whipped in order to send them to war, while in peacetime it enslaves us all so that we must pay more and more dearly to maintain a constant readiness for war. If we are willing to send our children to be slaughtered for nothing, why not eat babies? In the great balance of justice and morality, is it better to kill your son or daughter at six months or at age eighteen? Because that’s what war is.

  To create the state ostensibly for the sake of the individual and then to degrade and destroy the individual for the sake of the state is an intolerable contradiction. Tolstoy’s view was that it was no inadvertent contradiction at all but rather it was the hidden and true intention of all governments to ignore the individual and create states for the purpose of making war on other states.

  In other words, we cannot do violence selectively. To do it to others, we must do it to ourselves. For every evil we confer on another, an equal evil is conferred on us. To murder my enemies, I must become a murderer. That is why Saint Paul said, “Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not. . . . Recompense to no man for evil.”

  The Epistle to the Romans was no idle chatter. Evil is dangerous stuff. It is like the claymore, which sprays rocks and fire back at us, or the jumper who thought he was jumping to practice killing but actually jumped to his own death. If there is an institutionalization of violence by the state for export (i.e., war), then the concomitant is always automatically the institutionalization of violence for internal use, which is called by another name: oppression.

  W. B. Gallie, a professor of political science at Cambridge University and the author of the book Philosophers of Peace and War, writes about the lies that are necessary to conduct a war:

  But in all this falsity, the myth of the great heroic commander of genius stands head and shoulders above all other lies. . . . Tolstoy ascribes to Prince Andrei an attitude to Napoleon which must have been common to many of the ablest military men of the age: an admiration for his prowess and daring which came close to hero-worship, combined with a determination to cut him down to size in his role of national enemy. . . . Napoleon is presented, alternately, as something close to a criminal lunatic—a violent and unbridled megalomaniac dicing with hundreds and thousands of lives—and, on other pages, as a pitiable creature of circumstances or tool of fate. . . . But as a legend, as the embodiment of all the falsity of his own legend, he is presented as wholly evil. In this respect he is, in Tolstoy’s belief, at one with all other allegedly great commanders.

  One cannot help thinking of Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, and a score of others in our history books—or in even more recent times, of Reagan attacking Libya, Grenada, and Honduras, all backward, impoverished nations, and calling it honor and duty. Gallie concludes: “This suggests that most wars, and in particular great wars, have been wholly misunderstood by even the most intelligent of those who have taken part in them. And if this is so it must follow that questions of the use, the necessity, and still more the justification of wars have never been properly posed, still less satisfactorily answered.”

  It was another night of combat, and at dusk we were driven on rust-red sand trails into the black pine forests, the vast wilderness of Fort Bragg. There was still enough light to make out the tents of camouflage netting covering deuceand-a-half trucks, generators, equipment, and men scattered through the forest at the tactical operations center. We were going out this time to make an airmobile assault against a missile installation, and when I arrived, everyone was making preparations to get in quick and get out fast.

  When we heard the Black Hawk engines in the distance, men began lining up behind the chemlights at the edge of the clearing. I was to be in the third chalk, the third helicopter, and so I lined up behind a young captain and waited, watching the sky. I had been on a lot of helicopters in my life, but I was not prepared for what I saw. As the sound grew louder, the five modern, twelve-man, troop-carrying Black Hawks—long, lean, and lethal looking—materialized out of the moon-barren overcast and descended into the clearing. And their rotor blades began to scintillate with a dazzling, dancing fire.

  The sound was deafening. The windblast tore at our clothing. Each of the rotor blades, as thick as a man and forty feet long, spinning at near-supersonic velocity, lit up like a Chinese fireworks display with a fantail of white and yellow cascading sparks. Each helicopter seemed to be topped by an immense spinning flint that cast its fiery light in every direction. I was gulping air, breathing so deep and fast that I was getting dizzy. I had no idea what I was seeing. But before I knew it, all the men had run away from me, apparently unaffected by the astonishing sight of the firebirds descending in our midst.

  I forced myself to run after them and made my way beneath the whirling pinwheel of fire and into the open back door. I found a seat and belted myself in. I was crammed in with eleven other men with packs and weapons, and as the craft lifted away from the sand, the intensity of the rotor fire increased until it felt as if we were riding some strange and alien pyrotechnic creation to which the gods had lit the fuse. Only then did I notice that the door remained open because there were no doors to close.

  As we lifted to just above the trees, the fire went out, and the rotors vanished from sight. The wind was cold and violent as we skimmed the treetops at 140 knots in formation around the impact zone while the howitzers fired, “prepping the area.” When we descended into the white sand of the landing zone (LZ), that inexplicable scintillation lit up the rotors once more, and we leaped for the ground and ran away and dove into the tall grasses for cover from enemy fire. The insertion was quick, and the Black Hawks pulled up fast, blazing into the sky. I watched the fire disappear again and wondered what it could be.

  All was quiet. I popped my head up and looked around: the field appeared deserted. But then, at a signal, dozens of men stood and began running toward the tree line, and I followed them through a ditch, over the landing zone, and into the forest, where we sat and waited in silence. After an hour, we moved out into the woods to walk all night, hidden and hiding and preparing to kill each time we heard something outside of our little circle of mutual protection.

  When we were underway, I at once felt at ease, without a care in the world, and I certainly understood how I would rather do this than work in an office. I felt that I had a mission. I felt as if nothing could harm me. And after a helicopter ride like that, I felt a little like a god who had descended out of the sky on rotors of fire.

  War is considered a safeguard against the destruction of state units by others waging war. Nazi Germany and the outcome of World War II are the classic example used to illustrate that principle, which dates back to at least eighteenth-century Europe.

  But that is a lie. The aim of war is war. And once we prepare for war, we must inevitably go and fight it. To say that we prepare for war to maintain peace is like saying that a young man and a beautiful woman make a fire and have a glass of wine, light candles and play Mozart, and then crawl naked into a warm bed together on a cold winter’s night for the purpose of remaining celibate.

  The trouble with all philosophies of war is that they regard war from the point of view of those waging it, not from that of those who are the victims of it—the p
eople, the vast populations, who are killed, displaced, injured, or bereaved. Battlefields are not set aside in war as they are at Fort Bragg. To wage war is to wage war on people, in their homes. And to ignore the individual in any theory of warfare is to lose sight of the central effect of war on civilization. War does not preserve civilization. It destroys it. And war does not ennoble men. It makes them dogs.

  To choose war as a way of life simply because it is more fun and more interesting than other types of work is selfish and barbaric. But since most of the people who actually fight a war are far from selfish and barbaric, we must conclude that a state of mind is induced that allows them to act against what they know to be right. It is the state of mind that all cults must achieve in order to do their work.

  The Airborne soldiers go through Ranger school, which lasts eight weeks and is a profound induction into the cult state of mind that warfare requires. The training starts at Fort Benning, Georgia, and winds up sometimes as far away as Utah. It is the most intense, demanding, and exhausting ritual training that the US Army has. Rangers tell me that after a week or two, the aspirant begins to hallucinate—how long it takes depends on the person. The ration is two MREs every three days. “Meals ready to eat” are the modern-day equivalent of the C rations of previous wars. In other words, the Airborne Ranger trainee is slowly being starved. It is not uncommon for a man to lose twenty or thirty pounds during the fifty-eight-day course.

  He is also deprived of sleep, which is a well-known technique for mind control. Used by the North Koreans on American prisoners of war in the 1950s, sleep deprivation is used today by many religious cults. In addition to starvation and sleep deprivation, the Ranger aspirant is submitted to an escalating series of trials: forced marches, climbing sheer cliff faces dozens of stories high without ropes, being thrown into the middle of the snake- and alligator-infested swamps of Florida to find his way out. Fear of heights, fear of dark, fear of death, all combine to make one descend deeper and deeper into the self and to find whatever is there and to change it. To put it to sleep, some say. To wake it up, say others.