365 Days (8 page)

“Before I got here I used to think I knew what was what,” Macabe said one day as he sat using his bayonet to peel the mud off his boots. “I’ll tell you something. I’ve talked to ’em, and they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. It’s their way of life, I guess. I’ve never lived in a ghetto.”

“Well,” his fellow officer said, “something ought to be done. Ghettos or no, they’re in the United States Army now.”

“I don’t know,” Macabe said. “Maybe you have to pay a price if you want people to jump out of airplanes.”

The next day they began jump training: the 34-foot tower; the 250-foot tower; water landings; tree landings; high-tension wire evasion. And for each there was that one last moment when alone he had to take that one last step. For Macabe, each last step was a struggle with fear. Each survival brought with it an increased sense of well-being, a sense of power restrained only by what had yet to be done.

There was comfort, too, in helping others and sharing and being helped himself.

Enlisted men and officers—they watched each other suit up, checked each other’s gear, made sure there was nothing too sharp, nothing packed wrong. A comradeship that a few months ago Macabe would have sneered at helped to sustain him right up to the doorway of his first jump. Everyone, even the loudest and most obnoxious of the crazies, felt it. For days the tension grew. Like a wind out of the future it blew into everything they did, everything they thought. There had been injuries off the towers. Now, though, it was not simply a matter of a pulled muscle or a sprained ankle; it was a matter of dying—of falling forever.

The morning of the first jump no one ate, no one even talked. Macabe tried to shake off his fear. Like a child mumbling a lesson he repeated to himself over and over: “I’m trained, I’m ready, I’m fit. They wouldn’t send me up if they didn’t think I was ready. I’m trained, I’m ready, I’m fit.” He didn’t care who heard him, nor did anyone care what he said. He was fighting to keep from backing out. It made everything else that had ever bothered him—exams, girls, people—seem stupid and unimportant.

Tight-lipped, their fear out in the open, they helped each other put on their gear, silently, with a solemnity that was almost suffocating. For the first time in weeks no one joked. Everyone just stood there in the barracks strapping in his doubt, grimly getting ready. Full gear: one hundred and twenty pounds of added weight. Two chutes, front and back. Equipment packs slung between their legs, weapons, webb gear, entrenching hooks, jump helmets—they strapped in their terror until hardly able to move they shuffled out of the barracks to the flight line. It was a hot, dazzling day, and soon every one of them was soaked with sweat. Waiting near the transports, they sat along the runway back to back, resting against each other, their hands folded nervously across the tops of their front packs. Macabe found himself trying to look at the planes through the shifting spectrum of his own sweat. He closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing.

“How you feel, man?”

“Scared.”

“Me too.”

“Phew!”

“Long way down—huh, man.”

They had to be lifted into the planes. Sitting down, pushed together, they waited for the jump master to pull himself into the plane.

Feet braced in the doorway, the jump master was suddenly there. “Scared!” he yelled at them. There was a moment of stunned silence and then, “Airborne!” they screamed back. Macabe screamed as loud as he could. The very effort was comforting.

The jump doors slammed shut, and locked in they began rolling jerkily down the runway. Macabe pressed his back up against the bulkhead, listening past his nervousness to the sound of the engines. The plane picked up speed, and the jerkiness increased, pitching them from side to side, like dolls on a rack. Then they were airborne. The plane lifted sharply. Even while they were climbing, the jump master unexpectedly opened the doors. Dazzled by the sudden light they stared terrified out the open back of the plane, numbly watching the bits of cloud swirling past the open doorway. The jump master kept the door open. Macabe, despite the terror in his guts, was drawn again and again to look at the sky. He had never seen it so close, so huge.

Thirty minutes later the jump master, hanging on to the pitching plane, yelled over the noise: “Stand up!”

No one moved.

“What are you?” he yelled, his face contorted with the effort. “WHAT ARE YOU?”

“AIRBORNE!” they yelled back.

“Stand up! Hook up!”

Hooking their clips into the overhead line, they pressed close together, shuffling their feet, stomping harder and harder until the whole plane was vibrating under them as they edged forward, until they were packed so tight it was difficult to breathe. Macabe rested his cheek against the pack of the trooper in front of him. As they pushed closer to the doorway he could hear the engines and the wind whistling past the opening. The jump master grabbed on to the door jambs and stuck his head out into the 120-knot wind. It tore at his face, but he remained there until he was satisfied, then turned back to the rows of stomping troopers and shouted something, but his words were lost in the wind. The plane slowed a bit as the pilot cut the inboards.

“Equipment check,” he yelled over the noise.

“30-OK; 29-OK; 28-OK...” They were packed in so tight that when the light switched from red to green there was no place to go but out.

“Go, go, go. Go—go, go, go, go...” Macabe felt he was not so much moving toward the hatchway as being propelled there. The plane was bouncing now, making it tough to keep his balance. Ahead of him, they were leaping, twirling out of the doorway. “Go, go, go, go, go...”

Terrified, Macabe suddenly found himself even with the screaming sergeant. A great shove, and he was gone—hurtling out into the sky—a tiny brown stick twisting through all that brilliance.

Afterwards he heard that the fifth time was a bit easier.

Somewhere before the end of jump school, between the third and the last jump, he decided to go on to Ranger training. There was a poster in the barracks: a tough, good-looking soldier, framed against a yellow-red background of exploding shells, grim, sleeves rolled up, an M-16 held high in one hand, a Ranger tab on his left shoulder. Across the whole thing in big block letters were the words: RANGER TRAINING MAKES A GOOD SOLDIER BETTER. Macabe saw it every day. Maybe, he thought, maybe, just to do it right, he’d go, and finally two weeks before the end of jump school his decision was made. A fifth of the class went with him.

They weren’t given much time between Jump School and Ranger training at Fort Benning, but there wasn’t much time to give. The Tet offensive had finally been stopped, and while the Army called the American defense a success of sorts, it was, even to the most myopic general, obviously a costly one. In the two months that it had taken to stop the VC, 20,000 Americans had been killed or wounded. Whole units had become inoperational. Others were running at one-half to three-fourths strength. There weren’t enough first and second lieutenants to go around; sergeants were running companies, and corporals platoons.

Three days didn’t even give him time to relax. Later, all he could remember about his trip home was that everything seemed so easy there, so fat, and so very dull.

“Tomorrow morning, gentlemen, we will be up at zero three-thirty. We will begin the day by running one full mile.” What’s all the fuss, Macabe thought; they’d run six miles at a time at Airborne school.

They woke up at 3:30 in fatigues and jump boots. With 40-pound field packs on their backs, they lined up near the half-mile track of Fort Benning’s Jump School.

“Gentlemen,” the instructor said, “we shall now run one mile—in twelve minutes.” It took a moment for Macabe to realize what he was hearing. The six miles at Bragg had been a rather leisurely affair. A twelve-minute mile in full gear would almost have to be a sprint. “Tomorrow, we shall run a mile and a quarter; the day after that, a mile and a half, until you are running four miles in twenty-four minutes. Fall out!”

Everything from then on was timed—the low crawl, the parallel ladders, the run, the dodge and jump—everything. Macabe had come to Benning confident that he was in shape, but they were pushing him right from the beginning. “What’s wrong, soldier, don’t you want to be a Ranger?” He pushed, and still it was, “Come on, sonny, do it again.” There was almost one instructor per man, and he was always there over you, pushing, shouting, yelling. Already lean, Macabe could feel himself getting leaner.

“You look a little tired, mister, want to rest?”

“Dragging there, huh? You don’t want to be a Ranger, do you? Not if you move like that.” Through mud and water, through the woods, carrying forty-pound ammunition cans—and each other.

“Now get your ass moving, or back to mother.”

“Go back and do that again—right!”

During those first weeks at Benning, exercise became more than just PT. It took on the aspects of combat, of survival. Exhausted, they were pushed through miles of mud and water under full gear, always under full gear. They jumped blindfolded off three-meter boards, crawled for hundreds of yards, got up and did it again, and all the time they were getting less and less sleep and meeting grueling inspections. And all the time there were forced marches under full gear.

“The first few hours of sleep are the only ones you need. They’re the deepest ones. The rest are just for dreaming. Now fall out!” They went to bed at one and two and got up at three and four. There was no heat in the barracks, and after a while it didn’t matter. Everything was always done flat out, rapelling down freezing cliffs, log ladders, dragging forty-pound ammunition cans through the mud, going up rocky, forty-degree slopes. An incredible numbness began to take hold of them all; Macabe drank his morning coffee while he was still in line so that he could warm his hands. Then it would begin again.

He finished drills without even remembering what he had done, pulled himself through another mile without thinking of the mile ahead. In a world removed from anything he could remember, he began losing track of days, then hours. A strange, sullen kind of rebellion began to develop. Exhausted, his humor gone, he began glaring back at the screaming instructors. Others quit; they gave up or just said “Fuck it” and went away. Rebellion would have broken out, not only with him, but with the other survivors as well; a little more pushing, another unnecessary march, just one more abuse would have done it. But just when rebellion was taking over, the instructors, as if on cue, suddenly backed off, and it was over. The troops were called out and told to get their gear together and to get into the two-and-a-half-ton trucks.

For a month they moved out, living in the cold wet foothills of Georgia. There were snug, warm Quonset huts for the instructors, but for Macabe and the others there were only poncho liners and tarpaulins. The rain, cutting through the bushes, froze on them. They woke up in the morning shivering, as cold as they’d been when they’d managed to fall asleep. Moving along vague, slippery paths, they went out on patrols. Upper respiratory infections became pneumonias, pneumonias became pleurisies. The sick and the weak passed out. The rest, gulping penicillin pills, went on—pushing through the bush.

They stayed out patrolling four or five days at a time. The instructors, closed-mouth and seemingly indifferent, went along, but offered no help. The Georgia hills were at best difficult. In places, though, they were plainly uninhabitable, with tangles of second growth as thick as any forest anywhere. Macabe had never seen anything like it. There were times when he stood there, freezing, the rain blurring his vision, his fatigues soaked, looking into a wall of bushes and veins, with no place even to begin. They pushed through for days. Two weeks out, the patrol got lost and stayed in the field with no food for an extra thirty-one hours. When they got back, their instructor, who had been with them the entire time, failed the patrol leader and sent them out again that same afternoon.

For weeks they walked through those hills—blank-faced—with their weapons, carrying only what they needed, learning, despite the discomfort or because of it, where to put their feet, how to conserve their strength, what path to pick, how to follow a map. They got used to going for days with only ten-minute naps. There were no concessions for the weather, the land, or the men, but on night maneuvers those troopers classified as weak swimmers were allowed to put two pieces of luminescent tape on the back of their caps instead of one.

All the time the class grew smaller. You could quit any time. Just walk away. Once on patrol, though, all the options were gone. In a world that had once been full of possibilities there was only one left—finishing. For those who stayed, a certain pride and comradeship grew. Not the group kind at jump school, but an individual respect and reliance. There weren’t enough troops there to hold any one man up, and only one trooper could bring the whole thing down on everyone else’s head. So they moved carefully through the Georgia hills, five-, six-man patrols, watching each other and learning each other’s weaknesses and strengths, supporting where they could, helping if they had to.

They finished their patrolling techniques with a four-day sweep that ended up taking them into a windswept canyon where, frozen and wet, they edged themselves across slippery planks hanging sixty feet above rock-filled river beds. Two left after that, but even they had to cross the canyon to get out. Macabe felt like some kind of survivor. The future—any future—no longer seemed so worrisome.

After that last patrol the class was taken back to Benning. Macabe sat, hunched over in the back of the truck, grimly watching the hills recede. Climbing down at Benning, they were given six hours to clean up, get a steak, and get back to go to the mountains. Most went to town, but Macabe stayed by himself. He took a long, hot shower and went off to eat alone.

In the mountains, they camped high up where it was still winter, despite the fact that it was already almost April in the valleys. There were large patches of snow on the ground, and all the night temperatures were below freezing. The emphasis was not so much on working, as it was on learning the mountains. After Benning and the hills, it was almost leisurely. It was a sort of graduate school. There were field seminars on techniques, situations, execution, on administration logistics, command and signal, with the class standing around in their parkas, cradling their weapons while they listened. They learned how to repel down a cliff and advance, how to use grapples and pitons—in short, how to function in the mountains.