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The paratroopers of the Second Battalion, 327th Infantry, sometimes fought in lowland areas; however, most of our time was spent stalking North Vietnamese on the ancient game trails that weave through the jungles of the Anamese Cordillera. Geographically, these mountains lie on the Laotian border; psychologically, they seem to exist in some mystical realm. In the midst of their cloud-hidden summits, one senses the restoration of something primal. Reason, sanity, and order seem remote peculiarities of a civilization from which you have been isolated, banished , and your Christian God seems a deity out of His jurisdiction. In a way it seems appropriate that such a surreal landscape should host an event in which humans hunted other humans. It is as if, when the world was created, allowances were made for special zones, nonhomogeneous with the rest of the world, redolent with supernatural mystery, where human beings could experience the full expression of their darker side. On trails that seemed to come from nowhere and to go nowhere, we moved through the fog-shrouded forests of this reverse Shangri-la. Weighed down with sixty pounds of equipment, we would pass days of tortuous climbing with no sign of the North Vietnamese. The heat was suffocating and the terrain difficult to nearly impossible to traverse. Torrential rain fell for days, turning feet to sponge; under every leaf, leeches waited to attach themselves. Dysentery was frequent and parasite infestation certain. The sudden appearance of sandal tracks, bloody bandages, logreinforced trails, or other signs of human presence would send adrenaline rushing into the blood of the point man and his slack. The possible meaning of hesitation at the front of a moving unit was clear to all behind , and hearts would pound all down the line. Sometimes the fighting started and ended with a single burst from the point man’s m-16, but on other occasions the forest erupted in horizon- : j o h n w o l f e A Different Species of Time A D I F F E R E N T S P E C I E S O F T I M E | 1 0 3 tal firestorms of terminal rain; red and green tracers filled the air, and RPG rounds whooshing and exploding were answered by the thud of m-79 rounds. Squalls of deadly fire moving through claustrophobic open areas hacked at vegetation and flesh, splintering trees and bone; death danced through the forest among the nominated of both parties. Anyone familiar with the “flight or fight” choices offered by the survival instinct knows both can exert a compelling and irresistible force over a soldier’s actions, one primal urge sending him into shameless, panicked flight and the other launching him on an equally shameless attack, the ferocity of which often startles the attacker more than the attacked . Training, discipline, and comradeship help ensure that the latter response occurs and not the former. It is later, nauseous and shaking, that one actually comes to conscious grips with the full awfulness of combat events. The same atmosphere of quiet sacredness that inspires silent monks to choose the mountains as sights for their temples added, I think, an extra and malignant dimension to the carnage committed there. Few things in this world are as unforgiving, pitiless, ungovernable, and irrecoverable as lead and steel loosed from a weapon. The transfigurations they effect on the bodies of friend and foe alike form a permanent backdrop to all of a soldier’s future visions. While others experience intervals of silence between thoughts, a combat veteran’s intervals will be filled with rubbery Halloween mask heads housing skulls shattered into tiny shards, schemeless mutilations, and shocked, pained expressions that violent and premature death casts on a dead face. These images are war’s graffiti. They are scrawled across the veteran’s mind, defacing the silence and peace that others enjoy. At times the images may seem to fade, but an unguarded glance into the gloom is sufficient to exhume them. The possibility of being overwhelmed by such events was always one small horror away. In other wars, at such times, men probably called in desperation to their God to sustain and deliver them. In the 101st Division , we employed a secular technique of emotional first aid handed down from short-timer to cherry. If we felt ourselves at that point of saturation , we chanted the mantra, it don’t mean nothing, it don...

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