365 Days by Ronald J. Glasser Page A

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.
    They learned how to pass through different kinds of danger areas, how to go through mine fields and claymores, how to cut through razor wire and dismantle trip flares. They were taught to cross any river, field, or road free or under fire, how to set up for traveling, how to camouflage. Experts were flown in from all over the States to teach them. For the first time Macabe began to feel the privilege of it all.
    Self-defense gave way to infiltration and ambush. The discipline was taught just as calmly as traversing and repelling. No great emphasis was placed on these killing techniques. They were simply taught as another tool. The important thing was to get to your mission, accomplish it, and get out again.
    The last week it snowed. They were on a patrol when it started—and for five days they pushed through four-foot drifts. Two boys were frost-bitten, but they all finished. They returned to Benning and after two days of briefing and lectures they went to Florida.
    They were issued their jungle gear at Benning, so that when they landed at Eglin Airforce Base it was already like being deployed. They got off the planes black-faced, fully dressed and armed, and went directly from the plush, semi-tropical airbase into the jungle. The airmen from the base watched with amusement as they marched past. It annoyed Macabe. It annoyed them all. It was like walking through a foreign country. “Fuck ’em,” he thought. “Simple bastards, simple fucken bastards.”
    The swamp soon undermined his pride. It was the foothills of Georgia again, only worse. They were in the jungle all the time; they patrolled in the swamps, and their base camp was in the swamps; they never got out of it. The bugs and leeches were everywhere. The men were never dry. It was incredibly hot and stinking. They slushed through the filthy water for hours, weapons at port arms to keep them dry, stopping only to pick off leaches or kill a spider. Two were bitten by snakes the first week. They slipped on sunken roots and hidden rocks and they ate C-rations when they could, eating and drinking only what they carried.
    To survive, they developed a water ecology. They learned to cut holes in their pants so that the water could drain out and how to protect each other from water bugs. The emphasis was always on the immediate. Long-range concerns and feelings were simply shoved aside or didn’t matter here. An attitude of thinking began to develop: decisions couldn’t be postponed; they had to be made right then and there. What to do now? What to do when this happens, and that? They were learning how to live with someone trying to kill them.
    For the first time they were issued M-16’s, instead of the M-14’s they’d been using. They gave up their Thompsons for the M-60’s and began carrying M-79 grenade launchers. Macabe packed claymores into his rucksack and carried shotgun rounds. The instructors began to talk about killing now, and Nam was at last brought up.
    “You never—I repeat, never—use a track that’s already there, or come back the same way you went in. The gooks will booby-trap it for sure.” The instructors put out traps for them. “Hold it, Craig. Don’t move. There, by your foot.” “Christ, Macabe, look out, will you? You tripped it. You’d be dead if you were in Nam.”
    “When you’re in Nam,” the instructor said, wiping the sweat off his face, “you don’t jump off the track—ever. Charlie will put one sniper up on a path, fire a round, down it, and wait for you to go into the bushes and just tear yourselves apart on the punji spikes and booby traps. If anything looks wrong, rocks lying the wrong way, twigs bent—anything, remember the gooks have to let each other