Not Yet

I never knew there were so many shades of white until we got to Alaska for the training exercise in November of '74. I thought Alaska had trees and mountains, but the only trees we saw were scrawny little things, and the only mountains were on the horizon.

There were forty"'five of us plodding across the frozen white waste that morning. We'd jumped in out of North Carolina into an Arctic storm two weeks before, and had another week of frozen hell to go. The sun was just peeking over the horizon to the south, even though it was nearly eight. The helicopters had dropped us off two hours before, and were to pick us up six hours later.

Nobody remembered who first heard the "' shush "' shush "' shush "' the unmistakable sound of mortar shells, and no one later recalled who'd shouted first.

INCOMING!!!

Some guys were already diving for the ground when they hit. One shell came down between the point and the front of the platoon, another in the rear, and one on each flank. The 11"'Charlies couldn't have straddled a target better if they'd tried.

BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM!

The fuses were set at super"'quick so they went off right on the crust of the snow, with a maximum of fragmentation effect.

"Not yet."

What?

First thing I remember after the explosions, I was face down in the snow and I felt like I'd been kicked in the back. Next I knew there was a whole lot of hollering.

"CEASE FIRE CEASE FIRE," Lieutenant Bill hollered uselessly into his radio mike. His set was on the company frequency. Mine was on Range Command's. He was one of those lucky guys who looked like a little kid and would probably die an old man with a boy's face.

I got to my feet and shucked my ruck 'cause it felt hot. Radio parts scattered all over when it fell. The PRC"'77 was designed for a lot of abuse but couldn't get hit with a four"'deuce mortar fragment at ten meters and still work. But it stopped that frag from killing me. At least it didn't die for nothing.

"Raise Range Command," the lieutenant yelled at Owens, his moon"'faced RTO.

"Yassuh," Owens replied in his deep Alabama accent, his voice shaking with cold and fear.

"Hell, raise anybody," Sergeant Smith shouted. Platoon Sergeant Smith did two tours in the Southeast Asia Games, and had a little more self"'control than most of us just then. Eight of our nine NCOs had seen some firefights.

There was a few guys just standing around with dumb looks on their faces, watching. There were a lot lying in the snow, a lot bleeding.

Those of us that could still do anything started shuffling around the AO looking for casualties. Doc Tippie, our Medic, had found his first patient, Randy Buhler, a former machinist from Albany. Buhler was unconscious, a fragment having torn him open from knee to sternum. Doc had bandages, aspirin and iodine to treat him with.

Steve Acosta was screaming. A round had landed practically on top of him, ripping off one arm and the best part of a leg. Juan Morquetcho held Acosta down while he flopped around, blood splattering all over the multi"'white snow. Steve was a big lumberjack from California, and Juan was just a little squirt from southern Florida.

Up by the point Sergeant Morenzi tied a tourniquet to Dave Palmer's leg. Palmer was a skinny, goofy looking guy from Queens. Now his left leg was gone just below the knee, his right foot was mangled, and he had fragments in most of his lower body. Palmer was our platoon sniper and alternate RTO. Except for a strained back he should've been carrying my radio. Morenzi was a quiet, unassuming NCO and our weapons squad leader. He tried singing but spat out some blood through a hole in his cheek and gave it up.

Ernie Nash was in the middle of the platoon, an amiable machine"'gunner just married a week before we came to Alaska. He was from Ohio and had been my roommate before he got married, though we never got along too well. He had fragments through both lungs and was spitting frothy blood out on his parka. He didn't say anything, but he had a real strange smile in his face.

Ray Noller, second squad fire team leader from somewhere in Minnesota, was dead with most of his head missing. So was Chris Nenning from Las Vegas. Nenning had caught a single frag in his chest that bored through and buried itself in his rucksack. Thirty"'one guys had wounds of some kind, six of them what Doc called serious. That left twelve that could actually do something.

Owens tried and tried to get contact with the outside world. He built a bipole antenna and chopped a hole in the ice (six feet down to solid earth) to make a better ground, but nothing worked.

We wouldn't be missed for at least another six hours, we figured. Doc said that'd be too late for at least three of us.

"Well, they'll start looking for us," somebody said.

"Look around," McGrath, our Alaska State Guard guide told us. "Can you see the horizon?"

We looked and looked but we couldn't. Sky and earth had merged in the same multi"'hued white mass.

"Whiteout," McGrath declared. He tightened a bandage on his knee. "Nobody'll fly in it. Even if we raise somebody there'll be no medevac. Do we even really know where we are?"

"Sure," the lieutenant pointed out on his map. "Right here."

McGrath didn't even look at it. "If we got hit by mortars then we'd be at least three clicks south of where we're supposed to be. We're too close to the range, so we're not where we should be. They may not even know where to look once they start."

The lieutenant studied the map for no evident purpose. Without visible landmarks for orientation it might as well have been a map of the Moon for all the good it did us.

The lieutenant finally said, "I've got two dead and thirty"'one other casualties now and by the time the weather lifts I could have forty"'five dead. We have to do something."

"We can send a detail due west to the road," McGrath said. "It runs the length of the Fort's western boundary. They hit the road and turn north or south and they'll either find the Main Fort area or the State Guard post."

Somebody did the math and figured we could spare four guys to walk the escape azimuth to the road and find help. The rest would dig shelters, keep watch, and try to keep the rest alive. Guess who got nominated to walk?

We left two of our rucks and all our weapons behind. We all had a compass, water and rations and a flashlight. And we had about six hours to hump about forty clicks or the rest of the platoon would probably freeze to death.

Al Mock led off, paced out a hundred meters on a compass bearing and stopped. Stu Wainwright followed him, went a hundred meters beyond Mock and stopped. I followed Wainwright, went a hundred meters beyond and stopped. Phil Jacoby followed me, went a hundred meters out, and stopped.

We repeated this, moving last to first and following the compass bearing, again and again and again. With one man on pace, like normal land"'navigation, our course would tend to swerve wildly on the slippery, treacherous ground, especially since there were no landmarks. Two guys on"'line would still bend. Three might tend to veer around the center. But four guys could move across that featureless desert forever as long as they all kept lining up on all three points behind whenever they stopped.

The wind whipped up. Ice blew into my face. My upper lip had long before stopped feeling anything. My eyes started to hurt, my hands were numb, and my feet were a strange mixture of frozen and blister"'painful. My teeth chattered and my chin started to ice up under the snow mask. A rime of ice formed under my nose.

And the wind picked us up off our feet from time to time because our parka skirts acted like sails, adding injury to injury with painful falls. With the wind we were falling down about once every hundred yards.

Old soldiers talk about the wind in Germany and Korea. They call it the Hawk 'cause it screams in your ears as the wax freezes.

I heard it scream, all right. It was saying: "You fool! What are you doing out here? Yoooooou foooool..."

The tundra is a weird place to walk because the surface is illusory. What looks solid can really be soft, what looks rough may be glare ice. I'd set a foot down, try my weight, get about halfway up and BANG! My elbows and knees started to bleed before I was out of sight of the platoon. I strained my groin with every slip, and every time I broke through the ice. In time I stopped trying not to fall and found it was a little less painful.

After a while we remembered that this really WAS a desert and we needed a lot of water. So every time we completed a cycle we'd take a swallow of water. The stuff was bitter on the already-cold mouth, even painful, but those double"'insulated Arctic canteens kept it wet. Best piece of equipment the Army ever bought, in my estimation.

The worst was those damn Arctic boots. Some nitwit thought that Arctic boots should be made out of solid rubber, and he sold the notion to some other nitwit in the Army. To top it all off the hammerheads added an air bladder around the boots. Then they gave us the damn things. They're probably just great if you're standing in one place or walking a sentry beat, but for light infantry humping across Arctic waste they're the worst possible footgear.

When you walk you feet sweat. When you walk a lot your feet sweat a lot. When you're Infantry on the hump your feet sweat like Niagara Falls. And guess what happens to all that sweat when it's thiry below outside? You guessed it "'"' it freezes. And so do your feet, socks, long underwear, pants liners, pants and pants overcovers when the sweat wicks up. After a few hours of this you're carrying an extra ten pounds of frozen sweat on your legs that if you were wearing normal, rational footgear would just evaporate. So we kept humping with frozen legs, four hundred meters at a time. It was OK, though. After a few hours we couldn't feel our feet, anyway.

I had a kind of personal odometer at the time. After so many clicks I got a pain in my knees, and after so many more it radiated into the hips, then into the gut. Out there I was so damn cold I'm not sure I was even thinking about it. I just hurt all over.

It was long past dark when Wainwright found a marker. He waved at us to come up to him when he found it. Up there they've got a most marvelous system. Signposts and mile markers up to twenty feet high with little strobe lights on 'em.

We'd been marching for hours, but we couldn't think about time. It had long before stopped having any meaning. Our lives had become only shuffling, cold pain. The brain starts to act funny when you hurt that much. It starts to decide stuff for you, and it decides that breathing is important but digestion is not. Funny thing. Our guts were as hard as bowling balls with all that water in 'em.

"South to Main Fort," I suggested. Without discussion we took a bead on the next signpost down. We marched together since we had markers to lead us. We didn't talk because it was all we could do to keep humping. Talking or thinking about what to say would take too much energy.

In that kind of cold anything you do expends energy. Just standing still requires an awful lot of the human body when its thirty below outside. When you're trying to hump at six to ten clicks an hour you'd better have an awful lot of energy stored up. We didn't, but we kept on going.

We trudged from marker post to marker post until we saw a building with lights in it. Mock hammered on the door until someone came and opened it. I will always remember that blessed blast of heat that slammed out of that forty"'degree garage. We all ducked inside and shut the door.

The building's CQ had let us in, and stood there with his hands on his hips and a cigarette in his mouth, just gaping at us. We must've been quite a sight. Later we found out that the blood had wicked from our knees and elbows while they still had blood in them. Our whites were half"'red by then and we fairly stunk of blood. It was the blood that stunned him.

Jacoby started babbling an explanation first, and we all just kinda joined in. That CQ just stood there looking at us from one to another trying to make out what we were saying with our mouths frozen. I never realized how much you need to feel your tongue to talk until that moment. But even if we had been physically fine we wouldn't have made much sense.

Finally we got thawed out enough for him to understand us and he called the MPs and the medics. The CQ opened the garage door so we wouldn't get too unthawed before the medics came. The MPs took one look at us and called Range Command and our CO. The medics came around and called the State Guard and the Chaplains. Finally, after about an hour and saying the same damn thing five different times our Company Commander showed up and the fecal matter hit the rotary impeller.

Stuff always started happening real fast when our Old Man started hollering. He'd walked from Hungary to Germany as a teenager in '57, and wasn't about to take any crap from anybody as long as his people were in peril. Range Command got some Snow"'Tracks to come around, and the State Guard went out to find where we hit the road.

Then they put the four of us in Snow"'Tracks and sent us out after the platoon. You see, the Army reasoned that we knew where we were going, and were naturally the leaders of the rescue expedition. Me, being one of the rocket scientists in the Army, had a tank license, so was authorized to drive a Snow"'Track.

I got in a track after leaving that blessed heat and started to drive. They've got heaters with exactly two settings "'"' off and furnace. The Medics said it wasn't a good idea for us to leave it on in the enclosed Snow-Track cabins, so we left the floor vents open to keep my feet frozen until they could get my boots off.

I was with the Chaplain, a vivid, solicitous soul who had a most lovely whistling voice. After a hour of driving I turned to him and said: "Padre (all chaplains get called 'padre' regardless of denomination), I haven't felt my feet since this morning. I can't drive this thing anymore."

Only part of it was true. I could feel parts of my feet, and they hurt A LOT when I pressed the pedals.

"OK, son," he said, "let me at it."

"You ever drive one?"

"Nope. But you can't either." I never heard anyone make so much sense in all my life.

When we finally found the platoon Acosta, Palmer, and Buhler were dead, and Nash was nearly gone. Everybody else was about froze solid and buried in the snow and ice to get out of the wind. Blood freezes bright"'red, you know, and when it freezes it stops flowing. A lot of the less seriously wounded would've bled to death if it hadn't been so damn cold.

We bundled the survivors into the tracks. The Chaplain and the medics were the only guys out there that could handle the dead. They tied the five black bags to a Snow"'Track roof and headed back to post. The sun was nearly down again by the time we got there. Our ordeal had lasted a little over thirty hours.

They cut my uniform off at the hospital and stuck a bunch of tubes in me, then dropped me into a whirlpool bath. Two days later I woke up as the doctors were hugger"'muggering about my feet: still no circulation below mid"'calf. They did some pretty radical stuff "'"' for the mid"'1970's anyway "'"' to save my feet. I'd already lost the better part of two toes when they peeled my socks off.

I spent the next two weeks in the hospital, answering all the questions everybody put to me. We managed to put together a picture of what went wrong.

We had been at the far edge of a very large training area that doubled as an impact range, just a little south of where we were supposed to be. We were behind schedule. The mortars fired rounds at Charge 1 to set their baseplates ahead of schedule. Still, under normal conditions they shouldn't have hit us. The Army's insistence on wide safety margins should have put the mortar impact at least two clicks south of us.

But a high"'level wind picked up those low"'velocity mortar rounds and pushed 'em well beyond where they should have gone, right on top of us.

But there is still a mystery that was never really resolved. Thankfully for Army bureaucratic nonsense they do keep real good records. We know from the communications logs that the mortars got a cease"'fire from Range Command at about impact time for the rounds.

But who sent it? My radio got knocked out, and it was on the range frequency, the other one wasn't. I didn't send it before we got hit, I don't think. Range Command said they got a cease"'fire on the range frequency before they sent to the mortars, and said they didn't know the mortars had fired early. No one to date has come up with a good explanation, though I've heard a lot of theories. The most likely was that the mortar's FDC heard the firing off"'schedule and sent the cease"'fire, but just never said anything after all the screaming started and all those officers got relieved.

That seems probable.

But just as I went into the snow I heard a real soothing, majestic voice say, "not yet." Was my radio out then, and I sent the cease"'fire before the frag hit me? I can't remember.

I do remember all that blood on the snow. I remember Ernie Nash's smile the last time I saw him alive. And I distinctly recall thinking that the commie bastard that sold the Army those boots should be sentenced to wearing them for the rest of his life.

I get reminded that I once got too cold for too long. I get reminded in every draft, every air conditioned room, and every Midwestern winter. Now I get cold standing in front of refrigerators.

And I remember the voice that said "not yet."