Earle M. Holland

Science Writing/Science Communications/Research Risk Communications

A Soldier's Story

On some cold, crisp winter mornings, I drift back to that other world. For an instant, I'm back in uniform, standing in formation, garbed in green, waiting for someone else to run my life.

The trigger is always a simple thing, like the smell of diesel fumes from a passing semi as the sun begins to break through the dawn clouds. And I remember how it was to be crammed with a hundred troops into waiting cattle trucks, to breathe exhaust and feel the mindless loss of the soldier's life.

Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in the bone-chilling winter of 1970. The oven-cooked air roasting above Fort Sill, Oklahoma, that late spring. Jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the stifling dog days of August. Fort Gordon and more . . .

How do you forget a field covered with hundreds of troops, all in loose formation, weapons at the ready, learning how to kill. En garde. Lunge. Parry. Thrust. "What is the spirit of the bayonet?" the sergeant called. The mindless mass responded, screaming, "To kill, sergeant! To kill." On my right was an engineer. On my left, a former grad student in psychology. We glanced at each other, shrugged, and lost ourselves in the insanity of it all.

Twenty years and more than a universe away, it can all return in an instant, recalled by a sound or smell. People who never served in the military will never understand those who did. To go three months without hearing a bird's song or a baby's cry changes us unalterably. Survival, endurance, one day to the next, was the sole goal in life.

I was lucky. I never saw combat.

I'll never know the sheer terror, exhilaration, or adrenaline rush that came with that experience.

Thank God that few do.

Like Dan Quayle, my military tour was domestic, not foreign, as a member of the Alabama National Guard. But unlike most weekend warriors, my active tour lasted 51 weeks, four times longer than the normal reserve service. And for the next five years, I wore a Special Forces green beret every other weekend. Every other drill weekend lasted three days, rather than two, so we could stay jump-qualified, while other guardsmen and reservists drilled once monthly, as clerk typists and truck drivers.

I was lucky.

I never faced enemy fire. I never saw Vietnam up close and personal. I never returned from war to be called baby-killer. The epithets came as part of wearing the uniform. The accusers seldom asked where you served.
Irony fills the ranks for those in the service.

The morning after Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on students at Kent State, I along with three other guardsmen were cornered by more than 20 "regular" army troops and pummeled in retaliation for that campus tragedy. I emerged bruised, cut, and nursing two broken ribs. My buddies fared no better. Even today, I harbor no anger for that assault. Those "troops" had been students a few months before.

Domestic military service has always been far safer than tours in war zones. But it was never safe.

I remember one night jump where 400 troops were to hurl themselves from four-engine jets into the night sky, carrying weapons and full equipment packs. The officers in charge somehow had forgotten the 20-foot drop lines that allowed jumpers to hang their heavy equipment below them and land safely. We rode the packs into the ground. The operation was halted after the first hundred men jumped. Injuries exceeded 30 percent. Friends spent six months in hospitals recovering from that training exercise.

I was lucky.

I limped off the drop zone carrying the two halves of my M-16, which broke on impact. Better the weapon than a shoulder or back.

There was a night jump into sugar-cane fields in Puerto Rico, and the military bus ride across the island from Roosevelt Roads Air Field on a wild Saturday night. The steel screens on the bus windows deflected a Molotov cocktail tossed from the open door of a roadside bar along with curses about gringo militaristas.

This fall, my 15-year-old son found my army field jacket crammed in a corner of the basement and asked to try it on. Sadly, it fit; he donned the beret and stood before the hall mirror, swelling with pride, succumbing to the romance of the military that has lured generations throughout history.

"Awesome," he murmured, and I began to flash back to other young men in uniform, bunkmates, squad members, friends, some who never came back, and some who did but were never the same.

"Awesome," he repeated. And I wondered if he would be as lucky as his father.

--E.H.