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I had the leg strength. I’d always had the legs. The records that had fallen to me in the obstacle course, running, and other military skills during officer candidate school and the Basic School had all been functions of lower body strength and agility. The glacis was a challenge more of balance than it was strength or agility, however. Each step sideways, face and the front of my torso pressed hard into the flat rock, had to be negotiated hesitantly but with pressing haste. There were Marines higher up than and many lower down the angle of our climb.

Climbing in the night was a risk, since the enemy, once it figured out that we were doing, could fire indiscriminately at the rock face, and be almost certain to hit Marines unable to gain any cover or move much of any distance in any direction from where they would be trapped. However, even though supporting fires would be on station, active, and very effective, a single sniper during daylight hours could decimate the company in a much more devastating way. Plus, hunkering down at the base of the face, which at its lowest point where they were, lacked the cave-like fold of undercut earth that the canyon wall had provided further up the valley.

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