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“The soldier above all other people prays for peace, for they must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.” —Douglas MacArthur
Let me start the book by punching you square in the chest. In this chapter, I plan to shake your complacency, to get you to take a hard look at reality. It might be harsh, but you need realism, not rhetoric.
S.L.A. Marshall said that the soldier does not receive what he most needs to prepare for combat, “he does not get what he most requires—the simple details of common human experience on the field of battle.” “Battle Inoculation” is the training a soldier needs but doesn’t receive, and this book will fill that gap. Forewarned is forearmed. I hope to inoculate you against the situation you’ll face, so I must tell you the two most jarring facts about war—war is not fair, and war is hell.
War is not fair. We all want life to be fair, but in war bad things happen to good people, and perhaps more disconcertingly, good things happen to bad people. Unlike the Hollywood version of combat, in which the horror is justified by a higher good, and the good guys survive—or at least die nobly—in real life, it ain’t fair. The greatest unfairness falls on the combat soldier. Andrew Exum, reflecting on his experiences as a lieutenant with the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, said: “In the end, there is one thing I am sure of. No matter a war’s outcome, the soldier never wins.”
War is hell. To think clearly in stressful situations, you’ll need to mentally prepare so you can deal with your natural revulsion. E.B. Sledge, who saw combat in Peleliu and Okinawa as a marine infantry mortarman said, “I experienced some unspeakable things in close combat. I refuse to abide anyone now who seeks to either glorify or trivialize those realities.” I hope I do not glorify or trivialize in this book, and so we’ll start with the realities. You’ll see horror, and there is a good chance you’ll cause some of the horror—if you hope to survive, you might have to do some horrible things. It bears repeating, war is hell.
William Tecumseh Sherman is honored in the North, and dishonored in the South, for his March to the Sea during the U.S. Civil War. He is credited with the saying “War is Hell”, but anyone who has experienced war could tell you just as well. If you face the prospect of battle, you need to prepare yourself for something worse than you imagine.
1. You need to understand that, unlike traffic accidents, in war death is no accident. If two armies meet and no one dies, both sides failed. If an ambush is not detected, the side caught in the ambush failed; If the ambush is detected, the ambushers failed. So even if both sides are militarily perfect, someone will die!
2. You need to be mentally prepared for what is coming: The best soldier you know might be killed. You’ll think, “If he got it, how can I expect to make it?” David Hackworth, whom we’ll hear from again, says that “eventually the sunshine Army takes every warrior on a forced march into reality.”
3. You need to be able to deal with survivor’s guilt when men around you die. You need to understand that death is an inherent part of war, and even a great commander cannot, and in fact should not, prevent all casualties.
Commentators who have not experienced combat themselves rarely get it right. As Evan Wright said in his book about the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “War is either glamorized—like we kick their ass—or the opposite—look how horrible, we kill all these civilians.”
Weapons of war are designed to kill and maim, and throughout history, the designers have been very good at the job. You will see things happen to human bodies that are hard to comprehend. TV personality Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation, appeared on an episode of The Today Show which commemorated D-Day’s fiftieth Anniversary. After the program emphasized the heroics for some time, he reminded the viewers what was happening to men on those beaches. “They were terribly wounded. Their stomachs opened. Their faces shot away. Their limbs blown off. That was the reality of that day and we shouldn’t forget that.”
I’ll be recommending movies to you as we go along, because they are entertaining and do convey truth. But they have limitations. In movies, weapons kill cleanly and painlessly. War movies are exciting, in the video store you’ll find them in the Adventure Section, not the Horror Section. They do not portray the fear and the exhaustion of actual combat. Gene Larocque, who captained a ship in the Pacific in WWII and later rose to admiral, avoided movies because they glorified war and showed people get blown up then fall gracefully to the ground. “You don’t see anybody being blown apart. You don’t see arms and legs and mutilated bodies. You see only an antiseptic, clean, neat way to die gloriously.” In movies, death is clean. Most deaths aren’t clean, and even the few dead who are not mangled, who die cleanly and painlessly, are still dead. Nothing puts Shakespeare’s description of humans as “the beauty of the world” to lie more than the stench of human death. If you’ve never smelled a dead body after a day or two in the sun, you are in for a very unpleasant surprise. It’s worse than you can imagine. Bodies stink. Your friends and loved ones will stink. You will stink.
You might very well be required to do bad things yourself, things you would never have contemplated in civilian life. Paul Fussell comments that a World War II marine watching a fellow American killing an enemy soldier in a gruesome manner “learns what every generation would learn if it could see its youth engaged in infantry fighting.” They would learn what a Marine Sergeant in Vietnam told a green young lieutenant, Philip Caputo: “Before you leave here, sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.”
You must be willing to be brutal. “If you ever find yourself in a “fair” fight, your tactics suck.” Bill Mauldin (1921-2003) is beloved by combat veterans for his World War II cartoons on the plight of the common soldier. He said of the enemy: “You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him in the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself.” And this is a combat cartoonist! If you’re going into combat, you might have to get tougher than a cartoonist. Although you must harden yourself to the horror, to keep your sanity you need to deal with the tragedy of war.
Raymond Gantter, an infantryman in Europe during World War II, tells of seeing an American soldier, who “shot in the head, had fallen upon a fence. His body hung on the pickets, limp and shapeless as a scarecrow thrown carelessly from an upper window, a thing of rags and straw. Under his dangling head three daffodils, miraculous in the snow, were speckled with blood.” I wish I could have written that. The juxtaposition of the miracle of the flowers with the horror of death is insightful, and captures some of the waste of war. I have understood this since my childhood observations on the beautiful island called Okinawa. Okinawa
I attended Kubasaki Junior High and then Kubasaki High, American schools in Okinawa, Japan. Okinawa is the island where the last battle of World War II was fought, one of the most horrific battles in the history of the world, unique in its savagery on air, land and sea. Since Okinawa was such an historic battle, and my living there has affected my views on war and life, the Battle of Okinawa will come up again as we go along. Let me give a brief introduction here. Although a few British ships were involved, the fighting was primarily between Americans and Japanese. Okinawa was the most vicious battle of a vicious war, the Pacific War, a war that John Dower called the War Without Mercy. Stephen Ambrose said: “There are many contenders for the title of the Worst War That Ever Was, but a combination of factors give the Pacific War some claim.” In this, the worst battle of that most vicious war, “On both sides the men descended into hell, and not as visitors, but as participants.”
This savage battle was fought on the peaceful island of Okinawa. Okinawa is a subtropical paradise, the climate similar to Honolulu. As a schoolboy, my classmates and I always made it a point to go swimming on Christmas Day, but although the temperature is mild to a vacationer sipping a drink on a beach, it is of course uncomfortably hot to an infantryman carrying a hundred pounds of gear through the green hell of the jungle.
Iwo Jima gets a lot of press because of the Rosenthal photo, said to be the most reproduced photograph in history, of the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi. But actually, Okinawa was worse than Iwo Jima. It’s true, that in relation to the size of the force, a day on Iwo Jima was worse than a day in Okinawa. But you didn’t have the option of spending just one day in either place. Whichever place you went, you had to survive the campaign. On Iwo Jima, that meant three weeks. On Okinawa, it meant three months, and you had less chance of surviving three months on Okinawa than three weeks on Iwo Jima. Both were bad enough, and to the men in each place it was a difference in degree, not kind. But more Americans died on Okinawa than Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal combined.
Okinawa was one of the most horrific battles in the history of the world. On April 1, 1945, an Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day, ironically called “Love Day” by the planners, a savage battle began quietly, as General Ushijima decided to play a mind-game, and not oppose the landing on the beautiful sun-drenched beaches of Higashi. From the peaceful landing sprung a fierce campaign, in which the 29th Regiment, USMC, for example, suffered the greatest losses suffered by any U.S. Marine Regiment in a single battle ever, before or since. It was “the most costly of any single battle in the history of the United States Navy.” By many measures, the Battle of Okinawa saw the greatest loss of naval tonnage of any battle in world history. Neither of the Commanding Generals, Mitsuru Ushijima on the Japanese side nor Simon Buckner on the American, survived the battle. Ushijima committed suicide, Buckner was killed by a fragment of coral propelled by a Japanese artillery round. Okinawa was devastated, approximately one-third of its civilian population killed. The battle was characterized by the widespread use of the Kamikaze, as approximately 5,000 young Japanese on suicide missions died succeeding or attempting to fly their airplanes directly into their targets. More people died on Okinawa than died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
One thing I noticed about the Japanese and American people: they get along extremely well, on both a personal and at a national level. Considering the brutality of the Pacific War, you might think they must be natural enemies, but in fact they are natural friends. Since the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry opened Japan to the World in 1854, the two countries have experienced 150 years of great friendship, with four years of savage killing in the middle.
I am proud to be an American and proud of the great accomplishments of my country, and I also have a deep respect for the culture and people of Japan. So this has been a mystery throughout my life: how can it be that peoples who have such great human qualities, and who given the chance become such magnificent friends, can kill each other with such zeal? How could such barbarism and hatred develop among civilized peoples? After pondering for decades, I still don’t know the answer to that question, but if you face the prospect of combat, you need to accept the fact that other human beings are willing to do terrible things to you, and you better be capable of doing terrible things to them. Sad Memories
Even the soldiers such as myself, who survive physically unscathed, are not untouched. I once attended a ceremony at the Moving Vietnam Memorial Wall and gave my regards to Specialist Douglas Kempf, Private Ron Haynes and Sergeant Charles Andujar, whose names are on the Wall. The weather was absolutely perfect for the ceremony, namely a continuous drenching rain, which was appropriate considering the similar rains they and I endured in Vietnam together, and because it served so well to hide the tears.
Soldiers aren’t alone in their grief; those who never hear gunfire mourn the most. Although MacArthur is correct in asserting the soldier “must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war”, those who love them also suffer. Lawrence of Arabia spoke of the “Rings of Sorrow” that radiate wounds and scars throughout the community. Soldiers die, but those that love them survive them. Let’s consider just a few of the millions of less obvious examples. In post-World-War-II Germany, it became customary to call an older woman of the War generation “Frau”, a title previously reserved for married women, even though she had never married. Two million men killed meant two million women who could never marry, because there simply weren’t enough surviving men to go around, and they decided not to rub it in by emphasizing these women’s lonely lives.
Later we’ll speak of survivor’s guilt, the guilt a soldier might irrationally feel about having lived while buddies died. But survivor’s guilt can strike those who aren’t even there, even those who aren’t even born! Tom Brokaw, in The Greatest Generation Speaks, quotes an American woman who was born after her father died in World War II. As a child, she felt shame. “Shame that I did not have a father, shame that he had been killed when everyone else came home, shame that we were ‘different’.”
You don’t have to be part of the soldier’s family to feel a loss throughout your life. Tomiko Higa was a child when war came to her native Okinawa. Her book about her experiences, The Girl with the White Flag, was named for her “surrender” caught on film by an American combat photographer—seven years old, three feet tall—as she was carrying a white flag toward the American lines. Forty-five years later, she speaks of her love for a Japanese soldier who befriended her when she was a waif, who is buried near her home in Shuri: “My soldier sleeps there still, beside the stream. And he lives on in my heart, forever young, and gentle, and kind.”
Lives are lost and so are the possessions of a lifetime. General Sherman’s March to the Sea actually caused relatively few deaths; he primarily destroyed property. One of the most striking moments in the movie Gone With The Wind is the scene of Scarlet O’Hara’s mansion, Tara, burning. Note the people weren’t killed, but the life works of many were destroyed. Evan Wright, in his Generation Kill, about the War of Terror in Iraq, said of the machine that is the invading army: “It will knock down buildings, smash cars and tanks, put holes in people, shred limbs, cut children apart.”
Sometimes the effects are indirect but lasting. Two personal experiences are apropos. On one occasion, my company rested for several days near a remote village in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, these people lived in rather primitive conditions: dirt floors, no electricity, no running water. That’s normal for the Third World, the standard of living at the same level as a thousand years ago. But I was surprised when we left the village by a different route and we walked across concrete foundations for missing houses, and walked past downed power lines. These people were not living under primitive conditions because of their economic development, it was because of the war. Before the war it was safe to live in the houses that had concrete foundations, and they’d had electricity, running water, and all the trappings of civilization.
On another occasion, we stopped for lunch after cutting through thick jungle for some hours. Someone noticed an odd regularity to the jungle flora. Upon investigation, we discovered a train station that had been reclaimed by the jungle. This had once been a thriving community, but now it was only chance that allowed us to identify it as anything other than primeval vegetation. The jungle had reclaimed it so well that even though we were able to find the train tracks, and they went in the direction we were headed, it was easier to cut through virgin jungle than follow the right-of-way.
There are two competing theories about the nature of history. The first has been called the Great Man Theory, but let’s update it for gender neutrality and call it the Great Leader Theory. The Great Leader Theory emphasizes the role of individuals in human history. If you want to understand history, just study the careers of the leaders of the time. The competing theory is called “Historicism”, or “historical determinism”, but I call it the “Tide of Time Theory”. It asserts there are tides in human events that sweep we mortals along, tides that the individual cannot control. If the great man Caesar hadn’t existed, someone else would have conquered Gaul about the same time, since roman military and social conditions demanded it. If the great man Columbus hadn’t existed, someone else would have come to America about the same time, since ship technology and economic conditions demanded it. Many scientific advances were simultaneously made by several independent inventors, because the time had come for the next step, and if one of the inventors hadn’t existed the world would have progressed anyway. What if his World War I wounds had proved fatal for young Corporal Adolf Hitler? Would there have been a World War II? Surely Hitler had little impact on the events in the Far East, and Mussolini predated Hitler, which implies the forces of war were on the rise globally. But would there have been a Holocaust? And how far do the tides stretch back in time? Would there have been a WWII if there had been no Columbus? Would there have been a WWII if there had been no Caesar? Leo Tolstoy in his epic War and Peace argues against Napoleon as the quintessential great man. First, I must make a confession. I’ve quoted from War and Peace in several places in this book. I’ve purchased a number of copies of the book from time to time, and for most of my life I’ve owned at least one copy of it. It’s a great book. You should read it. But I must be honest with you. I’ve started the book many times, the first time when I was in Junior High School. But I have never managed to finish it. It’s so long, and there are so many characters to keep track of, each with the confusing multiple names customary in the Russian aristocracy, and although the war sections are brilliant, the peace sections are a dreary soap opera. In any event, Tolstoy ridicules the great man theory (at least in the parts I read. Read the book and let me know if I’m right). He speaks of the crucial Battle of Borodino on August 26, 1812, which sealed the fate of Napoleon’s army in Russia. “Many historians assert that the French failed at Borodino because Napoleon had a cold in his head.” This leads to the absurd conclusion that “consequently the valet, who forgot to put on Napoleon’s waterproof boots on the 24th, would be the saviour of Russia.” Although facetious about the boots, Tolstoy often emphasizes that in battle, many unrecognized individuals contribute greatly to victory or defeat, and the great commanders often have much less control over the outcome than even the commanders themselves imagine.
My opinion is that the two theories are equally correct, and each contributes about the same to history. But I think there is a third factor that outweighs the other two, what I call the Lucky Leader Theory. If Eisenhower had been born in Malawi, he wouldn’t have gotten very far. If Alexander had been born a few years later or earlier we would never have heard of him. Each was the right person at the right time, at any other time he would never have been successful. They had remarkable qualities, to be sure, but they were born on the right tide. Times change. It would have been hopeless to oppose colonialism or slavery at their height, and as the world came to its senses, it became impossible to be in favor of them. The acceptance of women in the military is a case in point, illustrated by the fact we once called it the Great Man Theory. There was a time when the suggestion a woman could be a great leader would be thought ludicrous, so “Great Man” was accurate. But once reason and observation overcome custom and prejudice, we’ve seen that women are capable of great leadership.
Even a casual study of World War II will show that Allied victory was, in Eisenhower’s appraisal of the D-Day landing, “A damn close thing”. It is a dangerous misunderstanding to fail to recognize that if things had gone slightly differently, Mussolini and Hitler might well have succeeded. Remove Hitler’s strategic blunders, such as invading Russia before England was subdued, and unnecessarily declaring war on the United States after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the War might have ended differently. It is even possible that the Balkans diversion that prevented Hitler from starting his invasion of Russia on schedule led to German defeat when winter came early that year. In a normal year with his attack on time, Hitler might well have knocked the Soviet Union out of the war in 1941. With a one-front war, the Axis would probably have won. These conclusions are of course arguable, but the fact that intelligent individuals can argue about them shows the Allied victory was decidedly not a forgone conclusion, and it’s dangerous to think so, even as a victory in our current War on Terror is not a foregone conclusion. We need to take the threat seriously because we could lose.
Surely the winning or losing of battles does depend on effort and ability because luck pans out in the long run—but battles are fought in the short run. So it is possible for the bad guys to win. If chance plays its part in the outcome of battles large and small, it’s even worse for the individual.
Let me give you the bad news. Survival in combat is largely chance. Paul Fussell, an Infantryman in France in World War II, after seeing a pile of dead soldiers, summed up the relationship between combat and justice: “My boyish illusions, largely intact to that moment of awakening, fell away all at once, and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just.” In our modern society, we expect fairness and justice, even Cosmic Justice, but nothing about war is fair. There is no certain way to protect yourself. No matter what you do, there is always the chance you’ll be killed. No amount of training will protect you if by coincidence the first round in a barrage lands on your head, or the guy in front of you snags the tripwire connected to a 500-pound bomb, or a burst from a machinegun aimed directly at you opens from the flanks. Siegfried Knappe relates an experience that many have had in combat. He was a young lieutenant in the German army during the Blitzkrieg assault into Russia in 1941. After a brief shelling, he got up, shaken but unharmed, to find the lieutenant next to him, who had done exactly the same thing in exactly the same way at exactly the same time, was dead. “That I happened to land where I did and he landed where he did was just a throw of the dice. He remained where he dropped and I walked away.” In fact, as Hannah Arendt said: “Nowhere else does Fortune, good or ill luck, play a more fateful role in human affairs than on the battlefield.” Erich Maria Remarque, in his classic novel of World War I from the German side, All Quiet in the Western Front, emphasizes the randomness. “It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hours’ bombardment unscathed.” A good story has justice in it, so few war movies “dared breathe what everyone knew but found hard to voice aloud—that death was random and success only partly related to one’s deserts.” James Webb, who experienced Vietnam as a Marine Infantry officer and later wrote the novel Fields of Fire based on his experiences said: “The victims could be selected so randomly. You could be 100 percent right and still be 100 percent dead.”
Good soldiering can increase your odds of survival, but can’t guarantee it. “In the melee, heroism, bravery, or even superior technology cannot guarantee survival.” Everett Alvarez was the first pilot shot down during the Vietnam War. He went on to spend more than eight years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. But he understood his plight was not a result of any failure on his part: “The fact that I lay shackled in a Vietnamese prison could not be attributed to any flight error on my part. Try as I might I could not find fault with any of my maneuvers. I had made no mistakes, taken no extraordinary risks. It was just pure bad luck that some wild flak had struck my plane. This was a natural hazard of combat missions which no amount of training could prevent.” Tobias Wolff, speaking of his experiences in Vietnam, emphasizes that individual skill does not protect you: “Despite the promise implicit in our training—If you do everything right, you’ll make it home—you couldn’t help but notice that the good troops were getting killed right along with the slackers and shitbirds. It was clear that survival wasn’t only a function of Zero Defects and Combat Readiness.” Tom Brokaw, in The Greatest Generation Speaks, quotes a soldier saying that after a shelling, a soldier near him was dead: “It’s all luck. It just happened that I could have been that guy. I wasn’t any better or braver or anything … it’s just one of those things.” General Douglas MacArthur said it this way: “That’s the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die—and the difference is just an eyelash.”
In Wartime, Paul Fussell asks “Why are blunders into ambushes not more rare?” He answers his own question with observations on inexperience and a reluctance to question orders. The implication is that you will be caught in an ambush only by blundering. I’ve been on both sides of ambushes, and I would say that in many of them neither side blundered. Each side did its best to accomplish a specific military goal, one to ambush, the other to avoid being ambushed. Although if either side makes a mistake, they will increase the odds they won’t accomplish their goal, in a case where each side does everything perfectly, one, or perhaps even both, will not accomplish the goal, and some will likely die on both sides. Avoid magical thinking: you can do everything right, and still get caught in an ambush if luck runs against you.
From at least the advent of the arrow, personal skill has offered no guarantee. Shells fall on the hero and the coward, the wise and the wicked. I once read a war story in an anthology that told the story of a man who had been in a number of battles, survived great dangers, and did brave things. But then he was killed by a mortar round as he was landing on a beach. The author said of him “Rifles couldn’t kill him! Bayonets couldn’t kill him! Machine guns couldn’t kill him! It took a mortar round to kill him!” Bullshit. His number just came up. The mortar round has no individual target, it’s fired into the general direction of the enemy, toward a cluster of men. It has no name on it, it’s addressed “to whom this may concern”. So there is no real defense against the first round, and precious little against subsequent rounds: it’s strictly luck whom a shell lands on.
At the most basic level, consider the fairness of your even being in a war at all. Especially in small wars, only a tiny percentage of the population is even inconvenienced by the war. The British military historian John Keegan said of the relationship between the individual and war: “It is now a relationship, in the Western world at least, for a very small minority indeed.” Actually, this has been true throughout history. “It was the boast of Frederick that when he went to war neither the peasants of the fields nor the tradesmen of his towns should know or care.” Only a small percentage of people ever face mortal combat. Even in World War II, with “full mobilization for total war”, less than 10% of the American populace was in the military. Of those in the military, less than a fifth were in direct combat arms. So less than 1% did the actual fighting. And back at home, they not only don’t understand—they don’t even care. Vietnam veterans are often thought to be unusual in that the returning soldiers faced a difficult homecoming, but E.B. Sledge was a veteran of World War II, “The Good War”, which should have been the easiest homecoming of all. He says he wrote China Marine because: “I also wanted to describe my troubled homecoming and difficult adjustment to a virtually oblivious America.”
As a soldier, although part of an army, you must face your war alone. Like the song says, you’ve got to walk that lonesome valley by yourself. In World War I, the men in the trenches spoke of having ‘One’s own private frontage’. An English soldier waiting to go ‘over the top’ observed his fellow soldiers as “One by one, they realised that each must go alone, and that each of them already was alone with himself, helping the others perhaps, but looking at them with strange eyes, while the world became unreal and empty, and they moved in a mystery, where no help was.” Although you’re alone, I hope reading this book will help you prepare.
The dilemma you’ll face in combat is unwittingly illustrated in a Civil War manual, The 1862 Army Officer’s Pocket Companion. In a single paragraph on General Principles, the author, William Craighill, tells us “it is far better to remain still than to go no one knows whither” and “the mind wanders while weighing pros and cons, and generally quick decisions are the best.” These two pieces of advice are contradictory. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth, and in this case both principles are equally valid. You’ll need to make sound decisions in a time-critical, life-and-death situation. You must take time to think it out, but mustn’t waste time thinking about it. Craighill gives us a way out: “Minutes are often precious; you must not then waver, and a firm and vigorous execution will frequently atone for the deficiencies of your plan.” More succinctly, the modern statement of the principle is “Do something, even if it’s wrong.” Since you won’t have time to ponder in combat, one of my goals in this book is to let you think situations through in advance as a way of preparing for what is to come, hellish unfairness and all.
It’s hell, and it’s unfair. But such is life. No matter how good a driver you are, and how careful, a truck might come across the median and kill you. But you continue to drive despite the danger. But you do what you can to reduce the odds. And so with combat. The good news is, certain actions and attitudes can improve your odds. Although there are no guarantees, knowledge, thinking and planning can all help. That’s what the rest of this book will do, prepare you to survive.
Just remember: Life isn’t fair. But death is even less fair.
The Notes for this chapter.
Copyright ©2009 Patrick McDermott