This Side Toward Enemy

by Patrick McDermott

Reference Notes

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Chapter 1. Unfair as Hell

“The soldier above all other people prays for peace, for they must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.” —Douglas MacArthur

Quoted in Grossman, Lt. Col. Dave, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, New York: Back Bay Books / Little, Brown (0-316-33011-6), 1996 (1995), p. xxxii.

“he does not get what he most requires—the simple details of common human experience on the field of battle.”

Quoted in Holmes, Richard, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle, New York: The Free Press / Macmillan (0-02-915020-5), 1986 (Firing Line, 1985), p. 53.

“In the end, there is one thing I am sure of. No matter a war’s outcome, the soldier never wins.”

Exum, Andrew, This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story from the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism, New York: Gotham Books (1-592-40063-9), 2004, p. 234.

“I experienced some unspeakable things in close combat. I refuse to abide anyone now who seeks to either glorify or trivialize those realities.”

Sledge, E.B., China Marine: An Infantryman’s Life after World War II, New York: Oxford University Press (0-19-516776-7), 2003 (2002), p. xv.

“eventually the sunshine Army takes every warrior on a forced march into reality.”

Hackworth, Colonel David H. & Tom Mathews, Hazardous Duty: One of America’s Most Decorated Soldiers Reports from the Front with the Truth About the U.S. Military Today, New York: Perennial / HarperCollins (978-0-380-72742-1 0-380-72742-0), 2001 (1996), p. 6.

“War is either glamorized—like we kick their ass—or the opposite—look how horrible, we kill all these civilians.”

Wright, Evan, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New face of American War, Berkley Caliber, New York: Berkley Publishing Group (0-425-20040-X), 2005 (2004), p. 219.

“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.”

Brokaw, Tom, The Greatest Generation, New York: Random House (0-375-50202-5), 1998, p. 17.

“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.”

Quoted in Terkel, Studs, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II, New York: The New Press (1-56584-343-6), 1990 (1984), p. 193.

“learns what every generation would learn if it could see its youth engaged in infantry fighting.”

Fussell, Paul, “Introduction” in Sledge, E.B., With the Old Breed: at Peleliu and Okinawa, New York: Oxford University Press (0-19-506714-2), 1981, p. xvi.

“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.”

Quoted in Fussell, Paul, “Introduction” in Sledge, E.B., With the Old Breed: at Peleliu and Okinawa, New York: Oxford University Press (0-19-506714-2), 1981, p. xvi.

“If you ever find yourself in a “fair” fight, your tactics suck.”

Pantano, Ilario with Malcolm McConnell, Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy, New York: Threshold Editions (1-4165-2426-6 978-1-4165-2426-7), 2006, p. 84.

“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.”

Mauldin, Bill, Up Front, 1945, pp. 11-13, quoted in McManus, John C., The Deadly Brotherhood: The American Combat Soldier in World War II, New York: Presidio Press / Ballantine Books (0-89141-823-7), 2003 (1998), p. 128.

“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.”

Gantter, Raymond, Roll Me Over: An Infantryman’s World War II, New York: Presidio Press / Ballantine Books (0-8041-1605-9), 1997, p. 133.

War Without Mercy.

Dower, John W., War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York: Pantheon Books (0-394-50030-X), 1986.

“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.”

Ambrose, Stephen E., To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, New York: Simon & Schuster (0-7432-0275-9), 2002, p. 102.

“On both sides the men descended into hell, and not as visitors, but as participants.”

Ambrose, Stephen E., To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, New York: Simon & Schuster (0-7432-0275-9), 2002, p. 103.

“the most costly of any single battle in the history of the United States Navy.”

Hanson, Victor Davis, Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, New York: Doubleday (0-385-50400-4), 2003, p. 27.

“Shame that I did not have a father, shame that he had been killed when everyone else came home, shame that we were ‘different’.”

Brokaw, Tom, The Greatest Generation Speaks: Letters and Reflections, New York: Random House (0-375-50394-3), 1999, p. 80.

“My soldier sleeps there still, beside the stream. And he lives on in my heart, forever young, and gentle, and kind.”

Higa Tomiko, Dorothy Britton, translator, The Girl with the White Flag: A spellbinding account of love and courage in wartime Okinawa, Tokyo: Kodansha International (4-7700-2931-4), 1991 (Shirahata no Sh?jo, 1989), p. 40.

Gone With The Wind

Mitchell, Margaret, Gone with the Wind, New York: Avon Books (0-380-00109-8), 1973 (1936).

“It will knock down buildings, smash cars and tanks, put holes in people, shred limbs, cut children apart.”

Wright, Evan, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New face of American War, Berkley Caliber, New York: Berkley Publishing Group (0-425-20040-X), 2005 (2004), p. 30.

“consequently the valet, who forgot to put on Napoleon’s waterproof boots on the 24^th, would be the saviour of Russia.”

Tolstoy, Count Leo, Constance Garnett (translator from Russian), War and Peace, New York: The Modern Library / Random House, (1869), Part 10, XXVIII, p. 732.

“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.”

Fussell, Paul, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, Boston: Little Brown (0-316-29717-8), 1996, p. 105.

“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.”

Knappe, Siegfried & Ted Brusaw, Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949, New York: Orion Books / Crown Publishers (0-517-58895-1), 1992, p. 192.

“Nowhere else does Fortune, good or ill luck, play a more fateful role in human affairs than on the battlefield.”

Quoted in Holmes, Richard, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle, New York: The Free Press / Macmillan (0-02-915020-5), 1986 (Firing Line, 1985), p. 193.

“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.”

Remarque, Erich Maria, A.W. Wheen (translator from German), All Quiet on the Western Front, New York: Fawcett Crest (0-449-21394-3), 1982 (Im Westen Nichts Neues, 1928), p. 101.

“dared breathe what everyone knew but found hard to voice aloud—that death was random and success only partly related to one’s deserts.”

Koppes & Black, Hollywood Goes to War, pp. 89, 308. Quoted in Fussell, Paul, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, New York: Oxford University Press (0-19-503797-9), 1989, p. 191.

Fields of Fire

Webb, James, Fields of Fire, New York: Bantam Books (0-553-58385-9), 2001 (1978).

“The victims could be selected so randomly. You could be 100 percent right and still be 100 percent dead.”

Timberg, Robert, The Nightingale’s Song, New York: Touchstone Book / Simon & Schuster (0-684-82673-9), 1996 (1995), p. 155.

“In the melee, heroism, bravery, or even superior technology cannot guarantee survival.”

Hanson, Victor Davis, Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, New York: Doubleday (0-385-50400-4), 2003, p. 13.

“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.”

Alvarez, Everett Jr. & Anthony S. Pitch, Chained Eagle, New York: Donald I. Fine (1-55611-167-3), 1989, p. 39.

“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.”

Wolff, Tobias, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, New York: Vintage Books (0-679-76023-7), 1994, p. 5.

“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.”

Brokaw, Tom, The Greatest Generation Speaks: Letters and Reflections, New York: Random House (0-375-50394-3), 1999, p. 222.

“That’s the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die—and the difference is just an eyelash.”

Quoted in Congressional Research Staff, Suzy Platt (editor), Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations, New York: Barnes & Noble Books (0-8802-9768-9), 1993, p. 361.

“Why are blunders into ambushes not more rare?”

Fussell, Paul, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, New York: Oxford University Press (0-19-503797-9), 1989, p. 20.

“It is now a relationship, in the Western world at least, for a very small minority indeed.”

Keegan, John, War and Our World, New York: Vintage Books / Random House (0-375-70520-1), 2001 (1998), p. 58.

“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.”

Fehrenbach, T.R., This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History, 50th Anniversary Edition, Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s (1-57488-334-8), 2000 (1963), p. 110.

“I also wanted to describe my troubled homecoming and difficult adjustment to a virtually oblivious America.”

Sledge, E.B., China Marine: An Infantryman’s Life after World War II, New York: Oxford University Press (0-19-516776-7), 2003 (2002), p. xiv.

“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.”

Quoted in Ellis, John, Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I, New York: Pantheon Books, 1976, p. 97.

“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.”

Craighill William P., The 1862 Army Officer’s Pocket Companion: A Manual for Staff Officers in the Field, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books (0-8117-0020-8), 2002 (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1862), p. 299.

“Minutes are often precious; you must not then waver, and a firm and vigorous execution will frequently atone for the deficiencies of your plan.”

Craighill William P., The 1862 Army Officer’s Pocket Companion: A Manual for Staff Officers in the Field, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books (0-8117-0020-8), 2002 (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1862), p. 299.

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Copyright ©2009 Patrick McDermott