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“Who was most courageous—the man who felt the least fear or the man who felt the most?”
The title of this chapter came from a question asked by Yasuo Kuwahara, who was a Kamikaze pilot in the Pacific War. His suicide flight was scheduled, and he was prepared to die. But the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 ended the war, and so ironically, the Atomic Bomb saved his life. Remembering his fellow pilots who accomplished their suicide missions, he asked whether it was the man who felt the least fear, or the man who felt the most, who was more courageous. This question could be expanded into an entire book, or series of books, and the question still wouldn’t be answered. In The Bridges at Toko-Ri, a fictional account of Navy pilots in the Korean War in 1952, James Michener has a character, Admiral George Tarrant, ask in awe and wonder about the men giving their lives in The Forgotten War: “Where do we get such men?” I don’t know the answer, but I hope considering some aspects of it will help you find enough courage to do what you must do, and to not do what you should not.
We had been through an operation that was particularly grueling, both physically and mentally, and had taken some particularly painful losses. We were now set up in a firebase with large, walk-in bunkers. The VC had assassinated several officials in a nearby village, which cast a pall over the village and the firebase, and the very atmosphere seemed heavy. We were told to expect an attack of a large force, twenty times our size, that night.
For some reason I can’t explain, we were determined to resist that attack to the death. We all began preparing, and all the preparation was designed to insure we did the maximum damage to the attackers; we did nothing that would help us escape. Any other time we would have been considering escape routes, how to fall back, maximum cover, the possibilities for surrender, etc.—but this time all we thought was “They’re going to kill us all, but it’s going to cost them more than they ever thought possible!” Strangely enough, we didn’t stay awake waiting, but instituted a normal guard rotation. We wanted to be fully rested when the attack came, so as to be as strong as possible and inflict the greatest damage. No one had any trouble falling asleep when it was their turn, since sleeping was part of the strategy—to stay awake worrying would help the enemy. And each man came instantly awake when his turn came to watch—none of the usual problems getting your relief to wake up.
In the morning, when the attack had failed to materialize, we were actually disappointed! We thought, and I still think to this day, the enemy might have sensed our readiness and resolve, and wisely decided this wasn’t the time and place to attack. Around noon, we realized how close we had come to dying, and then we all got scared, some of us even began to tremble at the thought of how close we’d come to death.
There was no other night in my time in Vietnam when I felt that way. I can’t explain it to you, why it happened, or if it could ever happen again. Because of it, I can understand how ordinary men sometimes show extraordinary courage. In this chapter we’ll explore some of the amazing feats of courage in situations where there was no hope, but no also fear.
You know the defiant mottoes. On any given Saturday night in army towns near military bases you’ll find a tattoo parlor where “Death before Dishonor” is being emblazoned on someone’s arm or chest. This determination is reflected in the Ranger Creed: “Though I be the sole survivor, I will not cease until the mission is accomplished.” We all know it’s “Better to die on our feet than live on our knees” and “Better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.” Colonel William Travis’ last message from the Alamo “To the people of Texas and all Americans in the world” concluded “I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country—Victory or Death”. From ancient times, soldiers remember the Spartan exhortation Molon Labe, which was “King Leonidas’s fabled response to the advancing Persian army’s demand that the Spartans lay down their weapons.”: “Come and get them”.
During the Battle of the Bulge, called by the Germans the Battle of the Ardennes Forest, Bastogne was at a “road octopus”—all roads passed through it. General Tony McAuliffe, when asked on December 22, 1944 to surrender his surrounded command holding Bastogne, defiantly answered “Nuts”. There is some dispute as to whether the quote was precisely accurate, perhaps a different four-letter word was used. After all, in that environment, it’s common to hear the four-letter Anglo-Saxon term for the sex act used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb and an interjection—all in the same sentence—but “Nuts” is what was recorded in the newspapers, and whichever word he used, it showed the determination by all, from general to private. One private in the 101st Airborne Division serving under General Tony McAuliffe observed “They’ve got us surrounded—the poor bastards.”
To be fair to the Screaming Eagles’ friendly rivals in the 82nd Airborne Division, I must tell another story from the Battle of the Bulge. With the breakthrough of the German armor, an American tank was barreling toward the rear, when a lone paratrooper from the All American Division flagged the tanker down. “Are you looking for someplace safe from the Germans?” he asked. “If so, get behind me, ’cause I’m from the 82nd Airborne and the Germans ain’t comin’ any further than where I’m standing.”
Heroes are chosen for reasons good and bad, and the choice might have more to do with luck and fashion than with courage. John Wayne is called an American hero as if his movie exploits had happened in real life, and our most esteemed “warriors” excel in sports, not war. Everybody thinks they can detect courage and cowardice when they see it, but both emotions happen inside a head. A cavalry trooper whose horse panics and runs into the enemy line might appear to have been recklessly brave, when in fact his charge was completely unintentional. Let’s look at a few examples of acts where motives are unclear. My goal is to open your eyes to the possibility that seemingly brave or cowardly deeds might have been the opposite. In the cases cited, of course, we may never know what the truth is, since we cannot look into the souls of the participants, but they serve here to illustrate the difficulty of passing judgment.
Let’s consider two cases of “desertion in the face of the enemy”. First, consider the man who left the Alamo in March 1836. In the made-for-Hollywood scene, the fort’s garrison was called out, and told of their desperate plight. Antonio López de Santa Anna’s forces had them surrounded, and reinforcement was improbable. The commander, Colonel William Travis, drew a line in the dirt with his sword. Each man was offered the option to leave that night, or cross the line and stay. The men willing to fight the forlorn hope stepped across the line. One man, Moses Rose, chose to leave. Was this man a coward? He was in later years often called a coward—although never to his face. And he never apologized in any way. After all, Colonel Travis, the commander, gave permission to leave, so leaving was permissible, and in his view honorable.
But further, some of the men who stayed no doubt did so because they were afraid to leave a fort to go traipsing through enemy territory in the dark. For some, going over wall to leave the Alamo took more courage than staying hoping against hope for reinforcement. John Keegan points out that “Even a half-good billet, a downright awful hole, will tempt the soldier to bide”, so Moses Rose might have been braver than some who stayed. As with all judgments of history, we have 20/20 hindsight. The men in the Alamo didn’t know Rose would live and they would die, since “Ordinary men see their immediate peril rather than the larger one to come.” If reinforcements had arrived, it would have been safer to have stayed, so our judgment of courage and cowardice is tainted because we know the outcome and they didn’t.
The second act of “desertion” involves the Spaniards who campaigned with Hannibal (247-183 b.c.e.), a Carthaginian from northern Africa, in 218 b.c.e. There is uncertainty about every campaign, especially those in the distant past, but let’s not worry about what actually happened—I want to look at the attitudes of the military historians, who, as Clemenceau said “beat their drums with the bones of the dead.” Hannibal was in the south of what is now called Spain, and recruited a large number of the locals to join him in a campaign in northern Spain. After a successful campaign, he revealed his ultimate plan, which was to attack Rome. A group of the Spaniards said “No thanks”, and left for home. Some historians have referred to the departing Spaniards as “cowardly” or “disgraceful”.
But what is disgraceful about their action? Imagine Hannibal’s plea to them. “Look, there are these guys who you never heard of, who have never hurt you, a long way away from here—but trust me, if you knew them, you wouldn’t like them. So I want you to desert your family and farms and go with me to attack these guys.” Isn’t it more disgraceful to wage a war against a people that has done you no harm than to return to your responsibilities at home? This wasn’t their war, it was about vengeance for the defeat the Romans had inflicted on Hannibal’s father in the First Punic War. By those standards, anyone who doesn’t join in a war between two foreign nations is a coward.
Of course, historians would naturally respect Hannibal as one of the great generals of history, and be keenly interested in the campaign, so to them, refusing to go with Hannibal was to miss out on one of the greatest events in history. But consider what we know in retrospect about those Spaniards that did go. More than half of them died in the passage of the Alps before they even reached Italy; most of the survivors died in Italy; most who survived Italy died at Zama when Hannibal retreated back to Carthage; any who survived that battle were sold into slavery. If any happened to straggle back to Spain, decades later, they would have been greeted not just as fools, but as traitors—they had abandoned their country to join the wrong side in the war, since in their absence, Spain elected to side with Rome in the conflict.
Some of today’s Iraqis are in a similar situation: they’re asked to fight against countrymen who might attain powerful positions in the future, and prefer to just sit it out. In a similar situation, Richard Holmes said of Dutch-Belgian troops at Waterloo, who had recently been in the French Army but were now expected to fight against it, and simply opted out of the battle, “These men were not panic-stricken cowards, ashamed of their conduct: they had simply decided that their interests were best served by the avoidance of battle.” The lesson for the modern soldier is that when we occupy another country, understand that the people have to believe you will stay and win before they will join you. And don’t think that those sitting on the sidelines are necessarily cowards. They might become valuable allies or fierce enemies under different circumstances.
Whether any given act can be judged brave or cowardly has changed with the fashions of the times. On July 3, 1863, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia assaulted the Union lines on the heights above Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in an action known as Pickett’s Charge. As accurately depicted in the movie, Gettysburg, which I highly recommend you study, the Confederates did not “charge”. They formed in regiments, shoulder to shoulder, and marched, rout step, across a mile of open ground toward the Union lines. First cannonballs, then grapeshot, then bullets tore holes in their ranks. Each hole was instantly filled as the survivors closed up, dressed right and continued their agonizing advance into fire that was so devastating some men leaned into it as if it were a hurricane force wind. They were the first soldiers facing modern gunfire, and they used tactics appropriate to an earlier age. What strikes me, as a modern infantryman, is their individual tactics—the opposite of everything that was drummed into me at Fort Polk! We get down and spread out; they stood up and bunched together! For them, it would have been cowardly to take cover. Now we think it’s stupid not to.
General George Patton “tried to forbid signs of prudence that bordered on cowardice, like officers concealing their insignia to avoid the special attention of snipers, and tankers augmenting their front armor with rows of sandbags.” Today the standard insignia is subdued, and all vehicles are expected to be augmented with protection. Likewise, French soldiers marched into World War I wearing Pantalon Rouge, bright red pants that showed they weren’t afraid to be seen by the machine gunners who mowed them down.
In the “days of honor”, people worried about appearances and what other people thought. If they had to withdraw, soldiers backed away so they wouldn’t be shot in the back, because that would imply they were running, a mark of cowardice. You must die facing the enemy. Losing a flag, which after all is only a piece of colored cloth, was a great shame. Mrs. Daly, who sewed the flag for the Irish Brigade in the Civil War, and said “My flag, which I gave to the 69th, was lost, the ensign dropped it in his retreat, and as he escaped unhurt has not dared to show his face.” It is unforgiveable to lose a flag unless you are severely injured, or even better, dead.
We tend to consider giving your life in battle the ultimate in courage. I hate to be politically incorrect, and dishonor the dead, but sometimes it’s stupidity, not courage, that gets a soldier killed. “In their instinctive generosity, Americans have never understood, God bless them, that the cowardly are wounded as readily as the brave.” The Purple Heart is engraved “For Military Merit”. What’s the merit in getting shot? In my estimation, your goal is to avoid getting wounded, and if you are wounded—especially killed—you blew it. As General Patton said: “It is a popular idea that a man is a hero just because he was killed in action. Rather I think a man is frequently a fool when he gets killed.” What appears to be courage can be a miscalculation. Vera Brittain, on the death of her fiancé, Roland Leighton, in no man’s land between the trenches in World War I, asked herself the age-old question about bravery and knavery: “Had it been heroism or folly, I asked myself for the thousandth time, which had urged him forth to inspect the wire beneath so bright a moon?”
In some cases, it could take more courage not to attack than to attack. If some soldiers are indeed more afraid of their NCOs than the enemy, it takes more courage to disobey orders than to obey them. When a German gunner refused to engage some British tanks, a German officer pointed his pistol at him and told him he could “either die now on my responsibility, or win a decoration on his own.” Consider the “cowardice” of mutineers. The First World War is often pointed to as the example of generals stupidly ordering men to their deaths. The Western Front was a meat grinder that chewed men in attack after attack that resulted in mounds of dead, but gained little if any ground. And so the French troops mutinied, but this was not the normal mutiny. The French “mutineers” continued to man their posts, and assured their commanders they would fight to the last man to resist any German advance. But they refused to follow any order for another senseless, suicidal attack. Looking at it from decades later, I can sympathize with the French infantrymen who faced a great injustice, and refused to sacrifice themselves for officers sitting safe in the rear. The leaders of the mutiny knew they’d be executed, as they were. They gave their lives for justice, perhaps nobly, perhaps foolishly. But there is little question in my mind some of the mutineers were far more courageous than the officers who had them executed.
The ideal soldier is fierce in a fight but meek in peace. But that’s not human nature. Should it be any surprise that assault troops who would storm an enemy position without batting an eye might occasionally get into a bar brawl? Consider the pilot who is afraid to risk censure by buzzing the tower, or flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. How do you then expect that he’ll fly against a target surrounded by anti-aircraft guns and protected by swarms of fighters?
Elite units, alas, sometimes seem to have balls bigger than their brains. Consider the incident during the invasion of Afghanistan on Takur Ghar mountain. This incident was the subject of the book Roberts Ridge, accurately called “a story of courage and sacrifice.” The official summary of the mission noted “the U.S. forces involved in this fight again distinguished themselves by conspicuous bravery. Their countless acts of heroism demonstrated the best of America’s Special Operations Forces (SOF) as Army, Navy and Air Force special operators fought side by side to save one of their own, and each other”.
In this operation, a team was going to be dropped on a mountain to direct air strikes during Operation Anaconda on March 3-4, 2002. Their helicopter came under fire as they approached, making it obvious the supposedly empty peak had a substantial enemy presence. The helicopter was severely damaged, the mission was obviously impossible and so aborted, and the chopper drifted off to a controlled crash seven miles away. But in the confusion, one of the SEALs in the landing party, Neil Roberts, slipped and fell from the helicopter. True to the Ranger Creed: “I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy”, the other men commandeered another helicopter and went back to rescue Roberts.
This was very, very brave. But it was not very smart. We now know that Roberts was almost certainly already dead when they went back, and at the time, it should have been obvious that he would have been killed soon after he fell. If they must go back, it didn’t make sense to go back to the same spot as before, where the new helicopter was immediately shot down. In the end, the return wound up costing the lives of six more men, a helicopter, and numerous wounds (including the loss of the leg of one of the survivors). All for an exploit that could have no good effect on the important battle that was raging in the valley below. In fact, it became a distraction, subtracting from the effectiveness of the forces fighting.
It’s possible that no one whose makeup would inspire them to go on the first attack would be able to avoid the second. You need to decide for yourself where your sense of honor takes you, but for me, I want my sacrifice to count. For some medals, courage is only part of the qualification. The Victoria Cross, which is called the British equivalent of the Medal of Honor, must be a very brave act that contributes to a victory—victoria, after all, is Latin for victory. In one case a soldier who single-handedly captured a hill against all odds, losing his life in the process, was denied the VC because while the paperwork was being prepared the Germans recaptured the hill, so it wasn’t counted a victory, after all. So in the case of the VC, courage must achieve a military end, ineffective courage is not recognized.
Since having been an infantryman, I mostly speak of ground combat, here are some words about extraordinary courage in the air. In World War II, bomber crews were rotated from combat after completing a certain number of missions. The number varied with the type of aircraft. Joseph Heller, of Catch-22 fame, was a bombardier on two-engine medium bombers, and had to fly 60 missions. Crews of four-engine long-range bombers flew longer and much more dangerous missions, so had to complete “only” 25 missions. Much was made of the first crew to complete this quota, the crew of a B-17 named Memphis Belle. A film crew was aboard the last mission, and the crewmembers went home to tour in bond drives. Now, when you think about it, a question arises. Think back to the Memphis Belle’s first mission. The plane was part of a large attack, and a number of other missions were flown before the Memphis Belle flew its second mission. So why was it the only plane flying its 25th mission that day? Shouldn’t there have been scores of planes on their last mission? In fact, not only was the Memphis Belle the only plane on its 25th mission, no other plane was on its 24th—or even 23rd—that day. How can that be? Some crews might have had mechanical problems or illnesses that made them fall behind the pace, but that is not the main explanation. Most of the crews that started with the Memphis Belle were dead. The numbers are hard to come by, but here are the rough numbers on what a crewmember could expect in 1943. About half died when their airplane was shot down. Another 10% returned aboard their plane dead, so even if your plane made it back, you might not. About 15% were on planes that were lost, but lived to be captured by the Germans, which means if your plane was shot down, about three-quarters of the time you’d die with it. This means only about one out of every four would successfully complete the required 25 missions, and three out of every five would be killed. I have to admit, I might have developed some strange illness that would have kept me from flying a mission like the second attack on Schweinfurt, where bombers had to return to a target where they had suffered devastating losses.
In my case, I never had to go on a mission where it was less likely I would return than not return. In the incident I opened the chapter with, we were already in the threatened firebase with no real option of escape, so I didn’t consciously seek extreme danger. When I did go into danger, at any given time, the choice was to get on the helicopter, or walk out of the firebase, for a possibly dangerous mission. Each time, it was unlikely that every one of us would return alive, but it was also unlikely that none of us would return alive. And so, each time, it was rational to go—to face the danger instead of disgrace or a court martial.
The closest I ever came to what could be called a suicide mission happened at a firebase near the Michelin Rubber Plantations. The base was jointly occupied by my company from my 199th LIB and elements of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. The 11th ACR had provided artillery, tanks and ACAVs with quad 50s—a set of four .50 caliber machine guns that fired in tandem. I was put in charge of three other infantrymen and told to report to one of the armored officers for the night. This obviously frightened young officer told me to take my men outside the perimeter as a listening post. He was convinced there was going to be a big attack that night, and figured it would be desperate fighting. He planned to close the concertina wire behind us, and said that when the enemy came there wouldn’t be time to let us back in. His artillery would blast the area. I should find the best cover I could and stay down. Now picture this. Four men, not dug in, with a human wave of attackers coming from one direction and from the other side final protective fire of bullets from machine guns, canister from howitzers, and ball bearings from claymore mines! There would obviously be no chance we’d survive.
Surprisingly enough, I didn’t protest. I had so much contempt for that excuse for an officer that I didn’t believe he could be correct about anything. If he was convinced an attack was coming, it couldn’t possibly be true. So I took the patrol out and found good cover between us and the firebase—I didn’t concern myself with protection from an advancing enemy, instead I found good protection from our “friend” hiding in his armored cocoon. I figured that cowardly officer might very well panic at normal night sounds and order the troops to open fire on imaginary attackers. In the event, nothing happened, and we returned to our unit the next morning once we were able to get back in—that disgrace of an officer had forgotten all about us and made no provision for our return. Now, in one sense, this was a suicide mission, and if the attack had materialized our courage in going out and sacrificing ourselves would have brought awe and inspiration to all who heard it. But frankly, there was really no courage involved, because since I didn’t believe the jerk, I didn’t think I was walking into the jaws of death.
People describe courage in different ways. Since I’ve worked as a computer systems analyst, where it is necessary to understand how computer structures mimic real-world analogs, I often use analogies as an aid to understanding. So here are a few ideas on what courage is.
An Attribute. The first theory is that courage is an attribute, like height. Even as you can line men up by height, you can line them up by courage—some men are brave, others aren’t. You can fake it within limits—elevator shoes, for example, can make you look a little taller than you are, and you can rally your courage—but there is a definite limit to how far it can stretch, peculiar to each individual. This concept seems to underlie the rule that a person can earn only one Medal of Honor. The medal says its holder has demonstrated the highest level of courage, and there’s no need to say it again. All of the other medals are for specific acts, signifying a brave act, but the MOH implies possession of the attribute of highest courage.
An Allotment. Each person is born with an allotment of courage. There’s a stash, a fixed amount, and like an inheritance, each person receives a different amount. An observer of Civil War Confederate soldiers noted soldiers do not “fear death less because of their repeated escapes from its jaws.” They see “so many new kinds of death” and “so many frightful and novel kinds of mutilation” in each battle, that “their dread of incurring the like fearful perils unnerves them for each succeeding conflict.” Each brave act uses some courage up, and when you use it all up, it’s gone. It can be replenished only very slowly, if at all. So you don’t get accustomed to combat, quite the opposite. This would explain why men become worthless after too much combat, and why PTS, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, can be a life-long problem.
A Bank Account. There’s a Bank of Bravery where you can deposit and withdraw courage. Facing danger, the experience of horror, deaths of friends, all draw down the account. Rest and recuperation can replenish it, as can good leadership and training. Lord Moran, who was a medical officer in the trenches in World War I, says you can even go bankrupt, “A man’s courage is his capital, and he is always spending. The call on the bank may be only the drain of the front line or it may be a sudden draft which threatens to close the account.”
The Weather. Under this theory, courage is like the weather, it varies from day to day, and like the weather it blows hot and cold. And like the weather, it can be hard to predict. Brigadier Smith spoke of some World War I riflemen who lost all fighting spirit and turned and ran at one engagement, but the next day held fast and fought like lions as they transformed into a band of fanatical furies who stormed and captured a fortified village against all odds. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, although a novel written by a man who had never seen combat, is among the most realistic depictions of combat ever written. Over the course of a two-day battle, our hero, Private Henry Fleming, goes from fleeing the battle in panic to leading heroic charges, showing extremes of cowardice and valor within 24 hours. [Note: The text of The Red Badge of Courage is available for your enjoyment.]
So which description is right? They all are! It’s different for different people, and on different days. There is a difference between the occasional coward and the constitutional coward, so even the bravest might seem cowardly at times, and the most cowardly could find a remarkable reservoir of courage under the right circumstances. Courage in one realm doesn’t necessarily transfer to another. We’ve all heard the story of the gruff sergeant who would charge a machine gun nest but is afraid to ask a girl for a date; or will face a bayonet but not a needle to get an immunization; or the decorated war hero who’s afraid of elevators. Joseph Heller flew 60 combat missions in World War II Europe but resolved to never fly in any airplane again for any reason. Anxious as he was to get home, he chose to return on a slow boat rather than fly in a fast airplane. It can be hard to evaluate what level of courage is required to perform a certain act, to define levels of courage, but let’s try.
Here’s something to discuss over beers. This is my take, and is clearly not scientific, so your opinion might be different. My goal is to get you thinking, not to convince you. To show how hard it is to judge courage, consider that it’s not always clear when one act is more courageous than another.
There is frequently disagreement over what medal a particular act deserves, a Medal of Honor, versus a Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) or Navy Cross, versus a Silver Star. Many European armies awarded their highest decorations to nobles, for the simple fact that they were born of the right parents, and Americans generally did not like the concept of nobility, so the U.S. Army resisted military decorations for a long time. George Washington (1732-1799) had given a Purple Heart for military merit (not for wounds), but even that medal was discontinued after the Revolutionary War. By the time of the Civil War, however, it was felt conspicuous gallantry should be recognized, and so the Medal of Honor was authorized. Since there was only one decoration available, there was a natural tendency for the standards to fall. If a soldier did something that was very brave, you could give him a Medal of Honor, or give him nothing. So an act that today might receive a DSC or Silver Star might get a Medal of Honor. There was also a tradition that capturing an enemy flag was an automatic Medal of Honor. Most times, this was justified. The Confederates were proud soldiers, and they put their pride in their colors. Capturing a flag often involved a hand-to-hand struggle, and holding a flag immediately made you the priority target of all the Confederates that saw you. But in some tactical situations there was no danger in retrieving the flag. In a few cases, after a desperate struggle, a man who had not even been involved in the combat found a flag lying on the ground and received a Medal of Honor by simply picking it up, while those whose last struggle had driven the enemy away received nothing.
By the early Twentieth Century, lower decorations such as the DSC and Silver Star were available, and fewer MoH’s were awarded for lesser acts. In 1916, the Army began reviewing the Civil War MoH’s, and downgraded almost a thousand of them to lesser decorations. They also imposed the rule that a soldier could receive only one MoH, since the medal implied the highest level of valor. Tom Custer, for example, had been awarded two MoH’s during the Civil War, which irritated his older brother George Armstrong, who had not earned even one, right up until the day they died together at the Little Big Horn. Another revoked Medal was the one given to a woman, Mary Edwards Walker, a graduate of Syracuse University who had started a medical practice in Rome, New York (my birthplace!) and during the Civil War had served as a medical doctor. She had not officially been in the military, and had never been in combat, or even under fire, but President Carter nonetheless restored the decoration in 1977 in an obvious gesture toward women in the military.
The hierarchy of military decorations implies there is an objective scale, that a certain act requires a certain level of courage, and you simply choose the appropriate medal based on the act. But an objective scale looks at an act from the outside, whereas courage is something that is inside. Consider a few factors that affect how courageous an act is:
Choice. Sometimes, “A hero is a coward who got cornered.” Certainly someone who volunteers for a dangerous mission, or does not take advantage of an honorable release, shows greater courage than someone who fate, not choice, put in harm’s way. One B-17 pilot in World War II was chosen to become the commanding general’s personal pilot, and was expected to report immediately. He had only flown 24 of the 25 missions that were required to complete a combat tour, however, and so he insisted on flying the last mission before reporting for his cushy job. It turned out to be an easy mission, but surely this man did something many of his peers would not have, and showed greater courage than the others who flew exactly the same mission, since he had an honorable choice to avoid the mission.
Consider those aircrews in World War II. As far as I know, every one of them volunteered for the job. No one was made a pilot, bombardier, navigator, engineer or gunner without asking to be sent to the school. Now, he might have expected to be assigned to a less dangerous mission, but he nonetheless had volunteered. If, part way through the tour, one of them refused to go on a mission, he would be shamed. He would be called a coward by men who had never volunteered to go on such dangerous missions themselves. Isn’t the man who volunteered, even if he later chickened out, more brave than the man who never even volunteered?
Duration. The duration of exposure contrasts the courage to face a dangerous mission with the grit to face the daily grind of attrition. If danger goes on and on, a small risk becomes crushing. In the trench warfare of World War I and the later part of the Korean War, or the booby trap war in Iraq and parts of Vietnam, the numbers are reassuring at first. After all, not one man in a thousand is killed in any single day. But one in a thousand comes to well over a third of the force within a year as the toll is taken day after day. Any one day is not bad, but day after day the odds look more hopelss. Consider trench warfare in World War I. On a typical day, you’d hear the explosions of a couple of artillery rounds lobbed at your positions. No big thing, the odds of getting hit were quite low—well under one percent on any given day. For the British, French and Germans, it went on for almost four years. Day after day, week after week, month after month, and then year after year the butcher bill mounted. And it became very unlikely any one person would survive the war.
In the World Wars, men were pretty much in “for the duration”, once assigned, the only established procedure for them to leave combat was to be killed or wounded. In limited wars, however, it is usually thought each man’s exposure should be limited, and that the danger should be spread out amongst the citizenry. In Korea and Vietnam, soldiers served one year, Marines 13 months, but then anyone below the grade of E-7 could not be sent back unless they volunteered. In Iraq soldiers are sent back for their third year on the line, which as a Vietnam veteran I see as an unfair burden—if a war is worth fighting, the burden should be spread among more of the populace.
Or consider the great courage involved in the D-Day landings in June 1944. To me the remarkable thing about D-Day is not so much that men did it, but that for those that survived it, the war wasn’t over. They next had to fight through the hedgerows, what the French called bocage. For centuries, hedgerows had grown up between the fields in this part of Normandy. Each hedgerow was three feet of dirt topped by thick vegetation. A hedgerow was an ideal defensive position: the Germans had cover from the dirt, and concealment from the vegetation, but the Americans had to cross flat open ground to get to them. Taking one hedgerow was a daunting military feat. Ninety-five percent of American soldiers in World War II never once did anything as difficult and dangerous. But the men fighting in the bocage didn’t do it once—each hedgerow was followed by another, and another, and another. I frankly find it easier to picture myself enduring the single day of D-Day than the weeks in the bocage that followed.
Expectation. The Battle of the Ia Drang in November 1965 was one of the most deadly engagements of the entire Vietnam War. The first part of this battle was portrayed in the movie We Were Soldiers, which gave the mistaken impression the battle ended when Lt. Colonel Moore’s First Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry left. Actually, the next day was the worst day of the entire Vietnam War in terms of American dead, when the Second Battalion of the Seventh Cav was ambushed at LZ X-Ray. Both battalions endured tougher fighting than I ever did in my tour. But in one sense, the guys who went to Ia Drang did no more than what I did many times, namely got onto a helicopter and flew to a LZ. They didn’t know a vicious fight was waiting for them.
On April Fools’ Day, 1945, U.S. forces landed on the beaches of Okinawa, expecting a slaughter greater than what happened on D-Day the year before. But the Japanese General Ushijima played an April Fool joke on them—the landing was totally unopposed. Did the first wave at Normandy show more courage than the first wave at Okinawa? Probably less, because the Okinawa landing force could brood over the losses on D-Day; but I will admit I would have no problem at all if everyone in the first wave at Normandy was automatically given, say, a Bronze Star for Valor, but I don’t think it would be fair to do that for the Okinawa landings. To this extent, a medal is awarded for enduring something horrific, rather than facing fears or finding courage.
That being said, let’s try to classify the level of courage involved in a given act of courage. Feel free to devise your own scale—as we’ve seen, there is often disagreement about levels of courage, or even what courage is.
Anyone who serves in the military, just doing the job, is doing something few citizens ever do. All soldiers show the quiet extraordinary courage of everyday war. Even those in the rear face death, even if the risk is much less than that of the frontline troops. Even in peacetime, all must know they can be called to face death any time. Surprisingly enough, most military careers involve little danger.
This is a story my father, Owen John McDermott, used to tell. I have seen references to the incident in numerous books, although they have not contained enough detail to confirm all the particulars, it appears to be accurate. My father was in the Army of Occupation in Japan, the ultimate peacetime army. The C-54 cargo plane he was responsible for as an aircraft mechanic had flown to Kimpo Field in Korea, and one of its ailerons had been damaged. Another C-54 was assigned to fly my father and some other mechanics over to Kimpo to fix it. While they were in flight, the co-pilot came back to nervously ask how long it would take to fix the plane. My father was unable to say, since he hadn’t seen the damage, and especially because he didn’t know which aileron was affected. One aileron, entangled with electronics and wiring, was especially tricky to repair, and would take some hours if it was the one damaged. Even after he explained this several times, the co-pilot kept coming back, nervously pressing him for an estimate, and asking if some makeshift repair could get the plane flight-worthy quickly, and complete the repairs back in Japan. When my father asked the co-pilot why he was so concerned, he said it was because “It was really hot over there”. My father thought he must be talking about the weather, but in fact the Korean War had broken out, and when they got to Kimpo, MiGs were strafing the airfield. The C-54 they had come to fix was in flames. This C-54 was in fact the first U.S. loss of the Korean War. Although the burning C-54 was clearly irreparable now, and the obvious thing would be to get back to their home base in Japan, the pilot insisted that his last order was to land the mechanics, and since those orders had not been countermanded, land he must. In addition to the MiGs, there were two U.S. fighters in the air. Apparently both groups of fighters had orders not to engage, since they did not fire at each other. Under the circumstances, the U.S. fighters, forbidden to attack the communist planes, wanted to leave the area, but felt obligated to stay to protect the unarmed transport plane my father was in. The fighter pilots managed to get a message up the chain of command about the damn fool transport pilot, and luckily the order soon came down to get out of there fast. When the crew of the destroyed C-54 returned safely to Japan a few days later, my father learned the original damage had been caused by a worker at Kimpo airfield who had intentionally rammed the plane with a forklift. He was captured by the South Koreans, and when they realized the North Koreans were attacking the South, they beheaded the saboteur without further ado. Actually, the saboteur might have saved the crew, since with their plane damaged they were inside the terminal instead of on the plane when it was strafed. In a career of more than two decades, this was the only day my father faced a combat situation. But during the entire 8,500 days he served, he might have been seen battle at any time, and even though a mechanic in the rear, airfields are prime military targets—he might have been under fire on any day.
Soldiers like myself, who were in a combat arm, sometimes fairly, and sometimes unfairly, can be contemptuous of the soldiers in safe jobs. Only ten to twenty percent of the military are in combat even in a combat zone. For sure, all share some risk, but there is a major distinction. Truck drivers might get shot at, and might even have to shoot back. But if they are shot at, it’s a mistake, and when they shoot back, it’s in self-defense. So facing death is not a constant strain, they don’t have to endure constant stress and fear. Support troops have to be on the lookout for the enemy so they can avoid them. Combat arms have to look for the enemy and go where they are. For support units, direct contact with the enemy is an infrequent accident. The combat arms—Infantry, Armor and Artillery—shoot and are shot at as an inherent part of their job. Combat medics and combat photographers are necessarily in the combat environment, but not as killers. Thus they rarely have to kill, and only in self-defense. Although even those soldiers “also serve who only stand and wait”, there is a difference in kind, not degree, between the rear echelon and those who are actually sent into combat. If you get killed while in the rear with the gear, it’s a fluke. For combat troops, it’s not kill or be killed, it’s kill and be killed.
The courage of the frontline is most clearly associated with the infantry and closely associated artillery, armored, medical and engineer units. For these people, it is heroism simply to endure another day. The uncommon courage of the common soldier is that he goes and takes his chances. Adolf Hitler’s ambition and outlook grew from his experience in World War I where he “served as an infantryman from 1914 through 1917 in a regiment which, like so many others, lost more than 100 percent of its initial troop strength.” In the trench warfare, many units on both sides had more than one hundred percent killed. Men were killed and replaced, and then the replacements were killed, so the number of dead was greater than the original strength of the unit.
I sometimes think there might be two distinct kinds of courage. Let’s consider the trench warfare of the First World War. The first situation, one that requires obvious courage, is to go over the top. To climb out of the trench and advance over open ground to grapple with the enemy, especially if you’ve done it before and know many will die for nothing, takes a certain kind of courage. But there is also the courage to endure “normal wastage”. Do you know how they would report casualty figures during World War I on the order of what we have been experiencing in Iraq? “All quiet”! Deaths of twos and threes were just normal wastage, not even worth reporting. It wasn’t fighting as much as sitting and dreading that next artillery round from an unseen enemy. Some men who volunteered for special operations admitted they did it because they would prefer a small number of very dangerous missions to the constant danger of routine combat.
At level three, I place the various elite and special units that get extremely hazardous missions. It’s hard to rank order the various units, and each of us might rank them differently, but we’ll all agree they are all brave. The minimum level for most elite military units is airborne qualification. Contrary to popular belief, the reason Airborne is elite is not because they jump out of airplanes. There are grandmothers who do that as a hobby, and many of the original airborne units in World War II landed in gliders, not parachutes. The fact of the matter is, whether you know it or not, when you volunteer for airborne you are volunteering for the kind of mission that requires jumping out of airplanes. And what kind of mission is that? No matter how long you think about it, you won’t come up with a single mission that requires a parachute jump that isn’t markedly dangerous under combat conditions. Places you can only get to by jumping—behind enemy lines, on top of bridgeheads and into fortresses. The real danger begins after you land: You can jump in, but you can’t jump out.
For an airplane to remain aloft it is necessary to keep air flowing over the wing. So the plane must fly above a certain speed, usually 110 or 120 mph. At that rate, the plane is moving two miles per minute, so if it takes just 30 seconds for the troopers to jump, the last one will land a mile from the first. And if one plane drops a minute early and another a minute late, some troopers will land six miles apart. So you’re not only in dangerous territory, you’re probably spread out and isolated in dangerous territory. In Ike: Countdown to D-Day, in a discussion about the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, there is an exchange regarding the 70 percent casualty rate expected to be experienced by these airborne units landing behind the beaches on D-Day.
Question: “What’s the split between wounded and dead?”
Answer: “Well, with paratroopers, we might as well assume they’re all dead. A wounded jumper is a cripple. And we all know this enemy.”
Although on D-Day the airborne expected 70% casualties, in the end they suffered “only” 20% that day. Russian Roulette has better odds, so when you volunteer for airborne you volunteer for the most dangerous missions. And since you volunteered for danger, you’ll generally be sent to whatever objective is most dangerous, even if you don’t need to jump in. If that’s not enough for you, after you get your jump wings, you can apply for one of the jobs that by their very nature are quite dangerous: Army LRRPs and Rangers, Marine Recon, Air Force combat air controllers, and Navy SEALs.
Evan Wright of Rolling Stone Magazine traveled with the Marine’s First Recon Battalion (see, I don’t only tell about the army!), which led the U.S. invasion into Iraq in March 2003. In his book about what he saw, Generation Kill, he states a basic rule of reconnaissance: “The lead element’s expendable.” As the spearhead of the invasion, “Their mission will be to seek out enemy ambushes by literally driving into them.”
In addition to these special operations personnel, I place the people who volunteer to defuse bombs in this category as well. When I was in Okinawa, more than two decades after the end of World War II, people were still being killed by munitions left over from the war. At least once a month someone would be killed by a mine or bomb from that war that had ended decades earlier. The EOD, Explosive Ordnance Disposal Units, had extremely dangerous missions. There was a series on PBS about the British unit, called UXB, for Unexploded Bomb, that handled this dangerous duty in World War II Britain that you might try to rent if you want to get a feel for how nerve-racking this can be.
With the many IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that have become as much a signature of the war in Iraq as the UH-1 helicopter was of Vietnam, the EOD units are among the busiest in Iraq. “Work all day, all night. Make one tiny mistake and you are hamburger.”
What we call suicide missions are usually not suicide, but suicidal. Survival is unlikely, but possible, although no one is surprised when courage becomes sacrifice. The Japanese and Iraqis have used literal suicide tactics, where the death of the attacker is inherent in the plan. In Chapter 6 we’ll discuss Suicide Attacks in depth, since they are so prominent in the War on Terror.
Being courageous does not mean being fearless. As this chapter’s title implies, the fearful are probably braver than the fearless. Unlike what some think, Fear is not the opposite of Courage. James McPherson, in For Cause & Comrades, pointed out that “Some Civil War soldiers grasped intuitively, and more acquired by experience, the modern understanding that courage is not absence of fear but mastery of it.” John Wayne had a line in one of his movies where he said something t effect of “Courage is when you’re scared as hell but you saddle up anyway.”
Fear is the most common reaction to combat. In World War II, a U.S. Army pamphlet called Army Life warned soldiers “YOU’LL BE SCARED. Sure you’ll be scared. Before you go into battle you’ll be frightened at the uncertainty, at the thought of being killed.” General George Patton said a man who says he is not afraid in combat is either a moron or a liar and “every man is scared in his first action. If he says he’s not, he’s a goddamn liar.”
In my case, I’m not ashamed to admit I was afraid. But it was not a specific fear. It was more a feeling of unspecific anxiety, but very intense. I could not rationally say “I’m afraid I’ll disgrace myself” or “I am afraid I’ll be killed” or “I’m afraid I’ll be maimed”, because what I felt wasn’t that specific. It was a deep, enveloping, instinctive fear that had no specific rationale, and thus there was nothing specific I could do about it, except hang on and tough it out. Some soldiers speak of a loss of bodily control, the saying being “Only me and the laundry lady will know how scared I was”. But frankly, I had the opposite reaction. My sphincter tightened up, and I wouldn’t have been able to release waste if I wanted to. The operative phrase is “scared shitless”.
Although it’s often said all soldiers are afraid in combat, that’s not quite true. A small percentage of soldiers claim they were not fearful in combat. George Washington (who certainly couldn’t have been telling a lie), describing his first battle at age 22, in the 1754 French & Indian Wars, said: “I can with truth assure you that I heard the bullets whistle. Believe me, there was something charming in the sound.” Philip Caputo, speaking of his first time in combat: “The truth is, I felt happy. The nervousness had left me the moment I got into the helicopter, and I felt happier than I ever had.” Winston Churchill said of his experiences as a young officer in the Boer War that “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” In the Civil War, “Many soldiers expressed surprise at their own coolness once fighting began.” Having something to do helped. A Massachusetts infantryman in the Civil War noted, “At such times we have so much to do that we hardly have time to be scared.” Hackworth points out “on the battlefield, you’re frightened all the time. You live with it. The beauty of being a leader, of being a squad leader, a platoon sergeant, a company commander, and so on, was that you were busy.”
Sometimes an irrational inner conviction can banish fear. Douglas MacArthur showed remarkable lack of fear in several dangerous situations in World War I. In World War II, he needlessly exposed himself to enemy fire on several occasions on Corregidor showing almost foolish bravery. It seems that on those occasions he had some sense of his own future and believed he couldn’t die without fulfilling his destiny. He had this mystical belief he wouldn’t be killed, so in a sense, whether deluded or not, he wasn’t being courageous. In the same sense, the comic book character Superman was not brave. As a kid, I wanted to have his superpowers, but didn’t think of him as brave. After all, bullets couldn’t hurt him. It would take no more courage for Superman to face bullets than for me to face a cap gun.
Another case of mystic courage is the early military career of Jeanne d’Arc, Joan of Arc. [Note: This tale is largely drawn from Chapter IX of Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. Click to read the full original text—PMcD] The Maid, la Pucelle, as she was called, was an 18-year-old peasant girl who in 1429 became convinced she had a divine mission to save the city of Orléans from the English, and then see the Dauphin crowned King of France. For six months, Joan showed reckless courage, fulfilled both her goals, and then prepared to return to her parents and tend her sheep. But she was persuaded to stay on by the newly crowned King and his Generals, and she served resolutely, but not as inspiringly as previously. I would argue Joan was more courageous after the Dauphin’s coronation than before. She had believed she had been given a divine mission, and firmly believed God would not allow her to be killed before fulfilling His mission. Once she had succeeded, she no longer felt she had divine protection. As Edward Creasy said in his 1851 classic, Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: “Our admiration for her courage and patriotism ought to be increased a hundred fold by her conduct throughout the latter part of her career, amid dangers, against which she no longer believed herself to be divinely secured.” She had a premonition that she would not survive another year if she kept fighting. Her premonition turned out to be true, as she was captured by the English and convicted of sorcery (how else could a woman have achieved such martial successes?), and burnt alive as a witch, a daunting inspiration for women in the military.
McPherson says under certain conditions soldiers exhibit what is described as “combat frenzy, fighting madness, or battle rage”, or even “combat narcosis” an effect almost like that of a hallucinogenic drug. They can turn into “preternatural killing machines oblivious to danger and fear.” “As H.G. Wells wrote, if you make men sufficiently fearful or angry the hot red eyes of cavemen will glare out at you.” Many MoH winners can’t explain what they did, or sometimes can’t even remember doing it. Something snaps, and the next thing they know they are either dead or heroes or both.
Many people become almost bipolar, switching between fear and rage, but Ernst Jünger, who served on the German side in World War I said in Storm of Steel he felt both emotions simultaneously: “You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry.” These two impulses are known as the Fight or Flight Syndrome.
Biologists speak of the two competing responses animals display when faced with danger: fight or flight. My karate sensei, Ferol Arce, correctly points out there is a third option: freeze. Each reaction is ingrained in us humans from our days as hunter-gatherers on the African savannah. The problem is that what was the best reaction in a prehistoric environment might not be the best reaction in today’s world. These actions can be associated with powerful emotions, for example fight with anger; flight with anxiety; and freeze with ambivalence. Nature wouldn’t have put these reactions in our repertoire if they weren’t sometimes useful, so consider these reactions so you can use them intelligently rather than instinctively.
Fight. Fight back! Fighting is obviously what soldiers are there for, so it needn’t be explained further here, except to say that a dead enemy can’t hurt you and sometimes the best defense is a good offense. Throughout history, with a few exceptions, the winning side has suffered much lighter casualties than the losers. Fight to win.
Flight. An ancient Chinese military theorist said: “Of the thirty-six strategies, running away is the best choice”. But running in panic is probably the worst strategy, since “The bloody carnage resulting from disintegration and flight”, will usually follow, and “Soldiers die in the largest numbers when they run.”
There is a fine line between bravery and foolishness. Assuming you aren’t in command or in some way the cause of the debacle, few people today would fault a soldier who fled a situation in which else everyone was killed—forlorn hopes, where sacrifice is essential as a higher objective, possibly excepted. Would you rather be a Live Coward or a Dead Hero? After all, it’s clear the lone survivor had the best sense of the tactical situation, and you can’t be expected to accept suicide for no good reason. But if you flee, and none of your compatriots are killed, you are going to be considered a coward. So what do you do when you have that feeling all is lost, trust your instincts or stay and possibly die?
Freeze. In combat I never felt tempted to run, I wanted to take cover behind a rock, or in a hole, and stay there. Not flight, freeze. This might be due to the nature of our war in Vietnam than to any excess of courage—there was no safe haven in any direction. In a linear war, moving back away from the line leads to safety, with complete safety often a short sprint away. In Vietnam, leaving your unit meant going alone into a hostile jungle filled with the enemy, so my fear drove me to take cover and stay put rather that to run. I had enough presence of mind to realize it was safer to take cover than to run and make myself a target. Often your “welfare and that of the group are intertwined.” If the group is annihilated, so are you: your fortune rides with the group; and you are usually safest with the group.
On the savannah where we evolved, freezing could sometimes be a good strategy. When you confront a wild animal, if you run, you look like lunch meat. If you attack you might lose the fight, and even if you win, you might be injured, and before modern medicine, every injury was a possible death sentence. Sometimes if you just stand there, the animal will back off. In combat, freezing is often the best strategy, but usually after taking cover, and by necessity the most common reaction. In a moving contact, you can’t see what’s going on. Until you receive direction from someone who knows the situation, it might be better to take the best cover you can and wait until you better understand the situation.
I was just a common infantryman, I never did anything especially brave, nor anything especially cowardly—although under the right circumstances I might have done either. I merely survived. But that’s who wins wars, not the rare hero, but the common everyday soldier who manages to hold on and do his duty.
If you do panic and run, don’t feel too bad. Consider the lesson of The Red Badge of Courage. The protagonist from his first battle, but went on to prove this observation from The 1862 Army Officer’s Pocket Companion that “A recruit, who deserts during his first engagement, may afterward become a hero.” [Note: The text of The Red Badge of Courage is available for your enjoyment.]
Tom Brokaw, in The Greatest Generation, talked to two men who were in the First Infantry Division at Normandy. When he asked them if they had been scared, “Both men had the same answer: they felt alternating fear, rage, calm, and, most of all, an overpowering determination to survive.” Since my goal in this book is to keep you alive, I want to help you sustain that determination to stay alive. I want you to avoid what we’ll discuss in the next chapter, Death.
The Notes for this chapter.
Copyright ©2009 Patrick McDermott