combat

Dulce bellum inexpertis – “War is Sweet to Those Who Have Never Experienced It”

SWJED — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 17:26:36 +0000

Dulce bellum inexpertis – “War is Sweet to Those Who Have Never Experienced It” SWJED Sun, 03/29/2020 - 1:26pm

While March 29th is National Vietnam War Veterans Day, the “official” federal remembrance day (August 18th in Australia and New Zealand), each of us who went to war will probably remember not only the date we left the United States and the date we returned, but also certain events in-between that occurred in the land which President Reagan called “…100 rice paddies and jungles in a place called Vietnam.”

How Does One Really Prepare for Combat

SWJED — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 15:40:04 +0000

How Does One Really Prepare for Combat SWJED Wed, 03/04/2020 - 10:40am

The “thousand-yard stare” from an infantry officer talking about his time in Iraq; routine bursts of anger from a former soldier who watch his friend step on an IED; a seasoned NCO who exited his track only to turn around and desperately scream to get back inside. Despite the myriad of training maneuvers, large-scale training center rotations, life-fire exercises, shoot-house drills, etc... nothing in training really prepares one for the visceral ugliness of combat.

Moral Deadening

SWJED — Sun, 12 May 2019 09:06:50 +0000

Moral Deadening SWJED Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:06am

Typically, Americans are raised from a young age to mind their manners, wait their turn, share, and most of all to not fight. They are raised as members of a non-aggressive society that continues to discourage competition more and more by the year. So imagine, after a life time of learning societal norms, you enter a new profession that begins to shift everything you thought you knew.

Saint Barbara as the Patron Saint of Grunts

SWJED — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 08:20:30 +0000

Saint Barbara as the Patron Saint of Grunts

51 years ago – this past Sunday - around 0630, I was looking over the berm shown in the picture, wondering how I emerged alive. It was Tet 1968. A very thin 52d ARVN Ranger Battalion was defending the Xuan Loc airfield against constant assaults.

Read more about Saint Barbara as the Patron Saint of Grunts

About the Author(s)

What I Have Learned With Bullets

SWJED — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 06:53:37 +0000

What I Have Learned With Bullets SWJED Thu, 01/31/2019 - 1:53am

I was cleaning out my accumulated files and I came across a series of notes regarding officers and leadership accumulated through the years. Having commanded four rifle companies, three Airborne/Ranger battalions and two Airborne/Ranger brigades, several in combat between 1965 and 1993, I saw a lot, did a lot and tried to remember. This article is for those who wish the knowledge, hopefully without the pain.

Read more about What I Have Learned With Bullets

Combat, Orders and Judgment

SWJED — Sat, 06 May 2017 13:16:34 +0000

Combat, Orders and Judgment

Flexibility exercised with good judgment is a pearl without price if it resides within the mind of the man on the spot.

Read more about Combat, Orders and Judgment

About the Author(s)

Paul Fussell's War

Peter J. Munson — Mon, 28 May 2012 14:09:24 +0000

Paul Fussell's War

Historian and critic Paul Fussell died this week at 88. His 1982 essay, "My War: How I Got Irony in the Infantry" is worth your time today.

My war is virtually synonymous with my life. I entered the war when I was nineteen, and I have been in it ever since. ...

We were in “combat.” I find the word embarrassing, carrying as it does false chivalric overtones (as in “single combat”). But synonyms are worse... “Combat” will have to do, and my first hours of it I recall daily, even now. They fueled, and they still fuel, my view of things. ...

My adolescent illusions, largely intact to that moment, fell away all at once, and I suddenly knew I was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just. ... To transform guiltless boys into cold marble after passing them through unbearable fear and humiliation and pain and contempt seemed to do them an interesting injustice. ...

[A month away from the line recuperating from pneumonia] had renewed my interest in survival, and I was psychologically and morally ill prepared to lead my platoon in the great Seventh Army attack of March 15, 1945. But lead it I did, or rather push it, staying as far in the rear as was barely decent. And before the day was over I had been severely rebuked by a sharp-eyed lieutenant-colonel who threatened court martial if I didn’t pull myself together. Before that day was over I was sprayed with the contents of a soldier’s torso when I was lying behind him and he knelt to fire at a machine gun holding us up: he was struck in the heart, and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket flew little clouds of tissue, blood, and powdered cloth. Near him another man raised himself to fire, but the machine gun caught him in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves. He was one to whom early on I had given the Silver Star for heroism, and he didn’t want to let me down.

As if in retribution for my cowardice, in the late afternoon, near Ingwiller, Alsace, clearing a woods full of Germans cleverly dug in, my platoon was raked by shells from an .88, and I was hit in the back and leg by shell fragments. They felt like red-hot knives going in, but I was as interested in the few quiet moans, like those of a hurt child drifting off to sleep, of my thirty-seven-year-old platoon sergeant—we’d been together since Camp Howze—killed instantly by the same shell. We were lying together, and his immediate neighbor on the other side, a lieutenant in charge of a section of heavy machine guns, was killed instantly too. My platoon was virtually wiped away. I was in disgrace, I was hurt, I was clearly expendable—while I lay there the supply sergeant removed my issue wristwatch to pass on to my replacement—and I was twenty years old.

Read it all here.

Peter J. Munson Mon, 05/28/2012 - 10:09am