The confident, physically fit recruit who went off to battle ended up a dirty, exhausted, fear-ridden combatant so immersed in war that the sight of normal peacetime activities struck him as out of place, even surreal. Lord Charles McM. Moran, a British battalion surgeon in World War I, described this immersion process: “[The soldier] had seen men go till none were left of those who had fought with him. He had gazed upon the face of death too long until exhaustion had dried him up making him so much tinder, which a chance spark of fear might set alight. He was forced at last to see the odds, by a wound perhaps, by a bad part of the line, by gas, by an unhealthy atmosphere in the mess, by some narrow escape that led him to ask can such luck last.”1
Over time the soldier became aware of the constant danger around him and the distinct possibility of his own demise; at the same time, fear and exhaustion made standing the strain increasingly difficult. Ernie Pyle, covering the fighting in North Africa in World War II, identified another significant aspect of the immersion process: “War coarsens most people. Men live rough and talk rough, and if they didn’t toughen up inside they simply wouldn’t be able to take it.”2 But just how coarse could a soldier become? For Private Eugene B. Sledge and his fellow marines during the grim fighting on Peleliu Island in World War II, the “fierce struggle for survival . . . eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.”3
The brutal environment of war thus presented two closely related problems for the soldier: how to survive while not losing his last shred of humanity in the process. Private Richard E. Ogden struggled to do both in Vietnam: “I was aware of the subtle changes in my mental state. . . . Complex issues and problems were becoming too simplified. There was a gleam of hope in the fact that I was aware of these changes. The fight to remain alive was one problem; the fight to remain human was quite another.”4
Immersion in war was thus a process of discovering combat’s dangers and hardships while struggling to survive and maintain a moral compass. This process, James R. Ebert points out, was inescapably “regressive.”5 The average soldier emerged from the initial shock of combat a confident and effective veteran, but in time he became increasingly aware of the odds against him while suffering the physically debilitating effects of continuous combat, often in a harsh climate. He began to lose his nerve, eventually breaking down or becoming dangerously fatalistic. Only by understanding this regressive process can one begin to comprehend how a soldier could fervently wish for a wound or even inflict one on himself, kill an enemy attempting to surrender in the heat of battle, take genuine delight in seeing rear-echelon soldiers of his own side blown away, or calmly munch on combat rations while sitting amid mangled corpses.
FROM GANGPLANK FEVER TO FIRST COMBAT
Most soldiers emerged from the training process physically fit and confident. Some were even impatient to get overseas, fearing they might miss the war. These eager warriors, often young and single, did not think about their own mortality. Lieutenant Robert G. Merrick, arriving with his artillery battalion in France in 1918, claimed that he and “every American soldier . . . had been hoping and longing for the day when he would get to the front.”6 Lieutenant Paul Fussell, off to World War II with his infantry division, if not exactly “hoping and longing” for combat, was nevertheless optimistic: “As the 103rd Division sailed away on the troop transport General Brooks, I simply radiated college-boy optimism. Later, I would tell encouraging lies to Mother and Dad in my letters, but now I was honest when I wrote home, ‘I feel very confident and safe.’”7
Private Matthew Brennan and his fellow replacements, about to fly to Vietnam in 1965, were equally confident, even eager: “The replacements at Oakland felt and acted like part of a conquering army. Most of us didn’t understand what was really happening in Vietnam. We believed that the war had reached its final stages and that we might arrive after the last big battles were won. . . . We were too naive to be afraid.”8
Not all soldiers, however, shipped out with the same enthusiasm as Brennan. Anxiety over leaving loved ones and uncertainty about what lay ahead made many soldiers “nervous in the service,” to use an army adage. Corporal Carl M. Becker, en route to the Pacific with his antiaircraft battalion in World War II, noticed an atmosphere of bravado, but he knew that it was a façade: “Our apparent courage notwithstanding, we were apprehensive, fearful men and boys. Had we voiced our real feelings, we would have diminished ourselves in one another’s eyes. . . . We remembered and longed for our families, girls in our arms. We wished for an immediate ending to the war that would send our ship in a peaceful direction to the United States.”9
A forlorn Private Randolph Stephens, en route to Korea, watched the American coastline recede as his ship left Puget Sound: “I stayed by the rail a long time, doing some soul searching and wondering if someday I would be seeing those same lights again.”10 As Private David Parks and his comrades in the First Infantry Division prepared for deployment to Vietnam, their morale was not improved by the nightly news: “We listen to the war broadcasts as we pack each day. One minute you’re packing; the next minute you’re hearing about the number of men killed. And you wonder if someday you’ll be in that count. Fear is creeping in now. Nobody talks or jokes as much as they used to.”11
For those soldiers least motivated and emotionally stable, orders for overseas movement triggered real or feigned physical and mental ailments, a condition the World War II GI nicknamed “gangplank fever.”12 Battalion surgeon Klaus H. Huebner believed that some of these men were “probably excellent actors with more endurance than their medical officer or company commander. Since one rotten apple, however, can spoil a barrel, we got rid of all problem cases.”13 Other soldiers attempted, with varying degrees of success, to go AWOL or to get themselves incarcerated to miss overseas movement.14
After the rotten apples were culled out, often by a discharge for medical or disciplinary reasons, the remaining soldiers departed for the combat zone. As early as World War II, individual replacements sometimes flew overseas, but units and their equipment, of necessity, traveled by ship. The voyage was long, boring, and uncomfortable, although not all the journeys were equally wretched. Some ships, notably the luxury liners converted to carry troops, were fast and relatively comfortable, although invariably overcrowded. At the other extreme were the small, old rust buckets that provided few comforts, rode the waves miserably, and took forever to complete a passage.15
The memoirs tell a common tale of being packed like sardines in tiers of bunks or hammocks. Seasickness reached epidemic proportions in rough seas, with the overpowering smell of vomit pervading the poorly ventilated sleeping quarters. The troops stood for hours in galley lines for food of dubious origin. The men did calisthenics on deck to keep in shape, but generally their fitness suffered. Training was mostly limited to classroom briefings for lack of space, although a few innovative units practiced firing machine guns and even mortars off their ships’ fantails. The bored men read and played cards—gambling pots reached extraordinary sums on occasion, since most players figured that they would not need much money where they were going.16
The soldier disembarked in the theater of war either as a member of a unit or as an individual replacement, and his first experience of combat varied accordingly. A soldier who was part of a green unit was buoyed by the presence of comrades he trusted and by the confidence typical of green units. A common theme in World War I memoirs is green-unit eagerness to come to grips with the Hun. Private Albert M. Ettinger’s 165th Infantry Regiment (which would not forsake its original National Guard designation, the Sixty-ninth New York), after being gassed and sporadically shelled during its initial stint in the trenches, was more eager than ever for a serious scrap: “The 69th had never flinched from a battle and never would. We were tired of all that mustard gas shit, and now we could get our hands on those Goddamned Germans. Many of the boys just relished that prospect.”17
Ettinger’s regiment was not alone in its eagerness. Doughboys frequently report on the displeasure of war-weary French allies over the arrival of a fresh American unit in their heretofore quiet corner of the front. The impromptu liveand-let-live system in place between the French and the Germans in such quiet sectors was soon disrupted by doughboys scrambling to be the first to pull a lanyard or trigger and draw German blood.18 Corporal Amos N. Wilder’s artillery battery, for example, took up position next to a French battery that had not fired a shell in two months. The French were not happy to see the doughboy cannoneers arrive: “Some in the French billets eye us askance. They have been living on indulgent terms with the Boche for some time. Their artillery had been well enough trained not to irritate the enemy. Now comes the American with his aggressive tactics and stirs up the hornets’ nest so that they have to live within two steps of shelters, gas masks and helmets.”19
Green-unit eagerness was evident in World War II as well. Ernie Pyle, after spending months with veteran troops in North Africa and Italy, visited unblooded units training in England for the invasion of France: “Not for ages had I been with a combat unit which had not yet been in battle. . . . The really noticeable difference was their eagerness to ‘get a crack at the Jerries.’ After they had a chance to crack at them for a few months, I knew they would be just as eager to let someone else have a turn at it.” Combat would undoubtedly be a rude awakening for this unit, but the men’s enthusiasm would help sustain them in their first battle. So too, Pyle understood, would their confidence in one another: “They had trained so long that they functioned almost automatically. They all knew every man on the team; they knew his temperament and how he would react. They have faith in each other. Only those who have fought realize what confidence that produces.”20
American units first on the scene during the Korean and Vietnam Wars were also confident, as Lieutenant Lyle Rishell, an infantry platoon leader in the first division to arrive in Korea in 1950, noted: “There was tremendous optimism shared by the soldiers. Many believed us to be invincible, and most had little awareness of what lay ahead.”21 Lieutenant Philip Caputo and his marine battalion, one of the first units to arrive in Vietnam, were equally confident: “We believed in all the myths created by that most articulate and elegant mythmaker, John Kennedy. . . . There was nothing we could not do because we were Americans, and for the same reason, whatever we did was right.”22
Caputo soon discovered, as did Rishell, that being American did not automatically guarantee victory. They were not the first to be so deluded, as Pyle pointed out after the embarrassing defeat at Kasserine Pass in America’s combat debut against the Germans in World War II: “It was all right to have a good opinion of ourselves, but we Americans were so smug with our cockiness. We somehow felt that just because we were Americans we could whip our weight in wildcats.”23
Herein lies the downside of going to war as part of a green outfit. Chauvinistic American units invariably believed that they could whip their weight in wildcats, but the reality was that green troops with inexperienced leaders made costly mistakes. They unnecessarily exposed themselves to enemy observation and fire until learning to use cover and concealment. Green soldiers bunched up under fire, resulting in heavy casualties. At night they were careless about noise and light, and trigger-happy lookouts gave away their position and drew enemy fire. Units learned the hard way that running out from under an artillery barrage when caught in the open was less costly than laying down and taking it.24
The list could go on. The grunts in John M. Del Vecchio’s Vietnam War novel The 13th Valley debated the pros and cons of going to war as a green unit versus joining a veteran outfit as a green replacement. The green-unit option came in second as far as Sergeant Daniel Egan was concerned: “I remember, just after I got here, talkin to guys who’d come in around Da Nang. They arrived, some of em, in ‘67. They’d say that they’d come from the World as a cherry unit and the entire unit would be moved to a ville or someplace to defend and they’d be there the day they arrived. . . . Just right to the boonies. They didn’t even have time to get acclimated. That’s why so many of em had their shit scattered. They weren’t comin in as one cherry among one hundred dudes with time in-country. They were virgin units who’d never been shot at. Didn’t take long before they knew the score but by then only half of em were still around.”25
Egan implies that a green replacement assigned to a veteran unit had a better chance of survival—a valid implication, assuming that the replacements were given an opportunity to train and assimilate. All too often, however, replacements were rushed straight into combat. Whatever the military necessity for doing so, it was a disastrous way of introducing them to the environment of war. The new replacement had no chance to be integrated properly into his unit. Thus he felt alone, even abandoned. Correspondent Pyle questioned the wisdom of sending replacements straight into the line at night in the Anzio beachhead during World War II: “All of us who have had any association at all with the imminence of death know that the main thing a man wants is not to be alone. He wants company, and preferably someone he knows. To go up to the brink of possible death in the nighttime in a faraway land, puzzled and afraid, knowing no one, and facing the worst moment of your life totally alone—that takes strength.”26
The memoirs verify that replacements were indeed often hustled straight into combat and that Pyle’s reservations about the practice are justified. Marine private Elton E. Mackin was part of a group of replacements whisked into the lines to reinforce a decimated rifle company in Belleau Wood in 1918. In the midst of combat, it was every man for himself: “Any men who carried the notion that someone was responsible for guarding them from harm soon knew they were mistaken. Such officers and noncoms as were left when we arrived had other things to do. We who were to live awhile soon knew our way about, without a shepherd. There wasn’t time for a proper initiation.”27
Being thrown into combat without a “proper initiation” was even more traumatic for replacement leaders. Such was the case for Lieutenant John L. Munschauer when he took charge of his infantry platoon in the Philippines during World War II: “When I arrived at Company K, no one told me what was going on, where we were located, where the Japs were, nothing of the immediate tactical situation.”28 Within minutes of his arrival, he and his platoon were shelled and assaulted. Luckily they held against the attack.
On the other hand, when replacements were given additional training and a chance to integrate into their squad and platoon when out of combat, their chances of survival went up. Far more than commonly perceived, soldiers trained when not in combat. Sometimes they were learning new tactics for an upcoming operation, such as an amphibious assault or an attack on a fortified position. At other times they were familiarizing themselves with new weapons or equipment. But frequently they trained, not because the veterans needed it but to integrate replacements.
There was rarely enough time to completely integrate and train replacements, but units did what they could. Father Francis P. Duffy described a fourweek training program laid out by his regiment when in a rest camp after the Aisne-Marne offensive: “The training was necessary not so much for the oldtimers as for the replacements.” Duffy noted that the regiment was trying to avoid what had happened during the previous offensive, “where our replacements had to go into [the] line without anything like proper training.”29
Lieutenant Wilson, who had to commit fresh replacements straight into combat during the bitter fighting in the Huertgen Forest during World War II, was determined to give the new men he received following the battle a better break: “Even though we were in reserve and were supposed to be recuperating, we had no time for rest. It would be suicidal to take those men into battle. We had to give them some intensive training while we had the chance.” A five-day training period ensued, with weapons firing and classes “on the absolutely essential basics,” and the men “responded well, being keen to learn and eager to try out all the weapons.”30
During the Korean War, replacements were again thrown into the meat grinder with little or no preparation. During the desperate fighting around the Chosin Reservoir in winter 1950–1951, marine replacements were flown from Japan to forward airstrips in Korea and sent into combat, all in the same day.31 The army likewise threw replacements directly into battle, according to Corporal Malcolm H. Dow: “We received replacements the afternoon we were scheduled to move up. The new people didn’t even have time to undo their packs. They just rested a few minutes and then moved into action. I felt sorry for these new men; no one knew them and no one was really looking out for them.”32
By the end of 1951, however, the fighting in Korea had settled into positional warfare, and replacements were more systematically integrated into their units. Divisions established orientation programs for new leaders, and replacement troops joined their units and trained when out of the lines.33 Similar programs were adopted during the Vietnam War. Virtually every Vietnam War soldier-author who arrived as a replacement mentions receiving some in-country training.34 This three-to-seven-day training period included classes on Viet Cong tactics, equipment, and booby traps; instructions on patrolling techniques; and the firing of various weapons.35
Following in-country training, the Vietnam War replacement joined his platoon or company. The replacement, or “cherry” or “FNG” (fucking new guy), then faced the challenge of fitting into a unit of veteran grunts. Recalling Sergeant Egan’s implied theory, a cherry in a unit full of veterans was better off than a cherry in a unit full of cherries because the veterans could protect him and teach him the ropes. This theory further assumes, of course, that the veterans were willing and able to do so. Some historians and veterans point out, however, that the old-timers were more inclined to look out for themselves first. Historian Roger J. Spiller notes that “units long in combat are made up of small cliques of veterans who do not easily admit replacements into their ranks.”36 James Jones believes that veterans even went so far as to sacrifice replacements: “Smart replacements soon learned that they got the dirtiest most-exposed jobs. . . . The lucky, the tough, and the smart survived, and the rest were forgotten, shipped home, or buried.”37
The notion of self-serving veterans sacrificing replacements should not be carried too far. Spiller is correct in his observation that veterans were reluctant to admit replacements into their ranks, but they did not ignore them or sacrifice them. As Appy points out in his study of Vietnam War soldiers, the FNG got a cool reception from veterans until he had proven himself, but “underneath this surface coolness . . . the more experienced men kept careful eyes on the replacements who joined their units, and the care they did take, however minimal, had an enormous impact on the new men.”38
Veterans were slow to accept replacements, and even pitied or despised them for their lack of combat prowess, but they did try to teach them how to fight and survive, if only because everyone had to depend on one another. Audie Murphy, then a sergeant in the Anzio beachhead in World War II, displayed a typical mix of contempt yet need for fresh replacements: “The need for reinforcements is desperate. But we are suspicious and resentful of the new men that join us. As the days pass, if they prove their worth, they gradually grow into our clique and share the privilege of riding other replacements.”39
Veterans did ride replacements, often scaring them with tales of combat, and as Murphy points out, acceptance was not automatic. The veterans first wanted to know, as one Vietnam grunt put it, if a replacement was a “shooter or a shaker.”40 Shooters were accepted. Marine lieutenant Howard Matthias noticed the same attitude during the Korean War: “For the most part the veteran operated under a ‘wait and see’ philosophy. Any new troops, especially officers, were expected to demonstrate their worth before full acceptance was made.”41 The more perceptive replacements understood this wait-and-see philosophy. Private Stanley Goff, newly arrived at the 196th Light Infantry Brigade in Vietnam, accepted the veterans’ standoffishness: “There were cliques. The guys that fought together and had been in the boonies together were all around each other, and I could understand it. So they were sort of looking at us like, ‘You got to go out there and prove yourself like we did.’ I felt respect for that, and I really tried not to take it personally.”42
While waiting to see how a replacement would perform, the veterans did what they could to teach him combat skills. During a replacement’s breaking-in period, Jones’s earlier comment aside, he did not draw the “most-exposed jobs,” if only because the most dangerous jobs were also usually the most important, and new replacements could not be trusted with them. Walking point, for example, was a very dangerous job, but as FNG Robert Sanders explains, cherries only walked point after they had gained some experience: “Once we got used to the company and started to learn a little, then the old-timers started to put the cherries . . . out on point to cut through the brush. The only reason they didn’t put us up there in the beginning was because they didn’t want us to walk into an ambush.”43 Another dangerous job in Vietnam was machine gunner, but again, cherries were not usually entrusted with the M-60 machine gun because it was a vital piece of the squad’s firepower. The gun was unpopular because it drew return fire and was heavy and bulky, but only proven “shooters” carried the “pig,” as the M-60 was called.44
Although replacements avoided many dangerous jobs, they did not miss out on the “shit details.” The cherry might not carry the machine gun, but he carried the extra ammunition for it. Replacements found themselves on carrying parties, hauling supplies forward. And new guys usually got last pick of the combat rations, meaning that they drew what the others did not want.
Whether he was an individual replacement or a member of a green unit, the soldier’s anxiety level rose with the prospect of actual combat. Despite his awareness that war was a deadly business, the green soldier worried less about being killed than about performing bravely under fire, a condition Lord Moran calls “the stage fright of the novice who does not know if he is going to act badly or well.”45
Sergeant Henry Giles, waiting in England for his engineer company to be sent to the Normandy beachhead during World War II, could not “help thinking what it’s going to be like & will I be able to stand up to it & what kind of guts have I really got. I hope I’ve got enough but won’t know till I get there.”46 Private Sledge, nearing the end of his Stateside training and knowing that he and his comrades would soon ship out, had the same concerns: “The fact that our lives might end violently or that we might be crippled while we were still boys didn’t seem to register. The only thing that we seemed to be truly concerned about was that we might be too afraid to do our jobs under fire. An apprehension nagged at each of us that he might appear to be ‘yellow’ if he were afraid.”47
Apprehension, or prebattle jitters, grew stronger as the time for combat drew near, especially if the green soldier had to pass through the physical evidence of war’s destructiveness while en route to the front. Marine Private Mackin and his fellow replacements, heading into the fighting at Belleau Wood in World War I, “heard the war scream and writhe and crash among the distant trees. The guns around us added to the din. . . . Dark of night would have been welcome then, so that a man might hide the terror in his eyes.”48
The set-piece battles of World War I, even during the relatively fluid fighting late in the war, made passage through battlefield carnage on the way to the front almost unavoidable. The torn countryside, the noise of the artillery, the spectacle of refugees and wounded streaming rearward, and the sight of the dead had a sobering impact.49 During World War II, troops being trucked forward, or perhaps crossing a recently seized beach, shared that experience. Sergeant Dan Levin and his comrades, fresh out of marine combat correspondents’ school, arrived on Saipan shortly after the assault forces had cleared the beaches. It might have been another planet:
Next came real, sinking-in fright, as we unloaded from the transport and then loaded onto trucks that rumbled past debris of battle: dead oxen, their legs sticking up over bloated bellies, and then in the fields an overlooked human body. The truck was jolting in time to the uneven thump of artillery rounds—like physical shocks hitting us. They were from our guns, but we did not know that. I only knew, all at once, that I was surrounded by violent danger, random death. The ten combat correspondents in the truck sat as if catatonic. There was, we all suddenly understood, another and terrifying dimension.50
Once the war in Korea entered its static phase, green replacements experienced a similar, sobering physical transition into the environment of war. Lieutenant Matthias and three other replacements were being trucked to their marine regiment at the front in June 1952. The sudden, deafening roar of a nearby eightinch artillery battery firing a volley literally knocked Matthias out of his seat: “The four of us checked each other out. Even though there was smiling and small talk, there was no fooling each other; we were scared. The remainder of the trip to regiment was filled not only with anticipation, but also, for the first time, real fear.”51
The most shocking aspect of this physical transition to war was the sight of the dead. With time, corpses would not occasion a glance or comment, but almost every soldier-author vividly recalls seeing his first dead man. Lieutenant Hervey Allen, on his first trip into the lines with his platoon in World War I, saw mangled corpses: “Here I was ghastly sick of heart and body for a while.”52
Private Roscoe C. Blunt Jr., moving into combat for the first time in a German town in World War II, encountered a dead GI, a soldier from his own division: “The war was now very close. The corpse was not that of a stranger; this was one of our own. Without looking back, I continued on, but having now actually touched death, I was even less confident of my own abilities. Nearly a half century of time has failed to erase the memory of that first dead G.I.”53
The often-mangled or bloated dead revolted the green soldier and inspired fear by reminding him of his own mortality. Yet many soldiers were also morbidly curious, even fascinated, by the first dead they saw—for most, it was their first encounter with violent death. “Joker,” the protagonist in Gustav Hasford’s Vietnam War novel The Short-timers, warned against being too curious because it was a sure sign of the FNG: “In Vietnam you see corpses almost every day. At first you try to ignore them. You don’t want people to think you’re curious. Nobody wants to admit that corpses are not old hat to them; nobody wants to be a New Guy.”54
Despite such shocking evidence of war’s destructiveness and the understanding, at least on an intellectual plane, that combat was a dangerous business, a soldier in his first firefight was in some cases not so much scared as incredulous—the other guy was really trying to kill him! The marine private James Doyle recalled that during his first combat on Guam in World War II, he was slow to take cover when the Japanese opened fire because “it really hadn’t sunk in to me that those other people were shooting at us.” Only after his failure to take cover drew more fire and a shout from his buddy to “get down, yuh fool,” did “the thing become personal. For the first time I realized that the people over on the ridge wanted to kill me. Hell, I didn’t even know them. It was a weird feeling.”55
Doyle’s hesitation to act might be written off as a rare case of near-terminal stupidity except that his reaction was not unique. A grunt interviewed by oral historian Mark Baker described how, in his first firefight, he just stood there until his lieutenant literally kicked him in the ass and told him to get down and return fire. The grunt explained, “I wasn’t so much scared as I was in awe. ‘Those motherfuckers are really shooting at us. They’re really trying to kill us.’”56
In their initial firefight, some soldiers did not even realize at first that they were being shot at. Marine Corporal Charles S. Crawford, a fresh marine replacement in Korea, just after entering the front-line trenches “heard what sounded like bees buzzing past me.”57 He found out later that the bees were machine-gun bullets. His fellow marines believed his failure to duck for cover had been an act of bravado. Lieutenant Robert Santos, in his first firefight in Vietnam, acted with the same seeming bravado. He moved about constantly, exposing himself recklessly, all the while hearing “these noises. Kind of like ping, ping—no idea what that noise was.” His radioman, puzzled and alarmed at his new lieutenant’s actions, set him straight on what the pings were: “‘That’s the bullets going over your head.’ I never knew it.”58
It may have taken the soldier in his first battle a few seconds to realize that the strange sounds he heard were incoming bullets and that the enemy really did mean him harm, but once that realization dawned on him, fear verging on terror was a normal reaction. Any prebattle cockiness evaporated. Captain Charles R. Cawthon describes how the soldier in his first fight felt: “On the first day of battle, the foot soldier probes new emotional depths, and the findings, I believe, are fairly universal. One is a conviction that he is abandoned, alone, and uncared-for in the world.”59
The soldier struggled to overcome his fear and sense of abandonment. For some, fear of appearing cowardly motivated them to act. Machine gunner Philip Dosier, the protagonist in Larry Heinemann’s Vietnam War novel Close Quarters, was panic-stricken in his first firefight during a night ambush patrol, but he fumbled to bring his gun into action, thinking, “I would lock and load that gun if it was the last natural act of my life. They are going to kill me, but what is it going to look like, the new guy so fucked up he couldn’t get off more than a couple rounds?”60
Some soldiers could not overcome their fear—they froze. Sergeant Nat Frankel describes a soldier whose hands “have to be pried loose from a pole to which he has grabbed on” during his first combat. “He is too scared to even whimper.” He would do better in future encounters, however: “Within a week that soldier is fighting bravely, killing with as much nobility as one can kill.”61
First combat was a time of fear, shock, and confusion. Many were slow to react, some froze, but most began to perform like soldiers, taking cover and returning fire as they had been taught to do. No baptism of fire was more physically and emotionally abrupt, however, than an amphibious assault. The smoke, noise, carnage, and chaos on the beach were so great that sometimes soldiers had no coherent recollection of what had happened. Sergeant Dan Levin has never been able to piece together what he went through during the landing on Iwo Jima in World War II: “Often I have struggled trying to establish a true chronology for those next hours, to wrench them out of their surreality so I could explain them coherently to others and to myself.”62
Captain Cawthon’s combat initiation was on Omaha Beach on D-Day during the invasion of France in World War II. His otherwise sharp memory is a blur concerning the events of that day: “Perhaps . . . my capacity for registering separate sights and sounds had become saturated. Whatever the reason, the afternoon and night of D-day are a tapestry in which scenes emerge from a generally gray background and then fade or run together.”63
Whether the sustained horror of a major amphibious assault or the gutwrenching but brief shock of a firefight, first combat came to an end, and with it came the green soldier’s sense of relief over having survived and done his job, or at least not run away. Private Blunt survived his first combat in World War II, fighting for the German town of Geilenkirchen, and even captured some Germans in the process: “When everything finally quieted down and I collected my thoughts, I realized my baptism of fire was behind me. I felt proud.”64 Lieutenant Matthias, after an eventful first twenty-four hours in the line at a forward outpost in Korea, found that combat was neither glamorous nor fun, but “there was some satisfaction: I had passed my baptism of fire. Evidently my work on the outpost met the approval of the troops on the outpost, for word spread fast among the troops that the new Lieutenant was willing to get his hands dirty and make some quick decisions.”65
“IT CAN’T HAPPEN TO ME”
Following his successful debut in combat, the soldier lost his anxiety over whether he could perform under fire and regained some of his precombat confidence.66 Psychiatrists Roy L. Swank and Walter E. Marchand, who observed a combat unit in its first campaign in Normandy in World War II, noted that soldiers became “battle wise” after about a week of combat. They had learned to avoid the mistakes typical of green soldiers and to differentiate the sights and sounds of the battlefield. The battlewise soldier then enjoyed a period of “maximum efficiency,” during which he remained confident and in control of his fear.67
Despite the death and destruction about them, many battlewise soldiers refused to consider the possibility of injury. In short, they believed that “it can’t happen to me.” Doughboy Private Ettinger, for example, transferred from the dangerous job of motorcycle dispatch rider to the more dangerous job of Stokes mortarman without giving it a second thought: “During combat, the mortar men and machine gunners were always the first target of the enemy . . . but while I often thought of my dear friend, Jack Perry, who had a premonition of death, I never really thought I’d be killed. I saw it as a matter of luck. . . . I had been lucky and I felt lucky.”68 Three wars later, Lieutenant Frederick Downs felt every bit as lucky as Ettinger, even after a month in Vietnam: “A small part of our mind tried to retain its sanity by reminding itself over and over that it would never happen to us. It can happen to anyone else, but it would not happen to me.”69
That soldiers like Downs and Ettinger could feel charmed despite the everpresent danger is a matter of some mystery. The cockiness of youth may have contributed to their sense of invulnerability. Lieutenant Fussell observes that “war must rely on the young, for only they have the two things fighting requires: physical stamina and innocence about their own mortality.”70 Scott Wilson, who lived to be an older, wiser sergeant by late in World War II, marveled at his earlier foolhardiness: “At age twenty you’re invincible. It’s never going to be you, it’s going to be the other guy. It’s not bravery, it’s idiotic adolescence.”71 Corporal Charles S. Crawford, a twenty-one-year-old marine who fought in Korea, remembers that “the thought never occurred to me that I might get killed. I had too much to live for; I was young and I was filled with the optimism of youth.”72
In addition to youthful optimism (or ignorance), the battlewise soldier’s confidence in his own prowess contributed to his belief that “it can’t happen to me.” The now-experienced soldier came to believe that if he could just avoid mistakes, then he would stay alive. Bob Hoffman attributed his survival to skill and caution: “I never got careless; I always had my gas mask. I always carried a shovel and a pick with me throughout the war. . . . I was the champion digger of the American army.”73 Psychiatrist Peter G. Bourne, who studied a Special Forces team in Vietnam, discovered that they firmly believed in their own expertise. Furthermore, the “occasional calculated exposure to the dangers of combat” bolstered each man’s confidence because he attributed his survival, at least in part, “to his own mastery of the situation.”74
The soldier who believed that his military prowess would keep him alive could at the same time blame the deaths of others on their lack of skill or carelessness. Bourne observed this attitude among several air ambulance medics in Vietnam: “Their awareness of death was predicated on the belief that it was something that happened to someone else, and from which certain superior capabilities which they possessed kept them immune.”75 In a similar vein, when Sergeant Bill Morgan, in Jack Fuller’s novel Fragments, reported in to his new unit, his platoon leader told him, “‘I been with this unit six months now,’ he said, pulling out a piece of paper. ‘Got written down here the name of every KIA [killed in action] we’ve had. I take it out from time to time to remind me how they died. They fucked up, that’s what happened. . . . That’s how people get greased.’”76
During this period of peak efficiency, the battlewise soldier was able to master his fears. Some soldier-authors even describe their fear as “useful” because it heightened their senses and reflexes.77 Veteran scout Martinez, in Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead, conducting a one-man night reconnaissance, “was frightened, but effectively so; he had no panic, and it left him intensely aware of everything he could see or feel.”78 Audie Murphy hated waiting for an attack to begin but knew that he would feel better once his unit moved forward: “The nerves will relax; the heart, stop its thumping. The brain will turn to animal cunning.”79 Lieutenant Downs’s senses were most acute during an air assault. As the helicopters headed into the landing zone, “my blood was pounding through my body. Every sense was alert to the action around me.”80
The battlewise soldier was now immersed in the environment of war. Indeed, as Lieutenant James R. McDonough came to realize in Vietnam, he had become an integral part of that environment: “I had passed during the battle from being in the war to being a part of the war. I was no longer an alien in a strange environment. I could no longer draw a distinction between the war and my presence in it. . . . And though my recognition of that fact was unnerving, I knew that probably within my transition lay the seeds of my ultimate survival.”81
Although immersed in war, the soldier was not yet overpowered by it. Some newly minted veterans even retained the sense of adventure that had impelled them to join up in the first place. Private Mackin and his three fellow battalion runners, having survived the fierce fighting in Belleau Wood in World War I, “were no longer . . . cowering, scared recruits. . . . We had pride. We were the four aces in the runner group. Strut a bit? Sure! We were leathernecks!”82 Lieutenant Caputo, in the section of his memoir “The Splendid Little War,” explains that his enthusiasm, if anything, was enhanced by his initial experiences in Vietnam. On this particular day, he was annoyed that one of his fellow platoon leaders had garnered more glory than he had: “I wanted to get into a fight, I wanted to prove myself the equal of the other officers in C Company. Lemmon had seen the lion’s share of action that day, and I envied the tough little Texan. He would probably win a letter of commendation or maybe a medal. I wanted to win one myself.”83
“IT CAN HAPPEN TO ME”
Caputo’s enthusiastic quest for glory did not last, however, nor did Mackin’s “four aces” still strut with pride after two of them were evacuated with serious wounds. Like so many other soldiers, they discovered that neither military skill nor good fortune could preserve them from harm forever. Some event, such as the death of a close comrade, exposure to battlefield carnage, or the receipt of a wound, usually prompted this realization, a process Lord Moran calls the soldier’s “discovery of danger”: “At first he has a strange feeling of invulnerability—a form of egotism—then it is suddenly brought home to him that he is not a spectator but a bit of the target, that if there are casualties he may be one of them.”84 The discovery of danger comes for Ernest Hemingway’s Colonel Richard Cantwell, the main character in Across the River and into the Trees, when, as a junior officer in World War I, he is seriously wounded:
He was hit three times that winter, but they were all gift wounds; small wounds in the flesh of the body without breaking bone, and he had become quite confident of his personal immortality since he knew he should have been killed in the heavy artillery bombardment that always preceded the attacks. Finally he did get hit properly and for good. No one of his other wounds had ever done to him what the first big one did. I suppose it is just the loss of the immortality, he thought. Well, in a way, that is quite a lot to lose.85
Private Robert Leckie, a veteran marine by the time of the fight for Peleliu in the Pacific in World War II, had lost most of his old comrades and all his sense of adventure: “Gone the pagan naiveté of the first battle. How much easier to be a pagan again and to refuse to take the thing seriously.”86 For Private Stephens, eight days on the line in Korea and a Chinese attack were enough to convince him: “I was beginning to see that this wasn’t some kind of sport, that people did get killed doing this.”87 The realization of danger came to Private Parks when his buddy, standing next to him in their armored personnel carrier in Vietnam, was killed in a firefight: “Poor Greenfield. Just a few more inches to the left and it would have been me. Maybe tomorrow will be my day. Who knows?”88 Vietnam War platoon leader Michael Lee Lanning put it succinctly: “Close brushes with death brought not a feeling that I was invulnerable but rather that my number might be due to turn up at any time.”89
With the realization of vulnerability came heightened fear and anxiety. The soldier found that his fear was no longer useful but debilitating and increasingly difficult to suppress.90 The physical symptoms of fear became more pronounced. Surveys of veterans catalog these symptoms, ranging from a pounding heart and weak stomach to a small minority who admit to involuntary urination or defecation.91 If the frequency with which soldiers wet or soiled themselves in the memoirs is any indication, then more men had difficulty holding to the old military salutation to “keep a tight asshole” than admitted to it in the surveys. Sergeant William Manchester, recounting his experiences on Okinawa in World War II, is probably closer to the mark: “Had I not been fasting I’m sure I would have shit my pants. Many did. . . . We were animals, . . . torn between fear . . . and a murderous rage at events.”92
Many soldiers described their symptoms of fear and the near-impossibility of controlling them. The ever-candid Private Sledge describes his physical fear as he waited in his amphibious tractor for the signal to hit the beach at Peleliu: “I broke out in a cold sweat as the tension mounted with the intensity of the [preparatory] bombardment. My stomach was tied in knots. I had a lump in my throat and swallowed only with great difficulty. My knees nearly buckled, so I clung weakly to the side of the tractor. I felt nauseated and feared that my bladder would surely empty itself and reveal me to be the coward that I was.”93
Even Audie Murphy, the country’s most-decorated soldier in World War II, was no stranger to fear. Recalling a movement to contact against German defenders in Italy, Murphy explained that he was “well acquainted with fear. It strikes first in the stomach, coming like the disemboweling hand that is thrust into the carcass of a chicken. I feel now as though icy fingers have reached into my midparts and twisted the intestines into knots.”94
While the symptoms were many, the cause of the soldier’s fear was simple enough—the realization that it could happen to him—he might be killed or wounded. Soldiers came to fear particular types of wounds.95 Lieutenant Lanning pointed out that, for grunts, “a wound to the genitals was the most feared injury in this war, as in any other conflict. A man’s first question to the medics was not ‘Am I going to make it?’ but rather ‘Do I still have my balls?’”96 Lanning further explained that the “loss of limbs, genitals, or senses was never far from our minds. Fear of such wounds seemed at times to rival that of death itself.”97
For armored vehicle crewmen, the constant fear was fire. Until diesel-fueled tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs) were introduced during the Vietnam War, armored vehicles were powered by volatile gasoline, or “mogas” as the army called it, and as APC crewman Dosier in Heinemann’s novel Close Quarters pointed out, mogasers “burn like paper soaked with tar.”98 Sergeant Frankel, commanding a gasoline-powered Sherman tank in World War II, observed that if the hatches of a burning Sherman were jammed or broken, a real possibility in a badly damaged tank, what transpired would not be pleasant: “It takes twenty minutes for a medium tank to incinerate; and the flames burn slowly, so figure it takes ten minutes for a hearty man within to perish. You wouldn’t even be able to struggle, for chances are, both exits would be sheeted with flame and smoke. You would sit, read Good Housekeeping, and die like a dog. Steel coffins indeed!”99
Not only did the soldier fear certain types of wounds, or dying in especially gruesome ways, but he also dreaded, for a variety of physical and psychological reasons, certain enemy weapons. As the sociologist John Dollard discovered in his survey of Spanish Civil War veterans, “A weapon may be high on the list [of feared weapons] either because it is especially common and dangerous, perhaps the case with artillery shells, or because something about it arouses irrational fear, perhaps the case with air-bombing. The machine gun should probably be high on the list because it is actually dangerous, but the men feel that, though dangerous, it is in the realm of the familiar and that they know how to cope with it.”100
The soldiers could “cope” with a machine gun by attacking it, even if, as was often the case, they paid a heavy price. They could not cope with artillery or air attack in a similar fashion, however, so they feared those weapons more. For the same reason, soldiers hated land mines and booby traps. These hidden killers were often difficult to detect or counter. Mines are only rarely mentioned in World War I memoirs because they were just coming into common usage by war’s end.101 From World War II on, however, soldiers mention them frequently, and with loathing.102
Soldiers hated mines for several reasons. First, they caused the maiming injuries to limbs and genitals that soldiers most dreaded. The Germans made liberal use of mines in their defense of the Huertgen Forest in World War II, and their effects were quickly and painfully evident, as Lieutenant Boesch recalls: “The parade of men wounded by mines was so constant and depressing that the thought of getting a foot or a leg blown off was with us at every turn. This specter haunted us day and night.”103
Soldiers also hated mines because they called for constant vigilance. Mines were normally buried and booby traps hidden, hence spotting them required time and a sharp eye. But as Ernie Pyle pointed out during the fighting in Italy, time was often at a premium, and thus mines were found the hard way: “The Germans had mined the country behind them beyond anything ever known before. Our troops simply couldn’t take time to go over every inch of ground with mine detectors, so they had to discover the mine fields by stumbling into them or driving over them. Naturally there were casualties, but . . . the greatest damage was psychological—the intense watchfulness our troops had to maintain.”104
Moreover, as with artillery and air attacks, mines generated a sense of helplessness and frustration because the soldier could not fight back. Lieutenant Caputo describes this frustration, common to the Vietnam War soldier: “It was not warfare. It was murder. We could not fight back against the Viet Cong mines or take cover from them or anticipate when they would go off. Walking down the trails, waiting for those things to explode, we had begun to feel more like victims than soldiers.”105 Lieutenant Matthias and his men felt the same way during the Korean War, where mines were ubiquitous once the static phase of the fighting set in: “We were mentally able to cope with physical, enemy troops but had trouble accepting the nasty, unexpected blast of a mine.”106
Another dreaded weapon was the German 88-mm high-velocity, dual-purpose antiaircraft and antitank gun of World War II. That weapon, as Bill Mauldin wrote, took on mythical proportions: “Their 88 mm. is the terror of every dogface. It can do everything but throw shells around corners, and sometimes we think it has even done that.”107 In reality, far more damage was done by standard German artillery pieces of the 105-mm and 150-mm varieties, but the mystique of the 88 remained powerful, and some memoirs refer to all incoming artillery rounds as 88s.108
Far less flashy than the infamous 88 was the run-of-the-mill infantry mortar, but experienced soldiers learned to fear it. Mortars were common. Compared to artillery pieces, they were less expensive, easier to maintain, lighter to transport, and easier to keep resupplied with ammunition. They lacked the range and punch of artillery but were accurate. The Chinese enemy in the Korean War got high marks from the GIs for his skill with mortars. Lieutenant Matthias explains why mortar rounds were so deadly: “Contrary to larger artillery, there was little warning when the shell came in. There was a sudden WHOOSH and an immediate explosion, so we did not have time to take cover as we might with other artillery rounds.”109 Only if a GI heard the “cough” of the enemy mortar round as it left the tube, a fairly frequent occurrence given the short range of most mortars, did he have time to take cover.
If mortars were feared partly for their silence, then other weapons were feared, in part, because of their noise. The Germans, and to a much lesser extent the Japanese, employed rocket artillery during World War II. Rockets were inexpensive, simple, and could be of considerable size. Although not known for their accuracy, they made such a horrific noise that they were called “Screaming Meemies” or “Moaning Minnies.” Lieutenant Boesch, like most GIs, vividly recalls his first Screaming Meemie attack: “We were hustling along the side of a paved road when we first heard it, a weird, agonizing sound—a sound which grew louder and more terrifying as the projectiles approached. It sounded for all the world like a ghost tearing a board from the wall of a haunted house on Hallowe’en.”110
The soldier’s fear of particular weapons or certain types of wounds stemmed from his realization that “it could happen to him.” At the same time that the soldier came to realize and fear his vulnerability, the harsh physical environment of war began to take its toll. James Jones praised Mauldin and his World War II GI cartoon characters Willie and Joe for portraying the debilitating effects of life in the combat zone: “The great thing Mauldin did was to show people over and over again that it was not only the danger of war that slowly did men in. It was perhaps even more that long haul of day after day of monotony and discomfort and living in perpetual dirt in the field, on and on with no prospect of release and no amenities.”111
The GIs would have agreed with Jones and Mauldin. Private Lester Atwell, a World War II infantryman in Europe, realized earlier than most what his future held: “What a rotten life this was going to be! Always outdoors, always dirty, devitalized, tired from the broken sleep of guard duty. . . . There was just a general feeling of depression, that flat carelessness that comes from knowing one has hit bottom and will stay there.”112 Atwell’s fellow World War II infantryman, Blunt, also serving in Europe, came to the same realization, if not as quickly: “The cold, penetrating March dampness, the constantly wet uniforms and the lack of proper rest and food were gradually wearing me down. One exhausting truck convoy after another, one rubble pile bed after another on top of weeks of cold food were too much for my system.”113 Indeed, Blunt’s system soon shortcircuited entirely, and he came down with pneumonia.
More than one GI, shivering during the European winter of 1944–1945, no doubt envied his counterparts in the Pacific—at least they were warm. But the Pacific was no tropical paradise. Private Sledge describes how he and his comrades were pushed to the limit during the fighting on Peleliu: “The grinding stress of prolonged heavy combat, the loss of sleep because of nightly infiltration and raids, the vigorous physical demands forced on us by the rugged terrain, and the unrelenting, suffocating heat were enough to make us drop in our tracks. How we kept going and continued fighting I’ll never know.”114
Homer Wright, an officer in the Thirty-second Infantry Division fighting in New Guinea, recalled that “climate and disease wore out good men so fast. We were tired beyond imagination. The first impact was weight loss.”115 Weight losses of twenty pounds or more were not unusual for combat soldiers. The monotonous diet of combat rations and the constant exertion of soldiering caused weight loss well beyond what was healthy for young men who were already lean.116
At times the combination of physical and emotional stress generated a feeling of accelerated aging. Soldiers like Lieutenant Robert Santos in Vietnam felt old before their time: “We got old fast. We were exposed to so much shit and you find out so much about yourself—your good, your bad, your strengths and your weaknesses—if you’re honest with yourself—so quickly that you might as well have aged.”117
The once battlewise soldier, realizing that his combat prowess was no guarantee of invulnerability, and with his confidence and physical stamina fading, no longer performed at peak efficiency. He entered what Swank and Marchand called the “hyper-reactive stage,” with symptoms that included abnormal fatigability, increasing fear reactions, overcautiousness, irritability, and eventually tremulousness.118
One of the first things a soldier did after realizing his vulnerability was to try to lessen his chances of getting killed. He could do little to reduce the dangers of his environment, but he could avoid taking unnecessary risks. Sergeant Hoffman remembered how the men had eagerly volunteered for his company’s first combat mission and how those who could not go were genuinely disappointed, but attitudes changed quickly: “Men who did not get to go on this trip cried real tears—a direct contrast to the lack of volunteering for dangerous missions a few months later when they had become war-weary. Then they would go if assigned to any task, no matter how dangerous, but they did not rush in. . . . They’d die if it were their turn, but they weren’t going to overwork fate.”119
A young, enthusiastic Lieutenant George William Sefton conducted patrols on his own initiative after jumping into France on D-Day with the 101st Airborne Division. While on one of these patrols he came under heavy machine-gun fire and, deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, returned to friendly lines: “In retrospect, it was the first time since landing in Normandy that I asked myself, ‘Is this trip really necessary?’ Up to now, my mind had simply blocked out the horrors of combat in the interest of accomplishing the jobs for which we had trained so intensively. In this particular instance, the instinct for self-preservation had prevailed.”120
Prudence in the face of heavy enemy fire might keep a soldier alive to fight another day, as might his battle skills. With the “discovery of danger,” however, came the additional realization that chance and fate, not military prowess, were the greater arbiters, as Lieutenant McDonough learned in Vietnam: “Rational decision making or technical and physical skills may save you once or twice. But a man in combat is exposed a thousand times. A gust of wind blows at the right moment to take the mortar round ten yards farther to explode harmlessly behind you. . . . A blade of grass, a bent branch, or an article of equipment deflects a speeding bullet enough to send it harmlessly through your flopping shirt or boneless flesh—or savagely through your brain or liver.”121
The soldier thus had to deal with the realization that he could only do so much, and not much at that, to improve his chances of survival. Small wonder that he became increasingly “hyper-reactive.” To make matters worse, the soldier was well aware that he was becoming hyper-reactive—that he was “shaky” or “shook up,” and he began to wonder how much more he could take. Private Sledge, after weeks of mud, filth, and combat on Okinawa, knew he was reaching the end of his rope: “I felt a sense of desperation that my mind was being affected by what we were experiencing. Men cracked up frequently in places such as that. . . . I vividly recall grimly making a pledge to myself. The Japanese might kill or wound me, but they wouldn’t make me crack up. . . . My secret resolve helped me through the long days and nights we remained in the worst of the abyss. But there were times at night during that period when I felt I was slipping. More than once my imagination ran wild during the brief period of darkness when the flares and star shells burned out.”122
Private Blunt, after months of combat in Europe in World War II, noticed how jumpy and nervous he had become. He hoped that he could hold on until war’s end, which he knew, by February 1945, could not be far off. Like Sledge, his fears were worse at night, in this case a murky, foggy one while he was on guard duty:
The mind becomes dulled by the physical and emotional stresses of war and regresses to the primal instinct of survival at all cost. This, I was afraid, was happening to me. The proof of this was apparent when I recoiled upon abruptly encountering German bodies, by my growing revulsion for mines, my increasing preoccupation with death and now by the gnawing apprehension about what was possibly lurking in the fog that embraced me.
I began to worry, for the one thing I didn’t need at this time was a breakdown of my nerves. I had controlled my emotions so far and I didn’t want to unravel this close to the end of hostilities.123
The rotation system established in the Korean and Vietnam Wars at least gave soldiers a departure date to cling to. Unlike Blunt, they did not have to hold on until the “end of hostilities.” But twelve months or more of combat was still a great deal to endure, and stressed-out soldiers wondered, like their predecessors in earlier wars, how much more they could take.124 Lieutenant James Brady, a marine platoon leader in Korea, noted that men eventually became “shook.”: “We were beginning to learn a new word for someone who’d had a bad scare or was losing his nerve. We said he was ‘shook.’ . . . It was 76’s [Chinese artillery rounds] coming in flat and fast or mortars dropping on you or fear of mines or maybe too many duck blinds and night ambushes or a wind that never stopped blowing. Those were what made you ‘shook,’ everyone agreed, and no fooling.”125
The once-confident helicopter pilot Mason provides an example from the Vietnam War of being shook. After six months or so of too many hot landing zones, Mason “was jumpy, worried. My nights were getting harder to bear.” Things only got worse. By the end of his tour, he suffered from epileptic-like seizures, nightmares, and hallucinations.126
Paradoxically, at the same time that the soldier became hyper-reactive to danger, he grew increasingly accustomed to the horrible sights and suffering around him. He had to, if he were to continue functioning. Tobey C. Herzog calls this defense mechanism “psychic numbing”: “The process involves becoming oblivious to the horrors of combat, to the death of friends, or to the guilt of killing other human beings.”127 Combat soldiers mention it frequently, occasionally adding that they were alarmed to discover such seeming callousness in themselves. Captain Arthur W. Little, commanding a battalion of doughboys, was grief stricken over the first of his officers killed in battle, but “the day was to come when the abnormality of my mind and heart was to become normal in its new plane. The death of an officer came to affect me, emotionally, not at all.”128
Private Blunt, detailed to help a graves-registration team find and collect the frozen bodies of soldiers killed during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, “began considering American and German dead with the same lack of emotion. A corpse was a corpse regardless of what color the uniform was, and war was war. When I returned to my platoon two days later, I wondered what was happening to me that I could become so blasé, so indifferent to death.”129
Many GIs continued to be shocked by the sight of American bodies, if only because they were stark reminders of the observer’s own mortality. But some soldiers, as in the case of Blunt, even grew accustomed to the dead of their own side. Private Matthews and his comrades shared a shell hole with several dead marines on Iwo Jima. They did not give the corpses a second thought: “Our attitude toward the bodies was almost perfunctory. . . . For these were not men we knew; they were the result of man’s ferocity and we were used to ferocity now.”130
American soldiers in later wars saw their share of ferocity as well and likewise grew accustomed to it. In Vietnam, platoon leader Downs noticed that “we were all becoming pretty callous to life,” and as if to prove the point, added, “The thought was a small one and soon left me.”131 Not only did the soldier become callous, but the sight of enemy dead also could produce, not horror, but a sense of triumph. Private Ogden, while counting enemy bodies after a major engagement in Vietnam, noted: “Viewing death was a curious and intriguing thing at first, but no more. As a kid I had felt terrible during slaughtering season, and ran and hid; but now I felt almost smug and arrogant: better these little pathetic bastards than me.”132
Fatigue, fear, and stress figured prominently in generating this “psychic numbing.” In its extreme form, it is best summed up by Ernie Pyle’s description of what World War II soldiers called the “thousand-yard stare” and marines called the “bulkhead stare”: “It’s a look of dullness, eyes that look without seeing, eyes that see without conveying any image to the mind. It’s a look that is the display room for what lies behind it—exhaustion, lack of sleep, tension for too long, weariness that is too great, fear beyond fear, misery to the point of numbness, a look of surpassing indifference to anything anybody can do. It’s a look I dread to see on men.”133
Sergeant Frankel realized that he was approaching such a state: “There is a condition common to all wars, which in World War II we called the two-thousand-[yard] stare. This was the anesthetized look, the wide, hollow eyes of a man who no longer cares. I wasn’t to that state yet, but the numbness was total.”134 Private Sledge and his fellow marines, waiting to be relieved by an army unit on Peleliu, were as close to the edge as Frankel: “During mid-afternoon as we waited for the army infantry, we sat numbly looking at nothing with the ‘bulkhead stare.’ The shock, horror, fear, and fatigue of fifteen days of combat were wearing us down physically and emotionally. I could see it in the dirty, bearded faces of my remaining comrades: they had a hollow-eyed vacant look peculiar to men under extreme stress for days and nights on end.”135
“IT WILL HAPPEN TO ME”
At this point the soldier was on the verge of being overwhelmed by the brutal environment of war. He had gone from apprehensive but optimistic novice to battlewise, confident veteran to hyper-reactive yet emotionally numbed survivor. A soldier who reached this physical and emotional nadir could become fatalistic—“it will happen to me.”
Such deep, despairing fatalism should not be confused, however, with the phenomenon of soldiers’ premonitions about their impending doom, generally expressed by the comment “my number is up.” Once the soldier realized that it could happen to him, he naturally began to wonder how long his luck would hold out. As others died or cracked up around him, the soldier came to believe that it would soon be his turn. Lieutenant Gerald P. Averill, prior to what he knew would be a costly amphibious assault on Iwo Jima in World War II, was “convinced more than ever that I never would leave the island alive.”136 Averill made it, but some premonitions of death came true. A veteran in Lieutenant Harold P. Leinbaugh’s Company K decided that it was not going to be his lucky day—it was not. He was killed by a burst of German machine-gun fire.137
Men who had premonitions often hurriedly wrote “last letters.” The World War II mortarman Howard S. Hoffman, growing increasingly edgy after many close calls, “became convinced . . . that I was not going to survive.”138 He left a letter with the supply sergeant concerning the disposition of his personal gear.
Premonitions of death, as in Hoffman’s case, reflected a soldier’s growing edginess or, as in Averill’s case, a realization that the odds of surviving an upcoming operation were not good. A premonition, however, did not equate to acceptance of death and certainly not to a desire for it. Thus, soldiers with premonitions were more akin to realists than to fatalists. But for some soldiers serving “for the duration,” a feeling that the war would never end contributed to a true sense of impending doom.139 Private Carl Andrew Brannen, for example, after experiencing the costly battles of Belleau Wood and Soissons in the Great War, not surprisingly “reasoned that the war would continue a year or two longer, but that I would not see the finish.”140 By October 1918, in Private Mackin’s marine company, only a “battered and bitter handful” of old-timers remained, and they “had long since lost all hope of ever going home.”141
During the Italian campaign in World War II, Lieutenant Bond, while in the hospital recovering from a severe bout of dysentery, was suddenly depressed: “The war would never end, and we would have to go on until we were all killed, fighting in the rocky mountains, and being shelled, sleeping in the slush. Or we would break.”142 For soldiers in the Pacific, the war seemed even more interminable, especially given the common perception, as expressed by Lieutenant Munschauer, that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end: “They would never give up. They would all die, one by one. We had seen that in the Philippines. By 1949 it would be over. Four more years. Millions would be dead. Odds for survival were nil. Only a severe wound taking me out of action would help to beat the odds.”143
Soldiers in the Korean and Vietnam Wars occasionally spoke as despairingly as troops in the world wars about their chances of surviving, despite the existence of a rotation system. James R. Ebert points out that for the grunt, “the prospect of a year in combat seemed like a lifetime . . . and they were unable to contemplate completing their tours unscathed.”144 Lieutenant Lanning was one soldier who felt that way. He noticed that grunts with more than six months in the company were considered “old-timers,” and there were not many of them: “Few completed a full tour without joining one of the casualty lists.”145
Soldiers in the Korean War were sometimes equally pessimistic, especially given the enemy’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of soldiers. During the heavy fighting around the Pusan Perimeter, Lieutenant Frank Muetzel came to that conclusion: “No one even considered the possibility of getting whipped by the NKs [North Koreans]. But there were a lot of them and few of us. We, me, all of us were eventually going to get it; it was just a matter of when and how bad.”146
Yet even soldiers like Lieutenant Muetzel, who anticipated death or serious injury, were not truly fatalistic. The fatalistic soldier not only anticipated his death but also accepted it and in some cases even welcomed it. The memoirs provide examples of truly fatalistic soldiers, but they are relatively scarce because few men actually reached that state of mind. Those who did failed to take even elementary precautions in the face of the enemy. Lieutenant Munschauer, whose platoon began receiving sniper fire, noticed that one of his men continued to sit outside his foxhole. He yelled at the man to take cover: “‘Aw, Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘don’t worry, when your number is up your number . . .’ He never finished. A small round hole in the middle of his forehead oozed blood as he slumped over.”147
“Scar-Chin,” a marine in Leckie’s company in World War II, refused to take cover during Japanese air attacks. He told Leckie, “If you’re gonna get it, you’re gonna get it, and there isn’t anything you can do about it.” Leckie presented his argument against fatalism, but it had no apparent impact on Scar-Chin: “Argue until you are weary, but men like Scar-Chin still lounge among the falling bombs. Tell them they don’t believe it, when they say, ‘You go when your time comes.’ Suggest that it is they, through their own foolhardiness, who choose the time. Impress upon them that they are their own executioner, that they pull their own name out of the hat. Remind them even if it is fatalism that they want—as opposed to common sense—they still must choose it: they must even choose nochoice.”148
Leckie is assuming that fatalists have the mental and emotional balance left to make a rational choice. But usually the fatalistic soldier was no longer functioning soundly. Ron Kovic was certainly not thinking rationally when he deliberately set out to trip a booby trap in Vietnam: “I remember walking along, knowing goddamn well exactly what I was doing, just waiting for those metal splinters to go bursting up into my testicles, sending me home a wounded hero. That was the only way I was getting out of this place.”149
Such an action equaled suicide by enemy bullet, and the truly fatalistic, burned-out soldier sometimes opted for it. Private Mackin’s friend “Baldy” had reached that point by early November 1918. During a halt in the advance, Baldy no longer took the elementary precaution of keeping his head down. He stood up while everyone else lay prone: “He . . . stood, straightening up his clothes, peering all the while up the slope ahead, full standing in a line of sprawling men. He was a target then, and it seemed to me he didn’t care too much. He long had known he wasn’t going home.”150 A sniper obligingly killed him.
Sometimes the suicide-by-enemy-fire was dramatic. Corporal Russ tells of a marine who, during the Korean War, “went berserk . . . and grabbed a BAR one night, leapt out of the . . . trench and headed for goonyland [the Chinese lines] before anyone could stop him.”151 More commonly, however, fatalistic soldiers died because of inaction. They simply no longer cared what happened, so they failed to duck for cover, or put on a helmet or flak jacket, or hide a light or a cigarette at night.
Few soldiers actually sank to the depths of fatalistic despair. Relatively more claimed that they were fatalists, but their own attitudes and actions betrayed them. Ernie Pyle knew the truth: “A dozen times I overheard this same remark: ‘Well. I don’t worry about it because I look at it this way. If your number’s up then it’s up, and if it isn’t you’ll come through no matter what.’ Every single person who expressed himself that way was a liar and knew it, but, hell, a guy has to say something.”152
A few who said it were not lying, as the preceding examples illustrate, but Pyle’s observation is generally accurate, as verified by cases where soldier-authors profess no longer to care but then prove by their actions or emotions that they still want to live. Corporal Charles F. Minder, in the midst of the fighting in the Argonne, began volunteering for dangerous carrying parties, claiming that he no longer cared and hence was no longer scared: “I don’t seem to be scared any more, and volunteered to go. What if I do get hit; it might get me out of this mess! I don’t want to kill any more.” Yet a few days later, in recording his reaction to a near-miss from a large artillery shell, Minder revealed just how scared of dying he still was: “The trees crashed, and rocks and dirt tumbled down the side of the hill like an avalanche. It scared the life out of me. . . . I sat there for the rest of my guard trembling.”153 So much for Minder’s fatalism.
After months of combat in Vietnam, Lieutenant Caputo was suddenly his old, enthusiastic self again. Like Minder, he chalked up his new attitude to freedom from fear, once he no longer cared what happened: “A sudden and mysterious recovery from the virus of fear had caused the change in mood. I didn’t know why. I only knew I had ceased to be afraid of dying. It was not a feeling of invincibility; indifference, rather.” Yet when caught in the open in his next firefight, Caputo “made love to the earth” as the bullets zipped by overhead. He then organized a hasty assault, because if he and his platoon stayed where they were, they would be slaughtered. He gathered himself for the rush forward: “My body was tensing itself to spring. Quite separate from my thoughts or will, it was concentrating itself to make a rush for the tree line. And that intense concentration of physical energy was born of fear. . . . I understood then why a cornered animal is so dangerous.”154 So much for Caputo’s indifference.
Soldiers like Minder and Caputo genuinely wanted to feel indifferent and may even have temporarily tricked themselves into believing it, because it brought an end to fear and anxiety. The problem, however, was that the will to live was too strong. As long as there was any hope, most soldiers could not succumb to fatalism. One powerful source of hope was the Date of Expected Return from Overseas (DEROS), or rotation date. Many Korean and Vietnam War soldiers despaired of completing a full tour of duty in one piece, and for good reason. But for those who survived to the point where their rotation date loomed as a real possibility, the chances of life after combat began looking better.
Yet the approaching rotation date brought a new problem. The soldier stopped believing, if he ever really did, that it would happen to him, but he began to worry that it might happen. Thus was born “short-timer’s syndrome.” The short-timer grew reluctant to risk his life in any way. He feared, almost to the point of obsession, that he would be killed by one of those freak occurrences so common in war, perhaps even on his last day in-country.
Short-timer syndrome is generally associated with the Vietnam War, but it was much in evidence during the Korean War as well. The rundown of shorttimer characteristics by Lieutenant Matthias would be familiar to any Vietnam War grunt:
The amount of time in their bunker began to increase. More C rations were eaten in the bunker rather than walking the trench lines back to chow. There was no more volunteering for any assignments that might have risk. . . . When possible, the shorttimer arranged some swaps of guard duty and patrol duty (I imagine some interesting inducements were provided for some changes). . . . The shorttimer often became more irritable, short tempered and nervous. His conversation often indicated fears of getting hit during the last week or last patrol, especially by a stray shell. Every marine could enumerate instances when some poor bastard got it at that time.155
Soldiers serving in the world wars had no rotation date to look forward to, but in some cases, especially in the European theater during World War II, they suffered the equivalent of short-timer syndrome: last-casualty syndrome.156 The imminent collapse of Germany was obvious by early 1945. The GI was amazed that the Germans, at least the more fanatical ones, could fight on in such a hopeless cause, and he did not want the dubious distinction of being the last American killed by one of those Germans.157
The GIs, in other words, could sense the war would end, and the prospect awakened fresh hopes and fears not unlike those felt by the Korean and Vietnam War short-timer. Captain Huebner, as the war drew to a close in Italy, took all the precautions typical of the short-timer: “I am now determined to come out alive. I’ll gamble on anything but my life. I’ll keep my head down, keep my damn helmet on, probe carefully for mines along my path, keep digging my holes deep, and look for cover as I run. I’ll think about each situation first, then face it as planned. No show-off stuff for me. I’ll obey all orders to the letter and do nothing more. My instinct for self-preservation is deep seated.”158
Many soldiers, like Huebner, survived “for the duration,” but their last weeks of combat were increasingly nerve-racking as the end of the war drew near. Other soldiers had broken down emotionally long before war’s end or even before becoming fully immersed in the environment. Conversely, a few soldiers actually thrived in this malignant climate. Most fell somewhere in between, struggling as best they could, using a variety of coping mechanisms to preserve their physical and mental health, and a measure of humanity, in the dangerous, hostile world of war.