INTRODUCTION
1. William L. Langer, Gas and Flame in World War I (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. xvii–xviii. Langer wrote this book while he was still a doughboy in Europe, and it was distributed to the members of his unit, E Company, First Gas Regiment, in February 1919.
2. Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 151.
3. James Jones, WW II: A Chronicle of Soldiering (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), p. 6.
4. Alice M. Hoffman and Howard S. Hoffman, Archives of Memory: A Soldier Recalls World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), pp. 145–146. For a similar assessment, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 326–327.
5. Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (Houston: Paul M. Boesch, 1985), p. 165. The Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo makes the same observation. See A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 90.
6. Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 24–25.
7. Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 156.
8. Henry G. Gole, “Literature and History for Soldiers,” Military Review 68:6 (May 1988): 5.
9. Roger A. Beaumont, “Military Fiction and Role: Some Problems and Perspectives,” Military Affairs 39:2 (April 1975): 70.
10. Tobey C. Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), p. 96. Herzog’s assessment of The Naked and the Dead is accurate. I would rank Mailer’s novel as the premier American antiwar novel of the twentieth century, which does not mean that it does not contain any number of valuable individual episodes and insights. The full citation for Mailer is The Naked and the Dead (New York: Signet, 1948).
11. Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, p. 25.
12. Peter Karsten, Soldiers and Society: The Effects of Military Service and War on American Society, Grass Roots Perspectives on American History, no. 1 (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 12.
13. Herzog, War Stories, p. 3. Joseph Remenyi carries this observation a step further, pointing out that the best literature of war, by dealing with these universal human themes, attracts the most reader empathy and interest. See his “Psychology of War Literature,” Sewanee Review: A Quarterly of Life and Letters 52:1 (winter 1944): 137–147.
14. Richard H. Kohn, “The Social History of the American Soldier: A Review and Prospectus for Research,” American Historical Review 86:3 (June 1981): 560.
15. Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Haas, Wounds of War: The Psychological Aftermath of Combat in Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 10.
CHAPTER 1. RALLYING TO THE FLAG
1. For an excellent discussion of the Selective Draft Act and the rationale behind it, see John Whiteclay Chambers II, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York: Free Press, 1987).
2. See ibid., p. 1, for the 72 percent figure. For a discussion of how volunteer enlistments continued to be the main source of manpower for the army from April through December 1917, see Marvin A. Kreidberg and Merton G. Henry, History of Military Mobilization in the United States Army, 1775–1945, Department of the Army Pamphlet 20-212 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, November 1955), pp. 246–252, especially Table 25, p. 250. In 1918, draft inductions increased significantly, and in August voluntary enlistment in the army was cut out altogether, which explains how, by war’s end, 72 percent of the army’s personnel were draftees.
3. Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. xiv.
4. Ibid., pp. 51–61. See also David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 179; Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 152–154; and Charles V. Genthe, American War Narratives: 1917–1918: A Study and Bibliography (New York: David Lewis, 1969), pp. 9–13, 32–33, 43–46, and 67–70.
5. Kennedy, Over Here, p. 178.
6. These themes are discussed in Adams, Great Adventure, pp. 9–44 and 73–84; Genthe, War Narratives, pp. 49–52 and 92–98; and Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 44–54.
7. On European society’s enthusiasm for war in August 1914, and the values that generated that positive outlook, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), pp. 115–135; Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp.18–29; and Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 39–72.
8. For an assessment of the romantic, overwhelmingly pro-Allied war literature produced by British, American, and Canadian authors from 1914 to 1918, see Genthe, War Narratives, pp. 13–17, 37–42, and 76–88; Kennedy, Over Here, pp. 180–184; and Cooperman, American Novel, pp. 13–44.
9. Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), pp. 363–364.
10. Kennedy, Over Here, p. 184. For a concurring assessment, see Charles A. Fenton, “A Literary Fracture of World War I,” American Quarterly 12:1, part 1 (summer 1960): 119–132.
11. May, American Innocence, p. 365.
12. Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), p. 89.
13. William E. Matsen, The Great War and the American Novel: Versions of Reality and the Writer’s Craft in Selected Fiction of the First World War (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 17.
14. For a discussion of the lack of idealism and romantic imagery in American World War II novels, see Peter Aichinger, The American Soldier in Fiction, 1880–1963: A History of Attitudes Toward Warfare and the Military Establishment (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975), pp. 37–38.
15. Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow (Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1979), p. 1.
16. Lekachman interview in Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 68.
17. Marguerite Higgins, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951), pp. 17 and 85.
18. Theodore R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 437 and 5.
19. Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 6.
20. Kennedy, Over Here, pp. 143, 151–153, and 167.
21. See Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 182.
22. Amos N. Wilder, Armageddon Revisited: A World War I Journal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 8.
23. Bulz interview in Henry Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance: Living Memories of the Doughboy (New York: Priam Books, 1978), p. 294.
24. Horatio Rogers, World War I Through My Sights (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1976), p. 2.
25. Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, The Men of Company K (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p. 2.
26. Stiles interview in Henry Berry, Semper Fi, Mac: Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in World War II (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 72.
27. Henry Berry, Hey, Mac, Where Ya Been? Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in the Korean War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 220. Berry added, following this quotation, “These pretty much seem to be the feelings of everyone I interviewed” (p. 220).
28. Two historians who do take note of idealistic motivations in the Vietnam War are Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 63–69 and 209–212, and James R. Ebert, A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965–1972 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), pp. 9–12.
29. William D. Ehrhart, “Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War,” Virginia Quarterly Review 63:2 (spring 1987): 263.
30. Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), p. 74. At a writers’ conference in 1985, Kovic reconfirmed his idealistic motivations. He recounted his reaction to John F. Kennedy’s famous inaugural address of January 1961: “I sat in my living room . . . and tears streamed down my face because I felt that I had a purpose in my life. I felt that I had an obligation to serve my country.” See Timothy J. Lomperis, “Reading the Wind”: The Literature of the Vietnam War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 30.
31. William L. Langer, Gas and Flame in World War I (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. xviii–xix.
32. Wilder, Armageddon, pp. 4 and 6.
33. Will Judy, A Soldier’s Diary: A Day-to-Day Record in the World War (Chicago: Judy Publishing, 1931), p. 20.
34. James Jones, WW II: A Chronicle of Soldiering (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), p. 15.
35. Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 6, 7–8.
36. John L. Munschauer, World War II Cavalcade: An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1996), p. 69.
37. John A. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers: Memoir of a Combat Platoon Leader in Korea (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1991), p. 2.
38. Ibid., p. 10. For another example, see the John Burns interview in Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 181.
39. The Vietnam veteran Tobey C. Herzog, an English professor, has dubbed the influence of popular war movies the “John Wayne Syndrome.” See his Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 16–24. See also Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 60–62.
40. Kovic, Fourth of July, p. 73.
41. Alfred S. Bradford, Some Even Volunteered: The First Wolfhounds Pacify Vietnam (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 3.
42. Peter Karsten, “Consent and the American Soldier: Theory Versus Reality,” Parameters 12:1 (March 1982): 42.
43. Ibid., pp. 47–48. See also Richard H. Kohn, “The Social History of the American Soldier: A Review and Prospectus for Research,” American Historical Review 86:3 (June 1981): 558. Kohn, a historian, makes the same point as Karsten—once the stock of volunteers dries up, as invariably happens, various forms of coercion, notably the draft, must be instituted to spur the more reluctant individuals into fulfilling their obligations.
44. Wilder, Armageddon, p. 137.
45. Alvin C. York, Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary, ed. Tom Skeyhill (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), p. 150.
46. Herschowitz interview in Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, p. 353.
47. Schaffer, Great War, p. 185. The historian Mark Meigs also notes the influence of peer pressure in getting men to join up in World War I and adds, “Peer pressure may indeed always play a role in sending young men to war” (Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War [Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1997], p. 24).
48. Carl Andrew Brannen, Over There: A Marine in the Great War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), p. 5.
49. Charles F. Minder, This Man’s War: The Day-by-Day Record of an American Private on the Western Front (New York: Pevensey Press, 1931), p. 146.
50. Leon C. Standifer, Not in Vain: A Rifleman Remembers World War II (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), pp. 31–32. For another example, see Carl M. Becker and Robert G. Thobaben, Common Warfare: Parallel Memoirs by Two World War II GI’s in the Pacific (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1992), pp. 6–7.
51. Jones, WW II, p. 17.
52. See a 1969 survey confirming the influence of social and peer pressure in Peter Karsten, Soldiers and Society: The Effects of Military Service and War on American Society, Grass Roots Perspectives on American History, no. 1 (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 65.
53. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987), p. 45.
54. Appy, Working-Class War, p. 50.
55. Rudolph W. Stephens, Old Ugly Hill: A G.I.’s Fourteen Months in the Korean Trenches, 1952–1953 (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1995), p. 25.
56. Baskir and Strauss, Chance and Circumstance, pp. 67–90 and 107.
57. Strong interview in Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), p. 55.
58. Samuel A. Stouffer, Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. DeVinney, Shirley A. Star, and Robin M. Williams Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 1, The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 329–337. Only the first two of the four volumes, referred to by their shared title The American Soldier, are cited in this book. See bibliography.
59. Baskir and Strauss, Chance and Circumstance, p. 55.
60. John Ketwig, . . . And a Hard Rain Fell (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), pp. 16–18.
61. Alice M. Hoffman and Howard S. Hoffman, Archives of Memory: A Soldier Recalls World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), pp. 24–25.
62. Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, pp. 120–121.
63. James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), pp. 9–10.
64. Kennedy, Over There, p. 153.
65. Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War (York, Pa.: Strength and Health Publishing, 1940), p. 31.
66. Jones interview in Mary Penick Motley, The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), p. 177.
67. George William Sefton, It Was My War: I’ll Remember It the Way I Want To! (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1994), p. xi. See pp. xi–xiii for Sefton’s upbringing.
68. William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 34. See pp. 15–35 for Manchester’s upbringing.
69. Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 16.
70. Foote interview in Baskir and Strauss, Chance and Circumstance, p. 255.
71. Jack Fuller, Fragments (New York: Dell, 1985), pp. 28–29.
72. Schaffer, Great War, p. 184.
73. Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, pp. 274 and 328. Twelve of Berry’s interviewees were National Guardsmen called up to go to the United States–Mexican border in 1916 (p. 341).
74. Janice Holt Giles, ed., The G.I. Journal of Sergeant Giles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1965), pp. 3–4.
75. Rodriguez interview in Gerald Astor, Crisis in the Pacific: The Battles for the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1996), p. 193.
76. Babyak interview in Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 112.
77. William C. Menninger, A Psychiatrist for a Troubled World: Selected Papers of William C. Menninger, M.D. (New York: Viking, 1967), pp. 557–558.
78. Charles C. Moskos Jr., “Racial Integration in the Armed Forces,” American Journal of Sociology 72:2 (September 1966): 139. See also Charles C. Moskos Jr., The American Enlisted Man: The Rank and File in Today’s Military (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970), Table 5.7, p. 220.
79. Moskos, American Enlisted Man, p. 117 and Table 5.6, p. 219.
80. See the survey of Vietnam-era enlistees in Patricia M. Shields, “Enlistment During the Vietnam Era and the ‘Representative’ Issue of the All-Volunteer Force,” Armed Forces and Society 7:1 (fall 1980): 133–151.
81. Anderson interview in Terry, Bloods, p. 221.
82. Albert French, Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), pp. 6–7.
83. John Sack, M (New York: Avon Books, 1985), p. 28.
84. Woodley interview in Terry, Bloods, p. 237.
85. Roy E. Appleman, South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), p. 180, cited in James H. Toner, “American Society and the American Way of War: Korea and Beyond,” Parameters 11:1 (spring 1981): 81.
86. Joseph R. Owen, Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996), p. 14.
87. Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 49.
88. Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 286–287.
89. William H. Mauldin, Bill Mauldin in Korea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952), p. 129.
90. William D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1983), p. 33.
91. Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 7.
92. Richard D. Camp, with Eric Hammel, Lima-6: A Marine Company Commander in Vietnam (New York: Pocket Books, 1989), p. 18.
93. Hoffman, I Remember, p. 78.
94. Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 2.
95. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers, p. 31.
96. Murphy, To Hell and Back, p. 20.
97. Lester Atwell, Private (New York: Popular Library, 1958), p. 16.
98. Matthew Brennan, Brennan’s War: Vietnam, 1965–1969 (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 236.
99. Rosenblum interview in Terkel, Good War, p. 384.
100. Michael Lee Lanning, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 1.
101. Foote interview in Baskir and Strauss, Chance and Circumstance, p. 256.
102. Ibid., p. 25.
103. For a discussion of various peacetime and wartime efforts to turn criminals and social misfits into soldiers, and the general condemnation of the practice as a bad idea, see Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel, War Neuroses (Philadelphia and London: Blakiston, 1945), p. 75; Robert H. Ollendorf and Paul L. Adams, “Psychiatry and the Draft,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 14:1 (January 1971): 87; Anne Hoiberg, “Military Staying Power,” in Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military, ed. Sam C. Sarkesian (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1980), p. 219; and Peter Watson, War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 146–148.
104. Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, p. 112.
105. Rasmus interview in Terkel, Good War, p. 39. For another example, in this case a young man who wanted to prove his bravery to his father, see the interview with the Vietnam veteran Richard Deegan in Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 74–76.
106. Charles S. Crawford, The Four Deuces: A Korean War Story (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1989), p. 9. For a tale almost identical to Crawford’s, see the story of Webster Manuel, who, after being hazed for doing “women’s work” as a switchboard operator in the Second Infantry Division in Korea, transferred to a rifle platoon (Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfred Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory: The Concluding Volume of an Oral History [San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988], pp. 62 and 73).
107. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, and Toronto: Ballantine Books of Canada, 1978), pp. 6 and 120.
108. Baker, Nam, p. 34.
109. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 89.
110. Morrison interview in Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, p. 323.
111. A study of U.S. Army Basic Training conducted in 1955 by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research describes this soldierization process as learning carried out simultaneously on two levels. In the “narrower sense,” basic training was a straightforward process of teaching the trainee specific combat skills. In the “broader sense,” basic training was an “acculturative process” in which the trainee learned “the basic mores, canons and customs of the military subculture, and the arts of living and cooperating with a large group of his fellow men” (David H. Marlowe, “The Basic Training Process,” in The Symptom as Communication in Schizophrenia, ed. Kenneth L. Artiss [New York and London: Grune and Stratton, 1959], p. 75).
112. Arthur J. Vidich and Maurice R. Stein, “The Dissolved Identity in Military Life,” in Identity and Anxiety: Survival of the Person in Mass Society, ed. Maurice R. Stein, Arthur J. Vidich, and David Manning White (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), p. 496.
113. Appy, Working-Class War, p. 86
114. Gwynne Dyer, War (New York: Crown, 1985), p. 111.
115. See Artiss, ed., Schizophrenia, p. 76, for a 1955 study that verifies the stressful nature of army basic training.
116. Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 29; see his chapter 2, “Basic Training,” pp. 25–42, and chapter 3, “Advanced Individual Training,” pp. 43–60, for an excellent overview of the Vietnam-era training process from the trainee’s perspective.
117. See Peter G. Bourne, “Some Observations on the Psychosocial Phenomena Seen in Basic Training,” Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes 30:2 (May 1967): 188, for a discussion of the “environmental shock” experienced by recruits during the reception process.
118. Leckie, Helmet, p. 4.
119. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 12.
120. Hoffman and Hoffman, Archives, p. 28.
121. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 16.
122. Munschauer, Cavalcade, pp. 9 and 7.
123. Stack interview in Berry, Semper Fi, p. 299.
124. Leckie, Helmet, p. 5.
125. Fuller, Fragments, p. 40.
126. During World Wars I and II, this platoon was often a tactical unit, and the men continued together into unit training and deployment overseas. For men being trained as individual replacements in the world wars, and for all new recruits in basic training during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, this platoon was strictly a training organization that disbanded on completion of training. In either case, the trainees usually remained together in their platoon, under the tutelage of the same cadre, for the duration of their initial training.
127. Leckie, Helmet, p. 10.
128. Hoffman and Hoffman, Archives, p. 27.
129. Leon Uris, Battle Cry (New York: Bantam Books, 1953), pp. 49–50.
130. The sociologist John H. Faris found group punishments, and the recruits’ sense of injustice over them, to be common when he studied basic and advanced individual training in the U.S. Army in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see his “The Impact of Basic Combat Training,” Armed Forces and Society 2:1 [November 1975]: 117).
131. S. Kirson Weinberg, “Problems of Adjustment in Army Units,” American Journal of Sociology 50:4 (January 1945): 273.
132. Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 32.
133. Weinberg, “Problems of Adjustment,” p. 273. See also Howard Brotz and Everett Wilson, “Characteristics of Military Society,” American Journal of Sociology 51:5 (March 1946): 375.
134. Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, p. 18.
135. Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 32.
136. Sociological studies of basic training note the lack of privacy and the extra measure of discomfort and even stress that resulted. See Faris, “Basic Combat Training,” pp. 116–117, and Artiss, ed., Schizophrenia, pp. 78–79.
137. Leckie, Helmet, pp. 10–11.
138. For a discussion of the trainees’ nadir in attitudes three to four weeks into basic training, see Bourne, “Psychosocial Phenomena in Basic Training,” pp. 191–192, and Artiss, ed., Schizophrenia, p. 89.
139. David Parks, G.I. Diary (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 20–21.
140. Appy, Working-Class War, p. 104. See also Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 39–41; Bourne, “Psychosocial Phenomena in Basic Training,” pp. 192–193; and Marlowe, in Artiss, ed., Schizophrenia, pp. 97–98.
141. Kennett, G.I., p. 56.
142. Leckie, Helmet, p. 11.
143. Parks, G.I. Diary, p. 25.
144. Klaus H. Heubner, Long Walk Through War: A Combat Doctor’s Diary (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), p. 97. For an even more positive testimonial to the value of training marches and a plea to the army never to stop conducting such training, “no matter how many armored personnel carriers it acquires,” see Charles R. Cawthon, Other Clay: A Remembrance of the World War II Infantry (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1990), p. 6.
145. Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 84.
146. See Marlowe, in Artiss, ed., Schizophrenia, p. 97, and Bourne, “Psychosocial Phenomena in Basic Training,” p. 193, for the use of recognition and the emerging sense of accomplishment in the buildup phase.
147. Fussell, Doing Battle, p. 80.
148. Parks, G.I. Diary, pp. 24 and 27.
149. See Faris, “Basic Combat Training,” 120; Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 40; and Dyer, War, p. 114.
150. Howard Matthias, The Korean War—Reflections of a Young Combat Platoon Leader, rev. ed. (Tallahassee, Fla.: Father and Son Publishing, 1995), p. 5.
151. Tuttrup interview in Terkel, Good War, p. 175.
152. See Marlowe, in Artiss, ed., Schizophrenia, p. 97.
153. For a discussion of griping as a psychological relief valve, see Irving L. Janis, “Psychodynamic Aspects of Adjustment to Army Life,” Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and the Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 8:2 (May 1945): 175–176. See also Marlowe, in Artiss, ed., Schizophrenia, pp. 86 and 89.
154. Paul Fussell believes that army vulgarity in World War II served, in part, to help the soldiers cope with the frustrations of army life. See Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 90–95.
155. Leckie, Helmet, p. 14.
156. Kennett, G.I., p. 63.
157. Faris, “Basic Combat Training,” pp. 123–124.
158. Uris, Battle Cry, pp. 40–41. Uris, incidentally, spared his readers the actual marine term for a World War II era recruit—“shithead” or “shitbird.”
159. Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, p. 120.
160. Janis, “Psychodynamic Aspects,” p. 164. See also Stein, Vidich, and White, eds., Identity and Anxiety, p. 499.
161. For a discussion of the friendships formed among trainees and the mutual support derived from them, see Artiss, ed., Schizophrenia, pp. 89–95, and Paul D. Nelson and Newell H. Berry, “Cohesion in Marine Recruit Platoons,” Journal of Psychology 68 (January 1968): 63–71.
162. Sefton, It Was My War, p. 4.
163. Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, p. 115. See also Bourne, “Psychosocial Phenomena in Basic Training,” p. 193.
164. See Bourne, “Psychosocial Phenomena in Basic Training,” p. 193.
165. Fuller, Fragments, pp. 52–53.
166. Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders, with Clark Smith, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), p. 7.
167. See Dyer, War, p. 126.
168. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 13.
169. Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, pp. 20–21.
170. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 19.
171. The soldier-authors are far more positive than negative in their descriptions of their training cadre, but a few accounts portray the drill sergeant as cruel and sadistic, and no doubt this type existed. See the cases of Sergeant Anderson in Ketwig, Hard Rain, pp. 19–26, and Sergeant Gerheim in Gustav Hasford, The Short-timers (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), pp. 3–33.
172. Dyer, War, p. 113. See also Faris, “Basic Combat Training,” pp. 118–125; Marlowe, in Artiss, ed., Schizophrenia, p. 98; and Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 43–47.
173. Leckie, Helmet, p. 9.
174. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 5. For a similar assessment of his Vietnam-era drill sergeant, see the playwright David Rabe’s comments in Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (London and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), p. 204.
175. Dyer, War, p. 128. Other observers of the training process, or more typically, observers of combat who thereby came to appreciate the importance of tough, realistic training in preparing men for combat, have echoed Dyer’s sentiments. For a World War II example, see Ralph Ingersoll, The Battle Is the Pay-off (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943), pp. 212–216. For a Korean War example, see the comments of Colonel John Michaelis in Higgins, War in Korea, pp. 220–222. Surveys of the soldiers themselves conducted by the Research Branch during World War II and summarized in the Stouffer Study reveal that, if anything, the training should have been even more demanding and realistic. See Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 2, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 220–231.
176. Jesse Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), pp. 27–28.
177. Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 28–29. See also R. Wayne Eisenhart, “You Can’t Hack It, Little Girl: A Discussion of the Covert Psychological Agenda of Modern Combat Training,” Journal of Social Issues 31:4 (fall 1975): 13–23, for an equally negative assessment of Vietnam-era marine boot camp.
178. Morris Janowitz and Roger W. Little, Sociology and the Military Establishment, 3d ed. (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1974), p. 67.
179. Kennett, G.I., p. 72.
180. Dyer, War, p. 116.
181. Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, with new preface (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), p. 124.
182. The more introspective recruits were themselves aware of the importance of their beliefs and attitudes in shaping their reactions to military service, as evidenced by their tendency to dwell at some length in their memoirs on their civilian upbringing and the importance of values learned prior to joining the military. See, for example, Standifer, Not in Vain, pp. 1–40; Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, pp. 15–35; and the character of Robert E. Lee Hodges Jr., in James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), pp. 23–36.
183. One of the best warnings about the perils of assuming cultural homogeneity is provided by the historian Craig M. Cameron, who rejects the historian Samuel L. A. Marshall’s argument that all recruits brought the same belief, specifically, “Thou shalt not kill,” with them into the service: “The argument has serious problems: foremost is the monolithic image Marshall suggests both as related to how all American soldiers feel and regarding the cultural heritage used as a measure” (see American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], p. 51 n. 7).
184. Janowitz and Little, Sociology, p. 67.
185. John Helmer, Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After (New York: Free Press, 1974), p. 148.
186. Kurt Gabel, The Making of a Paratrooper: Airborne Training and Combat in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), pp. 21–22.
187. Fuller, Fragments, p. 40.
188. Eli Ginzberg, James K. Anderson, Sol W. Ginsburg, John L. Herma, and John B. Miner, The Ineffective Soldier: Lessons for Management and the Nation, vol. 2, Breakdown and Recovery (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 33. For case studies of men discharged for various personal problems, see pp. 13–39; for those with homesickness and family problems, see pp. 40–51.
189. Robert A. Clark, “Aggressiveness and Military Training,” American Journal of Sociology 51:5 (March 1946): 423–432.
190. Meyer H. Maskin and Leon L. Altman, “Military Psychodynamics: Psychological Factors in the Transition from Civilian to Soldier,” Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and the Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 6:3 (August 1943): 263–267.
191. Kennett, G.I., p. 64.
192. Munschauer, Cavalcade, p. 10.
193. Marlowe, in Artiss, ed., Schizophrenia, p. 84 (note).
194. See the survey results of D. M. Mantell, True Americanism: Green Berets and War Resisters (New York: Teachers College Press, 1975), pp. 267–269 and 274–281, cited in Karsten, Soldiers and Society, pp. 81–82; Charles W. Brown and Charles C. Moskos Jr., “The American Soldier: Will He Fight? A Provisional Attitudinal Analysis,” Military Review 56:6 (June 1976): 8–17; William C. Cockerham, “Selective Socialization: Airborne Training as Status Passage,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 1:2 (fall 1973): 215–229; and William C. Cockerham, “Attitudes Toward Combat Among U.S. Army Paratroopers,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 6:1 (spring 1978): 1–15.
195. Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, p. 19.
196. Parks, G.I. Diary, p. 39.
197. Ketwig, Hard Rain, pp. 27 and 28.
CHAPTER 2. THE ENVIRONMENT OF WAR
1. Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 3. For a good, though not all-inclusive, synopsis of the various ways in which soldiers’ perceptions about combat proved to be erroneous compared to actual experiences in battle, see Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston, The Hague, and London: Kluwer, Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 219–225. See also Samuel Hynes’s discussion of the “unimaginable otherness of war” in The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 52–53. Hynes is a professor of literature and a World War II veteran.
2. John Keegan and Richard Holmes, with John Gau, Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 21.
3. Joseph R. Owen, Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996), p. 53.
4. Michael Lee Lanning, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 38.
5. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 57.
6. Elton E. Mackin, Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die: Memoirs of a World War I Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), pp. 240–241.
7. George William Sefton, It Was My War: I’ll Remember It the Way I Want To! (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1994), p. 185. Digging in was a staple in all the wars of the draft era. The grunts “humping the boonies” each day in Vietnam, for example, usually stopped several hours before dark, selected a defensive perimeter, and dug in. For an excellent description of how tiring that process could be, see Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), pp. 86–87.
8. Judd interview in Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfred Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory: The Concluding Volume of an Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 310. For a similar comment on the difficulties of bringing water forward during the Korean War, see Howard Matthias, The Korean War—Reflections of a Young Combat Platoon Leader, rev. ed. (Tallahassee, Fla.: Father and Son Publishing, 1995), pp. 174–175.
9. Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 75.
10. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 229.
11. John Hersey, Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), pp. 85–95. For a similar, though fictional, example, see the saga of the evacuation of Wilson, a wounded GI, in Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Signet Books, 1948), pp. 482–493, 501–502, and 519–532.
12. Hersey, Into the Valley, p. 93. Perhaps the only worse conditions, or at least equally bad, under which casualties had to be evacuated were on the frozen, slippery, rocky slopes of a Korean mountainside. See James Brady’s account of a thirteen-hour evacuation in The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), pp. 121–129.
13. Charles MacArthur, War Bugs (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1929), p. 157.
14. Ibid., p. 286. Other accounts verify how hard the artilleryman worked. See Amos N. Wilder, Armageddon Revisited: A World War I Journal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 77 and 107; Horatio Rogers, World War I Through My Sights (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1976), pp. 121–123, 137–139, and 227; and Robert G. Merrick, World War I: A Diary (Baltimore: privately published, 1982), pp. 68 and 107–108.
15. Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 109. For a Korean War example of the work involved in establishing an artillery position, see Knox, Uncertain Victory, pp. 271–274. A case can certainly be made that other combat specialties, such as armor and engineers, also worked very hard, but delving into each specialty would be a book in itself. For a personal favorite—the dirty, hot, tired driver working on his armored personnel carrier—see Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), pp. 102–104.
16. William D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1983), p. 39.
17. Examples of such raids by the Germans and Japanese are common in the memoirs. Cases of raids by North Korean or Chinese aircraft are far fewer, but they did occur. Sergeant Boris R. Spiroff, a First Cavalry Division soldier in Korea, tells of a “Bed Check Charlie”: “Though this was only a harassing action, it is eerie hearing the plane overhead. All pray that the bombs do not fall in their area. Everyone is jumpy and precious sleep is disturbed” (Korea: Frozen Hell on Earth [New York: Vantage Press, 1995], pp. 59–60). See also Knox, Uncertain Victory, pp. 246–250 and 349, and the interview with John Sack, in Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (London and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), p. 13.
18. Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow (Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1979), p. 81.
19. Accounts of jumpy soldiers on guard duty at night are common. For one of the best, see chapter 3, “The Hole,” in Albert French, Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), pp. 20–30.
20. A survey of World War II infantrymen revealed that even during a “quiet period,” 54 percent got only five to six hours’ sleep a day, and 31 percent got four hours or less. See Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol 2, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 78. Based on his interviews with Vietnam veterans, James R. Ebert estimates that four hours’ sleep a day was the norm for grunts in the field. See A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965–1972 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), p. 154.
21. Many students of soldier behavior have commented on the adverse effects of what the army, in recent years, has dubbed “continuous operations.” In sum, without adequate rest and relief from combat, soldier efficiency begins to decline, often in a matter of a few days. See Elmar Dinter, Hero or Coward: Pressures Facing the Soldier in Battle (London and Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1985), pp. 27–31; Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 122–125; Kellett, Combat Motivation, pp. 231–242; Samuel L. A. Marshall, Commentary on Infantry Operations and Weapons Usage in Korea, Winter of 1950–51, Operations Research Office Report 13 (Chevy Chase, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), pp. 29–31; and Arnold M. Rose, “Social Psychological Effects of Physical Deprivation,” Journal of Health and Human Behavior 1:4 (winter 1960): 285–289.
22. Wilder, Armageddon, p. 115.
23. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 237.
24. Charles R. Cawthon, Other Clay: A Remembrance of the World War II Infantry (Niwot: University of Colorado Press, 1990), pp. 118–121.
25. Henry Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance: Living Memories of the Doughboy (New York: Priam Books, 1978), p. 107.
26. References to the “forty and eights” are ubiquitous. See Carl Andrew Brannen, Over There: A Marine in the Great War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), pp. 8–9; Albert M. Ettinger and A. Churchill Ettinger, A Doughboy with the Fighting Sixty-ninth: A Remembrance of World War I (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing, 1992), pp. 22–23; and Charles F. Minder, This Man’s War: The Day-by-Day Record of an American Private on the Western Front (New York: Pevensey Press, 1931), p. 219.
27. Again, the references to forty and eights are numerous. See especially Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (Houston: Paul M. Boesch, 1985), pp. 96–103. The GI encountered the forty and eights in French North Africa as well as in metropolitan France. See Klaus H. Huebner, Long Walk Through War: A Combat Doctor’s Diary (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), p. 15.
28. George Wilson, If You Survive (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 257.
29. John W. Thomason Jr., Fix Bayonets! (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926), p. 81. Even artillery pieces were moved by truck on occasion, carried in the truck bed. See Rogers, Through My Sights, pp. 128–130.
30. Lester Atwell, Private (New York: Popular Library, 1958), pp. 104–109.
31. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 70. Or, as one World War I marine put it, “When they took you out of the line, you hiked. But when they wanted to send you up in hurry, it was camions” (Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, pp. 77–78).
32. Joseph D. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier: The A.E.F. in 1918, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1985), pp. 74–80. See also William L. Langer, Gas and Flame in World War I (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 26–27, and Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A War Diary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1934), chapter 12, “Another Night March,” pp. 180–190.
33. Merrick, A Diary, p. 89. See pp. 86–91 for his full description of the march. For a similar account, see MacArthur, War Bugs, pp. 110–111, 213–214, and 225–232.
34. Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War: The Story of G.I. Joe (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1945), p. 247.
35. Downs, The Killing Zone, p. 22.
36. Virtually every Vietnam infantryman’s memoir or novel describes the miserable conditions and constant threat under which the grunt humped the boonies. See especially Richard E. Ogden, Green Knight, Red Mourning (New York: Zebra Books, 1985), pp. 140–165. See also Ebert, A Life in a Year, chapter 8: “Humping the Bush,” pp. 151–181.
37. The issue of the soldier’s load is the major theme of one of Marshall’s books. See Samuel L. A. Marshall, The Soldier’s Load and the Mobility of a Nation (Quantico, Va.: Marine Corps Association, 1980). He also raised the issue in his study of combat in Korea, Commentary on Infantry, chapter 5, “Exhaustible Infantry and ‘Inexhaustible’ Stores,” pp. 42–50.
38. Many soldiers complained about the excessive weight they had to carry, but relatively few itemized their load or estimated the weight. Enough soldiers have done so, however, to give credence to Marshall’s claim that soldiers have been consistently overloaded: Private Bailey (World War I Chauchat gunner) carried seventy-two pounds, according to Laurence Stallings, in The Doughboys: The Story of the AEF, 1917–1918 (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 85; Albert M. Ettinger (World War I pioneer), carried a fifty-five pound pack plus eight-pound rifle, bayonet, and 150 rounds of ammunition (see Fighting Sixty-ninth, p. 35); William L. Langer (World War I mortarman), carried 105 pounds (see Gas and Flame, p. 31); William Manchester (World War II marine rifleman), carried 84.3 pounds during an amphibious landing (see Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War [Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979], p. 162). Charles R. Cawthon provides an excellent discussion of the “disastrously overweight” GI on D-Day in Normandy in World War II, without making a specific weight estimate, in Other Clay, pp. 42–43; Gerald P. Averill (Marine rifle platoon leader) makes the same point as Cawthon, and itemizes his load, without venturing to make an overall weight estimate, for the World War II landing on Iwo Jima, in Mustang: A Combat Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1987), p. 110; Arnold Winter (Korean War marine BAR man), carried eighty pounds (see Rudy Tomedi, No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War [New York: John Wiley, 1993], p. 24); Martin Russ (Korean War Marine BAR man), carried 110 pounds (see The Last Parallel: A Marine’s War Journal [New York and Toronto: Rinehart, 1957], p. 18); Robert Sanders (Vietnam War machine gunner), hauled seventy-five to eighty pounds, plus weapon and ammunition (see Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders, with Clark Smith, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam [Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982], p. 53); and Phil Yaeger (Vietnam War marine infantryman), carried seventy to eighty pounds (see Ebert, A Life in a Year), p. 171.
39. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier, p. 8.
40. Sefton, It Was My War, p. 75. See pp. 48–49 for an itemized rundown of all the gear Sefton and his fellow paratroopers carried, although Sefton does not hazard a guess as to the total weight. For other examples of the GI’s propensity for ditching his gas mask, see Henry Berry, Semper Fi, Mac: Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in World War II (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 96, and Kurt Gabel, The Making of a Paratrooper: Airborne Training and Combat in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), p. 195.
41. World War I memoirs frequently refer to a “combat” or “small” pack, as opposed to a “full” pack, when going into combat. See Thomason, Fix Bayonets! p. 36, and Minder, This Man’s War, pp. 230 and 315–316. Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell provide a rundown of the World War II infantryman’s combat load and estimate it at “more than thirty pounds,” with mortarmen and machine gunners carrying more, in The Men of Company K (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), pp. 5–6. Samuel L. A. Marshall estimated the “fighting load” of the Korean War soldier at forty pounds, with radiomen and crewserved weapons crewmen carrying more, in Commentary on Infantry, pp. 42–44. Curtis James Morrow mentions carrying about forty-five pounds plus clothing when sent patrolling during the Korean War. See What’s a Commie Ever Done to Black People? A Korean War Memoir of Fighting in the U.S. Army’s Last All Negro Unit (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1997), pp. 13–14. The Vietnam grunt, when not on an extended operation and given helicopter resupply, could likewise pare down his load to about forty pounds. See Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), p. 37.
42. Marshall, Soldier’s Load, p. 22.
43. Balsa quoted in Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996), p. 283. For a discussion of soldiers voluntarily overloading themselves during Operation URGENT FURY, see James M. Dubik and Terrence D. Fullerton, “Soldier Overloading in Grenada,” Military Review 67:1 (January 1987): 38–47.
44. Leon C. Standifer, Not in Vain: A Rifleman Remembers World War II (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), p. 119.
45. Ogden, Green Knight, p. 21.
46. Arthur W. Little, From Harlem to the Rhine: The Story of New York’s Colored Volunteers (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936), p. 99.
47. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier, p. 129.
48. Leckie, Helmet, p. 82.
49. Franklin interview in Berry, Semper Fi, p. 358. Army soldiers were just as likely as marines to find themselves stevedoring. See, for example, Gerald Astor, Crisis in the Pacific: The Battles for the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1996), p. 320.
50. Matthias, Reflections, p. 152. See also Russ, Last Parallel, pp. 106–108. Much of this spadework was done by the Korean Service Corps or hired Korean labor, but the soldiers were put to work as well.
51. Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War (York, Pa.: Strength and Health Publishing, 1940), p. 164.
52. Ibid., p. 161. See also Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, pp. 43–44, and Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 149–153.
53. Kennington quoted in Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 468. The novelist James Jones, who also served with the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division on Guadalcanal, describes a similar burial detail in his WW II: A Chronicle of Soldiering (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), p. 116. For another example of combat soldiers having to help recover the bodies of their own comrades, in this case bodies that were frozen solid in the dead of winter during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, see Gabel, Paratrooper, pp. 205–210.
54. Russ, Last Parallel, pp. 198–201.
55. Matthew Brennan, Brennan’s War: Vietnam 1965–1969 (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 247.
56. For an excellent description of the jungle terrain of the South Pacific, see Bergerud, Touched with Fire, pp. 55–89.
57. Salafia quoted in ibid., pp. 70–71.
58. Stiles interview in Berry, Semper Fi, p. 84.
59. E. J. Kahn Jr., G.I. Jungle: An American Soldier in Australia and New Guinea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), pp. 108–111 and 121.
60. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 57. For an excellent depiction of heavily laden grunts humping the boonies in such heat, see John M. Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 311–317.
61. Strong interview in Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), p. 55. Vehicular movement became almost impossible except on all-weather roads, and even movement on foot was difficult. Marine corporal Ehrhart got stuck up to his knees in mud and had to be pulled out (Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 222).
62. Richard D. Camp, with Eric Hammel, Lima-6: A Marine Company Commander in Vietnam (New York: Pocket Books, 1989), p. 210. See also Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 198, and Caputo, Rumor of War, pp. 224–225.
63. Harold L. Bond, Return to Cassino (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), p. 145. See also pp. 98–104.
64. Huebner, Long Walk, p. 126.
65. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, pp. 154 and 156.
66. Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 177. See also Roscoe C. Blunt Jr., Inside the Battle of the Bulge: A Private Comes of Age (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), pp. 64–66, and Sefton, It Was My War, p. 164.
67. For examples of these conditions, see Henry Berry, Hey, Mac, Where Ya Been? Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in the Korean War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 101 and 128; Henry Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 458, 473–474, 512, and 574–575; Charles M. Bussey, Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1991), pp. 244 and 251; and Tomedi, No Bugles, pp. 67–68.
68. Emer interview in Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 82.
69. Lyle Rishell, With a Black Platoon in Combat: A Year in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), p. 77. See also Spiroff, Frozen Hell, p. 77, and Rudolph W. Stephens, Old Ugly Hill: A G.I.’s Fourteen Months in the Korean Trenches, 1952–1953 (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1995), p. 95.
70. Korgie interview in Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 70. See also pp. 44–45, 102, and 107–110. See also A. Andy Andow, Letters to Big Jim Regarding Narrul Purigo, Cashinum Iman (New York: Vantage Press, 1994), p. 54.
71. For comments on mosquitoes and rice-paddy stench, see Tomedi, No Bugles, p. 41; Bussey, Firefight, p. 137; and Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 196.
72. In his book on the Korean War, Mauldin assumed the guise of “Joe,” his famous World War II cartoon figure, who is now a journalist. Joe relates his experiences in Korea to his equally famous cartoon sidekick “Willie,” who is now a civilian back in the States (William H. Mauldin, Bill Mauldin in Korea [New York: W. W. Norton, 1952], p. 23).
73. For accounts of the doughboy’s trench-warfare experiences, see Lawrence, Fighting Soldier, pp. 13–48; Francis P. Duffy, Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, of Life and Death with the Fighting Sixty-ninth (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1919), pp. 60–118; Rogers, Through My Sights, pp. 132–142; and MacArthur, War Bugs, pp. 33–74. Accounts from the positional-warfare period of the Korean War, incidentally, sound remarkably similar, portraying life as relatively comfortable compared to the earlier war of movement. See the memoirs from the static-war period: Russ, Last Parallel; Stephens, Old Ugly Hill; and John A. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers: Memoir of a Combat Platoon Leader in Korea (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1991).
74. Hoffman, I Remember, p. 195.
75. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 241.
76. Harry Brown, A Walk in the Sun (New York: Knopf, 1944), p. 147. For an example of an entire company falling asleep at night because of heat-related exhaustion, despite the known enemy threat in the area, see Camp, Lima-6, pp. 81–83.
77. Pratt interview in Tomedi, No Bugles, p. 68.
78. Minder, This Man’s War, pp. 126–127; he never got used to the lice either but complained about them throughout his diary (pp. 174, 191, 221, 282, 312, and 342).
79. Rogers, Through My Sights, p. 217.
80. Huebner, Long Walk, p. 82.
81. Peter Bowman, Beach Red (New York: Random House, 1945), pp. 55–56, quotation on p. 56.
82. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 54.
83. Reiland interviewed in Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 169. See also Goff and Sanders, Brothers, pp. 127–129, and Lanning, Only War, pp. 120–121.
84. See the discussion and statistics in John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), pp. 177–186.
85. Many of the soldier-authors in this study contracted malaria, and a few ended up in the hospital as a consequence. See Gwendolyn Medlo Hall, ed., Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (Colored): The World War II New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 192–193 and 231; Leckie, Helmet, pp. 230–231; Alice M. Hoffman and Howard S. Hoffman, Archives of Memory: A Soldier Recalls World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), p. 72; and Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 11–12.
86. Several of the soldier-authors suffered serious bouts of hepatitis, or “yellow jaundice.” See Sledge, Old Breed, p. 176; John L. Munschauer, World War II Cavalcade: An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1996), p. 143; and Leslie W. Bailey, Through Hell and High Water: The Wartime Memories of a Junior Combat Infantry Officer (New York: Vantage Press, 1994), pp. 155–156. For cases of hemorrhagic fever, see Charles S. Crawford, The Four Deuces: A Korean War Story (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1989), pp. 263–268, and Russ, Last Parallel, p. 275. To cite all the cases of dysentery or severe diarrhea would be to list most of the memoirs used in this study. For a few of the more serious cases, in which dehydration, weight loss, and weakness forced a soldier-author into the hospital, see Merrick, A Diary, pp. 63–64; Bond, Cassino, pp. 139–145; and Berry, Hey, Mac, pp. 91–92.
87. Camp, Lima-6, pp. 72–73. For other examples of the embarrassment and discomfort of trying to soldier when afflicted with diarrhea or dysentery, see Heubner, Long Walk, p. 136, and Sefton, It Was My War, pp. 143–144.
88. For examples of soldiers shot at while relieving themselves, see Janice Holt Giles, ed., The G.I. Journal of Sergeant Giles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1965), pp. 245–246; Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander (Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam Books, 1978), p. 53; and Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 380.
89. See Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 110; Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, p. 142; and Mary Penick Motley, The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), p. 164.
90. Gabel, Paratrooper, pp. 236–237. See also Nat Frankel and Larry Smith, Patton’s Best: An Informal History of the 4th Armored Division (New York: Jove Book, 1984), p. 208.
91. Ettinger and Ettinger, Fighting Sixty-ninth, p. 28.
92. Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 272.
93. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier, p. 77.
94. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 152. Boesch provides another excellent example of the hot-chow theory gone wrong when his battalion commander insisted that they eat a hot turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day, despite being in a precarious tactical situation. The outcome was three killed and seven wounded when the ration party drew enemy artillery fire (pp. 170–173).
95. For a discussion of World War I combat rations, see Allen, Toward the Flame, p. 188; Minder, This Man’s War, pp. 119–120; Rogers, Through My Sights, pp. 24, 160, and 181; and Thomason, Fix Bayonets! pp. 198–200.
96. MacDonald, Company Commander, p. 29. Other memoirs from the European theater indicate that while C-rations and 10-in-1 rations were also issued on occasion, the K-ration was the most common. See Cawthon, Other Clay, pp. 69–70; Wilson, If You Survive, pp. 207–208; Richard M. Hardison, Caissons Across Europe: An Artillery Captain’s Personal War (Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 1990), p. 162; and Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, pp. 107–108. See also Ellis, Sharp End, pp. 246–250, for a discussion of World War II combat rations.
97. W. Stanford Smith, with contributions by Leo J. Machan and Stanley E. Earman, The Cannoneers: GI Life in a World War II Cannon Company (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1993), p. 36.
98. See James Hamilton Dill, Sixteen Days at Mungol-li (Fayetteville, Ark.: M&M Press, 1993), pp. 264–266; Tomedi, No Bugles, p. 126; Del Vecchio, 13th Valley, pp. 218–219; Santoli, Everything We Had, p. 27; and Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 116 and 155.
99. MacArthur, War Bugs, p. 173. See also Allen, Toward the Flame, pp. 128–129.
100. Rogers, Through My Sights, p. 227. For a description of the ruined village of Limey, see Langer, Gas and Flame, pp. 27–28. For an especially vivid description of a World War I battlefield after the fighting was over, see Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “A Way You’ll Never Be,” in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The First Forty-nine Stories and the Play “The Fifth Column” (New York: Modern Library, 1942), pp. 500–501.
101. Sledge, Old Breed, pp. 257–258. See Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, pp. 359–361, for a similar assessment of the fighting on Okinawa.
102. Ogden, Green Knight, pp. 272–273.
103. Frankel, Patton’s Best, p. 74. Students of soldier behavior have noticed the demoralizing effect that violent and near-total destruction of the human body by modern firepower has on the survivors. The soldier might envision his own death, but not his own obliteration. See Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 72–75; Ellis, Sharp End, pp. 107–111; and Lord Charles McM. Moran, The Anatomy of Courage (Garden City Park, N.Y.: Avery Publishing, 1987), pp. 62–63.
104. Camp, Lima-6, p. 158. Paul Fussell was likewise sprayed with blood and tissue when the man in front of him was hit by a burst of machine-gun fire. See “My War: How I Got Irony in the Infantry,” Harper’s, 264:1580 (January 1982): 45, and Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in World War II (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 270–272.
105. Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, pp. 46 and 384. George Wilson was sprayed by gore, but not injured, when one of his men was hit in the back by a mortar round (If You Survive, p. 46).
106. Boyd, Through the Wheat, pp. 22–23. See also Allen, Toward the Flame, pp. 80 and 123.
107. Sledge, Old Breed, pp. 134–135. See also Brown, A Walk, pp. 24–25, and Mac-Donald, Company Commander, pp. 36 and 84.
108. Owen, Colder Than Hell, pp. 211 and 149. See also Brady, Coldest War, pp. 131 and 153; Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 405; and Russ, Last Parallel, p. 201.
109. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 80. For the armored crewman’s version of being dirty, in which grease and constant dust figure prominently, see Heinemann, Close Quarters, pp. 5–6 and 103–104.
110. Hurry interview in Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 63. See also Sledge, Old Breed, pp. 94–95.
111. Marshall, Soldier’s Load, p. 48. See also Ernie Pyle, Brave Men (New York: Henry Holt, 1944), p. 84.
112. Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Avon Books, 1978), p. 54.
113. Only a few students of soldier behavior have commented on this phenomenon. See Kellett, Combat Motivation, pp. 243–244. For a brief mention of the “hostile” Southeast Asian jungle, see William Barry Gault, “Some Remarks on Slaughter,” American Journal of Psychiatry 128:4 (October 1971): 84.
114. Leckie, Helmet, p. 58.
115. Ibid., p. 220. See also Hersey, Into the Valley, pp. 43–45, and especially Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, pp. 93–98 and 159–161.
116. Gustav Hasford, The Short-timers (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), pp. 149–150.
117. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 105. See also pp. 79–80. Michael Herr agrees, at least regarding the Central Highlands. See his Dispatches, pp. 93–96. While it is jungle terrain that most often appears in memoirs as hostile, other theaters of war could also prove to be inhospitable, if not evil. The historian Michael D. Doubler has noted that fighting in the gloomy Huertgen Forest in Germany in World War II was extremely demoralizing: “Excessive fatigue made troops sluggish and careless, and combat exhaustion became commonplace as the dark, deadly forest blanketed soldiers with a sense of gloom and desperation” (Closing with the Enemy: How GI’s Fought the War in Europe, 1944–1945 [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994], p. 189). Comments from veterans of the Huertgen fighting attest to the forbidding gloom. See Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (the subtitle is itself a comment), p. 150, and his description of the fighting on pp. 151–184; and Wilson, If You Survive, who also describes the bloody, miserable fighting in chapter 11, “Slaughter in the Huertgen Forest,” pp. 131–185.
118. Fish interview in Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, p. 423. For another World War I example, see Minder, This Man’s War, pp. 246–247.
119. Crary quoted in Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 445. See also Henry Dearchs, quoted on p. 220. For another World War II example, see Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, p. 219. For Korean War examples, see Rishell, Black Platoon, p. 36; Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 210; Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 129; and Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 176.
120. James Martin Davis, “Vietnam: What It Was Really Like,” Military Review 69:1 (January 1989): 36. See also Alfred S. Bradford, Some Even Volunteered: The First Wolfhounds Pacify Vietnam (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 109; Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 68; Goff and Sanders, Brothers, pp. 84, 130, and 144; Herr, Dispatches, pp. 14 and 41; and John Ketwig, And a Hard Rain Fell (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 42.
121. The Stouffer Study discusses “combat variables” that affected the World War II soldier’s level of stress and exhaustion. The level of danger or uncertainty made some operations more stressful than others. See Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 65–67. See Kellett, Combat Motivation, p. 250, and Ellis, Sharp End, pp. 46–50, for the soldiers’ hatred of patrols.
122. Matthias, Reflections, pp. 96–97. For discussions of patrolling, see also Wilson, If You Survive, pp. 103–105, and Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, pp. 173–174.
123. Russ, Last Parallel, p. 233. See also pp. 237–241.
124. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987), p. 91. See chapter 9, “Ambush,” for a description of a night ambush patrol, pp. 88–99.
125. Boyd, Through the Wheat, p. 100. See also Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, pp. 49 and 62.
126. Leckie, Helmet, pp. 65 and 66.
127. Matthias, Reflections, p. 109. See also Brennan, Brennan’s War, pp. 34–35.
128. Moran, Anatomy, p. 38. See also Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 229–231. A survey of American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War revealed that 71 percent experienced fear just before going into combat but that only 15 percent were afraid during combat. Of those exhibiting fear in combat, inability to take action against the enemy (as during a shelling) was a key factor. See John Dollard, with the assistance of Donald Horton, Fear in Battle (New York: AMS Press, 1976), pp. 8–9.
129. Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 69. See also Boesch, Road to Huertgen, pp. 21 and 27. Boesch found that he could overcome his “foxhole complex” by taking action appropriate for a leader, such as taking charge of a patrol.
130. Brooks interview in Tomedi, No Bugles, p. 215. See also the Richter interview in Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 490; Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 211; and Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, p. 69.
131. Sociologists, psychiatrists, and historians have noted this phenomenon. See Dinter, Hero or Coward, pp. 37–39; John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 64–65; Ellis, Sharp End, pp. 60–65; Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel, War Neuroses (Philadelphia and London: Blakiston, 1945), pp. 69–70; Robert H. Scales Jr., “Firepower: The Psychological Dimension,” Army 39:7 (July 1989): 43–50; and Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 82–83.
132. Hoffman, I Remember, p. 172. See also Boyd, Through the Wheat, pp. 139–140; Lawrence, Fighting Soldier, p. 81; Thomason, Fix Bayonets! pp. 164–167; and MacArthur, War Bugs, pp. 187–189.
133. Barrette quoted in Ralph G. Martin, G.I. War, 1941–1945 (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 191.
134. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 65.
135. Camp, Lima-6, pp. 295–296. See also pp. 281–292.
136. Langer, Gas and Flame, p. 24.
137. Duffy, Story, p. 288.
138. For such remarks, see Minder, This Man’s War, p. 212; Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 304–305; and Allen, Toward the Flame, p. 273. For examples of being strafed, see Merrick, A Diary, pp. 55 and 81; Thomason, Fix Bayonets! pp. 121–122; Rogers, Through My Sights, pp. 160 and 187; Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 155 and 180; and Ettinger and Ettinger, Fighting Sixty-ninth, p. 99.
139. Franklyn A. Johnson, One More Hill (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 57. See also pp. 33, 54, 56, and 66. For other examples of air attack during the fighting in North Africa, see Bailey, Hell and High Water, p. 78; Ralph Ingersoll, The Battle Is the Pay-off (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943), pp. 168–169, 174–176, and 179–180; Martin, G.I. War, p. 44; and Pyle, Your War, pp. 131–133 and 155–156.
140. Averill, Mustang, p. 62. See also Captain John L’Estrange interview in Berry, Semper Fi, pp. 180–181.
141. Freeman interview in Berry, Semper Fi, p. 165. For other examples of Japanese air attacks, see Kahn, G.I. Jungle, pp. 99 and 125–133; Hall, ed., Love, War, pp. 53, 78, 143–144, and 207–208; and Carl M. Becker and Robert G. Thobaben, Common Warfare: Parallel Memoirs by Two World War II GIs in the Pacific (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1992), pp. 138–139, and 143–148.
142. See Stanley Cooperman, “John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers: Aesthetics and the Doom of Individualism” in The First World War in Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Holger Klein (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 23–31.
143. John Dos Passos, First Encounter (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945), p. 59.
144. John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, Sentry ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), p. 63. See also the case of Private John Andrews, p. 228.
145. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 179. See also Wilder, Armageddon, pp. 141 and 146.
146. Jesse Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), p. 99.
147. Fussell, Wartime, p. 70. See also Ellis, Sharp End, pp. 288–290. The Stouffer Study found that a “fundamental source of strain was the sheer impersonality of combat” (Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 84). Students of World War II literature note the pervasiveness of this theme. See Eric Homberger, in Holger Klein, with John Flower and Eric Homberger, eds., The Second World War in Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984), chapter 5: “United States,” pp. 192–200.
148. Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Random House, 1943), p. 62.
149. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 103. For other examples, some eloquent, and a few equaling the bitterness of Dos Passos, see Bowman, Beach Red, pp. 107–108; Leckie, Helmet, pp. 86–87; Hall, ed., Love, War, p. 15; and Atwell, Private, p. 383.
150. Atwell, Private, p. 470. Doughboys, though not stuck with the GI label, also found army anonymity demeaning: “The soldier hangs to his name as his last hold on individuality. He likes to be called by his name rather than private” (Will Judy, Soldier’s Diary: A Day-to-Day Record in the World War [Chicago: Judy Publishing, 1931], p. 19).
151. Matthias, Reflections, pp. 27–28.
152. See Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 182–190; Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 209–210; and John Helmer, Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After (New York: Free Press, 1974), pp. 22–29.
153. Morrow, Commie, pp. 9–10. This example was chosen because of its similarity to comments made by the Vietnam grunts about bait. Tales of movement to contact by patrols or larger units are common in the memoirs from all the wars of the draft era. The American soldier was more often than not advancing against a stationary, dug-in, camouflaged enemy who got off the first shots.
154. Helmer, Bringing the War, p. 27.
155. For an excellent assessment of the U.S. Army’s emphasis on firepower and combined-arms tactics in lieu of expending lives in World War II, see Doubler, Closing, especially chapter 10, “The Schoolhouse of War,” pp. 265–299.
156. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 32.
157. James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), p. 155. See also Brennan, Brennan’s War, chapter 4: “Bait,” specifically pp. 53–54.
158. Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), p. 83.
159. The Stouffer Study found enlisted soldiers’ resentment of the army’s caste system, and the benefits it bestowed on officers, to be pervasive among troops stationed Stateside and overseas. Only when in combat, where junior officers went without perquisites and shared the danger and hardships with their men, did soldiers’ resentment largely disappear. See Samuel A. Stouffer, Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. DeVinney, Shirley A. Star, and Robin M. Williams Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 1, The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 71–75, 178–182, 379–382, and 363–381. See also Howard Brotz and Everett Wilson, “Characteristics of Military Society,” American Journal of Sociology 51:5 (March 1946): 373; G. Dearborn Spindler, “American Character as Revealed by the Military,” Psychiatry: Journal for the Operational Statement of Interpersonal Relations 11:3 (August 1948): 275–281; and Arthur J. Vidich and Maurice R. Stein, “The Dissolved Identity in Military Life,” in Identity and Anxiety: Survival of the Person in Mass Society, ed. Maurice R. Stein, Arthur J. Vidich, and David Manning White (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), pp. 494–496 and 502–505.
160. Munschauer, Cavalcade, p. 72. See also Smith, Cannoneers, pp. 19–22.
161. Rogers, Through My Sights, p. 21. See also Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, p. 133.
162. Hawkins interview in Berry, Semper Fi, p. 35.
163. As in the case of the Doolittle Board, convened in 1946 to examine deteriorating officer–enlisted relations during World War II, concern over poor officer–enlisted relations in the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I also prompted an investigation. The resulting Fosdick Report clearly indicated that the doughboys’ resentment of institutional inequality was a major part of the problem. Portions of this report are published in Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, pp. 381–382.
164. Judy, Soldier’s Diary, p. 206. See also Minder, This Man’s War, p. 313.
165. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 243.
166. Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, p. 34.
167. Bill Mauldin, Up Front (New York: Award Books, 1976), p. 184. For an example of soldiers’ resentment over officers acting “royally,” see Atwell, Private, p. 127.
168. Mauldin, Up Front, pp. 185–186.
169. Leckie, Helmet, p. 218. See also the Doyle interview in Berry, Semper Fi, p. 286.
170. Fussell, Wartime, p. 80. See also Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 81–82, and Kennett, G.I., pp. 81–83.
171. Fussell, Wartime, p. 82.
172. Camp, Lima-6, p. 74. See also Ralph Zumbro, Tank Sergeant (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1986), pp. 84–85.
173. Russ, Last Parallel, p. 109. See also p. 144.
174. Fox interviewed in Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 421. See also Corporal James Cardinal’s letter, quoted in Knox, Uncertain Victory, pp. 148–149, and Sullivan, Toy Soldiers, pp. 98–99.
175. Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 86.
176. Hoffman, I Remember, p. 254.
177. Webb, Fields of Fire, p. 252. Attempting, unsuccessfully, to retain a measure of control over one’s life in the midst of a war is a major theme in Jack Fuller’s Vietnam War novel, Fragments (New York: Dell, 1985); follow, in particular, the case of Sergeant James Neumann. Examples of the randomness of death (or survival) in war abound. See Duffy, Story, p. 251; Bailey, Hell and High Water, pp. 167–168; Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 102; Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 387; Spiroff, Frozen Hell, pp. 55–56; Bradford, Volunteered, pp. 82–83; and Fuller, Fragments, p. 65.
178. For training accidents, see Averill, Mustang, p. 103; Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, p. 14; Cawthon, Other Clay, pp. 26 and 31; Sefton, It Was My War, pp. 191–192; and Dominick Yezzo, A G.I.’s Vietnam Diary, 1968–1969 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974), August 27 entry (this book does not contain page numbers, but is organized chronologically by diary entry dates).
179. For traffic and vehicular accidents, see Ettinger and Ettinger, Fighting Sixty-ninth, p. 103; Hardison, Caissons, p. 69; Merrick, A Diary, p. 90; Berry, Semper Fi, pp. 99 and 217; Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 398; Spiroff, Frozen Hell, p. 29; and Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 245.
180. Hardison, Caissons, p. 73.
181. For accidents involving weapons, explosives, and duds, see Brannen, Over There, p. 41; Huebner, Long Walk, p. 194; Jones, WW II, p. 41; Sledge, Old Breed, p. 99; Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 136; Bradford, Volunteered, p. 38; Camp, Lima-6, p. 202; David Parks, G.I. Diary (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 113; Hall, ed., Love, War, p. 145; Wilson, If You Survive, pp. 128–129 and 217; Hoffman and Hoffman, Archives, p. 128; and Russ, Last Parallel, p. 146.
182. For engineers’ accidents, see Hall, ed., Love, War, pp. 80, 151, 247, 276, and 280; Bussey, Firefight, pp. 134 and 226; Astor, Crisis, p. 203; and Berry, Semper Fi, p. 391.
183. For artillery or heavy mortar–related accidents, see Rogers, Through My Sights, pp. 160–161; Merrick, A Diary, p. 76; Martin, G.I. War, p. 285; Hoffman and Hoffman, Archives, pp. 107–109 and 134–135; and Smith, Cannoneers, p. 52.
184. See the myriad helicopter accidents in Mason, Chickenhawk, pp. 127–128, 237–238, 259–260, 262–263, 290, 316, 345–346, 372, and 456–457; he does not exaggerate. Helicopter accidents were the biggest single cause of noncombat deaths in Vietnam (22 percent). See the statistics in Thomas C. Thayer, War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam (Boulder, Colo., and London: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 117–118.
185. For drowning accidents, see Minder, This Man’s War, p. 193; MacArthur, War Bugs, p. 121; and Camp, Lima-6, p. 185.
186. For exploding stoves during the Korean War (generally caused by burning too volatile a fuel in them), see Matthias, Reflections, pp. 211–212, and Sullivan, Toy Soldiers, pp. 55 and 106–107.
187. Blunt, Inside, pp. 106–107.
188. Martin, G.I. War, p. 279. See also Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 102.
189. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 72.
190. Charles R. Shrader, Amicicide: The Problem of Friendly Fire in Modern War, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Combat Studies Institute Research Study no. 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 1982), p. vii. Despite the 23 percent fratricide ratio in Operation DESERT STORM, Shrader continued to defend his 2-percent figure (“Friendly Fire: The Inevitable Price,” Parameters 22:3 [Autumn 1992]: 29–44).
191. See Charles F. Hawkins, “Friendly Fire: Facts, Myths and Misperceptions,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 120:6 (June 1994): 54–59, and Kenneth K. Steinweg, “Dealing Realistically with Fratricide,” Parameters 25:1 (spring 1995): 4–29. See also Bergerud, Touched with Fire, pp. 379–380.
192. Arnold M. Rose, “The Social Psychology of Desertion from Combat,” American Sociological Review 16:5 (October 1951): 621.
193. I hesitate to mention the following statistic because I am not sure exactly what it tells us, but of the 129 memoirs, oral histories, and novels used as sources for this study, 80 of them mention at least one incident of fratricide or near-fratricide, and many report multiple instances. As with Rose’s statistics, one can infer from the sheer frequency with which soldiers report being shot at by their own side that a 2 percent fratricide rate must be conservative.
194. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier, p. 111. For other examples of artillery or mortar fratricide, see Ettinger and Ettinger, Fighting Sixty-ninth, p. 166; Hoffman, I Remember, p. 221; Astor, Crisis, pp. 113, 246, and 437; Wilson, If You Survive, p. 21; Bailey, Hell and High Water, pp. 151–152; Berry, Semper Fi, pp. 245, 253–254, and 265; MacDonald, Company Commander, p. 99; Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, p. 376; Sefton, It Was My War, p. 98; Rishell, Black Platoon, pp. 89–91; Knox, Pusan to Chosin, pp. 183, 268, and 407; Knox, Uncertain Victory, pp. 113–114 and 316; Morrow, Commie, pp. 53 and 62; Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 184; Camp, Lima-6, p. 86; Lanning, Only War, p. 92; and Ogden, Green Knight, pp. 266–267.
195. Munschauer, Cavalcade, p. 139.
196. MacArthur, War Bugs, p. 148. For another example of angry soldiers returning fire on friendly aircraft, see Hoffman and Hoffman, Archives, p. 104. See also Astor, Crisis, p. 437, for a case where the soldiers did not actually shoot at a friendly aircraft that bombed them, but they did cheer when the plane came in too low and crashed. For examples of air-to-ground fratricide, see Bergerud, Touched with Fire, pp. 378–379; Wilson, If You Survive, p. 197; Boesch, Road to Huertgen, pp. 54–55 and 62; Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 290; Murphy, To Hell and Back, p. 158; Pyle, Brave Men, pp. 430–439; Tomedi, No Bugles, pp. 26 and 125; Knox, Pusan to Chosin, pp. 113 and 552; and Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 302. The Vietnam War saw the introduction of helicopter gunships and fratricide by same. See Brennan, Brennan’s War, pp. 219–220; Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 207; Mason, Chickenhawk, p. 427; and Parks, G.I. Diary, p. 124.
197. For an account of this incident and some of the other better known cases of fratricide throughout history, see Geoffrey Regan, Blue on Blue: A History of Friendly Fire (New York: Avon Books, 1995); though largely a compilation of friendly-fire accounts from other sources, it is one of the few books specifically to address fratricide.
198. Johnson, One More Hill, p. 91.
199. Ross S. Carter, Those Devils in Baggy Pants (New York and Toronto: Signet Books, 1951), p. 23. For other examples of ground-to-air fratricide, see Astor, Crisis, p. 378; Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, pp. 59–60; and Johnson, One More Hill, p. 56.
200. For examples of fratricide caused by armored vehicles, see Wilson, If You Survive, p. 22; Berry, Semper Fi, pp. 252–253; MacDonald, Company Commander, p. 269; Knox, Pusan to Chosin, pp. 178–179; Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 208; O’Brien, If I Die, pp. 151–152; and Baker, Nam, p. 218.
201. For examples of fratricide, or near-fratricide, because of mistakes and fear during patrolling, see Little, Harlem, pp. 295–296; Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, pp. 213–214; Wilson, If You Survive, p. 219; Crawford, Four Deuces, p. 98; Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, pp. 152–153; Sullivan, Toy Soldiers, pp. 46–48 and 53; Baker, Nam, pp. 207–208; Camp, Lima-6, p. 207; French, Patches of Fire, p. 167; and James R. McDonough, Platoon Leader (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), pp. 98–99.
202. For a good discussion and an example of the shortcomings of the challenging procedures, see Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 137, and Allen R. Matthews, The Assault (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), pp. 106–107.
203. Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, pp. 131–132.
204. Sledge, Old Breed, pp. 110–111.
205. La Magna interview in Astor, Crisis, pp. 190–191.
206. Frankel, Patton’s Best, p. 71. For an example of a soldier who suffered just such “catastrophic guilt,” see Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), pp. 194–195.
207. Wilder, Armageddon, p. 113. In a similar vein, Hervey Allen drew a measure of tranquillity from gazing at the stars on a clear night in France. See Toward the Flame, p. 26.
208. Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, pp. 313–314. See also Bond, Cassino, p. 159, and Huebner, Long Walk, p. 59.
209. Dill, Mungol-li, p. 41. See also pp. 46–47. For other scarce comments on Korea’s beauty, see Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 461, and Knox, Uncertain Victory, pp. 221–222.
210. Downs, Killing Zone, p. 33. See also Baker, Nam, p. 62, for a comment on the jungle’s beauty, at least at a distance. Veterans of the Pacific fighting in World War II also occasionally comment on the jungle’s beauty, but they almost always limit their admiration to a distant view. See Bergerud, Touched with Fire, pp. 87–88.
211. Merrick, A Diary, p. 39.
212. Pyle, Your War, p. 170.
213. Frankel, Patton’s Best, p. 8.
214. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 302.
CHAPTER 3. IMMERSION IN THE ENVIRONMENT
1. Lord Charles McM. Moran, The Anatomy of Courage (Garden City Park, N.Y.: Avery, 1987), p. 16.
2. Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War: The Story of G.I. Joe (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1945), p. 135.
3. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 123.
4. Richard E. Ogden, Green Knight, Red Mourning (New York: Zebra Books, 1985), pp. 274–275.
5. James R. Ebert, A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965–1972 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), p. 236. For an excellent analysis of the moral aspects of this regressive process, see Tobey C. Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 24–31.
6. Robert G. Merrick, World War I: A Diary (Baltimore: privately published, 1982), p. 28.
7. Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 101.
8. Matthew Brennan, Brennan’s War: Vietnam, 1965–1969 (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 4.
9. Carl M. Becker and Robert G. Thobaben, Common Warfare: Parallel Memoirs by Two World War II GIs in the Pacific (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1992), p. 53.
10. Rudolph W. Stephens, Old Ugly Hill: A G.I.’s Fourteen Months in the Korean Trenches, 1952–1953 (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1995), p. 33.
11. David Parks, G.I. Diary (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 50.
12. The Stouffer Study found that “anticipatory anxieties about going overseas,” especially among infantry replacements, generated “gangplank fever.” See Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 2, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 439–445.
13. Klaus H. Huebner, Long Walk Through War: A Combat Doctor’s Diary (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1990), p. 5.
14. See the classic case of Private Ciferri in Lieutenant Franklyn A. Johnson’s antitank platoon, who, in his effort to miss the Normandy landings in World War II, was caught trying to go AWOL, and then was grossly insubordinate to Johnson, hoping to get left behind in the guardhouse pending court-martial. Ciferri found himself, instead, on the way to Omaha Beach under armed guard by his fellow platoon members; see Johnson’s One More Hill (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 134–135.
15. See Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), pp. 114–118, for a good overview of the joys of life on a troopship, to include the GIs’ special disdain for the slow, uncomfortable Liberty Ships. If Howard S. Hoffman’s twenty-eight-day passage to Italy on a Liberty Ship in World War II is typical, then the GIs’ distaste for these otherwise famous, war-winning cargo ships is well founded. See Alice M. Hoffman and Howard S. Hoffman, Archives of Memory: A Soldier Recalls World War II (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1990), pp. 41–47.
16. Almost every soldier-author describes, some in sketchy terms and others in detail, their sea voyages to war. For World War I, see Will Judy, A Soldier’s Diary: A Day-to-Day Record in the World War (Chicago: Judy Publishing, 1931), pp. 77–84; Charles F. Minder, This Man’s War: The Day-by-Day Record of an American Private on the Western Front (New York: Pevensey Press, 1931), pp. 5–22; and [Howard V. O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War: A Diary of Disillusionment (New York: J. H. Sears, 1926), pp. 7–12. For World War II, see E. J. Kahn Jr., G.I. Jungle: An American Soldier in Australia and New Guinea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), pp. 1–13; Johnson, One More Hill, pp. 4–7; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (Colored): The World War II New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 35–42; W. Stanford Smith, with contributions by Leo J. Machan and Stanley E. Earman, The Cannoneers: G.I. Life in a World War II Cannon Company (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1993), pp. 19–22; and Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, pp. 125–127 and 131–134. For the Korean War, see Henry Berry, Hey, Mac, Where Ya Been? Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in the Korean War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 234–235 and 271; Joseph R. Owen, Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996), pp. 41–51; and Martin Russ, The Last Parallel: A Marine’s War Journal (New York and Toronto: Rinehart, 1957), pp. 33–36. For the Vietnam War, see Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 70–74, and Parks, G.I. Diary, pp. 55–59.
17. Albert M. Ettinger and A. Churchill Ettinger, A Doughboy with the Fighting Sixty-ninth: A Remembrance of World War I (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing, 1992), p. 122. Father Francis P. Duffy, the regiment’s chaplain, confirms the unit’s eagerness to do battle (Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, of Life and Death with the Fighting Sixty-ninth [Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1919], pp. 124–125).
18. For an excellent assessment of the live-and-let-live system on the western front, see A. E. Ashworth, “The Sociology of Trench Warfare, 1914–1918,” British Journal of Sociology 19:4 (December 1968): 407–423, or his expansion on the subject in his book, Trench Warfare, 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980).
19. Amos N. Wilder, Armageddon Revisited: A World War I Journal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 82. See also Alvin C. York, Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), pp. 202–203; Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War (York, Pa.: Strength and Health Publishing, 1940), pp. 271–272; and Minder, This Man’s War, pp. 205–206.
20. Ernie Pyle, Brave Men (New York: Henry Holt, 1944), pp. 343–344.
21. Lyle Rishell, With a Black Platoon in Combat: A Year in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), p. 25. See also Charles M. Bussey, Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1991), p. 83.
22. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 66. See also pp. 205–206.
23. Pyle, Your War, p. 177.
24. The Stouffer Study includes a survey of World War II veteran soldiers in the European theater who identified three mistakes most frequently made by green troops: bunching up, talking or making noise at night, and shooting before they were able to see their target. See Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 283–284. For a sampling of green-unit errors or ignorance, see Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A War Diary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1934), p. 13; Henry Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance: Living Memories of the Doughboy (New York: Priam Books, 1978), p. 298; Gerald Astor, Crisis in the Pacific: The Battles for the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1996), pp. 200 and 212–213; Janice Holt Giles, ed., The G.I. Journal of Sergeant Giles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1965), pp. 36–37; Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, The Men of Company K (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p. 160; Kurt Gabel, The Making of a Paratrooper: Airborne Training and Combat in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), pp. 172–173; and Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), sec. I (appropriately named “Virgins”), pp. 21–229, with specific incidents on pp. 80, 82 and 86, 99–100, and 118–120.
25. John M. Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 95.
26. Pyle, Brave Men, p. 271. A team of psychiatrists who visited the European theater late in World War II also found this practice psychologically damaging as well as inefficient. See Leo H. Bartemeier, Lawrence S. Kubie, Karl A. Menninger, John Romano, and John C. Whitehorn, “Combat Exhaustion,” two-part series, part 2, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 104:5 (November 1946): 516–517. See also Albert J. Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry in World War II, Medical Department, U.S. Army, Office of the Surgeon General, 2 vols., Overseas Theaters (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 2: 122. For a similar assessment from the Korean War, see Samuel L. A. Marshall, Commentary on Infantry Operations and Weapons Usage in Korea, Winter of 1950–51, Operations Research Office Report 13 (Chevy Chase, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), p. 56.
27. Elton E. Mackin, Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die: Memoirs of a World War I Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), p. 70. See also John W. Thomason Jr., Fix Bayonets! (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926), “Replacements,” pp. 31–35.
28. John L. Munschauer, World War II Cavalcade: An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1996), p. 103. See also George Wilson, If You Survive (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 11.
29. Duffy, Story, p. 227. Unfortunately, but typically, this four-week training program was terminated after ten days because the unit was sent back to the fighting (p. 229).
30. Wilson, If You Survive, p. 214. For other examples of replacement integration in World War II, see Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (Houston: Paul M. Boesch, 1985), p. 45; William Young Boyd, The Gentle Infantryman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 161–162; Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, pp. 105–106; and George William Sefton, It Was My War: I’ll Remember It the Way I Want To! (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1994), p. 145.
31. See Doug Michaud interview in Donald Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 565, and Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 220.
32. Dow interview in Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfred Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory: The Concluding Volume of an Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 392–393.
33. For examples of replacement training and integration during the static period of the Korean War, see ibid., pp. 458–459; Howard Matthias, The Korean War—Reflections of a Young Combat Platoon Leader (Tallahassee, Fla.: Father and Son Publishing, 1995), pp. 40 and 69; Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, pp. 44–47 and 84–85; and John A. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers: Memoir of a Combat Platoon Leader in Korea (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1991), pp. 18–23.
34. The historian Christian G. Appy says that although some replacements received in-country orientation and training, “just as often the need for replacements was so pressing that new men were dispatched [to their units] almost immediately” (Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993], p. 141). In periods of crisis (Appy provides an example of a marine arriving during the siege of Khe Sanh) replacements may have been sent directly into combat, but this was certainly not the norm. For a good overview of replacement training in Vietnam, see Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 96–101.
35. While most of the soldier-authors mention in-country training, many do not dwell on the details. Tim O’Brien, for example, mentions his week at the Americal Division’s Combat Center but little else (If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home [New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987], pp. 74–75). For one of the better descriptions, in this case the Screaming Eagle Replacement Training School, see Del Vecchio, 13th Valley, pp. 9–19. See also Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders, with Clark Smith, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), pp. 18–19 and 52–53.
36. Roger J. Spiller, “Isen’s Run: Human Dimensions of Warfare in the Twentieth Century,” Military Review 68:5 (May 1988): 24. See also John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), pp. 302–304.
37. James Jones, WW II: A Chronicle of Soldiering (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), p. 68. See p. 249 for an egregious example of the abuse of replacements.
38. Appy, Working-Class War, p. 138. Ebert draws the same conclusion in A Life in a Year, p. 129.
39. Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 108. Two Stouffer Study surveys, incidentally, show that more than 80 percent of the combat soldiers surveyed believed that the veteran soldiers “did as much as they could” to integrate replacements because “it was to the interest of the old-timers . . . to work the replacement into the unit as quickly and completely as possible” (Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 278–279).
40. The Vietnam grunt, Tom Schultz, is quoted in Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 111. See Ebert’s excellent chapter on FNGs, chapter 6, “Being New,” pp. 104–130.
41. Matthias, Reflections, pp. 41–42.
42. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, pp. 20–21.
43. Ibid., p. 57. See also p. 138.
44. Ibid., p. 64. See also Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 114–115.
45. Moran, Anatomy, p. 26. See also Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), “First Blood,” pp. 136–148.
46. Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, p. 22.
47. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 20.
48. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 19.
49. For several of the better descriptions of green troops marching through carnage while en route to the front, see Allen, Toward the Flame, pp. 101–110; John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, Sentry ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), pp. 177–186; and Thomason, Fix Bayonets! pp. 31–45.
50. Dan Levin, From the Battlefield: Dispatches of a World War II Marine (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. 11. See also Roscoe C. Blunt Jr., Inside the Battle of the Bulge: A Private Comes of Age (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), pp. 5–8; Huebner, Long Walk, pp. 40–42; and Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 41–42.
51. Matthias, Reflections, p. 24. For other Korean War examples, see Charles S. Crawford, The Four Deuces: A Korean War Story (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1989), pp. 45–52, and Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, pp. 47–50.
52. Allen, Toward the Flame, p. 38.
53. Blunt, Inside, p. 13. See also Sledge, Old Breed, pp. 254–255; Harold L. Bond, Return to Cassino (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), p. 24; Fussell, Doing Battle, pp. 104–105; and Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander (Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam Books, 1978), p. 19.
54. Gustav Hasford, The Short-timers (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), p. 130. James Ebert also notes that “a macabre fascination with death drew soldiers to their first corpse with more than professional interest” (A Life in a Year, p. 146).
55. Doyle interview in Henry Berry, Semper Fi, Mac: Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in World War II (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 285.
56. Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 40. See also Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 88, and John Sack, M (New York: Avon Books, 1985), pp. 154–155.
57. Crawford, Four Deuces, p. 93.
58. Santos interview in Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), pp. 112–113. For another example, see Alfred S. Bradford, Some Even Volunteered: The First Wolfhounds Pacify Vietnam (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 66.
59. Charles R. Cawthon, Other Clay: A Remembrance of the World War II Infantry (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1990), p. 54.
60. Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 44.
61. Nat Frankel and Larry Smith, Patton’s Best: An Informal History of the 4th Armored Division (New York: Jove Book, 1984), p. 14.
62. Levin, Battlefield, p. 65; this was Levin’s first amphibious assault, although he had experienced some previous combat. See also Allen R. Matthews, The Assault (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. 39; Matthews was also in the assault wave (his first) on Iwo Jima, and he likewise cannot piece together a clear picture of what happened.
63. Cawthon, Other Clay, p. 62.
64. Blunt, Inside, p. 19.
65. Matthias, Reflections, p. 39. See also Mason, Chickenhawk, pp. 108–109.
66. This section title and the two that follow are borrowed from Paul Fussell’s process of “realization,” whereby a combat soldier learns of his mortality: First comes, “it can’t happen to me,” followed by, “it can happen to me,” and finally, “it is going to happen to me.” See Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 282.
67. Roy L. Swank and Walter E. Marchand, “Combat Neuroses: Development of Combat Exhaustion,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 55:3 (March 1946): 238–239.
68. Ettinger and Ettinger, Fighting Sixty-ninth, p. 148.
69. Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War (New York: Berkley Books), p. 74.
70. Fussell, Wartime, p. 52.
71. Wilson quoted in Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996), p. 444. See also Frank Chadwick quotation on the same page.
72. Crawford, Four Deuces, p. 23. See also Rishell, Black Platoon, pp. 25 and 29.
73. Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 53–54.
74. Peter G. Bourne, Men, Stress, and Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 121. John Dollard’s survey of American veterans of the Spanish Civil War draws a similar conclusion. Sixty-four percent said they were less fearful in subsequent battles at least in part because they had learned to protect themselves in combat (see Fear in Battle [New York: AMS Press, 1976], p. 22).
75. Bourne, Men, Stress, p. 97.
76. Jack Fuller, Fragments (New York: Dell, 1985), p. 105.
77. Richard A. Gabriel, in his study of military psychiatry, notes that the short-term physical effects of anxiety can serve to key up the body, making it a “more efficient fighting machine by increasing its strength, endurance, and resistance to pain” (The Painful Field: The Psychiatric Dimension of Modern War [New York, London, and Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988], p. 166).
78. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Signet Books, 1948), p. 456.
79. Murphy, To Hell and Back, p. 98.
80. Downs, Killing Zone, p. 105. See also Caputo, Rumor of War, pp. 105–106, for the “strange exhilaration” he experienced during his first “hot” landing zone.
81. James R. McDonough, Platoon Leader (New York: Bantam, Books, 1986), p. 93. See also Ralph Zumbro, Tank Sergeant (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1986), p. 15.
82. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, pp. 82–83. See also Horatio Rogers, World War I Through My Sights (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1976), p. 58.
83. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 115.
84. Moran, Anatomy, pp. 26–27. See also Holmes, Acts of War, p. 182.
85. Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees (New York: Collier Books, 1987), p. 33. See also the case of Lieutenant Kreider in Richard Tregaskis, Stronger Than Fear (New York: Random House, 1945), pp. 19 and 65–66.
86. Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow (Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1979), p. 261.
87. Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, p. 57. See also Matthias, Reflections, p. xiv.
88. Parks, G.I. Diary, p. 112.
89. Michael Lee Lanning, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 259.
90. The Stouffer Study includes surveys of combat soldiers in World War II confirming that those who saw friends killed or wounded, or crack up emotionally, exhibited increased symptoms of stress and fear. In sum, they gained a realization of danger and vulnerability (see Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 80–82).
91. See the survey results in ibid., p. 201, and Dollard, Fear in Battle, pp. 10–11. See also Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 159–160; Ellis, Sharp End, pp. 97–98; and Fussell, Wartime, pp. 277–278.
92. William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 380. For other examples, see Rogers, Through My Sights, p. 63; Astor, Crisis, p. 233; Russ, Last Parallel, p. 179; and William D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1983), p. 224.
93. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 59. See also Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Random House, 1943), p. 166.
94. Murphy, To Hell and Back, p. 95.
95. For example, the Spanish Civil War veterans surveyed by John Dollard most feared abdominal, eye, brain, and genital wounds. See Fear in Battle, pp. 12–13.
96. Lanning, Only War, p. 71. Lanning provides an example of a sergeant with a shrapnel wound to his penis, from which he recovered. For another example, see James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), p. 61.
97. Lanning, Only War, p. 210.
98. Heinemann, Close Quarters, p. 102. When Sergeant Zumbro’s M48 tank was set on fire by a Viet Cong rocket-propelled grenade, the fire extinguisher system put the blaze out: “Thank God for diesel engines. If the old girl had been a gasoline fueled tank, we would be dead” (Tank Sergeant, p. 117).
99. Frankel, Patton’s Best, p. 156. Much like tankers, helicopter crewmen had their fears of crashing and burning. The Vietnam War correspondent Michael Herr called it “helicopter anxiety”: “If you were ever on a helicopter that had been hit by ground fire your deep, perpetual chopper anxiety was guaranteed” (Dispatches [New York: Avon Books, 1978], p. 15).
100. Dollard, Fear in Battle, p. 14. The Stouffer Study found a similar mix of physical and psychological factors at work in generating fear of certain weaponry and further discovered that the veteran soldier learned to place more weight on the physical factors (the weapon’s actual lethality). See Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 231–241. See also Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 209–213, and Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston, The Hague, and London: Kluwer, Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 254–257.
101. Albert Ettinger is one of the few doughboys to mention a land mine casualty. See Fighting Sixty-ninth, p. 77. The Germans also left mines behind on withdrawing after the Armistice. See O’Brien, Wine, Women, and War, pp. 260–261.
102. The historian John Ellis comments on the psychological impact of mines in Sharp End, p. 80. See also Fussell, Wartime, p. 279.
103. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 164. See also Wilson, If You Survive, pp. 111–112.
104. Pyle, Your War, p. 153. See also Huebner, Long Walk, pp. 51, 73, 111–113, and 139. Huebner, a battalion surgeon, confirms the demoralizing effect of mines because of the maiming wounds they generated.
105. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 273. See also Baker, Nam, pp. 71, 83, and 94, and O’Brien, If I Die, pp. 125–130.
106. Matthias, Reflections, p. 82. See also Crawford, Four Deuces, pp. 222–223, and Rishell, Black Platoon, pp. 148 and 165.
107. Bill Mauldin, Up Front (New York: Award Books, 1976), p. 93.
108. For two memoirs in which all incoming artillery rounds are from 88s, see Lester Atwell, Private (New York: Popular Library, 1958), and Giles, ed., G.I. Journal. More discerning memoirists, often artillerymen or antitank-gun crewmen, differentiated between high-velocity 88-mm artillery fire versus 105- or 150-mm artillery fire.
109. Matthias, Reflections, pp. 51–52. See also A. Andy Andow, Letters to Big Jim Regarding Narrul Purigo, Cashinum Iman (New York: Vantage Press, 1994), p. 49, and Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 238.
110. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 26. For other typical reactions to the rocket artillery, which the Germans had named “Nebelwerfer,” see Bond, Cassino, pp. 37–38; Frankel, Patton’s Best, p. 95; and MacDonald, Company Commander, p. 89.
111. Jones, WW II, p. 123.
112. Atwell, Private, pp. 35–36.
113. Blunt, Inside, p. 143.
114. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 149.
115. Wright quoted in Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 449.
116. Clifford Fox lost thirty pounds on Guadalcanal. See his comment in ibid., p. 442; Boris R. Spiroff lost more than twenty pounds in twelve months (see Korea: Frozen Hell on Earth [New York: Vantage Press, 1995], p. 72); Stephens claims to have lost sixty pounds after thirteen months in Korea (see Toy Soldiers, p. 160); and Matthias claims a loss of seventy pounds in Korea (see Reflections, p. 133).
117. Santos interview in Santoli, Everything We Had, pp. 122–123.
118. Swank and Marchand, “Combat Neuroses,” pp. 239–240 and diagram on p. 238. Other psychiatrists have described a condition similar to Swank and Marchand’s “hyperreactive stage.” See the discussion of the “incipient stage” of combat exhaustion in Bartemeier et al., “Combat Exhaustion,” two-part series, part 1, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 104:4 (October 1946): 374–375. See also the discussion of “the latency period” prior to combat exhaustion in Gary L. Tischler, “Patterns of Psychiatric Attrition and of Behavior in a Combat Zone,” in The Psychology and Physiology of Stress: With Reference to Special Studies of the Viet Nam War, ed. Peter G. Bourne (New York and London: Academic Press, 1969), pp. 23–24. Finally, see Lord Moran’s discussion of “windiness,” which is what the British called the symptoms a soldier displayed on the verge of cracking up, in Anatomy, p. 31.
119. Hoffman, I Remember, p. 78. See also p. 214.
120. Sefton, It Was My War, p. 86.
121. McDonough, Platoon Leader, p. 15.
122. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 263.
123. Blunt, Inside, p. 118.
124. The standard army tour of duty in Vietnam was twelve months, and the marines’ tour was thirteen. Rotation in the Korean War was based on a point system that was modified several times, but a twelve-month tour was roughly the norm for a combat soldier.
125. James Brady, Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), pp. 137–138. See the case of Sergeant Frank Almy in Knox, Uncertain Victory, pp. 217–218.
126. Mason, Chickenhawk, pp. 284, 391–392, 394, 415–416, 430, and 468–469.
127. Herzog, War Stories, p. 40. See also Jones’s discussion of “combat numbness” in WW II, p. 185, and Jesse Glenn Gray’s discussion of “stupification of consciousness” in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), p. 105.
128. Arthur W. Little, From Harlem to the Rhine: The Story of New York’s Colored Volunteers (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936), p. 248. See also Allen, Toward the Flame, p. 121, and Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 164–166.
129. Blunt, Inside, p. 96. See also Atwell, Private, pp. 317–318; Fussell, Doing Battle, p. 123; Huebner, Long Walk, p. 188; and Hoffman and Hoffman, Archives, pp. 153–154.
130. Matthews, Assault, p. 227.
131. Downs, Killing Zone, p. 84.
132. Ogden, Green Knight, p. 272. See also Baker, Nam, p. 101; Heinemann, Close Quarters, p. 252; Herr, Dispatches, pp. 18–19; and Parks, G.I. Diary, p. 93.
133. Pyle, Brave Men, p. 270.
134. Frankel, Patton’s Best, p. 102.
135. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 128. Incidentally, one of the classic case studies of a soldier’s immersion in the environment of war is that of Allen R. Matthews; in his memoir The Assault, he describes his transition from fresh replacement to bulkhead stare and combat exhaustion in thirteen days on Iwo Jima.
136. Gerald P. Averill, Mustang: A Combat Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1987), p. 108.
137. Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, pp. 239 and 243.
138. Hoffman and Hoffman, Archives, pp. 102–103. See also Berry, Semper Fi, p. 243; Sledge, Old Breed, p. 223; Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 59; and Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), pp. 216–217.
139. The Stouffer Study includes surveys of combat soldiers in World War II that indicate how demoralizing the war’s seeming endlessness was, with death, serious injury, or psychological breakdown as the only ways out. This discovery prompted the formulation of a rotation plan to alleviate the problem although it was not fully implemented before the war ended (see Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 88–95).
140. Carl Andrew Brannen, Over There: A Marine in the Great War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), p. 40.
141. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 213.
142. Bond, Cassino, p. 146.
143. Munschauer, Cavalcade, p. 146. See also Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, p. 172.
144. Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 214.
145. Lanning, Only War, p. 45.
146. Muetzel quoted in Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 184.
147. Munschauer, Cavalcade, p. 127. Jones in WW II, p. 43, argues that fatalism is a necessary condition that allows soldiers to function under fire; few agree with this thesis: see Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 189; Ellis, Sharp End, p. 206; and Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 240–241.
148. Leckie, Helmet, pp. 91–92.
149. Kovic, Fourth of July, p. 210.
150. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 233.
151. Russ, Last Parallel, p. 236.
152. Pyle, Brave Men, p. 6.
153. Minder, This Man’s War, pp. 329 and 339.
154. Caputo, Rumor of War, pp. 247 and 251–252.
155. Matthias, Reflections, pp. 163–164. See also pp. 165–166 for his discussion of his personal case of short-timer syndrome. For other examples, see Crawford, Four Deuces, pp. 135, 144, and 202; Rishell, Black Platoon, pp. 162–164; Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, pp. 86–87; Sullivan, Toy Soldiers, p. 116; and Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 462. Virtually every Vietnam grunt mentions the impact of growing “short.” For a good overview, see Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 316–338. For personal accounts, see John Ketwig, And a Hard Rain Fell (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), pp. 169–170, 177–178, and 187; Parks, G.I. Diary, p. 127; and Dominick Yezzo, A G.I.’s Vietnam Diary, 1968–1969 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974), diary entries for July 31 to August 16.
156. The term “last-casualty syndrome” is borrowed from Vietnam veteran John G. Fowler Jr., who explains that this syndrome was evident among soldiers in Vietnam late in the war, once troop withdrawals were in full swing. See “Combat Cohesion in Vietnam,” Military Review 59:12 (December 1979): 27.
157. The Stouffer Study comments on the World War II GIs’ renewed hope, toward the end of the fighting in Europe, of surviving the war (see Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 189). Last-casualty syndrome was much less in evidence in the Pacific in World War II because everyone expected continued hard fighting for the Japanese home islands.
158. Huebner, Long Walk, p. 193. See also Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, p. 337, and Murphy, To Hell and Back, p. 262.
CHAPTER 4. COPING WITH THE ENVIRONMENT OF WAR
1. Leo H. Bartemeier, Lawrence S. Kubie, Karl A. Menninger, John Romano, and John C. Whitehorn, “Combat Exhaustion,” two-part series, part 1, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 104:4 (October 1946): 368. Bartemeier and his colleagues, for example, classified the soldiers’ coping mechanisms as “normal” and “abnormal” defenses, with the abnormal ones possibly being the more important.
2. Bradford Perkins, “Impressions of Wartime,” Journal of American History 77:2 (September 1990): 565.
3. Ibid. Most commanders appreciated the need for breaks in the action. In World War II, for example, the shortage of American combat divisions meant that, as divisions, they stayed in the line for extended periods, but commanders recognized the need to provide rest and relief for individual soldiers and subordinate units. See Michael D. Doubler, Closing with the Enemy: How G.I.s Fought the War in Europe, 1944–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), p. 252.
4. For a discussion of the World War I Leave Areas, see Frank Freidel, Over There: The History of America’s First Overseas Crusade, rev. and abridged ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 195–197, and Mark Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 79–86.
5. For a description by World War II GIs of their activities while on pass to such cities, see Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (Houston: Paul M. Boesch, 1985), pp. 135–142; Leslie W. Bailey, Through Hell and High Water: The Wartime Memories of a Junior Combat Infantry Officer (New York: Vantage Press, 1994), pp. 142–143; and Klaus H. Huebner, Long Walk Through War: A Combat Doctor’s Diary (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), pp. 99–104, 118–120, 157, and 164–165.
6. William L. Langer, Gas and Flame in World War I (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 69. For similar comments, see Janice Holt Giles, ed., The G.I. Journal of Sergeant Giles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1965), p. 265; Franklyn A. Johnson, One More Hill (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 37; Gerald P. Averill, Mustang: A Combat Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1987), pp. 194–195; James Hamilton Dill, Sixteen Days at Mungol-li (Fayetteville, Ark.: M&M Press, 1993), p. 390; and Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. 129–130.
7. Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow (Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1979), p. 56. Communal bathing in a stream or river is especially evident in the World War I memoirs; for examples, see Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A World War I Diary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1934), pp. 84–86; Elton E. Mackin, Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die: Memoirs of a World War I Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), pp. 66 and 133–134; and Horatio Rogers, World War I Through My Sights (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1976), pp. 145 and 157. In later wars, the army made increasing use of bath and laundry units, and the memoirs speak more often of trips to an army showerpoint than they do of bathing in a stream. Swimming on a hot day remained a popular diversion, however, situation permitting.
8. Albert M. Ettinger and A. Churchill Ettinger, A Doughboy with the Fighting Sixty-ninth: A Remembrance of World War I (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing, 1992), p. 167.
9. Amos N. Wilder, Armageddon Revisited: A World War I Journal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 108.
10. Lester Atwell, Private (New York: Popular Library, 1958), p. 286.
11. Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War: The Story of G.I. Joe (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1945), p. 248. Pyle makes a similar observation in his Brave Men (New York: Henry Holt, 1944), p. 270. See also Francis P. Duffy, Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, of Life and Death with the Fighting Sixty-ninth (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1919), p. 260.
12. Lyle Rishell, With a Black Platoon in Combat: A Year in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), p. 71.
13. For grateful soldiers’ comments about entertainment and services provided by organizations like the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and the United Service Organization, see Charles MacArthur, War Bugs (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1929), p. 133; Will Judy, A Soldier’s Diary: A Day-to-Day Record in the World War (Chicago: Judy Publishing, 1931), pp. 110–111 and 148–149; Charles R. Cawthon, Other Clay: A Remembrance of the World War II Infantry (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1990), p. 108; Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, The Men of Company K (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p. 210; Johnson, One More Hill, p. 77; John A. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers: Memoir of a Combat Platoon Leader in Korea (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1991), p. 46; and John Ketwig, And a Hard Rain Fell (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 84.
14. Roscoe C. Blunt Jr., Inside the Battle of the Bulge: A Private Comes of Age (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 121. See also Pyle, Brave Men, pp. 244–245; Huebner, Long Walk, p. 117; and Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfred Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory: The Concluding Volume of an Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 295.
15. Ketwig, Hard Rain, pp. 236–237. See also Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Avon Books, 1978), pp. 181–182 and 257–258.
16. For examples, see Boris R. Spiroff, Korea: Frozen Hell on Earth (New York: Vantage Press, 1995), p. 39, and Rudolph W. Stephens, Old Ugly Hill: A G.I.’s Fourteen Months in the Korean Trenches, 1952–1953 (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1995), p. 103.
17. For accounts of European-theater GIs listening to the radio, see Blunt, Inside, pp. 80 and 153; Pyle, Brave Men, p. 107; and Leon C. Standifer, Not in Vain: A Rifleman Remembers World War II (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), p. 138.
18. For a rare mention of listening to music on a short-wave radio, see E. J. Kahn Jr., G.I. Jungle: An American Soldier in Australia and New Guinea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), pp. 134–135.
19. Sing-alongs were common in World War I, generally of popular tunes and ribald drinking songs, often borrowed from the British. See Judy, Soldier’s Diary, pp. 166 and 215.
20. Group singing was still a popular diversion in World War II. See Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, pp. 274–275; Kahn, G.I. Jungle, p. 135; Leckie, Helmet, pp. 25 and 250; and Richard Tregaskis, Invasion Diary (New York: Random House, 1944), p. 191.
21. Alvin C. York, Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), p. 198. See also Meigs, Optimism, chapter 4: “‘Mad’-moiselle from Armentières, Parlez-vous?’ Sexual Attitudes of Americans in World War I,” pp. 107–142.
22. Nat Frankel and Larry Smith, Patton’s Best: An Informal History of the 4th Armored Division (New York: Jove Book, 1984), pp. 85–86.
23. See Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 97–100.
24. James Jones, WW II: A Chronicle of Soldiering (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), p. 174.
25. Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War (York, Pa.: Strength and Health Publishing, 1940), p. 133.
26. Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 195. See also Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, pp. 226–233; Pyle, Your War, p. 83; Gwendolyn Medlo Hall, ed., Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (Colored): The World War II New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 198; and Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 151. All the examples cited, incidentally, are of army nurses. World War II marines speak harshly of their navy nurses (the navy provides medical care for the marines) because, by training or preference, they took their officers’ rank to heart and failed to show the compassion more typical of army nurses. The historian Craig M. Cameron notes this phenomenon in American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 78–79. For examples, see Henry Berry, Semper Fi, Mac: Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in World War II (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 172; Leckie, Helmet, p. 239; William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 273; and Leon Uris, Battle Cry (New York, London, and Toronto: Bantam Books, 1953), p. 295.
27. The intent, incidentally, is not to portray all soldiers as whoremongers. Most soldiers were young, single, and eager for female companionship, but in defense of the married soldier, some vowed to remain true to their loved ones, despite long separations. Howard V. O’Brien, Henry Giles, and Joseph R. Owen are some of the more conspicuous. They repeatedly mention being wretchedly homesick and make no mention of any sexual liaisons or even point out specific instances when they avoided temptation.
28. Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 244–246.
29. Bill Mauldin, Up Front (New York: Award Books, 1976), pp. 89–90.
30. Jones, WW II, p. 122. In the same passage, Jones praises Bill Mauldin for honestly portraying GI drinking in his famous Willie and Joe cartoons.
31. For examples, see ibid.; Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996), pp. 484–488; Leckie, Helmet, p. 250; Ralph G. Martin, The G.I. War, 1941–1945 (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 299; and Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 171.
32. See Martin, G.I. War, p. 250, and Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, pp. 288–290.
33. For examples, see Henry Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance: Living Memories of the Doughboy (New York: Priam Books, 1978), pp. 38 and 180; Ettinger and Ettinger, Fighting Sixty-ninth, pp. 27–28, 52–56, and 118–119; MacArthur, War Bugs, pp. 12–13, 15, 30, and 99–101; and Rogers, Through My Sights, pp. 93–94, 130, and 252–253.
34. For examples, see Atwell, Private, pp. 364, 448, and 473; Huebner, Long Walk, p. 167; Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 231; and Mauldin, Up Front, pp. 84–88.
35. Charles M. Bussey, Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1991), p. 246. The head cook in Charles S. Crawford’s unit, unlike Bussey’s mess sergeant, “couldn’t boil water without fucking it up” but was tolerated because he was a skilled moonshiner. See Crawford, The Four Deuces: A Korean War Story (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1989), pp. 156–157.
36. Liquor, often from captured stocks, was issued sporadically during World War II, and the officers received a liquor ration on a fairly consistent basis.
37. See A. Andy Andow, Letters to Big Jim Regarding Narrul Purigo, Cashinum Iman (New York: Vantage Press, 1994), p. 58; Bussey, Firefight, pp. 111–112; and Martin Russ, The Last Parallel: A Marine’s War Journal (New York and Toronto: Rinehart, 1957), pp. 294 and 298.
38. For examples, see Richard E. Ogden, Green Knight, Red Mourning (New York: Zebra Books, 1985), p. 244, and Mason, Chickenhawk, p. 474. (Of course, in Mason’s case, he was using prescription tranquilizers with regularity by the time he left Vietnam.)
39. See William D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1983), pp. 215–217, and Dominick Yezzo, A G.I.’s Vietnam Diary, 1968–1969 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974), diary entries for March 13, April 8, May 4, and August 4.
40. For a good overview of the “juicers” versus the “heads” subcultures, see John Helmer, Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After (New York: Free Press, and London: Collier Macmillan, 1974), pp. 184–208. One of the relatively few novels set late in the war (August 1970), John M. Del Vecchio’s 13th Valley (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), also describes, briefly, the “juicers” versus “heads” subcultures (pp. 124–125).
41. Johnson interview in Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 260.
42. Charles F. Minder, This Man’s War: The Day-by-Day Record of an American Private on the Western Front (New York: Pevensey Press, 1931), p. 284. See also Allen, Toward the Flame, p. 61, and Carl Andrew Brannen, Over There: A Marine in the Great War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), p. 41.
43. Pyle, Brave Men, p. 447. See also Leckie, Helmet, p. 31, and Allen R. Matthews, The Assault (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. 4.
44. Dill, Mungol-li, p. 266.
45. Howard Matthias, The Korean War—Reflections of a Young Combat Platoon Leader, rev. ed. (Tallahassee, Fla.: Father and Son Publishing, 1995), p. 148. See also Donald Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 448.
46. York, Sergeant York, p. 213.
47. Minder, This Man’s War, pp. 103–104. There are innumerable further examples of doughboy eat, drink, and be merry incidents; the exploits of Albert M. Ettinger (Fighting Sixty-ninth) and Charles MacArthur (War Bugs) and their hell-raising friends are the most illustrative.
48. John Hersey, Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. xii.
49. Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, p. 72. See also Ross S. Carter, Those Devils in Baggy Pants (New York and Toronto: Signet Books, 1951), p. 132; Huebner, Long Walk, pp. 22 and 169; Carl M. Becker and Robert G. Thobaben, Common Warfare: Parallel Memoirs by Two World War II GIs in the Pacific (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1992), pp. 130–131; and John L. Munschauer, World War II Cavalcade: An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1996), pp. 118–119.
50. Mason, Chickenhawk, p. 224. For descriptions of unit partying in Korea, see William A. Mauldin, Bill Mauldin in Korea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952), pp. 102–108, and Joseph R. Owen, Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996), pp. 84–85.
51. For a brief description of R and R, see Theodore R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 503. For accounts of the R and R experience, see Matthias, Reflections, pp. 186–189; Spiroff, Frozen Hell, pp. 70–72; Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, pp. 156–159; and Dill, Mungol-li, pp. 114–115.
52. The psychiatrist Gary L. Tischler describes the “hedonistic pseudocommunity” of the American soldier in Vietnam, for whom R and R was merely the culminating event (see chapter 2, “Patterns of Psychiatric Attrition and of Behavior in a Combat Zone,” in The Psychology and Physiology of Stress: With Reference to Special Studies of the Viet Nam War, ed. Peter G. Bourne (New York and London: Academic Press, 1969), p. 36. Tischler, who was a psychiatrist at a base hospital in Vietnam, overstates the extent to which the combat soldier was able to partake in the activities of the “hedonistic pseudocommunity” of the rear echelons, but the will was there, if not the opportunities.
53. Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 172. See pp. 172–208 for one of the most hedonistic R and Rs of any Vietnam War novel or memoir. For descriptions of R and R similar to Heinemann’s fictional account in theme and plot, if not in degree of excess, see Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, pp. 157–172; Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders, with Clark Smith, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), pp. 183–188; Ketwig, Hard Rain, pp. 111–124; and Mason, Chickenhawk, pp. 323–328.
54. About 5,000 servicemen were discharged for deserting during their tour of duty in Vietnam; about half of those had failed to return from R and R. See Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 113.
55. Mason, Chickenhawk, p. 328.
56. Peter G. Bourne, Men, Stress, and Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 44. For similar conclusions, see Elmar Dinter, Hero or Coward: Pressures Facing the Soldier in Battle (London and Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1985), p. 71, and John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), p. 281.
57. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 25. See also Munschauer, Cavalcade, p. 63; Matthias, Reflections, pp. 79–80; and Russ, Last Parallel, p. 55.
58. Michael Lee Lanning, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 37.
59. Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Haas, Wounds of War: The Psychological Aftermath of Combat in Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 210.
60. The historian Roger J. Spiller argues, contrary to the popular conception that modern “machine” warfare has made the soldier more insignificant, that the need for individual skill and initiative on today’s dispersed battlefield has enhanced the role of the soldier. See “Isen’s Run: Human Dimensions of Warfare in the Twentieth Century,” Military Review 68:5 (May 1988): 18.
61. Rogers, Through My Sights, p. 41. See his descriptions of leading the battery into position on pp. 41–43, 54–55, 102–104, 110–114, and 147–149.
62. Marine Brigadier General (ret.) Samuel Griffith related this story to the oral historian Henry Berry in Semper Fi, p. 118.
63. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 70. See also pp. 66–68.
64. James Jones, The Thin Red Line (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), p. 429. For a discussion of the importance of awards and recognition as motivators, see Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 355–359, and Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston, The Hague, and London: Kluwer, Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 201–209.
65. Duffy, Story, p. 209.
66. Ibid., p. 230. For other examples, see Boesch, Road to Huertgen, pp. 142–143; George Wilson, If You Survive (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), pp. 27–28; Goff and Sanders, Brothers, pp. 193–194; and Lanning, Only War, p. 192.
67. Blunt, Inside, p. 38.
68. Pyle, Brave Men, p. 136.
69. For soldiers at the bottom of the rank ladder (privates and second lieutenants), even the relatively routine promotion to the next rank was important because it was tangible evidence that they were no longer “rookies.” This rationale probably explains why James Brady and his friend Mack were so pleased with their promotion to first lieutenant during the Korean War. See Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), p. 205.
70. Albert French, Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), p. 150.
71. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 168. See also Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander (Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam Books, 1978), pp. 137–138.
72. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 111.
73. Ogden, Green Knight, p. 228.
74. The sociologist G. Dearborn Spindler provides a useful analysis of the World War II citizen-soldier who resisted military discipline, rebelled against the military hierarchy, and retained his self-centered outlook. See “American Character as Revealed by the Military,” Psychiatry: Journal for the Operational Statement of Interpersonal Relations 11:3 (August 1948): 275–281.
75. The literature professor Peter Aichinger, in his analysis of American war novels, points out that some of the more memorable characters are soldiers who struggle to retain their individualism in a story that “pits the individual against the organization that above all others specializes in reducing men to interchangeable parts of a machine” (The American Soldier in Fiction, 1880–1963: A History of Attitudes Toward Warfare and the Military Establishment [Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975], pp. 109–110).
76. Arnold M. Rose, “The Social Structure of the Army,” American Journal of Sociology 51:5 (March 1946): 363.
77. Hoffman, I Remember, p. 112. See pp. 65–66 and 69–73 for his unauthorized trips and subsequent catching up with his unit.
78. MacArthur, War Bugs, p. 217.
79. Leckie, Helmet, p. 151. Dominick Yezzo was another soldier who habitually rebelled against the system. See his June 18 diary entry in Vietnam Diary.
80. Ogden, Green Knight, p. 56.
81. Blue interview in Mary Penick Motley, The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), p. 128.
82. Duffy, Story, p. 218.
83. Owen, Colder than Hell, p. 44.
84. MacArthur, War Bugs, pp. 117, 146, 159, 200, and 253–254.
85. Robert G. Merrick, World War I: A Diary (Baltimore: privately published, 1982), p. 81.
86. Pyle, Your War, p. 299.
87. Richard D. Camp with Eric Hammel, Lima-6: A Marine Company Commander in Vietnam (New York: Pocket Books, 1989), p. 212.
88. Richard M. Hardison, Caissons Across Europe: An Artillery Captain’s Personal War (Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 1990), p. 61. See also p. 176 for the addition of a German truck to the battalion’s fleet, a fairly common occurrence, especially late in the war as captured stocks increased.
89. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers, p. 24.
90. Ralph Zumbro, Tank Sergeant (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1986), p. 65. Stealing equipment and supplies using ruses or even force was common. For other examples, see George William Sefton, It Was My War: I’ll Remember It the Way I Want To! (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1994), pp. 27–28 and 183; Bergerud, Touched with Fire, pp. 489–490; Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 205; and Henry Berry, Hey, Mac, Where Ya Been? Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in the Korean War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 89.
91. MacArthur, War Bugs, p. 150. See also Brannen, Over There, p. 32; Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. 115; and Rogers, Through My Sights, p. 189.
92. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 162. See also the Wright interview in Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 535.
93. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 88.
94. Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 150.
95. Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, pp. 272 and 323. See also Blunt, Inside, pp. 135 and 168; Cawthon, Other Clay, pp. 169–170; Hardison, Caissons, pp. 108 and 175; Terkel, Good War, p. 41; and Atwell, Private, pp. 363–365 and 416.
96. For examples, see Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 152; John W. Thomason Jr., Fix Bayonets! (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926), pp. 1–3; Brannen, Over There, p. 9; Atwell, Private, pp. 207–208; Mauldin, Up Front, pp. 173–174; Motley, Invisible Soldier, pp. 285–286; Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, pp. 66–67; and Sefton, It Was My War, pp. 132 and 134–135.
97. Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 240.
98. Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol 2, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p.112. See also William Darryl Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element in Combat: Leadership and Societal Influence in the Armies of the Soviet Union, the United States, North Vietnam, and Israel (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1988), p. 16.
99. See the discussion of how “formal” discipline contributes to the soldiers’ internalized “sense of duty” in Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 117–118. See also Kellett’s discussion of “imposed” discipline in Combat Motivation, pp. 92–93 and 134–148.
100. See William C. Cockerham’s 1976 survey of paratroopers (results published in 1978), in which the Vietnam veterans surveyed recognized more than did the nonveterans that discipline in combat was a “source of stability under stress” (“Attitudes Toward Combat Among U.S. Army Paratroopers,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 6:1 [spring 1978]: 1–15, quotation on p. 9).
101. Chadwick quoted in Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 443.
102. Thomas interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 174.
103. James R. McDonough, Platoon Leader (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), p. 73.
104. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, p. 233.
105. Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 175.
106. Tim O’Brien first used this phrase in his memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987), p. 31. The phrase next appears, attributed to the British World War I soldier-author Siegfried Sassoon, in the frontispiece of O’Brien’s Vietnam War novel, Going After Cacciato (New York: Dell, 1979).
107. O’Brien interview in Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (London and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), p. 128.
108. Harry Brown, A Walk in the Sun (New York: Knopf, 1944), p. 148.
109. Fox interview in Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 263. See also Spiroff, Frozen Hell, p. 22.
110. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 184. See also Gustav Hasford, The Short-timers (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), pp. 151–152.
111. French, Patches of Fire, p. 77. Daydreaming was often referred to as “World dreaming” by Vietnam War grunts. See Johnnie Clark quoted in James R. Ebert, A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965–1972 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), p. 177.
112. See Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 188; Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), pp. 74–75; Meyer H. Maskin and Leon L. Altman, “Military Psychodynamics: Psychological Factors in the Transition from Civilian to Soldier,” Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and the Pathology of Interpersonal Relationships 6:3 (August 1943): 264–265; Dixon Wecter, When Johnny Comes Marching Home (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), pp. 11–12; and Maria S. Bonn, “A Different World: The Vietnam Veteran Novel Comes Home,” in Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, ed. Philip K. Jason (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 5.
113. Pyle, Your War, p. 298.
114. Lanning, Only War, p. 38.
115. Ketwig, Hard Rain, p. 4. See also p. 8.
116. Blunt, Inside, p. 114. See also Minder, This Man’s War, p. 241; MacArthur, War Bugs, p. 9; Merrick, A Diary, p. 22; Boesch, Road to Huertgen, pp. 44 and 47; Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, pp. 42–43, 85, 88, and 103; Johnson, One More Hill, pp. 22 and 113; Kahn, G.I. Jungle, p. 28; Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Random House, 1943), p. 182; Bussey, Firefight, p. 101; Spiroff, Frozen Hell, p. 58; Ketwig, Hard Rain, pp. 46–48; and McDonough, Platoon Leader, p. 23.
117. Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 171.
118. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 237.
119. Hall, ed., Love, War, pp. 282–284.
120. Mauldin, Up Front, p. 24. The results of a post–World War II study of soldier effectiveness reinforce Mauldin’s comment. See Eli Ginzberg, James K. Anderson, Sol W. Ginsburg, John L. Herma, and John B. Miner, The Ineffective Soldier: Lessons for Management and the Nation, vol. 2, Breakdown and Recovery (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 41 and 46–49.
121. Lanning, Only War, p. 95; for similar complaints, see Atwell, Private, p. 395, and Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, p. 260.
122. Carter, Those Devils, p. 163; for other examples, see Bergerud, Touched with Fire, pp. 475–476; Pyle, Brave Men, p. 267; Uris, Battle Cry, pp. 143–146; Wilson, If You Survive, pp. 96–97; Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 264; Spiroff, Frozen Hell, p. 63; Berry, Hey, Mac, pp. 92–93; and Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 79.
123. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 132. For his increasing bitterness over losing his fiancée, see pp. 131–132, 135–136, 143, 153–154, and 288–289. The psychologist Dave Grossman believes that Dear John letters became more common as the Vietnam War grew increasingly unpopular. See On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. 277.
124. For examples of the demoralizing effect of mail delivery problems, see Terkel, Good War, p. 281; Wilson, If You Survive, p. 14; and Pyle, Your War, p. 50.
125. David Parks, G.I. Diary (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 92.
126. Zumbro, Tank Sergeant, p. 88.
127. Eighty-four percent of the Spanish Civil War veterans surveyed by John Dollard said that concentrating on the task at hand made them less afraid. See Fear in Battle (New York: AMS Press, 1976), pp. 30–31. See also Kellett, Combat Motivation, pp. 287–289, on “distraction.”
128. Wilder, Armageddon, p. 71. See also the case of Sergeant Ekland in Pat Frank, Hold Back the Night (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1952), p. 133.
129. Bourne, Men, Stress, p. 122.
130. Ibid., p. 97. See also Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 230.
131. O’Brien, Cacciato, p. 64.
132. Frank, Hold Back the Night, p. 65.
133. Lanning, Only War, pp. 261–262.
134. Shay refers to this detachment of attention as the soldiers’ shrinking temporal horizon. See Achilles, p. 176. See also Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 190, for a brief discussion of the “shortening of time perspective.”
135. Ernest Hemingway, ed., Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (New York: Bramhill House, 1979), p. xxiv.
136. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 80.
137. Leckie, Helmet, p. 80.
138. Allen, Toward the Flame, p. 121. See also [Howard V. O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War: A Diary of Disillusionment (New York: J. H. Sears, 1926), p. 80.
139. Dan Levin, From the Battlefield: Dispatches of a World War II Marine (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. 85. See also Matthews, Assault, p. 6, and Ogden, Green Knight, pp. 245–246.
140. Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), p. 27.
141. Curtis James Morrow, What’s a Commie Ever Done to Black People? A Korean War Memoir of Fighting in the U.S. Army’s Last All Negro Unit (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1997), p. 24. The literature professor Stanley Cooperman discusses the religious cynicism evident in World War I novels and attributes it to the doughboy’s disillusionment over organized religion’s support for the war. See World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 103–113. For examples, see Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, pp. 64–65; William March, Company K (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), p. 91; [O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War, p. 95; and John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, Sentry ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), pp. 156–157 and 209–211. For a discussion of grunts’ disillusionment with chaplains’ proselytizing, see Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 163.
142. For praise of Father Duffy as a chaplain, see Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, pp. 310–311.
143. Lanning, Only War, p. 101.
144. Jesse Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), p. 119. Students of soldier motivation tend to support one side or the other of this dichotomy. Lee Kennett, for example, claims that “there is . . . evidence that the spiritual factor was an important one in the soldier’s life” in World War II, but John Ellis points out in his World War II study that “for many men nothing so utterly and completely dissipated their residual religious beliefs as the randomness and pervasiveness of violent death” (see Kennett, G.I., p. 138, and Ellis, Sharp End, p. 99). Both, of course, are correct. See also Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 241–242, for a recognition, like Gray’s, that a dichotomy does exist, although Holmes rates those soldiers whose beliefs were shattered by war as “a minority.”
145. Bailey, Hell and High Water, p. 98. See also Joseph D. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier: The A.E.F. in 1918 (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1985), p. 130; Berry, Semper Fi, p. 288; Pyle, Your War, p. 12; Tregaskis, Guadalcanal, pp. 21–22; Spiroff, Frozen Hell, p. 61; and Knox, Pusan to Chosin, pp. 221–222.
146. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 22. See also pp. 74–75 and 112. For a similar comment, see marine Bud DeVeer quoted in Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 470.
147. Morrow, Commie, p. 23. See also the Ford interview in Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), p. 35.
148. Ent interview in Rudy Tomedi, No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993), p. 28.
149. Sefton, It Was My War, p. 216.
150. Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 144.
151. Huebner, Long Walk, p. 130.
152. Yezzo, Vietnam Diary, March 6 entry.
153. Ibid., April 3 entry. See also the case of the World War II soldier Han Rants in Gerald Astor, Crisis in the Pacific: The Battles for the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1996), p. 395.
154. Bourne, Men, Stress, p. 96.
155. York, Sergeant York, p. 276.
156. Minder, This Man’s War, pp. 331–332.
157. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 247.
158. Bryant interview in Terry, Bloods, p. 30. See also Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 121; Matthew Brennan, Brennan’s War: Vietnam 1965–1969 (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), pp. 57–58; and Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, pp. 82–83.
159. Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 201.
160. See Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 227–228; Ellis, Sharp End, p. 100; Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 48–51; and Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 238–240.
161. MacArthur, War Bugs, p. 143. Albert M. Ettinger, another Rainbow Division doughboy, also relates the rainbow superstition. See Fighting Sixty-ninth, p. 201.
162. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 157. See also Blunt, Inside, p. 20, for a discussion of a lucky crucifix.
163. Brennan, Brennan’s War, p. 182. See also Jack Fuller, Fragments (New York: Dell, 1985), p. 114.
164. March, Company K, p. 71.
165. Matthias, Reflections, pp. 69 and 70.
166. Alfred S. Bradford, Some Even Volunteered: The First Wolfhounds Pacify Vietnam (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 33.
167. Samuel L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1978), p. 185. See also Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 231–232; Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 242–244; and Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 164.
168. Mauldin, Up Front, p. 5.
169. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 248.
170. Blunt, Inside, p. 106.
171. Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 253.
172. See the case of Wagner, for example, in Cawthon, Other Clay, p. 16.
173. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 175. For other examples, see French, Patches of Fire, p. 90; Ernest Frankel, Band of Brothers (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 122; Kurt Gabel, The Making of a Paratrooper: Airborne Training and Combat in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), p. 204; and Munschauer, Cavalcade, pp. 126–127.
174. Aichinger, Soldier in Fiction, pp. 96–97. See also Thomas Myers, Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 105–139. The Stouffer Study also takes note of “the bitter humor of the front . . . as yet another way in which the soldier could achieve a frame of mind in which it was possible for him to endure and accept what could not be avoided” (Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 190).
175. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 22.
176. Downs, Killing Zone, p. 70. See Hasford, Short-timers, pp. 147–148, for a depiction of an enemy skull, complete with Mickey Mouse ears, mounted on a stick. See Brennan, Brennan’s War, p. 160, and photograph between pp. 140 and 141, for a nonfictional duplicate. See also Lanning, Only War, pp. 21–22, and James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), p. 269. For corpse humor in the Korean War, see Knox, Pusan to Chosin, pp. 569–570, and Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 300.
177. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 19.
178. Ibid., p. 20. See also Allen, Toward the Flame, p. 52.
179. Hoffman, I Remember, p. 60.
180. See Boyd, Through the Wheat, pp. 165–166 and 172; MacArthur, War Bugs, pp. 45–46 and 116; Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 174; and Minder, This Man’s War, p. 221.
181. For this rumor, see Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 60–61.
182. Duffy, Story, p. 104.
183. Pyle, Brave Men, p. 90.
184. Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 85. See also Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 141, for another acknowledgment that the “major project of the rumor mills” seemed to be morale boosting by “grinding out continually hopeful views of what lay ahead.”
185. Bourne, ed., Psychology, pp. 227–228.
186. Fuller, Fragments, p. 79. See also Herr, Dispatches, p. 118.
187. O’Brien, If I Die, p. 95.
188. James Brady, “Leaving For Korea,” American Heritage 48:1 (February/March 1997): 80; for a similar comment, see Mauldin, Korea, p. 41.
189. Jones, Thin Red Line, pp. 40–41. See also WW II, p. 42.
190. Thomason, Fix Bayonets! p. 139. Thomason refers to himself in the third person in his memoir; hence, “the captain” spoke these lines.
191. Duffy, Story, p. 73. See also Boyd, Through the Wheat, p. 114, and Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, p. 199.
192. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 161.
193. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, pp. 159–160.
194. Averill, Mustang, p. 110. See also Atwell, Private, pp. 55, 60, 75, and 228; Berry, Semper Fi, p. 385; Brown, A Walk, p. 9; Cawthon, Other Clay, pp. 80 and 157; Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K p. 161; Murphy, To Hell and Back, p. 191; Pyle, Your War, p. 264; Sledge, Old Breed, pp. 65–66 and 130; and Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 186.
195. Though less frequently than in earlier wars, soldiers still hoped for a million dollar wound during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, particularly at times when they were worn down from a long stretch of combat; for examples, see Knox, Pusan to Chosin, pp. 369 and 652; Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 271; Stephens, Old Ugly Hill, p. 79; Ogden, Green Knight, p. 270; and Mason, Chickenhawk, p. 406.
196. See Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 110, for a soldier happy over his “Pusan wound.”
197. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers, p. 130. See also Berry, Hey, Mac, pp. 306–307; Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 67; Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 68; and Matthias, Reflections, p. 206.
198. Ogden, Green Knight, p. 207.
199. Herr, Dispatches, p. 82. For other Vietnam War examples of million dollar wounds or accidents, see Ketwig, Hard Rain, p. 104; Mason, Chickenhawk, p. 406; and McDonough, Platoon Leader, p. 177.
CHAPTER 5. FOR COMRADES AND COUNTRY
1. Richard Kohn raises the issue of props versus motivators specifically in the context of primary-group cohesion: “The literature on primary group cohesion has never clearly shown whether solidarity with the group acted as a psychological prop to bolster men to endure the stress or as a motivation to carry out the mission and perform effectively in battle—or both.” The answer, as discussed in this chapter, is “both” (see “The Social History of the American Soldier: A Review and Prospectus for Research,” American Historical Review 86:3 [June 1981]: 561).
2. Jesse Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), p. 40. Samuel L. A. Marshall also believes that group loyalty is the critical motivator in battle: “I hold it to be one of the simplest truths of war that the thing which enables an infantry soldier to keep going with his weapons is the near presence or the presumed presence of a comrade” (Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War [Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1978], p. 42).
3. See Roger Kaplan, “Army Unit Cohesion in Vietnam: A Bum Rap,” Parameters 17:3 (September 1987): 58. Kaplan responds specifically to Kohn’s comment (quoted in note l above) that no one had addressed the issue of primary-group cohesion as “prop” or “motivator.” In reality, that issue was addressed at least as early as the Stouffer Study (1949), and the answer, again, was “both”: The primary group “served two principal functions in combat motivation: it set and enforced group standards of behavior, and it supported and sustained the individual in stresses he would otherwise not have been able to withstand” (Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 2, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949], pp. 130–131). See also the analysis and expanded discussion of the Stouffer Study’s findings concerning primary groups in Edward A. Shils, “Primary Groups in the American Army,” in Continuities in Social Research: Studies in the Scope and Method of “The American Soldier,” ed. Robert K. Merton and Paul F. Lazarsfeld (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), pp. 25–28.
4. See especially the Stouffer Study’s discussion of the “informal group” and group interaction in Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 130–149. See also the groundbreaking study by Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly 12:2 (summer 1948): 280–315. Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel discussed the importance of what they called “group ego” as a coping mechanism as early as 1943 in a report circulated to army medical officers and later published in book form in 1945: “Among the factors which enable the soldier successfully to withstand the onslaught of anxiety in the war situation, is his identification with the group” (War Neuroses [Philadelphia and London: Blakiston, 1945], p. 117). For other comments by World War II psychiatrists and psychologists on the importance of group bonds, see Raymond Sobel, “The ‘Old Sergeant’ Syndrome,” Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and the Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 10:3 (August 1947): 320; Edwin A. Weinstein, “The Function of Interpersonal Relations in the Neurosis of Combat,” Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and the Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 10:3 (August 1947): 307; and Leo H. Bartemeier, Lawrence S. Kubie, Karl A. Menninger, John Romano, and John C. Whitehorn, “Combat Exhaustion,” two-part series, part 1, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 104:4 (October 1946): 369.
5. Morris Janowitz and Roger W. Little, Sociology and the Military Establishment, 3d ed. (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1974), p. 94. See also Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston, The Hague, and London: Kluwer, Nijhoff, 1982), p. 97.
6. Stephen D. Wesbrook, “The Potential for Military Disintegration,” in Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military, ed. Sam C. Sarkesian (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1980), p. 274. See also p. 260.
7. Alvin C. York, Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), p. 213. For similar comments, see Janice Holt Giles, ed., The G.I. Journal of Sergeant Giles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1965), p. 377; Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders, with Clark Smith, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982, p. 60; and Michael Lee Lanning, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), pp. 24 and 95.
8. Richard D. Camp, with Eric Hammel, Lima-6: A Marine Company Commander in Vietnam (New York: Pocket Books, 1989), p. 167.
9. Francis P. Duffy, Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, of Life and Death with the Fighting Sixty-ninth (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1919), p. 69. See also p. 207. Elton E. Mackin echoes Duffy’s words: “We learned to close our minds to the memory of men who fell.” See Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die: Memoirs of a World War I Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), p. 122.
10. James Jones, The Thin Red Line (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), p. 195.
11. Lyle Rishell, With a Black Platoon in Combat: A Year in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), p. 91. For another example from the Korean War, see the marines’ reaction to the death of their company executive officer in Ernest Frankel, Band of Brothers (New York: Macmillan, 1958), pp. 220–221.
12. Jules W. Coleman, “The Group Factor in Military Psychiatry,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 16:2 (April 1946): 224.
13. Roger W. Little, “Buddy Relations and Combat Performance,” in The New Military: Changing Patterns of Organization, ed. Morris Janowitz (New York: Russell Sage, 1964), p. 200. Note that buddy relationships did not supplant the interpersonal bonds of the primary group, a point made by Little and also by Frederick J. Kviz, “Survival in Combat as a Collective Exchange Process,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 6:2 (fall 1978): 228–229.
14. Carl Andrew Brannen, Over There: A Marine in the Great War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), pp. 46–47 and 51.
15. Roscoe C. Blunt Jr., Inside the Battle of the Bulge: A Private Comes of Age (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 173. For the ongoing Blunt-Everett relationship, see pp. 25, 51, 61, 64, 66, 69, 71, 78, 91, 135, 144, and 180–181.
16. For other examples of close buddy relationships, follow the case of Boesch and Jack Bochner in Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (Houston: Paul M. Boesch, 1985); William Pope and Jim Mahoney in William Young Boyd, The Gentle Infantryman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); Kurt Gabel, Jake Dalton, and Joe Cooley in Kurt Gabel, The Making of a Paratrooper: Airborne Training and Combat in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990); and Lanning and Jerry Woody in Lanning, Only War, p. 52.
17. For a discussion of the traumatic impact on the soldier of the death of a close comrade, see Gray, Warriors, pp. 93–94, and John Keegan and Richard Holmes, with John Gau, Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle (New York: Viking, 1986), pp. 265–266.
18. York, Sergeant York, p. 272.
19. Giles, ed., GI Journal, p. 239. See also p. 152.
20. Howard Matthias, The Korean War—Reflections of a Young Combat Platoon Leader, rev. ed. (Tallahassee, Fla.: Father and Son Publishing, 1995), pp. 178 and 179.
21. Boris R. Spiroff, Korea: Frozen Hell on Earth (New York: Vantage Press, 1995), p. 51. The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, in his work with Vietnam War veterans suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, found that the obstruction of grief was an important contributing favor in some PTSD cases. Soldiers could not properly grieve for dead comrades because, as in Spiroff’s case, the exigencies of combat did not permit it, but also because open grieving was considered “unmanly.” The memoirs validate the importance of grieving when a close friend was lost. See Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1995), pp. 55–68.
22. For a discussion of some soldiers’ reluctance to make new friends in combat, see Shay, Achilles, pp. 40–53.
23. Johnson quoted in Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996), p. 441. See also the comments of Adam DiGenaro on the same page.
24. Michaud interview in Donald Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 670.
25. For a comment about their infantry company’s “core identity,” see Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, The Men of Company K (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p. xix. See also Charles R. Cawthon, Other Clay: A Remembrance of the World War II Infantry (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1990), p. 131.
26. For a discussion of “social control,” see Samuel A. Stouffer, Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. DeVinney, Shirley A. Star, and Robin M. Williams Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 1, The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 410–423. See also pp. 423–429 on group rewards and punishments. For a discussion of the doughboy “folk identity” and the norms set by the doughboy primary group, see Robert Sandels, “The Doughboy: Formation of a Military Folk,” American Studies 24:1 (1983): 75–81. For group norms in World War II, see S. Kirson Weinberg, “Problems of Adjustment in Army Units,” American Journal of Sociology 50:4 (January 1945): 271–278.
27. Kviz, “Survival in Combat,” p. 225. For a discussion of group norms in combat in the Korean War, see Little, “Buddy Relations,” in Janowitz, ed., New Military, pp. 200–219. For group norms in Vietnam, see James R. Ebert, A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965–1972 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), pp. 119–130.
28. Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War (York, Pa.: Strength and Health Publishing, 1940), p. 227; for other examples, see pp. 180 and 251.
29. Lieutenant General Robert Lee Bullard, a field army commander by war’s end, is one of the few senior commanders to attest to a serious straggler problem. See Robert Lee Bullard, with Earl Reeves, American Soldiers Also Fought (New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1936), p. 66. See also the discussion of straggling in Mark Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 60–62.
30. Joseph D. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier: The A.E.F. in 1918 (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1985), p. 92. For other examples of doughboy slacking, or straggling, see Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, pp. 207, 144–145, 219, and 230; Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A War Diary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1934), pp. 62–63, 186, and 235; Brannen, Over There, pp. 34–36; Albert M. Ettinger and A. Churchill Ettinger, A Doughboy with the Fighting Sixty-ninth: A Remembrance of World War I (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing, 1992), pp. 100–101 and 108–109; Henry Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance: Living Memories of the Doughboy (New York: Priam Books, 1978), pp. 214–215; and William March, Company K (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), pp. 141–143.
31. Lester Atwell, Private (New York: Popular Library, 1958), p. 166; Braaf continued to shirk, eventually deserted, and was caught and court-martialed (pp. 179, 181, 275, and 528). See also George Wilson, If You Survive (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 157.
32. Carl M. Becker and Robert G. Thobaben, Common Warfare: Parallel Memoirs by Two World War II GIs in the Pacific (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1992), p. 171.
33. Lanning, Only War, p. 198. For another example of a Vietnam War malingerer despised by his platoon and harshly dealt with, see Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), pp. 56–58. See also the case of Brennan’s radioman in Matthew Brennan, Brennan’s War: Vietnam, 1965–1969 (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), pp. 26 and 37.
34. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 87. See also pp. 131 and 145–146.
35. See Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Haas, Wounds of War: The Psychological Aftermath of Combat in Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 208.
36. Blunt, Inside, p. 169.
37. Fox interview in Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 421.
38. Jack Fuller, Fragments (New York: Dell, 1985), p. 78.
39. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 111–112; for another example, see Henry Berry, Semper Fi, Mac: Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in World War II (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 78.
40. Matthias, Reflections, p. 133. See also p. 134. Rudolph W. Stephens’s company in Korea also took harsh measures against men who fell asleep when on patrol. See Old Ugly Hill: A G.I.’s Fourteen Months in the Korean Trenches, 1952–1953 (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1995), pp. 53–54 and 93.
41. Historians, psychiatrists, and sociologists have noted the critical role of selfesteem, personal honor, pride, “ego-preservation,” and so forth, in motivating the soldier within the context of the primary group. See John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), pp. 312–319; Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 301–307; John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 52–53; Marshall, Men Against Fire, pp. 148–149; Herbert X. Spiegel, “Preventive Psychiatry with Combat Troops,” American Journal of Psychiatry 101:3 (November 1944): 310; Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 135–145; and S. Kirson Weinberg, “The Combat Neuroses,” American Journal of Sociology 51:5 (March 1946): 473–474.
42. Cutler interview in Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, p. 216.
43. Brannen, Over There, p. 48.
44. Bradford Perkins, “Impressions of Wartime,” Journal of American History 77:2 (September 1990): 566. See also Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), pp. 124–125, and Leon C. Standifer, Not in Vain: A Rifleman Remembers World War II (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), pp. 249–250.
45. Winter interview in Rudy Tomedi, No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993), pp. 26–27.
46. Alfred S. Bradford, Some Even Volunteered: The First Wolfhounds Pacify Vietnam (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), pp. 150 and 148–149.
47. Joseph A. Blake and Suellen Butler, “The Medal of Honor, Combat Orientations and Latent Role Structure in the United States Military,” Sociological Quarterly 17:4 (autumn 1976): 561–567. See also a broader survey of Congressional Medals of Honor by Jeffery W. Anderson, “Military Heroism: An Occupational Definition,” Armed Forces and Society 12:4 (summer 1986): 591–606. Anderson derives a definition of heroism based on the citations for 337 CMHs awarded from 1863 to 1979. This definition contains eight characteristics that involve both “soldier saving” and “war winning” (although Anderson does not use these terms), and this definition held true for all wars from the Civil War through Vietnam.
48. Cawthon, Other Clay, p. 74.
49. See Marshall, Men Against Fire, pp. 155–156.
50. For a discussion of going “AWOL to the front,” see Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 299–300, and Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), pp. 139–140.
51. Duffy, Story, p. 322.
52. Ibid., p. 209. See also p. 88 and the Krahnert interview in Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, p. 43.
53. Bill Mauldin, Up Front (New York: Award Books, 1976), pp. 126–127.
54. Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 195.
55. William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 391. For other World War II examples of going or threatening to go AWOL to the front, see Gerald Astor, Crisis in the Pacific: The Battles for the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1996), p. 418; Berry, Semper Fi, pp. 100–101; Harold L. Bond, Return to Cassino (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), p. 149; Allen R. Matthews, The Assault (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), p.167; and Richard Tregaskis, Invasion Diary (New York: Random House, 1944), p. 239.
56. Chase interview in Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfred Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory: The Concluding Volume of an Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 152–153.
57. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 146.
58. For a discussion of “vertical bonding,” see Faris R. Kirkland, Paul T. Bartone, and David H. Marlowe, “Commanders’ Priorities and Psychological Readiness,” Armed Forces and Society 19:4 (summer 1993): 579–598. For a discussion of “hierarchical cohesion,” see Alexander L. George, “Primary Groups, Organization, and Military Performance,” in Handbook of Military Institutions, ed. Roger W. Little (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1971), pp. 306–311.
59. Wesbrook, “Military Disintegration,” in Sarkesian, ed., Combat Effectiveness, p. 274 (I also cited Wesbrook in note 6).
60. Morris Janowitz, for example, believes American acceptance of warfare in the late nineteenth century did not require a specific ideological cause: “At the turn of the century the military considered the national purposes of war as self-evident; they did not require explicit ideological justification. . . . It sufficed to operate on the self-evident principle of common defense, and on the implicit moral crusade to enforce American-type law and order” (The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait [New York: Free Press, 1960, prologue added in 1974], p. 262).
61. John Dollard, with Donald Horton, Fear in Battle (New York: AMS Press, 1976), p. 46. For other discussions of the value of unit esprit, see Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 308–315, and Kellett, Combat Motivation, pp. 46–56.
62. Amos N. Wilder, Armageddon Revisited: A World War I Journal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 145.
63. Ibid., p. 144.
64. See Sandels, “Doughboy,” pp. 74–75, for a discussion of the emergence of the division as a focus for unit esprit in World War I.
65. Mauldin, Up Front, p. 1.
66. Little, “Buddy Relations,” in Janowitz, ed., New Military, p. 204.
67. Ibid., p. 205. See also James Hamilton Dill, Sixteen Days at Mungol-li (Fayetteville, Ark.: M&M Press, 1993), pp. 402–404, for the importance of regimental esprit.
68. Samuel L. A. Marshall, Commentary on Infantry Operations and Weapons Usage in Korea, Winter of 1950–51, Operations Research Office Report 13 (Chevy Chase, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), p. xvi; he also noted that regimental pride was operative during the Korean War, but “there was relatively less interest in loyalty to the division” than there had been in the world wars (p. xvii).
69. Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 81.
70. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 58. See also pp. 173–174.
71. For an analysis of the Marine Corps’ effort to establish and sustain its image as a unique, elite force, see Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
72. See the comments in Gerald P. Averill, Mustang: A Combat Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1987), p. 98, and Berry, Semper Fi, pp. 116 and 125.
73. See Leon Uris, Battle Cry (New York, London, and Toronto: Bantam Books, 1953). Uris’s novel is based on his World War II service with the Sixth Marines. See especially the classic barroom brawl between Sixth Marines and Eighth Marines in New Zealand, instigated by snide comments about “pogey-bait whistles” (pp. 270–271).
74. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 101.
75. Martin Russ, The Last Parallel: A Marine’s War Journal (New York and Toronto: Rinehart, 1957), p. 133.
76. See Thomas M. Camfield, “‘Will to Win’—the U.S. Army Troop Morale Program of World War I,” Military Affairs 41:3 (October 1977): 125–128.
77. Hans Speier, “‘The American Soldier’ and the Sociology of Military Organization,” in Merton and Lazarsfeld, eds., Continuities, p. 116.
78. See Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, chapter 9, “The Orientation of Soldiers Toward the War,” pp. 430–485, for the overall findings of the Research Branch concerning the lack of ideological motivation and the War Department’s effort to establish troop orientation programs, such as Frank Capra’s famous “Why We Fight” films.
79. John W. Thomason Jr., Fix Bayonets! (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926), p. 136.
80. [Howard V. O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War: A Diary of Disillusionment (New York: J. H. Sears, 1926), p. 37. See also p. 24.
81. Several historians comment on the prevailing attitude among GIs of “let’s get the war over with and go home.” See Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 88–89; Ellis, Sharp End, pp. 286–288; and Kennett, G.I., p. 140.
82. Ralph Ingersoll, The Battle Is the Payoff (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943), p. 74.
83. Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow (Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1978), pp. 25–26; for a similar call for a cause, or “positive aim,” see Grinker and Spiegel, War Neuroses, p. 119.
84. See Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, pp. 458–485, for a discussion of the Information and Education Division’s indoctrination program (see note 76 on the Morale Branch).
85. [O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War, pp. 96 and 42. See also Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 55.
86. Will Judy, A Soldier’s Diary: A Day-to-Day Record in the World War (Chicago: Judy Publishing, 1931), p. 125.
87. Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, pp. 473–484.
88. Spiegel, “Preventive Psychiatry,” p. 311. John Ellis also notes the World War II soldiers’ lack of interest in ideological issues. See his Sharp End, pp. 281–282.
89. Charles C. Moskos Jr., The American Enlisted Man: The Rank and File in Today’s Military (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970), p. 148.
90. Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 151.
91. Shils, “Primary Groups,” in Merton and Lazarsfeld, eds., Continuities, p. 22. See also p. 24.
92. Moskos, American Enlisted Man, p. 147. See also William Darryl Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element in Combat: Leadership and Societal Influence in the Armies of the Soviet Union, the United States, North Vietnam, and Israel (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1988), pp. 98–99; Speier, “Sociology of Military Organization,” in Merton and Lazarsfeld, eds., Continuities, p. 117; Wesbrook, “Military Disintegration,” in Sarkesian, ed., Combat Effectiveness, pp. 253–256; and Elliot P. Chodoff, “Ideology and Primary Groups,” Armed Forces and Society 9:4 (summer 1983): 581–582.
93. Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War: The Story of G.I. Joe (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1945), p. 297.
94. Ernie Pyle, Brave Men (New York: Henry Holt, 1944), p. 6.
95. Ira Wolfert, Battle for the Solomons (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1943), p. 196.
96. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 114. For similar statements by GIs about the justness of their cause, see the Norman Mailer interview in Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (London and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), pp. 92–93; Blunt, Inside, p. 73; Dan Levin, From the Battlefield: Dispatches of a World War II Marine (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. 48; Wilson, If You Survive, p. 157; and Fussell, Doing Battle, p. 99.
97. Frankel, Band of Brothers, p. 176.
98. Peter G. Bourne, Men, Stress, and Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 44–45.
99. Dominick Yezzo, A G.I.’s Vietnam Diary, 1968–1969 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974), author’s note at start of book.
100. Little, “Buddy Relations,” in Janowitz, ed., New Military, pp. 205–206.
101. Patton’s words as recalled by the historian Martin Blumenson, who as a young officer in World War II served on the Third Army staff. See Patton: The Man Behind the Legend, 1885–1945 (New York: William Morrow, 1985), p. 223.
102. [O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War, pp. 168 and 109. See also Judy, Soldier’s Diary, p. 13.
103. George William Sefton, It Was My War: I’ll Remember It the Way I Want To! (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1994), p. 52. See also the Leacock interview in Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 375, and the Johnny DeGrazio interview on p. 162.
104. James Brady, “Leaving for Korea,” American Heritage 48:1 (February/March 1997): 88. See also Curtis James Morrow, What’s a Commie Ever Done to Black People? A Korean War Memoir of Fighting in the U.S. Army’s Last All Negro Unit (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1997), p. 61.
105. Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (New York: Dell, 1979), p. 377. See also p. 68.
106. “A War for Nothing” is the title and theme of chapter 7 in Christian G. Appy’s Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 206–249. See also Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. xii.
107. Pat Frank, Hold Back the Night (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1952), p. 45.
108. See Gray, Warriors, p. 42, and Kellett, Combat Motivation, pp. 251–253.
109. The Stouffer Study comments on the value to morale of such “local victories” (Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 170).
110. Pyle, Brave Men, p. 103. See also Tregaskis, Invasion, p. 130, and Blunt, Inside, p. 31.
111. Fenton interview in Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 122. For other examples, see Boesch, Road to Huertgen, pp. 105–106; Henry Berry, Hey, Mac, Where Ya Been? Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in the Korean War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 208; and Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 13.
112. David Halberstam, One Very Hot Day (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 114. See also Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 188; Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 225–226; and Hendin and Haas, Wounds, pp. 8–9.
113. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 134. For another example, see the Paul Buckman (a pseudonym) case in Hendin and Haas, Wounds, p. 206.
114. Virtually every history of the Vietnam War comments on the problems inherent in the body count, both in its accuracy and as a measure of victory. Perhaps most telling is a survey of army generals who had served in Vietnam, which reveals that the senior leaders themselves had serious reservations about the accuracy and usefulness of the body count. See Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers: American Generals Reflect on Vietnam (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), pp. 72–75. See also Thomas C. Thayer, War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 101–104, and Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 271–276.
115. Downs, Killing Zone, p. 175.
116. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987), pp. 129–130.
117. Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 131. Of course, though Mason’s observation is generally valid, the enemy did stand and fight the First Cavalry Division when it first arrived in Vietnam and by all accounts suffered heavy losses for their trouble. But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army then backed off to lick their wounds, recover, and learn how to deal with the cavalry’s helicopters.
118. For examples of frustrated soldiers clamoring to “go north,” see William D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1983), p. 205; Wallace Terry, Bloods, an Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), pp. 110–111 and 214; and Ralph Zumbro, Tank Sergeant (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1986), p. 26.
119. Appy and Ebert and the sociologist John Helmer concluded that a majority of Vietnam War soldiers understood that America was in Vietnam to help democratic South Vietnam survive and to contain the spread of Communism, although as Helmer points out, understanding did not equate to personal commitment. See Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 209–212; Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 11–12; and John Helmer, Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After (New York: Free Press, and London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1974), p. 144.
120. See Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 40. See also Edward Tabor Linenthal, “From Hero to Anti-hero: The Transformation of the Warrior in Modern America,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 63:1 (spring 1980): 79–83. Linenthal describes how the American soldier’s view of himself as a heroic figure fighting for a just cause was shaken in Vietnam.
121. John Ketwig, And a Hard Rain Fell (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 32. Ketwig specifically mentions his expectation of being treated as a liberator. He was even more disappointed than the average soldier: “Secretly, I hoped to be greeted like a G.I. liberating France in World War II. The people resented us. . . . Downtown [Pleiku], we were treated like an invading army. Try as I might, I was never able to find the exotic, inscrutable Asian culture. Everywhere I looked, I found a society of murderers, thieves, and carnival hucksters” (pp. 70–71).
122. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 61. The memoirs provide overwhelming evidence of the American soldiers’ dislike, even hatred, for the South Vietnamese, but this dislike has also been verified by surveys. See Byron G. Fiman, Jonathan F. Borus, and M. Duncan Stanton, “Black-White and American-Vietnamese Relations Among Soldiers in Vietnam,” Journal of Social Issues 31:4 (fall 1975): 39–48. See also Thayer, War Without Fronts, pp. 186–188, for surveys of South Vietnamese civilians conducted in 1971 in which a majority admitted to not liking or even hating Americans and believing that the Americans felt the same way toward them.
123. David Parks, G.I. Diary (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 94. The rate at which a grunt’s expectations faded varied, but fade they did. Lieutenant Lanning, for example, used the term “gook” in his diary for the first time only after three months in Vietnam. His decision finally to do so “aptly showed my loss of respect for Vietnamese of both sides” (Only War, p. 164). See also the case of Dominick Yezzo, who, as a member of a civil affairs team, tried harder than most to sympathize with the plight of the South Vietnamese but after nine months was “sick of Vietnam and its people.” Trace his shifting attitude in his Vietnam Diary, entries for September 18 and 29, October 2, and May 11, 14, and 28.
124. John Sack, M (New York: Avon Books, 1985), p. 210. See also pp. 188–189.
125. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 133.
126. Ibid.
127. These security forces, incidentally, did more fighting than they are generally given credit for, especially the Regional and Provisional Forces, nicknamed the “Ruff Puffs” by the Americans. See Thayer, War Without Fronts, pp. 155–167.
128. Mason, Chickenhawk, p. 404.
129. Rawls interview in Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), p. 157. For other examples of grunt disdain for the ARVN, see Bradford, Volunteered, pp. 19–20, 115, and 161–162; Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, pp. 61 and 265–266; Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), p. 219; and Santoli, Everything We Had, pp. 117 and 137. See also Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 234–235.
130. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 317. See also Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 93.
131. See comments by Ketwig, Hard Rain, pp. 85–86, and Mason, Chickenhawk, pp. 440–441.
132. Moskos, American Enlisted Man, p. x, and Bourne, Men, Stress, p. viii.
133. Bourne, Men, Stress, p. 40. See also pp. 43–44.
134. A survey by Howard Schuman shows that antiwar sentiment jumped dramatically after Tet, not for the ideological or moralistic reasons championed by the middle-class, campus-centered antiwar movement but because of growing disillusionment, especially among the working class, over how the war was being prosecuted and the heavy price being paid in American lives (see “Two Sources of Antiwar Sentiment in America,” American Journal of Sociology 78:3 [November 1972]: 513–536). Charles Moskos agrees with Schuman’s assessment: “American public opinion was moved after 1969 by such pragmatic considerations as the unanticipated strength of enemy forces, the adoption of a ‘no-win’ military policy, and most important, distress over continued American casualties” (see S. L. A. Marshall Chair: Soldiers and Sociology, U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988], p. 12).
135. Ebert notes that draftees totaled 21 percent of America’s combat force in Vietnam in 1965 but 70 percent in 1970, with a concomitant increase in draftee battle deaths from 16 percent in 1967 to 43 percent in 1970. See A Life in a Year, p. 17.
136. Appy, Working-Class War, p. 208.
137. Moskos, S. L. A. Marshall Chair, p. 12. See also Kurt Lang, “American Performance in Vietnam: Background and Analysis,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 8:2 (fall 1980): 279; Thomas Myers, Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 140–141; and Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 209–211. Grunts’ doubts about the cause were also passed from veteran to new guy incountry, “resulting in a slowly maturing pessimism that was inherited and inculcated in the squads and fireteams” (see Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 233).
138. Anderson interview in Terry, Bloods, p. 226. See also Brennan, Brennan’s War, pp. 195–196.
139. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. 277.
140. Moskos, American Enlisted Man, p. 34. See also Thomas J. Begines, “The American Military and the Western Idea,” Military Review 72:3 (March 1992): 45–46, for a discussion of the growing alienation between the Vietnam War soldier and American society.
141. Incidentally, that a majority of grunts late in the war became disillusioned with either the cause or the way the war was being fought is not in doubt, as evidenced by a survey of returning veterans that was read into the Congressional Record in May 1971: 47 percent said the war was a mistake, 40 percent said it was not a mistake but fought incorrectly, and 10 percent said simply that it was not a mistake (survey cited in Helmer, Bringing the War, p. 35 and p. 31 n. 75).
142. Mason, Chickenhawk, p. 162.
143. John M. Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 96.
144. Grossman, On Killing, p. 277.
145. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 204.
146. Sack, M, p. 137. See also James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), p. 210.
147. Appy, Working-Class War, p. 51; he notes, however, that draft avoidance was not as common, or as acceptable, among working-class youth.
148. Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, p. 182. See also James Fallows, “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” Washington Monthly 7:8 (October 1975): 5.
149. Ketwig, Hard Rain, p. 289. The sometimes hostile reception that returning Vietnam veterans received stood in stark contrast to earlier wars; for examples, see Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 341–343, and the “Homecoming” chapter in Baker, Nam, pp. 239–268.
150. William L. Hauser, “The Will to Fight,” in Sarkesian, ed., Combat Effectiveness, p. 189.
151. O’Brien, Cacciato, pp. 240–241.
152. Del Vecchio, 13th Valley, p. 163.
153. John H. Faris, “An Alternative Perspective to Savage and Gabriel,” Armed Forces and Society 3:3 (May 1977): 459–460.
154. Wesbrook, “Military Disintegration,” in Sarkesian, ed., Combat Effectiveness, p. 257. For other discussions about the disintegration of hierarchical cohesion in the Vietnam War, see Chodoff, “Ideology,” pp. 588–590; Helmer, Bringing the War, pp. 43–48; Kviz, “Survival in Combat,” p. 229; Lang, “Performance in Vietnam,” pp. 274–276; Moskos, S. L. A. Marshall Chair, pp. 12–13; Kellett, Combat Motivation, pp. 107–112; and Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 316–317.
155. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 33; Goff then provides an example on p. 34 of faking contact with the enemy while on a night patrol. The grunts fired a few rounds and scurried back to base camp.
156. For examples of these various forms of combat avoidance, see Baker, Nam, pp. 42 and 189; Brennan, Brennan’s War, pp. 267–269; and O’Brien, If I Die, pp. 90 and 108. Even more serious were “combat refusals”—units of company-size and below that openly refused to carry out orders to conduct a specific combat operation. Richard Gabriel and Paul L. Savage believe that as many as 245 such refusals may have occurred in 1970, but they are speculating. See Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), pp. 45–46. Gabriel and Savage’s statistics are questionable, but combat refusals did occur; for examples, see Appy, Working-Class War, p. 231.
157. Anderson interview in Terry, Bloods, p. 223.
158. Biggers interview in ibid., p. 113.
159. Santos interview in Santoli, Everything We Had, p. 121.
160. Hendin and Haas, Wounds, p. 207.
161. Sarah A. Haley, “When the Patient Reports Atrocities: Specific Treatment Considerations of the Vietnam Veteran,” Archives of General Psychiatry 30:2 (February 1974): 193. See also Vernon Janick quoted in Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 122.
162. See Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 246–247; Gabriel and Savage, Crisis in Command, pp. 44–45 and 66–67; Thomas C. Bond, “The Why of Fragging,” American Journal of Psychiatry 133:11 (November 1976): 1328–1331; and Charles C. Moskos Jr., “The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam,” Journal of Social Issues 31:4 (fall 1975): 34–35. For fraggings, or threats of fragging, in the Vietnam War literature, see Brennan, Brennan’s War, p. 286; Ketwig, Hard Rain, pp. 88–91; Mason, Chickenhawk, p. 384; Terry, Bloods, p. 212; Webb, Fields of Fire, pp. 140–142; and O’Brien, Cacciato, pp. 278–282.
163. Wilson, If You Survive, p. 116; for other World War II examples, see Fussell, Doing Battle, p. 111, and Mary Penick Motley, The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), p. 284.
164. Cawthon, Other Clay, p. 121.
165. A. E. Ashworth, “The Sociology of Trench Warfare, 1914–1918,” British Journal of Sociology 19:4 (December 1968): 420.
166. Fussell, Doing Battle, p. 110. For an example of “live and let live” in effect in the Italian campaign during World War II, see Motley, Invisible Soldier, pp. 308–309.
167. Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 260–261. For a fictional example from World War I, see March, Company K, pp. 55–58.
168. Gabel, Paratrooper, p. 204.
169. Ibid., p. 205; the lieutenant survived this artillery barrage but was killed later in the war. See also the Eugene Lester interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 307.
170. Comparisons of the Korean and Vietnam Wars are scarce. James Toner, a professor of government, identifies several of the problems in the Korean War that surfaced again in Vietnam: loss of faith in the cause, disdain for the people ostensibly being saved, and the pros and cons of a rotation system. See “American Society and the American Way of War: Korea and Beyond,” Parameters 11:1 (spring 1981): 79–90.
171. Theodore R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 658. See also Toner, “American Society,” pp. 88–89, for another call for legions.
172. Frank, Hold Back the Night, p. 43. See also pp. 39–40. The issue of American credibility as a Cold War ally also crops up in this novel, foreshadowing similar concerns during the Vietnam War. If America was driven out of Korea by the Chinese and “came back home with its tail between its legs, then the whole world would know that the United States couldn’t hold Berlin or Vienna, or the line of the Elbe, or the Dardanelles, or the oil fields of the Middle East” (p. 137).
173. Dill, Mungol-li, p. 356.
174. Ibid., p. 170.
175. John A. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers: Memoir of a Combat Platoon Leader in Korea (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1991), p. 19. See also p. ix.
176. Russ, Last Parallel, p. 293. Comments on and bitterness over the war’s senselessness are common in accounts by soldiers who served after the Chinese intervention. For further examples, see Knox, Uncertain Victory, pp. 23 and 211; William H. Mauldin, Bill Mauldin in Korea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952), p. 9; Tomedi, No Bugles, p. 102; and Matthias, Reflections, p. xiii.
177. Muskat interview in Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 406.
178. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers, p. 101. For other examples of combat avoidance or complaints about the senseless patrolling in Korea, see Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 290; Matthias, Reflections, pp. 99–100; and Russ, Last Parallel, p. 314.
179. See Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, pp. 166 and 218. See also Jim Holton interview in Tomedi, No Bugles, pp. 200–201.
180. Baker interview in Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 216.
181. Matthias, Reflections, p. 78; for other negative comments about ROK Army or KATUSA soldiers, see Charles S. Crawford, The Four Deuces: A Korean War Story (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1989), p. 209; Joseph R. Owen, Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996), pp. 84, 101, and 232; Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 296; Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 164; and Rishell, Black Platoon, p. 33.
182. Muetzel interview in Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 369. See also Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 1.
183. Frankel, Band of Brothers, p. 177. See also p. 290.
184. Matthias, Reflections, p. 170.
185. Morrow, Commie, p. 102. Dill also comments on the shift to a force consisting primarily of draftees by late 1951 and implies that this shift was not for the better. See Mungol-li, p. 402.
186. Tomedi, No Bugles, p. vi.
CHAPTER 6. FAILING TO COPE WITH THE ENVIRONMENT OF WAR
1. Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 152.
2. Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Viking, 1996), p. 445.
3. Albert Glass, introduction, in The Psychology and Physiology of Stress: With Reference to Special Studies of the Viet Nam War, ed. Peter G. Bourne (New York and London: Academic Press, 1969), pp. xiv–xv. See also Thomas W. Salmon and Norman Fenton, The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War, 15 vols., Neuropsychiatry in the American Expeditionary Forces (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1929), 10: 311. For a shortened version of Salmon and Fenton’s volume, see Edward A. Strecker, “Military Psychiatry: World War I, 1917–1918,” in One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry, American Psychiatric Association (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. 385–416. Strecker includes verbatim passages from Salmon and Fenton without attribution and might be accused of plagiarism except that Strecker, who served as the psychiatrist for the Twenty-eighth Infantry Division in World War I, was one of the contributing authors to the earlier book, and thus probably extracted his own material.
4. Glass, introduction, in Bourne, ed., Psychology, p. xiv. For other discussions of how psychiatric casualties tend to exhibit the accepted or expected symptoms, see Peter G. Bourne, Men, Stress, and Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 80; Richard A. Gabriel, The Painful Field: The Psychiatric Dimension of Modern War (New York, London, and Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 141; and Larry H. Ingraham and Frederick J. Manning, “Psychiatric Battle Casualties: The Missing Column in a War Without Replacements,” Military Review 60:8 (August 1980): 20–22.
5. Cutler interview in Henry Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance: Living Memories of the Doughboy (New York: Priam Books, 1978), p. 214. For other examples, see Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A War Diary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1934), pp. 268–269, and Robert G. Merrick, World War I: A Diary (Baltimore: privately published, 1982), p. 94.
6. Goldsmith interview in Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, p. 280. See also the case of breakdown on p. 347. Sometimes the doughboys could see that the cause of a man’s breakdown was mental, not physiological, but the term “shell shock” was still being used, as in this shell-shock case described by a marine, Carl Andrew Brannen: “I was awakened suddenly by a fellow near me becoming a raving maniac. The strain had been too much and something had slipped in his head. Cases like this were called shell shock” (see Over There: A Marine in the Great War [College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996], p. 34).
7. Albert J. Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry in World War II, Medical Department, U.S. Army, Office of the Surgeon General, 2 vols., Overseas Theaters (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 2: 991.
8. Ibid., pp. 26–27. See also pp. 130–131.
9. Glass, introduction, in Bourne, ed., Psychology, p. xvi.
10. Ibid. See also Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel, War Neuroses (Philadelphia and London: Blakiston, 1945), pp. 4–48.
11. Grinker and Spiegel, War Neuroses, pp. 66 and 70.
12. Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, pp. 9–10.
13. Glass, introduction, in Bourne, ed., Psychology, p. xviii. The terms “exhaustion” or “combat fatigue” were not entirely satisfactory to World War II psychiatrists, but they generally agree with Glass (who was himself a division psychiatrist) that the terms were an improvement. See Leo H. Bartemeier, Lawrence S. Kubie, Karl A. Menninger, John Romano, and John C. Whitehorn, “Combat Exhaustion,” two-part series, part 1, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 104:4 (October 1946): 386–389, and Francis J. Braceland, “Psychiatric Lessons from World War II,” American Journal of Psychiatry 103:5 (March 1947): 591–592.
14. Richard Tregaskis, Invasion Diary (New York: Random House, 1944), p. 139.
15. For a discussion of combat reaction, see Ted D. Kilpatrick and Harry A. Grater Jr., “Field Report on Marine Psychiatric Casualties in Vietnam,” Military Medicine 136:10 (October 1971): 801–809.
16. For a discussion of pseudocombat fatigue, see Robert E. Strange, “Combat Fatigue Versus Pseudo-Combat Fatigue in Vietnam,” Military Medicine 133:10 (October 1968): 823–826. For a discussion of character and behavior disorders in Vietnam War soldiers, see Bourne, ed., Psychology, pp. xxiv–xxv and 228–229; Bourne, Men, Stress, pp. 63–74; and Franklin Del Jones, “Experiences of a Division Psychiatrist in Vietnam,” Military Medicine 132:12 (December 1967): 1003–1008.
17. For a discussion of the statistics problem, see Bartemeier et al., “Combat Exhaustion,” part 2, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 104:5 (November 1946): 507–508; Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, pp. 996–998 and 1013; Glass, introduction, in Bourne, ed., Psychology, pp. xx–xxii; and Franklin Del Jones and Arnold W. Johnson Jr., “Medical and Psychiatric Treatment Policy and Practice in Vietnam,” Journal of Social Issues 31:4 (fall 1975): 60–64.
18. Gabriel, Painful Field, p. 30. Nor does this estimate include “deferred” psychiatric casualties suffering from what is now called Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Psychiatrists cite several reasons, incidentally, for the lower level of psychiatric casualties during the Vietnam War, to include the intermittent nature of the fighting; the relative lack of stress from prolonged bombardment; the psychological boost provided by good training, equipment, medical care, and logistical support; improved psychiatric treatment procedures; and last but not least, the hope of reprieve provided by the rotation system. See Bourne, ed., Psychology, pp. xxv–xxvii, 15–16, and 227–228; Bourne, Men, Stress, pp. 74–76; and Jones and Johnson, “Treatment Policy,” pp. 53–54.
19. Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 447. See also the discussion of the “occasional coward” in Jesse Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), pp. 111–112.
20. A survey of Spanish Civil War veterans provides statistical evidence of “transient breakdown.” Sixty-one percent reported that they “lost their heads for a moment, couldn’t control themselves and were useless as soldiers for a little while.” See John Dollard, with Donald Horton, Fear in Battle (New York: AMS Press, 1976), p. 4.
21. George William Sefton, It Was My War: I’ll Remember It the Way I Want To! (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1994), p. 123.
22. Ibid. For other examples of panicking soldiers, see Joseph R. Owen, Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996), p. 58; Charles F. Minder, This Man’s War: The Day-by-Day Record of an American Private on the Western Front (New York: Pevensey Press, 1931), p. 272; and James Hamilton Dill, Sixteen Days at Mungol-li (Fayetteville, Ark.: M&M Press, 1993), pp. 321–322.
23. Roscoe C. Blunt Jr., Inside the Battle of the Bulge: A Private Comes of Age (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), pp. 26–29.
24. James R. McDonough, Platoon Leader (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), p. 122. For other examples of transient breakdown, see Gerald P. Averill, Mustang: A Combat Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1987), pp. 113–114; Henry Berry, Hey, Mac, Where Ya Been? Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in the Korean War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 103–104; Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfred Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory: The Concluding Volume of an Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 498; and Richard D. Camp, with Eric Hammel, Lima-6: A Marine Company Commander in Vietnam (New York: Pocket Books, 1989), pp. 130–131.
25. Ralph G. Martin, The G.I. War, 1941–1945 (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 339.
26. John H. W. Rhein, “Neuropsychiatric Problems at the Front During Combat,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 14:1–2 (April–June 1919): 11. For similar assessments, see Sidney I. Schwab, “The Mechanism of the War Neuroses,” ibid., pp. 3–4, and Lord Charles McM. Moran, The Anatomy of Courage (Garden City Park, N.Y.: Avery Publishing, 1987), p. 69.
27. Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War (York, Pa.: Strength and Health Publishing, 1940), p. 319.
28. Joseph D. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier: The A.E.F. in 1918 (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1985), pp. 116–117.
29. Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 138. See also Dave Grossman’s discussion of “the well of fortitude” in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), pp. 83–86.
30. Frederick W. Parsons, “War Neuroses,” Atlantic Monthly 123:4 (March 1919): 337. See also the discussion of “last straws” by the World War I psychiatrist John F. W. Meagher, in “Prominent Features of the Psychoneuroses in the War,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 158:3 (September 1919): 347.
31. Roy L. Swank and Walter E. Marchand, “Combat Neuroses: Development of Combat Exhaustion,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 55:3 (March 1946): 241. See also the case studies in Grinker and Spiegel, War Neuroses, pp. 11, 16, 17, 29, 35, and 104, in which a “last straw,” usually artillery fire or an air attack, triggered a breakdown.
32. Raymond Sobel, “The ‘Old Sergeant’ Syndrome,” Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and the Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 10:3 (August 1947): 320. See also Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, pp. 49–52, and the survey of World War II combat soldiers discharged for psychiatric reasons in Eli Ginzberg, James K. Anderson, Sol W. Ginsburg, John L. Herma, and John B. Miner, The Ineffective Soldier: Lessons for Management and the Nation, 3 vols, Patterns of Performance (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1959), 3: 71–88. This survey lends credence to Sobel’s “old sergeant syndrome.” While some soldiers broke early in combat, others had served satisfactorily for a long time before breaking, had attained corporal’s rank or higher, had often been decorated for valor or for wounds in combat, and had served a year or more overseas before breaking down.
33. Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (Houston: Paul M. Boesch, 1985), pp. 167–168.
34. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 308. For an excellent fictional example of a World War II combatant who couldn’t take it anymore, see the case of Sergeant Porter in Harry Brown, A Walk in the Sun (New York: Knopf, 1944), pp. 10, 16, 78–79, 101, 117–121, 123–124, and 132–133. For other World War II examples, see Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 237; Leon C. Standifer, Not in Vain: A Rifleman Remembers World War II (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), pp. 91 and 205; and George Wilson, If You Survive (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 91.
35. Randell interview in Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 123. For another Korean War example, see James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), p. 112.
36. For a discussion of the reasons for a reduction in the occurrence of classic combat fatigue during the Vietnam War, see the sources cited in note 18. For a discussion of declining psychiatric casualty rates in the latter part of the Korean War, see Donald B. Peterson, “The Psychiatric Operation, Army Forces, Far East, 1950–53,” American Journal of Psychiatry 112:1 (July 1955): 23–28. Peterson cites improved psychiatric care and facilities as the war progressed as a major factor in reduced casualty rates. See also Glass, introduction, in Bourne, ed., Psychology, pp. xxii–xxiii. Glass notes the beneficial effects of reduced combat intensity and the rotation system in lowering the incidence of genuine combat fatigue during the Korean War.
37. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), pp. 190–191. For other Vietnam War examples, see Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders, with Clark Smith, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), pp. 134–135; William D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1983), p. 235; Michael Lee Lanning, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), pp. 269–270; and Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), pp. 96–97.
38. Swank and Marchand, “Combat Neuroses,” pp. 240–241.
39. John W. Appel and Gilbert W. Beebe, “Preventive Psychiatry: An Epidemiological Approach,” Journal of the American Medical Association 131:18 (August 31, 1946): 1470. See also David G. Mandelbaum, “Psychiatry in Military Society,” two-part series, part 1, Human Organization 13:3 (fall 1954): 8.
40. Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 2, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 452–453.
41. These short, violent island campaigns, however, should not be allowed to overshadow the campaigns in New Guinea and the Philippines, which were long and arduous, generating cases of combat fatigue in “old sergeants” not unlike those occurring in Europe. For an example of old-timers in the Sixth Infantry Division cracking up after months of fighting in the Philippines, see Gerald Astor, Crisis in the Pacific: The Battles for the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1996), p. 417.
42. Averill, Mustang, p. 120. One of Averill’s platoon sergeants broke down after several days on Iwo Jima (pp. 120–121); after about a week of combat, the marine rifle company he was in was down to 50 percent strength (p. 124).
43. Allen R. Matthews, The Assault (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. 1.
44. Meagher, “Prominent Features,” p. 346. For discussions of the World War II soldier’s tendency to break down early on, see Bartemeier et al., “Combat Exhaustion,” part 1, 377; Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, p. 996; and Swank and Marchand, “Combat Neuroses,” pp. 241–242.
45. Ernie Pyle, Brave Men (New York: Henry Holt, 1944), p. 189. For a case study of a GI who broke down even before reaching combat, see Grinker and Spiegel, War Neuroses, pp. 17–18.
46. Lester Atwell, Private (New York: Popular Library, 1958), p. 166. For early breakdowns in combat, see the cases of Lieutenant Millbank (p. 73) and litter bearer Cornell (pp. 194–196). For fictional examples of early GI breakdowns, see the cases of Sergeant Stack in James Jones, The Thin Red Line (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), p. 113, and Hennessey in Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Signet Books, 1948), pp. 32–34.
47. Clark interview in Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, pp. 164–165. For other examples of suicide, or attempted suicide, to avoid combat, see Carl M. Becker and Robert G. Thobaben, Common Warfare: Parallel Memoirs by Two World War II GIs in the Pacific (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1992), p. 51; Astor, Crisis, p. 347; and Bergerud, Touched with Fire, pp. 450–451.
48. Based on a study of 200 soldiers referred for neuropsychiatric evaluation in Vietnam, 23 percent were in the first month of their tour of duty and almost half were within the first four months. See Gary L. Tischler, “Patterns of Psychiatric Attrition and Behavior in the Combat Zone,” in Bourne, ed., Psychology, p. 25.
49. Matthew Brennan, Brennan’s War: Vietnam, 1965–1969 (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 224.
50. Ibid., p. 227. See also the case of Rayburn, in Albert French, Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), pp. 33 and 133.
51. Combat veterans surveyed in the Italian campaign in World War II by the Research Branch verify the adverse effects of seeing fellow soldiers crack up. Seventy percent reported that it made them nervous, depressed, or demoralized (see Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 208–209).
52. McDonough, Platoon Leader, p. 18.
53. Wilson, If You Survive, pp. 41 and 38.
54. Military psychiatrists are virtually unanimous in emphasizing the importance of external, or “situational,” factors in causing breakdown, but most also believe that personal factors affect how well a soldier can cope with these external stresses. For discussions of “predisposition” toward breakdown, see Bartemeier et al., “Combat Exhaustion,” part 1, p. 373; Schwab, “Mechanism,” p. 4; S. Kirson Weinberg, “The Combat Neuroses,” American Journal of Sociology 51:5 (March 1946): 468–471; and Edwin A. Weinstein, “The Function of Interpersonal Relations in the Neurosis of Combat,” Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 10:3 (August 1947): 310–313.
55. The Research Branch examined the background of maladjusted soldiers (psychiatric cases and AWOLs) and found these characteristics to be in greater evidence than in well-adjusted soldiers. See Samuel A. Stouffer, Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. DeVinney, Shirley A. Star, and Robin M. Williams Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 1, The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 112–147. For similar findings, with an emphasis on intelligence and education levels as being especially important in effective soldiering, see Ginzberg et al., Lost Divisions, 1:104–125, and Patterns of Performance, 3: 89–116.
56. In addition to the studies cited in note 65, see Robert L. Egbert, Tor Meeland, Victor B. Cline, Edward W. Forgy, Martin W. Spickler, and Charles Brown, Fighter I: An Analysis of Combat Fighters and Non-Fighters, Human Resources Research Office Technical Report 44, December 1957, p. 26. See also Mandelbaum, “Military Society,” part 1, p. 7; Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston, The Hague, and London: Kluwer, Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 62–65 and 310–311; Peter Watson, War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 138–148; and Anne Hoiberg, “Military Staying Power,” in Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military, ed. Sam C. Sarkesian (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1980), pp. 214–218.
57. Egbert et al., Fighter I, p. 26.
58. Atwell, Private, p. 115.
59. Ibid., p. 324. See also the case of “H. R.” in Standifer, Not in Vain, pp. 92–93, 137–138, and 178–179.
60. Gray, Warriors, pp. 114–115. See also Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), p. 81.
61. William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 391.
62. Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, The Men of Company K (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p. 169; for another early breakdown, see p. 223. For a fictional example of a bully and braggart who broke down and fled in his first fight, see the case of Private Irv Donaldson, in William Young Boyd, The Gentle Infantryman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 170–172, 183, 211, and 216.
63. Standifer, Not in Vain, pp. 102 and 164.
64. Fourteen out of every 1,000 inductees, totaling 68,000, were rejected for service during World War I for emotional or mental reasons, which did not preclude another 9 out of every 1,000 doughboys being separated from service for emotional or mental reasons (35,000 men). Screening was even more vigorous during World War II, with 94 out of every 1,000 inductees rejected (1,686,000), yet the separation rate for GIs with emotional or mental instability was 50 out of every 1,000, for a total of 504,000. These numbers lend credence to claims that screening cannot accurately identify those men who are “predisposed” to breaking down (see Ginzberg et al., Lost Divisions, Table 37, 1:145).
65. The chief psychiatrist of the AEF, Thomas W. Salmon, warned that “even after a careful selection, with the elimination of many psychopathic, mentally defective, and unstable men,” American divisions “were capable of furnishing a large number of war neurotics under battle conditions” (Salmon and Fenton, Neuropsychiatry, p. 306). Despite this warning, psychiatrists put great faith in psychological screening during the early months of World War II, and as the statistics in note 64 indicate, this faith was misplaced. The most comprehensive critique of the screening process (educational and psychological) in World War II can be found in Ginzberg et al., Lost Divisions, 1:137–193. See also Braceland, “Psychiatric Lessons,” pp. 589–590; William C. Menninger, “Psychiatric Experience in the War, 1941–1946,” American Journal of Psychiatry 103:5 (March 1947): 582; and Albert N. Mayers, “Dug-out Psychiatry,” Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and the Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 8:4 (November 1945): 387–388. Psychiatric screening during the Vietnam War also suffered from various deficiencies: shifting evaluation criteria, inadequate numbers of screeners, and insufficient time for more than a superficial evaluation. See Robert Paul Liberman, Stephen M. Sonnenberg, and Melvin S. Stern, “Psychiatric Evaluations for Young Men Facing the Draft: A Report of 147 Cases,” American Journal of Psychiatry 128:2 (August 1971): 147–152.
66. One of the best descriptions of these factors, in layman’s terms, can be found in Ginzberg et al., Breakdown and Recovery, chapter 1, “The Determinants of Performance,” 2:1–12. A soldier’s effectiveness depends on the interaction of psychological, organizational, and situational “determinants”—in other words, a mix of personal and environmental factors.
67. Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War: The Story of G.I. Joe (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1945), p. 266.
68. Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, p. 100. See also Weinstein, “Neurosis of Combat,” p. 308.
69. Meagher, “Prominent Features,” p. 346. See also Salmon and Fenton, Neuropsychiatry, p. 310, and Moran, Anatomy, pp. 78–87.
70. Grinker and Spiegel, War Neuroses, p. 68. For other discussions of the contributing role of physical factors in breakdowns, see John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), pp. 199–204; Grossman, On Killing, pp. 67–73; Shay, Achilles, pp. 121–124; and Bartemeier et al., “Combat Exhaustion,” part 1, p. 367.
71. See, for example, Morris Janowitz and Roger W. Little, Sociology and the Military Establishment, 3d ed. (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1974), p. 105.
72. Samuel L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1978), p. 78. See also Grossman, On Killing, pp. 52–54. Grossman, like Marshall, discounts fear of death as a primary cause of breakdown in favor of “resistance to overt aggressive confrontation” (p. 54).
73. For case studies of soldiers who broke down primarily because of anxiety and guilt over killing, see Bartemeier et al., “Combat Exhaustion,” part 1, p. 379, and Grinker and Spiegel, War Neuroses, pp. 30 and 33–35.
74. Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, p. 995.
75. Appel and Beebe, “Preventive Psychiatry,” p. 1469. For further support for this position, see Tischler, “Psychiatric Attrition,” in Bourne, ed., Psychology, p. 20; Kurt Lang, Military Institutions and the Sociology of War: A Review of the Literature, with Annotated Bibliography (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1972), pp. 76–77; Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 77–78 and 445–455; Kilpatrick and Grater, “Field Report,” p. 809; and Ingraham and Manning, “Battle Casualties,” p. 23.
76. Pyle, Brave Men, p. 103.
77. Rudolph W. Stephens, Old Ugly Hill: A G.I.’s Fourteen Months in the Korean Trenches, 1952–1953 (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1995), p. 63. See also pp. 67 and 78.
78. Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 112.
79. Lyle Rishell, With a Black Platoon in Combat: A Year in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), p. 80.
80. One of the major findings of John Dollard’s survey of Spanish Civil War veterans was that “fear is a normal experience in battle. Experienced men admit it and are not ashamed.” Seventy-four percent of those surveyed experienced fear in their initial combat, and 91 percent were “always” or “sometimes” afraid in subsequent actions. And what the veteran soldiers feared was being killed, crippled or disfigured for life, or captured and tortured (see Fear in Battle, pp. 4–5 and 18–19). The Research Branch in World War II concluded that “from the standpoint of the individual soldier, it is primarily the danger of death or injury which makes the combat situation so harassing an experience. . . . The threats of being maimed, of undergoing unbearable pain, and of being completely annihilated elicit intense reactions which may severely interfere with successful performances” (Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 192).
81. For summarizing lists or discussions of the multiple stress-producing factors that could contribute to soldier breakdown, see Brian H. Chermol, “Wounds Without Scars: Treatment of Battle Fatigue in the U.S. Armed Forces in the Second World War,” Military Affairs 49:1 (January 1985): 27–29; Bartemeier et al., “Combat Exhaustion,” part 1, pp. 366–368; Albert J. Glass, “Psychotherapy in the Combat Zone,” American Journal of Psychiatry 110:10 (April 1954): 727–728; Ellis, Sharp End, pp. 212–215; and Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 76–95.
82. For a discussion of survivors’ guilt, see Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 99–133. In his book, Lifton expands the concept of survivors’ guilt into “animating guilt,” encompassing guilt over killing or committing atrocities, and even guilt over fighting in a “wrong” war. For a more circumscribed discussion of survivors’ guilt in combat, see Shay, Achilles, pp. 69–75. See also Weinstein, “Neurosis of Combat,” p. 311.
83. Dan Levin, From the Battlefield: Dispatches of a World War II Marine (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. 81.
84. French, Patches of Fire, p. 143.
85. For a discussion of discontinuity, see Kellett, Combat Motivation, pp. 278–279.
86. Bourne, Men, Stress, p. 86.
87. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987), pp. 112–113. Michael Herr, who flew in and out of combat with some regularity as a war correspondent in Vietnam, also describes the emotional shock of discontinuity. See Dispatches (New York: Avon Books, 1978), pp. 79–80.
88. Blunt, Inside, pp. 117–118.
89. Ginzberg et al., Breakdown and Recovery, 2:127–132.
90. David Rothschild, “Review of Neuropsychiatric Cases in the Southwest Pacific Area,” American Journal of Psychiatry 102:4 (January 1946): 458. Indeed, the Southwest Pacific Area in World War II may be the one theater of war in which physical hardship and deprivation proved to be the major, rather than just a contributing, factor in psychological breakdown. See Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, p. 995.
91. Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, p. 157. For another example, follow the experiences of Captain Hyman Samuelson and his outfit, the Ninety-sixth Engineers. Samuelson served in New Guinea from April 1942 through September 1944. Except for the early part of this period, the enemy threat was low, but Samuelson records numerous breakdowns and suicides in his regiment because of location stress. See Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (Colored): The World War II New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 139, 217–218, 234, 241–242, and 252.
92. Westberg interview in Donald Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 477.
93. Brady, Coldest War, p. 114.
94. PIES and battle fatigue are discussed in U.S. Department of the Army Field Manual 8-51, Combat Stress in a Theater of Operations: Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, final approved draft, May 1994), chapter 1, “Control of Combat Stress,” pp. 1-1 to 1-16. See also Gabriel’s discussion of treatment techniques in Painful Field, pp. 145–148.
95. This official policy, promulgated on September 25, 1918, is contained in Salmon and Fenton, Neuropsychiatry, pp. 308–309. See also the discussion of treatment at the division-psychiatrist level on pp. 313–318. World War I psychiatrists confirm the validity of this policy. See Parsons, “War Neuroses,” pp. 337–338; Rhein, “Neuropsychiatric Problems,” pp. 10–13; Schwab, “Mechanism,” pp. 6–7; and Tom A. Williams, “The Emotions and Their Mechanism in Warfare,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 14:1–2 (April–June 1919): 24–25. For a good overview of the treatment of neuroses in the AEF, see Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), chapter 12, “The Treatment of ‘Shellshock’ Cases in the AEF: A Microcosm of the War Welfare State,” pp. 199–212.
96. For the failure to learn, or remember, the lessons of World War I concerning the treatment of combat neuroses, see Lawrence Ingraham and Frederick Manning, “American Military Psychiatry,” in Military Psychiatry: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Richard A. Gabriel (New York, London, and Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 33–48; Glass, introduction, in Bourne, ed., Psychology, pp. xv–xxii; and Menninger, “Psychiatric Experience,” p. 583 (see the World War II references in note 65 for a discussion of the failure of psychological screening).
97. Menninger, “Psychiatric Experience,” p. 581.
98. See the discussion of treatment techniques for World War II battle fatigue in Bartemeier et al., “Combat Exhaustion,” part 2, pp. 489–506; Braceland, “Psychiatric Lessons,” pp. 591–592; and Grinker and Spiegel, War Neuroses, pp. 75–77.
99. Albert J. Glass, “Principles of Combat Psychiatry,” Military Medicine 117:1 (July 1955): 27.
100. Ibid., pp. 31–33. See Jones and Johnson, “Treatment Policy,” pp. 58–59, for the application of these treatment principles during the Vietnam War.
101. Recovery rates again raise the sticky issue of statistics. What constitutes recovery? Some soldiers were returned to combat but broke down again. Others “recovered,” but were fit only for noncombat duty. Statistics on recovery are thus suspect, but they clearly show that a substantial number of soldiers, perhaps a majority, were returned to some form of useful duty after suffering a breakdown, at least once an adequate treatment infrastructure had been established. See the statistics in Strecker, “Military Psychiatry,” pp. 410–411; Menninger, “Psychiatric Experience,” pp. 579 and 581; Peterson, “Psychiatric Operation,” pp. 25–27; and Jones and Johnson, “Treatment Policy,” pp. 61–64.
102. Parsons, “War Neuroses,” pp. 337–338.
103. Glass, “Principles,” p. 31.
104. The symptoms of battle fatigue varied widely and tended to reflect expected or accepted characteristics of breakdown, depending on the current terminology. For overviews of symptomology, see Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 265–269, and Gabriel, Painful Field, pp. 37–43.
105. Salmon and Fenton, Neuropsychiatry, p. 306.
106. Glass, “Psychotherapy,” p. 726. Overevacuation was also a problem in the Pacific early in World War II. See Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, p. 628. For overevacuation problems in the Third Marine Division during the Vietnam War, see Kilpatrick and Grater, “Field Report.” Kilpatrick notes, incidentally, that the army’s psychiatric treatment apparatus was more robust, and that overevacuation was apparently not a problem (p. 801).
107. Ginzberg et al., Patterns of Performance, 3:138, 152–153. See also Grinker and Spiegel’s discussion of “conversion symptoms” in hospitalized soldiers in their War Neuroses, pp. 125–126. The evacuation and hospitalization of a psychiatric casualty did not mean that he automatically stopped thinking about the comrades he left behind. Military psychiatrists note the hospitalized patient’s continued struggle between his desire for selfpreservation and his sense of duty. Some patients condemned themselves as quitters, suffered survivors’ guilt, or feared the loss of honor that a “psycho” discharge might bring. In some cases, psychiatric patients claimed, in all sincerity, that they were ready to return to their units but were in no condition to do so. See Meagher, “Prominent Features,” pp. 348–349; Bartemeier et al., “Combat Exhaustion,” part 1, p. 383; Weinberg, “Combat Neurosis,” p. 474; and Grinker and Spiegel, War Neuroses, pp. 32–37.
108. Rhein, “Neuropsychiatric Problems,” p. 12. See also Parsons, “War Neuroses,” p. 337. Hospitalized soldiers during the Vietnam War were also susceptible to the hold of the hospital: “The disabling psychiatric symptoms of wounded soldiers . . . usually developed after hospitalization; or, if present when hospitalized, the symptoms persisted or became more severe, requiring neuropsychiatric consultation” (Jones and Johnson, “Treatment Policy,” p. 54).
109. For example, of the 8,057 World War II combat veterans in the Ginzberg study who were discharged from the army as psychologically unfit, 1,140 of them had recovered from physical wounds, had returned to combat, but were then rehospitalized for psychiatric disability. See Ginzberg et al., Patterns of Performance, 3:138.
110. Murphy, To Hell and Back, p. 259. For another example of a returning officer, recovered from a wound, who promptly broke down, see Wilson, If You Survive, pp. 139–140.
111. Amos N. Wilder, Armageddon Revisited: A World War I Journal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 129 and 134.
112. Paul Fussell, “My War: How I Got Irony in the Infantry,” Harper’s 264:1580 (January 1982): 44–45.
113. Saddic interview in Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 166.
114. Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 210.
115. Brannen, Over There, p. 17. See also Minder, This Man’s War, pp. 189 and 310.
116. Klaus H. Huebner, Long Walk Through War: A Combat Doctor’s Diary (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), p. 50. Private Lester Atwell, who worked in a battalion aid station in World War II, also noted the near-impossibility of determining intent, but he knew that most such wounds were deliberate: “In Tillet, a wave of self-inflicted wounds broke out. Time after time, men were carried into the aid station from nearby houses, wincing in pain, shot through the foot. Each swore it was an accident. . . . The circumstances were almost always the same: the man was alone in a room, or a foxhole, and at most in the presence of his best friend; there would be the one shot, the cry for help, the wound always through the foot” (Atwell, Private, pp. 185–186).
117. A 1944 Research Branch survey of GIs in the Southwest Pacific Area revealed that 10 percent believed (incorrectly) that a case of malaria would get them evacuated to the States (see Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, p. 176).
118. Atwell, Private, p. 161. See also pp. 186–187. For other examples from the world wars of self-inflicted wounds, see Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 147–149; Lawrence, Fighting Soldier, p. 91; Atwell, Private, pp. 61–62; Nat Frankel and Larry Smith, Patton’s Best: An Informal History of the 4th Armored Division (New York: Jove Book, 1984), p. 94; and Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 44 and 67.
119. Atkins interview in Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 95.
120. Anderson interviewed in Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), p. 73. For other examples of self-inflicted wounds in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, see p. 156, and also Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 123, and James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), pp. 274–275.
121. The first study was conducted by the Eighty-fifth Infantry Division psychiatrist from September to November 1944 and can be found in Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, pp. 85–87. The second was a survey conducted by the Research Branch sociologist Arnold M. Rose in March 1945, the results of which are discussed in his article, “The Social Psychology of Desertion from Combat,” American Sociological Review 16:5 (October 1951): 614–629.
122. Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, pp. 86–87.
123. These characteristics of deserters are drawn from the two studies cited in note 121.
124. Newman interview in Berry, Hey, Mac, p. 237. Eugene B. Sledge voiced a similar opinion in his interview with Studs Terkel in Good War, p. 60.
125. Weinberg, “Combat Neurosis,” p. 473.
126. Ibid. The variation in soldier responses to fellow grunts who wounded themselves during the Vietnam War, for example, was diverse enough for two students of grunt behavior to come to different conclusions on the subject. Christian G. Appy explains that at least until late in the war, a self-inflicted wound was considered “an understandable but cowardly escape and a betrayal of the group” (Working-Class War: American Soldiers and Vietnam [Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993], p. 244). Conversely, James R. Ebert has concluded that “soldiers generally treated self-inflicted wounds as none of their business,” and he relates examples of grunts who did not turn in comrades for inflicting wounds on themselves (A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965–1972 [Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993], p. 224).
127. Rose, “Psychology of Desertion,” p. 627. He adds, “This, of course, would not apply to the few AWOL’s who ran away before the strain of combat is intense or long,”
128. Suarez interview in Rudy Tomedi, No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993), p. 95.
129. Hubenette interview in Knox, Uncertain Victory, pp. 60–61.
130. Atwell, Private, p. 187.
131. Chadwick interview in Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 451. For other examples of soldiers who were ridiculed or distrusted for inflicting wounds on themselves, see Boyd, Gentle Infantryman, pp. 166–167; Sefton, It Was My War, pp. 101–102; and Pat Frank, Hold Back the Night (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1952), pp. 128–129.
132. Brockway interview in Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, p. 363.
133. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 42.
134. Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 200.
135. Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 120.
136. Howard Matthias, The Korean War—Reflections of a Young Combat Platoon Leader, rev. ed. (Tallahassee, Fla.: Father and Son Publishing, 1995), p. 55; for another example, see Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 186.
137. Levin, Battlefield, p. 70.
138. Blunt, Inside, p. 29.
CHAPTER 7. THE JOYS OF WAR
1. Samuel L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1978), p. 184. Unfortunately, except for reference to the thrill of danger and a discussion of GI humor, Marshall did not elaborate on his caveat. See also Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 28–29, and the discussion of war’s “powerful fascination” in Jesse Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), p. 28.
2. Of the students of soldier behavior, Jesse Glenn Gray provides the most complete analysis of war’s redeeming qualities and appeals, which he calls war’s “three delights” (Warriors, pp. 28–58).
3. William Broyles Jr., “Why Men Love War,” Esquire 102:5 (November 1984): 58. See also Gray, Warriors, p. 44; Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), p. 398; and John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), pp. 305–309 and 317–319.
4. Francis P. Duffy, Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, of Life and Death with the Fighting Sixty-ninth (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1919), p. 325. See also the Win Stracke interview in Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 159.
5. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 323.
6. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. xvii. See also Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders, with Clark Smith, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), p. 60.
7. Leon C. Standifer, Not in Vain: A Rifleman Remembers World War II (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), p. 246.
8. Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (Houston: Paul M. Boesch, 1985), p. 226.
9. Charles M. Bussey, Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1991), p. 184.
10. James Martin Davis, “Vietnam: What It Was Really Like,” Military Review 69:1 (January 1989): 39–40.
11. Dominick Yezzo, A G.I.’s Vietnam Diary, 1968–1969 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974), December 6 entry. See also Fred Reed, “A Veteran Writes,” sidebar in Peter Marin, “Coming to Terms with Vietnam,” Harper’s 261:1567 (December 1980): 44; John Ketwig, And a Hard Rain Fell (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 43; and Michael Lee Lanning, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 147.
12. Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, p. 23. See the case of Arthur W. Little, From Harlem to the Rhine: The Story of New York’s Colored Volunteers (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936), p. 180.
13. Richard M. Hardison, Caissons Across Europe: An Artillery Captain’s Personal War (Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 1990), p. 167.
14. Broyles, “Men Love War,” p. 58. See also Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 69–70, for a discussion of the marines’ sense of “release from societal strictures.”
15. John L. Munschauer, World War II Cavalcade: An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1996), p. 111.
16. Gray, Warriors, p. 31 (“lust of the eye” appears on p. 30). See also Holmes, Acts of War, p. 273, and Broyles, “Men Love War,” p. 62.
17. Elton E. Mackin, Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die: Memoirs of a World War I Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), p. 41.
18. [Howard V. O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War: A Diary of Disillusionment (New York: J. H. Sears, 1926), p. 70.
19. Little, Harlem, p. 272.
20. Howard Matthias, The Korean War—Reflections of a Young Combat Platoon Leader, rev. ed. (Tallahassee, Fla.: Father and Son Publishing, 1995), p. 79. Matthias, like most soldiers, was also fascinated by the spectacle of aerial warfare. See p. 124.
21. James Jones, WW II: A Chronicle of Soldiering (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), pp. 38–39. Robert Leckie also describes watching, with fascination, the naval battles off Guadalcanal. See Helmet For My Pillow (Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1979), p. 110.
22. Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War: The Story of G.I. Joe (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1945), p. 14. Pyle reported other instances of lust of the eye in his second wartime book, Brave Men (New York: Henry Holt, 1944). See his description of a nighttime naval bombardment (pp. 25–26) and the shelling of an enemy position (p. 81).
23. Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), pp. 104–105.
24. Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Avon Books, 1978), p. 160. For further examples of lust of the eye, see Robert G. Merrick, World War I: A Diary (Baltimore: privately published, 1982), p. 100; Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War (York, Pa.: Strength and Health Publishing, 1940), pp. 97 and 198–199; Charles F. Minder, This Man’s War: The Day-by-Day Record of an American Private on the Western Front (New York: Pevensey Press, 1931), pp. 64 and 296; Roscoe C. Blunt Jr., Inside the Battle of the Bulge: A Private Comes of Age (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 23; Nat Frankel and Larry Smith, Patton’s Best: An Informal History of the 4th Armored Division (New York: Jove Book, 1984), p. 17; Allen R. Matthews, The Assault (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. 158; Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Random House, 1943), pp. 99–100 and 220–222; Richard Tregaskis, Invasion Diary (New York: Random House, 1944), pp. 170–172; George Wilson, If You Survive (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 119; Lyle Rishell, With a Black Platoon in Combat: A Year in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), pp. 53–54; and Ketwig, Hard Rain, pp. 157–158.
25. Duffy, Story, pp. 43–44.
26. Mark Meigs describes the AEF’s effort to sponsor doughboy tourism in Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1997), chapter 3, “‘From a hayloft to a hotel where kings have spent their summers’: Americans’ Encounter with French Culture,” pp. 69–106. See also David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 205–209.
27. Rasmus interview in Terkel, Good War, p. 39. For other young soldiers impressed with their first view of the world, see Carl M. Becker and Robert G. Thobaben, Common Warfare: Parallel Memoirs by Two World War II GIs in the Pacific (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1992), pp. 122–123, and Leckie, Helmet, p. 45.
28. David Parks, G.I. Diary (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 51.
29. Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), p. 90.
30. Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 219.
31. Cuthbertson letter quoted in Frank Freidel, Over There: The Story of America’s First Great Overseas Crusade, rev. and abridged ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 121.
32. Jones, WW II, pp. 184–185.
33. Janice Holt Giles, ed., The G.I. Journal of Sergeant Giles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1965), p. 296.
34. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 254. See also Richard E. Ogden, Green Knight, Red Mourning (New York: Zebra Books, 1985), p. 218.
35. Gray, Warriors, p. 51.
36. Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 262–263.
37. Charles R. Cawthon, Other Clay: A Remembrance of the World War II Infantry (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1990), p. 128.
38. For a discussion of the soldiers’ love of weaponry and the sense of power thus derived, see Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 263–264; Broyles, “Men Love War,” p. 62; and Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), pp. 134–137.
39. Hanley interview in Terkel, Good War, p. 273. A similar though fictional example is found in Harry Brown, A Walk in the Sun (New York: Knopf, 1944), p. 153.
40. Ralph Zumbro, Tank Sergeant (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1986), p. 98.
41. Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 135. See also pp. 172–176, 184, and 187, and the example in William D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1983), pp. 70–71.
42. The historian Ronald Schaffer found this ambiguity in doughboys’ memoirs: “As one reads what they wrote about the war, one notices that many of the front-line soldiers developed conflicting feelings about it and about the part in it that they had played. The idea that the experience had been awful appears again and again, but they were glad they had gone through it and would not have missed it for anything” (America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], p. 172).
43. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. xvi. See also p. 68.
44. James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), p. 260.
45. Prendergast interview in Terkel, Good War, p. 58.
46. Will Judy, A Soldier’s Diary: A Day-to-Day Record in the World War (Chicago: Judy Publishing, 1931), p. 216.
47. Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, p. 203.
48. Matthias, Reflections, p. 225.
49. Gray, Warriors, pp. 55 and 125.
50. See Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 169–170, and Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 280–282. See also the discussion of combat soldier “drivers” versus “passengers,” in Elmar Dinter, Hero or Coward: Pressures Facing the Soldier in Battle (London and Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1985), pp. 19–21; the fighter–nonfighter motivational “continuum” in Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston, The Hague, and London: Kluwer, Nijhoff, 1982), p. 334; the discussion of “killer-angels” in Peter S. Kindsvatter, “Cowards, Comrades and Killer Angels: The Soldier in Literature,” Parameters 20:2 (June 1990): 43–48; and soldier “sheep” versus “sheep dogs” in Grossman, On Killing, pp. 183–185.
51. Gwynne Dyer, War (New York: Crown Publishers, 1985), pp. 117–118.
52. Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, The Men of Company K (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), pp. 304–305. See also the case of Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987), p. 147.
53. Jones, WW II, p. 40.
54. James Jones, The Thin Red Line (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), p. 205.
55. Fife names the characters of Witt, Doll, Bell, and Dale, who are classic fictional case studies of soldier-adventurers (ibid., p. 315).
56. Ent interview in Rudy Tomedi, No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993), p. 22.
57. Cawthon, Other Clay, p. 141. Samuel L. A. Marshall came to the same conclusion after studying numerous small-unit actions during World War II: “I came to see . . . that the great victories of the United States have pivoted on the acts of courage and intelligence of a very few individuals” (Men Under Fire, p. 208).
58. Pyle, Brave Men, p. 71.
59. The accuracy of statistics on psychiatric casualties is questionable, for the reasons discussed in chapter 6, but psychotics exhibited distinct symptoms and usually required medical evacuation and discharge from the service; hence, the statistics on the occurrence of psychoses are probably more accurate than for other types of psychiatric casualties. The rate of U.S. Army overseas hospital admissions for psychoses during World War II was 2.8 cases out of 40.2 cases per 1,000 soldiers for all types of neuropsychiatric disorders. See Table 87 in Albert J. Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry in World War II, Medical Department, U.S. Army, Office of the Surgeon General, 2 vols., Overseas Theaters (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 2:1006. Similar low but constant rates of psychosis occurred during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. See Donald B. Peterson, “The Psychiatric Operation, Army Forces, Far East, 1950–1953,” American Journal of Psychiatry 112:1 (July 1955): 27, and Franklin Del Jones and Arnold W. Johnson Jr., “Medical and Psychiatric Treatment Policy and Practice in Vietnam,” Journal of Social Issues 31:4 (fall 1975): 62–63.
60. Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel, War Neuroses (Philadelphia and London: Blakiston, 1945), pp. 44–45.
61. Ibid. See also Gray’s discussion of the “soldier-killer” in Warriors, pp. 56–57.
62. Jones, WW II, p. 67. Norman Mailer provides an intricate portrayal of a World War II psychotic, Sergeant Samuel Croft. Croft loved killing, considered himself invincible, resented and distrusted his superiors, and did not care about anyone but himself. See The Naked and the Dead (New York: Signet Books, 1948), pp. 18, 26, 50, 124–128, 149–155, 342, 346, 411–415, and 466–472.
63. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 29. See also Herr’s description of the psychotic Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) soldier “Ocean Eyes” in Dispatches, pp. 5–7.
64. Robert L. Egbert, Tor Meeland, Victor B. Cline, Edward W. Forgy, Martin W. Spickler, and Charles Brown, Fighter I: An Analysis of Combat Fighters and Non-fighters, Human Resources Research Office Technical Report 44, December 1957, pp. 4 and 26–31. This study is unique in looking at combat soldiers in the midst of a war, but surveys of GIs in a regiment of the Seventieth Division in World War II, conducted before the unit went to combat and again at war’s end, revealed a similar set of characteristics for soldiers rated “above average” in combat performance by their junior leaders: confidence in their skills, lower anxiety levels, willingness to kill as part of the job, and intelligence. See Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 2, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 30–37.
65. Egbert et al., Fighter I, pp. 5 and 7.
66. Ross S. Carter, Those Devils in Baggy Pants (New York and Toronto: Signet Books, 1951), p. 31.
67. Childress interview in Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), p. 63.
68. Ent interview in Tomedi, No Bugles, p. 19.
69. Broyles, “Men Love War,” p. 58. See also Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, p. 28.
70. Brady, Coldest War, p. 147.
71. Martin Russ, The Last Parallel: A Marine’s War Journal (New York and Toronto: Rinehart, 1957), p. 216.
72. Lanning, Only War, p. 208. See also pp. 178 and 221–222.
73. Matthew Brennan, Brennan’s War: Vietnam 1965–1969 (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 35.
74. Ibid., p. 182. For fictional examples of soldiers who were good fighters and reveled in it, see the case of “Snake” in James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), pp. 20 and 233; Joe Sumeric, in William Young Boyd, The Gentle Infantryman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 82–85, 91, 167–168, 189, and 321; and Charlie Dale, in Jones, Thin Red Line, pp. 182, 189–190, and 363–364.
75. James Hamilton Dill, Sixteen Days at Mungol-li (Fayetteville, Ark.: M&M Press, 1993), p. 147. For a fictional example of a Korean War marine who had “found a home” in the Marine Corps, see the case of Private Nick Tinker, in Pat Frank, Hold Back the Night (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1952), pp. 34–35 and 207–209. Tinker came from a background of abuse and poverty, joined the marines as soon as he turned seventeen, and proved to be loyal and brave.
76. Brennan, Brennan’s War, p. 217. For other examples of Vietnam War soldiers who escaped unhappy home lives and found a new home in the army or marines, see the cases of Billy Cizinski and Bob Foley, in Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 66–72.
77. Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, p. 28.
78. Jones, Thin Red Line, pp. 79, 341, and 174.
79. Blunt, Inside, p. 77. For instances of paybook collecting, see pp. 38, 50, 125, 131, and 166.
80. Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, pp. 18 and 303.
81. Barr interviewed in Tomedi, No Bugles, pp. 70, 72, and 77.
82. Pyle, Your War, p. 214.
83. Tregaskis, Invasion Diary, p. 201. See also John Sack’s interview in Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (London and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), p. 14, and Herr, Dispatches, pp. 225 and 245.
84. Herr admits to crossing the line between correspondent and soldier and picking up a rifle on occasion. See Dispatches, pp. 67–68. Correspondents were supposed to be unarmed, but some carried unauthorized weapons, especially if they doubted that the enemy would honor their noncombatant status.
CHAPTER 8. CLOSING WITH THE ENEMY
1. Gwynne Dyer, War (New York: Crown, 1985), p. 13.
2. See Elmar Dinter, Hero or Coward: Pressures Facing the Soldier in Battle (London and Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1985), p. 22.
3. Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, with new preface (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), p. 13.
4. Keen provides a catalog of these various “archetypes” (ibid., pp. 16–88).
5. See Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 365–368, and Jesse Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), pp. 131–134.
6. Mark Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1997), p. 22.
7. Will Judy, A Soldier’s Diary: A Day-to-Day Record in the World War (Chicago: Judy Publishing, 1931), p. 73. See also p. 37.
8. Leon C. Standifer, Not in Vain: A Rifleman Remembers World War II (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), p. 19. See also p. 34. “Kill the dirty Japs” was a common sentiment, as evidenced by a Research Branch survey of a group of infantry soldiers conducted while they were still Stateside. What is not clear from the survey is the extent to which military training versus social and propaganda influences instilled these attitudes. See Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 2, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), chart 7, p. 34.
9. See the discussion of troop indoctrination in chapter 5. See also John A. Ballard and Aliecia J. McDowell, “Hate and Combat Behavior,” Armed Forces and Society 17:2 (winter 1991): 229–241, for a review of the literature and research on the role of hatred as a motivator. The authors note that no consensus exists on the value of hatred as a motivating factor in combat.
10. See Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. 252.
11. Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 103.
12. For other discussions of dehumanization as part of the Vietnam-era training process, see Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 105–107; James R. Ebert, A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965–1972 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), pp. 45–52; and R. Wayne Eisenhart, “You Can’t Hack It, Little Girl: A Discussion of the Covert Psychological Agenda of Modern Combat Training,” Journal of Social Issues 31:4 (fall 1975): 18–19.
13. Edwards interview in Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), pp. 5–6.
14. Kirkland interview in ibid., p. 90. See also Ebert, A Life in A Year, pp. 49–51.
15. Grossman, On Killing, pp. 249–260.
16. Brown interview in Mary Penick Motley, The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), p. 271.
17. Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 98. See also p. 130.
18. David Parks, G.I. Diary (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 24. For another example of a Vietnam War soldier who was not sure he was ready to kill, see the case of Sergeant Bill Morgan in Jack Fuller, Fragments (New York: Dell, 1985), pp. 57–58.
19. William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 3–7.
20. Neeley interview in Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 149.
21. Greene interview in Gerald Astor, Crisis in the Pacific: The Battles for the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1996), p. 322. See also the case of paratrooper Rodriguez on pp. 210–211.
22. Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 63. See also Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War (York, Pa.: Strength and Health Publishing, 1940), p. 109.
23. Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 10.
24. For a discussion of self-preservation as a motivator, see Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston, The Hague, and London: Kluwer, Nijhoff, 1982), p. 302, and Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 169.
25. Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, p. 373.
26. Richard E. Ogden, Green Knight, Red Mourning (New York: Zebra Books, 1985), pp. 22 and 237.
27. Ernie Pyle, Here is Your War: The Story of G.I. Joe (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1945), p. 241.
28. Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (Houston: Paul M. Boesch, 1985), pp. 231–232.
29. Parks, G.I. Diary, p. 63.
30. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. xix.
31. See Gray, Warriors, p. 140.
32. Stiles interview in Henry Berry, Semper Fi, Mac: Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in World War II (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 84.
33. Caputo, Rumor of War, pp. 268 and 270.
34. Dinter, Hero or Coward, p. 45. See also the survey in Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 167.
35. Franklyn A. Johnson, One More Hill (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 98. See also the Renstrom interview in Berry, Semper Fi, p. 224.
36. Baker, Nam, p. 72.
37. See Gray, Warriors, p. 51.
38. Hoffman, I Remember, p. 108. Historians have noted that soldier-author accounts of heavy fighting are understandably blurred, sketchy, or surreal. See John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 98–104; John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), pp. 102–105; and John Keegan and Richard Holmes, with John Gau, Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 263. See also the case of Lewis Millett, who won a Congressional Medal of Honor in Korea but remembers only part of what happened and admits to going “berserk.” See his interview in Rudy Tomedi, No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993), p. 110.
39. Joseph D. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier: The A.E.F. in 1918 (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1985), p. 99.
40. John W. Thomason Jr., Fix Bayonets! (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926), p. 17. See also the interview with Sergeant Merritt D. Cutler in Henry Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance: Living Memories of the Doughboy (New York: Priam Books, 1978), pp. 216–217.
41. James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), p. 256.
42. James R. McDonough, Platoon Leader (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), p. 159. For other examples of postcombat elation over surviving, see William Young Boyd, The Gentle Infantryman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 37; Curtis James Morrow, What’s a Commie Ever Done to Black People? A Korean War Memoir of Fighting in the U.S. Army’s Last All Negro Unit (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1997), p. 35; Baker, Nam, p. 71; and Charles R. Cawthon, Other Clay: A Remembrance of the World War II Infantry (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1990), p. 67.
43. George William Sefton, It Was My War: I’ll Remember It the Way I Want To! (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1994), p. 129.
44. See John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 34.
45. Observers of soldiers’ behavior describe a “Frontkämpfer spirit” as common on the western front during the world wars, especially the first war. German and Allied soldiers sympathized with one anothers’ condition—they were the ones suffering and dying, not those in the rear areas and on the home front. See Gray, Warriors, pp. 135–138; Holmes, Acts of War, pp. 367–371; and Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 68–73.
46. Robert G. Merrick, World War I: A Diary (Baltimore: privately published, 1982), p. 20. For other examples, see [Howard V. O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War: A Diary of Disillusionment (New York: J. H. Sears, 1926), p. 79; Judy, Soldier’s Diary, p. 116; and Horatio Rogers, World War I Through My Sights (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1976), pp. 28–29.
47. Roscoe C. Blunt Jr., Inside the Battle of the Bulge: A Private Comes of Age (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 19. See also p. 161. For other examples, see Rasmus interview in Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 44–45; Cawthon, Other Clay, p. 130; Kurt Gabel, The Making of a Paratrooper: Airborne Training and Combat in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), pp. 156–157; Klaus H. Huebner, Long Walk Through War: A Combat Doctor’s Diary (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), p. 75; and Pyle, Your War, pp. 274–277.
48. For examples of German “fair play” in honoring the Red Cross emblem or allowing truces for the recovery of casualties, see Carl Andrew Brannen, Over There: A Marine in the Great War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), pp. 24–25 and 42; Harold L. Bond, Return to Cassino (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), p. 57; Blunt, Inside, p. 69; Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, The Men of Company K (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), pp. 225–226; Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander (Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam Books, 1978), p. 85; and Ralph G. Martin, The G.I. War, 1941–1945 (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 77–78.
49. Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 185–186.
50. Francis P. Duffy, Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, of Life and Death with the Fighting Sixty-ninth (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1919), p. 311.
51. For condemnations of the rapaciousness of the German occupation and withdrawal, see Judy, Soldier’s Diary, pp. 163 and 195; [O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War, pp. 222 and 255; and Rogers, Through My Sights, pp. 193–194.
52. For examples, see Alice M. Hoffman and Howard S. Hoffman, Archives of Memory: A Soldier Recalls World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), p. 100, and Janice Holt Giles, ed., The G.I. Journal of Sergeant Giles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1965), pp. 199–200, 277–278, 322–323, 338, 350, and 352.
53. Blunt, Inside, pp. 79–80. For another example of a GI differentiating between “brainwashed” SS troopers and “ordinary” German soldiers, see Terkel, Good War, p. 259.
54. Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 134.
55. Duffy, Story, p. 312.
56. Hoffman, I Remember, p. 306. See also pp. 120–121. For other positive doughboy assessments of the Germans as soldiers, see William L. Langer, Gas and Flame in World War I (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. xix–xx, and Elton E. Mackin, Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die: Memoirs of a World War I Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), pp. 55, 189, and 246.
57. Bill Mauldin, Up Front (New York: Award Books, 1976), pp. 51–52.
58. Huebner, Long Walk, p. 174. For other positive GI assessments of German fighting ability, see Leslie W. Bailey, Through Hell and High Water: The Wartime Memories of a Junior Combat Infantry Officer (New York: Vantage Press, 1994), p. 96; Bond, Cassino, pp. 37 and 187; Harry Brown, A Walk in the Sun (New York: Knopf, 1944), p. 100; Cawthon, Other Clay, p. 76; and Nat Frankel and Larry Smith, Patton’s Best: An Informal History of the 4th Armored Division (New York: Jove Book, 1984), pp. 110–111.
59. See Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), pp. 155 and 153.
60. Research Branch surveys of combat veterans and soldiers still in training verified that hatred of the Japanese, as revealed by the large affirmative response to the suggestion “wipe out the whole Japanese nation,” far outstripped hatred of the German people, who received a much lower affirmative response to the same recommendation (see Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, chart 9, p. 158).
61. Gray, Warriors, p. 149.
62. John Hersey, Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines, with new foreword (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. xxviii.
63. Prewar racial stereotyping and the resultant underestimation of the Japanese is discussed in Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 89–95, and Dower, Without Mercy, pp. 98–106.
64. Gerald P. Averill, Mustang: A Combat Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1987), p. 18. For similar reactions, see Berry, Semper Fi, pp. 294 and 354, and Terkel, Good War, p. 87.
65. For a discussion of this shift in perception, see Cameron, American Samurai, pp. 104–105; Dower, Without Mercy, pp. 111–117; Kennett, G.I., pp. 167–168; and James J. Weingartner, “War Against Subhumans: Comparisons Between the German War Against the Soviet Union and the American War Against Japan, 1941–1945,” Historian 58:3 (spring 1996): 564.
66. Hawkins interview in Berry, Semper Fi, p. 41. For other comments about the loss of Japanese “superman” status, see E. J. Kahn Jr., G.I. Jungle: An American Soldier in Australia and New Guinea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), p. 122, and Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow (Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1979), pp. 197–198.
67. For a discussion of “exterminationist ideology,” as Cameron calls it, see American Samurai, pp. 114–118 and 166–168. See also Dower, Without Mercy, pp. 88–93.
68. Rants interview in Astor, Crisis, p. 275.
69. Peter Bowman, Beach Red (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 13.
70. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 37–38. As Sledge notes, the Japanese also contributed to the racism and hatred. For a discussion of Japan’s racist view of the West during World War II, see Dower, Without Mercy, pp. 240–261.
71. Charles M. Bussey, Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1991), p. 73.
72. Ent interview in Tomedi, No Bugles, pp. 16–17.
73. Pat Frank, Hold Back the Night (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1952), p. 18.
74. Samuel L. A. Marshall, Commentary on Infantry Operations and Weapons Usage in Korea, Winter of 1950–1951, Operations Research Office Report 13 (Chevy Chase, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), pp. 118–119.
75. Ent interview in Tomedi, No Bugles, p. 18.
76. Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 63.
77. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 66.
78. Alfred S. Bradford, Some Even Volunteered: The First Wolfhounds Pacify Vietnam (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 37.
79. Ogden, Green Knight, p. 132.
80. For an analysis of this dehumanizing, racist outlook, see Robert Jay Lifton’s discussion of the “gook syndrome” in his Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 191–205.
81. Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War (New York: Berkley Books, 1978), p. 7.
82. Baker, Nam, p. 173. See also p. 66.
83. See Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996), pp. 404–406. Bergerud does not mention which scholarly accounts he is taking issue with, but the best of the works arguing that racism was the main cause of hatred and brutality in the Pacific in World War II is Dower’s Without Mercy.
84. Ore Marion interview in Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 412.
85. Dan Levin, From the Battlefield: Dispatches of a World War II Marine (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. 58. Ira Wolfert notes that Japanese suicidal tendencies were first encountered on Guadalcanal and were as mystifying to Americans then as they were throughout the war. See Battle for the Solomons (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1943), pp. 128–131.
86. Marguerite Higgins, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951), p. 203.
87. White interview in Tomedi, No Bugles, p. 129. See also Freeman interview, pp. 120–121. See also Boris R. Spiroff’s comment about a Chinese wave assault during the April 1951 offensive in his Korea: Frozen Hell on Earth (New York: Vantage Press, 1995), p. 69.
88. For comments about possible Chinese use of opium, see Henry Berry, Hey, Mac, Where Ya Been? Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in the Korean War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 183–184, and Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfred Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory: The Concluding Volume of an Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 434.
89. Grossman, On Killing, p. 267.
90. Dixon Wecter, When Johnny Comes Marching Home (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), p. 488.
91. Dower, who stresses that both sides must share the blame for racism and the downward spiral of atrocities, acknowledges that the Japanese had a deserved reputation for brutality even before Pearl Harbor, and their harsh treatment of American prisoners of war captured during their early victories only made matters worse. See Without Mercy, pp. 33–52. See also Bergerud, Touched with Fire, pp. 403–416.
92. Kahn, G.I. Jungle, p. 117. Kahn goes on to describe various Japanese brutalities and dirty tricks. See pp. 117–119. See also the Hoffrichter interview in Astor, Crisis, p. 276.
93. Bowman, Beach Red, p. 78. This statement concludes a discussion of Japanese cruelty during the Bataan Death March that is superfluous to the plot, except to show the hatred generated by such Japanese actions.
94. Theodore R. Fehrenbach provides a discussion of atrocities and the mistreatment of prisoners by the North Koreans, and to a lesser extent, by the Chinese. See This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 199–201, 233, 423–425, 461–469, and 540–549. For eyewitness accounts from the Sunchon Tunnel Massacre in October 1950, and of North Korean brutality in general, see Tomedi, No Bugles, pp. 48–59; Donald Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 98, 173–175, 330, and 372–373; and Higgins, War in Korea, pp. 91–92.
95. Higgins notes that “the Chinese were certainly far more correct in their behavior toward captives than were the North Koreans” (War in Korea, p. 208). Higgins is only relatively correct, however. The Chinese were not exactly compassionate jailers, especially during the first winter of the war. See Knox, Uncertain Victory, pp. 327–344.
96. William H. Mauldin, Bill Mauldin in Korea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952), p. 94.
97. Scott interview in Tomedi, No Bugles, p. 181.
98. Dominick Yezzo, A G.I.’s Vietnam Diary, 1968–1969 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974), diary entry for May 14. See February 12 entry for Yezzo’s sympathetic view of some North Vietnamese prisoners. See also McDonough, Platoon Leader, pp. 192–193; Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders with Clark Smith, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), pp. 139–140; Ogden, Green Knight, pp. 96–98; Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), p. 61; and Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 297–299.
99. For examples, see Mason, Chickenhawk, pp. 218–219; Ogden, Green Knight, pp. 8–11; and Terry, Bloods, pp. 46 and 241–243.
100. Ebert makes this point and provides examples of wounded Americans killed by the North Vietnamese in A Life in a Year, p. 282.
101. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 142.
102. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. xviii.
103. For examples of these tricks and ruses, see Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A War Diary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1934), p. 46; Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, pp. 39, 165, and 278; Judy, Soldier’s Diary, pp. 121, 127–129, and 131; Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, pp. 58–65; Thomason, Fix Bayonets! pp. 24–27; Amos N. Wilder, Armageddon Revisited: A World War I Journal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 96; and Laurence Stallings, The Doughboys: The Story of the AEF, 1917–1918 (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 317.
104. Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Random House, 1943), p. 146. For other examples of Japanese soldiers playing dead, see Bergerud, Touched with Fire, pp. 410–411; Berry, Semper Fi, p. 86; and Astor, Crisis, p. 374.
105. Levin, Battlefield, p. 22. See also Sledge, Old Breed, p. 37.
106. Higgins, War in Korea, pp. 202–203.
107. Charles S. Crawford, The Four Deuces: A Korean War Story (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1989), pp. 224–226; for a discussion of the enemy’s propensity for infiltration, see pp. 89–90.
108. William D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1983), p. 56.
109. Yushta interview in Ebert, A Life in a Year, p. 296.
110. See Ellis, Sharp End, p. 88.
111. Hersey, Into the Valley, p. 42.
112. Fox interview in Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. 359.
113. La Magna interview in Astor, Crisis, p. 190. The numerous personal accounts in Astor and also in Bergerud, Touched with Fire, provide a vivid portrait of the grim, stressful nature of jungle fighting in the Pacific in World War II.
114. Averill, Mustang, p. 200.
115. Marshall, Commentary on Infantry, p. 6.
116. Scheuber interview in Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 487. See further examples on pp. 48, 286, and 499. See also Howard Matthias, The Korean War—Reflections of a Young Combat Platoon Leader, rev. ed. (Tallahassee, Fla.: Father and Son Publishing, 1995), p. xi, for a comment on the Korean and Vietnam Wars being “very personal wars with much close contact with the enemy.”
117. Ogden, Green Knight, p. 209. See also Tobey C. Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 51–52.
118. John Sack, M (New York: Avon Books, 1985), p. 157; for another shadow-boxing analogy, see Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 194.
119. Grossman, On Killing, p. 196.
120. Keen, Faces, pp. 61–62. For this point raised specifically in the cases of the Japanese and Vietnamese enemies, see Gray, Warriors, pp. 152–153, and Shay, Achilles, pp. 115–119.
121. Bowman, Beach Red, pp. 20 and 61.
122. Stiles interview in Berry, Semper Fi, p. 82.
123. Higgins interview in Astor, Crisis, p. 369.
124. Averill, Mustang, p. 297.
125. Joseph R. Owen, Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996), p. 45. See also Crawford, Four Deuces, pp. 76–77. Positive comments about the Chinese enemy’s skill and endurance are also evident in the memoirs. See Lyle Rishell, With a Black Platoon in Combat: A Year in Korea (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1993), p. 155, and Spiroff, Frozen Hell, p. 31.
126. Gustav Hasford, The Short-timers (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1979), p. 153.
127. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, pp. 130–131. For other sympathetic or respectful comments about the NVA or VC, see Matthew Brennan, Brennan’s War: Vietnam, 1965–1969 (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), pp. 60–61 and 66, and Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 262.
128. Leckie, Helmet, p. 212.
129. Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, p. 240.
130. James J. Weingartner, “Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941–1945,” Pacific Historical Review 61:1 (February 1992): 54. Dower discusses how this mutual racism and hatred spawned reciprocal brutalities, until “no mercy” prevailed. See Without Mercy, chapter 3, “War Hates and War Crimes,” pp. 33–73.
131. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 150.
132. Caputo, Rumor of War, pp. 217–218. See Ebert, A Life in a Year, pp. 293–315, for a discussion of the problems of fighting an unconventional war and the terrorism, atrocities, and brutalities that occurred on both sides.
133. Astor, Crisis, p. 449. See also James J. Weingartner, “Massacre at Biscari: Patton and an American War Crime,” Historian 52:1 (November 1989): 24–39, for the effect that a “no-prisoners” speech by General George S. Patton may have had in precipitating a massacre of German and Italian prisoners of war by American soldiers during the fighting in Sicily in World War II. For discussions of the role of leaders in either moderating or encouraging brutality, see Robert J. Berens, “Battle Atrocities,” Army 36:4 (April 1986): 56, and Dower, Without Mercy, pp. 66–67.
134. Frederick Downs, “View from the Fourth Estate: Death and the Dark Side of Command,” Parameters 17:4 (December 1987): 92.
135. Downs, Killing Zone, p. 192.
136. See Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Haas, Wounds of War: The Psychological Aftermath of Combat in Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 239.
137. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier, p. 104.
138. Brady, Coldest War, p. 208. See pp. 206–212 for the entire affair.
139. Brennan, Brennan’s War, p. 100. See also Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 140.
140. MacDonald, Company Commander, p. 215.
141. For examples of Japanese wounded or soldiers feigning surrender who attempted to take some Americans with them, see Astor, Crisis, pp. 373 and 431, and Berry, Semper Fi, p. 327.
142. Astor, Crisis, pp. 448–449. See also Kennett, G.I., pp. 163–166.
143. Matula interview in Astor, Crisis, p. 373; for other GI refusals to take prisoners, despite the intelligence officers’ requests to do so, see pp. 278 and 437.
144. Rosenblum interview in Terkel, Good War, p. 382.
145. Sturkey interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 171.
146. Winter interview in Tomedi, No Bugles, pp. 25 and 28.
147. Brannen, Over There, p. 49. For similar doughboy comments about a no-mercy attitude toward machine gunners and snipers, see Hoffman, I Remember, p. 306, and Frank Freidel, Over There: The Story of America’s First Great Overseas Crusade, rev. and abridged ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 115.
148. Ernie Pyle, Brave Men (New York: Henry Holt, 1944), p. 373.
149. Blunt, Inside, p. 21. See also Lester Atwell, Private (New York: Popular Library, 1958), p. 327, for a captured German sniper forced to dig his own grave and then being shot, on the orders of the division commander, no less. Atwell was one of the few to ponder what was obviously a double standard of GI fairness: “It always struck me as odd: the enemy snipers were unspeakable villains; our own were heroes.”
150. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, pp. 96 and 97.
151. Crawford, Four Deuces, p. 195. See also Frank, Hold Back the Night, p. 89.
152. Frankel, Patton’s Best, p. 5.
153. Peter Watson, War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 244.
154. William Barry Gault, “Some Remarks on Slaughter,” American Journal of Psychiatry 128:4 (October 1971): 84. See also Joel Yager, “Personal Violence in Infantry Combat,” Archives of General Psychiatry 32:2 (February 1975): 261. Yager sees group dynamics, situational factors, and personality as interrelated in generating atrocities, but “in some instances, the personal factors . . . seem to far outweigh group and situational factors.”
155. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 128.
156. Brennan, Brennan’s War, p. 141. See also pp. 85–86 for the case of Gould, another unrestrained killer.
157. Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 54. For other World War II examples of prisoners killed in a fit of rage, see Blunt, Inside, pp. 84–85, and Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, p. 381.
158. Mason, Chickenhawk, p. 435.
159. Peter Marin, “Coming to Terms with Vietnam,” Harper’s 261:1567 (December 1980): 49; Gray also makes this point in Warriors, pp. 186–188.
160. Houghton interview in Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, p. 149.
161. Blunt, Inside, p. 80. For a fictional example of a World War II soldier who could not kill an enemy prisoner, even though his close friend had just been killed, see the case of Captain Paul Kreider in Richard Tregaskis, Stronger Than Fear (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 107. Kreider reasons that “it was not right to kill an unarmed man in cold blood. The fact that the enemy had done that in many cases didn’t make it any more right or honorable.”
162. Gonzalez interview in Knox, Pusan to Chosin, p. 514. See also Ogden, Green Knight, pp. 294–295.
163. Allen, Toward the Flame, p. 182.
164. Ibid., p. 183. For other examples of soldiers who appreciated how counterproductive killing surrendering prisoners was, see Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 308–309; Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 141; Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 148; and Berry, Semper Fi, p. 67.
165. Parks, G.I. Diary, p. 121. For another example, see James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), p. 171, for the case of a lieutenant nicknamed “Rock Man” and his platoon, whose cruelties toward the local populace “made a lot more VC than they ever end up killing.”
166. Herzog, War Stories, p. 106, makes the point that wrestling with this “critical issue” is especially prevalent in the Vietnam War literature. See also Cornelius A. Cronin, “Line of Departure: The Atrocity in Vietnam War Literature,” in Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, ed. Philip K. Jason (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), pp. 200–216.
167. Frankel, Patton’s Best, p. 4.
168. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. xx.
169. Downs, Killing Zone, p. 162. For a similar statement about the Vietnam War turning the grunt “deep-down mean,” see Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 278.
170. Lifton, Home, p. 102.
171. Hasford, Short-timers, p. 133.
172. McDonough, Platoon Leader, p. 62. Tim O’Brien, although not a leader like McDonough, also understood that the grunt could not abdicate personal responsibility. See his interview in Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (London and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), p. 138.
173. Fuller, Fragments, pp. 53, 54, and 287.
174. Samuel L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1978), p. 50, for the 25 percent ratio of fire; p. 53, for Marshall’s claim to having conducted approximately 400 postcombat interviews; and p. 54, for his claim that “nearly all hands” could have brought fire on the enemy at some point in each engagement but only 20 to 25 percent did so. See also pp. 71 and 78.
175. Richard A. Gabriel, The Painful Field: The Psychiatric Dimension of Modern War (New York, London, and Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 3. Gabriel used a 15 percent figure assumedly because the actual range of Marshall’s estimate was 15 to 25 percent firers, with 25 percent being the best that could be expected from “the most spirited and aggressive companies” (see Marshall, Men Against Fire, p. 54).
176. John A. English, On Infantry (New York: Praeger, 1981), p. 145.
177. Russell F. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaigns of France and Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 38.
178. Fredric Smoler, “The Secret of the Soldiers Who Didn’t Shoot,” American Heritage 40:2 (March 1989): 40.
179. Ibid., p. 43. The two articles referred to are this one and Roger J. Spiller, “S. L. A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire,” Royal United Services Institute Journal 133:4 (winter 1988): 63–71.
180. For examples, see Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 96–97, and especially Grossman, who wholeheartedly embraces Marshall’s ratio of fire and guilt rationale in On Killing, pp. 4 and 87–93.
181. Michael D. Doubler, Closing with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in Europe, 1944–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), pp. 289–290.
182. MacDonald, Company Commander, pp. 124–128.
183. George Wilson, If You Survive (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 111.
184. See Fussell, Doing Battle, p. 100.
185. Ross S. Carter, Those Devils in Baggy Pants (New York and Toronto: Signet Books, 1951), p. 41.
186. Standifer, Not in Vain, p. 53.
187. Edwin A. Weinstein, “The Function of Interpersonal Relations in the Neurosis of Combat,” Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and the Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 10:3 (August 1947): 312.
188. Wilson, If You Survive, pp. 150–151.
189. Cameron, American Samurai, p. 51.
190. Astor, Crisis, pp. 451–452. A large majority (more than 70 percent) of GIs in a Research Branch survey responded, while still in training, that they would “like” to kill a Japanese soldier or would “feel that it was just part of the job, without either liking or disliking it.” Add in the catalyst of the battlefield, as Astor mentions, and the number of GIs too reluctant to shoot at a Japanese soldier must have been small indeed (see Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, chart 7, p. 34).
191. Dinter, Hero or Coward, p. 23.
192. Jules W. Coleman, “The Group Factor in Military Psychiatry,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 16:2 (April 1946): 224. Guilt over killing as a limited factor at most in causing psychological breakdowns is discussed in chapter 6.
193. Cameron, American Samurai, p. 51 n. 7.
194. Crawford, Four Deuces, pp. 99 and 100.
195. In contrast to Marshall’s self-invented ratio of fire from World War II, a bona fide survey of Vietnam veterans from the First Cavalry Division revealed that more than 80 percent engaged the enemy in a firefight. The handful of nonparticipants in a particular battle said they failed to fire because they were performing other duties, had a weapon malfunction, did not want to give away their positions, wanted to avoid fratricide, or froze out of fear. Anxiety or guilt over killing was not mentioned (see Russell W. Glenn, “Men and Fire in Vietnam,” two-part series, part 1, Army 39:4 [April 1989]: 18–26; part 2, Army 39:5 [May 1989]: 38–45).
196. Downs, Killing Zone, p. 161.
197. This quotation is from the title of Grossman’s section on killing and physical distance. See his On Killing, pp. 97–137. For other discussions of the effect of distance on killing, see Gray, Warriors, p. 178; Keen, Faces, pp. 72–88; and Lifton, Home, pp. 346–361.
198. Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 35.
199. MacDonald, Company Commander, p. 252.
200. Sefton, It Was My War, p. 113. See also the Freeman interview in Tomedi, No Bugles, p. 119. For “shooting gallery” analogies, see Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 188, and Crawford, Four Deuces, p. 105.
201. James Hamilton Dill, Sixteen Days at Mungol-li (Fayetteville, Ark.: M&M Press, 1993), p. 312. For another example of the traumatic effect of up-close killing, see Morrow, Commie, p. 30.
202. Altieri interview in Martin, G.I. War, p. 43.
203. Avery interview in Knox, Uncertain Victory, p. 48.
204. Blunt, Inside, p. 115.
205. Ibid., pp. 115–116. See also Morrow, Commie, pp. 63–64.
206. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 68.
207. Ibid., p. 289. Caputo’s sense of guilt contradicts his earlier statement (see note 168) that the environment of war was to blame for the grunts’ “brutishness.” Like most soldiers, Caputo could not absolve himself of some measure of responsibility for his actions, no matter how brutal the environment of war. For an analysis of environmental factors versus personal responsibility in Caputo’s Rumor of War, see Thomas Myers, Walking Point: American Narratives in Vietnam (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 97–102.
208. Levin, Battlefield, p. 26.
209. Sledge, Old Breed, pp. 120–121.
210. Alvin C. York, Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), p. 236. See also Charles F. Minder, This Man’s War: The Day-by-Day Record of an American Private on the Western Front (New York: Pevensey Press, 1931), pp. 247–248, 292, and 332.
211. Johnson interview in Terkel, Good War, pp. 261, 262, and 263.
212. Anderson interview in Santoli, Everything We Had, p. 71. For an example of one such reluctant killer in Vietnam, see the case of Arthur in Brennan, Brennan’s War, pp. 87–88, 95–96, and 105–106.
213. Brennan, Brennan’s War, p. 64. For a fictional example of comrades consoling while also congratulating a GI for killing his first Japanese soldier, see the case of Private Bead in James Jones, The Thin Red Line (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), pp. 150–152.
CHAPTER 9. LEADERSHIP IN COMBAT
1. Lord Charles McM. Moran, The Anatomy of Courage (Garden City Park, N.Y.: Avery, 1987), p. 185.
2. Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), p. 142. Research Branch surveys of enlisted men in World War II verify Kennett’s list of desirable junior leader traits. See Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 2, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 118–130.
3. Bill Mauldin, Up Front (New York: Award Books, 1976), p. 178.
4. Frederick Downs, “View from the Fourth Estate: Death and the Dark Side of Command,” Parameters 17:4 (December 1987): 93.
5. William Darryl Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Experience in Combat: Leadership and Societal Influences in the Armies of the Soviet Union, the United States, North Vietnam, and Israel (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1988), p. 114.
6. Michael Lee Lanning, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 96. For a synopsis of the “esoteric skills and knowledges” required of a platoon leader in Vietnam, see James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), pp. 205–206.
7. Lanning, Only War, p. 33. After his first two days as a platoon leader in the boonies, Lanning’s “abilities to navigate and read a map had gained the respect of the platoon” (p. 36). For an example of the difficulties involved in maneuvering cross-country at night, and the weight of responsibility felt by the leader while doing it, see James R. McDonough, Platoon Leader (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), pp. 155–158.
8. Joseph D. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier: The A.E.F. in 1918 (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1985), pp. 39–41. For other examples of inept land navigation by World War I leaders, see Henry Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance: Living Memories of the Doughboy (New York: Priam Books, 1978), p. 383, and Albert M. Ettinger and A. Churchill Ettinger, A Doughboy with the Fighting Sixty-ninth: A Remembrance of World War I (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing, 1992), p. 158. Leaders got men lost while on patrol in other wars as well, sometimes with fatal results; for examples, see James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), pp. 216–217, and Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), pp. 37–51.
9. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 222.
10. Howard Matthias, The Korean War—Reflections of a Young Combat Platoon Leader, rev. ed. (Tallahassee, Fla.: Father and Son Publishing, 1995), p. 42.
11. Ralph Zumbro, Tank Sergeant (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1986), p. 54.
12. Richard D. Camp, with Eric Hammel, Lima-6: A Marine Company Commander in Vietnam (New York: Pocket Books, 1989), pp. 26, 24, and 30–31.
13. Richard E. Ogden, Green Knight, Red Mourning (New York: Zebra Books, 1985), p. 33.
14. Sponaugle interview in Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996), p. 438.
15. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 238.
16. Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, The Men of Company K (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), pp. 7–8.
17. Carl M. Becker and Robert G. Thobaben, Common Warfare: Parallel Memoirs by Two World War II GIs in the Pacific (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1992), p. 141.
18. Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 15.
19. Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A War Diary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1934), p. 7.
20. Mauldin, Up Front, pp. 179–180.
21. Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (Houston: Paul M. Boesch, 1985), p. 114. See also Shay’s discussion of “the fairness assumption” in Achilles, pp. 10–14.
22. Albert French, Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), p. 77.
23. George Wilson, If You Survive (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 159.
24. Henderson, Cohesion, p. 15. See also p. 109.
25. W. Stanford Smith, with contributions by Leo J. Machan and Stanley E. Earman, The Cannoneers: GI Life in a World War II Cannon Company (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1993), pp. 49–50.
26. Morris Janowitz and Roger W. Little, Sociology and the Military Establishment, 3d ed. (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1974), p. 103.
27. Rudolph W. Stephens, Old Ugly Hill: A G.I.’s Fourteen Months in the Korean Trenches, 1952–1953 (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1995), p. 128.
28. John Dollard, with Donald Horton, Fear in Battle (New York: AMS Press, 1976), p. 44.
29. Avery interview in Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfred Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory: The Concluding Volume of an Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 8.
30. Brady, Coldest War, p. 151. For a condemnation of officers seeking to enhance their careers at the expense of men’s lives, see Matthias, Reflections, p. 53.
31. Camp, Lima-6, p. 48.
32. Joseph J. Ondishko Jr., “A View of Anxiety, Fear and Panic,” Military Affairs 36:2 (April 1972): 60.
33. Elmar Dinter, Hero or Coward: Pressures Facing the Soldier in Battle (London and Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1985), p. 54.
34. Klaus H. Huebner, Long Walk Through War: A Combat Doctor’s Diary (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), p. 27.
35. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 43. See also Sledge’s praise for Lieutenant Edward (“Hillbilly”) Jones, pp. 92–94.
36. Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander (Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam Books, 1978), p. 96.
37. George William Sefton, It Was My War: I’ll Remember It the Way I Want To! (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1994), p. 215.
38. Leo H. Bartemeier, Lawrence S. Kubie, Karl A. Menninger, John Romano, and John C. Whitehorn, “Combat Exhaustion,” two-part series, part 2, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 104:5 (November 1946): 515. See also Jules W. Coleman, “The Group Factor in Military Psychiatry,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 16:2 (April 1946): 224.
39. Downs, “Death and the Dark Side,” p. 95.
40. Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 53.
41. Wilson, If You Survive, p. 22.
42. Camp, Lima-6, pp. 197–198. For other examples of junior leaders struggling with the dilemma of caring for their men while trying to steel themselves against their loss, see Lawrence, Fighting Soldier, p. 102; John L. Munschauer, World War II Cavalcade: An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1996), p. 113; William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 69–70; and Brady, Coldest War, pp. 79–80 and 159.
43. Matthias, Reflections, p. 41.
44. Nat Frankel and Larry Smith, Patton’s Best: An Informal History of the 4th Armored Division (New York: Jove Book, 1984), p. 192.
45. MacDonald, Company Commander, p. 101. For other examples of officers sharing their liquor ration, see Wilson, If You Survive, pp. 223–224, and Henry Berry, Hey, Mac, Where Ya Been? Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in the Korean War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 236.
46. Charles F. Minder, This Man’s War: The Day-by-Day Record of an American Private on the Western Front (New York: Pevensey Press, 1931), p. 108.
47. Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 8.
48. Brady, Coldest War, p. 154.
49. Joseph R. Owen, Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996), p. 165.
50. Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders, with Clark Smith, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), p. 59. “Rabbit” was also a pejorative used by African-American soldiers for whites. Sanders is black, but there is no indication in his memoir that this nickname for his commander was used in this sense.
51. Alfred S. Bradford, Some Even Volunteered: The First Wolfhounds Pacify Vietnam (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 40.
52. James Hamilton Dill, Sixteen Days at Mungol-li (Fayetteville, Ark.: M&M Press, 1993), p. 255.
53. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier, pp. 115 and 114.
54. Stiles interview in Henry Berry, Semper Fi, Mac: Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in World War II (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 85.
55. Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 134. See pp. 121–122 for the incident of panic.
56. Moran, Anatomy, p. 188. Dollard’s survey of Spanish Civil War veterans verifies the importance of coolness under fire: “Coolness is contagious. Ninety-four per cent of the men feel that they fought better after observing other men behaving calmly in a dangerous situation” (Fear in Battle, p. 28).
57. Francis P. Duffy, Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, of Life and Death with the Fighting Sixty-ninth (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1919), p. 270. One of Berry’s doughboy veterans agrees with Duffy’s assessment of Donovan: “He was the calmest man under fire I ever saw. Oh you’d think he was standing at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, not in the middle of a barrage. And he was always in the middle of everything—Bill was no dugout officer” (see Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, p. 332).
58. Ettinger and Ettinger, Fighting Sixty-ninth, p. 147.
59. Allen R. Matthews, The Assault (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. 148.
60. Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 153.
61. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987), p. 85.
62. Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow (Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1979), p. 57.
63. John Hersey, Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), pp. 78 and 79.
64. Lanning, Only War, p. 107.
65. Herbert Spiegel, “Psychiatry with an Infantry Battalion in North Africa,” in Neuropsychiatry in World War II, ed. Albert J. Glass, Medical Department, U.S. Army, Office of the Surgeon General, 2 vols., Overseas Theaters (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 2:122–123.
66. Michael D. Doubler, Closing with the Enemy: How GI’s Fought the War in Europe, 1944–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), p. 238.
67. MacDonald, Company Commander, p. 171. See ibid. for Doubler’s discussion of this incident.
68. Common sense dictates that these three leadership virtues are interrelated, but two sociological surveys add some empirical evidence. A survey of combat-experienced leaders revealed that the leader who was competent and possessed technical expertise was more willing to expose himself to danger and had closer personal relations with his men than did less competent leaders. See Dean E. Frost, Fred E. Fiedler, and Jeff W. Anderson, “The Role of Personal Risk-Taking in Effective Leadership,” Human Relations 36:2 (February 1983): 185–202. A survey of leaders and soldiers in peacetime companies in the U.S. Army determined that commanders who were indifferent to their soldiers’ welfare had units with poor morale and cohesion, even though these same commanders stressed tactical and technical proficiency. In sum, leaders needed both to care and to be proficient. See Faris R. Kirkland, Paul T. Bartone, and David H. Marlowe, “Commanders’ Priorities and Psychological Readiness,” Armed Forces and Society 19:4 (summer 1993): 579–598.
69. Dinter, Hero or Coward, p. 56.
70. Sefton, It Was My War, p. 57.
71. Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel, War Neuroses (Philadelphia and London: Blakiston, 1945), p. 69. Other psychiatrists came to the same conclusion. See Glass, ed., Neuropsychiatry, pp. 634–635; Coleman, “Group Factor,” pp. 223–224; John W. Appel and Gilbert W. Beebe, “Preventive Psychiatry: An Epidemiological Approach,” Journal of the American Medical Association 131:18 (August 31, 1946): 1474; and Bartemeier et al., “Combat Exhaustion,” part 2, 518.
72. Gerald P. Averill, Mustang: A Combat Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1987), p. xviii.
73. Smith, Cannoneers, p. 50.
74. Owen, Colder Than Hell, p. 126.
75. John A. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers: Memoir of a Combat Platoon Leader in Korea (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1991), p. 93.
76. McDonough, Platoon Leader, pp. 109–110.
77. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 254.
CHAPTER 10. DWELLERS BEYOND THE ENVIRONMENT OF WAR
1. For example, the Research Branch surveyed soldiers worldwide in July 1945 to determine how many had experienced any combat. Only 27 percent of the soldiers and junior officers claimed to “have been in actual combat,” and another 16 to 18 percent said they had been “under enemy fire but not in actual combat,” the assumption being that these men endured one or more artillery barrages or air attacks behind the lines. The rest (53 to 57 percent) never came under fire. See Samuel A. Stouffer, Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. DeVinney, Shirley A. Star, and Robin M. Williams Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 1, The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), chart 3, p. 165.
2. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 135 and 138 (quotation is split by a map on pp. 136–137).
3. Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, p. 296. See also “The Making of the Infantryman,” American Journal of Sociology 51:5 (March 1946): 376.
4. Rants interview in Gerald Astor, Crisis in the Pacific: The Battles for the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1996), p. 433.
5. Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (Houston: Paul M. Boesch, 1985), p. 128.
6. Bill Mauldin, Up Front (New York: Award Books, 1976), p. 58. See also the discussion of the World War II GI’s “status hierarchy,” with the combat soldier the self-proclaimed elite, in Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 2, The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 305–312.
7. Amos N. Wilder, Armageddon Revisited: A World War I Journal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 139.
8. Mauldin, Up Front, p. 123. For comments about the importance of the CIB to the World War II infantryman, see Charles R. Cawthon, Other Clay: A Remembrance of the World War II Infantry (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1990), p. 39, and James Jones, WW II: A Chronicle of Soldiering (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), p. 137.
9. John A. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers: Memoir of a Combat Platoon Leader in Korea (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1991), p. 106. For another example of pride in earning the CIB in Korea, see Curtis James Morrow, What’s a Commie Ever Done to Black People? A Korean War Memoir of Fighting in the U.S. Army’s Last All Negro Unit (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1997), p. 86.
10. Michael Lee Lanning, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam (New York: Ivy Books, 1987), p. 134.
11. Mauldin, Up Front, p. 135. Carrying the relativity concept to its logical extreme, as an infantryman in Harold P. Leinbaugh’s and John D. Campbell’s company did, the rear echelon was “any son of a bitch behind my foxhole” (The Men of Company K [New York: Bantam Books, 1987], p. 74).
12. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 125.
13. Ibid., p. 51. For other discussions of rear-echelon relativity, see William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 260, and John M. Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 174–175.
14. William H. Mauldin, Bill Mauldin in Korea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952), p. 127.
15. For general discussions of the combat soldier’s disdain for the rear echelon, see Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 77–79, and Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston, The Hague, and London: Kluwer, Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 119–122.
16. Joseph D. Lawrence, Fighting Soldier: The A.E.F. in 1918 (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1985), pp. 131 and 132.
17. Charles MacArthur, War Bugs (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1929), p. 119.
18. O’Brien interview in Henry Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance: Living Memories of the Doughboy (New York: Priam Books, 1978), p. 112.
19. Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 160.
20. Harold L. Bond, Return to Cassino (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), p. 231. See also Klaus H. Huebner, Long Walk Through War: A Combat Doctor’s Diary (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), pp. 90–97.
21. Sledge, Old Breed, p. 107.
22. Sullivan, Toy Soldiers, p. 17. For another classic, and almost as sarcastic, description of the comfortable life in the rear echelons, in this case a marine ordnance battalion, see Martin Russ, The Last Parallel: A Marine’s War Journal (New York and Toronto: Rinehart, 1957), pp. 43–44.
23. An excellent account illustrating the yawning gap between the grunt’s life in the boonies and the rear-echelon soldier’s life of comfort is provided by Al Santoli, who juxtaposes interviews with a marine rifleman and a rear-area supply officer in his Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), pp. 87–99. See also Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), pp. 215–221; Lanning, Only War, pp. 17–26; Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (New York: Dell, 1979), pp. 58–59; William D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1983), pp. 241–242 and 249; and Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders, with Robert Clark, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), pp. 125–126.
24. Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), pp. 285 and 286.
25. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 129. See also the Research Branch survey in Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 297.
26. Lester Atwell, Private (New York: Popular Library, 1958), p. 374.
27. Janice Holt Giles, ed., The G.I. Journal of Sergeant Giles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1965), p. 112.
28. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie, p. 190. See also Santoli, Everything We Had, p. 146, and John Ketwig, And a Hard Rain Fell (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), pp. 39 and 154–155.
29. Atwell, Private, p. 493. See also the case of Captain Sarsfield and his Bronze Star on pp. 491–492, and Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, pp. 255–256.
30. Higgins interview in Santoli, Everything We Had, p. 95. See also the case of Captain Owen and Warrant Officer White in Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. 331–332. Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage are especially critical of the debasement of the awards system in Vietnam. See Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), pp. 14–16.
31. Research Branch surveys confirm the validity of this observation. See Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 314–316. See also Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A War Diary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1934), p. 239.
32. Ralph Ingersoll, The Battle Is the Pay-off (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943), p. 63.
33. Peter G. Bourne, Men, Stress, and Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 115.
34. Lanning, Only War, pp. 67–68. See also pp. 110–111 and 242; Gustav Hasford, The Short-timers (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), pp. 37–39; and Franklyn A. Johnson, One More Hill (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 76.
35. Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), pp. 99–100; for another example, see Leinbaugh and Campbell, Company K, p. 231.
36. Russ, Last Parallel, p. 95. See also Kurt Gabel, The Making of a Paratrooper: Airborne Training and Combat in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), p. 211.
37. James Hamilton Dill, Sixteen Days at Mungol-li (Fayetteville, Ark.: M&M Press, 1993), pp. 172 and 188.
38. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987), pp. 109, 110, and 114.
39. Elton E. Mackin, Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die: Memoirs of a World War I Marine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), p. 179. See also John Dos Passos, First Encounter (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945), p. 40.
40. Muetzel interview in Donald Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 185.
41. Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, p. 313.
42. Ibid., p. 316. See also Cawthon, Other Clay, p. 82.
43. The noncombatant in World War II was certainly aware, as the Research Branch discovered, that “relative to the combat men, . . . he had got a fairly good break in the Army” (Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, p. 173).
44. [Howard V. O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War: A Diary of Disillusionment (New York: J. H. Sears, 1926), p. 109.
45. E. J. Kahn Jr., G.I. Jungle: An American Soldier in Australia and New Guinea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), pp. 113–114. I refer to Kahn as a “headquarters clerk,” but he never actually identifies which headquarters he worked in or what his exact duties were, perhaps for security concerns. He served in the Thirty-second Infantry Division, which by all accounts had a rough fight under appalling conditions in New Guinea.
46. Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, p. 56. See also Carl M. Becker and Robert G. Thobaben, Common Warfare: Parallel Memoirs by Two World War II GIs in the Pacific (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1992), p. 81; David Rabe interview in Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (London and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), p. 199; O’Brien, If I Die, pp. 168–169; and Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), pp. 122–123.
47. The Research Branch discovered that combat troops in both the Pacific and European theaters were generally satisfied with the support they received, but that did nothing to diminish their resentment of the rear echelon. See Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 292–295.
48. Mauldin, Up Front, pp. 79–80. See also James R. McDonough, Platoon Leader (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), p. 3.
49. As the Research Branch learned from its soldier surveys, “However superior the combat man may have felt toward the rear echelon, this feeling of superiority rarely supplanted frank eagerness on his part to change places and fill one of the rear jobs towards which he was so scornful” (Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, p. 312).
50. James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), p. 270.
51. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 124.
52. Boesch, Road to Huertgen, p. 108. See also the case of Lieutenant Bond, who accepted a job as a general’s aide with a mix of joy, reluctance, and guilt (Cassino, pp. 171–174 and 178–180).
53. Dixon Wecter, When Johnny Comes Marching Home (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), p. 504. Research Branch surveys confirm Wecter’s assessment. A majority of soldiers serving in Europe and the Mediterranean, despite their litany of complaints against the home front, nevertheless believed that the people back home supported them. See Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 320–323.
54. [O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War, p. 216. See also p. 231.
55. Ibid., p. 183. See also Mackin, We Didn’t Want to Die, p. 161.
56. Sledge, Old Breed, pp. 272–273.
57. Murphy, To Hell and Back, p. 134. See also Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), p. 478; Alice M. Hoffman and Howard S. Hoffman, Archives of Memory: A Soldier Recalls World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), p. 140; Jones, WW II, pp. 141–144; and Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War: The Story of G.I. Joe (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1945), p. 11.
58. Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. 8.
59. Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, p. 188. Surveys of soldiers in the European and Mediterranean theaters also reveal resentment of the “home guards”; see Stouffer et al., Combat and Its Aftermath, pp. 317–319. See also Pyle, Your War, pp. 197–198.
60. Pyle, Your War, p. 96.
61. Stracke interview in Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 160.
62. Wecter, Johnny, p. 349; he also discusses the World War II soldier’s resentment of war workers (pp. 505–508). See also Huebner, Long Walk, p. 59.
63. Wilder, Armageddon, p. 70.
64. [O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War, p. 42.
65. Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 213.
66. Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow (Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1979), p. 241. Paul Fussell levels the same charges in Doing Battle, pp. 171–172.
67. Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), p. 23. See also Bradford Perkins, “Impressions of Wartime,” Journal of American History 77:2 (September 1990): 564.
68. For an analysis of the Army’s AGCT and assignment policies, see Eli Ginzberg, James K. Anderson, Sol W. Ginsburg, John L. Herma, and John B. Miner, The Ineffective Soldier: Lessons for Management and the Nation, 3 vols., The Lost Divisions (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1959), 1:41–57.
69. The Selective Service Act of 1948, incidentally, established the student deferment, which figured prominently in Korean and Vietnam War-era draft deferments. The survey findings are from Edward A. Suchman, Robin M. Williams Jr., and Rose K. Goldsen, “Student Reaction to Impending Military Service,” American Sociological Review 18:3 (June 1953): 293–304.
70. Morris Janowitz and Roger W. Little, Sociology and the Military Establishment, 3d ed. (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1974), pp. 71–72.
71. Roger W. Little, “Buddy Relations and Combat Performance,” in The New Military: Changing Patterns of Organization, ed. Morris Janowitz (New York: Russell Sage, 1964), p. 220. See also Theodore R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 610.
72. Ernest Frankel, Band of Brothers (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 177.
73. Albert J. Mayer and Thomas Ford Hoult, “Social Stratification and Combat Survival,” Social Forces 34:2 (December 1955): 155.
74. See Anne Hoiberg, “Military Staying Power,” in Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military, ed. Sam C. Sarkesian (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1980), pp. 219–220.
75. For a discussion of the problems inherent in measuring class in surveys, see Thomas C. Wilson, “Vietnam-Era Military Service: A Test of the Class-Bias Thesis,” Armed Forces and Society 21:3 (spring 1995): 461–465.
76. For surveys including officers in their statistics, see Allan Mazur, “Was Vietnam a Class War?” Armed Forces and Society 21:3 (spring 1995): 455–459, and Arnold Barnett, Timothy Stanley, and Michael Shore, “America’s Vietnam Casualties: Victims of a Class War?” Operations Research 40:5 (September–October 1992): 856–866. For a survey arguing that Vietnam was only “marginally” a class war, see Wilson, “Vietnam-Era Military Service,” pp. 466–471.
77. Extracts from this orientation kit can be found in Peter Karsten, Soldiers and Society: The Effects of Military Service and War on American Society, Grass Roots Perspectives on American History, no. 1 (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 102–106 (quotation on p. 103).
78. For an analysis of channeling and its failure during the Vietnam War era, see Lawrence M. Baskir and William S. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Knopf, 1978), pp. 14–17 (see p. 6 for the 6 percent estimate); John Helmer, Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After (New York: Free Press, and London: Collier Macmillan, 1974), pp. 3–10; and Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 28–30.
79. Baskir and Strauss, Chance and Circumstance, p. 17.
80. Ibid., p. 9. Baskir and Strauss are here summarizing the results of their own “Notre Dame survey,” which the authors briefly describe on p. xviii and refer to, along with other studies, throughout their book. See also Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 11–43; Gilbert Badillo and G. David Curry, “The Social Incidence of Vietnam Casualties: Social Class or Race?” Armed Forces and Society 2:3 (May 1976): 397–406; Charles C. Moskos Jr., The American Enlisted Man: The Rank and File in Today’s Military (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970), pp. 41–54; and Michael Useem, “The Educational and Military Experience of Young Men During the Vietnam Era: Non-linear Effects of Parental Social Class,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 8:1 (spring 1980): 15–29.
81. Baskir and Strauss, Chance and Circumstance, p. 8.
82. Moskos, American Enlisted Man, p. 163. See also Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 220–225, for a discussion of grunt “class anger.”
83. For an assessment of the dodge of enlisting in the reserves and the fact that those forces, during the Vietnam War era, were manned by middle-class volunteers, see Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 36–37; Baskir and Strauss, Chance and Circumstance, pp. 48–51; and James R. Ebert, A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965–1972 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), pp. 15–16.
84. Heinemann interview in Schroeder, We’ve All Been There, p. 146. See also Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. xvi.
85. Lanning, Only War, p. 86.
86. Ibid., p. 87. See Baskir and Strauss, Chance and Circumstance, pp. 28–32, for a discussion of the student deferment as a draft dodge. The deferment for graduate school that Lanning condemns was actually abolished in 1967, but deferments for undergraduate studies continued. See also James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), p. 409.
87. James Fallows, “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” Washington Monthly 7:8 (October 1975): 14; see also Baskir and Strauss, Chance and Circumstance, p. 7.
88. James Martin Davis, “Vietnam: What It Was Really Like,” Military Review 69:1 (January 1989): 41.
89. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 155. For other discussions of the importance of homefront recognition, see Elmar Dinter, Hero or Coward: Pressures Facing the Soldier in Battle (London and Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1985), pp. 49–50; William Darryl Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element in Combat: Leadership and Societal Influence in the Armies of the Soviet Union, the United States, North Vietnam, and Israel (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1988), p. 79; and Kellett, Combat Motivation, pp. 209–213.
90. Mauldin, Up Front, p. 127.
91. Francis P. Duffy, Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, of Life and Death With the Fighting Sixty-ninth (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1919), p. 329.
92. Mauldin, Korea, p. 10.
93. Jack Fuller, Fragments (New York: Dell, 1985), pp. 209 and 210.
94. Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 197. For an example, see Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), p. 134.
95. Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War (York, Pa.: Strength and Health Publishing, 1940), p. 310.
96. Jules V. Coleman, “Division Psychiatry in the Southwest Pacific Area,” in Neuropsychiatry in World War II, ed. Albert J. Glass, Medical Department, U.S. Army, Office of the Surgeon General, 2 vols., Overseas Theaters (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 2:626.
97. Giles, ed., G.I. Journal, p. 295. See also p. 76.
98. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (Colored): The World War II New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 211. For a discussion of the combat soldiers’ concerns over fair and accurate press coverage, see Mauldin, Up Front, pp. 18–23, and Kellett, Combat Motivation, pp. 185–188.
99. Hoffman, I Remember, p. 80.
100. MacArthur, War Bugs, p. 75. See also Berry, Make the Kaiser Dance, pp. 114–117.
101. Jones, WW II, p. 39. See also Bergerud, Touched with Fire, pp. 175–176 and 435.
102. Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 226. There was, of course, more to army-marine antagonism than the issue of publicity. The marines’ self-avowed elitism, differences in tactics and doctrine, the marine belief that soldiers were inferior fighters, and the rivalry over missions between two competing ground fighting forces also generated antagonism (see pp. 130–165).
103. Hockley interview in Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfred Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory: The Concluding Volume of an Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 383. See also Charles M. Bussey, Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1991), pp. 144–147.
104. Ernie Pyle, Brave Men (New York: Henry Holt, 1944), pp. 399–400.
105. Marguerite Higgins, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951), pp. 84 and 95.
106. Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Avon Books, 1978), p. 206. See Herr’s follow-on example of a marine who asks him to “tell it! You tell it, man” (p. 207). See also John M. Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley (Toronto, New York, London, and Sydney: Bantam Books, 1983), acknowledgments page.
107. [O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War, p. 157. This joke resurfaces as an apocryphal story in later wars. Correspondent Ira Wolfert reported that a captured Japanese bomber pilot in World War II supposedly quipped, “I understand what we are fighting for—Togo [Tojo Hideki]—and what the Germans are fighting for—Hitler—but your Marines seem to be fighting for souvenirs!” (Battle for the Solomons [Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1943], p. 50).
108. For other examples of doughboy souvenir hunting, see Robert G. Merrick, World War I: A Diary (Baltimore: privately published, 1982), pp. 84 and 97–100; William L. Langer, Gas and Flame in World War I (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 38; Horatio Rogers, World War I Through My Sights (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1976), pp. 172, 210, and 212; and Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 12 and 124.
109. George William Sefton, It Was My War: I’ll Remember It the Way I Want To! (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1994), p. 94. See also W. Stanford Smith, with contributions by Leo J. Machan and Stanley E. Earman, The Cannoneers: GI Life in a World War II Cannon Company (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1992), p. 63; Roscoe C. Blunt Jr., Inside the Battle of the Bulge: A Private Comes of Age (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), pp. 29, 50–51, 89, 117, and 137; and Becker and Thobaben, Common Warfare, pp. 179–180.
110. Matthew Brennan, Brennan’s War: Vietnam, 1965–1969 (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), pp. 72 and 75. America’s enemies, incidentally, were well aware of the GI’s passion for souvenirs and often booby-trapped weapons, equipment, and even corpses.
CHAPTER 11. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY IN THE FOXHOLE
1. Samuel A. Stouffer, Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. DeVinney, Shirley A. Star, and Robin M. Williams Jr., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, vol. 1, The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 533.
2. Sturkey interview in Mary Penick Motley, The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), p. 170. See also p. 168. For a discussion of the “right-to-fight” issue in World War I, see Mark Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 19–21 and 54–56, and for World War II, see Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, pp. 526–535.
3. Arthur W. Little, From Harlem to the Rhine: The Story of New York’s Colored Volunteers (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936), p. 350.
4. Long interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 152. See also the interview with Horace Evans, p. 157, confirming Patton’s speech and its positive impact on the black tankers of the 761st Tank Battalion.
5. Curtis James Morrow, What’s a Commie Ever Done to Black People? A Korean War Memoir of Fighting in the U.S. Army’s Last All Negro Unit (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1997), p. 35.
6. Some black soldiers surveyed by the Research Branch “welcome the chance to prove their loyalty and fighting ability in the belief, or at least the hope, that such efforts would be rewarded.” A second group of black soldiers, however, expressed “bitterness over the treatment Negroes had received and were receiving at the hands of their country both in and out of the Army, cynicism over expressions of war aims in view of traditional deviations from these professed principles in American racial practice, and skepticism about whether Negroes would in fact receive recognition for the efforts they put forth” (Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, p. 507).
7. Blue interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 122. See also Jones interview, p. 190.
8. Brown interview in ibid., p. 279.
9. Morrow, Commie, p. 77.
10. Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders, with Clark Smith, Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), p. 133.
11. Research Branch surveys verify that blacks from northern states were dissatisfied with being stationed in southern camps, as were many blacks from southern states, for that matter, and that Jim Crow was the reason. See Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, pp. 550–566. Given the focus on the soldier in combat, the problems of discrimination and segregation in the Stateside army are touched on here only briefly. That Stateside segregation generated black soldiers’ resentment and proved detrimental to the training process is without question, however. See the experiences of the black 369th Infantry Regiment training in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1917 in Little, Harlem, pp. 48–70. See also the Stateside experiences of Motley’s interviewees in chapter l, “The Wrong War in the Wrong Century,” of Invisible Soldier, pp. 39–72, and Studs Terkel’s interviewees in “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 264–266 and 366–370. And see the Stateside surveys conducted by a team of sociologists in 1951 in Leo Bogart, ed., Project Clear: Social Research and the Desegregation of the United States Army (London and New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992), pp. 145–279.
12. Albert French, Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), p. 16.
13. Wilson interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 61. See also the interviews on pp. 161, 266, and 326.
14. Will Judy, A Soldier’s Diary: A Day-to-Day Record in the World War (Chicago: Judy Publishing, 1931), p. 162.
15. Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, pp. 543–544. For other comments by black GIs about good relations with Italian civilians, see Motley, Invisible Soldier, pp. 53, 162, 299, 310, and 318.
16. Jones interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 178.
17. For examples of segregated facilities or segregation policies overseas, see ibid., pp. 50–51 and 188, and Terkel, Good War, p. 379.
18. Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 1–2. For similar racist comments in World War I novels and memoirs, see John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, Sentry ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), p. 177; [Howard V. O’Brien], Wine, Women, and War: A Diary of Disillusionment (New York: J. H. Sears, 1926), pp. 89 and 298–299; and John W. Thomason Jr., Fix Bayonets! (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926), p. 105. For a World War II example, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (Colored): The World War II New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 66–69.
19. Bradford Perkins, “Impressions of Wartime,” Journal of American History 77:2 (September 1990): 563.
20. The black Ninety-second and Ninety-third Infantry Divisions saw combat in World War I, the latter fighting as separate regiments with the French. The same two divisions were reactivated in World War II. The Ninety-second fought in Italy and the Ninety-third in the Pacific, the latter again never functioning as an entire division. A handful of separate black tank, tank-destroyer, and artillery battalions also fought in World War II. One black infantry regiment, the Twenty-fourth, with its black supporting arms fought in the Korean War, until it was disbanded as part of the integration process.
21. Lyle Rishell, With a Black Platoon in Combat: A Year in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), p. 47.
22. This study is by William T. Bowers, William M. Hammon, and George L. Mac-Garrigle, Black Soldier, White Army: The 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1996).
23. See the comments by white officers in ibid., pp. 114, 120, 123, 167–168, and 268, and in Bogart, Project Clear, pp. 11–19.
24. Charles M. Bussey, Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War (Washington, D.C., and London: Brassey’s, 1991), p. 93.
25. Bogart, Project Clear, pp. 104–108.
26. Millender interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 316. For other examples, see pp. 96–97, 268, 297, 311, and 322; Bussey, Firefight, p. 124; and Rudy Tomedi, No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War (New York: John Wiley, 1993), p. 179. See also Bowers, Black Soldier, pp. 55–56 and 72–73.
27. Green interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 90; for similar complaints, see pp. 91, 93, 296–297, and 318.
28. Walden interview in ibid., p. 62; for similar complaints, see pp. 75, 84, 98, 152, 275, 297, and 304. See also Bowers, Black Soldier, pp. 168, 257, and 265.
29. See Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, pp. 580–585; Bogart, Project Clear, pp. 117–120; Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 334; and Bowers, Black Soldier, pp. 57–58.
30. Lawton interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 100.
31. Morrow, Commie, p. 34. See also pp. 11–12. For similar comments, see Motley, Invisible Soldier, pp. 76, 85, and 99, and Bussey, Firefight, pp. 213–214.
32. Harrison interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 157.
33. Donald interview in ibid., p. 166. See also p. 327 for a positive assessment of a white commander.
34. Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, p. 502. Albert J. Glass came to the same conclusion: “Segregation of Negro troops in separate units was a clear communication that they must be considered as inferior beings for separation could have no other purpose” (Neuropsychiatry in World War II, Medical Department, U.S. Army, Office of the Surgeon General, 2 vols., Overseas Theaters [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973], 2:89 n. 58).
35. Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, p. 506.
36. Little, Harlem, p. 239.
37. Hall, ed., Love, War, p. 233.
38. Bogart, Project Clear, pp. 53–54. See also pp. 54–55 for several examples provided by interviewees of perceived discrimination in combat support.
39. Duplessis interview in Motley, Invisible Soldier, p. 328.
40. Evans interview in ibid., p. 163.
41. Wells interview in ibid., p. 314; for other comments about black combat units being deliberately disbanded, misused, or held out of combat, see pp. 99, 161, 303, and 321–322.
42. Cason interview in ibid., p. 268. See also the interview with the black commander of the 366th Infantry Regiment, who details the misuse of his unit, pp. 334–340.
43. Bowers, Black Soldier, p. 65. See also pp. 263–266.
44. See Russell F. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaigns of France and Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 960–963.
45. Stouffer et al., Adjustment During Army Life, pp. 588–589 and 592.
46. Bogart, Project Clear, pp. xxix. See pp. xxix–xxxi and 7–10 for an overview of the situation leading to integration in the army in Korea as summarized in the next few paragraphs.
47. Ibid., pp. 22–24 and 93–98.
48. Ibid., p. 98. See also Charles C. Moskos Jr., The American Enlisted Man: The Rank and File in Today’s Military (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970), pp. 118–121 and Table 5.9, p. 222.
49. Koegel interview in Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfred Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory: The Concluding Volume of an Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 268.
50. William H. Mauldin, Bill Mauldin in Korea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952), p. 73.
51. See the questionnaire results in Bogart, Project Clear, pp. 88–91.
52. Project Clear researchers in ibid. discovered that the white soldier strongly opposed to integration “does not commit any hostile acts, but rather withdraws as far as he can from [interracial] contact” (p. 101). He might also seek a transfer to an outfit that was not yet integrated (Table A29, p. 102). Conversely, most soldiers of both races responded positively to integration, and 64 percent of whites in integrated units said they had made friends among black soldiers (p. 77).
53. Joseph R. Owen, Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996), pp. 34–35 and p. 21. For a similar example, see James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), p. 116. And for an example of this problem from the perspective of a black marine placed in charge of white soldiers for the first time, some of whom were less than eager to serve under a black, see Henry Berry, Hey, Mac, Where Ya Been? Living Memories of the U.S. Marines in the Korean War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 151–152.
54. Howard Matthias, The Korean War—Reflections of a Young Combat Platoon Leader, rev. ed. (Tallahassee, Fla.: Father and Son Publishing, 1995), pp. 104–106 (quotation on p. 104).
55. Moskos, American Enlisted Man, p. 124.
56. See the recommendations in Bogart, Project Clear, pp. 142–143.
57. For surveys supporting these statements, see Byron G. Fiman, Jonathan F. Borus, and M. Duncan Stanton, “Black-White and American-Vietnamese Relations Among Soldiers in Vietnam,” Journal of Social Issues 31:4 (fall 1975): 39–48, and Moskos, American Enlisted Man, pp. 118–131.
58. Richard E. Ogden, Green Knight, Red Mourning (New York: Zebra Books, 1985), pp. 189–190. For other examples of interracial “boonie brothers,” see Howard and “Rosey” in Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), p. 199, and Charles Strong and Joe, p. 57; “Doc” and “Blond” in John M. Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 129–131; and “Bagger” and “Cannonball” in James Webb, Fields of Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), pp. 192–198.
59. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, pp. 23 and 131.
60. Woodley interview in Terry, Bloods, p. 239; for similar comments, see pp. 23, 38–39, and 59, and Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), pp. 72 and 157. Historian James E. Westheider provides an overview of the military’s growing racial problems in the Vietnam era but acknowledges that interracial cohesion in combat units remained viable. See Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 6, 86, and 113–115.
61. Moskos, American Enlisted Man, p. 122. For other discussions of racial exclusivity, see John Helmer, Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After (New York: Free Press, and London: Collier Macmillan, 1974), pp. 100–101; James R. Ebert, A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965–1972 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993), pp. 327–328; and Westheider, Two Fronts, pp. 85–93.
62. David Parks, G.I. Diary (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 34 and 41.
63. Matthew Brennan, Brennan’s War: Vietnam, 1965–1969 (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 205.
64. Ogden, Green Knight, p. 221.
65. The final proportion of black combat deaths in Vietnam was 12.5 percent, versus a 10 percent level of African-American military presence in Vietnam and a national, black draft-age population of 13.5 percent in 1973. See Thomas C. Thayer, War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 113–114, and Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 18–19. Although the rate of black combat deaths evened out in the long run, the killed-in-action rate for blacks between 1961 and 1966 was 16 percent, yet blacks constituted only 10.6 percent of the military personnel in Southeast Asia during that period. See Moskos, American Enlisted Man, p. 116, and Table 5.5, p. 218.
66. Parks, G.I. Diary, pp. 86–87.
67. Kirkland interview in Terry, Bloods, p. 99. See also pp. 36 and 212–213. Incidentally, as nasty as the “shit-burning” job sounds, it was not simply someone’s sick idea of makework. Cutoff fifty-five gallon drums were used to catch human waste in the latrines. These drums could be slid out of the wooden latrines and the waste burned off using diesel fuel. All in all, it was an efficient and sanitary procedure, but understandably no one looked forward to the detail.
68. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987), p. 171.
69. Ibid. Given this book’s focus on the combat experience, real or perceived discrimination in other areas, such as the draft and military justice, is not addressed. See Westheider, Two Fronts, pp. 20–65.
70. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 11. For other examples of this genocidal theme surfacing, see Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Haas, Wounds of War: The Psychological Aftermath of Combat in Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 225, and Webb, Fields of Fire, pp. 270–271.
71. Terry, Bloods, p. xiv.
72. John Ketwig, And a Hard Rain Fell (New York: Pocket Books, 1986), p. 209.
73. O’Brien, If I Die, p. 111.
74. Brennan, Brennan’s War, p. 235.
75. Anderson interview in Santoli, Everything We Had, p. 72.
76. Edwards interview in Terry, Bloods, p. 12; for other examples, see the cases of “Franko” in French, Patches of Fire, pp. 52 and 59–60; “Jax” in Del Vecchio, 13th Valley, pp. 88–89, 316–317, and 399; “Panther” in Brennan, Brennan’s War, p. 254; and “Piper” in Goff and Sanders, Brothers, pp. 29–30.
77. Parks, G.I. Diary, pp. 115–116.
78. Goff and Sanders, Brothers, p. 132.
79. Biggers interview in Terry, Bloods, p. 117. See also the case of Sergeant Sadler in Webb, Fields of Fire, pp. 344–345, and Sergeant Henry in Brennan, Brennan’s War, p. 254. See Westheider’s discussion of “oreos” in Two Fronts, pp. 126–128.
80. Albeit belatedly, the military instituted policy changes and reforms late in the Vietnam War period to improve equality and to eliminate discrimination in such areas as educational testing, military justice, and promotions. See Westheider, Two Fronts, pp. 131–139.
81. Bussey, Firefight, p. 261.
CONCLUSION
1. Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Allen Lane, 1997), p. 30. For similar assessments, see Charles V. Genthe, American War Narratives: 1917–1918: A Study and Bibliography (New York: David Lewis, 1969), pp. 1–20; John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 103–108; and Edward Tabor Linenthal, “From Hero to Antihero: The Transformation of the Warrior in Modern America,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 63:1 (spring 1980): 79–93.
2. See Richard Holmes’s discussion of “dislocation of expectation” in his Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), p. 73.
3. William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 382.
4. Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 4 and 15.
5. James Hamilton Dill, Sixteen Days at Mungol-li (Fayetteville, Ark.: M&M Press, 1993), p. 160. See pp. 158–159 for the artillery incident.
6. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 153.
7. Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, p. 30.
8. Will Judy, A Soldier’s Diary: A Day-to-Day Record in the World War (Chicago: Judy Publishing, 1931), pp. 211–212. This theme is also evident in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home.” See his The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The First Forty-nine Stories and the Play “The Fifth Column” (New York: Modern Library, 1942), pp. 243–244. See also Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 177.
9. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 142. The historian Gerald F. Linderman agrees with Fussell. See his The World Within War: America’s Combat Experience in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 362.
10. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 213.
11. G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), p. 86.
12. See ibid., pp. 92–153, for a description of the memorialization process following the world wars.
13. Archibald MacLeish, “Lines for an Interment,” with a response by Malcolm Cowley, New Republic 76:981 (September 20, 1933): 161.
14. Archibald MacLeish and Malcolm Cowley, “A Communication: The Dead of the Next War,” New Republic 76:983 (October 4, 1933): 216.
15. Dixon Wecter, When Johnny Comes Marching Home (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), pp. 555–556.
16. John L. Munschauer, World War II Cavalcade: An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1996), p. 67.
17. Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, pp. 28 and 67–68.
18. See Holger Klein, with John Flower and Eric Homberger, eds., The Second World War in Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 181, and Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 38–48.
19. Tobey C. Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), p. 19. See pp. 16–24 for a full discussion of the “John Wayne Syndrome.”
20. Ibid., p. 24. See also Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 15.
21. Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), pp. 54, 55, and 56.
22. Caputo, Rumor of War, p. 6.
23. Davidson interview in Donald Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 238. See p. 288 for a similar example.
24. Cardinal interview in ibid., p. 419.
25. Davis interview in ibid., p. 276.
26. Kali Tal, “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Trauma” in Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, ed. Philip K. Jason (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 224. John Hellmann examines this national myth (or “American myth,” as he calls it), the way it influenced soldiers going to the Vietnam War, and the influence of the war in turn on that myth in American Myth.
27. Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Haas, Wounds of War: The Psychological Aftermath of Combat in Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 214.
28. One of the most in-depth expositions of this theory is provided by the historian Eric J. Leed, although his examples are based on European soldiers’ experiences. See No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 75–76 and 80–96. Mark Meigs provides some evidence that education and class may have affected doughboy expectations as well. See Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1997), p. 216. And see Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 80–84, for a discussion of the impact of class on Vietnam War soldiers’ attitudes and expectations.
29. Henry G. Gole, “Literature and History for Soldiers,” Military Review 86:6 (May 1988): 3.
30. Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, p. 30.
31. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, Dell, 1987), pp. 32 and 31.
32. Charles F. Minder, This Man’s War: The Day-by-Day Record of an American Private on the Western Front (New York: Pevensey Press, 1931), p. 242.
33. James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), p. 237.
34. Harold L. Bond, Return to Cassino (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), pp. 38–39.
35. Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness, p. 28.
36. Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, p. 111.
37. Mailer interview in Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (London and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), p. 92.
38. Roger J. Spiller, “My Guns: A Memoir of the Second World War,” American Heritage 42:8 (December 1991): 47.