2004:
"The hours in the assembly area before an attack are among the most miserable moments in a soldier's
life. The thought of one's own death cannot be chased away, nor can the nagging certainty that one's
own luck cannot be permanent. This waiting, I think, is the most somber experience of being up front
in a war which seems endless; sooner or later, it is bound to be my turn. Death is no shared or
communal experience; it is utterly individual. In those moments, one is quite alone in the middle
of his comrades. No one talked, our faces were concealed in the dark; only now and then a face under
the peak of a mountain cap would light up from the red glow of a cigarette."
Johann Voss, Black Edelweiss
2003:
So long as there is life, keep charging the enemy.
Unknown
2002:
For the next few weeks, the rifle companies kept to a schedule almost as regular as that of office clerks or factory workers. In effect, we commuted to and from the war. We went into the bush for a day or two or three, returned for a brief rest, and went out again.
There was no pattern to these patrols and operations. Without a front, flanks, or rear, we fought a formless war against a formless enemy who evaporated like the morning jungle mists, only to materialize in some unexpected place. It was a haphazard, episodic sort of combat. Most of the time, nothing happened; but when something did, it happened instantaneously and without warning. Rifle or machine gun fire would erupt with heart-stopping suddenness, as when quail or pheasant explode from cover with a loud beating of wings. Or mortar shells would come in from nowhere, their only preamble the cough of the tubes.
In those weeks we did not see heavy fighting...but we saw enough to learn those lessons which cannot be taught in training camps; what fear feels like and what death looks like, and the smell of death, the experience of killing, of enduring pain and inflicting it, the loss of friends and the sight of wounds. We learned what war was about, "the cares of it, and the forms of it." We began to change, to lose the boyish awkwardness we had brought to Vietnam. We became more professional, leaner and tougher, and a callus began to grow around our hearts, the kind of emotional flak jacket that blunted the blows and stings of pity...
Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War
2001:
What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with
sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even
to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel
helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal
facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the
cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers.
Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
2000:
You ask what is our policy? . . . It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us. . . That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? . . . Victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road the road may be. . .
Winston S. Churchill, May, 1940
1999:
Now shrugging off his rags the wiliest fighter of the islands leapt and stood on the broad door sill, his own bow in this hand. He poured out at his feet a rain of arrows from the quiver and spoke to the crowd: "So much for that. Your clean-cut game is over. Now watch me hit a target that no man has hit before. . ." He drew to his fist the cruel head of an arrow for Antinoos just as the young man leaned to lift his beautiful drinking cup, embossed, two-handled, golden: the cup was in his fingers: the wine was even at his lips: and did he dream of death? How could he? In the revelry amid his throng of friends who would imagine a single foe-though a strong foe indeed-could dare to bring death's pain on him and darkness on his eyes? Odysseus' arrow hit him under the chin and punched up to the feathers through his throat. Backward and down he went, letting the winecup fall from his shocked hand. Like pipes his nostrils jetted crimson runnels, a river of mortal red, and one last kick upset his table knocking the bread and meat to soak in dusty blood.
Homer, The Odyssey, Book 22--Death in the Great Hall (Translated by Robert Fitzgerald)
1998:
This was a mean country for a moving line of battle. One hundred feet from the turnpike a man lost sight of the road entirely, and there seemed to be no other landmarks whatever. No regiment could see the troops on its right or left. . .The smoke intensified the forest gloom and made it opaque. Splinters and tiny branches came down as the bullets clipped through the trees, and only in the rare clearings could any man get a glimpse of his enemies. . . The dry underbrush and matted duff underfoot began to take fire, here and there, so that malicious little flames ran along the battleground. . . The smoke became heavier and heavier as the men advanced, and the sound of rifle fire and shouting men and crackling flames grew louder, and the bullets came faster and more deadly. . . There was a high wind, and it whipped the little flames in the underbrush into big flames, and its roar in the treetops mingled with the roar of battle as if some unimaginable tempest were lashing this dark forest. Men who fought were aware that all about them wounded men were pathetically trying to drag themselves along the ground away from the fires. . . There was no sound of artillery because guns could not be advanced or fired in this jungle but thousands upon thousands of men were firing their muskets as fast as they could load, until the whole Wilderness seemed to throb with the endless concussion. . . There had never been a fight like this before. There seemed to be whole acres where the musketry had cut the saplings in two a few feet from the ground, so that the tops lopped over drunkenly to make progress even more impossible. . . The whole Wilderness seemed to be boiling and smoking, with dense clouds going up to blot out the sunlight. . . Men simply lay on the ground or knelt behind logs and stumps and kept on firing, and the very intensity of their fire pinned both sides in position--the only chance for safety was to crouch low or lie flat; if a man stood up he was almost certain to be shot. . . The smoke blew down across the field, and all around to right and left there was the unending sound of rifle fire. . .
Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox
1997:
Another cause of concern was MacArthur's decision, in the drive north, to divide his forces, sending the Tenth Corps up the east side of the peninsula, the Eighth Army up the west--an immensely risky maneuver that the Joint Chiefs questioned. But MacArthur was adamant, and it had been just such audacity after all that had worked the miracle at Inchon. "Then there were those," wrote Matthew Ridgway, "who felt that it was useless to try to check a man who might react to criticism by pursuing his own way with increased stubbornness and fervor." With one powerful, "end the war offensive", one "massive comprehensive envelopment", MacArthur insisted, the war would be quickly won. As always, he had absolute faith in his own infallibility, and while no such faith was to be found at the Pentagon or the White House, no one, including Truman, took steps to stop him.
Bitter cold winds from Siberia swept over North Korea, as MacArthur flew to Eighth Army headquarters on the Chongchon River to see the attack begin. "If this operation is successful. . . I hope we can get the boys home for Christmas." The attack began. . .the day after Thanksgiving. Four days later. . . General Bradley telephoned the President. . . to say he had "a terrible message" from MacArthur. "We've got a terrific situation on our hands", Truman told his staff. . .The Chinese had launched a furious counterattack, with a force of 260,000 men, Truman told his staff. MacArthur was going over on the defensive. "The Chinese have come in with both feet.". . .Truman paused. The room was still. The shock of what he had said made everyone sit still and silent. Everything that had seemed to be going so well in Korea, all the heady prospects since Inchon, the soaring hopes and Wake Island were gone in an instant. . . Everyone present knew at once what the news meant for Truman, who would be answerable, "alone and inescapably," for whatever happened now in Korea. . ." We face an entirely new war, " MacArthur declared. It had been all of three days since the launching of his "end-the-war" offensive, yet all hope of victory was gone. The Chinese were bent on the "complete destruction" of his army. "This command. . . is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength."
David McCullough, Truman
1996:
It was not Napoleon alone who experienced that nightmarish feeling of the dread blow of his arm falling impotent, but all the generals and soldiers of his army, whether they had taken part in the battle or not, with their experience of previous battles (where after a tenth of this effort the enemy had fled) who experienced a similar feeling of horror before an enemy which, after losing one-half of its men, stood still, as formidable at the end of the battle as at the beginning. The moral force of the French, the attacking army, was exhausted. What the Russians had done at Borodino was not the sort of victory that is determined by the capture of some staffs with scraps of cloth on them known as standards, or a piece of ground upon which a body of troops had stood or were standing, but a moral victory--one that convinces the enemy of the moral superiority of its foe and of its own moral impotence. The French invader, like a maddened beast that in its onslaught receives a mortal wound, felt that it was doomed but could no more stop than the Russians army, weaker by half, could help swerving. After its initial impetus, the French army was still able to forge ahead to Moscow, but there, without further effort on the part of the Russians, it was bound to perish, bleeding to death from the mortal wound received at Borodino. The direct consequence of the battle of Borodino was Napoleon's groundless flight from Moscow, his return along the old Smolensk road by which he had come, the destruction of the invading army of five hundred thousand men, and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on which, at Borodino for the first time, the might of an opponent of stronger spirit had fallen.
Leon Tolstoy, War and Peace
1995:
Soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. . . Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely. . .
General Dwight David Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander (Order of the day, Invasion of Normandy, June 6, 1944)
1994:
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard among the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
(John McCrae)
1993:
It was the fourth day of May, and beyond the dark river there was a forest with the shadow of death under its low branches, and the dogwood branches, and the dogwood blossoms were floating in the air like lost flecks of sunlight, as if life was as important as death; and for the Army of the Potomac this was the last bright morning, with youth and strength and hope ranked under starred flags, bugle calls riding down the wind, and invisible doors swinging open on the other shore. The regiments fell into line, and great white-topped wagons creaked along the roads, and the spring sunlight glinted off the polished muskets and the brass of the guns, and the young men came down the valley while the bands played. A German regiment was singing, "John Brown's Body." Beside the roads the violets were in bloom and the bush honeysuckle was out, and the day and year had a fragile light that the endless columns would soon trample to fragments. The last campaign had begun, and a staff officer sat on a bank overlooking the Rapidan and had a curious thought: how odd it would be if every man who was to die in the days just ahead had to wear a big badge today, so that a man watching by the river could identify all of those who were never coming back...The men who marched away from winter quarters that morning took a last look back and saw a golden haze which, even at the moment of looking, they knew they would never see again. They tell how the birds were singing, and how the warm scented air came up the river valley. . . It would never be like this again, and young men who were to live on to a great age, drowsing out the lives of old soldiers in a land that would honor them and tolerate them and finally forget them, would look back on this one morning and see in it something that came from beyond the rim of the world.
Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox
1992:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
Ernest Hemmingway, A Farewell to Arms
1991:
Dear Madam:
I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement from the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine that would attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming but I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the alter of Freedom.
Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
Abraham Lincoln
1990:
Victorious warriors win first, then go to war. Defeated warriors go to war first, then seek to win.
Sun Tzu
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