Reality of War Is That Men Have to Die for Grant to Take Richmond

Why does the United States, at considerable expense, maintain an Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps? Almost 20 years ago, as I walked in military uniform from the bus stop to my home, a gaggle of young children would inevitably trail along behind me. And they would always ask the same two questions. The first was, “Are you in the Army or what?” And the next, without fail, was, “Did you ever kill anyone?”

As I later told my Army War College students, “Those bloodthirsty little bastards know what the Army is for. You’re the ones who have forgotten it.”

And they’re not the only ones who have forgotten it. That was obvious from reading a letter-to-the-editor in the Army Times concerning an article in which I quoted approvingly the observation of historian and Korean war combat veteran T. R. Fehrenbach’s that “men willingly take orders to die only from those they regard as superior beings.”

The anonymous writer was outraged. “Officers, in his (Summers’) mind, are now ‘superior beings’ . . . . Also, it seems to be his opinion that officers or ‘superior beings’ should expect their men to willingly take orders to die . . . . Officers in the United States sometimes have to give orders to accomplish missions that will regretfully result in some of their men becoming casualties, but hopefully in this country, they will never order their men to die, willingly or not.”

In fairness to Fehrenbach, the complete quote (from “This Kind of War,” one of the best books written on the Korean War) reads: “Orders in combat--the orders that kill men or get them killed, are not given by generals, or even by majors. They are given by lieutenants and sergeants, and sometimes by PFCs . . . . Such orders cannot be given by men who are some ofthe boys. Men willingly take orders to die only from those they are trained to regard as superior beings.”

Whether the writer wants to face up to it or not, that’s what the military is ultimately all about. My first “order to die” came on a Korean ridgeline in the winter of 1950. Then an 18-year-old infantry squad leader, my platoon sergeant, Master Sgt. Mike Thiel (a “superior being” as far as I was concerned) showed me where my squad was to dig in and ordered me tohold the position until he told me otherwise. That that order could cost me my life was unspoken, but both of us knew the reality of the situation. In two wars, both as a noncommissioned officer and as an officer, that reality did not change.

When soldiers no longer “willingly take orders to die,” we no longer have an Army. As that preeminent military authority Carl von Clausewitz put it more than a century-and-a-half ago: “The end for which a soldier is recruited, clothed, armed and trained, the whole object of his sleeping, eating, drinking and marching is simply that he should fight at the right place and the right time.”

He went on to say that “it would be futile--even wrong--to try and shut one’s eyes to what war really is, from sheer distress at its brutality.” Those words Americans ought to mark well, for we shut our eyes to war’s realities once and paid for it dearly. The nature of the Vietnam War was deliberately obscured with euphemisms--nation-building, winning hearts and minds, counterinsurgency--and when the realities began to show up on local television screens, many Americans recoiled in horror.

“War is death and destruction,” wrote Gen. Fred C. Weyand, then the Army chief of staff, in 1976. “The American way of war is particularly violent, deadly and dreadful for we believe in using ‘things’--artillery, bombs, massive firepower--in order to conserve our soldiers’ lives.

“We should have made the realities of war obvious to the American people before they witnessed it on their television screens,” Weyand concluded, “so that Americans can weigh the probable costs of involvement against the dangers of non-involvement.”

And we should particularly continue to make the realities of war obvious to our soldiers, especially now when the ranks of combat veterans are stretching thin. But the letter to the Army Times makes it plain that this has not been done.

How did the writer suppose that Gen. Washington took Yorktown? That Ulysses Grant took Richmond? That Pershing won at Chateau Thierry? That Eisenhower secured a beachhead at Normandy? That MacArthur liberated the Philippines? That Ridgway stopped the Chinese? That Westmoreland held Saigon and retook Hue?

“Follow me” is still the motto of the infantry school, and every infantryman knows what that means. So do most of the men and women in our armed forces today. When and if it comes down to it, they are prepared to honor the oath they took when they donned their nation’s uniform.