Young GIs Shown Their Roles in History : Leadership: Veteran officers, noncoms try to expand limited horizons of their ‘grunts.’

Almost every morning now, Army Capt. Charlie Arp shuffles through his notebook and tries to tell the men of Alpha Company that they are living in historic times.

One day, Arp, a native of Blue Ridge, Ga., told of a massive B-52 attack to the north, a score of American bombers attacking Iraqi troops for hours on end. Another time he talked of the sheer size of the American buildup.

But for his frustrated group of ground troops, whose horizons after two weeks of war remain confined to a patch of uncontested Saudi sand, the lessons from the commander are only slowly sinking in.

“They’re not really grasping it yet,” Arp said Wednesday afternoon as he climbed aboard his M-1A1 tank. “They’re just dying to go out and mix it up. They don’t realize just how big this whole thing is. For them, it’s Alpha Company versus Iraq.”

In this still-placid piece of desert, the references to history are becoming a regular refrain. With younger soldiers still seemingly bristling with impatience, older troops try to pry them from their narrow focus. From plain-spoken generals to profane sergeants major, the most experienced among the Americans here are trying to instill a sense that all are in the midst of something big.

“This is something you ought to be writing to yourself about and writing home about,” Maj. Gen. Ronald H. Griffith, commander of the 1st Armored Division, urged hoarsely to soldiers standing stiffly at attention in a tank battalion ceremony the other day. “It’s unprecedented, and it’s historic.”

Earlier, the battalion’s senior noncommissioned officer offered a more down-to-earth assessment, urging soldiers to reach back and brace themselves for what he assured them would be a momentous time.

“Some day, when you’re sitting in a bar 20 years from now and you hear some dirtball talk about this time, you’re going to snicker,” shouted 38-year-old Sgt. Maj. Juan Mendez to the assembled group. “You’ll know that you were there.

“It’s a proud time,” Mendez continued, his voice a deep roar across the sands. “It’s a proud time to be an American soldier.”

But with some commanders now fearing that a ground war could last several months, the talk of a place in history could serve to gild unpleasant times to come. More importantly, some officers insist, it might help soldiers to appreciate from the outset what could be formative experiences.

“You remember the movie ‘Patton’?” asked Col. James R. Riley, commander of the 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. “He stood up and said, “Well, guys, someday you’re going to talk to your grandkids about this and they’re going to say, ‘What did you do in the war?’ and you’re not going to have to say, ‘Well, I shoveled (manure) in Louisiana.’ ”

“In many senses,” Riley continued in an interview, “this may be the most important thing that many of us will do in our lifetime.”

In a brigade drawn largely from the 7th Infantry Regiment, the Army’s most-decorated unit, a sense of history is inescapable. Its two infantry battalions here are known as the Cottonbalers, a name drawn from the regiment’s heroism in the War of 1812, when musketeers took cover behind bales of cotton to repel advancing British forces in the Battle of New Orleans.

But it is the extraordinary size of the current American military effort to which commanders refer day after day in telling their men that, however remote their patch of sand might seem, it is part of a whole whose scale they can barely conceive.

That the lessons appear not yet to have found acceptance is hardly surprising, experienced officers say, in an institution whose structure requires soldiers to focus on the narrowest of tasks.

“A grunt’s world is his field of fire,” one veteran soldier said. “Anything that comes in there, he shoots. But most of the time, he doesn’t care about or even want to know about anything else.”

But already, Wednesday, a few soldiers said they had begun to heed the advice of others, asking their wives to keep their letters or even start a journal recording their own experiences of the war.

Staff Sgt. Wilmer Hill, a 30-year-old from Las Vegas who is a gunner in a Bradley fighting vehicle, said he had begun to scrawl notes on pieces of paper.

“This is just something you never want to forget,” Hill said. “It will always have a place in your mind, and, hopefully, I’ll be able to tell my grandkids about it.”

He paused, “Then, if they tell me they want to join the Army, I can kick them in the butt.”