The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  Rejecting tough-guy rhetoric (although himself a battle-hardened warrior), William Manchester expresses the need to move past grief: “It was bad form to weep long for a fallen buddy. We moved on, each of us inching along the brink of his own extinction.”206

  A FEW REVELED in it; most were disgusted by it, and yet more were reconciled to the necessary truth that killing is what combat soldiers are meant to do: “We were in the business of killing … it was what we were trained for; it was our livelihood, in a very real sense. I am not justifying, but explaining, when I say those were the days when, if a selection board chairman asked (and he did): ‘Wouldn’t you like to stick a bayonet in a German’s guts, eh?,’ he was not expecting an answer drawn from the Sermon on the Mount.”207

  As with most soldiers throughout history, combat troops in World War II tended to resolve any moral qualms with an uncomplicated directness: In the words of an armored infantryman, “You learn one basic axiom and that is kill or be killed. You learn to think of ‘me.’ With someone getting killed you say, ‘Better him than me.’ ” And of a medic: “In the heat of all this bitterness, anger, and fear of being done in, it’s either you or them.”208 Survival had a way of trumping most other considerations: “You don’t fight a kraut by Marquis of Queensberry rules. You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself. He does the same to you. He tricks you and cheats you, and if you don’t beat him at his own game you don’t live to appreciate your own nobleness.209

  An American infantryman in the Pacific theater would have heartily applauded the sentiment: “Hollywood movies do not actually portray the realities of war, as in many cases the enemy is shot from behind or stabbed from behind or blown up from behind easier than front on. This is not a step-by-step hip-swinging, gun-throwing, honor-bound situation. Actually, you were out to save your own neck in the safest, easiest possible way.”210

  Men under great stress cannot help but feel satisfaction—joy even—in killing an enemy who would kill them given half a chance. Is it evidence of innate and primal evil? Of a bloodlust like a lousy inheritance? Or simply that huge sigh of relief—“He. Not me.” George MacDonald Fraser recalls being in an attack against a strong Japanese position at Pyawbwe in Burma that had been long anticipated and much feared by the attackers. Finally, they were in the thick of it, and the killing, surprisingly, brought an almost luxurious sense of satisfaction, deliciously unburdened of guilt:

  Nick jumped into the wagon [railroad car], and I was on his heels. It was open on the far side, like a picture window; it might have been designed as a firing point for kneeling marksmen. All around the wagon men were yelling with excitement, throwing themselves down on the rubble and blazing away at those running figures, some of whom must have turned to fire at us, for two or three shots clanged against the wagon. But most of them were running, and all we had to do was pick our targets.

  This was something new. In my previous contacts with the enemy, everything had been split-second in crisis, with nothing to do but react at speed, snap-shooting.… There had been no time to think; it had been scramble and shoot and hope … in a way like a goal-mouth scramble.…

  But in that railway wagon it was more like the moment when you’re clear with the ball.… There wasn’t much time, but enough: to pick a target, hang for an instant on the aim to make sure, take the first pressure according to the manual—and then the second.

  It was exciting; no other word for it, and no explanation needed, for honest folk. We all have kindly impulses, fostered by two thousand years of Christian teaching, gentle Jesus, and love thy neighbour, but we have the killer instinct, too, the murderous impulse of the hunter … but one must not say so.211

  Killing, in Fraser’s world, was sanitized by distance and sanctified by an ancient tribal dispensation. However, when it was up close and personal, the killer was no longer protected from the consequences, as Raymond Gantter found:

  It is hard to write this part, because this is where I killed a man. The first one. The first one I was sure of. It ought to be told simply, because it’s important that you should understand what it’s like—how you feel when you have trapped a small, running creature between the cold sights of a deliberate gun and pulled the trigger, and suddenly the creature has stopped running and is lying there, and now it’s a man and his body is naked, and soft and crumpled. It ought to be told without hint of boast, and yet so that you would see there’s something of the bragging boy in the sense of achievement; it ought to be told without sentiment, and yet so you would see what a big thing it is.

  I saw a German soldier rise from behind the protective shoulder of the ridge and start to run to the rear, sprinting across the open field toward the hills. Perhaps he was a runner, a messenger—I cannot remember that he carried a weapon. It occurred to me later that he must have been young and very green, because he ran in a straight line, an easy course to follow with the sights of a rifle. He had unbuttoned his overcoat for greater freedom in running, and the skirts flapped like huge blue wings around his legs. He was a moving dot of blue, a clumsy blue object to be stalked deliberately.… Now, impaled within the sights, the blue coat was enormous, presented itself to my squinted eye like a cloud, like a house, like a target painted solid blue on the firing range.… I squeezed the trigger and he fell. He did not move again, the skirts of the blue overcoat made a patch of unnatural color in the field where he lay.

  For a moment I was triumphant and my eyes lingered on my prize, confirming it. There he was! … He was there, still lying there, and it wasn’t a game any longer. He hadn’t risen to his feet, dusted himself off, and thumbed his nose at me gaily before started to run again. He lay there, quiet now, and he hadn’t moved, and I laid my rifle on the floor of the attic—carefully, because of the plaster dust—and put my head in my hands. I wanted to be sick, but there wasn’t time to be sick. And I thought, Poor bastard … he was hungry and cold, too … scared and homesick and missing his people and tired of war. And I was sick and ashamed because I never hated him, never him specifically, and I never wanted to kill him. And it was an ugly and an evil thing.… Then I picked up my rifle and went back to my job.212

  TWO SOLDIERS ARE killed. Their deaths, humiliating for one, defiant for the other, stand at the polar opposites of combat. A great arc—the spectrum that connects the heroic and unheroic—is made visible. They are particular in that they happened during World War II, but they are also universal, belonging to all wars.

  William Manchester kills his first Japanese:

  Utterly terrified, I jolted to a stop on the threshold of the shack. I could feel a twitching in my jaw, coming and going like a winky light signaling some disorder. Various valves were opening and closing in my stomach. My mouth was dry, my legs quaking, and my eyes out of focus. Then my vision cleared. I unlocked the safety of my Colt, kicked the door with my right foot, and leapt inside.

  My horror returned. I was in an empty room. There was another door opposite the one I had unhinged, which meant another room, which meant the sniper was in there—and had been warned by the crash of the outer door. But I had committed myself. Flight was impossible now. So I smashed into the other room and saw him as a blur to my right. I wheeled that way, crouched, gripped the pistol butt in both hands, and fired.

  Not only was he the first Japanese soldier I had ever shot at; he was the only one I had seen at close quarters. He was a robin-fat, moon-faced, roly-poly little man with his thick, stubby, trunklike legs sheathed in faded khaki puttees and the rest of him squeezed into a uniform that was much too tight. Unlike me, he was wearing a tin hat, dressed to kill. But I was quite safe from him. His Arisaka rifle was strapped on in a sniper’s harness, and though he had heard me, and was trying to turn toward me, the harness sling had him trapped. He couldn’t disentangle himself from it. His eyes were rolling in panic. Realizing that he couldn’t extricate his arms and defend himself, he
was backing toward a corner with a curious, crablike motion.

  My first shot had missed him, embedding itself in the straw wall, but the second caught him dead-on in the femoral artery. His left thigh blossomed, swiftly turning to mush. A wave of blood gushed from the wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across his legs, pooling on the earthen floor. Mutely he looked down at it. He dipped a hand in it and listlessly smeared his cheek red. His shoulders gave a little spasmodic jerk, as though somebody had whacked him on the back; then he emitted a tremendous, raspy fart, slumped down, and died. I kept firing, wasting government property.

  Already I thought I detected the dark brown effluvium of the freshly slain, a sour, pervasive emanation which is different from anything else you have known. Yet seeing death at that range, like smelling it, requires no previous experience. You instantly recognize the spastic convulsion and the rattle, which in his case was not loud, but deprecating and conciliatory, like the manners of civilian Japanese. He continued to sink until he reached the earthen floor. His eyes glazed over. Almost immediately a fly landed on his left eyeball. It was joined by another. I don’t know how long I stood there staring. I knew from previous combat what lay ahead for the corpse. It would swell, then bloat, bursting out of the uniform. Then the face would turn from yellow to red, to purple, to green, to black.…

  Jerking my head to shake off the stupor, I slipped a new, fully loaded magazine into the butt of my .45. Then I began to tremble, and next to shake, all over. I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear: “I’m sorry.” Then I threw up all over myself. I recognized the half-digested C-ration beans dribbling down my front.… Then Barney burst in on me.… He said: “Slim, you stink.” I said nothing.… I remember wondering dumbly: Is this what they mean by “conspicuous gallantry”?213

  Michael Calvert, a British commando-trained officer fighting deep behind Japanese lines with Orde Wingate’s Chindit special forces group in Burma in 1943, meets a noble adversary in a fight to the death:

  On the beach, as naked as I was, stood a Jap. A pile of clothes lay near his feet and in my first startled glance I took in the insignia of an officer.…

  While I was still thinking hard the Jap officer stepped into the river and came towards me. I think his mind must have been working much like mine; he could see I was unarmed but if he used his gun it would bring both patrols running and he did not know our strength.… Anyway, he wasn’t taking any chances on an open fight which would needlessly risk his men’s lives. He preferred to tackle me with his bare hands.

  He knew his ju-jitsu and the water on his body made him as slippery as an eel, but I was the bigger and the stronger. We fought in silence except for the occasional grunt, and struggled and slipped and thrashed around until we were at times waist deep in the swirling river. It was an ungainly fight, almost in slow motion, for it is extraordinarily difficult to keep balance or move quickly and surely in two or three feet of water. Our breathing became heavier and the Jap got more vicious as he jabbed his fingers at my face in an attempt to blind me. I think it was not till then that I fully realized this would have to be a fight to the death.

  I was a trained soldier, taught how to kill with a gun, or a bomb, or a bayonet or even a knife in the thick of battle. Somehow this seemed different, more personal, as the two of us, naked as we were, fought in the water. Apart from anything else I had come to admire this game little Jap. He had all the guts in the world. He could so easily have called up his men.…

  Now he was putting up a tremendous show and I was hard put to it to hold him. I pulled myself together. Brave or not I had to kill him. Or he would kill me.

  I was thankful for one lesson I had learned: never to take my boots off in the jungle outside camp. Other clothes can be scrambled on in a moment but boots take time, and time can cost lives. Even on this occasion I had stuck to my rule, which was just as well. I managed to grab the Jap’s right wrist and force his arm behind his back. And I buried my face in his chest to stop him clawing my eyes out. Then as he lashed out with his left arm and both feet, I forced him gradually under water. My boots gave me a firm grip and I shut my eyes and held him under the surface. His struggles grew weaker and weaker, flared again in frantic despair and then he went limp. I held on for a few seconds longer before releasing my grip. Slowly I opened my eyes and for a moment could see nothing except the eddies of water caused by his final efforts to break free. Then his body emerged on the surface a couple of yards away and floated gently off downstream.214

  * It was called a knee mortar because “at first it was thought that the concave base plate meant it was fired while resting on the soldier’s thigh, an impression furthered by pictures of Japanese troops posed in this fashion. This was found to be untrue after a few Allied soldiers broke their legs while trying it. The Japanese pictures had been made because the troops looked tough that way.” James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi, The Pacific War Encyclopedia (New York: Facts on File, 1998), 265.

  † An ungainly but quite effective device invented in 1912 by an engineer officer in the British Army in India (hence its name) made up of connecting sections of tube that gave the operator some distance from the TNT charge at the end. It was primarily used to blow gaps in barbed wire and other obstacles.

  ‡ It would be intriguing to know the derivation of this bit of slang. “Government issue,” as in government-issued rations that induced diarrhea?

  EIGHT

  DIAMONDS IN THE MIRE

  Death and the Heroic in Modern Combat

  I don’t want to die in this fucking country.

  The last words of Staff Sergeant Stevon Booker, a tank commander with Alpha Company 1/64 Armor, Third Infantry Division, Baghdad, Iraq, April 5, 2003 as reported in Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq.

  If I have to die, let me die in a stand-up fight.

  David Bellavia in his war memoir, House to House (2007)

  A STAND-UP FIGHT IN whatever country—Vietnam, Somalia, the Falklands, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan—is all the soldier asks. (Or, perhaps more accurately, all the Western soldier asks.) To give his life or, more likely, have it taken for some purpose is the first and last clause in the contract he has made with his country. The cause may not be grand (think Grenada) or even comprehensible (think Vietnam) to the men at the sharp end (the politicians, editorialists, and think-tank pointy-heads will provide the ideological scaffolding), but there has to be some lifeline of meaning by which the soldier can haul himself out of the madness and bloody mire of combat. The actions that lead to his death may not, in the strictest sense, be heroic, but in a more general sense his death should be redeemed by purpose. There should at least be some vestige of significance. To give up one’s life as a gratuity is not acceptable, although for many warriors it has been the price demanded, and all the more terrible for it.

  Looking back, it seems as though the end of World War II also marked the end of a compelling and luminous version of heroic warfare. There was an overwhelming national commitment. The war was noble, the enemy unambiguously evil. The Allies stood foursquare, untroubled by any niggling doubt as to the righteousness of their cause. There were no mass antiwar rallies. Good believed in itself without being undermined by the sneer of irony.

  Back then, the enemy was, by unequivocal definition, bad (Germans), bad but silly (Italians), and sometimes truly evil (the Japanese in totality, the Germans partially, as in the SS), but they were the recognizable enemy. They wore uniforms (and if they did not, they were shot out of hand). They may have been bastards, but they stood up and gave a good honest fight. On the whole they fought within the broad context of the rules of the game (although, reprehensibly, the Japanese did not always sing from the same songbook and were therefore disgusting and bestial). It was, give or take a few “irregularities,” a symmetrical confrontation, despite some localized disequilibrium. (The Japanese tended to be on the wrong end of this equation, but they were,
by common agreement, fanatics, and therefore thoroughly deserved their bloody fate.)

  Partisan warfare muddied the waters, but in the end it was quite clear. If the partisans fought for the Allies, they were good, their guerrilla tactics brilliant and daring, their breaking of the rules thrilling and heroic. If they were killed by the Germans, Italians, or Japanese, it was very wicked and provided yet more evidence that our enemies were brutal thugs. When German soldiers had themselves photographed gawping and grinning contemptuously at partisan bodies swinging from makeshift lamppost gallows or dumped into communal pits, we were revolted by the crassness and the cruelty.

  The Germans enjoyed killing Communist partisans because they were, as far as the Nazis were concerned, terrorist scum. For the Germans there was no noble link between “partisan” and “patriot.” They were simply the vermin of the battlefield, their courage mere fanaticism, their tactics underhanded and despicable.

  After World War II it seemed as though the established notions of how wars would be fought changed drastically. With the Great Powers held in a standoff by the mutually assured destruction that their nuclear arsenals guaranteed, the conflicts of the postwar era fragmented into “small wars” of empire as communistic and capitalistic systems fought to maintain their spheres of influence.

  There were some exceptions. The mass frontal charges of Chinese infantrymen during the Korean War (complete with rousing bugle calls) strike us now as the last expression of an ancient style of heroic warfare. The pitched battles between Israeli and Arab tank armies during the sixties and seventies had a heroic dimension that harks back to a type of combat freed of the tactical messiness that accompanies the insurgency warfare that characterized Vietnam, the later stages of the invasion of Iraq, and Afghanistan.