What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  34. Alphabetic system used by the ancient Irish.

  35. North Vietnamese soldier. I apologize for the use of this word, but that’s where I was when I was in Vietnam.

  36. A large knife carried by Marines.

  37. Just days before I reported for duty at Mobilization Planning, the colonel I was supposed to work for had a heart attack. I was the only one around who knew FORTRAN and PERT networks (Program Evaluation Review Technique), so I temporarily replaced him until I was discharged.

  38. I later learned to call it being “numb,” the first sign of PTSD.

  39. The same hill I described in chapter 2.

  40. Executive officer, the second in command in an infantry company. In most tactical situations the commanding officer (CO) and the XO are separated physically to ensure that both won’t be killed at the same time.

  41. Canadians in the Marines were not unusual. I’ve often wondered how Canadian veterans have handled their return to a nation that already projects so much of its own darker side onto the United States.

  42. One of our guys retorted, “Who the fuck needs to be accurate with an M-60 machine gun?”

  43. Unannounced machine-gun fire would have made the whole hill come unglued. Etiquette and common sense demanded announcing any intentional fire where no attack was under way.

  44. “Walking point” means taking the lead position at the front of the unit. This is probably the most frightening of all patrolling experiences, particularly in dense jungle where you can’t see more than two or three feet into the foliage. The point man is responsible for detecting any danger and is the one most likely to be sacrificed should that danger not be detected in time. I was excused from this role because I was an officer, but the few times I took it on just to prove something I was a nervous wreck and frightened out of my mind.

  45. Long-range rations. Freeze-dried food that was not only light but a very welcome departure from the heavy cans of C-rations we usually ate. Long-rats were very new then and were supposed to be used only by special groups such as reconnaissance teams.

  46. Intravenous fluid, plasma that ran by gravity from a bottle down a plastic tube and through a needle into a vein on the arm or leg. Loss of blood causes shock, which is a principal cause of combat deaths.

  47. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross and four men wear silver bracelets engraved with his name because he saved their lives..

  48. Semper fidelis, “always faithful,” is the motto of the U.S. Marine Corps. When originally coined it probably meant always faithful to the call of the nation. It still does, but it has taken on an additional, more personal meaning for Marines: always faithful to one another, in a variety of contexts ranging from risking your life for a fellow Marine in battle to getting a fellow Marine a date. In my darkest moments in Vietnam I never doubted that my fellow Marines would risk killing themselves trying to help me and it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t do the same for them.

  49. I never saw the NVA run. At most I saw them hurry from their positions to reach their main units, but their units always withdrew in good order and very dangerously to any pursuers. They were a disciplined and effective fighting force.

  50. Combined Action Group. Marines who could operate very independently were chosen to work in small groups that were assigned to villages too far from main cities to be covered by more conventional forces. They usually operated in combination with local Vietnamese militia units.

  51. Trained as elite shock troops, with a specific history of acting that way, and with logistical support designed for short tough fights, the Marines were misused in Vietnam. The generals in the first Gulf war, almost all of them veterans of Vietnam, used the Marines correctly: first, as a quick reaction force to help defend Saudi Arabia; then, as an offensive threat to the beaches behind Iraqi lines; and, finally, as shock troops to drive through the heavy Iraqi fortifications near the coast.

  52. We consider this to be fanatical. If an American did this we would consider it heroic.

  53. Most Japanese Americans fought in Europe with the justly famous Nisei Division, although some acted as interpreters in the Pacific.

  54. I’ll always remember a Chinese businessman in Malaysia being astounded when I told him I had volunteered for the Marines and fought in Vietnam. He said, “We Chinese see our sons as fine steel, not nails to be thrown away.”

  55. Dead and wounded.

  56. It’s no different from grade inflation or putting all excellents on fitness reports for average work. If others are doing it, why would you ruin some student’s chance for Yale or a guy’s career just to be a one-person crusade for rigor and honesty?

  57. After an epic defense and one week after Westmoreland left Vietnam the Marines abandoned it with Creighton Abrams’s full blessings. The decision to make a stand at Khe Sanh is still controversial.

  58. I was well aware that I had received this assignment when the Corps was desperately short of infantry officers. I felt grateful then and still do.

  59. United States Marine Corps Reserve. In the Marines in those days there was a very clear distinction between those who elected to make the Corps their career by “going regular” and those who didn’t. Those who hadn’t gone regular, by signing a formal agreement with the Corps, were designated USMCR.

  60. Meg and I had a poignant reunion and emotional reconciliation some three decades later. She told her story and I told mine. We both sadly accepted that we were dumb kids in love who hurt each other. I am blessed to have her as a friend.

  61. I think the smugness and ease with which this line of defense was dismissed had less to do with fairness than with the self-righteous morality of people on the winning side. Japanese and German military people committed terrible crimes and deserved punishment. However, the large number of death penalties handed out to so many should have been tempered with some recognition of the awful choice of disobeying an order in a frightening dictatorship as opposed to the relative ease of disobeying an order in a democracy with rule of law.

  62. The primary reason you don’t make sound judgments in combat is that you too often are exhausted and numbed. There is little that can be done about this except training under extreme duress to learn how to function at such times—one very strong reason why I deplore ignorant attempts by civilians and noncombat veterans to make boot camp more “humane.” There is nothing humane about dead kids because someone cracked under pressure.

  63. People have this idea that you just touch a match to an ammo dump and it goes off. Actually, very little powder is exposed. It’s all encased in metal. Shells, bullets, and rockets all take a lot of explosives to get cooking. Once they do, then you have the popular image of an ammo dump going off, which is, indeed, spectacular.

  64. Charles M. Province, The Unknown Patton, 1984.

  65. Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, 1969.

  66. Platoon Leaders Class, a U.S. Marines officer candidate school.

  67. The final line of departure, the preplanned line on the ground that is the last stop before committing everything to the assault and the control point for managing artillery, naval gunfire, and air support just prior to the assault.

  68. Controlling an assault—and the word control is used loosely—treads a fine line between not having any gaps, which weakens the attack, and not bunching up, which makes it too easy for the defense to kill you.

  69. The Purple Heart is a medal given for wounds received in combat. The Combat Action Ribbon is awarded to people who have experienced combat, although this is a tougher one to judge on the surface. A person could be at an air base, where one rocket hit the base half a mile from the person, and still be awarded a CAR the same as an infantryman who spent months fighting in the jungle.

  70. Medals have a hierarchy. In the Marine Corps the order of medals for valor in combat, from top to bottom, is Congressional Medal of Honor, Navy Cross, Distinguished Flying Cross, Silver Star, Bronze Star, Single Mission Air Medal, Navy Commendation Med
al. Once you’re in the service, you can read a person’s ribbons and quickly know where you fall in the hierarchy.

  71. Forward Air Control.

  72. The official commendation makes it sound as if I took a bunch of bunkers all alone. I did lead the charge, but I often remind people that none of those kids who wrote the eyewitness accounts could have done so if they hadn’t been right there with me.

  73. I stayed with the company until we were relieved, I must say feeling very sorry for myself. Luckily, the blindness was temporary. The surgeon on the hospital ship, the Repose, later told me that several metal slivers were just microns from the optic nerve.

  74. Aircrews are armed only with pistols, virtually useless in a fight like this. They may as well have been unarmed.

  75. To be clear, I know the stupid headline was completely out of the control of the pilot and crew, who, like all aircrews, were risking their lives to help us.

  76. Upon being asked back then if I’d ever fight again, I remember saying yes, I would, when the enemy crossed the local river. I’ve since extended my geographic constraints. Metaphorically, it is better for my family if the fighting is on the other side of the river.

  77. Nonspecific urethritis.

  78. I can take you “left-handed,” with my disadvantaged side. Possibly, I can take you with the hand I wipe with.

  79. I am paraphrasing or quoting from Thomas Kinsella, trans., The Táin, 1982.

  80. Army, Long Range Reconnaisance Patrol.

  81. Tim O’Brien, “Speaking of Courage,” in The Things They Carried, 1990.

  82. Norman Maclean, “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky,” in A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, 1976.

  83. A person who “cruises” through uncut timber estimating its potential for harvesting.

  84. There are sound psychological reasons for this, namely that if the initiation rite is demystified there will be little psychological transformation when it is undergone, and of course the whole purpose will be lost. You can’t scare someone to death if he knows ahead of time that it’s all a trick.

  85. Childbirth held much of the same mystery, terror, and transcendence for the girls. It, too, is disappearing as a means to womanhood. Women can now choose not to be mothers and large numbers will so choose. In addition, bearing children can now be done while a woman is unconscious or heavily sedated (although this choice is not generally taken), with much decreased risk of death in first-world countries.

  86. She no longer feels this way.

  87. From Life on the Mississippi, 1883.

  88. Hans von Luck, “The End in North Africa,” in The Quarterly Journal of Military History (Summer 1989).

  89. I am a German.

  90. Ares is the Greek god of war. Mars is the Roman equivalent.

  91. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, 1963.

  92. I refer the reader to the works of authors such as Alice Miller, John Bradshaw, Gershen Kaufman, Adele Faber, and Elaine Mazlish.

  93. This is one reason why the advent of science so shook most religions. Science proved that what was in fact global didn’t fit the old mythologies based on a false sense of what was global.

  94. H. R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, 1984.

  95. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 1955.

  96. Perhaps with the same myopia. Someday people may be amazed that we didn’t think of trees as “people.”