>
this being Memorial Day, Dennis recently arranged for
> Iuniverse to publish a reprint edition of his
first-ever book-length
> work."
Actually the new edition of COMBAT SOLDIER was reissued some
years ago as part of The Authors Guild Back-In-Print program
with Iuniverse. (The title wasn't mine, I called it FAR OFF
IS OUR LAND. A bit pretentious, but I was young and eager,
and the title is a quote from Freiheit, a song of the Spanish
Civil War which meant a lot more to me at the time, and, in a
way, still does.)
That raises another question for Dennis. You were
a soldier in
> Korea, right? Did Roy's disillusionment with Vietnam
in Another Way to
> Die mirror your Korea experience?
>
> No, World War Two, as you'll see in Combat Soldier,
Korea appears briefly
in UPTOWN DOWNTOWN. Disillusionment is part of all wars, but
I think for most of us in combat units in WWII we went in
with few illusions---WWOne had taken care of that to a
considerable extent. Oh, sure, we had our gung-ho boys, and
we had our good, solid men who were defending their country,
but I think for most of us it was a matter of doing what we
had to once we were there, and jumping at any chance to get
the hell out of it---with quite a few creating their own
chance. I recall vividly how we cheered in the hospital when
the Soviets crossed the Oder. There were no considerations of
strategy or tactics in the ranks, it was Go you Reds. Every
mile they took, we didn;t have to.
(Two of the best WWII movies made
toward the end or immediately after the war tell it more or
less as it was. Battleground, despite a whole lot of the
usual uplifting claptrap meant for the home front, has some
scenes that show the stark truth, especially the brief moment
when Van Heflin is about to run away in panic, and is stopped
only because a buddy runs up at that instant and he can't
desert in front of him. (There are some in jokes in it too,
especially early in the film.)The Story of GI Joe, is the
other.)
Vietnam, and to a lesser extent,
Korea, were vastly different wars. Those were both
questionable wars, political wars, imperial wars, and that is
a recipe for dissillusionment, especially when the fighting
falls heavily on the backs of the poor and the minorities.
For those kind of wars you need a professional army.
That's the kind of war we fight
today. The kind of wars the British fought all over the globe
in the Nineteenth Century in expansion and defense of Empire,
some of them in the exact same places against the exact same
enemy. (Afghanistan really isn't a country, it was an
invention of the British to build a barrier against the
Russians and protect India, and it took them two wars to
establish it out of entirely different warring tribes.) The
Romans did the same and had to make their legions
professional after the end of the Republic, made up mostly of
non-Romans.
So while I learned a lot about what
happens to ordinary soldiers in combat in WWII, Vietnam
brought it's own disilluons.
Dennis
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