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A Grunt's-eye View
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16750 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
2,510 Words |
| Author
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Col. Harry G. Summers, Jr.
Twice wounded in action on the battlefield and twice
decorated for valor, Colonel Harry G. Summers, a combat
infantry veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, is the author
of On Strategy (Presidio/Dell), the Vietnam War Almanac, and
the forthcoming Korean War Almanac (Facts on File). The
editor of Vietnam magazine, he also writes a syndicated column
for the Los Angeles Times. |
MUD SOLDIERS
Life Inside the New American Army
George C. Wilson
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989
228 pages, $19.95
"The Athenian commanders before Salamis," wrote Korean War veteran and historian T.R. Fehrenbach in his classic This Kind of War, "talked of art and the Acropolis, in sight of the Persian fleet. Beside their own campfires, the Greek hoplites chewed garlic and joked about girls.
"Without its tough spearmen," Fehrenbach continued, "Hellenic culture would have had nothing to give the world. It would not have lasted long enough. When Greek culture became so sophisticated that its common men would no longer fight to death, as at Thermopylae, but became devious and clever, a horde of Roman farm boys overran them.
"Thus," concludes Fehrenbach, "The time came when the descendants of the Macedonians who had slaughtered Asians till they could no longer lift their arms went pale and sick at the sight of the havoc wrought by the Roman gladius Hispanicus as it carved its way toward Hellas."
Has that time come for America? Have our infantrymen--the present-day counterparts of Fehrenbach's tough Greek spearmen--gone weak and soft? That is the question Washington Post military correspondent George Wilson set out to address in his remarkable new book, Mud Soldiers, "an account from the inside of where the fighting part of the American Army stands today."
Wilson, a World War II Navy veteran and a frontline war correspondent in the Vietnam War, begins with an account of a latter-day Thermopylae, the April 11-12, 1966, battle of Charlie Company, Second Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry, First Infantry Division, in the jungles of Vietnam's Phuoc Tuy province, southeast of Saigon.
Reconstructed by Wilson through interviews with the survivors, the battle was among the most ferocious of the Vietnam War. An estimated 150 enemy soldiers of the Viet Cong's D-800 main force battalion were killed, but the price had been high. Thirty-five of Charlie Company's infantrymen were killed in the fierce battle and seventy-one wounded. "With 106 out of 134 men killed or wounded, Charlie Company's casualty rate for the Easter battle was 80
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