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Fire seldom but accurately. Thrust the bayonet with force. The bullet misses, the bayonet doesn’t. The bullet’s an idiot, the bayonet’s a fine chap. Stab once and throw the Turk off the bayonet. Bayonet another, bayonet a third; a real warrior will bayonet half a dozen and more. Keep a bullet in the barrel. If three should run at you, bayonet the first, shoot the second, and lay out the third with your bayonet. This isn’t common but you haven’t time to reload....
Alexander Suvorov, The Science of Conquering
1966
As in Arkansas, forsythia also announces the coming of spring in Korea. Korean newspapers track the progress of the blossoming from the southern tip of the peninsula up to the north and those blooms, as well as those of the azaleas, tell the Korean people that spring has arrived.
Korea is one of those places in the world the United States knows, but does not attend to. It is a place like Cuba, the Philippines, France, Tunisia, Algiers, Morocco, Italy, Germany, New Guinea, Burma, China, Japan, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan and a few others where U.S. infantrymen have studied the nature of its dirt, and marched and killed and died.
The invasion of South Korea by the North in 1950 was a surprise. The strategists of the day had looked into the future and tried to come to an understanding of their new atomic weapon that had blossomed twice over Japan. Those men did not expect Korea. They had not thought through the political inhibitions that ensnared the new weapons, nor had they yet come to a clear understanding of the unique circumstances that allowed the first, and only, use of those bombs. That first use was an old front line soldier’s decision. It was the reflexive response of a man who had seen war as a young artillery captain and who had seen the casualty reports of Okinawa and the estimates of the human costs of invading Japan. Truman probably didn’t lose much sleep over his decision. He was, after all, one of the few real soldiers to ever serve in the White House.
In 1966 Sergeant First Class Sapp was the Platoon Sergeant of the First Platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 39th Infantry, “Paddy’s Gang, Anything, Anytime, Anywhere, Bar None,” of the 8th Infantry Division garrisoned in Worms, Germany. He had been a PFC in the Korean War. He had experienced bugles wailing in the dark, the sudden appearance of a hundred Chinese soldiers in front of his foxhole, masses of men who seemed just to rise up out of the night. He never quite got over it.
That explains the incident in the US Army training area in Baumholder, Germany. The 1st of the 39th was a mechanized infantry unit. That meant that instead of walking across the training areas of Baumholder, we soldiers rode in diesel-powered, tracked, aluminum boxes, one squad to a machine. We let our machines carry us to the vicinity of the objective, but to win we had to stop, drop the loading ramp in the rear, and run out with half a squad (a fire team) going to one side and the second fire team going to the other. Then we went on the attack, one fire team providing covering fire as the other fire team advanced up the hill.
This was a training exercise. All the weapons were fitted with adapters so that the rifles and machine guns could fire blanks. Instead of real artillery and mortars, umpires had big firecracker-like devices called simulators to make noise. They threw smoke grenades to confuse the fake battlefield. For all the smoke and noise, it was still grown-ups playing cowboys and indians. The buzz of bullets and the whine of shrapnel were not in the air. Bodies were not being shattered and shredded. At least that was the way it went until one of the fake enemy, a young soldier with a red armband designating him as the enemy, jumped out of his foxhole right in front of Sergeant Sapp.
He jumped up in front of Sapp and yelled something at him. Sapp buttstroked him.
A buttstroke is usually executed when you are carrying your rifle, in this case an M-14, at the ready position. For a right-hander, that’s with your left hand under the forestock and the right hand holding the small of the stock just back of the trigger guard. The buttstroke is like a right uppercut, just bringing the rifle stock up and into the face of your opponent.
After he buttstroked the fake enemy, Sapp drew his rifle back and made as clean a bayonet thrust as you could ask for. Absolutely no question that if his bayonet had been on the end of his rifle it would have gone right up through that young soldier’s chest and into his heart. As it was, the tip of the barrel cracked the boy’s sternum. The buttstroke had already shattered his jaw. He lost three teeth. His clothing had powder burns from where Sapp had pulled the trigger of his M-14 twice and fired two blanks.
The boy lurched back. His mouth gaped open and blood sprayed out over his chin. When he fell backward his helmet came off and rolled down the hill with a clatter. The umpires began blowing their whistles.
After only a few moments sanity crept back into Sapp’s face.
A couple of things were then clear to me, the Lieutenant from Arkansas who was now Sergeant Sapp’s Platoon Leader. One was: Don’t fuck with Sergeant Sapp. He’d earned that Combat Infantryman’s Badge he wore.
Another was that I realized that I was in some confusion as I tried to distinguish between the war-like nature of games and the game-like nature of wars. I never quite overcame my confusion. I am not alone. But, for me, it helped to keep thinking about blood and dirt, about killing and avoiding being killed.
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