Battle Joined
Reader Bill Befort has this to say about the S.L.A. Marshall controversy:
S.L.A. Marshall deserves very little of the criticism he’s received, most of it from people who never got around to challenging him while he was alive to reply. Even his disputed claim that three-quarters of US WWII infantrymen would fail to engage in any given action has never been disproved — in the antique sense of “been shown by evidence to be in error” — probably because Marshall was better placed to know the truth than any other man.
Criticize him for his idiosyncratic lingo or the execrable maps and drawings that disfigure his books, but not for the candor of his reporting. Recently I visited the Marshall Collection at the University of Texas/El Paso and was able to read some of the unpublished combat analysis he produced for the Army: it is all of a piece with his published work, and confirmed my impression of his integrity. His basic purpose was to understand and explain what happens at soldier level in combat, in order to improve the way the Army used men. He devoted his life to that, and it’s a dirty shame that his reputation has not received the defense it merits.
What I really wanted to say, though, is that you shouldn’t omit Marshall’s Vietnam output from your list. In his mid-60s he went there and produced, following his usual after-action interview methods, no fewer than five volumes of combat reporting: “Battles in the Monsoon,” “The Fields of Bamboo,” “West to Cambodia,” “Ambush,” and “Bird: the Christmastide Battle.” He also produced the “Vietnam Primer” for the Army, a graphical and typographical disaster but still a timely corrective to mistaken tactics. The “Primer” was researched and written together with Hackworth, some of whose exploits had been related in the other books, and who received from Marshall (in print, anyway) much kindlier treatment than he gave in turn.
Countering that view is reader Crocker:
I’ve read a good many on the list. Slam Marshall probably deserves much of the criticism he’s received. It’s true that Hackworth trashed Slam in ‘About Face’, primarily for being a celebrity-seeker who wrote about grunts while living the good life himself.
The S.L.A. Marshall google search drops you into the debate immediately. Here’s is the earlier S.L.A.M. list.
Meanwhile, here’s his Vietnam output:
Battles in the monsoon: Campaigning in the the Central Highlands, Vietnam, summer 1966,
West to Cambodia and The Fields of Bamboo - Two Action Histories from the Vietnam War
Bird: The Christmastide Battle
All I have to say is, having hung around Southeast Asia a bit, I saw a lot of thickets of bamboo, maybe even what you might call a forest now and then, but nothing I’d call a field.
Crocker by the way like Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills. Notes the journo/novelist/doggerel scribbler knew his stuff re the locals and soldiering in foreign climes. Sort that one under truths told via fiction.
Topics: A Right-Wing Warmonger's Boutique Bookshop, books
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:26 pm on Wednesday, May 27, 2009
2 Responses to “Battle Joined”
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May 28th, 2009 at 9:52 am
You can count me squarely on the side of Marshall. I was introduced to his works at an early age, and over the years, I have seen nothing to refute the core of his works, especially his analysis of US soldiers in WWII.
One of the easiest ways to examine his conclusions, is to read his work, then watch combat footage of US troops in action. Time and again, you see US soldiers either watching other’s fight, or sending rounds downrage with little, if any, attempt at marksmanship. Again and again you see men raising their rifles up from cover, pointing them in the general direction of the enemy, and quickly firing off a few rounds.
The same image is repeated in footage from Vietnam. For every soldier examining the ground to his front, selecting a target and engaging with careful, deliberate fire, there are several who just blaze away, and every now and then you see fellows with their rifles raised so high that they are simply pouring fire downrange as though they were part of a mortar squad.
It’s not until the current footage from the first Gulf War, and then the combat in Iraq and Afghanistan that you see the majority of US soldiers taking deliberate aim, and accurately engaging their enemy with controlled fire.
Marshall may well rub some the wrong way, but to my mind, it’s more because he strikes a nerve with his analysis.
respects,
May 28th, 2009 at 10:35 am
It can happen today, too, as seen in this dispatch from Michael Yon:
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/gates-of-fire.htm
I think a lot of the criticism of Marshall stems from the use of his work by others to support their own pet theories about violence and combat.