II. LEARNING WAR

II. Learning War

     I first saw the world on January 23, 1943. Pearl Harbor was 13½ months in the past; the United States was at war with Japan and Germany. The 1^st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal(1)5½ months earlier. Americans had invaded North Africa 3 months after that. The Soviet Army had counterattacked Axis forces outside Stalingrad, trapping 91,000 German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian troops inside a pocket. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would surrender all those troops a week after I was born, and the Japanese would begin evacuating Guadalcanal a day later. Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term as President of the United States. The blockade of Leningrad was in its 502^nd day, of 872. Tatyana Savicheva(2) was 5 months dead. Treblinka(3) had been in operation 6 months, with 10 gas chambers working full time. In October of that year, Jewish slaves at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland, would stage a sufficiently successful revolt that the Nazis destroyed the camp for fear that the escapees would tell the world what had happened there, which they did.(4) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.

1 Twenty-three years later, I would stand in the open, off to the side of the village well in Tho An, side by side with a veteran of Guadalcanal, other island battles in the Pacific, and Korea. Wore a .45 revolver on his left hip; I never saw him draw it. He was by then First Sergeant of “F” Company, 2^nd Battalion, 7^th Marines. I learned later that his name was Gene Mills. He leaned close to my ear to be heard above the firing and said calmly, “You be the last man out.” I carried the only automatic rifle in the detail, an M14 with selector.

2 See below, “Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague” p.271ff.

3 The reader who may have seen Treblinka listed as a “concentration camp” should clarify that notion: the only things concentrated at Treblinka were corpses, ashes, and huge piles of clothing and shoes taken from the people who were reduced to ashes. Treblinka was an extermination camp.

4 http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8381413.stm (Published Nov. 27, 2009, by BBC.)

5 Pretty sure about this: on April 19, 1966, I was in the village of Tho An, with a detail of Marines. We had just destroyed, mostly, the village. We had returned with canteens to the village well, to get water. The First Sergeant, whose name I just recently learned, was Gene Mills. One of the most impressive men I ever met: WWII vet from its early days when he was one of the Marine Raiders, or so I was told by one of the young men I walked beside, for a while, in the village. Last I heard, he was still alive. Had to be in his 90s.