The Reality of War: Volunteers to Fight Our Wars, #5

By Martina Sprague

Although large numbers of men and women volunteer for military service, astoundingly few soldiers actually achieve their dream of going to war and emerging as heroes. When not battling for survival in its purest sense, military service and war are for many soldiers a tedious period of their lives that does not compare to the colorful images of action and adventure the recruiter promised them. Desertion was always a possibility for men who found army life intolerable. Yet each new generation walks into the recruiter’s office with the same ignorance of war’s reality only to discover, when reality strikes, the terrible price they have to pay for believing the myth of war.

This book examines military service as 90 percent boredom and 10 percent action; the search for the “real” army while discovering the cost of war; and climbing the “mountains of life” in search of the “Holy Grail.” The material in this book is excerpted from For God, Gold, and Glory: A History of Military Service and Man’s Search for Power, Wealth, and Adventure, also by Martina Sprague. The full series comprises the following books:

1. The Forces of War: Patriotism, Tradition, and Revenge

2. The Financial Incentives of War: Poverty Draft, Mercenaries, and Volunteers in Foreign Armies

3. The Propaganda of War: Personal Transformation and the Search for Adventure

4. The Glory of War: The Way to Historical Immortality

5. The Reality of War: Boredom, Disillusion, and Desertion

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martina Sprague
• Release date: Apr 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386583851

Martina Sprague

Martina Sprague grew up in the Stockholm area of Sweden. She has a Master of Arts degree in Military History from Norwich University in Vermont and has studied a variety of combat arts since 1987. As an independent scholar, she writes primarily on subjects pertaining to military and general history, politics, and instructional books on the martial arts. For more information, please visit her website: www.modernfighter.com.

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INTRODUCTION

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During the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940, students, farmers, industrial and construction workers, and independent businessmen from neutral Sweden signed up for the Volunteer Corps to help their Finnish neighbors.¹ Naturally some rotten apples ended up in the volunteer forces; for example, criminals looking for a way to escape the law. Others volunteered for no other reason than because they believed that the Finns might be in need of someone who could care for the horses.² Many had an adventurous spirit. Two young men mutually promised each other to fight also in the Continuation War, the second war fought between Finland and the Soviet Union during World War II. Such promises may seem absurd when reality strikes and the dreams of long ago are buried in the deep recesses of the young soldier’s memory. They later admitted that nobody in his right mind would make such a promise absent a longing for adventure.³ One volunteer from the Swedish island of Gotland noted in hindsight that it was the madness of youth that drove him to volunteer, and he would not do it again.⁴

While some men, by design or good luck, [choose] soldiering as a way of life and [find] their minds enlarged by it,⁵ others feel misled by army advertising that promises an education and a job and instead sends them to war.⁶ Philip Caputo who grew up in the comfortable white suburbs of 1960s Chicago . . . felt smothered by comfort and wanted more from life than the suburbs could provide . . . He volunteered for Vietnam, where he became steadily disillusioned and an opponent of the war.⁷

The principles of strategy and tactics, and the logistics of war are really absurdly simple: It is the actualities that make war so complicated and so difficult,⁸ said Field Marshal Lord Wavell (1883-1950) in a letter to B. H. Liddell Hart (1895-1970), English soldier and military historian. There is no cost to imagining glory until the moment of confrontation, and the commander may lead his army only where it wants to go. The military commander must earn the trust of his subordinates. He does not rule the army; the army rules him. He must feed its [the army’s] appetite for novelty and adventure, keep it fit and confident . . . discipline it, coddle it, reward it.⁹

Desertion was always a possibility for men who found army life intolerable. Through the ages generals have been unable to prevent it. In the early 1570s the yearly peacetime desertion rate of about ten percent in the army of Flanders more than tripled once hostilities broke out.¹⁰ Of the more than eleven thousand military personnel detained near the Stalingrad front between October and December 1942, more than a thousand turned out to be deserters or former Red Army men now working for the enemy.¹¹ The American Civil War saw huge numbers of deserters on both sides of the conflict, and in contemporary times, by 2004 more than 5,500 American servicemen had deserted to Canada and various European countries since the war started in Iraq.¹²

According to one U.S. Marine, After I joined the Corps, a very smart Captain told me ‘no one joins the Corps for what it IS, they join for what they THINK it is, and once you realize what the Corps actually IS, you either get out or continue to serve the reality.’ I chose to continue and while I haven’t planted a flag or rode into the sunset, I have met Marines who HAVE done both.¹³The three essays contained in this book examine military service as 90 percent boredom and 10 percent action; the search for the real army while discovering the cost of war; and climbing the mountains of life in search of the Holy Grail.

NINETY PERCENT BOREDOM AND TEN PERCENT ACTION

When the devil are we going to attack?¹

—Nikolai Belov, Red Army officer in World War II

Although large numbers of men and women volunteer for military service, astoundingly few soldiers actually achieve their dream of going to war and emerging as heroes. When placed in perspective, not many will have the opportunity to tell their children and grandchildren about glorious fights and startling victories in wars that will later fill the pages of the history books. When not battling for survival in its purest sense, military service and war are for many soldiers a tedious period of their lives that does not compare to the colorful images of action and adventure the recruiter promised them. Even to those fortunate enough to come away with amazing tales of heroism, the experience is often about heroic battle in defeat rather than victory. For those fighting in obscure wars and obscure regions, the whole treasured adventure, as one French Foreign Legionnaire put it, often ends in some pointless, forgotten debacle in a place that interested no one.² Yes, the mercenary might have joined the Legion in search of fun and adventure, but those dreams, according to one Legionnaire, were buried years ago.³

The soldier was bored with life before he was a soldier, which was why he fled to the French Foreign Legion. But when he becomes a soldier he is still bored with life. As evidenced by a 1975 article in the Milwaukee Journal Green Sheet, life in the French Foreign Legion has become almost excruciatingly boring as the past glory of battle has faded and many Legionnaires are confined to the island of Corsica, where they have to endure endless hours of menial tasks and