Remembering war (III): It proved unexpectedly hard to get platoon leaders to discuss their fights, especially failures

Editor’s Introduction: This article is an excerpt from General John Galvin’s Fighting the Cold War: A Soldier’s Memoir, published in April. Before he passed away in September, General Galvin graciously contributed this passage to our series, “War, as best as we can remember it.” Like many young officers anticipating combat, General Galvin wanted his training to be realistic. Without personal experience, the benchmark for ‘realistic’ was, of course, elusive. So he turned to veterans for help. I am deeply grateful to General Galvin, his family, and the University Press of Kentucky for sharing this profound example of one reason it is difficult to remember war well. — Paul Edgar

Excerpted from Fighting the Cold War: A Soldier’s Memoir 

General John R. Galvin, USA (RET.)

At Benning I received my serving of the basics of infantry tactics: how to lead at the level of rifles and machine guns and mortars. Missing, I felt, was the personal experience of combat, the understanding in some detail of what actually happened to others who faced leadership challenges of the kind we lieutenants might encounter. The solutions to the problems we were presented with were uninspiring: we were given a hypothetical situation — “If this happened, what would you do?” After we answered, we were told, “Well, here’s the best solution; this is what Fort Benning says you should do.” I asked an officer on the faculty, Captain Philip Bardos, a veteran of Korea and a member of the Weapons Department of the school, about this. Was there any book, any collection of examples of squad and platoon combat from the war now just finished or from earlier times? It seemed to me that a loose-leaf book would be good for a study of small-unit tactics: one side ­­­would show a sketch map, and the other side would present a historically accurate factual situation — for example, the story of an ambush: “I was attacked by such and such from this direction and also from this other direction. My men were pinned down and I had a man wounded; however, I did have contact with the artillery.” This was the situation. Now, after you have studied the map, what would you do? “OK, in this case I would do this and I would do that and that.” Then you turn the page, where you find not the school solution, but what the person actually did, for better or for worse. It might be better than your plan, it might not be; it might have been successful, and it might not have been—but at least now you have thought about this historical situation enough to have become really involved in it, and now you understand what the officer involved actually did. Maybe he made a mistake or maybe he pulled it off pretty well; but at least this isn’t somebody’s school solution. The value would be in the authenticity of the stories. The book would start out as a pamphlet and grow as we were able to find contributors.

Captain Bardos and I drew up a letter explaining what we wanted to do. Captain Bardos knew many infantry lieutenants and sergeants who had fought in small-unit engagements in Korea, and we wrote to them. We said we wanted to publish a pocket edition of combat situations, titled “A Platoon Leader’s Decisions.” We recognized that in any war the small unit, the platoon, the squad is the driving force, and its leader the inspiration. In a rather stilted way, we tried to coax responses to a questionnaire that we sent to a long list of veteran leaders, along with a letter signed by Bardos. We wanted to come as close as possible to the reality of combat—to a true experience—rather than offering a theoretical problem with its school-approved solution. We told each other that leaders should learn not from the perfect example but rather in the way that most things are learned—by trial and error. Our format, we decided, would allow new pages of text and maps to be inserted, so that each leader’s notebook eventually could be distinct in its content.

But time ran out. Getting combat stories was slow and hard. The events were too recent, and officers were reluctant to assert a personal version that might be seen by others involved as subjective. The style of our letter was not entirely helpful. We asked not for simple yes or no answers, but for detailed descriptions of the action, including dates, places, and unit identification, followed by analysis and conclusions. The conclusions we sought were not “what to do,” but “what I did.”

This approach proved naïve, as we learned from the replies we received to our letter. Captain Bardos and I went on to new assignments, and our attempt to create the book by mail grew unwieldy. Many wished us well and expressed interest in reading the product, but practically no one wanted to contribute. Some were reluctant to talk about successful actions, worried that their tale would be seen as self-promotion — “ a war story.” One officer replied that he was better at making the right tactical moves than he would be at writing about them. And when it came to failed operations, we had no volunteers at all.

The largest group of recipients was comprised of those who simply didn’t answer. We thought our potential authors would be bursting to tell their stories. But as it turned out, not many lieutenants wanted to “go public” on tactical situations that could be seen from several very different angles. We had expected too much.

General John R. Galvin, USA (Ret.), was dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and is the author of The Minute Men: The First Fight: Myths and Realities of the American Revolution; Air Assault: the Development of Airmobile Warfare; and Three Men of Boston: Leadership and Conflict at the Start of the American Revolution. He has received numerous awards, including the Legion of Merit and the Army Distinguished Service Medal. He died in September. 

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