Every kind of war

“In these stories I’ve been translating what I learned in 1970 with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Viet-Nam and Cambodia. 

“We – the Blackhorse – were an elite unit. I was very fortunate to have  been assigned to a regiment in which you never had to worry if the guy next to you was going to do his job; he was, and so were you – whatever you thought of war or The War or our Vietnamese allies. (Generally the answer to all those questions was, “Not much.”)

“The flip side was that the distinction between the categories Not Blackhorse and Enemy got blurred. We didn’t view our job as winning hearts and minds: we were there to kill people and then go home. And we didn’t much care about the cost of victory so long as somebody else was paying it.”

“That’s something civilians ought to consider long and hard before they send tanks off to make policy. Because I can tell you from personal experience, it isn’t something the tankers themselves are likely to worry about.” -- David Drake, "End Note to The Day of Glory," Other Times Than Peace.

My thought.

Someone somewhere wrote that after Tet ’68 you could ask any 19-year-old grunt why he was in Vietnam, and the answer always was, “To kill gooks.”

That is simplistic. Any American in any branch of service, his job was to kill gooks, if not directly, then administratively, freeing trigger-pullers from the mundane things that make an army work. A Combat Arms Company Clerk’s job was to keep up with promotions, assignments, transfers and etc. so a soldier could go about the business of killing gooks. A cook’s job was to prepare and serve hot meals to trigger pullers so they would be of good physical and mental standard when killing gooks. A finance clerk’s job was to ensure trigger pullers were paid on time and in the right amount of money so his emotional standards remained high and he could kill gooks. This goes for any MOS, whether Stateside or In Country. Every soldier’s job is to support that guy with the rifle or machine gun or grenade launcher, that guy walking along a rice paddy dike or on a dusty mountain trail or down a village street. No matter a soldier’s written job description, his overall job is to kill gooks, whatever the definition.