There have always been tigers in the world

I'm reading Fehrenbach's This Kind of War, and he has some very intersting things to say about men, politics, national will, and war in this history of the Korean conflict.

One thing that struck me is how similar the world is today as it was back then. I'd like to list a few quotes, but its hard to pick just a few since they are all wonderful insights on the tendencies of man. (I'm only at page 85, and already most of my pages have numerous of my markings and comments penciled in along the margins.) Enjoy (I hope. ;)


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In 1950 there was only one power and one people in the world who could prevent chaos and a new, barbarian tyranny (he also calls it imperialist communism, how appropriate. /dwb) from sweeping the earth. The United States had become a vast world power, like it or not. And liking it or not, Americans would find that if a nation desires to remain a great and moral power there is a game it must play (the game of power politics and small wars. /dwb), and some of its people must pay the price.

Truman, sending the divisions into Korea, was trying to emulate the Roman legions and Her Majesty's regiments - for whether the American people have accepted it or not, there have always been tigers in the world, which can be contained only by force.

But Truman and the American Republic had no legions
...
The ancient legions, and the proud old British regiments, had been filled with tavern's scum, starvelings, and poor farm boys seeking change. They had been inducted, knocked about, ruled with a rod of iron, made into men of iron, with iron discipline. They were officered by men wholly professional, to whom dying was only a part of their way of life. To these men the service was home, and war - any war - their profession.

These legions of old, like the sword itself, wre neither moral nor immoral. Morality depended upon the use to which their government put them. But when put to use, they did not question, did not fail. They marched.
...
The young men [sent to Korea] were the new breed of American regular, who, not liking the service, had insisted, with public support, that the Army be made as much like civilian life and home as possible. Discipline had galled them, and their congressmen had seen to it that it did not become too onerous. They had grown fat.

They were probably as contented a group of American soldiery as had ever existed. They were like American youth everywhere. They believed the things their society had tought them to believe. They were cool, and confident, and figured that the world was no sweat.

It was not their fault that no one had told them that the real function of an army is to fight and that a soldier's destiny - which few escape - is to suffer, and if need be, to die.
...
None of them was told why they were in Korea. None of them cared. They only wanted to get back to Japan. ... Instead, if they wanted to live, they would have to fight. They were learning in the hardest school there was (combat itself /dwb), that it is a soldier's lot to suffer and that his destiny may be to die. They were learning something they had not been told: that in this world are tigers.

No American may sneer at them, or at what they did. What happened to them might have happened to any American in the summer of 1950. For they represented exaclty the kind of pampered, undisciplined, egalitarian army their society had long desired and had at last achieved.

They had been raised to believe the world was without tigers, then sent them to face those tigers with a stick. On their society must fall the blame.