Thirteen Soldiers Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. Soldier of the Revolution

  2. Brothers-in-Arms

  3. Adventure

  4. Touched with Fire

  5. Fog

  6. A Howling Wilderness

  7. Lost, Scared Kids a Long Way from Home

  8. Lone Wolf

  9. Duty

  10. Valor

  11. Wounds

  12. The Job

  13. Above and Beyond

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Photo Credits

  To the memory of Colonel George “Bud” Day, USAF;

  General James Robinson Risner, USAF;

  Admiral Jeremiah A. Denton, USN;

  and Captain Edwin A. Schuman, USN.

  It was a privilege, gentlemen.

  What battles have in common is human: the behaviors of men struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honor and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them. The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear and usually of courage; always of leadership, usually of obedience; always of compulsion, sometimes of insubordination; always of anxiety, sometimes of elation or catharsis; always of uncertainty and doubt, misinformation and misapprehension, usually also of faith and sometimes of vision; always of violence, sometimes also of cruelty, self-sacrifice, compassion; above all, it is always a study of solidarity.

  John Keegan,

  The Face of Battle

  INTRODUCTION

  EVERY MEMORIAL DAY AT ARLINGTON National Cemetery, soldiers from the 3rd U.S. Infantry Brigade place small American flags at the headstones of more than three hundred thousand graves. The headstones bear the names of people of every ethnic origin. They mark the final resting places of professional soldiers and conscripts; of rich and poor; Christian, Jew, and Muslim; believer and nonbeliever; descendants of Mayflower pilgrims and immigrants who had barely arrived in the country before they took up arms to defend her; dark-skinned and white; city dwellers and people from small towns and farms; teachers and machinists; businessmen and day laborers; poets and presidents. People of impeccable character rest here. Scoundrels do too. Most were brave; some may not have been. Some of the dead were celebrated successes in their lifetimes, and some obscure failures. Many here perished in war and never had the opportunity to pursue peaceful ambitions; others died in ripe old age, rich in blessings. Some sacrificed willingly, others resentfully. But all of them sacrificed. And families from every place in America have wept at a graveside here.

  War might be a great leveler while it is being experienced, but the millions upon millions of Americans who have gone to war are the most diverse population the country could produce. There is no other profession in all of human endeavor as varied as the profession of arms.

  This book recalls the experiences of a single American soldier, sailor, airman, or marine in each of the thirteen major wars our country has fought. We did not attempt to identify the prototypical soldier. No such prototype exists. Not one of the subjects is much like the others. Rather the stories were chosen to represent a particular attribute of their service or condition in their experience of war. Obviously there is some arbitrariness at work here. The conditions illustrated are only a few features in the nature of soldiers and wars. We had only thirteen stories to tell. The intent was to write about things most soldiers in combat will have experienced or witnessed, but even then it is a very incomplete catalogue of commonly shared emotions and experiences.

  The subjects hail from different walks of life, though most of them had modest origins, like most soldiers today and in the past. We wanted to represent all four branches of the armed services, as the experience of war can vary from one service to another, though many sensations and situations are common to all.

  Many were chosen because they left accounts of their experiences that have survived to the present. Some kept diaries or wrote books or spoke publicly about their wars. A few subjects left little or no record of their service. One subject especially is mostly lost to history; we know where he served and a few incidents from his life and have tried to reconstruct his story informed by the few facts we do know and the experiences of others in the same or very similar circumstances.

  We were not looking for thirteen stories of supermen or superwomen. We wanted to write straightforward, honest accounts of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. All thirteen soldiers were brave and sacrificed for our country. There are Medal of Honor recipients among them, and others distinguished by high decorations for valor. Some wore no decoration more proudly than their combat infantry badge. They are not perfectly virtuous. The readers will admire some of our subjects more than others, although all have earned admiration. Soldiers come in all types, from righteous, God-fearing human beings to wantonly cruel scoundrels. None of the stories we elected to recount features a soldier who belongs in the latter category, though one of them identified himself as a rogue and possessed some less than admirable qualities.

  Soldiers in combat share a genuine and powerful bond, so powerful that they are willing to die for one another. The paradox that makes that bond so unique is that in their lives before war they might not have chosen to associate with each other. They might not have liked each other. They might not even like each other while they serve together, and yet they will fight for each other, and often die for each other.

  Every war occasions heroism and nobility. Every war has its corruptions, which is what makes it a thing worth avoiding if possible. There is compassion and savagery in these stories, terror and valor, confusion and acuity, obedience and insubordination, self-aggrandizement and humility, brotherhood and individuality, triumph and loss, and in all of them, sacrifice for something greater than self.

  Each of these stories is also a story of change. Rare is the soldier who is not changed by war. Some are changed for the better and some for the worse, but all are changed in some way and forever. It is a surpassing irony that war, for all its horrors, provides the combatant every conceivable human experience. Experiences that usually take a lifetime to know are all felt—and felt intensely—in one brief moment of life. Anyone who loses a loved one knows what great sorrow feels like. Anyone who gives life to a child knows what great joy feels like. The veteran knows what great joy and great loss feel like when they occur in the same moment, in the same experience. Such an experience is transforming. Some come home and struggle to recover their balance, which war had upset. For those who came home whole in spirit if not in body, civilian life will seldom threaten their equanimity. They have known the worst terrors the world holds and have seen acts of compassion and love that no evil can destroy. They have seen mankind at its most dehumanized and its most noble. No other experience will ever surpass its effect on their lives, and they can never forget it.

  Here are the stories of eleven men and two women who went to war for our country, who risked their lives and suffered, and should not be forgotten.

  “Soldiers of the Revolution and their Commander-in-Chief at Valley Forge.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Soldier of the Revolution

  Joseph Plumb Martin joined the Revolutionary War at fifteen and fought from Long Island to Yorktown.

  TWO DAYS AFT
ER JOHN HANCOCK affixed his extravagant signature to the Declaration of Independence, an intelligent, spirited boy of fifteen pretended to write his name on an order for a six-month enlistment in the Connecticut militia: “I took up the pen, loaded it with the fatal charge, made several mimic imitations of writing my name but took especial care not to touch the paper.”

  Someone standing behind him, probably a recruiting officer, reached over his shoulder and forced his hand. The pen scratched the paper. The helpful agent declared, “The boy has made his mark.” “Well, thought I, I may as well go through with the business now as not. So I wrote my name fairly upon the indentures. And now I was a soldier, in name at least, if not in practice.”

  Joseph Plumb Martin would remain a soldier for the duration of the revolution. He first saw action as part of Washington’s outnumbered army on Long Island. Five years and many hardships later he witnessed the British surrender at Yorktown. He lived the remainder of his life in obscurity and poverty. He received little compensation for his service, not even, at least in his lifetime, the reverence of his countrymen that was his due as one of the patriots to whom they owed their liberty.

  MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON’S self-control, maintained in its severest trials by a supreme exertion of will, seldom failed conspicuously. But in the instances when it did, the effect was spectacular. Those who witnessed Washington’s temper were stunned by its ferocity and left accounts of the experience that imagination need hardly embellish.

  Around noon on September 15, 1776, after galloping the four miles from his command post at New York’s Harlem Heights, General Washington beheld five hundred or so shell-shocked Connecticut militia fleeing from hastily constructed defensive works on the East River at Kip’s Bay. As they ran from British and Hessian bayonets, he urged them to turn and retake the ground they had surrendered without a fight. They flooded past him.

  Washington’s physical bearing appeared no less striking, and perhaps more so, for his loss of composure. He wheeled his white charger amid the noise and confusion, his powerful legs gripped the animal firmly, his broad-shouldered, six-foot-two-inch frame sat erect in the saddle. Enraged, he cursed and threatened officers and men alike and struck at a few with his riding crop. Then he drew his sword and pistol and charged toward the enemy within range of their muskets, seeking to impart courage by his example.

  It was all to no avail, as the terrified farmers and shopkeepers, boys and men, some having lost or abandoned their muskets, others armed only with pikes, found more to fear from the glittering bayonets of the enemy than the violent anger of their commander in chief. He threw his hat to the ground and groaned, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?” At last the great man’s frantic aides convinced him to ride to safety.

  Private Joseph Martin must have made his escape that day by a route that avoided proximity to the raging Washington. Had he witnessed the unforgettable sight, he would surely have recounted it in his remarkable memoir, which includes a characteristically candid and ironic account of “the famous Kip’s Bay affair, which has been criticized so much by the historians of the Revolution.”

  The British commander in chief, General William Howe, had waited more than two weeks to pursue the rebel army after Washington ordered its evacuation from Long Island to Manhattan on August 29. In the interim Washington and his officers had decided to abandon New York City, recognizing it was indefensible while the British fleet commanded its rivers and harbor. The American forces were widely scattered: four thousand men under General Israel Putnam garrisoned the city in lower Manhattan; nine thousand men under Major General William Heath protected the army’s escape route in the north from Harlem to Westchester County; dispersed widely across the center of Manhattan were General Nathanael Greene’s several thousand men, including the Connecticut militia under the command of the experienced Colonel William Douglas.

  Washington was unsure where the British invasion would make landfall. He feared they would try to block his outnumbered army’s escape by attacking at Harlem, where he made his headquarters and where his largest force was deployed. On September 13 four large warships (by Martin’s account, although most historical accounts put the number at five) sailed into Kip’s Bay, a small cove that offered a deep-water anchorage on the East River’s west bank.

  Half of Private Martin’s regiment was deployed to Kip’s Bay that night to, in his words, “man something that were called ‘lines,’ although they were nothing more than a ditch dug along the bank of the river with the dirt thrown out toward the water.” They returned to camp in the morning, and the following night the other half of the regiment, including Martin, were ordered to take their place in the lines. Sentinels were posted along the river for several miles and passed the watchword “All is well” on the half hour. “We will alter your tune before tomorrow night,” Martin remembered the British on their warships retorting. “They were as good as their word for once.”

  He awoke that Sunday morning tired—and, as he would be throughout most of the war, starving—and saw the warships anchored within musket range of his regiment’s crude defensive line. Although the ships’ crews appeared to be busy with preparations, nothing happened until midmorning. “We lay very quiet in our ditch waiting their motions,” he recalled. By ten o’clock he could see scores of flatboats embark from Newton’s Creek on the Long Island shore, ferrying four thousand British and Hessian soldiers across the river. They formed their boats into a line and continued “to augment their forces . . . until they appeared like a large clover field in full bloom.” By late afternoon another nine thousand would join them.

  Martin was idly investigating an old warehouse near their lines when, at eleven o’clock, he heard the first roar of ships’ cannon, which, by his account, constituted over a hundred guns. He dove into the ditch and “lay as still as I possibly could” until British guns leveled the militia’s breastworks, burying men in blasted earth. At that point, realizing they were completely exposed to enemy fire, their officers neither possessing nor issuing orders to continue their futile resistance, to the dismay of their commander in chief, the Connecticut men ran for their lives.

  “In retreating we had to cross a level clear spot of ground 40 or 50 rods wide,” Martin wrote, “exposed to the whole of the enemy’s fire; and they gave it to us in prime order. The grapeshot and lagrange flew merrily, which served to quicken our motions.”

  Martin was separated from his regiment in the melee. He spent the long, dangerous, oppressively hot day searching for them with a neighbor from home. They made their way to the American lines in Harlem while trying to avoid, not always successfully, encounters with the enemy. Their progress was slow. His Connecticut neighbor became ill and dispirited, and Martin had considerable trouble convincing him to continue. At one point, after nearly stumbling into contact with a company of British soldiers, he quit the road they were traveling on and hid in a bog. When the enemy passed by after coming so close to him that he “could see the buttons on their coats,” Martin emerged from his hiding place and discovered that his sick friend had vanished. He found him later, resting with a group of rebels in the shade of a tree. Martin pleaded with him to continue the march north but was rebuffed. “No, I must die here,” his friend despaired. “At length with more persuasion and some force I succeeded in getting him on his feet again and moving on.”

  Martin and his companion had not eaten anything in more than a day. They had slept hardly at all the previous night. They were thinly clothed, starving, and exhausted. Twice they spotted American forces in the distance only to watch them be overtaken by British or Hessians and flee in terror. “Our people were all militia,” he explained, “and the demons of fear and disorder seemed to take full possession of all and everything on that day.”

  It began to rain, and as sundown approached, the hot day turned cool. “We were as wet as water could make us,” Martin remembered, and he began to fear his sick friend would succumb to the chill. They came up
on a large body of Americans preparing to make a stand with a few artillery fieldpieces. An officer ordered them to remain there. Martin argued that they were trying to rejoin their regiment, which he believed was located a short distance ahead. The officer didn’t believe him and again ordered them to take a place in the line. Martin pleaded for his sick comrade, who would die of exposure if he spent the night in the cold air.

  “Well, if he dies the country will be rid of one who can do it no good,” the officer coolly replied.

  “When a man has got his bane in his country’s cause,” wrote Martin, who was still appalled by the cruel remark a half century later, “let him die like an old horse or dog, because he can do no more.”

  A drunk and distracted sentinel guarding the road north gave Martin and his friend an opportunity to escape. Not long afterward they found their regiment, which had joined Washington’s lines at Harlem Heights, “resting themselves on the cold ground after the fatigues of the day.” They were warmly received by their fellows, who had assumed they had been captured, as many others had, including the regiment’s major, or killed.

  Martin closed his reminiscence of the “Kip’s Bay affair” by mocking the much publicized story of a soldier who claimed to have been sitting by the highway when Washington rode by and asked him why he sat there. “I would rather be killed than trodden to death by cowards,” the soldier was purported to reply. Martin doubted whether the soldier had taken part in the fighting on September 15 and attributed the day’s humiliation to the conspicuous absence of officers to lead them. “Every man that I saw was endeavoring by all sober means to escape death or captivity,” he recalled. “The men were confused being without officers to command them. I do not recollect of seeing a commissioned officer from the time I left the lines on the banks of the East River in the morning until met with the gentlemanly one [the artillery officer who had insulted his ailing friend] in the evening.”