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American Soldiers - Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea and Vietnam (Hardcover, illustrated edition)
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American Soldiers - Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea and Vietnam (Hardcover, illustrated edition)
Series: Modern War Studies
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Some warriors are drawn to the thrill of combat and find it the
defining moment of their lives. Others fall victim to fear,
exhaustion, impaired reasoning, and despair. This was certainly
true for twentieth-century American ground troops. Whether
embracing or being demoralized by war, these men risked their lives
for causes larger than themselves with no promise of safe return.
This book is the first to synthesize the wartime experiences of
American combat soldiers, from the doughboys of World War I to the
grunts of Vietnam. Focusing on both soldiers and marines, it draws
on histories and memoirs, oral histories, psychological and
sociological studies, and even fiction to show that their
experiences remain fundamentally the same regardless of the enemy,
terrain, training, or weaponry. Peter Kindsvatter gets inside the
minds of American soldiers to reveal what motivated them to serve
and how they were turned into soldiers. He recreates the physical
and emotional aspects of war to tell how fighting men dealt with
danger and hardship, and he explores the roles of comradeship,
leadership, and the sustaining beliefs in cause and country. He
also illuminates soldiers' attitudes toward the enemy, toward the
rear echelon, and toward the home front. And he tells why some
broke down under fire while others excelled. Here are the first
tastes of battle, as when a green recruit reported that "for the
first time I realized that the people over the ridge wanted to kill
me, " while another was befuddled by the unfamiliar sound of
bullets whizzing overhead. Here are soldiers struggling to cope
with war's stress by seeking solace from local women or simply
smoking cigarettes. And here are tales of combatavoidance and
fraggings not unique to Vietnam, of soldiers in Korea disgruntled
over home-front indifference, and of the unique experiences of
African American soldiers in the Jim Crow army. By capturing the
core "band of brothers" experience across several generations of
warfare, Kindsvatter celebrates the American soldier while helping
us to better understand war's lethal reality--and why soldiers
persevere in the face of its horrors.
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