Formative Experiences, 1959-1976

I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. The city isn't far from Fort Bragg at Fayetteville, about forty miles south.  I had several friends whose fathers served on the post.  The tone of the time was one of unreflective patriotism.  At school we raised the flag each day to the tune of "To the Colors."  In music class we learned to sing "The Green Beret Hymn." (Fighting soldiers / from the sky / fearless men / who jump and die, etc.)  The earliest television programs I can remember watching were westerns like "Rawhide" and "Wagon Train," but not far behind them was Combat, a fairly gritty--for the time--drama about the men of "King Two;" i.e., the second platoon of Company K in an unspecified infantry battalion. In a sense, it presaged by thirty years the HBO mini-series "Band of Brothers," in that it followed the platoon from D-Day through its advance across western Europe. The show ran from 1962 until 1967. I would therefore have been three years old when it began, eight when it ended. I don't remember all that much about it except for the series' central character, Sergeant Saunders (Vic Morrow).

Among the first books I can recall reading--aside from Sally, Dick and Jane--was one called Great Fighter Pilots of World War II.  I also read a version of Richard Tregaski's Guadalcanal Diary done for young people.  As time went on, I read a lot of military history.  And yes, I once received an Army uniform for Christmas and had toy guns, even a toy .30 caliber Browning machine gun.

Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964, two months before my fifth birthday.  From the next ten years I grew up on images of the Vietnam War, which regularly clashed with the image of war I had from John Wayne films a TV series like Combat.  In third grade I remember that my teacher, Miss Drake, leaving class abruptly to comfort a teacher across the hall whose husband had just shipped out for Vietnam.  We kids couldn't understand why the teacher was upset.  We thought the natural reaction would be pride.  We didn't have a clue.  Miss Drake was one of the more understanding teachers I had, but I remember that her reaction to our reaction was clipped, almost annoyed.

It goes almost without saying that my favorite war film during this period was Patton, winner of numerous Academy awards in 1970:  Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (which George C. Scott refused), and Best Screenplay (penned by Francis Ford Coppola, who went on to direct the Godfather saga and Apocalypse Now).  It really is a good film.  But like nearly all such movies, it makes war seem neat.  Further, its focus on command plays right into the way most buffs mentally position themselves when they think about war.  They're nearly always arm chair generals at heart.  (Click image for a few seconds of the main track from Patton, albeit in that wienie sounding MIDI format)

I can't remember a time when I wasn't reading some book on military history.  But the event that really changed my life occurred when I was twelve, and picked up a copy of Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox that, for some reason, was just lying around the house.  The book was the concluding volume of Catton's Army of the Potomac trilogy.  I knew nothing of that.  But the back cover told me the book had won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize, and my own reading opened up the world of the Civil War.  (A critic once observed that "Catton writes like he owned the Civil War.  It could not be in better hands.")  Since then, I've met a lot of people whose passion is the Civil War.  A surprising number trace their interest back to A Stillness at Appomattox.

That was in 1972.  Two years later I had read a good deal on the war, and since I was already working beyond my grade level, my ninth grade English teacher, Billie Cranford, gave me the option to pursue an independent writing project.  I decided to write an account of the Antietam campaign.  Although I completed only four chapters of about 4,000 words each, the project was my first real attempt at historical writing.  When years later The Hard Hand of War was published, I dedicated it to three teachers, the first of whom was Ms. Cranford.

During this same period, my younger brother and I also discovered war-gaming, especially those published by Avalon Hill. There's no telling how many hours we spent playing them. Of the two of us, he was somewhat better because he better exploited the rules and the "grain" of the board--these games used hexagons rather than squares because "hexes" permitted movement in six directions, not just four. I tended to do only what made sense historically.

Still, we were both pretty good, and these games taught me the basic vocabulary of operational military history, a lesson I've drawn upon ever since. And on at least one college midterm, the experience of having played France 1940 actually supplied me with the wherewithal I needed to write an "A" essay.

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