I, Soldier - part 1

The original title to this novella was I, Rambo. I wrote to David Morrell, creator of Rambo for permission to use his character and he was kind enough to respond. He said fanfiction is OK, but because Rambo is copyrighted, I can’t publish a story for profit with that name. No problem, I re-wrote the story. Enjoy.

Foreword

While I was in the Army, I did not experience any combat, though I have been in a number of dangerous situations in the US and overseas. I drew on those experiences in part to write this book.

All the violent and criminal acts described herein are 100% fictitious and strictly for entertainment purposes only. Don’t try this stuff at home.

Coming in hot; locked, cocked, and ready to rock!

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I was born in 1945 and grew up in Jefferson County, West Virginia. Fun fact: it’s the only county in that state which doesn’t have any coal. But I digress. Often. The most famous town there is called Harpers Ferry. John Brown’s failed abolitionist raid took place there. He was hanged a few months later in Charles Town, about five miles away from the house I grew up in. The history of The Civil War and war in general saturated my childhood. I remember once climbing up Maryland Heights, where you can get a great view of Harpers Ferry. Confederate artillery was once positioned there during a battle and it’s easy to see why. From there, you can see a Catholic church that was used as a hospital for the wounded of both sides. To avoid being attacked, the priest flew the British flag as a sign of neutrality. The ruse worked. That flag is still displayed in the church. It was in September of 1862 when that happened. 26,000 Confederates surrounded 14,000 Union troops defending Harpers Ferry. In the end, The Confederates won, and 12,000 Union soldiers surrendered. It was the largest surrender of the US Army until the fall of Bataan in 1942.

My dad was a tail gunner on a B-17 during WW2. Of course, I was amazed when I found out and all the more so since he was so humble about it. I asked the question everybody who’s never been to war asks: did you kill anybody? His answer was: “I kind of hope not, but it was my job. They were shooting at me, so I shot back. I was lucky to make it home in one piece.” The stories he told me got me interested in WW2 and all things military. I read Audie Murphy’s autobiography, To Hell and Back, when I was 12. It’s the amazing true story of a boy who grew up poor and had to hunt rabbits to keep his siblings fed. Later, he lied about his age to join the Army when he was 16 after being rejected by the Marines and paratroopers. He won every medal for bravery the Army gives. His greatest feat was fighting off a charge of six German tanks reinforced with 150 infantry. He called in artillery after ordering his own men to fall back, and then he jumped on a burning tank and used its machine gun to repulse the surviving enemy. Stories like these were my inspiration for joining the Army.

Another important part of my education was reading the Bible. You’d be surprised how much there is in there about strategy and unconventional warfare. My favorite story in that regard concerns the origin of the term shibboleth, which today is a synonym for password. There was a battle between the Israelites and another tribe, and in the aftermath, a soldier came up out of a river and begged for help. The Israelite guard asked him to say “shibboleth” and when the soldier said “sibboleth”, the guard killed him because he knew from his pronunciation he was not an Israelite. In the story of Jericho, Joshua sends two scouts into the city to recon the defenses. They are pulled up into a window by a woman named Rahab who asks that they spare her and her family in exchange for helping the Israelites. And lastly, there is the story of Gideon, who despite a cowardly reputation led an army of 350 against 100,000 Assyrians and won. His secret was having his troops light the enemy tents on fire while smashing clay jars and blowing trumpets. I knew there was an element of truth to this story because later I read about how the great commander Hannibal won a naval battle by using catapults to launch clay jars full of snakes onto enemy ships. When the jars hit the decks, they broke open, released the snakes, and panicked the crews, thus disabling the ships.

As a kid and teen, I spent a lot of time alone in the woods. I wanted to toughen myself so I could be a great soldier and figured that was the best way to do it. When I wasn’t outside, I was reading. Most people can read about 250 words per minute, which is the same as 15,000 words per hour. If you read an hour per day every day for 10 years, that’s almost 55 million words. For comparison, the current edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is 44 million words in all. In fact, reading just an hour per day every day for ten years gives you enough time to read the Bible, War and Peace, and the complete works of Shakespeare with another 52 million words to spare.

I mostly studied military history, but I read just about everything I could get my hands on. West Virginia is a good place to learn how to shoot so I did a lot of that too. It took a lot of practice to get good at it. The mistake most beginners make is anticipating the recoil which makes them flinch. Until you can suppress that reflex, it doesn’t matter how much you practice aiming. I was never a great marksman much in the way that the Red Baron by his own admission wasn’t much of a pilot. His strategy was to fly out of the sun or a cloud and attack at close range. He was sort of the human form of an ambush predator, like a trapdoor spider or a crocodile. Every living thing has tactics and a strategy for survival and reproduction.

Nature is itself a kind of intense, never-ending war. The subtitle for The Origin of Species is “The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”. At the end of the book, Darwin writes that from the war of nature, famine, and death, higher and more complex animals are evolved. In my opinion, anyone who neglects the study of natural history is not truly educated. My love and study of nature would have many practical applications later when I was trying to stay alive in the jungles of Vietnam.