War Stories of the Infantry: Americans in Combat, 1918 to Today - Hardcover

From the muddy trenches of France in World War I to the arid landscape of Iraq, War Stories of the Infantry immerses a reader in the immediate drama of combat as American infantrymen, Army and Marine Corps, have experienced it. In its pages, infantrymen tell of their struggles with the enemy, the terrain, the weather, as well as their own fears and doubts in battle. In the humid heat of a faraway jungle, in the bone-chilling cold of a Korean mountaintop, we endure what they endure, see what they see--as they rout the enemy of open their eyes in a field hospital or suffer the indignities of a POW camp.

Our literature is replete with military histories—stories of conquests made and empires expanded or lost, of political, economic, social, or religious goals achieved or failed. Such accounts are told not only in text but in the pictorial language of maps re-colored and redrawn, and of boldly swooping arrows tracing the progress of campaigns across countries and continents. Their military forces are depicted as so many game pieces deployed across irregular and multi-colored chessboards. This isn’t one of those books.

These accounts weren’t set down by men who write history; they are the words of men who made history. The infantrymen, whose stories these are, were at the cutting edge of the arrows you have already seen drawn across the maps. Theirs are not the tales of countries conquered but of farmers’ fields crossed under fire dragging a wounded buddy. Their victories were not of cities captured or fortresses reduced but of machine-gun bunkers silenced and hedgerows crossed.

War is a terrible undertaking, and infantrymen bear the worst of it. Artillerymen, aviators, cavalrymen, and tankers see their share of the terrors of combat, but anybody who’s ever been in a fight will tell you that the infantry always has it the toughest.

An infantryman knows more than one treatment for malaria and can state his personal preference. He knows why you crawl through the jungle alongside a trail instead of walking along it. An infantryman knows why that rock out in the clearing looked like it was crawling closer to his foxhole last night. And he knows that no foxhole is ever deep enough to protect him from that one-in-a-million mortar round that has his name on it.

A common thread running through these stories is that almost none of these guys started out trying to be a hero, and even fewer ended up trying to be one. They were sons of Iowa farmers, New Jersey grocers, and Texas ranchers who were just trying to do their duty and keep alive in the process. . . . (from the introduction)