War hard to understand if you aren't there

In the entire military, only 10% are active on-the-ground combat troops. These are the infantry platoons of the Army and the Marine Corps. Then also throw in medics from the Navy, and Air Force forward observers. The other 90% are support troops.

I have read that during World War II, in a platoon of 42 front-line infantry troops, only 10% survived, and 90% were either killed or wounded. When I was in Vietnam, almost the same statistics, but a little different. From the start of the first year of service, 90% were killed, wounded, or transferred out. Every war has different circumstances.   

In the Revolutionary War, we practiced what amounted to guerilla warfare. In the Civil War, it was lines of soldiers attacking (foolish). In World War I, it was trench warfare, but also included lines of soldiers “going over the top of the trenches” and attacking, with the majority getting killed. 

In World War II, it was more modern, with no attacking in lines. It was laying down fields of fire, attacking at the flanks, fire and move, etc. Same thing in Korea. In Vietnam, it changed to walking through the Jungle, looking for the enemy and getting shot at, and then the battle.  In Afghanistan, the troops went on patrol like in Vietnam, but no jungle, it was cities and rural areas.  Most deaths came not from rifle fire but from improvised explosive devices and other bombs that blew up trucks when they ran over them.  

For me, I was a supply officer. But being in an Infantry division, we had to protect our own areas and thus many of us support troops were required to go on night ambush patrols in the jungle. I can tell you it is a weird feeling to be walking through the jungle, not knowing if you are walking into an ambush or not, then setting up an ambush and lying there all night, raining or not, waiting for someone to come along. Orders were to shoot anyone coming as friendlies don’t travel in the jungle in the middle of the night.

Just imagine a front-line infantry platoon that does it day in and day out.  In the quartermaster, we had the responsibility of processing all the KIA’s, (killed in action). When you don’t know the dead soldiers, we became calloused to it.  Sort of hard, but that is the way it was. But a few times, when I had 30 or more dead lying there to be processed back to Saigon, I would think that these dead soldiers all have families and loved ones back home who don’t know their loved one is dead, but they are going to know in a couple of days.

War is terrible and it is sad.  As the old saying goes, if you haven’t experienced it, you can’t really understand.