Fussell's preparation for war was limited. ROTC was “a wonderland” of marching and snappy uniforms. Nothing was mentioned of “tree bursts and Graves Registration” or trench foot, nor that first-aid kits were adequate for bullet holes but hardly for a “foot blown off by a Schumine.” They soon realized that they were being trained as lieutenants to replace dead ones. In France, their first operation was to perform a night relief of another battalion. Hopelessly lost, they were ordered to lie down and sleep. At dawn they discovered they were lying in a field of dead Germans. A sobering sight. “My boyish illusions, largely intact to that moment of awakening, fell away at once, and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just.” It wasn’t just the sight of the dead. Many were mere children. Two, no older than 14, had been shot in the head, one with brains dripping from his nostrils. The realization sets in that he has been trained to commit like murders. Nor had training prepared him for other indignities: the gut-twisting cramps of instant diarrhea, ruining layers of clothing, and having no place to wash. Often half the platoon might disappear frantically into the woods.
He learned what a marine sergeant told Philip Caputo many years later during the Vietnam War: “Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.” The “Great Turkey Shoot” bore mute witness to that. The men in F Company came upon a trench holding two squads of German infantry wishing to surrender. The Americans gleefully shot all of them dead.
Fussell soon realized that most army documents were intricately prepared falsehoods, that cowards are maimed and injured with the same regularity as heroes, that heroes are often invented post-death to make the survivors feel good, that “the Good War,” when it ended, did not lead to riotous celebrations by the troops, rather a feeling of bitterness at the appalling destruction and death. As Kay Summersby (Eisenhower’s British mistress) said, “No one laughed., No one smiled. It was all over. We had won, but the victory was not anything like what I thought it would be. . . So many deaths. So much destruction. And everybody was very, very tired.”
A bitter Fussell, having been shunted around after the war to various camps doing all sorts of make-work, mind-numbing activities, came face-to-face with the terrible reality of the way we conduct war. He realized the truth behind military historian Russell Weigley’s comment: “The American army of World War II habitually filled the ranks of its combat infantry with its least promising recruits, the uneducated, the unskilled, the unenthusiastic.” Fussell speculated as to why no one seemed to care terribly that those remaining after the marines, air corps and navy got their pick, were expected to bear the brunt of sustained battle: “Perhaps the reason is that the bulk of those killed by bullets and shells were the ones normally killed in peacetime in mine disasters, industrial and construction accidents, lumbering, and fire and police work. . . . Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, a form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all young American males? Killed in the tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers had the effect, welcome or not, of improving the breed. Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust.” (Deborah Shapeley in her biography of Robert McNamara [book:Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara|677540] records his program to enlist thousands of men who formerly had not been able to pass the minimal entrance tests for the army. They were allowed to enter on his assumption the army would raise their skill levels. Most were killed in Vietnam.)
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