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By Root 1350 0

police forces loved to hire experienced infantrymen, his division had only about fifteen hundred of them, which was the one structural weakness in an armored division: not enough people with rifles and bayonets. An American tank division was superbly organized to take ground—to immolate everyone who happened to be on real estate they wanted—but not so well equipped to hold the ground they overran. The United States Army had never been an army of conquest. Indeed, its ethos has always been liberation, and part and parcel of that was the expectation that the people who lived there would be of assistance, or at least show gratitude for their deliverance, rather than hostility. It was so much a part of the American militarys history that its senior members rarely, if ever, thought about other possibilities. Vietnam was too far in the past now. Even Diggs had been too young for that conflict, and though hed been told how lucky he was to have missed it, it was something he almost never thought about. Vietnam had not been his war, and he didnt really want to know about light infantry in the jungle. He was a cavalryman, and his idea of combat was tanks and Bradleys on open ground.

"Okay, gentlemen. Ill want to meet with all of you individually in the next few days. Then I need to come out and see your outfits. You will find that Im a fairly easy guy to work for"—by which he meant that he wasnt a screamer, as some general officers were; he demanded excellence as much as anyone else, but he didnt think ripping a mans head off in public was a good way to achieve it—"and I know youre all pretty good. In six months or less, I want this division ready to deal with anything that might come down the road. I mean anything at all."

Who might that be, Colonel Masterman mused to himself, the Germans? It might be a little harder to motivate the troops, given the total absence of a credible threat, but the sheer joy of soldiering was not all that much different from the kick associated with football. For the right guy, it was just plain fun to play in the mud with the big toys, and after a while, they started wondering what the real thing might be like. There was a leavening of troops in First Tanks from the 10th and 11th Cavalry Regiments whod fought the previous year in Saudi Arabia, and like all soldiers, they told their stories. But few of the stories were unhappy ones. Mainly they expounded on how much like training it had been, and referred to their then-enemies as "poor, dumb raghead sunsabitches" whod been, in the final analysis, unworthy of their steel. But that just made them swagger a little more. A winning war leaves only good memories for the most part, especially a short winning war. Drinks would be hoisted, and the names of the lost would be invoked with sadness and respect, but the overall experience had not been a bad one for the soldiers involved.

It wasnt so much that soldiers lusted for combat, just that they often felt like football players who practiced hard but never actually got to play for points. Intellectually, they knew that combat was the game of death, not football, but that was too theoretical for most of them. The tankers fired their practice rounds, and if the pop-up targets were steel, there was the satisfaction of seeing sparks from the impact, but it wasnt quite the same as seeing the turret pop off the target atop a column of flame and smoke.., and knowing that the lives of three or four people had been extinguished like a birthday-cake candle in front of a five-year-old. The veterans of the Second Persian Gulf War did occasionally talk about what it was like to see the results of their handiwork, usually with a "Jesus, it was really something awful to see, bro," but that was as far as it went. For soldiers, killing wasnt really murder once you stepped back from it; theyd been the enemy, and both had played the game of death on the same playing field, and one side had won, and the other side had lost, and if you werent willing to run that risk, well, dont put the uniform on, yknow? Or, "Train better, asshole,