Re: [eia] US Memorial Day remembrance

[MICHAEL P GORMAN <mpgorman@xxxxxxxx>]

Whenever conversations like this occur I'm reminded of a past conversation with a friend of mine that served in the rangers through the Reagan era up until the beginning of the deployment to Somalia.  He was wounded in Grenada and knew personally almost every person killed in the events we now remember as Black Hawk Down.

He left the army when he was faced with having to leave the Rangers to be promoted further, this is normal practice as people move into the higher versions of sergeant, and he really only wanted to be in that unit, so he left.

I once asked him why he didn't try to become an officer since he could've stayed in the rangers if he'd done that.  There were the standard jokes about officers and the issues of pay cuts dropping from a high ranked enlisted to a minimum ranked officer, but then he said something that really changed how I viewed the difference between an NCO an officer.

A sergeant has to have the courage to tell a group of soldiers to follow him into a situation that they might not survive going into.  An officer has to have the courage to tell a group of soldiers to go into a situation that they might not come back from while the officer stays behind and is safe.  These are two very different types of courage and while he had never had a problem having the sergeant's courage, he really didn't think he had an officer's courage.

We often joke that the great generals of history are at least a little odd.  After that conversation, it has always made sense to me that they had to be.

----- Original Message -----
From: Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Monday, May 28, 2007 9:32 am
Subject: Re: [eia] US Memorial Day remembrance
To: public list for an Empires in Arms game <eia@xxxxxxxxx>


> Thus spake "Bill Jaffe":
>  > We can't see each other over the cyber wires (yet), but as a child 
> of a vet,
>  > married to a 28.5 year retired LTC, her uncle dropped 4 times from 
> the 82nd
>  > in WWII, and her father was the bomb officer on the Enola Gay, 
> loaded the
>  > bombs onto the planes for Nagasaki and Hiroshima... Oh and we've 
> got 1
>  > cousin in Iraq - God be with them all.
>  
>  Huh. The grandfather of one of my friends from high school was the radio
>  operator on the USS Missouri who radioed out the news of the Japanese
>  surrender. My grandfather was in France in WWI. I think that my great-
>  grandfather was in the Franco-Prussian War. Two of my great uncles were
>  on the Eastern Front in WWII, and one died in a POW camp in Mongolia.
>  The little town of Glidden, seven miles from where I grew up, was the
>  home of the Merle Hay, who they claim was first American soldier killed
>  in combat in WWI---though I don't see how they could know that, given
>  that he died in the middle of the night in a trench raid, probably
>  "among the first" is more accurate.
>  
>  -- 
>  J.
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>  
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